Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  “Mmm. I kind of suggested that, and she said she hit him. Said there was no way she missed. I kind of think she might have hit him.”

  “Better get the word out to the local hospitals.”

  “We can do that.”

  THEY WERE STILL talking about it when Weather called back. “Turns out there’s an air evac service out of Brainerd, which is almost halfway up there, and they can have a helicopter on its way in a half-hour. They’ll call you when they’re coming, and give you a time estimate. He says there’s a landing pad right there at the hospital. He said it wouldn’t be much more than an hour before they’re coming in up there. I can meet her when she gets down here.”

  “Excellent.”

  BACK IN THE hospital he told the doc, “We’re medevacing her, sending her down to Hennepin General and a hand guy. A chopper’ll be here in an hour or so. We need to get her stable.”

  “The hand is the only big problem,” the doc said. “She’s got a groove in her side where she was shot, but that’s minor. So’s the leg. The hand . . . the hand is a problem.”

  “So how soon can she go?”

  “I’ll start some pain medication, and she can be ready in a half-hour. If the chopper’s coming in here, we’re good.”

  Lucas said to Letty, “I told you my wife is a doctor. She’s setting up everything down in the Cities, and she’s gonna meet you. You’ll be okay, but they want to fix your hand as soon as they can.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Did you check on Mom?”

  “We’re gonna do that now,” Lucas said. “I’m gonna head right back up there—you’ll be okay, just ride along and do what everybody tells you. They’ll take care of you.”

  “Mom’s dead,” she said.

  “We’ll go see what happened,” Lucas said. He touched her good leg. “You take care of yourself.”

  BACK AT THE West house, the fire was virtually out—there was almost nothing left to burn, and what had been a four-square farmhouse was now a hole in the ground. A deputy, who said that he’d met Lucas at the hanging scene, shook his head when they asked about Martha West. “Nobody’s seen her. Car’s here. There was this . . .” He gestured at the house. “There was this smell . . .”

  “I know. Letty said her mother was downstairs. She heard a knock on the door, then her mother started screaming, there was a shot, the screaming stopped, and Letty went out the window. Never saw her mother or heard her again.”

  “We’re sure she’s telling the truth? I don’t want to suggest anything, but they were out here alone.”

  “Letty was shot herself, and it’s not self-inflicted, believe me,” Lucas said. “Somebody shot her from behind and above. And nobody would do to themselves what happened to her, just to cover up. Her hand—there’s a possibility that she’s gonna be crippled.”

  The deputy winced. “Okay. You know, out here on the prairie . . . strange things happen when people are alone too much.”

  “In the city, strange things happen when they’re together too much,” Del said.

  “Strange things happen,” the deputy said.

  Lucas suspected they were about to lurch off into some philosophical black hole and hastily interjected. “We need to alert all the local hospitals and doctors that the killer may have been shot.”

  “That’s something. Since she didn’t hit him in the head, I hope she hit him in the nuts,” the deputy said. “I’ll call it in.”

  ONCE SINGLETON GOT the fire going, he’d slipped out the front of the West home and begun jogging down the highway. He’d thought about one more look around, one more quick search for Letty, but she had that gun, and she’d see him coming. He gave up on that, and jogged.

  His chest hurt. Hurt a lot—but he wasn’t spitting blood, wasn’t having any trouble breathing. If he could just keep going . . .

  Running hurt. He ran halfway back to Broderick, then he stopped, stooped over, braced his hands on his knees, and tried to ease the pain. The pain was coming in waves now, and if he hadn’t been shot, he might have thought he was having a heart attack. Behind him, the fire was growing. He ran on, hurting, made it to the car, running through the dark behind the convenience store and the shop.

  This was the dangerous part. This was where somebody might see him. He eased the patrol car out from behind the shop, pointed it south, and took off. No lights in any windows that he could see, but in the rearview mirror, the fire was going like crazy.

  A mile out of town, two miles, four—then his handset burped, and he heard the comm center calling over to the fire station. He dropped the hammer on it. He was still two miles from the nearest road that would take him away from Highway 36.

  He made it by ten seconds. He’d made the turn when he saw the light bar on the first responder truck. He continued east, and out the side window could see the huge balloon of fire at the West house; then the comm center was squawking at him and he said he was on the way back but he was pretty far south and he heard the siren come up . . .

  And he hurt. Goddamn Letty West.

  He was sweating from the pain: he could smell himself. He made another mile, crossed a gravel road heading south, into the backside of Armstrong. Four minutes later, he was at his garage, running the door up.

  Inside the house, he peeled off his parka, took off his shirt and undershirt, and examined the hole in his chest. It was a hole: a purplish, .22-sized dot on his chest, already surrounded by a nasty bruise. He pushed on the skin around it, and winced: won’t do that again. Blood trickled steadily from the hole—not much, but it wouldn’t stop.

  He went into the bathroom, got a roll of gauze, made a thick pad, went into the kitchen, found some duct tape, and taped the pad to his chest. He couldn’t help fooling with the area around the hole, squeezing gently to see if he could feel the slug. He couldn’t, but he hurt himself again.

  “Fuckin’ dummy,” he said.

  The phone rang. He let it ring. Probably Katina, with news about the fire. He got enough tape on his chest that he was sure he wouldn’t bleed through his shirt, then checked his arm. Martha West had scratched him, not too badly, but there would have been skin under her fingernails. Good idea about the fire. He washed the scratches with soap and warm water, smeared on some disinfectant ointment, and duct-taped it.

  All right. No blood showing. He could still walk around. He got a fresh shirt, eased into it. Touched his chest, and the pain ran through him. The phone started ringing again. He ignored it, touched his chest again, gasped with the pain, and headed out to the car.

  THE FIRE STATION was lit up—and empty. Every man was out at the fire. Singleton pulled into the station, pushed through the main door and called out, “Hey. Anybody home?”

  Nobody answered, though a Hank Williams, Jr., song was drawling through the open truck slots.

  “Hey. Anybody?”

  No? Excellent. He headed up the stairs, to the sleeping loft, went straight through it to a storeroom where the medical gear was kept. The fire department was also the backup paramedic service. He pulled down a paramedic’s pack, ripped off the sealer tab, and zipped it open.

  Shit: no pills. He needed some painkillers, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing. He’d been sure there’d be some—firefighters always seemed to have a few pills around, supposedly because of the small burns they took on the job. If so, they didn’t get the pills from the paramedic packs. He zipped the pack up, replaced it.

  Where else? The hospital, the drugstore. The hospital would probably be on alert, with the fire, and he didn’t know how he’d get the drugs anyway. The drugstore had a safe . . .

  He touched his chest. Goddamnit, that hurt.

  He was on his way out when he got lucky. All the lockers were open and he saw a tube of pills in one of them. He looked at it: Advil. Not good enough. Then he checked all the lockers, quickly, found a dozen more bottles of pills, mostly vitamins and nonprescription painkillers. Finally, in the locker of one of the two full-time firemen, he found two tubes of Dilaudid. T
wenty orange tabs, in total. Both tubes carried the notation, “One tablet every four to six hours.”

  Excellent. He took the tubes. Dug further through the locker and found another tube: penicillin. Good. Took that, too.

  Have to think about Katina, though. He was gonna be out of action for a while, and he needed a reason. Had to think.

  Made it out to the car, touched his chest. Goddamn, that hurt.

  Then he thought, Wonder where Letty West got to? He’d gone out to her house to solve a problem, and hadn’t. She was still out there, Letty was.

  Singleton got into his car and headed for the fire. Halfway there, a new thought occurred to him: Mom was gonna be pissed.

  16

  The fire was out, and a couple of the firemen were gingerly working through the blackened jumble of burnt wood and plaster in the now-open basement; it looked like a bomb crater. Lucas and Del took turns watching the work, and getting warm in the car. Ray Zahn showed up in his Highway Patrol cruiser, and they chatted for a while. “The comm center called the sheriff. He told them to handle it, and to coordinate with you guys, and then he went back to bed. I guess this isn’t important enough.”

  “We’re not being fair to him,” Del observed.

  “No, we’re not,” Zahn said. “I’m sure we don’t know all the problems and contingencies he has to deal with. The miserable twat.”

  Zahn left on a drag-racing call, and Lucas and Del lingered, watching. More sheriff’s deputies came in, apparently working on their own time. Zahn came back, and wanted to talk about how Rose Marie Roux might change the Highway Patrol.

  They’d been back at the fire site for an hour, when a gray Toyota Land Cruiser pulled off to the side of the highway and two women got out. Lucas recognized one of them as the woman he’d talked to at the church. He dug around in the back of his mind for a moment, then came up with her name—Ruth Lewis.

  Ruth walked down to a cluster of the firemen, as the other woman popped open the back of the Land Cruiser. Lewis talked to the firemen for a moment, then two of them broke away and followed her back to the truck. The second woman was doing something in the back, then produced a carton of white paper cups, and the firemen who came back with Lewis took the cups and stepped out of sight, behind the truck.

  “Coffee,” Del said.

  “Like to talk to that woman,” Lucas said. “Want some coffee?”

  “Take a cup,” Del said. They got out of the Acura and walked over to the Toyota. More firemen and cops were clustering around the back of it, taking cups, and Lucas and Del edged into the line. When they got their coffee, Lucas took a sip and stepped over next to Lewis.

  “You heard what happened? You heard about Letty?”

  “Some of it. I heard she was at the hospital, that you took her in,” Lewis said.

  “She’s hurt,” Lucas said. “She was shot, not too bad, but when she was getting away, she had to jump out her window. She slashed her hand open, really bad—we’re flying her down to the Cities so a hand guy can look at her. Her ankle is either busted or twisted so bad that she can’t walk.”

  “That’s terrible. I heard her mom . . .” Lewis’s eyes went to the house, “. . . might still be in there.”

  “We’re waiting, but Letty thinks she was shot to death. Right at the beginning of it. She apparently fought the guy long enough for Letty to get away.”

  “This doesn’t happen in Custer County,” Lewis said. “Somebody told me that the last murder here was fifteen years ago.”

  “Our operating theory is that Deon Cash, Jane Warr, and probably Joe Kelly kidnapped the Sorrell girl and killed her, and probably another girl named Burke.”

  “Two of them?”

  “Yes. We think that Hale Sorrell somehow grabbed Joe Kelly and tortured him and got the names of Cash and Warr. We think he found out that his daughter was already dead. We think he then waited until their guard might be down a little, then he came up here, took them and hanged them for the murder of his daughter. But we think there was at least one more person involved, and that person is afraid that somebody will give him away. It’s a him, by the way, not a her—he spoke to Letty.”

  She smiled quickly, a flitting smile that was gone as quickly as it came. “Thanks for the briefing.”

  “I’m not just chatting,” Lucas said. “Something complicated is going on around Broderick, and I don’t know what it is. But it’s the cause of all these deaths. And people in Broderick are evading us, they’re not telling us what they know. I don’t know why they’re doing that, but they are.”

  “I more or less know everybody in Broderick. Some of the men from the body shop keep to themselves, but nobody I know well would have done this. Kidnapped those girls or . . .” She gestured at the burned-out hole in the ground.

  Three firemen were standing in the ruins of the basement, and as Lewis gestured and they looked that way, one of them called up to another man, who was standing outside the hole, and he turned and trotted toward one of the fire trucks. Two more firemen dropped into the basement.

  “Aw, shit,” Lucas said. “I think they found her.”

  THEY HAD. LUCAS and Del hung around for another hour, watching as the medical examiner crawled down into the basement. Ten minutes later, he climbed back out.

  “Martha West?” Lucas asked.

  “I assume so, from what I’ve been told. No way to tell by looking at the body. We’ll have to do DNA on the body and on her daughter, and make some comparisons. But—it’s her.”

  “All right.” They lingered a few more minutes, then headed back to Armstrong. There was actually traffic on the highway, cop cars and fire department vehicles, and maybe rubberneckers running up to see what had happened.

  On the way back, Del asked, “What’d you tell Ruth Lewis?”

  “I gave her something to be guilty about. Those kind of women, they guilt-trip pretty easily.”

  “Just gonna let it percolate?”

  “Yeah, overnight. Then I’m gonna go up there tomorrow and ask Lewis if she’ll go down to the Cities and tell Letty that her mother is dead.”

  “Mmm,” Del said. Then after a minute, “Hitting her with a hammer.”

  “Maybe she’ll break,” Lucas said.

  They stopped at the hospital, found it quiet. The duty nurse told them that the resident had gone back to bed, and that Letty was in the air. “They got here really quickly,” she said. She glanced at a wall clock. “She should be at Hennepin in a half-hour.”

  After leaving the hospital, they drove over to the Law Enforcement Center, where two people were sitting in the comm center eating microwave pizza. Lucas borrowed a computer and wrote a memo to the sheriff, outlining what had happened, and what had been done about it. He made two copies, put one in the sheriff’s mailbox, and kept one himself.

  AT THE MOTEL, they went to their separate rooms, and though he was tired, Lucas turned on the television, found a movie channel, and watched James Woods, Bruce Dern, and Lou Gossett get wry with each other in Diggstown. Forty-five minutes later, Weather called.

  “We’ve got her on the ground,” she said. “The hand is not good, but it’s fixable. Gonna take a while to heal. Do you know if she has insurance? She doesn’t seem to think so.”

  “She doesn’t,” Lucas said. “I’m buying.”

  “Is this a Roman Catholic guilt thing that I’ve got to be psychologically careful about?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Call me tomorrow. I want all the details. She seems like an interesting child. She’s scared.”

  “She jumped out a window, got shot, got stalked in the dark, shot a guy, saw her house burned down, and her mother’s dead. She doesn’t know about her mother for sure, yet. I’m going to try to get somebody up here to fly down and tell her. Somebody she knows.”

  “Aw, jeez . . . All right. I’ll stay with her. Call me.”

  SLEEP WOULD BE tough—coming up to five o’clock in the morning, but he was still too cranked. He clicked aroun
d the TV channels, found nothing that he wanted to watch. Eventually, he put on his shoes and walked down to the motel office.

  “That black guy from Chicago still here?” he asked the clerk.

  “Yup. Said he’s checking out tomorrow morning.”

  “What’s the room?”

  “Two-oh-eight. Is he gonna be a problem?”

  “Naw. I called Chicago, and they say he’s gonna win the Nobel Prize for reporting. I just wanted to shake his hand.”

  WAY TOO EARLY for this, he thought, but what the hell, reporters fucked with him often enough. He knocked on 208, waited, knocked again, and then a man croaked, “What time is it?”

  “Five in the morning,” Lucas said. “Check-out time.”

  “What?”

  A crack of light appeared between the curtains in the room window, and a moment later, Mark Johnson peered out the door over the safety chain. “Davenport?”

  “So, what’re you doing?” Lucas asked.

  “Trying to sleep.”

  “You’re so young, too,” Lucas said.

  Johnson took the chain off and opened the door and yawned and asked, “What’s going on?”

  “Somebody just burned down the West house, murdered Martha West, and shot and wounded Letty. She’s been taken to the Twin Cities for surgery.”

  Johnson stared, then looked back at his bed, then back to Lucas. “You’re shitting me.”

  “I shit you not.”

  “Come on in. Let me get my pants on. Jesus . . . What happened?”

  “I talked to Deke, and he said you’d be marginally okay to talk to.”

  “Yeah, margin my ass.”

  “So the deal is, I tell you what you want to know, and you got it from an informed source. And I’ve got a lot of stuff that nobody else has picked up.”

  “Like what?”

  LUCAS TOLD HIM, and when he was done, Johnson stared down at his laptop and said, “I can see this as a story. It’ll take some work.”

  “Christ, the best story of his life is handed to him on a platter, and he says it’ll take some work,” Lucas said.