Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  12

  Sunday.

  Lucas and Del went north in a two-car convoy, Lucas leading in the Acura, Del trailing in the rented Olds. They left the Big New House at three-thirty in the morning, out past the airport, around the sleeping suburbs, then northwest on I-94.

  Rose Marie had called ahead and cleared them with the overnight highway patrolmen, and Lucas put the cruise control on eighty-five, with Del drafting behind him. They made the turn north at Fargo in three hours, picking up a few snowflakes as they crossed the narrow cut of the Red River. The snow got heavier as they drove north up I-29, but was never bad enough to slow them. After a quick coffee-and-gas stop at Grand Forks, they continued north, then cut back across the border to Armstrong, and pulled into the Law Enforcement Center a few minutes before nine o’clock.

  Bitter cold now, but the snow had quit for the moment. More was due during the day, and Lucas wanted to get started in Broderick before conditions got too bad. The sheriff wasn’t around—probably at church, the comm center man said—so they left a message that they’d be somewhere around Armstrong or Broderick, then stopped at the Motel 6. With the discovery of the bodies of Hale and Mary Sorrell, most of the reporters had gone, and they got rooms immediately.

  “Like a land office in here the night before last,” the clerk said. “Now we’re back to Sleepy Hollow.”

  “All the reporters gone?”

  “All but one.” The clerk leaned across the desk and dropped his voice. “A black guy from Chicago. He says he’s a reporter, but I wouldn’t be too sure.”

  “Hmm,” Lucas said wisely, and took the room key.

  ON THE WAY out of Broderick, rolling through the bleak landscape, Del punched up the CD player and found Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page,” in the cover version by Metallica.

  They listened for a while, and then Del said, “I like Seger’s better.”

  “Close call, they’re both good,” Lucas said. “I go for the Metallica. Great goddamn album, anyway.”

  “Dusty fuckers versus metalheads; and you always leaned toward the metal,” Del said. “Back when you were running around town on that bike. I remember when you went to that first AC/DC concert. You talked about it for weeks.”

  “They kept your motor clean,” Lucas said. They were coming up on Broderick. “Tell you what—let’s go on through town and find that kid.”

  “Letty . . .”

  “West.”

  A FORD TAURUS was parked in the yard next to the Wests’ Cherokee. Lucas and Del trooped across the porch, and Martha West met them at the door before they had a chance to knock.

  “The state policemen,” she said to the room behind her. She pushed the door open and said, “C’mon in!”

  The front room was too warm and smelled of wool and, Lucas thought, old wine and maybe Windex or lemon Pledge. Letty was sitting on a piano bench in front of a broken-looking Hammond organ; a short, muscular black man with a notebook was perched in an easy chair, forty-five degrees to her right, a Nikon D1X by his feet. A pillow sat on the floor at the third point of the triangle, where Martha West had apparently been sitting.

  “Hey, Lucas and Del,” Letty said. She got up, smiling. “Did you see me on TV?”

  “All over the place,” Del said. “You were like Mickey Mouse.”

  Martha West said, “We’ve been having an interview with Mr. Johnson from the Chicago . . .” She looked for the name but couldn’t find it.

  “Tribune,” the black man said, standing up. He wore round, gold-rimmed glasses and looked like he might once have been a lineman for Northwestern. “Mark Johnson.” He reached out to shake hands with Lucas, and then with Del. “You’re agents Davenport and Capslock?”

  Lucas nodded. “I’m Davenport and this is Capslock. I’m surprised you’re here. Your friends got out of town fast enough,” he said.

  “Mostly TV,” Johnson said, as if that explained everything.

  “We need to talk to Martha and Letty, but we don’t want to disturb your interview,” Lucas said. “We can come back, if you’d like.”

  Johnson shook his head. “I got most of what I was looking for. I’m trying to figure out how in the hell Cash ever wound up here.”

  “Learn anything?”

  “No. The guy down in the car shop won’t talk because he’s afraid he’ll get busted, or even worse, get sued. The guy with the dogs won’t talk to me because of his American principles. And the women at the church think I’m probably a rapist because I’m black, but they’re too nice to say so.”

  “We can’t help you with Cash,” Lucas said. “We’d like to know ourselves. He just doesn’t fit.”

  “He was pure-bred city,” Johnson agreed. “I called some people down in KC and they tell me there’s no truck-driving job in the world that’d keep him up here. He’d rather have some cheap-ass job like robbing 7-Elevens.”

  “Interesting,” Lucas said.

  “It is,” Johnson said, gesturing with his notebook. “Now you tell me something. Do you really think Cash and this Joe guy and Jane Warr kidnapped the Sorrell girl? If they did, why in the heck would they be out in the country where everybody could see them coming and going, and know every move they made?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “But I think they were involved in the kidnapping. I think they did it for the money and we’ll eventually nail it down. We’ve got a state crime scene crew taking their cars apart, looking for DNA that might tie them to the girl.”

  “Can you tell me precisely why you think they were involved?” The notebook was poised again.

  Lucas thought it over, then asked, “Do you know Deke Harrison?”

  “Yeah, sure. He’s my guy at the Trib,” Johnson said. “He runs our desk.”

  “He used to come through the Cities,” Lucas said. “For years. We’d go out and get a drink.”

  “Yeah. That’s my job now. He moved up,” Johnson said.

  “Tell him to give me a call,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a cell phone.”

  LUCAS GAVE JOHNSON the cell-phone number, Johnson said good-bye to Lucas and Del, went out through the door, and then a moment later stuck his head back inside. “Find a good place to eat?”

  Letty said, “The Red Red Robin.”

  “That’s the best? God help us,” Johnson said, and he was gone.

  Letty put her hands on her hips and looked at Lucas. “Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?”

  LUCAS TOLD LETTY and Martha West what they needed: any hint of an irregularity around the Cash-Warr property. “There is no body in the house—we took the place apart after we found the money and the dope.”

  “So they must’ve buried her,” Letty said, crossing her lips with both of her forefingers, thinking. Martha shivered at the thought, and looked at her daughter. Letty seemed more interested than scared.

  “I imagine they did,” Lucas said. “But out here . . . there’s ten thousand square miles of unbroken dirt and bog.”

  “Yeah, but even out here, there’s always people going by. You couldn’t just drive out somewhere and spend an hour digging a grave and be sure nobody saw you,” Letty said. “People see you out here, because—wherever you are—you’re unusual. They notice you. I’ll be walking across the lake down by the old dump and two days later somebody’ll say, ‘Saw you down by the dump with your gun.’ And I never saw them.”

  “Gives me the creeps,” Martha West said. “You got no privacy.”

  Letty looked out the window, the white winter light picking out her blue eyes. Still not much snow. “Why don’t we go look around?” she asked. “I’ll come with you, see if I can see anything. I walk up and down there all the time, on my way to the crick. If we wait until tomorrow, there might be too much snow.”

  “Must’ve been snow since the girl was taken,” Del said. “She was taken before Christmas.”

  “There’s been some, but not much,” Letty said.

  “If you guys are gonna take Letty, could I get you to buy her some lunch
or something?” Martha West asked. “I’ve got to run into town for a while.”

  “Sure,” Del said. “Down to the Bird.”

  MARTHA WEST WAS suddenly in a hurry, and Del looked past Letty at Lucas, catching his eye, with an uh-oh twist of his head: Martha West needed a drink right now. Lucas nodded and said to Letty, “Get your coat.”

  “Want me to bring the .22?”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Piece of crap, anyway,” she said, and headed up the stairs to her bedroom.

  Martha West was gone before Letty came back down. Letty came down wearing a slightly too big parka, pac boots, and carrying a pair of mittens. “S’go,” she said, clumping through the living room to the door.

  “Your mom’s already gone,” Del said.

  “Straight to the Duck Inn,” Letty said. She added, without irony, in a voice that sounded older than her twelve years, “It’s a tragedy.”

  THEY DROVE BACK down to the Cash/Warr house in the Acura, Letty fascinated by the CRT screen in the dashboard. “Can you play movies on it?”

  “Nope—you get the information screen and the map screen, and that’s it. Unless you have to eject.” Lucas kept his voice flat. He was a firm believer in lying to children. “If you need to eject, you go to the information screen, and push History, and one second later, you’re history. Throws you right out of the car, through the moon roof.”

  Letty, in the back seat, thought about it for a second, then said, “It’s not nice to fuck with kids.”

  Del twisted and said, “Jesus Christ. Watch your mouth, little girl.”

  TWO VEHICLES WERE sitting in the driveway at the Cash/Warr house: a BCA crime scene van, and a sheriff’s department car. Lucas pulled in behind them. They all climbed out, and a deputy sheriff came out on the stoop and said, “Your guys are out in the garage, if you’re looking for them.”

  “Thanks,” Lucas called back. They trudged up the driveway to the garage, and went in through the side door. A BCA tech was standing at the open trunk of Jane Warr’s car, and said, “Hey, guys.” When he spoke, another man, shorter and stockier, backed out of the trunk. He was holding a plastic bag and a pair of forceps. A magnifying hood was pulled down over his glasses, and his eyes appeared to be the size of ashtrays.

  “Doing any good?” Lucas asked.

  “The trunk is full of stuff—we’ve got hair for sure, we might have some blood, but it could be something else, too,” the shorter man said. “Typical trunk.”

  “How about Cash’s car?”

  “Same thing. All kinds of stuff.”

  “How long before we know if anything’s good?”

  The taller tech shrugged. “Depends on how much stuff there is . . . a week or two. Anything we can do for you?”

  “We’re gonna look around the grounds,” Lucas said. “See what there is to see.”

  “Uh, Dickerson called this morning, said something about a guy with ground-penetrating radar.”

  “Could happen,” Lucas said. “But he can’t do the whole place. That’d take weeks. We’re gonna see if we can find a place to start.”

  “Good luck.”

  LUCAS, DEL, AND Letty went back outside, and Lucas turned around once, looking at the house, the garage, an old dying tree line that once marked the southern boundary of the farmyard, a fence that might have marked the western end.

  “If you had to bury somebody . . .” Letty said.

  “I wouldn’t do it here,” Del said, turning like Lucas. “I’d take her someplace.”

  “Everybody in the state was looking for her.”

  “Probably not yet, when they killed her. If they killed her before Sorrell brought in the FBI . . .”

  “But they couldn’t be absolutely sure that he hadn’t done that right away,” Lucas said. “If they had her here, in that cell, they wouldn’t want to take her too far. Especially if, like Letty says, everybody sees things here. Everybody would remember a black guy with a little blond girl, up here, even if they thought it was innocent.”

  “Keep her in the trunk?”

  “Too many things to go wrong,” Lucas said.

  “They drove her all the way up here from Rochester.”

  “What can I tell you? They did that. Maybe. But when it came to getting rid of her, do you think they’d drive her all the way back down, and take another big risk?”

  “Dunno,” Del said. “I just don’t know where we could start looking.”

  LETTY POINTED: “OUT there in the trees. That’s the crick. Five-minute walk. You could carry a bag. If you walked out there right at dark, nobody would see you, and you could walk back in the dark. How old was she?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Skinny?”

  “Not fat,” Lucas said. “Sort of fleshy.”

  “Minnesota skinny.”

  “That’s it.”

  “So she weighs seventy or eighty pounds. Five-minute walk.”

  “You’d leave footprints,” Del said.

  “Not in December. I remember how cold it was, but it wasn’t snowing. We had hardly any snow at Christmas.”

  “Let’s go look,” Lucas said.

  THE CREEK BEGAN as a swale in a farm field, narrowed into a line, not really a depression, toward the back of the Cash/Warr land, and finally deepened into a knee-deep notch in the black earth, surrounded by willows and box elders.

  They started with the first tree, at the north end of the property, and followed the deepening notch into the thicker line of trees and brush, walking on the ice of the little creek itself. The band of trees was no more than thirty yards wide. They followed the creek for two hundred yards, until it ended in a bog. They saw nothing unusual—no disturbed earth, and the only tracks they found had probably been left by Letty.

  They finally walked back up the creek; halfway back, three dogs began barking from the back of a house that lay down the highway from Cash’s place. They were black and brown, square-faced, crazy: pit bulls. “That’s the dogs I’ve been telling you about,” Letty said.

  “Scare the heck out of me,” Del admitted. To Letty: “They ever let them out on you, you shoot first and ask questions later.”

  Lucas was annoyed. “You just stay away from there,” he said. “You don’t need to do any shooting.”

  “Maybe they fed the kid to the dogs,” Letty suggested.

  “Goddamnit,” Lucas said. And as they came to the top of the creek, “Goddamnit. We could be standing ten feet from the Sorrell kid and not know it.”

  “How would you do it?” Letty asked. She looked up at Del. “If you killed a little kid, and brought her out here, where would you put her?”

  Del said, “I don’t think you should be here.”

  “C’mon, Del. Look around. What’d you do?” she asked.

  Lucas looked around, then down at his feet. “Is there always water in the creek?”

  “No. But most of the time, there is.”

  “Under the creek?” Del asked, skeptically.

  “It’s a possibility,” Lucas said. “But if he was going to dig around here, I bet he’d be down here in the creek bed. Maybe digging in the bottom, or in the creek bank. Couldn’t be seen, but he could see people coming.”

  “Unless it was at night,” Letty said.

  They walked up and down the creek ice, looking at the banks, but couldn’t find anything unusual. Lucas probed a low cut-bank with a stick, then shook his head and threw the stick back into the trees. “We need the crime scene guys down here, and the radar guy, and maybe some dogs or something.”

  DISCOURAGED, THEY WALKED across the thin crunchy snow back up to the house, and Lucas looked at his watch and said, “Little early for lunch, but we could get some breakfast.”

  “Can I see the cell?” Letty asked. “The room in the basement?”

  “Fuckin’ TV,” Del said. The cell had been mentioned prominently.

  “Watch your mouth around a kid,” Letty said, payback for the little girl comment. To Lu
cas: “I’d really like to go down there. I’m a kid, maybe I could think like a kid or something.”

  Lucas sighed, looked at Del, then said, “All right. Two minutes.”

  They trooped through the house, nodded to the deputy, and took Letty into the basement. Inside the bathroom—the cell—she turned round and round, then sat down on the floor, then lay down and looked at the ceiling, her arms outstretched as though she were making a snow angel. She closed her eyes, and a minute later, she said, “If they left me here alone—if they left me here alone—I would try to write my name somewhere.”

  She opened her eyes, found Lucas’s eyes, and asked, “What do you think?”

  “Sit up,” Lucas said.

  She sat up, and Lucas and Del sat down, and they began scrutinizing the walls. Nothing apparent. Lucas stood up, pulled the top off the toilet tank, and looked inside. Nothing visible. Lucas flushed, watched the water go down, pulled the float to stop water, and groped around the bottom of the tank with his hand. The shower stall was bare, not even a bar of soap. He pulled open the medicine cabinet, found it empty. Del looked inside the cabinet under the sink, and found four rolls of toilet paper. He looked through all the toilet paper tubes. Empty. Lucas checked the rim on the top of the medicine cabinet, and got his fingers dusty.

  “I would write something,” Letty said, a little defensively. “I would scratch it with something.”

  She crawled around on her hands and knees, peering at the baseboard. Then Del, who’d crawled over to the toilet, said, “Got something here.”

  “What?” Lucas got down on his stomach, and Letty crawled over.

  Del was lying face up. “Something twisted around the water line . . . it’s a chain. Let me . . .” He fumbled under the tank, said, “Uhhh . . .” Then: “Got it.”

  He slid out from under the toilet. A silver locket, a small oval, dangled from his fingers on a short silver chain.

  “Aw, Jesus,” Lucas said. “Don’t fuckin’ move. Don’t even twitch.” Lucas ran up the stairs, dashed through the house to the mudroom door, outside to the garage, and said, “You guys . . . get some shit, get some baggies and those tweezers . . . c’mon.”