Naked Prey

by John Sandford

“We was just talking about it,” Wolf said. “Letty says they was frozen like Popsicles.”

  “They put them in the black bags to carry them out, and they were in there like a sackful of boards,” Letty said.

  “Do the police have any ideas who did it?” Ruth asked.

  Letty shook her head. “Nah. They know a heck of a lot less than I do. They don’t know anything about Broderick—I been filling them in. There’s these guys, Lucas and Del, I’m helping them out. We ate up at the Bird this afternoon.”

  “What . . . did you actually see? At the murder scene?”

  Sandy Wolf leaned on the counter and Ruth plopped on the stool next to the girl, and Letty went through the whole story, as she’d told it to the television cameras that afternoon. When she finished the story about finding the bodies, she added that the cameras were coming back the next day for a feature story. “They’re gonna come along and run my traps with me. I had to go out this afternoon and put some traps in, just so I’ll have some ’rats for the feature story tomorrow.”

  “Are they paying you?” Wolf asked.

  “Maybe,” Letty said. She wasn’t sure—she hadn’t thought of that angle.

  “They oughta,” Wolf said. “I mean, you got a product to sell. You could go on Oprah.”

  “You think?” Letty liked Oprah.

  “You can’t tell where this kind of thing will lead. You could be in Hollywood. Stranger things have happened,” Wolf said.

  “I don’t know about Hollywood,” Ruth said. She felt a tickle of concern. “Letty, do you have anybody staying with you out there, with you and your mom? I mean, a policeman?”

  “No . . . You think we should?”

  “Well.” She nibbled at a lip.

  “Okay. Now I’m scared,” Letty said. She’d seen all the cop dramas. The killers always came back. “All I got is that piece-of-shit .22.”

  “The guy isn’t coming back,” Wolf said disdainfully. She’d been cleaning up the grill and she flapped her cleaning rag at Letty. “The guy who did this is a million miles from here. He’s probably on Miami Beach by now.”

  “I hope,” Ruth said. To Wolf: “Egg sandwich with raw onions?”

  “Fried hard? Coming up,” Wolf said. She asked Letty, “Another piece of pie? Short piece?”

  “If you’re buying,” Letty said. She grinned at Ruth. “Got a free piece of pie for the story?”

  “You’ll get a free ride to jail if the state patrol sees that truck parked out back,” Wolf grunted. To Ruth: “She’s driving her mom’s truck again. Little goddamn juvenile delinquent.”

  “Little goddamn juvenile delinquent who’s gonna be on Oprah,” Letty said. She looked at the wall clock. “Four-thirty. I gotta be out of here in ten minutes. They’re telling me that we’ll be on at five.”

  “Movie star,” Wolf cackled, sliding a half-slice of cherry pie down the countertop.

  WHEN RUTH GOT back to the church, she told Katina about Letty, smiling as she recounted the girl’s enthusiasm. Katina wasn’t so amused. “That kid’s all over the place. If she’s talking to the police, I hope she doesn’t talk about us. Or about Gene’s place.”

  “Not really much for her to know,” Ruth said. “Bunch of cars getting fixed.”

  “I suppose. Just the way that she’s always hanging around. I mean, Ruth—we’re criminals. We should act like criminals, at least part of the time.”

  “She’s having a good time. I don’t think she’s a danger to us,” Ruth said. “She’s a kid.”

  “If you say so,” Katina said, letting her skepticism show.

  “Besides—we’ve talked about this—sooner or later, one of us is going to get caught crossing the border. Or somebody will tell some ambitious little creep prosecutor what we’re doing, and they’ll come get all of us. We could go to jail, Katina. It’s a fact of life.”

  Katina shook her head. “I never believed that. If we’re careful. If we’re really, really psychopathically careful, I don’t think we will.”

  THE DISCUSSION HAD not quite been an argument, and nothing was resolved. Later on, Katina crossed the highway when she saw Singleton pull into Calb’s parking lot. Singleton had a remote that worked the overhead door, and the door went up, and he pulled inside—to get the car out of sight, Katina supposed. There were still two cop cars and a state van at Cash’s house, though it was so cold, all the cops had gone inside the house. Singleton saw Katina coming across the highway and held the door up for her, dropping it when she was inside.

  “Gene’s in the back,” Singleton said.

  Calb was in his cubbyhole, staring at an aging Dell computer. He looked up and said, “Loren,” when Singleton came in, leaned back to look around him and said, “Hey, Katina.”

  “Talk to the state guys yet?” Singleton asked.

  “Two sets of them. This afternoon. One set was okay and they were here for an hour, taking notes. The other set was just two guys who stood around with their hands in their pockets. Like the fuckin’ gestapo.”

  “Davenport and Capslock,” Singleton said. “Supposed to be heavy hitters. What’d you tell them?”

  “The truth,” Calb said. “I talked to Shawn down in Kansas City before they came in, told him what I was going to do, which was, tell the truth. That I knew Shawn in the Army and knew he had this troubled cousin and when the cousin got out of jail, I hired him as a favor. Then I told them I was about to fire him because he was a screw-up, and I suspected he used the drugs, but not that he sold them. I told them I thought the trouble might be coming from Jane’s casino job . . .”

  “Good,” Singleton said. “I was going to suggest that. We’ve gotta reinforce it now that you got them thinking about it.”

  Katina pulled at her lip. “I’m worried about Letty West. She’s spending a lot of time with the police, and she hangs around here.”

  Calb shook his head. “Nothing to worry about. She comes in to get warm, and I don’t let her go in the shop because I don’t want her getting hurt, all the shit laying around here. I don’t believe she ever talked to Deon.”

  THEY CHATTED FOR a few more minutes, then, as they left, Singleton deflected a hint from Katina—she could have used some comforting in these troubled times—and headed back to Armstrong. He stopped at Peske’s market to pick up a six-pack of caffeinated Coke, and ran into Roger Elroy, who was also looking into the cooler at the back of the store. “Anything happening?”

  “They got him,” Elroy said quietly.

  “They got him?”

  Elroy was young and eager and full of news. “They know who it is—those two BCA guys figured it out up at the casino,” Elroy said. Singleton thought, the casino, and a wave of relief washed through him, and he leaned into the cooler for a six-pack. “It was that guy whose kid was kidnapped, Hale Sorrell, that guy from Rochester. Remember, last month?”

  Singleton almost gave it away then. Might have, if Elroy had seen his face, but his face was in the cooler, as he reached deep inside. He stopped, got a grip both on himself and the six-pack, backed out, and said, “Where’d they come up with that?”

  Elroy told him, briefly, then shook his head. “Anderson talked to the governor. They think the Sorrell girl’s body might be out there at Deon Cash’s place. You knew those guys, right?”

  “Knew who they were,” Singleton said. “Talked to Cash a couple of times . . . Jeez. So have they grabbed Sorrell yet?”

  “Not until tomorrow. They’re trying to run some stuff down—they’ve got a line on the car he used, they’re running some pictures by a witness. They don’t want to tip him off.”

  “Jesus.”

  “These BCA guys, they’re heavy duty,” Elroy said. “I met Davenport a couple of years ago, when he was on another job. I’m telling you, he’s the smartest cop in the state. He’s the guy who set up that ambush on that assassin woman down in Minneapolis. If he thinks it’s Sorrell, then it is.”

  “Maybe not so smart. Maybe just lucky.”

  “You ha
ven’t met him,” Elroy said. “He is something else. When I met him, he was up here with this policewoman, fuckin’ her, she had a set of knockers . . .”

  SINGLETON HAD A lot to think about, and he prowled down the streets of Armstrong, doing just that. Thought about Letty West. Thought about her for five minutes, tried to remember exactly where he’d seen her around the farmhouse. He knew he’d seen her out around the dump, but not when . . .

  He sat on a street corner for a while, tapping a Marlboro into his hand, lit it with an ice-cold Zippo. Thought about Hale Sorrell. Finally, disturbed and a bit angry at the unfairness of it, he drove over to Logan’s Fancy Meats, used the phone on the outside wall, dialing a number from memory.

  A man answered, “Hello?”

  He hung up, walked back to his car. Unraveling sweaters. He lit another Marlboro, thought about it.

  SINGLETON DIDN’T THINK of himself as a killer, because he’d never actually killed anyone—not that the law cared. The law would say he was a killer, because he was there when the girls were killed. It was all really gentle: Mom had gone into the room with them, and told them that they were being taken back home, but that they weren’t allowed to see it. So she’d give them a shot, and when they woke up, they’d be back with their mom and dad.

  They never woke up, of course. Singleton had carried them out in a black plastic garbage bag, still warm, out through the night, the burial spade rattling in the back of the truck. They’d gone quickly, quietly, mercifully. They never felt a thing.

  He’d like to go like that. In a way, they’d been lucky.

  NOW THEY HAD the Sorrell problem. It wasn’t Joe; it was Sorrell. And there was only one way, as far as he could see, that Sorrell could possibly have found out about Deon and Jane, and that was through Joe. Sorrell had gotten him.

  Had Joe given up his name as well? Or Mom’s? Had Deon or Jane given them up?

  Damn. Like a sweater unraveling. He thought about it for a few more minutes, and then called Mom.

  9

  Del had gotten them rooms in a Motel 6, but after Small Bear identified Sorrell with the photos, they decided to head back to the Cities. The helicopter had already gone, so they’d be driving.

  “We have to put together an approach,” Lucas told Dickerson, as they rode back to Armstrong in Anderson’s truck. “You gotta stay right on top of the DNA samples. The lab’ll want to take three or four days, but you can get them in two days if you push. Also: we need that formal statement from Small Bear. Get her while she’s hot.”

  “You gonna bust him?”

  “I’ll talk to the governor,” Lucas said. “I’d rather have the DNA done first, so we know that what we’ve got is good. But there’s some politics in this, so—I dunno. If the DNA’s good, we’ll have him cold, and what I’d like to do is talk to him without any lawyers around. Find out what the hell happened. How did he pin them down? What was the sequence? Were there more people involved?”

  Dickerson nodded. “All right. He was in the Army, so he’ll have prints on file. I’ll get them and run them against everything we’re taking out of his hotel room, so we’ll have that, too. I’ll get all the tapes from Moose Bay, see if we can get him following her out of the casino . . .”

  “Need statements from everybody . . .”

  “I wish you’d stay around for when Washington gets up here,” Anderson said to Lucas. Anderson was behind the wheel. “I don’t know exactly what to do with him.”

  “Don’t talk to the guy,” Lucas said. “Be too busy solving the crime. This guy makes a living with confrontation, and you cannot win. Have somebody designated to handle your information and to deal with him—a woman would be best, somebody a little older and motherly, so if he really ripped on her, he’d seem like an asshole. But you oughta stay away.”

  “I gotta say something,” Anderson protested. “It’s my town.”

  “Man, I’m telling you, if you go out there and meet him, he’s gonna fuck you,” Lucas said. “If you want to be on TV, that’s okay. Have somebody keep an eye on Washington, and talk to the TV people while he’s taking a nap, or eating. Be really polite about him—welcome him to the community—but do not talk to him.”

  Anderson looked at Dickerson. “What do you think?”

  “Lucas is right. If you talk to him with a TV camera around, he’ll hand you your ass. If you gotta talk to him, do it privately, in your office. Don’t let the cameras in.”

  “If you can hold him off until the day after tomorrow, then the whole thing may be moot,” Lucas said. “We’ll jump on Sorrell, and leak the story like crazy. Washington probably won’t want to be identified as defending people who kidnapped and murdered a little girl.”

  “All right, all right,” Anderson said. He muttered something under his breath, then said, “You guys are treating me like the village idiot.”

  After a moment of silence, Lucas asked, “Think you could do pretty good surgery?”

  “What?” Anderson said.

  “Surgery. You think you could do a heart bypass tomorrow if you had to?”

  Now Anderson was pissed. “Is this leading to something?”

  “Yeah. This: Washington is to confrontation and publicity what a heart surgeon is to bypass surgery. You shouldn’t be embarrassed if you’re not as good at it as he is. None of us are. It’s his specialty. He’s not interested in getting to know you, or understanding the problem, or solving the crime. He’s here to fuck somebody and raise some money for himself. If you give him a target, he’ll fuck you. Nothing personal—it’s just his job.”

  They rode in silence for a while, then Dickerson said, “I’m seeing stars, I think.”

  “Supposed to clear off just long enough to get really cold, then tomorrow, we got more clouds coming,” Anderson said.

  DEL CALLED THE Motel 6 from the Law Enforcement Center and canceled their rooms, and Lucas talked to the car dealer, Holme, about taking the Oldsmobile south to the Cities. “It’s a good runner,” Holme said. “No problem about that. But how you gettin’ it back?”

  “I’ll find somebody to bring it back, or bring it back myself,” Lucas said. “Give me a week.” He thought about the possibility of a body out at the Cash house: he’d be back.

  And he called Mitford, who was still in his office. “We got a solid ID,” Lucas said. “I’m coming back tonight, we ought to arrive sometime after two in the morning, so I can be in early tomorrow. If you talk to the governor tonight, our next question is: When do we take him?”

  He explained about the DNA processing time. “The thing is, if we really nail him down right at the start, before he has a chance to get into some long strategy sessions with his lawyers . . . maybe we can find out what happened. At least what happened with the kidnapping.”

  “A two-fer,” Mitford said. “Clean up the kidnappings and the lynchings—the hanging. I’ll talk with the governor tonight. You’ll be on your cell phone?”

  “Yeah, but there are some big holes in the cell-phone net. You might not be able to get me for a couple hours, unless I’m going through a town. Once I get on I-94 going south, we could probably hook up.”

  “If I don’t get you, we meet tomorrow for sure. How about seven o’clock?”

  “You got a life, Neil?”

  “What?”

  ON THE WAY out of the Law Enforcement Center, Lucas said good-bye to Anderson and Dickerson, the sheriff shaking hands with him this time. Lucas had the feeling that he wouldn’t stay away from Washington, but that was Anderson’s problem. “Guys, we kicked some ass today,” Lucas said.

  They consolidated their bags in the Olds, and Lucas took the wheel. As they passed the front of the courthouse, they saw the glow of TV lights on the front steps.

  “Getting set up for Washington,” Del said.

  “Like a flame for a moth,” Lucas said. “I’ll bet you ten bucks that Anderson winds up out there.”

  “No bet.”

  THE TWIN CITIES were southeast from Armstrong, bu
t the fastest way home was on a state highway that went directly west for almost forty miles, where they would hook up with the north-south I-29 in North Dakota. They’d take I-29 to Fargo, where they’d catch I-94 east into the Cities. It was a long way around, but both Anderson and Dickerson said it was the quickest way, by at least an hour.

  On the way out of town, they called home to tell their wives that they were on the way. The housekeeper told Lucas that Weather was at the supermarket on Ford Parkway, but she’d pass the message on. Lucas put the speedometer on ninety and they headed through the moonless dark toward the North Dakota border.

  “Ought to bring the Porsche up here, let her out,” Lucas said. “Dead straight, not another car in sight, and we know where all the cops are.”

  “’Course, we could hit a cow,” Del said.

  They rode along for a few minutes, then Lucas said, “You know, I didn’t see any cows.”

  “Come to think of it, neither did I.”

  Another minute, and Lucas said, “They must’ve named Moose Bay after something. Maybe we’ll hit a moose.”

  Del didn’t answer. Lucas glanced over at him, found him staring out the window.

  “What?”

  “My God. Look at the lights. Northern lights.”

  Lucas couldn’t see them from the south side of the car, so he stopped, and they both got out and stood next to the idling Olds. The stars were so close that they looked like headlights on a city highway, but the real show was to the north, where a rippling curtain of pale yellow and even paler violet hung from the vault of the sky. The curtain moved, swayed, brightened and then faded, and then exploded in another sector. They stood on the highway watching, until the cold began to seep into their shoulders, and then they got back in the Olds and took off.

  Del still watched from his window, and finally he sighed and said, “Too much light to see them in the Cities. I mean, you can see them, but not like this.”

  “I can see them pretty good from my cabin,” Lucas said.

  “So goddamn bright that you don’t need your headlights,” Del said.