Naked Prey (27 page)

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.

L
UCAS AND
D
EL
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.

M
ARTHA
W
EST’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.”

A
S 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.”

D
EL KNOCKED ON
Lucas’s motel door an hour later. Lucas had been watching TV news, and he got up in his bare feet to answer the door. Del had his duffel bag slung over one shoulder, and a package wrapped in brown paper under the opposite arm. He handed the package to Lucas.

“See ya,” he said.

“Where’re you going?” Lucas was mystified.

“Back to the Cities. Got a plane out of Fargo in two hours. Figure to get home by seven-thirty. Cheryl’s gonna pick me up at the airport, and I’m gonna take her out to LeMieux’s for a little French food, maybe a little wine, tell her on the way home how cute she looks with her hair that way, whichever way it is today.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Gettin’ laid,” Del said. He ticked an index finger at Lucas. “I’ve got a round-trip ticket, I’ll be back tomorrow by noon. Now. In that package you will find five different-colored fine-line Magic Markers and a large spiral art pad.
So you get a couple beers down here, lock yourself in, and
think.
Draw your pictures on the pad, all those arrows and squares and shit. I’ll come back tomorrow and you can tell me who did it.”

“Jesus, Del . . . ”

“We don’t need to be chasing people,” Del said. “We need to figure out what the fuck happened. I think there’s enough information—you just haven’t thought about it enough. So. See you tomorrow.”

He reached forward, took the doorknob, and pulled the door shut. Lucas looked at the package, hefted it, looked at the closed door, and thought,
This is ridiculous.
He opened the door just in time to see Del slip inside the Mustang, which he’d had waiting in the drive. Del looked over at him, lifted a hand, and drove away.

“Hey!”

Del kept going.

L
UCAS WENT BACK
inside with the package, tossed it on the second bed, went back to the television. The woman newscaster had the most amazing lips. They couldn’t be real, he thought—they must keep a bee in the studio, trained to sting them. Must hurt . . .

He fell asleep for a while, got up with a bad taste in his mouth. Del didn’t understand about the arrows and boxes, he thought as he brushed his teeth. His seances with the drawing table and the arrows and boxes only worked when his head was right, when something down in the lizard part of his brain said that a solution was available . . .

He wasn’t getting that message yet. He stopped brushing for a moment and looked at himself in the mirror. On the other hand, there
was
something. Not something he missed, just something about the killings that he hadn’t digested yet.

Maybe he could figure something out, draw a box and a couple of arrows. Couldn’t hurt.

First, get a few beers . . .

H
E WASHED HIS
face, bundled up, and walked down to the Duck Inn. The bartender had been at the funeral that afternoon, and they nodded at each other as Lucas came in. “Bad day at Black Rock,” the barkeep said. “What can I do you for?”

“Six-pack of Leinies, if you got it . . . Yeah. That poor kid is the one I think about,” Lucas said. “Bad goddamn thing to happen to a kid.”

“She just went by—with one of them nuns,” the barkeep said. He lifted the six-pack of Leinenkugel’s onto the bar.

“Just now? She went by?” Lucas asked, pushing a ten across the bar.

“One minute ago. Heading over to Larson’s, the way they were going. She’s limping pretty good. She’s gonna need some clothes, I guess.”

Lucas took the change from the ten, but pushed the six-pack back at the bartender. “Hold on to this, will you? I want to see if I can catch them.”

“Larson’s—right down the block.”

H
E FOUND THEM
in the women’s foundations area, buying cotton underpants. Ruth Lewis saw him coming, and smiled sadly. “Have you heard anything?”

Lucas shook his head. “Not yet.” He looked at Letty, who’d been looking at an underwear rack. “How are you?”

“We’re both pretty sad, me and Ruth, trying to figure out what’s going to happen,” Letty said. Her eyes were red, with circles below. Her lip trembled. “I never even got to see Mom.”

“What’re you doing here?” Lucas asked Ruth.

Ruth tipped her head at Letty. “She’s got nothing left. Nothing. No shoes, no underwear. We went through our stores at the church, didn’t find much.”

“I love to shop,” Lucas said.

“Ohhh . . . ” Ruth said. A skeptical smile, not the first time he’d gotten that reaction from a woman. But it was true.

“I’m serious. I really like to shop. Especially for clothes. You wanta party?”

Letty looked at Ruth, and Ruth said, “We don’t really
need
that much.”

“I’ll let you in on a small secret, which I wouldn’t want you to spread around,” Lucas said. “Okay?” They both nodded, and Lucas said, lowering his voice, “I’m the richest cop in Minnesota.”

“I knew that,” Ruth said. “Sister Mary Joseph said you have a ridiculous amount of money.”

“So I can spend a few bucks on a good time,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”

They bought all kinds of stuff, with Letty getting seriously involved: Jockey underpants; a couple of brassieres that Lucas wasn’t entirely sure were necessary, but which he wouldn’t have remotely thought of questioning; three pairs of jeans and two pairs of slacks; and four sweatshirts, which Lucas thought was too many, but Letty said “they’re all I wear.” They bought four more shirts at Lucas’s insistence, a vest, a watch, some costume jewelry and a pair of pearl earrings, a parka, mittens, two hats, and a duffel bag that would carry everything that she didn’t wear.

And though Ruth was skeptical, they spent half an hour and thirty-five dollars at the cosmetics counter.

Out on the street, Letty said, happily, “That was the best time I ever had.”

Further down the street, across from an Ace Hardware, they put the packages in Ruth’s Corolla, and Letty told Lucas, “I will pay you back every penny.”

“I won’t take the money,” Lucas said. “Not a cent. You gotta learn to take gifts.”

“It’s charity.”

“It’s not charity,” Lucas said. “It’d be charity if I didn’t know you and didn’t like you. These are gifts, because I like you.”

“Would you loan me some money? Right now? If I pay back every cent?”

He hesitated, then said, “Probably. What do you want it for?”

She nodded at the Ace Hardware. “I want to go in there and get a new gun. They took that piece of crap .22, and the deputy said I wouldn’t get it back. It’s evidence, if they ever catch the guy I shot.”

“Oh, Letty . . . ” Ruth said.

“Lucas?” Letty asked.

Lucas looked at Ruth, and then said, “I’d do it, unless Ruth absolutely vetoes it. The gun would be in her house, at least for a while.”

Letty turned to Ruth, who said, “I really don’t think you need a gun, Letty.”

“But you don’t really know me very well, do you?” Letty said. Lucas estimated her working age at a quick forty-three. “I do sort of need the gun.”

Ruth said to Lucas, “If you want to loan her the money, I won’t say no.”

O
NCE INSIDE THE
hardware store, Ruth went to look at other stuff—went to be away from them—while Lucas and Letty got into the details of the gun purchase. Letty wanted
a Ruger 10/22 semi-auto; Lucas suggested a bolt-action Ruger 77/22. Letty said it cost too much, and she’d be more comfortable with the lighter semi-auto. Then the store manager, a thin man with spiky gray hair, and a hunter himself who knew Letty, jumped in and said they had an even lighter semi-auto, a Browning, that split the price difference.

Lucas finally told Letty that he wouldn’t buy a semi-auto, because he worried that an auto-loader was not safe enough. “I want you to know when you’ve got a round in the chamber, because you put it there yourself.”

Then Letty got pouty: “I’ve been doing this for years . . . ”

“Yeah, with a single-shot . . . ”

“ . . . and I know when there’s a round in the chamber.”

Lucas stood firm, and the manager said, “You know, I’ve got a Remington pump in the back. It’s used, but it’s in perfect shape. I could let you have it for three hundred bucks.”

Lucas and Letty looked at each other, and Letty said, “Bring it out.”

They took the pump, but Letty got it for two seventy-five, with five boxes of .22 long-rifle shells thrown in as a deal-sweetener. She said to Lucas, “I’ve had enough of that .22 short bullshit. Next time this jerk comes around, he
better be
wearing a bulletproof vest.”

L
UCAS ENJOYED POETRY.
Couldn’t help himself. He was especially fond of haiku, the Japanese form, and in reading haiku from time to time, he’d encountered talk of Zen Buddhism, and the concept of the
koan.
A
koan
was a kind of a riddle, or paradox, without a solution. They were used by the Zen master to demonstrate the ultimate futility of logic, and to provoke—with some pupils, anyway—instant enlightenment.

Lucas heard Letty say
bulletproof vest
and took a step
toward enlightenment, though later he thought the enlightenment might have been provoked by the way she’d orally italicized the
better be.

D
EL ARRIVED BACK
the next day at one o’clock, knocked on the door. Lucas was lying on the bed with the door unlocked and called, “Come in.”

Del pushed the door open, stuck his head in, and said, “Am I too early? Or have you figured it out?”

“I don’t have a name yet,” Lucas said. He held up the art pad, and the top page was covered with red and green squares and arrows. “I’ve got some thoughts.”

Del tossed his duffel in the corner, sat on the second bed. “Give.”

Lucas said, “One: We figure out in the evening that the killer was probably Sorrell. Then we drive home, and about twelve hours after we leave Armstrong, we arrive at the Sorrell house. He’s dead, and he’s been dead for at least a little while. That means that the killer had to hear that we’d figured out Sorrell, had to make a plan, and had to drive seven hours, at least—Rochester is more than an hour south of the Cities—and then he has to find Sorrell’s house, where the phone number is unlisted, do the killing, and get away. That’s pretty amazing, when you think about it.

“Two: Thirty hours after he hanged two people in Armstrong, Sorrell lets his own killer into his house, with his wife standing right there with him. He’s unarmed and is shot down in cold blood. He takes no precautions, he never thinks that the guy at the door might be connected to the murders.

“Three: Why did the guy attack Letty? We don’t know. But we do know that Letty’s mother let him in the house after midnight, when both she and Letty knew there was a killer running around loose.

“Four: Letty claims she shot the guy, but none of the hospitals inside two hundred miles report a guy shot in the chest with a .22, that might possibly be our guy. Why is that?

“Five: I talk to Burke, Annie’s dad, and he shows us stuff that looks like it came from the FBI. It looks real. How’d they know how to do that?

“Six: I talk to Letty last night after you head back to the Cities . . . Hey, did you get laid?”

“Yeah.” Del nodded. “It was wonderful.”

“I have fantasies about Cheryl. Maybe you could tell me . . . Never mind.”

“C’mon, wiseass.”

“All right. Anyway, I talk to Letty, and one thing leads to another, and we buy her a replacement rifle down at Ace Hardware. And she says to me that if this asshole comes back, quote, ‘He
better be
wearing a bulletproof vest,’ unquote.”

Lucas looked at Del and raised his eyebrows. Del asked, “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Del shook his head. “Maybe I can get a refund on some of them pens. Looks like you only used red and green.”

“Think about it for a minute,” Lucas said. “What are the chances that . . . the guy is a cop?”

D
EL THOUGHT ABOUT
it for a minute. “If the guy is a cop, he would have heard about Sorrell really early. If he was wearing a uniform, people would let him in their house any time of day. He’d see FBI stuff, so he’d know the format. And if he was wearing a bulletproof vest . . . it would explain all of that shit.”

“We know that there are at least two cops who were friendly with Gene Calb—Ray Zahn and this other guy, the
boyfriend of Katina Lewis. Zahn sometimes hung out there, and the boyfriend painted his cars up there.”

“How many points did you have? Six?”

“Six,” Lucas agreed.

Del nodded. “Then here’s number seven. If you were running a major car-theft ring, there’d be nothing more valuable than having a cop inside the only major police agency for miles around. In fact, you’d just about have to have one.”

T
HEN
L
UCAS SAID,
“I got another list.”

“Yeah?”

Lucas said, “One: You’re a friendly looking guy like Gene Calb, maybe with a spy inside the department, or maybe not—it’s a small town, and word gets around. He bluffs his way into Sorrell’s house, kills him, and gets back here.

“Two: He goes after Letty. We don’t know the specific reason, but we do know that Letty hung around his shop and maybe he’s afraid that she saw or heard something. And Calb is a friendly guy, everybody likes him, and if he knocks on the door, maybe Martha West lets him in—Letty told me one time that Martha’d had a crush on Calb.

“Three: Calb kills Katina Lewis. Why? We don’t know, but suppose that Letty really did shoot him, and hit him in the chest like she said. He was hurt, but not badly. Maybe his wife patched him up or something. But suppose he bled through his shirt, or did something that tipped Katina that his chest was hurting. Heck, maybe she patted him on the chest. Anyway, the instant that she suspected, he’d have to get rid of her, because all she’d have to do is tell any cop, and we’d go straight to Calb and take his shirt off. We find a bullet hole or even a bruise, he’d be toast. So he’d have to kill her. Maybe that was done so spontaneously that he panicked, and ran.”

D
EL LAY BACK
on the bed, and after a minute said, “I like the first one better. The cop.”

“Why?”

“Because it all goes back to kidnapping the girls, and everybody says that Calb wouldn’t do that. He might have been a criminal, but he wasn’t a nut. Because if this car ring worked like we think it did, he was up to his ass in money—why’d he need to kidnap somebody? And most of all, he really seemed to think that Deon Cash and Jane Warr were stupid assholes. Would he get involved in a kidnapping with partners he thought were stupid assholes? I don’t think so.”