Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  “So, what do you do, pull on the trap to see if there’s a body . . .?”

  She shook her head, groped in her pocket, found a pencil stub, and got a napkin. “The chain comes out of the house like this . . .” She drew a chain with a bigger circular link at the end. “Then you put your pin through this circle, so that the ’rat can’t pull it free. But you keep the pin in the middle of the circle, when you set it, so if something hits the trap inside, it’ll pull the circle against the pin. That way, you can walk up to a house and see right away if anything has hit the trap.”

  “Huh.”

  “You can usually get four or five of them out of a house. You always got to leave some breeders.”

  “How much do you make during a winter?” Lucas asked.

  She grinned at him and shook her head. “That’s not polite.”

  “You’re a kid,” he said.

  “Tell that to the feds when they want their taxes.”

  “THINK YOU COULD give me a ride home?” Letty asked. She crushed the empty Pepsi can in her hands, and tossed it into a waste basket.

  “What about your mom?” Lucas asked.

  “She can always get a ride from one of her friends,” Letty said. “I don’t want to hang around all day.”

  Lucas nodded. “Okay. But let’s go check with Mrs. Holme, see if they had anything else set up.”

  “I’d rather ride with you,” Letty said. “I don’t like the deputies. They give me a hard time.”

  “You get in trouble?”

  “Mostly about driving my mom’s car. But I got no other way to get around, and it’s too far to walk to town.”

  “How old are you?” Del asked.

  “Twelve,” she said.

  “That’s a little young to be driving, don’t you think?”

  “Might be for some people,” she said. Then, “If you give me a ride, I could show you around Broderick. I know every house in the place.”

  “Sounds like a deal,” Lucas said.

  HOLME WAS HAPPY enough to let Lucas take Letty home. Outside, in the parking lot, they decided that Del would hit the local motels, and ask about strangers driving Jeeps. Lucas would take a look at the victims’ house in Broderick. Later on, they’d hook up for an afternoon snack, and then go out to the casino and talk with Warr’s coworkers.

  Letty listened to them talk, then told Del, “There’s four motels. You want to know where they’re at?”

  Del said yes, and Letty started to explain the layout of the town, drawing with a piece of gravel on the blacktop, her hands rough, red, but apparently impervious to the cold. Halfway through the explanation, Lucas cut her off, and they walked over to the courthouse, found the county clerk, and bought maps of both the town and the county. Letty read the maps well enough and, with the clerk, pinpointed the motels.

  Outside again, Del took off in the Mustang, and Lucas and Letty headed back toward Broderick. As they crossed the river, Lucas noticed a dense spread of ice-fishing shacks at a bend to the north. A few were simply flat-topped boxes with doors, while others were more elaborate, with pitched roofs and American flags on door poles. Then the river was behind them and they followed the railroad tracks past the pastel Cape Cods and the dwindling businesses and quickly were back on the prairie.

  “You ever been out here before?” Letty asked after a while.

  “Not exactly here,” Lucas said. “Been over to Oxford.”

  “You got a gun with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You ever shoot anybody?”

  “Maybe,” Lucas said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you should mind your own business,” Lucas said.

  He tried not to be mean about it, but Letty stayed on top of him. “Don’t want to talk about it?” Letty asked.

  He looked at her. “Why don’t we change the subject?”

  She shrugged. “Okay, if you don’t want to talk about it.”

  AFTER A WHILE, “You got any kids?”

  “Two,” Lucas said. “A daughter, and my wife just had a baby boy.”

  “What’s your wife do?”

  “She’s a doctor.”

  “I’d like to be a doctor,” Letty said, looking out at the countryside. The countryside reminded Lucas of a modern painting he’d once seen at the Walker Art Center as a young cop, out on a sexual assault call. The painting had been done in two colors—a narrow band of black on the bottom, a wider band of gray above it. He still remembered the name: Whistler in the Dark: Composition in White and Gray. If the artist had known about it, he could have called it Winter Landscape, Broderick, Minnesota.

  “Or maybe run a beauty salon,” Letty was saying. “We’ve got three beauty salons in Armstrong, two good ones and one bad one.”

  “Mmm,” Lucas said.

  “If I was a cop, I’d put secret agents in every beauty shop in town. Teach them to be hairdressers, but, y’know, they’d all have tape recorders and cameras hidden away. Like spies.”

  “Take a lot of cops,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, but you’d know everything. I go to Harriet’s Mane Line with my mom, and the salon ladies know everything that’s going on. Everything. That’d be pretty good for a cop.”

  Lucas looked at her again, more carefully. “You’re right. That’s absolutely right. Maybe you’ll grow up to be a cop.”

  “I could do that,” she said comfortably. “Wouldn’t mind carrying a gun. If I’d had a real gun this morning, I wouldn’t have been scared at all. All I had was that crappy .22.”

  THE THING THAT made traveling across the land so strange, Lucas realized, was that you did nothing: you simply sat in the car and time passed. Driving almost anywhere else, the road moved: you went up and down hills and around curves and past houses, speed zones came and went, cars and trucks went by, and something new was always popping up. Out here, the road was dead straight, with hardly anything on it, or at the sides. Rather than whipping around a curve over the crest of a hill, and finding a town tucked away, surprising you, here the towns came up as a slowly growing lump on the horizon; you could see them, it seemed, for hours before you arrived.

  Though Broderick arrived quickly enough: Lucas slowed as they came into town. “So what’s where?”

  “Okay. So there’s the church,” she said, pointing across the highway. “It used to be run by Don Sanders. He’s kinda crazy and I stay away from him. For the last, I don’t know, maybe two or three years, there are a bunch of women living there. People call them the nuns.”

  “Are they nuns?”

  “A couple of them are. They wear old-fashioned dresses.”

  “Okay. You know them?”

  “I talk to them in the diner, when I see them, but my mom says I should stay away from them because they might be lesbians. They claim that they’re church people, and say that they take food and clothes to poor people.”

  “Do they?”

  She nodded: “I guess. I got some jeans from them once. Chics. I know a couple of them, the nuns, and one of them, Ruth Lewis . . . I really like her. She doesn’t take any shit from anyone. She says I’m as good as anybody and I should remember that.”

  “How about the Sanders guy? Why do you say he’s crazy?”

  “I just don’t like the way he looks at me. I get a bad feeling.”

  “Like what? Like he might hurt you?”

  “Like he might try to make me do something with him,” she said.

  “Okay.” He didn’t comment; he simply filed it until he knew her better. Young girls, in his experience, were sometimes psychic in their ability to pick out predators. At other times, they were capable of straight-faced accusations against the absolutely innocent. “He’s been replaced by lesbians?”

  “That’s just my mom,” Letty said. “I know that Ruth’s sister is going out with a guy in town. The word is, she’s no lesbian.”

  Lucas said, “Huh,” and took another look at her, and thought she might have blushed.
She hurried on, pointing over the dashboard. “Those two big yellow buildings belong to Gene Calb, he fixes up cars and trucks. He’s a real good guy. If I’m out with my traps, he’ll let me come in and warm up. I can’t go into the bar or the cafe because sometimes I’m a little stinky, but he doesn’t care. I think Mom had a crush on him once, but he’s married. I heard that sometimes the lesbians drive for him, like when he needs a car delivered somewhere. I could do that, if I had a license.”

  “And you probably ought to wait for the license,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah-yeah.” She pointed: “That’s the bar, the guy who runs it is named Pete. Mom used to go there when Randy Pearce ran it, but she says she doesn’t feel welcome anymore. She says it’s a dive now, a bunch of paint sniffers from the body shop. She says they’re all jailbirds.”

  “Are they?”

  She shrugged. “Some of them been in jail, I guess, but they seem like pretty good guys.”

  On the other side of the highway: “The diner is run by Sandra Wolf, she’s pretty nice, and John McGuire has the gas station, he’s okay. And down there, right across from the barn . . .” She pointed down a side street, where a low rambling house sat across a graveled street from a small white barn. “. . . I don’t know what those guys do, but if I was a cop, I’d take a close look at them.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “I was walking through there, taking a shortcut back from the lake, and the guy came out of the house and yelled at me to get off his property. I was only about ten feet on it. And he’s got dogs, big black-and-brown ones. He had these little paper flags around his property for a while. They said, ‘Dog Training, Invisible Fence,’ but I think if he sicced one of those dogs on you, that invisible fence wouldn’t do any good. They’d go through it like it was, you know, invisible.”

  “But all he did was yell at you.”

  “I thought it was pretty suspicious. I mean, he’s got ten acres there, and I was about three steps on it.”

  “What’s the guy do for a living?”

  “Works at Calb’s. Sometimes he’s got a woman in there. I’ve seen a couple of them, different ones. He sure does keep you off his property.”

  They were coming to the north end of town, and the house where Jane Warr and Deon Cash had lived. Two sheriff’s cars were parked outside now, along with one of the BCA cars from Bemidji.

  “If you want to stop, I can wait,” Letty said. “You might want to ask me some more questions after you look inside.”

  HE WAS BEING steered, Lucas thought—she’d shown signs of the female steering gene during the interview at the LEC, and even more on the way to Broderick. On the other hand, she was right. He pulled in and parked. A sheriff’s deputy stepped off the porch and walked toward them. Lucas got out, said, “I’m Davenport, with the BCA.”

  The deputy nodded. “Okay. One of your guys is inside.”

  Lucas stuck his head back inside the car and said “Wait,” shut the door, and followed the deputy up to the porch.

  “Where’d you get the kid?” the deputy asked, bending down a bit to get a look at Letty She lifted a hand to him.

  “She was downtown making a statement. You know her?”

  “Sure. I know everybody around here. She’s a pretty interesting kid. Don’t let no grass grow under her feet, that’s for sure. Gonna wind up rich.”

  “Got a nice line of bullshit,” Lucas said.

  “First thing you notice,” the deputy said. He pushed the door open and Lucas stepped into the house, into an entry with a coat closet to one side. He continued into a living room, where one of the BCA guys he’d been introduced to that morning was standing at the bottom of a double-wide staircase, talking on a cell phone. He saw Lucas and held up a finger. Lucas nodded and looked around.

  The place smelled of macaroni, cheese, marijuana, and blood, not a new smell in the few hundred houses he’d been through on homicide cases. To his right, in the corner, was a wide-screen Panasonic television, and on a table next to it, a big Sony. A game console was plugged into the Sony, while the Panasonic had boxes for a DVD and satellite dish. A love seat and a leather chair faced the TVs.

  Straight ahead, behind the BCA guy, on the other side of the staircase landing, a hallway led to the kitchen. Lucas could see a breadmaker sitting on a counter next to a microwave.

  To the right, an archway led into another room, with a dining table in the center of it. The table was stacked with boxes, most of them from small electric appliances. Fifty or sixty magazines, mostly on sex, European cars, or travel, were in heaps along one wall. A Bose Wave Radio sat upside down under the table, as though it had fallen off; it was still plugged into a wall socket. A set of earphones, one earmuff broken off, lay on the other side of the table, along with a generic-brand bottle of ibuprofen. A box of Wheat Thins sat on top of the litter of boxes on the table.

  The generally upset state didn’t have the look of deliberation, of a search—it simply looked like bad housekeeping.

  “Hey . . .” The BCA guy came up behind him. “Look at this.” He led the way to the kitchen. On the way he said, “I’m Joe Barin, by the way, we were introduced . . .”

  “This morning,” Lucas said.

  “Here,” Barin said. “Be careful where you put your feet. We’ve got some blood spatter.”

  He was pointing into a wastebasket on the floor by the kitchen door. When Lucas looked inside, he saw two tiny Ziploc-type bags, the kind used by hardware stores to hold small collections of screws, washers, cotter pins, and the like, and by dope dealers to parcel out measured amounts of cocaine, heroin, and crystal methadrine. There were no cotter pins in sight.

  “You pull one out?”

  “Not yet. You can see there’s some residue. I wouldn’t stake my child’s life on it, but it’s coke.”

  “They were dealing?”

  “We looked around, can’t find any more baggies. So maybe just using. Or maybe we’ll find more stuff later . . . and then, we’ve got these clothes.” He pointed to another corner, at a heap of clothing. “It’s all cut to shreds. This is where the killer cut the clothes off them.”

  “So he comes in with a gun, cuffs them up, tapes them up, then cuts the clothes off them.”

  “Beats the shit out of the guy, of Cash.”

  “Beats the shit out of Cash, and then drags them both out the door, and throws them into his truck, and takes them down the road, and hangs them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tough guy.”

  “Fruitcake.”

  LUCAS LOOKED AROUND the kitchen for a few more seconds: nothing for him here, that he could see. The crew might get something. “What’s upstairs?”

  “Three bedrooms and two bathrooms,” Barin said. “One of the bedrooms doesn’t look too used. One of the other ones has a double bed, and there’s some clothes hanging in a closet, a man’s clothes, and some stuff in the bathroom, but it doesn’t look like it’s been used lately. The clothes are not Cash’s, they’re for a bigger guy. The third bedroom, the big one, was their regular bedroom. Clothes for both Warr and Cash. Lots of clothes. Lots of cashmere.”

  “Let’s get the crime scene crew over quick as we can,” Lucas said. “Tear this place apart. If they were dealing, that would explain a lot. Could be punishment killings.”

  “Okay.” Barin hesitated. “I don’t exactly understand the chain-of-command here . . .”

  “Where’s Dickerson?”

  “Still out at the scene, I guess.”

  “He’s in charge on your side, I’m running my own thing. What I just suggested was . . . a suggestion.” Lucas grinned at him. “Of course, I do talk to the commissioner five or six times a day.”

  Barin shrugged. “I’m not big on bureaucracy. Tearing the place up is the right thing to do.”

  “The guy with me, Del, knows every drug hideout invented by modern man. I’ll bring him by later on.”

  “Good enough.”

  The deputy came to the door. “This young lady
. . .” Lucas and Barin turned. Letty was standing behind the deputy, looking around with interest. “. . . says she has to use the bathroom.”

  “Uh . . . not here. I’ll run you home,” Lucas said. To Barin: “So you know what you’re doing. I’ll get Del up here.”

  “Okay.” Barin was looking curiously at Letty. “Is this the young lady who found . . .” He tipped his head to the north.

  “Yeah,” Lucas said.

  Barin said, “For a second, I thought she might be your daughter. She’s got exactly your eyes.”

  “I CAN WALK back to the cafe,” Letty said to Lucas. “It’s only two blocks.”

  “I’ll take you,” Lucas said. “C’mon.”

  On the way out, Letty pointed at the wide-screen Panasonic television in the corner. “That used to be in the window at Lute’s. You know how much that cost?”

  “Thousand, fifteen-hundred?”

  Letty snorted. “It was on sale for nine-thousand, nine-ninety-nine. Ten thousand bucks. High-definition TV. Sat there for six weeks, and then one day, it was outa there. Didn’t know it came here, though.”

  Lucas looked at Barin, raised his eyebrows. Barin nodded—he’d check. A ten-thousand-dollar television would give weight to the drug-dealing proposition.

  “So let’s go,” Lucas said to Letty.

  But outside, Letty said, “I don’t really have to pee. I just wanted to get a look around.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ,” Lucas said, irritated.

  “I’m trying to help. You need all you can get,” she said. Then, “Why couldn’t I pee here?”

  “They have to process the whole place. Crime scene process. Like the shows on television. Bathrooms are good places to process, because they have good surfaces for fingerprints and so on. You can sometimes get DNA out of them.”

  “Okay.” She nodded. “Good reason.”

  “Let’s get you home,” Lucas said.

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