Naked Prey (22 page)

“How’s Sam?”

“He is just such a cutey. He’s so cheerful. And it’s pretty apparent that he’s really bright . . . no, I’m serious, he’s really bright. I don’t think . . . ”

She got Lucas laughing, all the more because she was sincere. “Talk to you later.”

H
E TOLD
D
EL
about Letty’s progress as he dialed a third number. A woman answered: “St. Anne’s, Department of Psychology.”

“My name is Lucas Davenport. I’m a police officer and I need to talk with Sister Mary Joseph.”

“Just a minute, please.”

Elle Kruger came on a second later. “How’s the baby?” she asked.

“Probably the most intelligent kid in the Twin Cities, if not the entire Midwest,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a question for you. Sort of a semiofficial question.”

“Go ahead,” she said cheerfully. She’d given Lucas advice on other cases.

“You know a woman named Ruth Lewis, right? Used to be a nun? Sat in on a couple of games with us?”

He sensed a hesitation, then: “I know Ruth.”

“What’s going on with her?”

“What’s going on with you?”

Lucas was dumbfounded. Elle was his oldest, closest friend, and he was feeling resistance. That hadn’t happened before.

“I’m trying to figure out the Sorrell kidnapping. A little girl was shot last night, almost had her hand cut off, and her mother was murdered, and then she had her house burned down around her. Lewis lives just a few blocks down the highway, and she knows something she’s not telling me. I can feel it. This guy, the guy who’s doing the killing—he’s not gonna stop if he thinks he’s in danger.”

Another moment of hesitation, then: “Lucas, are you on your cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Let me call you back.”

“Elle? What the hell’s going on?”

“I’ll probably tell you, but I want to talk to Ruth first. I want to make sure there’s no possibility that she’s involved with your case. She won’t be involved directly, but I want to make sure that there are no . . . ramifications from her job, that might create some, mmm, involvement.”

Lucas was getting angry. “Elle, you’re bullshitting me.”

“No, I’m not. You’ve just got me stuck. If I tell you why, you’ll understand, but I’ve got to talk to Ruth first.”

“C’mon.”

“I’ll call you back, Lucas, I promise. I will tell you something about Ruth, though. She wasn’t a very good nun because she was . . . too much. She demanded perfection,
and she was the one who’d define what that was. The people she most admired were all martyrs. So . . . ”

“She’s nuts.”

“No. She’s not crazy, but she will do what she will do. And you won’t stop her. Nobody will stop her. If she winds up martyred because of it, that wouldn’t faze her. Wouldn’t slow her down. In some ways, she’s a throwback.”

“To what, the fifties?”

“I was thinking of the crusades,” Elle said. “Anyway, I’ll call you back.”

T
HEY WERE COMING
up to the Bird when Lucas got off the phone, now as puzzled as he was angry. Del asked, “What was that all about?”

“I’m getting stonewalled by Elle. She knows Lewis and she knows what’s going on, but she won’t tell me.”

“I don’t know, man,” Del said. “That’s weird.”

“I even told her about Letty,” Lucas said.

“Now we know one thing—something’s going on and it probably ain’t legal. What are the chances of two big illegal things going on in a town the size of Broderick, that aren’t connected somehow?”

“Slim and none,” Lucas said. “She’s gonna call me back.”

S
HE CALLED BACK
as Lucas was in the middle of a low-voiced rant about the scrambled eggs. “How in the fuck can you screw up eggs? You just scramble them in a bowl with a little milk, and then pour them in a pan. These things are like burned yellow rubber. They even
smell
like burned yellow rubber. Where’d they get the fucking eggs, from a Firestone factory? Don’t even get me started on the goddamned danish. This feels like a piece of skin. Is that a prune? That looks like . . . ”

“Don’t say it. I’m gonna eat it,” Del said.

The phone rang and Lucas dug it out of his shirt pocket. “Davenport.”

“Lucas, it’s Elle. Ruth is up at that church, or whatever it is. She wants to talk to you now.”

“Elle, what the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know the details, I only am . . . aware . . . of the outline of what she’s doing. But I promised her that you were going in as a citizen, and not exactly as a cop—that your conversation would be off the record. I don’t know if you’ll be able to go along with it, but that’s what I told her.”

“Oh, boy. They’re smuggling grass, right? They’re using the money to regild the dome on the cathedral.”

Another odd hesitation, and then Elle said, “Talk to her. I don’t know what she’ll say.”

T
HEY GAVE UP
on the breakfast and headed for Broderick, Del still driving. On the way out of town, they got hung up in a four-car traffic jam behind a lift truck taking down Christmas lights. For the first time since they’d come to town, there were cracks in the clouds, and hints of sunshine. The car thermometer said it was six below zero, and the air was almost still. Wherever a house was burning wood, the smoke from the chimney went straight up for fifty feet before fading away.

On the way, Lucas dialed the Kansas City number that Mark Johnson had given him early that morning. The answer was fumbled, and Lucas recognized it as a cell phone, being answered by somebody who was standing on a street corner. “Block.”

“Yeah, my name is Lucas Davenport, I’m with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension up in Minnesota—”

“Mark Johnson said you might call. He said you were the Tom Block of Minnesota. But better looking.”

“That’s true,” Lucas said.

Block laughed and asked, “So he told me what’s going on, with the lynching and the kidnapping.”

“Not a lynching.”

“If it was down here, it wouldn’t be a lynching, either. In Minnesota, it’s a lynching. Anyway, you think the Cashes are chopping cars up there?”

“No, I don’t,” Lucas said. “The place we’re looking at—it’s called Calb’s—doesn’t look like a chop shop. It looks like what they say it is, car body and truck rehab.”

“See any Toyota trucks up there? I mean, connected to this place?”

Lucas thought—and he’d seen one. “One,” he said. “Land Cruiser.”

“Now we’re talking. The thing is, we know the Cashes are moving hot cars. We’ve even caught their boys in a couple, but those were going to chop shops down here. There’s a rumor that they steal new Toyota trucks. Only new Toyotas. And then the Toyotas disappear, and they’re never found again. Ever. They’re gone. Never get in wrecks, never sold to wrecking services. I’ve got some numbers of insurance companies that are interested, if you want to talk to them, but I’d say we’re talking anywhere from seventy-five to a hundred trucks a year, from all over the Midwest and the plains, far east as Cleveland and far west as Denver.”

“That’s a lot of trucks.”

“We figure about five million worth. We had one guy across the river in Kansas City, Kansas, who bought a new Land Cruiser, sixty thousand dollars, got it stolen, got his insurance check, bought another one, and they stole
that,
the second night he had it.”

“Hmm.”

“Listen, I gotta get a bus. If you want to talk, come
down, or call me this afternoon, I’ll have some open time. I can tell you all about the Cashes. I grew up with them.”

“A
NYTHING GOOD
?” D
EL
asked.

“That was a Toyota Land Cruiser those women were hauling coffee in, right? Last night?”

“Yeah, I think.”

“They’re driving for Calb for $100 a week and they drive a sixty-thousand-dollar Land Cruiser. That’ll cause you to think.”

“Oh, boy. Tell me about it.”

Lucas told him. And as they came up to Broderick, he said, “Go on through. Let’s see if there’s anything going at Letty’s.”

As they went past Deon Cash’s place, they noticed a half-dozen cars in the driveway and yard. “FBI has landed,” Del said.

“Talk to them later.”

There wasn’t much at Letty’s house: one deputy sheriff’s car and one state fire marshal’s car sat next to the hole that used to be the house. The deputy was in his car, writing on a clipboard, and waved at Lucas. Another man was digging carefully through the basement.

When Lucas identified himself, the man climbed out on a stepladder. He was wearing rubberized coveralls, and his face was smudged with charcoal. “George Puckett,” he said.

“Figure anything out?”

“Not a thing,” he admitted. “I don’t see any signs of accelerant. The sheriff’s deputies say the fire was deliberate, but I couldn’t prove it.”

“That’s not nothing,” Lucas said. “That means that the guy probably didn’t come here to burn it down. Probably did it on the spur of the moment.”

“Might not be nothing, but it isn’t much,” Puckett said. “Wish I could help more.”

Lucas and Del walked around the scene a few minutes longer, found a patch of blood where Letty had huddled in the snow. No blood between that spot and the window, as far as they could tell, although the remaining snow was covered with soot and debris from the fire.

“Church?” Del asked.

“I guess. What else is there?”

T
HE MOTHERLY WOMAN
met them at the door, looked hard at both of them, and without a word took them back to the kitchen, where Lewis was again working at the table. When they came in, she stood up, looked at Del, and said, “I’d like to talk privately with Lucas.”

Del shrugged, looked at Lucas, and said, “I’ll be out in the TV room.”

When he was gone, Lewis said, “Sit down.” Lucas pulled out the kitchen chair opposite her. She asked, “Want a cup of coffee?”

“No, I’m fine. So. What’s the story?”

“I wasn’t surprised to hear from Sister Mary Joseph. I’d been more or less expecting it.” She paused, but Lucas kept his mouth shut. “Anyway,” she continued, “we all talked about it, and several of our sisters have left in the past two days—people not yet too involved, so if you decide to bust us, they can pick it up later.”

He kept his mouth shut.

She said, “So we talked about it, and not one of us could figure out how we could be involved in anything that had to do with the girls. We couldn’t see any possible connection.”

“Good,” Lucas said. “The parents of the other girl are coming up here today. You could meet them, if you like.”

Her hand went to her throat. “That’s cruel.”

“Keep going with the story,” Lucas said. “What’re you doing? I’ll figure out for myself if there’s a connection.”

“We’re smuggling drugs,” she said abruptly. “We bring them down from Canada. We put on nun’s habits so that the border people don’t check too closely, and bring them across.”

“Marijuana?”

“Some. But that’s more complicated. Usually, it’s tamoxifen and ondansetron. They’re cancer drugs and we get people in Canada to buy them for us at Canadian government prices. We bring them across the border and distribute them to people who can’t afford them. Because of the way the drugs are sold in Canada, they only cost about ten or fifteen percent of what they cost in the U.S. Tamoxifen in the states costs a hundred a month, or more, and you might take it for years. The poor tend to skip days or skip whole months and hope they can get away with it. Ondansetron is a really expensive antinausea drug. It costs two hundred dollars to cover the nausea from one chemo treatment—so a lot of people go with a cheap drug that doesn’t work as well, and just put up with the nausea. Ever been nauseous for a week straight?”

“No.”

“Neither have I, but it looks pretty unpleasant. We can buy the stuff in Canada for thirty bucks.”

“Cancer drugs,” Lucas said.

“And some marijuana. The marijuana is the cheapest way to fight nausea—sometimes, it’s the only way—and the best marijuana for our purposes comes from British Columbia. We don’t bring it across too often because of the dogs. The dogs don’t care whether we’re wearing habits or not. And if we have to, we can get it in California.”

“Huh,” Lucas said. Then: “Just, uh, for the sake of my own, uh, technical knowledge, how
do
you get it past the dogs?”

“We have a number of religious young men and women from Winnipeg who have grown out their hair. We provide them with what you might call “doper clothing,” and they drive vans across the border ahead of us. If the dogs are working, they’ll do the van every time, and as soon as the people see the dogs, they let us know with a walkie talkie. If there are no dogs, we’ll come across.”

“Okay. Cancer drugs.”

“Yes.”

“That’s all a little hard to believe.”

“Sister Mary Joseph said that if you don’t believe, you should ask your wife. I don’t know exactly what that means . . . is she a cancer survivor?”

“No. She’s a doctor.”

“Then she’ll know. I promise you this, Lucas, and Sister Mary Joseph would tell you the same thing—this is only for people who might die if they don’t get the drugs. People can get the standard chemotherapy, one way or another, even if they don’t have money, but the ancillary drugs and the follow-up drugs . . . lots of times, it comes down to a choice between eating and taking the drugs. I’m absolutely serious about that—that’s what it comes to. Our drug shipments involve about four thousand patients at the receiving end.”

“Four
thousand—”

“And we’re growing.”

“And you weren’t involved with Deon Cash or Jane Warr or Joe Kelly.”

“No. Except that we drive for Gene Calb, and they did.”

“They never tried to cut in on your drug deal.”

“There is no money in the drugs.
We don’t get any money. We don’t buy or sell anything—the whole point is that our clients can’t afford to buy it. You have to understand, except for marijuana, all these drugs are
legal
down
here. We’re not so much smuggling the drugs, as smuggling the prices paid for them.”

They sat looking at each other for a minute, then Lucas said, “That’s crazy.”

“Want to know something even crazier? There probably isn’t any way to make it work better. Ask your wife.”