Naked Prey

by John Sandford

Letty’s house was visible from Cash’s: a gray spot on the bowl-rim of the horizon.

  “What the heck are they doing?” Letty asked, peering out the passenger window, as they drove out of town.

  “What?” Lucas ducked his head to look through her window. Out over one of the farm fields, directly south of the line of cop cars at the crime scene, two helicopters were hovering thirty feet above the ground, kicking up a small storm of ice crystals and dirt as they moved slowly sideways, in line, toward the ditch and the police cars.

  “Television,” Lucas said. He looked at his watch: not yet two o’clock. The newsies had been quick. “Taking pictures.” He glanced over at her. “You really don’t have to use the bathroom?”

  “Not really.”

  “Okay. You better stick with me for a while.”

  A SHERIFF’S CAR was parked across the side road, and Lucas held his ID out the window as he turned in. The deputy stopped to look through the windshield—it was one of the guys who Lucas had released from the hanging site—and waved them through. They continued down the track toward the cop cars.

  There were fewer cars now, but as they pulled up, they saw three men carrying a black body bag through the trees.

  “Are those the dead people?” Letty asked, peering out over the dashboard.

  “One of them,” Lucas said. He popped the door and was about to get out of the car when his cell phone rang. He swiveled back into the car and punched the phone: “Yeah?”

  “Lucas. Neil Mitford.” The governor’s aide. There was electronic noise in his voice. Again, Lucas remembered, they were on the edge of nowhere. “Anything yet?”

  “One of the victims, the black guy, was in jail down in Missouri until he moved up here. That was probably a year and a half ago. The guys from Bemidji are running that down. And at the house where they lived, there’re a couple of baggies in the wastebasket, small ones like the kind used for street drugs, that show some white residue—probably cocaine.”

  “Excellent,” Mitford said. “Is it too early to start spinning out a dope story?”

  “Don’t let the governor do it. You want to be able to deny it if you have to,” Lucas said. “But I think it’ll hold up. They’re just bringing the bodies out of the woods now.”

  “Any film?”

  Lucas told him about the helicopters: “I don’t know what they could see from out there. They’ll be able to get pictures of the bodies coming out in the body bags.”

  “But nothing of the trees?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask and get back to you.”

  “We’re pretty anxious,” Mitford said.

  “I’ll get back,” Lucas said. He rang off and turned to Letty: “This time, you stay in the car.”

  “It’s a free country,” she said.

  “You step out on the crime scene, which this is, and I’ll put you in a sheriff’s car and send you back to Armstrong to sit in the sheriff’s office and think about it for a few more hours,” he said.

  “Not fair,” she said.

  “So take a couple aspirins and lie down,” Lucas said.

  As he started climbing out again, Letty said, “Ex-con with bags of cocaine, huh? That’s a pretty picture.”

  “Stay,” Lucas said.

  AS HE GOT out of the car, Lucas spotted Ray Zahn leaning on the fender of his patrol car at the far end of the line. Zahn was watching the body bag being loaded into a Suburban. Lucas walked toward him. Zahn turned his head, nodded, and called, “Bringing them out.”

  “ME still in there?”

  “Yeah, he helped take them down. He had them cut the rope so they could keep it around their necks to make sure that this rope was what killed them.”

  “You think any of the TV helicopters got pictures?” Lucas asked as he turned into the trees. Zahn trailed behind.

  Zahn said, “Yeah. I don’t know how much they could see, but if you go over there diagonally, look out over toward the field, there was an open line into the hanging tree. You don’t see it right away because of the brush, but if you’re up fifteen or twenty feet, looking down at an angle . . . that’s exactly where the choppers were. They kept moving in and out of that hole.”

  “Shit.”

  “Maybe couldn’t see too much.”

  “Anything was too much.” They could see the hanging tree and a group of men around it. “The ME’s the guy in the black coat?”

  “Yeah. Henry Ford.”

  “Really? Henry Ford?”

  “Yeah. He’s out of Thief River. Good guy. Doesn’t know shit about cars.”

  ANDERSON, THE SHERIFF, Dickerson, the BCA supervisor, and a few other men were huddled to the left of the second black bag, cigarette smoke streaming away from them.

  “Cold,” Zahn mumbled from behind him. “Radio says it’s two below.”

  “I heard,” Lucas said. “But it’s gonna warm up tonight. Then maybe snow.”

  “We could use it,” Zahn said.

  Anderson had spotted them coming through the trees and turned to the ME, who had what looked like an unfiltered cigarette hanging from one lip, and said something, and Ford looked toward them. He was a white-haired man, hardly old enough to be so white—thirty-five, Lucas thought—with round gold grandpa glasses. Lucas came up, with Zahn a step behind, nodded and said, “Dr. Ford? Lucas Davenport.” They shook gloved hands, and Lucas said, “Anything useful?”

  “They almost certainly died here, if that’s useful,” Ford said, talking around the cigarette. “Cash’s neck was cut by the rope and he bled down the length of his body and there were a few drips on the ground, in the snow under his right foot, so he was alive when they hung him up. I assume the same was true with Warr, but we’ll know for sure later. The blood on Warr’s face—I don’t believe it’s hers. I was worried about jarring anything loose, taking her down, so I took some swabs on the spot. We’ve got three short blond hairs, not hers, not Cash’s.”

  “Good. Excellent. Any signs of drug use?”

  Ford took the cigarette out of his mouth. “Both of them were raw around the nostrils, like they might be if they used cocaine. Cash had some scars on both of his forearms and Warr on her right forearm and both feet, that could be from needles. I couldn’t swear to the cocaine because we haven’t seen much of that here lately. We’ll need a few hours to verify all of this. We’ll do the full range of toxicology, of course.”

  “Okay. Quicker is better, though.” He looked out toward the choppers, still hanging south of the crime scene. He could see them clearly, just above the brush. They would have had a straight shot of the bodies hanging from the tree. To Dickerson: “There’s no chance that you had the bodies down before the choppers arrived?”

  “No.” The BCA man shook his head. “If they’ve got the right cameras, they got the shot. If we’d had another twenty minutes . . .”

  “They tried to come right in and we waved them off,” Anderson said. “Not much more we could do.”

  “Spilled milk,” Lucas said.

  THE BCA CRIME scene crew was already working the site, and Lucas drifted over and spoke for a moment to the supervisor. “Nothing. No good footprints—everything is frozen, and the snow didn’t hold anything,” the man said. “The length of stride and the size of the foot would make the killer a male, but hell . . . we didn’t think a woman dragged them back there anyway. Looks like just one guy, if that means anything.”

  “Yeah, it does,” Lucas said.

  “So it’s one guy. Not much else—we’re gonna clean the whole place out, though, right down to the dirt.”

  LUCAS TURNED TO go back to Dickerson, but the phone rang again and he pulled it out and punched it up.

  “You’re not going to believe it,” Del said. “There was a guy staying at the Motel 6 the night before last, driving a ’95 Jeep Cherokee, paid with cash. I’ve got his registration card, he shows Minnesota plates, including the tag number. I’m gonna run it, see what happens. The night clerk says he saw the guy again last night—that h
e pulled into the parking lot as if he were going to check in again, but he didn’t. He just sat in the lot for a few seconds, then pulled away. The clerk says he was a white guy with a short beard, big guy, well-spoken. He was wearing a dark blue parka and a watch cap. If Letty’s right on the time, he would have been in the motel parking lot about an hour earlier. Maybe a little less.”

  “Huh. Anybody else stay in the room since him?”

  “One guy last night, who already checked out, and the room’s been cleaned. We’ve got a credit card on the guy who checked out, so we should be able to get him for some prints. I locked up the room and put some duct tape on the doors.”

  “What else?”

  “If I don’t get something to eat in the next twelve minutes, my ass is gonna fall off.”

  “Got a place?”

  “There’s a cafe called the Red Red Robin. It comes reluctantly recommended.”

  “See you there in fifteen,” Lucas said.

  He went back to Dickerson and they stepped away from the crowd to talk. Lucas told him about the dope baggies at the Cash farmhouse. “I was just heading back down there,” Dickerson said. “Anything else?”

  “We interviewed the kid and she thinks the killer’s car was a Jeep Cherokee,” Lucas explained and outlined the conversation with Del. “So the guy at the motel saw the Jeep not long before Letty saw the lights out here on the road. It makes me nervous to say it, but it fits.”

  “Gotta process the room,” Dickerson said. He was interested now. “Priority one.”

  “It’s sealed with official duct tape,” Lucas said. “Feel free.”

  “Do any good for us to talk with the kid?”

  “I don’t think so. She mostly just found them,” Lucas said. “You can take a crack at her if you want.”

  “We got other stuff to do, if you think you got it all.”

  “I’m taking her back downtown, to see if I can keep her away from the reporters for a while,” Lucas said. “We’ll talk to her some more.”

  LETTY WAS SITTING on the hood of the Oldsmobile, apparently impervious to the cold, when Lucas got back to the road. “Couldn’t breathe inside the car,” she said. “But I stayed right here.” She hopped off the passenger side, popped the door, and climbed in. “The bodies in the bags looked stiff, like bags full of boards,” she said, as Lucas got in and fumbled out the key.

  “Uh. You know a place called the Red Red Robin?”

  “The Bird. Downtown. Nice place. My mom and I went there once for Thanksgiving.”

  “I’m going in to get a bite to eat with Del. I hate to leave you without your mother.” He didn’t mention that he hated even more to leave her with a pack of reporters outside her door. “Want to come?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Letty said. “If you’re buying.”

  “I’m buying.”

  On the way, Letty asked, “They were stiff in the bags. Is that like, rigor mortis?”

  Lucas shook his head. “No. They were frozen. Like Popsicles.”

  THE RED RED Robin was a storefront cafe with a robin painted on a swinging wooden sign outside the door, like the sign on an English pub. Inside, a dozen red-topped stools ran straight down a coffee bar, and behind those, and behind a sign that read, PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF, were sixteen booths covered with the same red leatherette as the stools. The place smelled of fried eggs, fried onions, fried potatoes, and fried beef. Eight other customers sat in three groups down the booths. They seemed to be arranged to keep an eye on Del, who sat halfway down the right-hand wall.

  “Anything?” Lucas asked Del, as he and Letty slid into the booth.

  “Ran the numbers. No such tag,” Del said.

  “Shit.” He glanced at Letty. “Shoot.”

  “But it occurs to me that a guy who’s gonna come up here and do something like hang two people would have to be pretty weird to do it in a small town, in his own car. He’s gotta know he’s gonna be somewhat noticed.”

  “You’d think.”

  “So maybe he wouldn’t lie about the Minnesota part of the plates, in case the clerk might notice. Maybe he just jumbled the numbers. I got the guys in St. Paul to look for recent title transfers on older Jeep Cherokees. Turns out the new ones don’t have those taillights. The motel clerk thought that it might be an older model, too.”

  “Maybe get lucky,” Lucas said.

  Letty asked, “Can you guys talk while you eat? Or is that too complicated?”

  Del lifted an eyebrow at her. “My daughter is only three years younger than this kid,” Lucas told him. “Do you think I could lock her in a freezer? I mean, what if she grew a mouth like this one?”

  “Ha ha,” Letty said. She handed a slightly greasy menu to Lucas. “You’re buying.”

  LETTY STUFFED HERSELF. Del and Lucas went out of their way to prove that they could talk while they ate. The food struggled toward mediocrity, but, Lucas realized as he sampled the potatoes, wasn’t going to make it. Half of the meatloaf was refrigerator cold; the other half, microwave hot. As they were finishing, a tall man in tan Carhartt coveralls came in, stamping his feet and snuffing with the cold. Letty called, “Hey, Bud.”

  The man looked around until he spotted Letty, then stepped over. He was about fifty Lucas thought, and as thin and hard-looking as an oak rail, with a bulbous red nose and flinty white eyes.

  “Hey, Letty,” he said, his eyes bouncing off Lucas and Del. “Been working hard, or hardly working?”

  “Doin’ okay,” she said. “I heard you been shootin’ beaver again.”

  “Yeah, over to Spike. What’s this about you finding those people? I heard about it at Jerry’s.”

  “Yep.” Letty puffed up a little. “They were nude.”

  “All right,” Lucas said dryly. “Let’s finish the meatloaf.”

  “Bud’s a trapper, like me,” Letty told them. To Bud: “These guys are state agents. They’re taking me around.”

  Bud nodded. “I thought Jane might come to a bad end,” he said.

  “Why was that?” Lucas asked.

  “Not good people,” he said. “She thought we were a bunch of hicks. She was always laughing at people behind their backs, and she used to talk about Las Vegas all the time, like that was the navel of the universe. Every time she opened her mouth she’d start off by saying, ‘In Las Vegas we used to . . . whatever.’ ”

  “Sounds like you knew her pretty well,” Del said.

  “Just to play blackjack,” the trapper dude said. “She was the main dealer up at Moose Bay.” He hesitated, then said, dropping his voice, “You know what you ought to do when you get up to the casino, is talk to a guy named Terry Anderson. He knew Warr real well.” He leaned on real just enough.

  Lucas nodded and said, “I’ll do that. Thanks. Terry Anderson.”

  “Any relation to the sheriff?” Del asked.

  The trapper was puzzled, looked at Letty and then back to Del. “Terry? Why would he be?”

  “Both Andersons?” Del suggested.

  The trapper cackled: “Shit, buddy, half the people up here are Andersons.”

  They talked for another fifteen seconds, then Bud retreated to the counter and got a menu.

  “Heck of a trapper, and he’s supposed to be an unbelievable hunter, too. He knows more about animals than they know themselves,” Letty said. “He’s been number one around here for years.”

  “Taught you everything you know?”

  She shook her head: “He doesn’t teach anything to anybody. He’s got his secrets and he keeps them.”

  Lucas dropped his voice to match hers: “Think he might have had anything going with Jane?”

  “No.” Now she was almost whispering. “Don’t look at him, he’ll know we’re talking about him. But, uh, everybody says Bud’s a little . . . gay.”

  WHEN THEY’D FINISHED the meal, Lucas sent Del to Broderick, to look for dope hideouts. “We’re gonna pick up Letty’s mother,” Lucas said. “Then, I’ll see you up there.”

  As he
and Letty were about to get in the car, he remembered Mitford. “Damnit . . . why don’t you go look in a store window for a minute?” he suggested to Letty, and pulled out his phone.

  Mitford picked up on the first ring, and Lucas gave him the bad news: “They’ve got pictures. I don’t know how good, because they were a couple hundred yards away, but they’ve got something.”

  “Aw, man. That’s terrible. Anything on the dope?”

  “Not yet. My partner’s on the way up to the house. If there’s anything, he’ll find it. What about Cash, and the jail business?”

  “We’re getting that now, through Rose Marie,” Mitford said. “We got a summary: he’s had a whole list of minor stuff, some drug-related, disorderly conduct, like that. Then this last one, he was originally charged with ag assault. He beat on some other guy with a steel coat tree in a hotel. They pled it down and he took a year in the county lockup on some lower-level assault. Served nine months.”

  “Doesn’t sound like something you get hanged for.”

  “I got Missouri trying to figure that out. They said they’d get back to us this afternoon, with whatever they can find,” Mitford said. “Oh, and I got two more words for you.”

  “What words?”

  “Washington Fowler.”

  “You’re joking.” Washington Fowler was a civil rights attorney from Chicago, who’d mostly given up the law in favor of incitation to riot.

  “I’m not,” Mitford said. “He’s having a press conference here, at the airport, in an hour, and he’s flying out to Fargo in a private plane in an hour and a half. The governor invited him over to the mansion for a conference, but he told us to go fuck ourselves. You should see him up there tonight.”

  “Aw, jeez.”

  “Yeah. Lucas—we need to hit Cash hard. The woman, too. Before the news. Before that film gets down here. Before Fowler gets up there.”

  “We’re looking.”

  WHEN LUCAS GOT off the phone, Letty suggested that they might find her mother at the Duck Inn, two blocks over. They ambled over, Lucas looking in the storefronts. Small towns, he’d realized a long time ago, were a little like spaceships, or ordinary ships, for that matter—they generally had to have one of everything: one McDonald’s or Burger King (couldn’t support one of each), a department store, a quick oil change, a hardware store, a feed store, a satellite-TV outlet, a bar or two. Everything needed for survival. Armstrong was like that, a lifeboat, one of everything necessary for life, all packaged in yellow-brick and red-brick two-story buildings. About one in four of the storefronts was empty, and the owners hadn’t bothered to put “For Rent” signs in the windows.