Naked Prey (11 page)

Letty got up and closed the door. On the back of the door, she’d mounted a mirror that she’d found at the Goodwill store. She looked pretty tough, she thought, trying to turn so she could catch her own profile. She was weather-smudged from the wind and the ice, but she couldn’t help that. But maybe . . .

She lay down again and closed her eyes. Maybe some lipstick. Just a little teeny hint of lipstick. She should definitely clean up her shoes. She’d seen a girl in a John Wayne
movie, a spunky kid just a little older than herself, maybe, and that was the
look
she wanted. That was the
attitude.

Martha West ran up the stairs. “Dick’s here, he’s gonna take me,” she said. Dick was her on-and-off boyfriend; he’d heard about the press conference. “Are you okay? Harriet’s gonna give me a quick wash and set, and then Dick and me might go out after. You know, just for a while.”

“I’ll be okay. I gotta get some traps out, for when the reporters come back tomorrow. And maybe clean up my room—one lady said they might want to look out my window, if they decide to do a reenactment.”

“Okay. Maybe catch the kitchen, too, okay? And just run the vacuum around the living room. Spray some of the lemon Pledge around, okay?”

“Okay. Don’t be too late. We gotta get up early tomorrow,” Letty said.

“We’re just gonna go out for a few minutes, see what people are saying.”

Martha ran back down the stairs, and Letty sat on the bed and pulled on her knee-high gum boots and got her coat and gloves: going to set some traps. Her mom yelled back up, “Don’t miss the six o’clock news. They said maybe five o’clock and for sure at six.”

“Okay.”

This was like paradise.

Ten minutes later, visions of MTV still dancing in her head, she was out the door with her trap sack. She carried the .22, though she didn’t need it, and the machete in the green jungle sheath, which she did need. But who knew? Maybe the TV would come back, and the TV people liked the gun. She looked over her shoulder, and she trudged across the road and then into the frozen marsh on the north side, wishing them back.

She spent an hour with the traps, the sun dropping out of sight as she worked. Back at the house, in the light of the single bulb in her room, she looked at herself in the mirror, again, and thought about the men who’d come in from St. Paul, Davenport and Del, and how they carried an air of the city with them. She’d told Davenport she might like to be a surgeon, or a hairdresser, or even a cop. Maybe she could do those jobs, but she no longer thought that was what she wanted.

She liked the lights. She was going to be a reporter. A star.

She went downstairs, got one of the two remaining Cokes, and saw the keys to the Jeep on the kitchen table. She had a hundred and twenty-seven dollars hidden in an old metal Thermos jug under her bed. Maybe just a piece of pie down at Wolf’s. After a day like this, she deserved it.

T
HE
H
OLY
R
OLLER
church in Broderick had been converted into a rough-and-ready dormitory. Wooden screens divided the former prayer space into nine rooms, to provide privacy. Each cubicle contained a folding bed, a bureau, a night table, a fire extinguisher, and a curtain across the doorway, in the long tradition of the flophouse.

A Christian electrician from Bemidji had laid some cable between the rooms, so each room had one electric outlet to power a lamp. Personal radios and televisions were forbidden, not for religious reasons but because the noise might annoy others. Most of the women had Walkman radios or CD players, for personal use, and most had small bookcases jammed with mystery novels and spiritual how-to’s.

The women who lived at the church usually ate communally, cooking out of the church kitchen, although there was no rule about that. A side room had a pile of bean-bag
chairs, a television connected to a satellite dish, a DVD player and sixty or seventy slowly accumulated chick flicks. A balcony in the back, once an organ loft, had been set aside as a quiet place, for someone who needed a moment’s peace and separation.

Two of the women at the church were nuns. None, or maybe just one—nobody was certain—was a lesbian. Absolutely none of them cared what the people in town said.

Ruth Lewis was the leader. She worked out schedules and tactics with Calb, for the dope operation, and coordinated through Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services for the food and clothing distribution work. The food and clothing distribution might have helped a few people, but Minnesota was a socialist state, and much of that was done more efficiently by the local state agencies. The women didn’t care about that, either; a decent cover was worth maintaining.

After briefing the other women on the murders of Jane Warr and Deon Cash, Ruth listened to worries and arguments for an hour, but most of them were self-reliant, not given to panic. After an hour of talk, they agreed there was nothing to do but wait—to work the drug transport as well as they could, to work the rural food program, and to keep their heads down.

Afterward, Katina Lewis took her sister aside and said, “Loren will keep us posted about the police. There’s a good chance that if something happens . . . if they find out about the drug runs, we’ll have some warning before they do anything.”

“If they know about you guys, about your relationship, we might pull Loren down with us,” Ruth said. She smiled her cool smile. She didn’t like Loren Singleton, and Katina knew it.

“He’s willing to take the chance,” Katina said. “The only problem might be, he’s always been under his
mother’s thumb. If she knew what was happening out here, she’d sell us to the highest bidder. The old witch.”

“Warn him.”

“I am, sorta. What I’m really doing is . . . ” She smiled; her older sister was always so solemn that she made Katina giggle.

“What?” Ruth asked solemnly.

“We’re sorta changing thumbs,” Katina said. “The old witch’s for mine.”

L
ATER,
R
UTH WALKED
up the highway in the afternoon darkness to get a salty fried-egg-and-onion sandwich at Wolf’s Cafe. Ruth always felt guilty about the egg sandwiches—they were greasy, probably put an extra millimeter of cholesterol in her veins every time she ate one, the salt probably pushed her blood pressure, and the raw onion gave her bad breath that lasted for hours. On the other hand, she had no heart problems, her blood pressure was perfect, and the sandwiches tasted wonderful, a break from the gloom of winter and the glum healthy food of the communal kitchen.

The cafe had a double door, and always smelled of grease, and was fifteen degrees too warm, and Sandy Wolf called out, “Hey, baby Ruth.”

“Hi.” Ruth nodded shyly. She wasn’t a hail-fellow, like Wolf, but she enjoyed the other woman’s heartiness. Another woman sat halfway down the counter . . . not a woman, though, Ruth thought, but a girl, eating a piece of pie. Letty West.

“Letty?” Ruth stepped down the bar, smiling. She’d liked the girl the first time they met, and had talked to her a dozen times since. “How are you?”

Letty returned the smile, waved her fork. “I’m fine. Had a press conference this afternoon.”

“Oh, I heard.” Ruth went solemn, looked for the right words. “Heard that you found the . . . people.”

“We was just talking about it,” Wolf said. “Letty says they was frozen like Popsicles.”

“They put them in the black bags to carry them out, and they were in there like a sackful of boards,” Letty said.

“Do the police have any ideas who did it?” Ruth asked.

Letty shook her head. “Nah. They know a heck of a lot less than I do. They don’t know anything about Broderick—I been filling them in. There’s these guys, Lucas and Del, I’m helping them out. We ate up at the Bird this afternoon.”

“What . . . did you actually see? At the murder scene?”

Sandy Wolf leaned on the counter and Ruth plopped on the stool next to the girl, and Letty went through the whole story, as she’d told it to the television cameras that afternoon. When she finished the story about finding the bodies, she added that the cameras were coming back the next day for a feature story. “They’re gonna come along and run my traps with me. I had to go out this afternoon and put some traps in, just so I’ll have some ’rats for the feature story tomorrow.”

“Are they paying you?” Wolf asked.

“Maybe,” Letty said. She wasn’t sure—she hadn’t thought of that angle.

“They oughta,” Wolf said. “I mean, you got a product to sell. You could go on
Oprah.”

“You think?” Letty liked
Oprah.

“You can’t tell where this kind of thing will lead. You could be in Hollywood. Stranger things have happened,” Wolf said.

“I don’t know about Hollywood,” Ruth said. She felt a tickle of concern. “Letty, do you have anybody staying with you out there, with you and your mom? I mean, a policeman?”

“No . . . You think we should?”

“Well.” She nibbled at a lip.

“Okay. Now I’m scared,” Letty said. She’d seen all the cop dramas. The killers always came back. “All I got is that piece-of-shit .22.”

“The guy isn’t coming back,” Wolf said disdainfully. She’d been cleaning up the grill and she flapped her cleaning rag at Letty. “The guy who did this is a million miles from here. He’s probably on Miami Beach by now.”

“I hope,” Ruth said. To Wolf: “Egg sandwich with raw onions?”

“Fried hard? Coming up,” Wolf said. She asked Letty, “Another piece of pie? Short piece?”

“If you’re buying,” Letty said. She grinned at Ruth. “Got a free piece of pie for the story?”

“You’ll get a free ride to jail if the state patrol sees that truck parked out back,” Wolf grunted. To Ruth: “She’s driving her mom’s truck again. Little goddamn juvenile delinquent.”

“Little goddamn juvenile delinquent who’s gonna be on
Oprah,”
Letty said. She looked at the wall clock. “Four-thirty. I gotta be out of here in ten minutes. They’re telling me that we’ll be on at five.”

“Movie star,” Wolf cackled, sliding a half-slice of cherry pie down the countertop.

W
HEN
R
UTH GOT
back to the church, she told Katina about Letty, smiling as she recounted the girl’s enthusiasm. Katina wasn’t so amused. “That kid’s all over the place. If she’s talking to the police, I hope she doesn’t talk about us. Or about Gene’s place.”

“Not really much for her to know,” Ruth said. “Bunch of cars getting fixed.”

“I suppose. Just the way that she’s always hanging around. I mean, Ruth—we’re criminals. We should act like criminals, at least part of the time.”

“She’s having a good time. I don’t think she’s a danger to us,” Ruth said. “She’s a kid.”

“If you say so,” Katina said, letting her skepticism show.

“Besides—we’ve talked about this—sooner or later, one of us is going to get caught crossing the border. Or somebody will tell some ambitious little creep prosecutor what we’re doing, and they’ll come get all of us. We could go to jail, Katina. It’s a fact of life.”

Katina shook her head. “I never believed that. If we’re careful. If we’re really, really psychopathically careful, I don’t think we will.”

T
HE DISCUSSION HAD
not quite been an argument, and nothing was resolved. Later on, Katina crossed the highway when she saw Singleton pull into Calb’s parking lot. Singleton had a remote that worked the overhead door, and the door went up, and he pulled inside—to get the car out of sight, Katina supposed. There were still two cop cars and a state van at Cash’s house, though it was so cold, all the cops had gone inside the house. Singleton saw Katina coming across the highway and held the door up for her, dropping it when she was inside.

“Gene’s in the back,” Singleton said.

Calb was in his cubbyhole, staring at an aging Dell computer. He looked up and said, “Loren,” when Singleton came in, leaned back to look around him and said, “Hey, Katina.”

“Talk to the state guys yet?” Singleton asked.

“Two sets of them. This afternoon. One set was okay and they were here for an hour, taking notes. The other set
was just two guys who stood around with their hands in their pockets. Like the fuckin’ gestapo.”

“Davenport and Capslock,” Singleton said. “Supposed to be heavy hitters. What’d you tell them?”

“The truth,” Calb said. “I talked to Shawn down in Kansas City before they came in, told him what I was going to do, which was, tell the truth. That I knew Shawn in the Army and knew he had this troubled cousin and when the cousin got out of jail, I hired him as a favor. Then I told them I was about to fire him because he was a screw-up, and I suspected he used the drugs, but not that he sold them. I told them I thought the trouble might be coming from Jane’s casino job . . . ”

“Good,” Singleton said. “I was going to suggest that. We’ve gotta reinforce it now that you got them thinking about it.”

Katina pulled at her lip. “I’m worried about Letty West. She’s spending a lot of time with the police, and she hangs around here.”

Calb shook his head. “Nothing to worry about. She comes in to get warm, and I don’t let her go in the shop because I don’t want her getting hurt, all the shit laying around here. I don’t believe she ever talked to Deon.”

T
HEY CHATTED FOR
a few more minutes, then, as they left, Singleton deflected a hint from Katina—she could have used some comforting in these troubled times—and headed back to Armstrong. He stopped at Peske’s market to pick up a six-pack of caffeinated Coke, and ran into Roger Elroy, who was also looking into the cooler at the back of the store. “Anything happening?”

“They got him,” Elroy said quietly.

“They
got
him?”

Elroy was young and eager and full of news. “They know who it is—those two BCA guys figured it out up at the casino,” Elroy said. Singleton thought,
the casino,
and a wave of relief washed through him, and he leaned into the cooler for a six-pack. “It was that guy whose kid was kidnapped, Hale Sorrell, that guy from Rochester. Remember, last month?”

Singleton almost gave it away then. Might have, if Elroy had seen his face, but his face was in the cooler, as he reached deep inside. He stopped, got a grip both on himself and the six-pack, backed out, and said, “Where’d they come up with that?”