Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  23

  Letty’s house, six miles south, had been on the far fringe of the cell-phone net. The dump was out of it. “Gonna have to go get the FBI guys,” Lucas said.

  “I can run back with the truck, if you guys want to scrape around here,” Del suggested.

  “That’d be good.” Lucas tossed him the keys. “The insurance certificate is in the door pocket. Don’t use it.”

  “What am I gonna hit out here?”

  Del took off, and Lucas, Letty and Ruth began walking around the dirt surface of the dump, Letty using her crutch on about every fifth step. She could feel the sprain, she said, but they’d packed her leg in ice at the hospital, and had kept the ice on it for most of the next day, and that had helped. “I’ll be running in a week,” she said.

  “It probably wouldn’t hurt to stay off it, though,” Lucas said. “Much as you can, anyway.”

  “Drives me crazy.”

  “Yeah, well . . . I know. Always drove me crazy, too.”

  They chatted about old injuries for a while, as they wandered around. The dump was large, probably covering half a square mile, but most of the surface was covered with snow. Lucas had been to dumps before, and knew generally how they worked: the garbage and trash was dumped in the working area and was covered with a layer of dirt. Then another layer of trash went down, followed by another layer of dirt. When a predetermined level was reached, the whole thing was capped with an impervious layer of clay that would tend to sheet water off to the sides. The dump would also have a clay bottom, beneath all the layers of trash, to prevent contamination of the local groundwater.

  It was, in a way, like a clay-and-garbage pie, with the clay acting as the crust, and the garbage the filling.

  If Singleton was the killer, and if he’d buried his victims at the dump, he would have chosen an area already disturbed by the bulldozer, they decided. Over the rest of the area, the surface was frozen solid, and any grave-shaped hole would have shown through to the bulldozer driver.

  “Do people come out here? I mean, other than the dump guy and you?” Lucas asked Letty.

  “Oh, sure. Especially during hunting season. People want to get rid of deer hides and heads and so on, they’ll put them in a garbage bag and bring them out and throw them in the pile. Or maybe they’ve got something too big to put out for the trash, they’ll haul it over in their truck and throw it in. They’re not supposed to, but they do.”

  “So it wouldn’t be completely unusual to see somebody out here?”

  “No. When I’m trapping out here, I probably see somebody half the time.” She carried the rifle across the cast on her left arm, the muzzle pointing up at the sky. Lucas had been watching her handle the gun, and decided that she was safe enough.

  “This all looks pretty raw,” Ruth called. They walked over to her. She was standing on a patch of dirt thirty feet wide and fifty long, rumpled beneath the snow, softer-feeling—a bulldozer runway that led to the feeding edge of the landfill.

  Lucas kicked some of the snow off, then stooped and picked up some dirt, looked at it, tossed it aside, and brushed his hands. “We oughta get the dump guy out here,” he said. “Maybe he saw something strange.”

  After exploring the area of raw dirt, they drifted back toward the shooting range, and Lucas borrowed Letty’s rifle and bounced one of the cans around. Then Letty asked about his pistol, and Lucas took out the .45 and showed her how it worked.

  “Same kind of sight picture as with the rifle,” he said. He stepped away from her, aimed at one of the cans, which was now about forty feet away, and fired once, missing right by three inches. He frowned, fired again, and again missed right, by only a half-inch this time, but also a little high. A third shot sent the can skittering away.

  “Let me try,” Letty said.

  “It’s gonna feel heavy, with only one hand on it,” Lucas said. He gave her the pistol, showed her how the safeties worked.

  She held the pistol out straight from her side, her head turned so that she was looking over her right shoulder. After a moment, she said, “Squeeze,” and fired a round. She missed the can by three feet to the right, a foot low. “Holy cow,” she said. “What’d I do?”

  “Try once more,” Lucas said. He heard truck noises back at the gate.

  Letty pointed the pistol, but the barrel was shaking, and after a few seconds she took it down. “I’m not strong enough one-handed,” she said.

  Lucas took the gun from her, spent a couple of seconds pulling down on the can, let out a half-breath and smashed the can a second time.

  “You got a string tied to the can, right?” Del called from the direction of the gate.

  Lucas turned around, and saw Del with four of the California FBI crewmen walking across the dump toward them. Lucas popped the magazine from the .45, jacked the shell out of the chamber, thumbed it back in the magazine, then took a fresh magazine out of his holster and seated it in the pistol butt. The half-used magazine went into the holster.

  “Good time to quit,” one of the Californians said, talking through the snorkel of his snorkel parka. “If you’d kept it up, I would have been tempted to take out my piece and kick your sorry ass. No offense, ladies.”

  “I don’t want to seem insulting, or vulgar, but none of you fuckin’ FBI humpty-dumpties can shoot half as well as Del over there, and I personally can shoot several times better than Del,” Lucas said.

  “Au contraire,” Del said. “You can hold your end up on the nice, heated, lighted range. But out here, in the real world, you can’t hold a candle to me. Though you’re right about the fuckin’ FBI humpty-dumpties.”

  Ruth looked at Letty and said, “Oh, God. This is why you should never get married, honey. These people got a rivulet of testosterone running through them, and anything can set it off. A cheese sandwich can set it off.”

  The lead Californian was digging under his parka and produced a .40 Smith. “You are a bunch of rural people who have never seen good shooting, so you don’t have to apologize for what you just said.”

  One of the other Californians jerked the back of his coat and he turned, and they conferred, snorkel to snorkel. Then the lead Californian turned back to Lucas and said, “Uh, are we doing this for free? Or is there some money in it?”

  They spent twenty minutes banging away at cans, without conclusion, but they all felt better afterward. Lucas then showed the crew the area that needed to be surveyed, and the lead man suggested that they needn’t survey all of it. “We can do stripes; we don’t even have to set up guidelines, because on that thin snow, we can see where we’ve been . . . We can do it in a couple of hours, quick and dirty. Done before dark, anyway.”

  THE CREW HAD a radar set mounted on a wagon, which the Californians rolled back and forth over the raw patch. The radar was pointed down into the dirt, and returned echoes from lumps of differing density. The data was fed into a memory module, which was dumped into a laptop back in one of the FBI trucks. The laptop then produced a density map of the surface covered.

  Striping the dirt patch took an hour and a half. Halfway through, Ruth and Letty, bored and a little cold, decided to head back to the church and eat. “Stop by when you’re going back to Armstrong,” Letty said. “I want to know how it comes out.”

  When the striping was done, the lead Californian dumped the data to the laptop, let it churn for a few minutes, then tapped a few keys and a map began scrolling up. Two-thirds of the way from the back edge of the dirt strip, toward the working edge of the landfill, he said, “Whoops.”

  “Got something?”

  “Got a hole. We got it on the third and fourth runs. It looks like it’s, uh, four feet long and three feet wide.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Mostly what look like tread tracks from the bulldozer, both current ones and some buried ones . . . but the hole cuts through all of that. It looks like there’re a few inches of packed stuff, then it goes soft.” He tapped the computer screen. “You can see the edges of i
t.”

  “Better get some shovels out here,” Lucas said. “Why don’t you guys pin down the edges of the hole, and Del and I’ll get the shovels.”

  “Get some sandwiches,” one of the Californians said. “There’s a place in town called Logan’s . . .”

  “Fancy Meats,” Lucas said. “Give me your orders. Might as well do it right. I’ll get some lights, too.”

  THEY WENT THROUGH Broderick without slowing down and as soon as they were within cell-phone range, Lucas called Ray Zahn. “I need to get the guy who runs the dump bulldozer. Know where we can find him?”

  “Yeah, he’s about three blocks from me, if he’s home,” Zahn said. “What do you want him for?”

  “We need him to show us around the dump,” Lucas said. “It’s serious.”

  “I’ll drag his ass up there,” Zahn said. “When do you want him?”

  *

  AT THE ACE Hardware, Lucas bought four long-handled shovels and four spotlights with cigarette-lighter adapters. “Haven’t sold that many spotlights since deer season,” the counterman said. “Pick out a deer at two hundred yards.”

  Lucas thought about that for a moment, then went to the back of the store and found four two-by-four-foot pressed-board handy panels with one white side, and a roll of duct tape. “Reflectors,” he said to Del. Outside, it was getting dark.

  BACK AT THE dump, the Californians had outlined the hole, and using a long-bladed screwdriver, had determined that there were about six to eight inches of compressed dirt over a looser fill.

  Lucas used a tire-iron to pop the lock off the dump gate, and they drove Lucas’s truck and the two FBI vehicles into a circle around the dig site. Lucas brought the spotlights out, the Californians set up the white panels, and when the lights were plugged in, Lucas focused them on the panels, and the dig site was bathed in a smooth reflected light. “Cool,” one of the Californians said.

  THEY STARTED DIGGING, three at a time—four shovelers was one too many—and cleared out the ’dozer-compacted cap in ten minutes.

  “Looks like a grave,” Del said from the sidelines.

  Another set of headlights swept over the dump, and a minute later, Ray Zahn had pulled in beside Lucas’s Acura. Zahn and another man got out, and Zahn said to Lucas, “This is Phil Bussard. He runs the ’dozer.”

  “You remember seeing anything that looked like a hole, or a dug spot, right here, this morning?”

  “Nothing like that,” Bussard said. “Did see a bunch of truck tracks. Somebody unloaded something back here. Didn’t think nothing of it.”

  “How did they get through the gate?” Lucas asked. “Is it always locked when you’re not here?”

  “Yeah, but about half the people in town know the combination,” Bussard said. “All kinds of people are authorized to get in here, and the number gets around. It’s ten-twenty-thirty.”

  “So why lock it at all?”

  “For the lawyers. If somebody works the lock and gets in here, and gets hurt, I guess it’s breaking and entering, or something. They committed a crime, and if they get hurt doing it, it ain’t the county’s fault.”

  “Where were you working a month ago? Around Christmas?”

  “Right over on the other side there,” Bussard said, pointing. “If you look at the edge, you can see some Christmas wrap. That’s where it’d be.”

  “See any holes over there?”

  “Not that I remember. See truck tracks all the time.”

  Zahn came back from the widening hole. “Sure does look like a grave,” he said.

  THE PEOPLE IN the hole were slowing down, so the last Californian, Bussard, and Lucas took the shovels, and continued down. At three feet, the Californian said, “Somebody hand me that screwdriver.”

  He took the screwdriver, squatted, and pushed it into the dirt at the bottom of the hole, probed for a minute, then stood up. “I’d say we’re eight inches off the garbage level.”

  “That’d be about right,” Bussard said, bobbing his head.

  Eight inches down, Lucas cut through a white garbage sack, and could smell the garbage inside. “Smells like old pizza,” he said. “Like from a Dumpster out behind a pizza joint on a hot summer night.”

  “Lucky you didn’t get one of them diaper bags,” Bussard said. “They smell like old shit on a hot summer night.”

  The Californian said, “I got something here.” He was probing at a dark green garbage bag. They cleared away a little more dirt, then Bussard took a Leatherman tool off his belt, flicked open a blade, and slashed through the green bag.

  A woman’s bare leg, flexed; her toenails were painted red.

  “There you go,” Zahn said. “There you go.”

  DEL SAID, “LOREN Singleton. Here we come.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Zahn said. “I want to see what that sonofabitch has to say for himself.”

  24

  All of it was innocent. Back at the church in Broderick, Letty told the older woman about the scene at the dump and the shoot-out between Lucas, Del, and the FBI. Then Letty took a pill for her hand, got a book, and found an empty bed she could lie on, to read. Ruth went to work on the phone, calling members of her network in Canada. The older woman went down the highway to Wolf’s Cafe, got a piece of pie and a cup of coffee, and told Sandra Wolf that the FBI and the state were up at the dump, and about the shooting contest.

  A bit later, a sheriff’s deputy came into the cafe, and Wolf told him about the shooting contest, and that the FBI was searching the dump. The deputy was a little put off about it because he’d been working—well, watching—the FBI guys at Deon Cash’s house, and they’d all taken off without telling him anything. He was also fairly sure that the sheriff had been cut out of the deal, so he called Mrs. Holme, the sheriff’s secretary, and asked her to pass on the word to the sheriff.

  The sheriff was out, but she passed it on to several other people.

  The word took almost an hour to get to Loren Singleton, who was getting a Sprite out of the fire station Coke machine when he heard about it. “Up there digging holes,” said the guy who’d heard it from a guy who’d heard it from Holme. “Better them than me. That place smells bad even when it’s all covered up and froze.”

  MARGERY SINGLETON HAD just gotten home, carrying a brown grocery bag with a box of beef brains from Logan’s Fancy Meats, flour and milk from the Kwik Stop, and a sack of potatoes, when her son burst in on her.

  “The jig’s up,” he groaned at her. “Jesus Christ, the jig is up. The FBI and the state guys are up at the dump digging holes, and they’ve got all that special equipment up there. They’re gonna find them. Those California guys say they can find a hundred-year-old grave, and the Calbs haven’t been in the ground long enough to get cold.”

  Margery’s eyes narrowed. “You think it’s because of that kid?”

  “Who else? When I took the girls up, there weren’t any cars around and I took them off to the back corner and it was almost dark. So who else is up there that might have seen me? There’s nothing out there, except those goddamn raccoons that the kid goes after.”

  “Who’d you hear this from? This isn’t just bullshit, is it?”

  “Naw, I got it from Roland Askew. Here’s something else: they cut the sheriff out of the loop, even though they were all buddy-buddy up at Calb’s house. Why’d they do that? Because I’m a deputy, and they know it’s me that put them in the ground. God, Mom, I’m really scared.” He jammed a knuckle into his mouth and bit it.

  Margery looked at the box of beef brains on the kitchen table. Brains, sliced like bread and fried up in beer batter, were a rare treat, as long as you got the brains when they were fresh. Frozen brains got mushy when you thawed them. She thought about the possibilities for a minute, then said, “If the girl is dead, she can’t testify. You’ve got to get up there and finish it.”

  “Mom, if they think it’s me . . . I got a hole in my chest, and a bruise. All they have to do is get me to take my shirt off.”
r />   “So you go up and take care of the girl. By the time you get back here, I’ll have it figured out: you’re gonna have an accident.”

  “An accident?”

  “A car wreck. Bruise you all up. I gotta think about it. Hurt you bad enough someplace else, like Fargo, that they put you in the hospital. You drive my car, we fake the wreck, you fake the injury. Hit something hard enough to pop the airbags. By the time they find us, the hole’s healed up . . . We can figure something out. I can pretty much see what we’re gonna do—but it ain’t gonna work if that little kid talks.”

  “Aw, jeez, they’re gonna get us.”

  “You better hope not. You know what they do to guys like you down at Stillwater? You won’t have any trouble taking a shit, I tell you that. You’ll be nice and loose. That’s if the feds don’t get you. The feds’ll put you in the chair, if they get you.”

  “Oh, God.” He stuck his knuckle in his mouth again, closed his eyes, bit on it. The pain helped clear his mind out. He opened his eyes and said, “I’m going. It’s almost dark now, I still got the garage-door opener for Calb’s, I can put the car in there, walk across to the church. I heard that the other women left after Katina died; there’ll only be Ruth Lewis and the kid.”

  Talking himself into it. Margery nodded and said, “You might not have much time. Best get moving. I’ll figure things out here.”

  THE SHERIFF HEARD about the dump dig at the same time that Loren Singleton heard. Anderson got it from an assistant county attorney at Borgna’s Drugs. The sheriff was mulling over the selection of Chap Stick products when the prosecutor came by, carrying a box of NyQuil, and said, “We gotta stop meeting like this.”

  Anderson said, “Especially with you carrying drugs.”

  “That’s the darn truth. I don’t know why those crazy fools mess around with meth labs when they can come down to Borgna’s and buy NyQuil . . . So what’d they find at the dump?”

  “The dump?” Anderson was puzzled.