Naked Prey

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 amp; 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 dump 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 accident, 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."

"How about his pal, Joe?"

"I hardly knew him, but he always seemed to be walking behind Deon. I think Deon impressed him. Deon impressed Jane, too-she liked him being crazy. Like it gave her status." Again, she looked away, thinking, and then turned back. "We see that quite a bit, actually. Women taking status from the violence of their men."

"A sense of protection, if you live in a slum," Lucas said.

But she shook her head. "Not just in the slums. All kinds of women. Even nuns."

She showed a little smile and Del grinned at Lucas and said, "Ouch."

Lucas said, "Tell me one good fact. One thing that will point me somewhere. Something you know, way down in your head, about Deon."

"I've thought about this, ever since they found Jane and Deon," she said. "I keep thinking, Deon was from the big city, Kansas City. So was Jane. They hated it here. I don't think they even knew anybody, besides a couple of people at Calb's. But they stayed, so there had to be a reason. Something they couldn't do in Kansas City. Maybe they were selling the dope, maybe it was the kidnapping. Whatever it was, came from up here."

"Good," said Lucas.

OUTSIDE, DEL SAID, "Sister Ruth does a little dope herself."

"Yeah?"

"I could smell it on her. Faintly. Raw, not smoke."

"Brownies."

"Maybe." Del looked around at the white-on-white landscape, at their lonely car sitting in the empty, snow-swept parking lot outside the empty yellow building across the highway. "I can't blame her. It's like, it's dope or network TV. There ain't nothin' else."

"I'll ask Elle about her," Lucas said. "I'm not sure the sister was entirely straight with us."

"What'd I miss?"

Lucas shook his head. "Maybe nothing. I counted eight cots in there and most of the rooms seemed to be lived in. That's a sizable operation. What would a hundred dollars a week mean to them? I mean, if they each worked one night in a Holiday store, they'd make three or four times as much. If they need the money that bad… "

"Maybe it's just easy, casual. Pin money. Take it if they have somebody around, skip it if they don't. Wouldn't be tied to a schedule."

"Could be," Lucas agreed. "She seemed pretty rehearsed… but then she might have expected us." He looked at his watch, and found a patch of white skin where the watch face should have been. Not having a watch was going to drive him crazy, he realized. "The bar's closed. Let's go try the cafe, and then the grocery."

"It feels hopeless," Del said. "Knocking on doors in nowhere."

ON THE WAY to the cafe, Lucas's cell phone rang, and when he answered it, a voice said, "This is Deke Harrison. Is this Davenport?"

"Yeah, it is. How are you, Deke?"

"Interrupted. I was halfway through an anchovy, pepper-cheese, onion sandwich and you know what it's like to be interrupted halfway through one of those."

"So are-"

"Halfway through, when somebody called for somebody else who got a call from Mark Johnson that said you wanted him vouched for."

"You vouching for him?"

"Yeah. He's a good guy, knows what he's doing. Takes care of his sources."

"I might chat with him, then."

"Excellent. If you ever run for governor of whatever hick state you're in-Minnesota?-you'll know that the Tribune stands behind you."

"Far behind."

"You stepped on my line," Harrison said.

"Yeah, I know," Lucas said. "It was such an original. Go back to the sandwich."

SANDY WOLF, WHO ran the cafe, told them that Deon Cash liked coconut cream pie and that Jane Warr was allergic to sulfites used as a preservative. She said that she'd never seen them argue. Every time they left the cafe together, she said, Warr would go through the door first and that Cash would reach out and squeeze her ass. Wolf also knew that Cash liked basketball and was a Los Angeles Lakers fan, and that he didn't care for football and especially hated the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings. She once had a Vikings game on the television, and Cash asked her to turn it off. "He had a mean look in him, so I turned it off," she said.

THE CONVENIENCE STORE/GAS station was run by John McGuire and McGuire's sister, Shelly. McGuire was a lean man who might have been taken for a farmer; his sister, equally lean, reminded Lucas of a pool shark he'd known in Minneapolis, who eventually became a successful rug-cleaning franchisee. Both of them knew Cash, who, in addition to whatever dope habits he might have had, also was attracted to the orange Halloween Hostess cupcakes, and had bought four dozen of them last Halloween, all that the store had in stock.

They had also known Joe Kelly and said that he seemed like a shy man. Every night when they saw his car parked at Cash's place, Kelly came in and bought a twelve-pack of Budweiser. "We think he had alcohol issues," Shelly McGuire said.

"I should have offered to take him to my AA meeting," McGuire said, "but I wasn't sure he was drinking it by himself, and I couldn't get him talking. And I thought, you know, him being colored, maybe colored people can drink more than white people."

The bar was closed.

THE DOG HOUSE on the side street was a manufactured home, built in a factory and trucked to the homesite, where it was hammered together on a prepoured slab. The siding felt like tin. Del knocked, and a man in a sleeveless undershirt came to the door while the dogs went crazy in a back room. Lucas, without looking, could feel Del loosening up his Glock.

The man said, "Yep?" He propped himself in the door, and Lucas could smell tomato sauce and dog shit in the overheated air streaming out. The man had an American flag tattooed on one shoulder, and on the other, a skull with a dagger through its eye, and the legend, Death From Above.

"We're with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We're investigating a series of crimes… "

"Got an ID?"

A woman in the house yelled, "Who is it, Dick?"

Lucas held out his ID and Dick glanced at it and yelled, "Cops, asking about Cash," and stepped out on the porch. "What can I do for you?"

"Don't want you to freeze," Lucas said. He would have liked a look inside.

"I'm fine," the man said. His arms were turning red. "Don't feel the cold."

"We understand you work at Calb's, and we're looking for any information… "

The man's name was Richard Block, and the woman inside was his girlfriend, Eurice. He was a prep specialist who set the trucks up for painting.

"I didn't have nothin' to do with the drivers," he said. "I was always back in the sanding booth; I ain't management. I don't think I talked to Cash more than once in my life. Never did meet his old lady, except to nod at her in the store. She never came to the bar. Talked to Joe, once or twice. He was interested in the prep business, he wanted to paint his own car. Don't know anything about him, though."

They bounced a few more questions off him, looking for an edge, and found nothing but genuine ignorance.

"You ever meet any of the nuns, er, whatever, over at the church?" Del asked.

"Never saw them, except at the cafe and maybe at the store. Call them the rug-munchers, over to the shop," he said.

"I thought they drove for Calb?" Lucas said.

"Not that I know of," Block said, his eyes shifting away, momentarily. He was lying. "You have to talk to Gene about his employees. I mean, I ain't in management, and I don't want to piss anybody off. I'd like to keep the job."

He had nothing more to say, except that he hoped to build a kennel and breed pit bulls.

"Nice tats," Del said, as they backed away from the door.

The man glanced at his dagger tattoo and for the first time showed a hint of a smile. "Sometimes I wished I'd gotten Mom. But I was in the Army, and only Navy guys get Mom."

THE MAN STEPPED back inside and closed the door behind himself. "Why would he lie about the nuns?" Del asked, as they walked away. "He was doing good up to then."

"I don't know," Lucas said. "Let's try some more."

There were a half-dozen trailer homes scattered around town. One had unbroken snow around it, and was apparently not being lived in. Of the others, three were being lived in, but nobody was home. At the other two, they talked to men who worked for Calb, but seemed genuinely confused about the killings. One of the men, who smelled strongly of beer, said, "We're sittin' here with a gun, tell you the truth." He reached sideways onto a table, picked up a heavy-frame revolver, waggled it at his ceiling, and said, "I dare the motherfucker to come in here. He'll be walking home without a couple of pounds of meat."

"Make sure who you're shooting it at," Lucas said.

"I don't know-I think people get more scared when they think that you're crazy and maybe drunk. Tend not to fuck with you," said the man, smiling in a distinctly crazy way.

"You could be right about that," Lucas said.

As they walked away, he looked at the patch of white skin on his arm. "Let's go get Letty."

LETTY WAS OUT on the dump when they got there, a small figure in dark clothes, kicking through the trash pile. Letty was concentrating on something, and didn't see them pull in. Lucas got out and yelled, "Hey. Letty."

She turned, waved, and skidded down the side of the pile of trash, and clumped across the dirt pan between the edge of the trash pile and the gate. When she got to the gate, she passed him the.22 and the empty gunny sack, then climbed the gate. When she dropped down beside him, he got a whiff of aged garbage.

"You oughta stay out of the trash," he said. "You don't know what might be in there."

Letty said, "Nobody knows what might be in there. Phil gets all kinds of good stuff out of there."

"Who's Phil?"

"Drives the Cat," she said, nodding at the bulldozer. "He gets about one good computer a week."

"Won't do you any good if you die of some weird disease," Lucas said. "You better take a shower when you get home."

"Water kills cancer?"

"You're also a little stinky," Lucas said.

"Yeah? It'd be worth it, stinky, if I could get a good computer out of it," she said. "My computer is worse than this old piece-of-crap.22."

They were loading into the Acura as she said it. Del asked, "If the gun's a piece of crap, why don't you get another one?"

" 'Cause they cost money, and this one works," she said. "I mean, it's a piece of crap, but that's all I need. My computer… that's just a piece of crap." As they were backing out, she added, "You know what I'd do if I was a cop? I'd tell the guy at the dump to turn in all the computers he found. Most of them work, they're just old. When people throw them away, they leave all their letters and stuff on them-he finds out the neatest stuff about people, messing with the old computers. It's his hobby. One time he found, uh… " She suddenly colored, and snapped her mouth shut.

"What?" Lucas asked.

"Never mind."

They both looked at her, and then Del said to Lucas, "I need to get my old computer back."