Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  BACK DOWN IN the basement, the stocky crime scene guy grabbed the locket with his forceps, held it sideways to one of the overhead lights and said, “There’s a partial print on the back. If it’s not yours . . .”

  He looked down at Del, who shook his head: “Not mine. I never touched the locket part, only the chain.”

  “Looks like a good print,” the tech said. He turned it in the light. “It’s got an inscription. The locket does.”

  “What?”

  The tech’s lips moved as he worked through the script. Then he frowned and asked, “Who the heck are Jean and Wally?”

  Lucas scratched his head. “Maybe somebody the Sorrell kid knew. Her grandparents, or somebody?”

  “Whoever, she put it down there,” Del said. “The locket didn’t just fall in there.”

  “Where’d you find it?” the tech asked.

  Del explained, and the tech looked around and finally said, “Did you check the mirror? And the shower booth walls? If she used hot water in here, they’d get steamed up, and she’d write in the steam. If she had soap or shampoo or oil on her fingers, you might get the image back.”

  “I do that every time I’m in the bathtub,” Letty said. “I write on the mirror when I get out.”

  Lucas said, “Worth a try, I guess.”

  The tech said, “Let me put this away, and get my camera. Huh. Wally and Jean.”

  WHILE THE TECH went to put the locket away, Lucas, trailed by Letty, went out to the car, got his address book out of his briefcase, and looked up the numbers for the FBI agents on the Sorrell case. He got Lanny Cole’s wife on the second ring, and she said Cole was out shoveling the walk. “Just had a quick two inches,” she said. “Of snow.”

  Lucas heard her calling her husband, then some stomping around, and then Cole was on the line. He didn’t know the names on the locket. “We were told that she probably wasn’t wearing any jewelry when she was taken—she was just a kid, and she had a pretty limited set of stuff. Nothing like a locket, far as I know. Sorry.”

  “Thought we had something,” Lucas said. “It’s weird.”

  “I’ll ask around,” Cole said. “I wouldn’t hold my breath. Maybe the print will turn out to be something.”

  Lucas hung up and Letty said, “No luck?”

  “Not yet.”

  “It’s gotta be something,” Letty said. “It didn’t belong to the plumber.”

  BOTH TECHS WERE in the basement with Del, the hot water pouring out of the shower, when Lucas and Letty got back down the stairs. They half-closed the door of the bathroom, waited fifteen seconds. The mirror steamed, and showed several finger-drawn lines, but nothing they could make sense of. The tech took a picture anyway. The walls of the shower showed what looked like sponge marks: “Somebody cleaned up,” the tech said.

  “Good try, guys,” Lucas said.

  Feeling a little morose, they all wandered back up the stairs, and the burly tech said that he’d recheck the walls with his magnifying hood as soon as the humidity cleared. “Maybe somebody wrote really small—it’d be about the only thing you could do. It was a good idea, looking for a name. It turned up the locket. That’ll be something.”

  Lucas looked at Letty. “Maybe you oughta be a cop.”

  Letty shook her head. “Nope. I’m going to be a reporter. It’s decided.”

  Lucas said to Del, “We could be responsible for that.”

  “I’ll never feel clean again,” Del said. “Want to head down to the Bird? My gut says it’s lunchtime.”

  They rode down to the Red Red Robin in near silence, all thinking about the house and where the Sorrell kid’s body might be. Del finally said, “If they thought they ever might be suspected of anything, they wouldn’t want a body anywhere around. They must’ve driven it out into the countryside. All right, if they’re seen, they’re seen, but they could fix it so they weren’t. Scout out a spot ahead of time, dig a hole, drop the body during the night, fill the hole—it’d only take a couple of minutes—and get out of there.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Lucas said. “She’s probably gone for good.”

  THE BIRD WAS as below-average as it was the first couple of times: below-average coffee, below-average food. Below-average: Letty ate everything in sight, with the shifty-eyed compulsion of a kid who’d gone to bed hungry a few times, who was afraid the food might disappear.

  “You okay with your mom?” Del asked halfway through the meal.

  “Gettin’ this far with her was the hard part,” Letty said, working around the edges of the mashed potatoes, so the gravy wouldn’t spill out of the center cup. “Now that I’m in middle school, things are smoother. I ride the bus back and forth, she can do what she needs to.”

  “Just checkin’,” Del said. “I’ve had a little trouble with alcohol myself. It’s a bitch to get off your back, but it can be done.”

  “You drink?” Letty asked Lucas, holding his eyes. Lucas shook his head. “A bottle of beer, few times a week. I never got the hang of it.”

  “That’s good,” Letty said.

  THE PHONE IN Lucas’s pocket rang, and he pulled it out. “Davenport.”

  “Hey, Lucas, this is Lanny Cole.” The FBI man sounded like he was having a hard time catching his breath. “You said Wally and Jean on that locket. It was a white gold oval locket with a white gold chain and the names in script in the front oval. Picture of an elderly couple inside.”

  “We didn’t look inside because of the print, but you got the rest of it, except that I thought it was silver,” Lucas said. “Was it Tammy Sorrell’s?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “It belonged to a girl named Annie Burke, fifteen, daughter of the owner of a chain of nursing homes from Lincoln, Nebraska. One of our guys downtown remembered the locket thing. She was kidnapped last April. A million-dollar ransom was paid, but she was never returned, never heard from again. The deal was, the kidnappers told Burke’s father that they had an in with the FBI, and they left him a pack of papers that looked like FBI printouts. They told him that if he contacted the FBI or any police agency, they would know. He bought it, made the payoff. And get this: he got the money in Vegas, same way Hale did.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  Letty said, “What?”

  “We’re coming up there,” Cole said. “We need that locket, we need that fingerprint. I’ll talk to your boss. What do you need up there?”

  “You got people who can look for soft spots in the ground, under the snow?”

  “We got that. We have a team in California who do exactly that. They can be here in forty-eight hours.”

  “Bring them in,” Lucas said.

  13

  After lunch, they took a protesting Letty back to her house. “I can still help you.”

  “If we need you, we’ll stop by,” Lucas said. “We really do appreciate what you’ve done.”

  Her face anxious, she asked, “If I get my traps real fast, could you drop me at the dump? It’s only five minutes in the car. I can walk back.”

  Lucas said, “We’re pretty busy.”

  “I helped you,” she said. “I need to get some clothes. TV might come back.”

  Lucas sighed. “Get the traps.”

  She took ten minutes, getting into an old pair of jeans, her boots and her parka. She got a can of generic-brand tuna cat food from under the kitchen sink—bait—the gunny sack with her traps, and her .22. The .22 was an old Harrington & Richardson bolt action single-shot, probably made in the 1940s. She tossed it all in the back of the Acura.

  Six miles north of Broderick, on a back road, the landfill was marked by a clan of crows flapping overhead like little specks of India ink thrown against the gray sky. Lucas pulled into the entrance road, next to a sign that said “Quad-County Landfill,” and stopped by a locked gate. Inside the landfill, a small Caterpillar sat at the base of a wall of garbage.

  Lucas got out of the truck at the same time Letty did, and looked over the locked gate. The d
ump was bigger than he’d expected, covering a half of a square mile. Much of the garbage appeared to be pizza boxes, though it smelled more like old diapers. Letty walked around to the back of the truck to get her gear.

  “Six miles,” Lucas said, as he walked back around the truck and popped the lid for her. “How’re you gonna get back home?”

  “Walk, or hitch a ride,” she said. She dragged the sack of traps out, stuck the rifle under her arm. “I won’t have my traps. Do it all the time.”

  “Aw, Jesus.” Lucas looked around at the weird, cold landscape, the spitting snow, the circling crows, and the piles of trash.

  “I’m not asking for a ride back,” Letty said. He could feel the manipulation.

  “How long will it take to set out the traps? Minimum?” Lucas asked.

  “Hour, hour and a half, do it right,” she said.

  “You got a watch?”

  “No.”

  “Goddamnit. You need a watch.” Lucas took his watch off and handed it to her. “If you lose the watch, I’ll poison you. My wife gave it to me. We’ll be back in an hour and a half.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Be careful.”

  A car pulled into the entryway, stopped, and they both looked at it. The man inside put up a hand, a hello, then turned and backed away. He got straight on the road, and headed back toward the highway. An old Cadillac.

  Letty said, “See you,” and walked away.

  Lucas slammed the lid, got back in the truck. “She’s more goddamn trouble than women ten years older than she is,” he said.

  “What’re we doing?” Del asked.

  “Let’s start tearing Broderick down.”

  “Starting with . . .?”

  “Gene Calb. Go back and hit him again. Nail him down. And maybe those church women, if we can find them. Letty said they worked for Calb, sometimes, delivering cars. They’re church women, so maybe they’ll tell us the truth.”

  “Fat fuckin’ chance,” Del said. And a while later, as they headed back toward Broderick, “That was a nice Caddy, you know? I’ve thought about buying an old one myself. You see them in the Sunday paper: you can get a good one for six or seven thousand, ten years old, some old guy drove it until he died, put thirty thousand miles on it, or something. You can drive it for another ten years.”

  “Of course, you’d have spent ten years driving a pig,” Lucas said.

  “Go ahead, tarnish my dream.”

  CALB’S SHOP WAS locked, and Del said, “It is Sunday. Not everybody works.”

  “Yeah. There’re a couple of cars over at the church, though,” Lucas said. They both looked across the highway, where two ’90s Toyota Corollas, both red, sat in the driveway next to the church. Electric cords ran out to both of them, firing the block heaters. “Let’s check them out.”

  “Nuns make me nervous,” Del said.

  “Except for Elle,” Lucas said.

  “Elle makes me nervous,” Del said. “I’m always afraid she’s gonna start shaking and moaning and screaming about Jesus.”

  “Wrong religion,” Lucas said dryly, as they trudged across the empty highway toward the church. “She screams about the archbishop. Jesus, she doesn’t scream about.”

  “It could happen, though,” Del said. “She’s one of those skinny women with big eyes. They can start shaking anytime. That’s my experience.”

  Elle Kruger was Lucas’s oldest friend, a nun and professor of psychology at a St. Paul women’s college. He’d known her before kindergarten—they had walked together with their two mothers, carrying their tin lunch boxes, on the first day they’d ever gone to school. Later, when he was with Minneapolis homicide, she’d consulted on a number of his cases; and when Lucas began writing role-playing games as a way to make extra money, she’d created a group at her college to test-play the games.

  WHICH MADE THE coincidence seem even stranger—that they should be talking about Elle Kruger as they crossed the highway, and then . . .

  They climbed the stoop and knocked on the door of the old church. Lucas’s ears were burning from the cold, and Del said, “Fucking Minnesota” and shuffled his feet in the keeping-warm dance. Lucas reached out to knock again when the door opened, and a woman looked out. She was an older woman, in her sixties, white-haired, round-faced with little pink dots at her cheeks, wearing bifocals, and holding what looked like a dustcloth. The pink dots made her look like Ronald Reagan. When they explained what they wanted, she said, “You’d have to talk to Ruth. Come in.”

  When the two men hesitated, her bottom lip twitched and she said, “This isn’t a nunnery or a dormitory. You’re allowed to come in.”

  “Thanks,” Lucas said, feeling a little lame. They followed her through the back of the church, which had been cut into sleeping cubicles, reminding Lucas of an old Washington Avenue flophouse in Minneapolis, except that it didn’t smell like wine vomit; past a side room where two women were sitting on a couch, watching the movie Fight Club; and into the kitchen. A small woman sat at a kitchen table, peering through gold-rimmed glasses into a notebook. A pile of what looked like insurance forms sat to one side. She looked up and the woman who’d met them at the door said, “Ruth, these gentlemen are from the police. They wanted to speak to somebody.”

  “Lucas Davenport,” the woman said, closing the notebook. She showed him a thin, cool smile.

  Lucas, surprised, said, “I’m sorry . . .”

  She stood up and put out a hand. As they shook, her hand small and cool, she said, “I’m Ruth Lewis. I’m sure you don’t remember, but I’m a friend of Elle Kruger. I once played a game with your gaming group, maybe ten years ago, when Elle was running it. I got to be George Pickett at Gettysburg.”

  “I remember that,” he said; and he did, clearly, and with pleasure. She’d learned fast and had been determined to win. “You kept taking out Buford,” Lucas said. “No matter how many times we played it, you’d kick Buford out of the way and then you’d get on top of the hills.”

  “And that was that,” she said, dusting her hands together. “The South wins the battle and maybe the war.”

  “Bad design,” Lucas said. “You never came back for Stalingrad.”

  “Nobody invited me,” she said. “I thought maybe it was because I kept messing up the first one.”

  “No, no, no,” Lucas said. “You were invited back, you just didn’t come.”

  “Have you seen Elle?”

  “Just the other day . . .”

  THEY CHATTED FOR a few minutes—she’d known Lucas as a Minneapolis cop, and he told her about his move to the state; and Lucas had known her as a nun, and she told him about her migration away from the sisterhood. “I made the mistake of going to the Holy Land,” she said. “I saw that the Sea of Galilee was a big, dirty lake and that the Mount of Olives was a neighborhood. Then Jesus didn’t seem divine. He seemed more real, but he seemed like another one of the guys that the Old Testament is full of. Down in my heart, I didn’t believe anymore—in Jesus, I mean.”

  “So you quit?”

  “Yup. Moved over to Catholic Charities. Got a boyfriend—though that didn’t last long. I think he just liked the idea of sleeping with an ex-nun.”

  Lucas was embarrassed. “Some people,” he said.

  She smiled, letting him off the male hook, and said, “You’re here investigating the lynchings.”

  “Murders,” Lucas said hastily. “Not really—we know who did those—”

  “The man from Rochester. I heard about that, the man and his wife. It’s hard to believe.”

  “Yeah. Now we’re trying to figure out who killed them. We were told that you guys sometimes make money driving cars for Gene Calb. Since Deon Cash worked over there as a driver, we thought you might have known him.”

  She was nodding. “I did know him, and he was a bad man. A bad man. Gene was going to fire him, because he thought Deon was taking dope, and Gene was worried about some insurance issues. Like if Deon was driving for him and got in an acci
dent, driving under the influence. Gene was afraid he’d get sued for everything.”

  “So everybody knew about the drugs?”

  “Some of us, anyway,” Ruth said. “There was a woman here, Jeanette Raskin, she used to work for Lutheran Social Services down in Minneapolis and she knows a lot about drugs—she said he once had a crack pipe in his car. I wouldn’t know what one looked like, but that’s what she said. I have her phone number if you need it. She’s back in the Cities.”

  “I know Jeanette,” Del said, and to Lucas: “You do, too. She used to run the Love Bug place, the free clinic.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Lucas said. “She would know about drugs.”

  “How come you guys drive for Calb?” Del asked Ruth.

  Ruth shrugged. “Extra money. Pizza money. Easy money. We follow the delivery car in my Corolla. Fifty cents a mile, so we get fifty dollars for a hundred-mile round trip, and we can do that on three gallons of gas. We don’t have a lot of money here.”

  “You did it a lot?”

  “A couple of times a week,” she said.

  “Is Calb straight?” Lucas asked.

  “Yes. He’s a very nice man, in a . . . car-mechanic way,” Ruth said, meeting his eyes. She had pale eyes, like the moons you could see in daylight. “His wife sometimes helps us out, when we’re checking on older people, shut-ins.”

  “You don’t think . . . if Cash and Warr were involved in a kidnapping, you don’t think that Calb would have been involved?”

  “Good gosh, no. I mean, the girl . . . is dead, I guess.”

  Lucas and Del both nodded.

  Ruth continued. “Gene always wanted children, but he and his wife couldn’t have any. They’ve been foster parents, even, for like a half a dozen kids. There’s no way he’d ever hurt a child.”

  Lucas said, “All right. But Deon Cash could.”

  “Deon . . . Deon was crazy. I didn’t know him very well, but you didn’t have to. I once saw him kick a door for two minutes because it didn’t open right. He was really crazy-angry with it. With the door.” She looked away from them for a minute, thinking about it, then back, and nodded positively. “He could kill children.”