Naked Prey (21 page)

“I know. Letty said her mother was downstairs. She heard a knock on the door, then her mother started screaming, there was a shot, the screaming stopped, and Letty went out the window. Never saw her mother or heard her again.”

“We’re sure she’s telling the truth? I don’t want to suggest anything, but they were out here alone.”

“Letty was shot herself, and it’s not self-inflicted, believe me,” Lucas said. “Somebody shot her from behind and above. And nobody would do to themselves what happened to her, just to cover up. Her hand—there’s a possibility that she’s gonna be crippled.”

The deputy winced. “Okay. You know, out here on the prairie . . . strange things happen when people are alone too much.”

“In the city, strange things happen when they’re together too much,” Del said.

“Strange things happen,” the deputy said.

Lucas suspected they were about to lurch off into some
philosophical black hole and hastily interjected. “We need to alert all the local hospitals and doctors that the killer may have been shot.”

“That’s something. Since she didn’t hit him in the head, I hope she hit him in the nuts,” the deputy said. “I’ll call it in.”

O
NCE
S
INGLETON GOT
the fire going, he’d slipped out the front of the West home and begun jogging down the highway. He’d thought about one more look around, one more quick search for Letty, but she had that gun, and she’d see him coming. He gave up on that, and jogged.

His chest hurt. Hurt a lot—but he wasn’t spitting blood, wasn’t having any trouble breathing. If he could just keep going . . .

Running hurt. He ran halfway back to Broderick, then he stopped, stooped over, braced his hands on his knees, and tried to ease the pain. The pain was coming in waves now, and if he hadn’t been shot, he might have thought he was having a heart attack. Behind him, the fire was growing. He ran on, hurting, made it to the car, running through the dark behind the convenience store and the shop.

This was the dangerous part. This was where somebody might see him. He eased the patrol car out from behind the shop, pointed it south, and took off. No lights in any windows that he could see, but in the rearview mirror, the fire was going like crazy.

A mile out of town, two miles, four—then his handset burped, and he heard the comm center calling over to the fire station. He dropped the hammer on it. He was still two miles from the nearest road that would take him away from Highway 36.

He made it by ten seconds. He’d made the turn when he saw the light bar on the first responder truck. He continued
east, and out the side window could see the huge balloon of fire at the West house; then the comm center was squawking at him and he said he was on the way back but he was pretty far south and he heard the siren come up . . .  .

And he hurt. Goddamn Letty West.

He was sweating from the pain: he could smell himself. He made another mile, crossed a gravel road heading south, into the backside of Armstrong. Four minutes later, he was at his garage, running the door up.

Inside the house, he peeled off his parka, took off his shirt and undershirt, and examined the hole in his chest. It
was
a hole: a purplish, .22-sized dot on his chest, already surrounded by a nasty bruise. He pushed on the skin around it, and winced: won’t do that again. Blood trickled steadily from the hole—not much, but it wouldn’t stop.

He went into the bathroom, got a roll of gauze, made a thick pad, went into the kitchen, found some duct tape, and taped the pad to his chest. He couldn’t help fooling with the area around the hole, squeezing gently to see if he could feel the slug. He couldn’t, but he hurt himself again.

“Fuckin’ dummy,” he said.

The phone rang. He let it ring. Probably Katina, with news about the fire. He got enough tape on his chest that he was sure he wouldn’t bleed through his shirt, then checked his arm. Martha West had scratched him, not too badly, but there would have been skin under her fingernails. Good idea about the fire. He washed the scratches with soap and warm water, smeared on some disinfectant ointment, and duct-taped it.

All right. No blood showing. He could still walk around. He got a fresh shirt, eased into it. Touched his chest, and the pain ran through him. The phone started ringing again. He ignored it, touched his chest again, gasped with the pain, and headed out to the car.

T
HE FIRE STATION
was lit up—and empty. Every man was out at the fire. Singleton pulled into the station, pushed through the main door and called out, “Hey. Anybody home?”

Nobody answered, though a Hank Williams, Jr., song was drawling through the open truck slots.

“Hey. Anybody?”

No? Excellent. He headed up the stairs, to the sleeping loft, went straight through it to a storeroom where the medical gear was kept. The fire department was also the backup paramedic service. He pulled down a paramedic’s pack, ripped off the sealer tab, and zipped it open.

Shit: no pills. He needed some painkillers, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing. He’d been sure there’d be some—firefighters always seemed to have a few pills around, supposedly because of the small burns they took on the job. If so, they didn’t get the pills from the paramedic packs. He zipped the pack up, replaced it.

Where else? The hospital, the drugstore. The hospital would probably be on alert, with the fire, and he didn’t know how he’d get the drugs anyway. The drugstore had a safe . . .

He touched his chest.
Goddamnit, that hurt.

He was on his way out when he got lucky. All the lockers were open and he saw a tube of pills in one of them. He looked at it: Advil. Not good enough. Then he checked all the lockers, quickly, found a dozen more bottles of pills, mostly vitamins and nonprescription painkillers. Finally, in the locker of one of the two full-time firemen, he found two tubes of Dilaudid. Twenty orange tabs, in total. Both tubes carried the notation, “One tablet every four to six hours.”

Excellent. He took the tubes. Dug further through the
locker and found another tube: penicillin. Good. Took that, too.

Have to think about Katina, though. He was gonna be out of action for a while, and he needed a reason. Had to think.

Made it out to the car, touched his chest.
Goddamn, that hurt.

Then he thought,
Wonder where Letty West got to?
He’d gone out to her house to solve a problem, and hadn’t. She was still out there, Letty was.

Singleton got into his car and headed for the fire. Halfway there, a new thought occurred to him: Mom was gonna be pissed.

T
HE FIRE WAS
out, and a couple of the firemen were gingerly working through the blackened jumble of burnt wood and plaster in the now-open basement; it looked like a bomb crater. Lucas and Del took turns watching the work, and getting warm in the car. Ray Zahn showed up in his Highway Patrol cruiser, and they chatted for a while. “The comm center called the sheriff. He told them to handle it, and to coordinate with you guys, and then he went back to bed. I guess this isn’t important enough.”

“We’re not being fair to him,” Del observed.

“No, we’re not,” Zahn said. “I’m sure we don’t know all the problems and contingencies he has to deal with. The miserable twat.”

Zahn left on a drag-racing call, and Lucas and Del lingered, watching. More sheriff’s deputies came in, apparently working on their own time. Zahn came back, and wanted to talk about how Rose Marie Roux might change the Highway Patrol.

They’d been back at the fire site for an hour, when a gray Toyota Land Cruiser pulled off to the side of the highway and two women got out. Lucas recognized one of them as the woman he’d talked to at the church. He dug around in the back of his mind for a moment, then came up with her name—Ruth Lewis.

Ruth walked down to a cluster of the firemen, as the other woman popped open the back of the Land Cruiser. Lewis talked to the firemen for a moment, then two of them broke away and followed her back to the truck. The second woman was doing something in the back, then produced a carton of white paper cups, and the firemen who came back with Lewis took the cups and stepped out of sight, behind the truck.

“Coffee,” Del said.

“Like to talk to that woman,” Lucas said. “Want some coffee?”

“Take a cup,” Del said. They got out of the Acura and walked over to the Toyota. More firemen and cops were clustering around the back of it, taking cups, and Lucas and Del edged into the line. When they got their coffee, Lucas took a sip and stepped over next to Lewis.

“You heard what happened? You heard about Letty?”

“Some of it. I heard she was at the hospital, that you took her in,” Lewis said.

“She’s hurt,” Lucas said. “She was shot, not too bad, but when she was getting away, she had to jump out her window. She slashed her hand open, really bad—we’re flying her down to the Cities so a hand guy can look at her. Her ankle is either busted or twisted so bad that she can’t walk.”

“That’s
terrible.
I heard her mom . . . ” Lewis’s eyes went to the house, “ . . . might still be in there.”

“We’re waiting, but Letty thinks she was shot to death.
Right at the beginning of it. She apparently fought the guy long enough for Letty to get away.”

“This doesn’t happen in Custer County,” Lewis said. “Somebody told me that the last murder here was fifteen years ago.”

“Our operating theory is that Deon Cash, Jane Warr, and probably Joe Kelly kidnapped the Sorrell girl and killed her, and probably another girl named Burke.”

“Two
of them?”

“Yes. We think that Hale Sorrell somehow grabbed Joe Kelly and tortured him and got the names of Cash and Warr. We think he found out that his daughter was already dead. We think he then waited until their guard might be down a little, then he came up here, took them and hanged them for the murder of his daughter. But we think there was at least one more person involved, and that person is afraid that somebody will give him away. It’s a
him,
by the way, not a
her—
he spoke to Letty.”

She smiled quickly, a flitting smile that was gone as quickly as it came. “Thanks for the briefing.”

“I’m not just chatting,” Lucas said. “Something complicated is going on around Broderick, and I don’t know what it is. But it’s the cause of all these deaths. And people in Broderick are evading us, they’re not telling us what they know. I don’t know why they’re doing that, but they are.”

“I more or less know everybody in Broderick. Some of the men from the body shop keep to themselves, but nobody I know well would have done this. Kidnapped those girls or . . . ” She gestured at the burned-out hole in the ground.

Three firemen were standing in the ruins of the basement, and as Lewis gestured and they looked that way, one of them called up to another man, who was standing
outside the hole, and he turned and trotted toward one of the fire trucks. Two more firemen dropped into the basement.

“Aw, shit,” Lucas said. “I think they found her.”

T
HEY HAD.
L
UCAS
and Del hung around for another hour, watching as the medical examiner crawled down into the basement. Ten minutes later, he climbed back out.

“Martha West?” Lucas asked.

“I assume so, from what I’ve been told. No way to tell by looking at the body. We’ll have to do DNA on the body and on her daughter, and make some comparisons. But—it’s her.”

“All right.” They lingered a few more minutes, then headed back to Armstrong. There was actually traffic on the highway, cop cars and fire department vehicles, and maybe rubberneckers running up to see what had happened.

On the way back, Del asked, “What’d you tell Ruth Lewis?”

“I gave her something to be guilty about. Those kind of women, they guilt-trip pretty easily.”

“Just gonna let it percolate?”

“Yeah, overnight. Then I’m gonna go up there tomorrow and ask Lewis if she’ll go down to the Cities and tell Letty that her mother is dead.”

“Mmm,” Del said. Then after a minute, “Hitting her with a hammer.”

“Maybe she’ll break,” Lucas said.

They stopped at the hospital, found it quiet. The duty nurse told them that the resident had gone back to bed, and that Letty was in the air. “They got here really quickly,” she said. She glanced at a wall clock. “She should be at Hennepin in a half-hour.”

After leaving the hospital, they drove over to the Law Enforcement Center, where two people were sitting in the
comm center eating microwave pizza. Lucas borrowed a computer and wrote a memo to the sheriff, outlining what had happened, and what had been done about it. He made two copies, put one in the sheriff’s mailbox, and kept one himself.

A
T THE MOTEL,
they went to their separate rooms, and though he was tired, Lucas turned on the television, found a movie channel, and watched James Woods, Bruce Dern, and Lou Gossett get wry with each other in
Diggstown.
Forty-five minutes later, Weather called.

“We’ve got her on the ground,” she said. “The hand is not good, but it’s fixable. Gonna take a while to heal. Do you know if she has insurance? She doesn’t seem to think so.”

“She doesn’t,” Lucas said. “I’m buying.”

“Is this a Roman Catholic guilt thing that I’ve got to be psychologically careful about?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Call me tomorrow. I want all the details. She seems like an interesting child. She’s scared.”

“She jumped out a window, got shot, got stalked in the dark, shot a guy, saw her house burned down, and her mother’s dead. She doesn’t know about her mother for sure, yet. I’m going to try to get somebody up here to fly down and tell her. Somebody she knows.”

“Aw, jeez . . . All right. I’ll stay with her. Call me.”

S
LEEP WOULD BE
tough—coming up to five o’clock in the morning, but he was still too cranked. He clicked around the TV channels, found nothing that he wanted to watch. Eventually, he put on his shoes and walked down to the motel office.

“That black guy from Chicago still here?” he asked the clerk.

“Yup. Said he’s checking out tomorrow morning.”

“What’s the room?”

“Two-oh-eight. Is he gonna be a problem?”

“Naw. I called Chicago, and they say he’s gonna win the Nobel Prize for reporting. I just wanted to shake his hand.”

W
AY TOO EARLY
for this, he thought, but what the hell, reporters fucked with him often enough. He knocked on 208, waited, knocked again, and then a man croaked, “What time is it?”

“Five in the morning,” Lucas said. “Check-out time.”

“What?”

A crack of light appeared between the curtains in the room window, and a moment later, Mark Johnson peered out the door over the safety chain. “Davenport?”

“So, what’re you doing?” Lucas asked.

“Trying to sleep.”

“You’re so young, too,” Lucas said.

Johnson took the chain off and opened the door and yawned and asked, “What’s going on?”

“Somebody just burned down the West house, murdered Martha West, and shot and wounded Letty. She’s been taken to the Twin Cities for surgery.”

Johnson stared, then looked back at his bed, then back to Lucas. “You’re shitting me.”

“I shit you not.”

“Come on in. Let me get my pants on. Jesus . . . What happened?”

“I talked to Deke, and he said you’d be marginally okay to talk to.”

“Yeah, margin my ass.”

“So the deal is, I tell you what you want to know, and you got it from an informed source. And I’ve got a lot of stuff that nobody else has picked up.”

“Like what?”

L
UCAS TOLD HIM,
and when he was done, Johnson stared down at his laptop and said, “I can see this as a story. It’ll take some work.”

“Christ, the best story of his life is handed to him on a platter, and he says it’ll take some work,” Lucas said.

“The no-attribution is the hard part,” Johnson said.

“That’s the deal—but I’ll tell you what. You come around tomorrow, wearing your sport jacket, and I’ll talk
for
attribution, but I’ll also refuse to comment on some of the other stuff, like the locket. You can ask the FBI about that. They’ll be up here tomorrow, looking for the kids’ bodies.”

“That’s great. They’re like the world’s worst media connections. They won’t tell me anything.”

“They might. Their media training’s improved a lot, the last two or three years. And I’ll put in a word for you.”

“Appreciate it . . . Look, on my side of the deal, I sorta got a name for you.” He slapped a group of keys on the laptop, saving his notes and changing programs, then reached into his briefcase for a pen and paper, scribbled on it, and handed it to Lucas.

A name, Tom Block, and a phone number in an unfamiliar area code.

“This is another guy Deke put me onto, maybe a year ago, down in Kansas City. He’s sort of Kansas City’s Lucas Davenport, although he’s younger and better-looking.”

“Could be younger,” Lucas admitted. “What’s he do?”

“Wanders around town. But he knows a lot about the Cash family and what that whole group does down there. You might want to chat. He told me a couple of things that I can’t use, because of libel problems, but it wouldn’t be a problem for you.”

“Like tell me one thing.”

“Like the whole Cash family—it’s really more like a clan, with aunts and uncles and nephews and all that—they started out in drugs, and then, when crack came in and all the killing started, they got out. Went into other stuff. Tom says some of the brothers down there went to business school at the University of Missouri, then came back to KC and diversified.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. One of their things now is that they steal a lot of cars. That’s the rumor. Low risk, high profit. And since Calb’s body shop up there is involved in this thing . . . ”

“You think Calb’s is a chop shop?”

“I don’t know. Doesn’t make sense, really. They could chop cars down there, no problem. I don’t know what Calb could do out here that they couldn’t do.”

“Hmmp.” Lucas stood up and stretched. He thought he might be able to sleep. “All right. I’ll probably see you around tomorrow, one place or another. You still checking out?”

“Shit, no.”

“The desk clerk thinks you’re up to something. Being black, and all.”

“I encourage him to think that,” Johnson said. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”

L
UCAS SLEPT LIKE
a baby.

For almost five hours, until Del called. Lucas rolled
over and picked up the phone, and Del said, “I can’t lay down anymore.”

“Try harder,” Lucas said. Then: “I’ll get up.”

“I’ll come over in fifteen minutes. We’ll go down to the Bird and get breakfast.”

L
UCAS BRUSHED HIS
teeth and skipped shaving so he could stand in the shower for a few extra minutes. He was just pulling on a shirt when Del knocked. He let Del in, then sat on the bed and put on his shoes and socks, got his coat, tossed the car keys to Del. “You drive. I’ve got some calls to make.”

He started by calling the sheriff’s comm center, where he got the phone number for the church in Broderick. He called the church, and asked for Ruth Lewis.

“I’m calling to ask you to do something for me,” he said, when she came on.

Wary: “What?”

“I would like you to go down to the Cities and tell Letty that her mother’s dead. She knows it, but nobody’s come right out and said it, yet. You know her, and she likes you. It would be good if you could tell her.”

“Oh, God,” Lewis said. Then, after a moment, “I could go this afternoon.”

“Thanks. She’s at Hennepin General, and I’ll call down to make sure they let you through. If you go pretty soon, you could talk to her this evening.”

T
HE NEXT CALL
went to Weather’s cell phone. She answered, after a moment: “I’m in the locker room cleaning up. I sat in on the operation—pretty neat stuff. The guy knows how to tie a square knot.”

“Yeah, yeah. How is she?”

“She’s gonna be pretty dopey the rest of the day, and they’re gonna put a cage around her hand.”

“The hand gonna work?”

“She’ll probably need more surgery, you know, to release the scar tissue as it builds up, but yes—she should be okay. She won’t be playing the piano for a while.”

“How about her leg? How about the bullet wound?”

“The bullet wound isn’t a problem. The guys up there cleaned it up, and should be okay—just took some skin off her rib cage and the inside of her arm. Her ankle is sprained, but it’s not too bad. Since it’s on the other side from the cast, she should be able to use a crutch for a couple of days, if she needs it.”

“Nothing broken.”

“Nothing broken.”