Naked Prey

3

WEST DITCH ROAD was frozen solid, but sometime during the winter there'd been a thaw, and a tractor had cut ruts in the thinly graveled surface. As they bumped through the ruts, now frozen as hard as basalt, Zahn pointed to a house across the ditch and said, "That's where the girl's from."

"What girl?" Lucas asked. He and Del looked out the windows. A thirty-foot-wide drainage ditch ran parallel to the road and showed a steely streak of ice at the bottom. A narrow, two-story farmhouse, its white paint gone gray and peeling, sat on the other side of the ditch. The house faced the highway, but was a hundred feet back from it. A rusting Jeep Cherokee squatted in the yard in front of the sagging porch.

Zahn glanced over at him. "How much you know about this? Anything?"

"Nothing," Lucas said. "They threw us on the chopper and that's about it."

"Okay," Zahn said. "To give it to you quick, a girl named Letty West lives in that house with her mother. She's this little twerp." He thought that over for a second, then rubbed an eyebrow with the back of his left hand. "Naw, that's not right. She's like a little Annie Oakley. She wanders around with an old.22 and a machete and a bunch of traps. Caught her driving her mother's Jeep a couple of times. Got a mouth on her. Anyway, last night-she looked at her clock when she woke up, and she says it was right after midnight-she saw some car lights down the road here, and wondered what was going on. There's nothing down here, and it was blowin' like hell. This morning, about dawn, she was walking her trapline along the ditch, and went up on top to look at that grove of trees. That's how she found them. If she hadn't, they might've hung there until spring."

THEY WERE ALL looking out the windows at the girl's house. The place might have been abandoned, but for a light glowing from a window at the front door, and foot tracks that led on and off the porch to the Jeep. The yard hadn't been cut in recent years and clumps of dead yellow prairie grass stuck up through the thin snow. A rusting swing-set sat at the side of the house, not square to anything, as though it'd been dumped there. A single swing hung from the left side of the two-swing bar. On the far back end of the property, a forties-era outhouse crumbled into the dirt.

Lucas noticed a line of green-paper Christmas trees taped in an upstairs window.

"How old's the girl?" Del asked.

"Eleven or twelve, I guess."

"What's the machete for?" Lucas asked.

"Something to do with the trapping," Zahn said.

"She down at the scene, or…?"

"They took her into town with her mother, to make a statement."

Lucas asked, "Who'd know about this road? Have to be local, you think?"

Zahn shrugged: "Maybe, but I think it's probably the first road the killer came to that led off the highway, outside of Broderick. First place he could do his business with a little peace and quiet."

"Must have scouted it, though," Lucas said. The road was only slightly wider than the patrol car, with no shoulder on the left, and on the right, six feet of frozen dirt and then an abrupt slope into the ditch. "That ditch would be dangerous as hell. How'd he turn around?"

"There are some tracks, you'll see them up ahead. What's left of them, anyway. He just jockeyed her around, and got straight. But you're right; he must've scouted it."

"If this kid could see him, why'd he think he was out of sight?" Del asked.

"We had a good wind through here last night, a nice little ground blizzard," Zahn said. "From the grove of trees, on the ground, he might not be able to see the farmhouse, but from up on the second floor of the farmhouse, you could see his lights down in the grove. Anyway, Letty said she could, and there's no reason to think she was lying. She never turned her room light on."

"Mmm." Lucas nodded. He'd once been in a ground blizzard where he couldn't see more than three feet in any direction, but if he looked straight up, he could see a fine blue sky with puffy, white fair-weather clouds. "So the victims lived back in Broderick?"

"Yeah, down there in another old farmhouse. That's how we identified them so quick. Took one look and knew who the guy was. Him being black."

"How long did he live here?"

"Year and a half. He was in jail down in Kansas City, showed up here in July a year ago, and moved in with Warr. Warr was working at the casino in Armstrong, dealing blackjack. We just found out about the jail thing this morning."

"The Warr woman-she was from here?" Del asked.

"Nope. She was from Kansas City, herself," Zahn said. "Got into Broderick about a month before Cash, so we think she must've been his girlfriend, and came up here when he was about to get out of jail, to nail down the job. But to tell you the truth, we don't really know the details yet."

"Okay."

"What about Broderick?" Del asked. "Anything there? What do they do? Farmers?"

"Well, it was mostly a ghost town until Gene Calb got his truck rehab business going. There was always a gas station and a store, and a bar off and on, servicing the local farm folks. Just a crossroads. Then some people moved up here, to be close to work at Calb's-houses are really cheap-and now, there must be twenty or thirty people around the place."

"So what the hell was an interracial couple from Kansas City doing there?" Lucas asked.

"That seems to be a question," Zahn agreed. They'd come up on the line of cop cars, which were parked on both sides of the narrow lane. A half-dozen cops were standing around, backs to the wind, ducking their heads briefly to see who Zahn was bringing in. Zahn threaded between them, slowed, pointed to a tall white-haired man in sunglasses, a camo hunting jacket, and nylon wind pants, who stood with his hands in his pockets talking to two other men. Zahn said, "That's the sheriff, Dick Anderson. I'll let you out here. I'm gonna find someplace to get turned around. I get claustrophobic when I'm pointed the wrong way."

LUCAS AND DEL climbed out, and the sheriff and the two men he was talking to looked down at them, and the sheriff said something to the other two and they both smiled. Del, who was coming up behind Lucas, muttered, "We're city slickers."

"For a while, anyway," Lucas agreed. He smiled as he came up to the sheriff. Lucas's blue eyes were happy enough, but his smile sometimes made people nervous. "Sheriff Anderson? Lucas Davenport and Del Capslock with the BCA. We understand you've got a situation."

"If that's what you'd call it," the sheriff said. The sheriff was about forty, Lucas thought, with a pale pinkish complexion; he ran to fat, like a clerk, but wasn't fat yet. His hands stayed in his pockets. A statement of some kind, Lucas thought.

Anderson nodded to the two men with him: "These are deputies Braun and Schnurr. We understood that Hank Dickerson was coming up from Bemidji with a crime scene crew."

Lucas nodded, still smiling. "Yes. They should be here anytime. Del and I were sent by the governor to make sure everything was handled right."

"The governor knows about this?" Anderson asked doubtfully.

"Yes. I talked to him this morning before I left. He said to say hello and that he hoped we could get this cleared away in a hurry."

"Maybe I should give him a call," Anderson suggested.

"I'm sure he'd be happy to hear from you," Lucas said. He looked around. "Where are the victims?"

Anderson turned toward the stand of trees north of the road, took a hand out of his jacket pocket, and pointed. "Back in there, where the guys in the orange hats are."

Lucas said to Del. "Let's go take a look."

"Are you running this, or Hank?" Anderson asked.

"Both of us, in a way," Lucas said. "I report directly to the commissioner of Public Safety and to the governor. Hank reports up through the BCA chain of command."

"So what exactly do you do?" Deputy Schnurr asked. "Handle the politics or what?"

"I kick people's asses," Lucas said. His eyes flicked over Schnurr and the other deputy, then went back to the sheriff. "When they need to be kicked."

He and Del both stepped away at the same time, toward the men in the orange caps. The sheriff and his two deputies hesitated, and Del and Lucas got a few steps away and Del said, "That was cool."

"Hey, the guy didn't even shake hands."

"Yeah." They pushed through a tangle of brush and caught a glimpse of the bodies hanging from the ropes; passed a few more trees and then saw them fully, in the clear. Lucas focused on them, got careless, pushed back a springy branch and got snapped in the face by a twig. His cheek stinging, he said, "Careful," to Del, and went back to staring at the bodies.

They looked like paintings, he thought, or maybe an old fading color photo from the 1930s, two gray, stretched-out bodies dangling from a tree, half facing each other, ropes cutting into their necks, with four white men not looking at them-desperately not looking at them.

As they came up, Del asked, quietly, "You ever noticed how hanged people sort of all look alike-like they lose their race or something? They all look like they're made out of clay."

Lucas nodded. He had noticed that. "Except redheads," he added. "They always look like they came from a different planet."

Del said, "You're right. Except for redheads. They just get paler."

The four orange-hatted men were spaced around the bodies at the cardinal points, as though they might be rushed from any direction. A short stepladder was set up beside the bodies, and the snow had been thoroughly trampled down for fifty feet around. Two of the men were doing the cold-weather tap dance, a slow shuffle that said they were freezing. When Lucas and Del came up, one of the orange-hats turned and asked, "Who're you?"

"BCA," Lucas said. "Who're you?"

"Dave Payton." The man turned back to the bodies and shivered. "D-Deputy sheriff."

"What're you doing?" Del asked.

"K-Keeping everybody out of a circle around the bodies. You guys are supposed to have a crime crew coming. You don't look like them."

"They'll be a bit," Lucas said. His voice had turned friendly. "You get here early?"

"I was the first car in, after the state patrol. Ass is freezin' solid."

"Where's the line they were brought in on… tracks or anything?"

Payton jerked his arm toward the road. "Back that way, I guess. Pretty trampled down, now."

Lucas looked, and could see the kind of snaky break in the brush that often meant a game trail. If the bodies had been brought in along it, then the hangman had known exactly where he was going.

Del had taken a couple steps closer to the dangling bodies. "Woman's got blood on her face," he said.

"G-Guy's pretty messed up, too," Payton said. "Looks like somebody beat the heck out of him before he did… this."

"I don't think it's her blood," Del said. "Some of it's off to the side, and on her upper lip and nose."

"We'll get the lab to check," Lucas said. "That'd be a break, if it's the killer's."

Payton said, "D-D-D-DNA. We did a DNA in a rape last year."

"Catch the guy?"

"N-N-No," Payton said.

Lucas said, "Look, why don't you go sit in a car for a while and get warmed up, for Christ's sakes? You're shaking like a leaf."

" 'Cause Anderson'd have a cow," Payton said.

"We're taking over the crime scene," Lucas said. "The BCA is. I'm ordering you to leave, okay?" He looked at the other guys, who were watching him, some hope in their eyes. "All of you. Get some place warm. Get some coffee."

Payton bobbed his head, said, "Aye aye, cap'n." The four men hurried in a wide circle around the hanging bodies, another of them muttered, "Thanks," and then they all scuttled off through the naked trees toward the cars.

"ANDERSON COULD BE a problem," Del said, conversationally, when the deputies were out of earshot. He and Lucas were still looking at the dead people. The ghastly fact was that Cash and Warr hung only a few inches off the ground, and neither one had been tall-Lucas and Del were looking almost straight into their dead, half-open eyes, at their purplish faces, and the two bodies swayed together as though dancing on the same floor where the two cops were standing. "He doesn't know what he's doing," Del continued. "Half the goddamn crime scene is stuck to the bottoms of the deputies' boots. Then he left them out here to freeze."

"Yeah." Lucas decided that they were gawking at the bodies. "We're gawking," he said.

"I know," Del said, looking at Warr. "How many dead people we seen in our lives? You think a thousand?"

"Maybe not a thousand," Lucas said, still looking.

"I don't dream about any of them, except maybe one burned guy I saw, all black and crispy but still alive… died while we were waiting for the ambulance. And a little kid who drowned in a creek, she was my first one right after I went on patrol."

"I remember my first kid."

"Everybody does," Del said. He did the cold-weather tap dance, and blew some steam. "I'm gonna remember this one for a while."

"THEY'RE ON DISPLAY, " Lucas said after a while. "You think it could be a biker thing? Bikers do this kind of shit, sometimes."

"I've never seen it," Del said doubtfully. A gust of wind came through, and both of the bodies slowly rotated toward them.

"Neither have I, but I've read about it," Lucas said.

"Read about it, or seen it in the movies?"

"Maybe the movies," Lucas admitted. "The thing is, the guy who did this wanted everybody to freak out. This isn't just a murder. This is something else. The guy was making a point."

"No clothes around," Del said. "Must've pulled the clothes off somewhere else, or took them with him."

"Somewhere else. This was all planned," Lucas said. "The killer wasn't struggling around in the dark, pulling their clothes off. He didn't have to look for this place, off the top of his head. He knew what he was going to do. He worked it all out ahead of time."

THEY WERE TALKING about the line the killer took through the trees, and the angle down to the kid's house and the distance from the town, and more about the display of the bodies, when they heard people coming in. Anderson was pushing through the brush with Braun and Schnurr, followed by three more men in bulky uniform parkas and insulated pants. "Must be the guys from Bemidji," Del said.

They were. Dickerson, a tall man in a tan parka, with straw-colored hair and gold-rimmed glasses, introduced himself and the other two agents, Barin and Woods. All of them gawked at the bodies as they talked. "The crime scene and special operations guys are about five minutes behind us," Dickerson said. "The ME's out on the road right now. The special ops guys'll get it on film and we'll process the scene, then we'll get those folks out of the trees."

"We need a careful sweep," Lucas said. "I mean like, crazy careful."

"Pretty screwed up already," Dickerson said. Then he second-thought himself, with the sheriff right there, and diplomatically added, "We're getting set up now. We're bringing in a propane heater, and after we get finished crawling the place, we'll melt out the snow and make sure nothing was trampled down into it."

"Excellent."

"You and I ought to go off somewhere, and decide who's going to do what." Again, a bureaucratic wariness.

"Del and I don't have anything to do with crime scene stuff," Lucas said. "That's all yours-but make sure the ME takes a close look at the woman's mouth. That blood on her face looks likes it might not be hers. We'll want a DNA on it and we'll want her mouth cleaned out."

"Sure."

"Otherwise, we can chat if you want, but basically, Del and I just go around and talk to people." Lucas said. "Your guys should do the same thing-interview whoever you want. Duplicate us. No problem."

"So we're not… one investigation." Dickerson looked skeptical.

"Nope." Lucas shook his head. "Del and I have done this a lot, in Minneapolis. We find it's handy, with the hard ones, to have two investigations running side by side, if you can do it without a lot of in-fighting. You get different ideas going."

Dickerson shrugged. "It's all right with me. These two guys"-he turned a thumb to Barin and Woods-"will be doing all the work. I'm going to get us set up, hang around today and maybe tomorrow, and then I'll be on call down in Bemidji. I understand the governor's taken an interest."

Lucas said, "He has. He's worried about the image. Two people hanged, naked, the man's black."

"Got a pretty good dick on him, too," said Schnurr, the sheriff's deputy.

Lucas turned on him, his teeth showing. "Shut the fuck up. Honest to Christ, if I hear anybody talking like that, I'll personally slap the shit out of him."

"Didn't mean nothin'," Schnurr said. He shuffled his feet like a child who'd been bad in class; but he had mean eyes.

"If a reporter heard that, or even heard you'd said it, sheriff's deputies making cracks like that, we'd have twice as much trouble as we do now. So keep your fuckin' mouth shut," Lucas finished. To Anderson: "I don't know how much you like your job, but your whole goddamn county is about to get smeared in the national media. Do you understand that?"

"I… don't know," Anderson said, uncertainly.

"Believe me, it's gonna happen. And one asshole making comments like this guy, it could mean that you don't only lose your job, but you gotta move to Arizona and change your name."

Anderson glanced nervously at Schnurr and said, "We'll keep a lid on it."

Dickerson was peering up at the bodies, embarrassed, Lucas thought, to be from the same agency as Lucas. "You better," Lucas snarled. He looked again at Schnurr, nailing him in place, then asked Anderson, "The little girl who found the bodies-is she in town?"

"Giving a statement," Anderson said.

"We'd appreciate it if you'd have somebody call in, tell them to keep her there until Del and I have a chance to talk to her."

Anderson nodded.

Lucas said to Dickerson, "Good luck. You guys got it."

"We got it," Dickerson said.

"NEED TO GET to that little girl," Lucas said, as they walked back out to the line of cars. "If the sheriff's crew is as bad as it looks, we need to talk to her before somebody fucks her up."

"Gotta get some wheels," Del said.

"Get them at a car dealer, probably, if we get there fast," Lucas said. "Tomorrow morning, you won't be able to rent a car anywhere north of Fargo."

"Zahn oughta know."

ZAHN DID KNOW. "Holme's Motors in Armstrong," he said. "Fix you right up. How many do you want?"

"Two?"

As they bounced slowly down the dirt road, past the girl's house to the highway, Zahn fumbled out a cell phone, pushed a speed-dial button, and said, "This is Ray Zahn. Let me talk to Carl." And a moment later, "Hey. I gotta couple of cops in town from St. Paul. They need two cars, good shape. Uh-huh." He turned to Lucas: "What kind of credit card?"

"American Express or Visa, whatever they take," Lucas said.

"American Express or Visa… yeah. Yeah. Ten minutes. Yeah, see you then." He hung up. "All fixed," he said. "One of you gets a loaded three-year-old Oldsmobile, the other one gets a six-year-old five-liter Mustang."

"I'll take the one with the best heater," Del said.

"We need to get over to the sheriff's department, quick as we can," Lucas said. "Is that the courthouse?"

"Law Enforcement Center," Zahn said. "Three years old, state-of-the-art, behind the courthouse and right across the street from Holme's car lot. The LEC is the reason Dick Anderson's the sheriff."

"He built it?" Lucas asked.

"No. The last sheriff did. Bobby Carter," Zahn said. He grinned at Lucas and pumped his eyebrows. "Don't tell anybody I said so-Bobby's a friend of mine-but he got a little too close to the construction process. Nobody went to jail, but people around here figure that a good chunk of money stuck to his fingers. He's back to farming."

"What was Anderson? Not a deputy?"

"He was a lawyer, private practice. Real estate, mostly. He worked with the county attorney, sometimes. When Bobby got into trouble and figured he better get out, he put up one of his good old boys to run. That pissed people off. Anderson jumped in at the last minute and got elected."

"A political wizard, huh?" Del said.

Zahn smiled into his steering wheel as they bumped over the last set of ruts onto the highway, and turned south toward Broderick and Armstrong. "Never heard anybody use the word wizard around him," he said. "He's pretty much wholly owned by Barry Wilson, who's the head of the county commission. That's okay, most of the time. Doesn't work too well when there's an actual crime, or something."

THE TOWN OF Broderick was a few hundred yards down the highway, and Zahn took them through it at a crawl.

The town was built along two streets that intersected the highway at right angles. A big four-square farmhouse sat on the north edge of town, on the west side of the highway. A sheriff's car sat in the driveway, in front of the garage, and Zahn said, "That's the victims' place."

"Okay." It looked like a rural murder scene on a CNN report, a lonely white farmhouse surrounded by snow, with a cop car in the yard.

Farther south, still on the west side of the highway, they passed Wolf's Cafe, which looked like a shingle-sided rambler; the Night Owl Club; and a building with a wooden cross fixed above the door and a bare spot where a sign had been pulled down. "That used to be the Holy Spirit Pentecostal Church-holy rollers," Zahn said. "They eventually rolled out of town. Now a bunch of women work there. Like religious women, do-gooders, I guess. Some Catholics and some Lutheran women from Lutheran Social Services, and I heard one of them's a Quaker. One of the Catholics is a looker. The other ones are the blue-tights kind."

Scattered among the buildings were a half-dozen small houses, a couple of trailer homes, a corrugated-steel corn silo with a cone-shaped roof, and a red barn.

The east side of the highway was sparser: a Handy Mart gas station and convenience store; Calb's Body Shop amp; Tow, in a long yellow metal-sided pole barn; Gene's 18, an over-the-road truck rehab place; and two more houses.

"That's it?"

"That's it, that's the town," Zahn said, as they rolled out into the countryside.

Del asked, "What's with all the truck places, the body shops? Isn't that pretty heavy industry for a place like this?"

"Naw… I don't know. Would you drive your car nine miles to get it fixed? We're nine miles from Armstrong."

"I guess I would," Del admitted. "Actually, I know I would, 'cause I have."

"And it was an inheritance deal. Gene inherited the body shop from his old man, and then he added the truck rehab business. Truck rehab, you can do anywhere. He does pretty good. He's why the town started coming back. Most everybody who lives here works for him. Not a bad guy."

"A long way out," Del said.

"Some people like it lonely," Zahn said. "Some people don't."

Then they were out of town, out in the countryside. A crow or a raven was flying south, parallel to the highway, a fluttering black speck against the overcast sky, the only thing besides themselves that was moving. Del said, "Jesus Christ, it's flat."

They rode in silence for a couple of minutes, then Zahn started a low, unconscious whistling. Lucas recognized the tune, probably from an elevator somewhere. "What's that song you're whistling?"

"Didn't realize I was whistling," Zahn said. He thought a minute. "It's that thing from Phantom of the Opera."

"That's right." After a second, "You don't seem to be too upset, you know, by the bodies."

"Well, you're with the Patrol, you learn not to be a pussy, like a homicide cop or something," Zahn said.

"All right, pussy," Del drawled from the back seat.

Zahn glanced over the seat and said, "Every time I go out to an accident and there are a couple of high school kids bleeding to death right in front of my face, and screaming for their dad or their mom, I know them. They're kids from down the street. You do that for a few years and a couple strangers up in a tree won't bother you much. Unlike some homicide pussies."