Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  Then she heard him talking on the phone, and turned around, like a dog in its bed, looking for her jeans, couldn’t find them, and heard the phone clatter back on the hook. A moment later, Singleton came back. “Deon and Jane were found hanging in a tree across the Nine Mile Ditch. That Letty kid found them. This morning, about two minutes after I went off duty. They were naked and dead. Somebody beat the shit out of them before they were hanged.”

  “No.” She was astonished, but not distraught.

  “Yup. People are coming in from all over. State police are flying in from St. Paul. They might already be here. Ray Zahn’s going up to meet them, take them around.” He had a few more details, but not much.

  “I’ve got to go,” Lewis said. She turned her back, stepped toward the bathroom and he said, “You smell like vanilla,” and she said, absently, “That perfume . . . I wonder if your mom knows anything?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Katina hadn’t known Cash or Warr very well, and hadn’t liked either one, but their deaths could create problems. “I’ve got to get down to the church. We had some sisters getting ready to make a run. I better call Ruth right now.”

  She disappeared, half-dressed, down the hallway, and Singleton stood there, puzzling over it, staring at the very expensive cowboy boots that sat at the end of his bed. Deon and Jane?

  Lewis came thundering back. “She already heard, five minutes ago. I gotta get down there. What’re you doing, cowboy?”

  “I don’t know. Still gotta get some sleep. Then maybe see what’s going on.”

  SINGLETON SAT DOWN on the edge of the bed and ran his hands through his hair, worried. What the hell had happened? Hanged? He couldn’t get past that part. Maybe he should go look, but too much curiosity . . . who exactly knew that he’d spent time with Jane and Deon?

  Katina knew some of it, of course. Calb knew some of it, knew that he’d been at their house a few times. Maybe some of the other body shop people—the shop was just down the highway, and they may have seen him turning in Deon’s driveway.

  But he’d taken a little care not to be seen. When he was there, he’d always parked on the slab beside the garage, where you really couldn’t see the car. That hadn’t been a matter of foreboding, but just common sense. Now the common-sense care might pay off.

  WHAT’RE YOU DOING, cowboy? Lewis had asked.

  Loren Singleton was a cowboy, though without a horse or a ranch. He wanted to like horses, but horses always tried to bite him, sooner or later, and he’d quit trying to ride. Besides, Cadillacs were even better—old, over-the-top, seventies and eighties Cadillacs, which, for a cowboy, was close enough.

  In his own mind, Singleton was a cowboy and an artist with automotive lacquer, and only in a secondary, unimportant way, a sheriff’s deputy and a lookout for a band of car thieves. He knew, though, that something was missing in his life. He felt that all the details were there, but not the color. He felt like a black-and-white photograph—only when he met Katina did a little color begin to bleed into his life.

  In other people’s minds, Loren Singleton was, when they thought of him at all, a loner, a familiar outsider, a man always standing on the edges. A few women had tried to talk with him—he wasn’t bad looking, and the cowboy clothes seemed to give him some kind of personality—but they’d found him unresponsive, emotionally stunted. As a deputy, he had a reputation for casual brutality that seemed to go with his essential coldness. Even his cars, his Caddys, tended to cold, brilliant colors that could set your teeth on edge.

  Everybody nodded to him on the street; almost nobody spoke to him.

  THEN KATINA LEWIS had arrived to work with the nuns. Singleton wasn’t sure that he’d ever loved anyone before he met Lewis. He thought about it sometimes. He probably loved Lewis, he thought—there was no other explanation for the way he felt when he was around her—but did he love his mother? Had he ever? She was the only other possibility for love in his life, and everyone was supposed to love his mother. People got “Mom” tattooed on their arms. People ate at places called “Mom’s,” because Mom would never hurt you, would always have that extra piece of pie for her little boy.

  But Singleton’s mom had whacked the shit out of him for years; had beat him up so badly when he was six months old that an uncle had taken him to the hospital, told the doctor that he’d crawled out of his playpen and had fallen down the stairs.

  His father, Edgar Singleton, had died in a live-steam accident at the chipboard plant when Loren was two years old. Singleton had heard his mother telling stories, with some relish, about “poached Eg,” how his father had been poached from the neck down when a steam line broke in a processing tank, and how he lay in the hospital, burned over 95 percent of his body, waiting to die, without pain, but also without a mind: he’d rambled on for seven days about haying on the old farm, then he’d died.

  When Eg was gone, Mom began dressing Singleton in girl’s clothes. She’d wanted a girl; girls were more manageable. She did her damnedest to make Singleton into one—would have done better if the nosy old school principal hadn’t gotten a restraining order against her, requiring her to dress her kindergartener in gender-appropriate clothing.

  Singleton vaguely remembered all of that. After the court order, she still made him put on a dress, occasionally, and serve tea at one of her ladies’ poker parties. That ended when he was eleven, big for his age. She’d ordered him into a dress, and he’d refused. She’d begun to hit him with a broomstick that she’d used to beat him in the past, and he’d fled into the winter darkness.

  When he came back, she was in the bathtub. He’d gone into the bathroom, and she’d screamed at him and tried to cover her nakedness, but he didn’t care about that. He, a big, tough, abused eleven-year-old, had grabbed her hair and shoved her head under water. She’d thrashed and fought and clawed at him, but he’d held her under until she quit struggling.

  Then he held her under for another fifteen seconds. When he finally let her up, she lay back against the end of the tub, apparently without breath. Then, she breathed in, a small breath, and then another one. In five minutes, still weak, she tried to climb out of the tub. Singleton heard her, came back in, shoved her head under water again, until she passed out a second time.

  The second time she revived, she was quiet about it: crept over the edge of the tub and crawled to the bathroom door and managed to get it locked. She lay there, naked, until the next morning, when she heard him whistling out the door on his way to school.

  When he came home that night, he found she’d locked him out. He kicked the back door until the lock broke, found her crouched inside with a baseball bat. He pointed a finger at her, the eleven-year-old did, and said, “Don’t fuck with me anymore.”

  They spent their next seven years together, with the bedroom doors locked at night.

  AFTER HE GRADUATED from high school, Singleton had enlisted in the Air Force, had been trained for the Air Police, and had been sent to Eielson Air Force Base outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. All he could remember of the place were the clouds and the cold: better than two hundred days of cloudy skies every year, bone-chilling for seven months, cold for another three, mosquitoes for the final two. Just like home.

  Out of the Air Force, he worked in East Grand Forks for a while, moving lumber around a home improvement warehouse, then heard about a deputy sheriff’s job in Custer County. His AP background got him in. But he didn’t try very hard, at anything, and after two years was assigned to permanent Sunday-through-Thursday night shift. If he’d take it, he could stay, the sheriff said. Otherwise, it was the highway. He took it.

  There was almost nothing to do at night in Custer. In twelve years, there’d been three house fires that started on his shift, and maybe once a month he’d get a medical emergency, which only required that he show up. He’d stop a few speeders on country roads, jail a few drunks, break up the occasional bar-room fight with his casual brutality.

  Given his work hours, he didn’t have
a social life. He followed no sports teams, didn’t hunt or fish or ride ATVs or snowmobiles, didn’t garden or read or pay attention to music or go to movies. Didn’t even watch much TV.

  His only real interest were the old Cadillacs. He’d get one in his garage, do the mechanical work that would bring it back to life, and then lovingly and carefully strip it down to bare metal. After months of preparation, he’d move it to Gene Calb’s autobody shop, where he rented the equipment to do the paint. He changed cars every year or so, driving one while he rehabbed a second one. His current ride was an ’82 Eldorado Biarritz with a custom Rolls Royce grille. The finish was a hand-polished flame-orange flake over a deep mocha base.

  That was it. Other than the Caddys, it was all about taking numbers, passing the years.

  Then, four years earlier, Gene Calb had offered to expand their relationship—an expansion that would give Singleton free working space for his cars and a thousand dollars a week, with an up-front payment of ten thousand dollars.

  Ten thousand down, and a thousand dollars, cash money, no taxes, every Friday. All he had to do was keep an eye out . . .

  The money had changed everything. For one thing, his mother had begun to take an interest in him. Then, one night up at the casino, he’d introduced her to Deon Cash and Jane Warr.

  And then Katina had shown up.

  SINGLETON HEARD KATINA coming out of the shower, heard her clumping around, getting into her pants and shoes. She came out of the bathroom like a rocket, kissed him quick, once on the mouth, once on the penis, gave him a quick suck and then said, “Wally’s gonna have to wait.”

  “C’mon, thirty seconds,” he said.

  “Fifteen seconds.” She sucked on Wally for fifteen seconds, and then hurried away, laughing, and was gone.

  SINGLETON AND KATINA Lewis had fallen in bed a couple of months after they met, which was at Calb’s. Katina came in with her sister, Ruth, who was showing her around before Katina made her first run across the border. Ruth didn’t care for Singleton, but Katina was immediately attracted. Their daddy liked to work on old cars, she told Singleton later. Ruth didn’t care about that—she was closer to her mother, and to Jesus.

  Katina saw a relationship with Singleton. She’d already mentioned love, that she might be falling into it, with him. She’d told him over dinner at the Bird, and then peered over the little red votive candle on the table.

  Singleton had felt something blossoming within him, as he looked across the table at the woman. After all this time, a woman really cared for him? Somebody who would hang out with him, and cook and make babies? How did that happen?

  He’d reached across the table, and had taken her hand; tears rolled down his face, and she said something like, “It’s okay.”

  Later, feeling a little unmanly about the whole thing, about the tears, he’d started to apologize for himself and she’d laughed and squeezed him and said, “Loren, you did just perfect. Just perfect.”

  Somehow, he thought, he had.

  SINGLETON HAD WORKED until seven that morning and had come home to find Katina in his bed. He’d crawled in with her, though he hadn’t been too tired. Now, at ten o’clock, he was sleepy; he closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep.

  Deon and Jane, he thought. Hanged.

  Fear tickled through his chest. He tried to shut it out, flopped this way and that, wrestling with his pillow. Maybe somebody was coming for him, he thought.

  A hangman.

  Katina didn’t know anything about that.

  RUTH AND KATINA Lewis stepped inside the body shop’s overheated office, took off their mittens, and Ruth pulled the door shut behind her. Gene Calb was working behind his desk. He was a balding, heavyset man in his mid-forties, with a weathered face and thick, scarred mechanic’s hands. A pair of reading glasses perched on his thick nose. He looked over the glasses and said, “Guys. You musta heard.”

  “A little while ago, in town,” Ruth said. “Jane and Deon, but people said they were hanged?” Ruth stuffed her mittens in her coat pocket, and unzipped the parka. Ruth Lewis felt like her sister, but didn’t look like her. She was a slender woman, where Katina was round, and she had flinty-green eyes behind steel-colored, wire-rimmed glasses, while Katina’s eyes were softer, paler. Ruth’s hair was close-cropped, an ascetic’s ’do; Katina wore her hair full. Ruth’s cheeks were rosy from the cold, like her sister’s, but unlike Katina, she wore no lipstick or jewelry—a pretty woman determined to do nothing with her looks.

  Ruth was the older sister and the boss, Katina the subordinate.

  Calb said, “Hung in a grove off the ditch road. That Letty kid found them this morning.” He looked at the clock. It was just 11:45. It seemed like the morning had stretched on forever, since he’d heard the news at ten.

  “So what are we doing?” Katina asked. She always reminded Calb of a clucking hen, a busy, mildly overweight woman, but with a sensuous underlip. She was supposedly a member of some Catholic religious group, but apparently one that didn’t have anything against sex: Katina had been sleeping with Loren Singleton, and Singleton was looking as happy as he ever did, if a little peaked. “Do we do anything?”

  “I’m closing down,” Calb said. “For the time being. Until we find out what’s going on.”

  “That’s not acceptable,” Ruth said.

  “I . . .” A car went by on the highway, and Ruth and Katina and Calb all turned their heads that way—you always looked at a car on the highway in Broderick. A Highway Patrol car with extra passengers.

  “Ray Zahn,” Ruth said.

  “Loren told me that a couple of big shots flew in from St. Paul, and Zahn’s driving them around,” Katina said.

  Calb shook his head. “I’ll tell you what, guys; they’re gonna hook Deon up with me, and I don’t know what I’m going to tell them.”

  “Tell them as much of the truth as you can,” Ruth suggested. “That you hired Deon to drive for you, on the recommendation of an old army buddy in Kansas City, that you rehab trucks from all over the Midwest, and that he picks them up.”

  “That’s not exactly . . .”

  “He does that,” Ruth interrupted. “You could give references.”

  “Yeah. He’s done that,” Calb said. “What about you guys?”

  “We can’t stop,” Ruth said. Her chin was set, tough, square. “We need to keep working.”

  “I’m sorry, but we gotta stop, until we find out what’s going on,” Calb objected. “This may be coming out of Kansas City. If that’s what it is, maybe we can give some stuff to the cops, and they can settle it, but before then . . .”

  “Ray, we can’t,” Ruth said urgently. “We haven’t made enough runs lately. The Ontario net just came back up, since Jeanette died.”

  “I can’t help that,” Calb said. “I talked to Sister Mary Ann yesterday, when she came in—she seemed pretty happy.”

  “She did fine, but the mix wasn’t that good. We can’t stop,” Ruth said.

  “Hey—I’m shipping a load of junkers out right now. George is on his way in with his truck and we’re getting them the fuck outa . . . excuse the language. I’m sorry.” He was genuinely worried that they might be offended. Ruth had once been a nun.

  “I don’t care about the language,” Ruth said. She switched a smile on, and then off. “All I care about is that we keep working—and we won’t stop. If we have to pile up the junkers on your doorstep, that’s what we’ll do.”

  “Ah, Jesus Christ on a crutch,” Calb said, forgetting himself again.

  THE DEAL WAS complicated, but profitable for everyone.

  A man named Shawn Davis from Kansas City, Missouri, working with old drug-dealing friends in St. Louis, Des Moines, and Omaha, would spot and steal late-model Toyota Land Cruisers, 4Runners, and Tacoma pickups. No Nissans, no Fords, no Chevys. Nothing but Toyotas. That kept parts and paint supply simple.

  The stolen vehicles would be driven, individually, from Davis’s place in Kansas City to Calb’s body shop,
in Broderick. Calb had been in the Army with Davis, and they’d done some chickenshit black market stuff in Turkey, selling U.S. government meat. They trusted each other, to a point. The stolen cars were driven north by Deon Cash, who was Davis’s cousin, or Joe Kelly, a friend of Cash’s.

  As Cash or Kelly was driving north, one of a group of religious women—as a group they were called the “nuns” by the Custer County people, and some of them were—would pick up a late-model, but high-mileage, last-legs Toyota in Canada, usually from a dealer auction. The nun would nurse the wreck across the border into Minnesota, and deliver it to the body shop.

  In the shop, the stolen car would be repainted to match the beater. Some of the parts and trim—the dashboard graphics indicating kilometers per hour, instead of miles—the ID numbers, and papers of the high-mileage Toyota would be transferred to the low-mileage machine.

  A nun would then drive the truck back across the border, where it would be resold. The remnants of the beater would be shipped to a junkyard, where it would be crushed into a cube and sent to a smelter.

  The money was great: a battered, busted-up two- or three-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser, often owned by the kind of long-distance salesman who’d put fifty thousand rough miles a year on his car, would be purchased at a used-car auction for a few thousand dollars Canadian. Three weeks later, it would turn up on a working ranch in Saskatchewan or Alberta, in near-new condition, with all the right papers. The buyer would pay the equivalent of $50,000 American for a $20,000 machine. After all the work was done, and the employees paid, and the investment in the vanishing truck was accounted for, Calb and Shawn Davis would split $5,000 on each Toyota sale, give or take. Two trucks a week added up to a quarter-million tax-free dollars a year, each. Hiding the cash was almost as much trouble as making it, but they found ways.

  THERE WERE A few flies in the ointment.

  The nuns made everybody nervous. They weren’t paid anything, which meant that Davis and Calb didn’t have a good hold on them. The women were using the trucks and the body shop’s expertise to smuggle drugs south across the border. Although they had no economic hold on the women, Calb believed that they were safe. The women were, he thought, the next thing to fanatics. Nice fanatics, like Ruth Lewis, but they would go to prison before they talked about the deal.