Naked Prey

20

THE CRIME SCENE crew had suspended work at Cash's house and had moved down to Calb's. Lewis's body was still in the crawl space under the eaves and nobody knew exactly when they could move her-removing the body would be a job, and they wanted as few people as possible going in and out of the house until it was fully processed.

Lucas and Del carefully probed through the life the Calbs had left behind. Calb had a small home office, and one of the file drawers was open. Files had been taken, Lucas thought. He found income tax returns for 1996-99, but nothing newer. None of the files related directly to the body-shop business, but when they'd talked to Calb the first time, Lucas had noticed a row of filing cabinets in his office, so business papers might well be there.

Del came in after a while, with a small zippered bag. He handed it to Lucas, who said, "What?" and zipped the bag open. An insulin kit.

"Somebody's a diabetic and didn't take his or her shit," Del said.

"Unless this is a backup."

"Still."

A deputy came through, and they asked him about the airport; it was small planes only, and Calb wasn't a flier, as far as the deputy knew. Nor were there any taxis in town.

One of the BCA investigators from Bemidji, who'd been working at the Cash house, called to say that he and his partner had walked across to Calb's place and had frozen it-all the employees were there, and they were detaining any more who showed up.

Then the crime scene crew at Calb's house found a fingerprint on the.380 shell. "We'll do the Super Glue trick but it's about the best single print I've ever seen," the tech said. "We'll have something for you."

Lucas, going through Mrs. Calb's bedroom closet, found two shoeboxes that contained virtually new shoes, with perhaps an evening's worth of wear on the soles. In Calb's closet, on the floor under some shoes, he found a steel box, and inside the box, a thousand dollars in ten-dollar bills and a loaded.38 caliber Smith amp; Wesson revolver.

"I'm getting a bad vibe," Del said. "He might leave the gun, if he's got another one. Why would he leave the money?"

AFEW MINUTES after noon, the sheriff came back, trailing a tall cowboy-looking cop who the sheriff introduced as Loren Singleton.

"Loren was seeing Ms. Lewis," Anderson said.

"I'm sorry," Lucas said. "About your friend."

Singleton was distant, a little vague. Lucas had seen it before. "I'm, a, you know, we were… hell, we were sleeping together. But, I, uh… " A tear ran down his cheek and he wiped it with his shirt sleeve. "Goldarnit. Why'd this have to happen? You think it was Gene that did it?"

"Can't find him. Do you know any reason he'd have a problem with Ms. Lewis?"

"No, I don't," Singleton said. "I know what Katina was doing… I know what those women were doing, and I'm sure Gene knew… but how in the heck, I mean, what would that mean to Gene?"

"What were the women doing?" Anderson asked, taking a half-step back from his deputy.

"Bringing prescription drugs across the border from Canada," Lucas said. "They had a little distribution thing going, giving out drugs to the poor."

Anderson nodded, glanced at Singleton, and said, "Well, tell you the truth, half the people in town do that sometimes. No point in smuggling, though-you can order on the Internet."

"Gotta have the Internet," Lucas said. "Most of their clients are poor, and a lot of them are older-probably not too big on the Internet."

"How well did you know Gene Calb?" Del asked.

"I grew up here, so I knew him pretty well," Singleton said. "I didn't think… I don't know that he'd do anything like this. I mean, I refinish cars as a hobby, and once a year or so, I'd rent one of his paint booths to do some painting… That's how I met Katina. At Calb's."

"What was she doing there?" Lucas asked.

Singleton shook his head-"Just chatting, I guess. I mean, there're only forty or fifty people in that town. You tend to chat when you can."

"You know anything about Toyotas?" Lucas asked.

"Toyotas?" Singleton looked at Anderson, who frowned at Lucas.

"Toyotas?" Anderson asked.

"There are some people down in Kansas City, associated with Deon Cash-members of his family-who apparently steal a lot of Toyotas. They're never found again."

"Toyotas," Singleton said. He scratched his breast bone. "You know, I never thought about this, but there were a lot of Toyotas going through Gene's shop. You don't see that many around here, but you'd see them in Gene's shop. Just about every time I went up there, when I think about it. Didn't seem strange then, but it seems kinda strange when you mention it."

"What were they doing to them? Rehabbing them… what?"

"Sometimes, it seemed like they had some parts off, but they weren't chopping them or anything. They were like fixing them. And painting them. Man, they painted a lot of Toyotas."

"Aw, Jesus," Del said. To Lucas: "That's where the hot Toyotas went."

"When the girls… the women… came back across the border, they were always in a Toyota Land Cruiser or maybe some old beat-up 4Runner. There's always one of them around the church, up there."

"You didn't think anything was weird about that?" Lucas said.

Singleton wagged his head. "Well, sure. But I knew what they were doing, and I… guess I didn't have much problem with it. I mean, gosh, everybody around here does it. Everybody's drugstore is over there."

THEY TALKED FOR a few more minutes, then Singleton went to look at Katina Lewis. He came back down the stairs two minutes later, even more shaky, sweating a bit. "Jeez… Jeez almighty… "

"Go home and lie down for a while," Lucas said.

"That's gonna help?"

"No, not much, but it's better than walking around with everybody staring at you. You look kinda messed up."

"Aw, man… "

LUCAS SAID TO Del, "They bought old Toyotas across the border, brought them down here, took what they needed off the bodies, junked what was left, then transferred the papers to the ones they'd just stolen and moved them back across the border. Probably sold them out in the woods somewhere, where nobody would ever give them a second look. Even if somebody looked, the papers would match, 'cause they were legitimate papers. You'd have to take the car apart to figure out something was wrong.

"The women took them back and forth, and the body shop guys probably rigged up some kind of plug-in carriers for the drugs-a false floor, some kind of undercarriage box, that you could move from one vehicle to the next. With their tools, they could build anything. You could get a million pills into a one-inch deep false floor in the back of a Land Cruiser."

"Don't get two big crimes in a small town, without them being related," Del said.

"So the women would know about Calb's little sideline, which was bringing in a few million a year," Lucas said. Del nodded, and they both thought about it.

"Okay-I can see Calb for doing Lewis," Del said, after a moment. "But why in hell would he do the Sorrells, or Letty?"

"Because Sorrell tortured one of their guys, Joe Kelly. Who knew what Kelly told him about the whole Kansas City arrangement? That's why they had to act so fast-if Sorrell found a way to tip the cops… I mean, all we'd need is about three words, and we'd know all of it. If Sorrell called and said, 'Hey, a guy named Gene Calb is buying cars across the border and switching them with cars stolen in Kansas City by the Cash gang,' and if we'd called around, it'd take us fifteen minutes to put the parts together."

"How about Letty?"

"I don't know about Letty-but what if it was Letty's mother? She'd lived there for a long time. Would she know something was going on at the body shop? Maybe even knew exactly what it was, the stolen Toyotas? So then, her kid is hanging around with us, and again, all she'd have had to say was about three words, and we'd have been on Calb like Holy on the Pope."

"Gonna be interesting talking to Ms. Lewis today," Del said. He looked at his watch. "Funeral in two hours. They oughta be getting here."

RUTH LEWIS CALLED the Calb house a half-hour later. A deputy answered, and she asked for Lucas. The deputy handed the phone to Lucas and said, "Ruth Lewis."

"I'll take it."

"How did it happen?" Ruth asked, when Lucas came on. She was croaking, as though she'd spent the morning crying.

"We don't know, yet. We didn't know about the stolen car ring, so we didn't lean hard enough on Calb. Something happened here last night-we think your sister was killed here and the Calbs are gone. If you'd told me about this, we might have avoided it."

"Oh my God."

"Is there anything else I need to know right away?"

"Oh, god… " Ruth was weeping. Then a different woman's voice: "I don't think she can talk any more."

"Where are you? Is Letty there?"

"We're up at the church: Letty's here."

"Tell Ruth to stay there. We'll be there in ten or fifteen minutes."

THE SNOW WAS steady, but not getting any worse. There were a few little drifts around the edges of buildings and down in the ditches, and the highway was slick. Maybe an inch and a half, maybe two inches, Lucas thought. Letty was waiting by the church door with the older woman who'd watched Night of the Living Dead with Del. Letty was happy to see them. She held up her hand, in a fiberglass cast, smiled automatically, but then her lower lip came out and tears started and she said, "My mom's dead."

Lucas was not good around tears, even little-girl tears, and he tried to pat her on the back and she threw her arms around his waist and squeezed. "They say Gene Calb… "

Lucas pried her off and walked her away from the older woman, sat on a chair, and asked, "Letty, think about it. Was the guy you shot at… was that Gene Calb?"

"I don't think so," she said, shaking her head. "I would have known him. He was fat, and I couldn't see the man, but I don't think he was fat. I don't think his voice was right. Was Gene shot? Because I shot the man."

"There's a question about whether you hit him."

"I hit him."

"But if you're shooting.22 shorts, it might not even have gotten through his coat. A cold night, he might have been all bundled up."

"Then why did he fall on his butt? You don't fall on your butt if the bullet sticks in your coat."

"Maybe he was ducking."

"He wasn't ducking. He fell on his butt. Then he crawled for a while and then he ran back to the house and then the fire started."

When they finished talking, Lucas sent Letty to the TV with the older woman, who told Letty that she had to change for the service. "For the funeral," Letty said, correcting her.

Lucas wagged his head at Del, and they walked through the church to the kitchen, where they found Ruth at the kitchen table. She was red-eyed, red-faced. "Gene did this? With Gloria? That's… that's… Are you sure?" She had a brown cardigan wrapped around her shoulders.

"We're not sure. We just can't find them. There was blood on a carpet, and we found your sister hidden up under the roof."

"Why bother to hide her if she was so easy to find?" Ruth asked.

"Maybe they didn't think anyone would come looking. Or that if somebody did, they couldn't look too hard. Maybe all they expected was a head start."

"Hard to believe. Gene wasn't a bad man. I didn't think he was."

"Why didn't you tell us?"

"You know why," she said, defensively. "You could let us go, when you knew what we were doing, but you could never let Gene go."

"How did you get hooked up with him, anyway?"

She sighed. "One of our people up in Canada knew a man who bought a car from one of his… salesmen. We desperately needed different cars to bring the drugs across-you can't keep going back and forth, two or three times a week, without somebody asking why. So when we figured out where the cars were coming from, I came down here and talked with Gene. He wasn't too happy-but you know, if he'd done this, if he killed Katina… why didn't he kill me way back then?"

"Different situation," Del suggested. "No pressure then."

"Maybe. Anyway, I talked to him. I told him that we would all be committing crimes together, so nobody could talk about anyone else. He really needed people to drive the cars across, since he was starting to do some… some volume. We were perfect. Older women, forties and fifties and sixties. Who would suspect? And Gene built some special… things… for us, that fit in the Toyotas, and let us bring the drugs across. It was all very smooth."

"Did you bring a Toyota through last night?" Lucas asked.

"No. The last one was the one we had at the fire at the Wests' house. You saw it. Gene took it. It was a wreck, though. I don't think it would make another two hundred miles."

"You know what the license plates were?"

"I have no idea."

"Okay… You got some people killed," Lucas said. He said it in a soft voice, but a mean one, taunting, like a bully trying to pull another kid into a fight. Pushing her.

"But there was no connection between the kidnappings, between Deon and Jane, and the car deal," she said. She said, "Listen to me: no connection. I knew Gene pretty well, and he didn't even like Deon or Jane. He didn't trust them. Deon wasn't a big shot in this thing, he was a driver. He was a gofer. "

"But if we'd had a piece of it… "

"It wouldn't have made any difference," she shouted, tears running down her face. "You're not listening to me. The kidnappings and all the rest of it weren't connected. They weren't."

ALITTLE LATER, Lucas spoke to Neil Mitford. "I don't think the governor necessarily would want to know about this conversation," Lucas said, as an opener.

"That's why I work here," Mitford said. "Talk to me."

Lucas outlined the situation, including the murder of Lewis, and the cover-up of the stolen-car ring. "The women covered up material information. We could bust them six different ways. The thing is, I'm not sure that if they had told us, it would have made any difference to the killer. He's operating on some other schedule-I can't figure out why Calb would kill Lewis and then run for it. As far as we can tell, she didn't know anything that all the other women didn't know. If he was going to kill Lewis, he should have been up here, trying to wipe out the church."

"And if we bust the women, that's the end of their little drug-running enterprise," Mitford said.

"That's right. I don't feel too good about that-and to tell the truth, I think we could smell a little stinky afterward. We bust them, and four or five thousand women don't get their cancer pills."

"Let me rephrase that for you," Mitford said. "Four or five thousand registered voters won't get their cancer pills and they'll complain to one of the biggest interest groups in the country, the breast-cancer coalition."

"You think we should let it slide?"

"I don't think anything. I'm not a law enforcement officer. I don't even recall having this conversation. The governor certainly never knew about it."

"So I'm working on my own book."

"Welcome to state government," Mitford said.

LUCAS AND DEL left the church, so Letty and the other women could get ready for the funeral, and walked across the highway to Calb's. The two BCA investigators were in the shop, working through the office. A deputy was sitting in the work bay, with a half-dozen employees scattered around the bay on folding chairs.

Lucas briefed the BCA guys on the theft ring, then went out to talk to the employees. "You all may be in some sort of trouble, so maybe you want to get a lawyer or public defender out here… but none of you will be charged with anything right away. The guys in the office will want to talk to you individually. I would like somebody to tell me one thing, which won't have any effect on you at all… Okay?"

The men glanced around at each other, a couple shrugged, and a stocky man in a grimy Vikings sweatshirt said, "What do you want to know?"

"You know that one of the women from the church-one of the nuns-was found dead at Gene Calb's house. Shot in the head."

"Gene didn't do it," one of the men interrupted.

"That's not what I need," Lucas said. "We're not sure what happened, but we know that both of Gene Calb's cars are still in his garage. What I want to know is… did one of those Toyotas come in last night, or the night before? One of the good ones?"

The men all looked around at each other again, there was more shrugging, eyes drifted away, and finally the spokesman said, "I don't know."

"Is there an old one around here? At somebody's house, or around back? I haven't looked around back."

"Not around here," the spokesman said. No more eye contact.

On the way out, Del said to Lucas, "So the Calbs are running in a wrecked Toyota. Why is that? Why not take one of their cars?"

"Because if they can get it as far as the airport at Thief River, or Fargo, and if we hadn't found out about it… we'd never know where they went."

"I'll get some calls out," Del said.

MARTHA WEST'S FUNERAL service was held in a nondescript chapel at the funeral home, so nondescript that it could hardly even be called nondenominational-it looked like a grade-school cafeteria without the charm, and was cold, as if the funeral home didn't want to waste energy on heating it. Seventeen people showed up, including cops. The coffin was sealed. Letty sat at the front and cried, her cast propped on the chair in front of her, her single crutch between her legs. A Lutheran minister called on Martha's friends to talk about her, and a few did, without much to say.

Couldn't say that she drank a lot, and spent most of her time at the Duck Inn.

Most talked about her songs, and how hard she worked on them, and what a good voice she had, for Custer County anyway, and let it go at that. A women's group served Ritz crackers with cheese, and sliced celery and carrots with pimento spread, in a side room, for people who weren't going to the cemetery. That was almost everybody.

Lucas and Del drove out to the cemetery behind the hearse, with Letty crying in the back seat, and Ruth trying to comfort her when she wasn't crying herself. The snow was blowing hard, and the grave looked like a big fishing hole in an ice-covered lake. The coffin went in the ground and they all left, with Letty peering back for as long as she could see the cemetery. And when she couldn't see it anymore, she rolled facedown on the back seat and sobbed.

The sheriff had made tentative arrangements for a foster home, but in the end, they didn't take her there. They left her with Ruth, at the church, with the older woman. The arrangement, they agreed, was temporary, until they figured something out. "Don't tell me you're gonna try to find my dad," Letty said. "There's no way I'd live with that sonofabitch."

AS THEY DROVE away from the church, Del said, "What a wonderful fuckin' day. If there was a four-story building in town, I'd jump off it."

"There's the smokestack. There's the grain elevators."

"Fuck you."

Lucas: "Got to think of something, man."

"I have thought of something," Del said. He suddenly seemed comfortable, Lucas thought, which was odd, given the circumstances.

"What?"

"I'll tell you in a while. I gotta make sure I can pull it off, first."

"What?"

"Drop me off at the drugstore. I got things to buy."

"What're you doing?"

"Figured out how we're going to end this thing."

"Tell me."

"I will-in about an hour."