Naked Prey (28 page)

L
UCAS THOUGHT ABOUT
that for a while, then said, “Let’s go talk to Letty and Ruth Lewis. They’re up at the church. I think we ought to stay away from the sheriff’s office until we’ve got something solid.”

“I don’t think Ray Zahn,” Del said. “He’s one of our guys.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t think so either, but . . . we gotta keep him on the list. And we gotta think about the possibility that it’s nobody we know yet. Maybe a cop, but nobody we know yet.”

“Think we’ll have him by midnight?” Del said, joking.

“I don’t know. If I were gonna bet, I’d say a week. Or less.”

T
HE OLDER WOMAN
came to the door of the church and said, “If you’re looking for Letty and Ruth, they went up to the dump to shoot that gun you bought.” Her tight lips suggested that she didn’t approve.

“Another fan,” Del said, as they got back in the car. “Dump?”

R
UTH
L
EWIS’S
T
OYOTA
Corolla was parked at the dump gate, and they could hear the little .22 banging away. “You don’t think they’d shoot back this way, do you?” Del asked.

“Jesus, I hope not.” He hadn’t thought of that. “Where are they?”

“Sounds like they’re over to the left.”

T
HEY WALKED CAREFULLY
toward the sound of the shooting. A .22 long-rifle slug makes a distinctive
whip
sound as it goes by, and they didn’t hear anything like that. Eventually, they crossed the high point of the dump and spotted Letty and Ruth at the far left edge of the raw dirt, shooting into a mound of clay. Ruth had the gun.

“May have been a conversion here,” Lucas said. “Lewis wasn’t that happy about buying the gun.”

“Oughta get her an NRA membership,” Del said.
“My cold dead hands . . . ”

“From what I’ve seen of her, she’d probably take the damn thing over,” Lucas said.

L
ETTY AND
R
UTH
saw them coming and stopped firing. Letty’s crutch was lying on the ground, so her ankle must have been feeling better. When they got close, Lucas saw that they were shooting at Campbell’s soup cans, which made good reactive targets. He called, “How you doing?”

As they came up, Letty said, “The gun’s not as bad as I thought.”

“She hit the can every time, right from the start, even with the cast. Now she’s trying to hit the gold medal thing every time,” Ruth said. “I haven’t hit the can once.”

“I can’t even see the gold medal thing from here,” Del said. The cans were twenty-five yards away.

“It’s sure a lot quicker than that old piece of shit,” Letty said. “Even one-handed.”

“Letty . . . ” Ruth said.

“I know; watch my mouth.” She took the gun from Ruth with her good hand, braced it over the cast on the other, and sighted down the barrel at one of the cans. She pulled the trigger and the can hopped across the ground. She turned the gun upside down with her good hand, got the pump under the upper part of her bad arm, trapped it,
pumped, aimed and fired again, hit the can. She looked nonchalantly at Lucas. “So what’s going on?”

“We stopped at the church, they said you were out here.” He looked around. “Whatever happened to those traps you put out before the fire? Are they still out here?”

Letty shook her head. “Naw. I had Weather call Bud, from down at the hospital. He came and picked them up the next morning. We already checked, and they’re all gone. I gotta get them from him.”

Lucas nodded. “Okay. Listen. We need to talk to both of you about . . . mmm . . . whoever might have done all this. We were wondering specifically—do you know anything about any police officers who might have been connected with Gene Calb or with Deon Cash and Jane Warr?”

Letty looked at Ruth, and then Ruth asked, “Do you think this . . . person . . . might be a police officer?”

“There are some things,” Lucas said. To Letty: “Who would your mom let in the door after midnight? We know it wasn’t her boyfriend, because he was still down at the Duck Inn. Who else?”

Letty thought. “A guy? There might be a couple of guys, but I don’t know. It never happened.”

“How about a cop that she knew?”

“You’d always let a cop in,” Letty said. “Especially since all the trouble.”

“Ray Zahn? Or how about that boyfriend of Katina’s?” Lucas looked at Ruth.

“Loren Singleton,” she said, slowly. She pinched her bottom lip, thinking. Then, to Lucas: “I . . . oh, God.”

“Look, we’re interested in one thing: finding the killer,” Del said to her. “We don’t care about all this other happy horseshit, the cars and the drugs and all that. If you know something about a cop . . . ”

“Loren kept an eye out for us at the sheriff’s office,” Ruth said.

Letty said,
“Really?”

“Was that because of his relationship with your sister?” Lucas asked.

“No. They met at Calb’s. Loren was being paid by Gene before Katina got here. I don’t think he’d . . . ” She stopped, they waited, and then she said, “I was going to say that I don’t think that Loren would hurt Katina, but when I think about it now, I’m not sure. But I can tell you one thing: I’ve talked to Loren since the fire at Letty’s, and he certainly wasn’t shot.”

Lucas said, “Huh.” Then, “I talked to him, too, and I didn’t see any holes in him. He seemed pretty freaked out by what happened to your sister.”

“He was—I talked to him that night. He was really shaky.”

“Do you see him as a kidnapper?” Del asked.

“I don’t . . . You know, I’m not sure he’s
creative
enough, if that’s the word. If he’s
ambitious
enough. I didn’t know Deon very well, but Deon was this ocean of
want.
He wanted money and he wanted dope and he wanted cars and he wanted clothes and he wanted to go to Vegas and LA and he wanted season tickets for basketball . . . I don’t think, I mean, Loren didn’t seem to want anything. He didn’t seem to care about anything, or even do anything, other than sleep with Katina.”

“He had his Caddys,” Letty chipped in. “He was always driving one old Caddy while he worked on another one. I heard he made some good money selling them.”

“A Caddy,” Lucas said. He looked at Del. “Where’d we see that Caddy? You said something about it . . . ”

“Right here,” Del said, jabbing a thumb back at the gate. “When Letty brought her traps up here.”

“Day of the fire,” Lucas said. He looked around at all the raw black dirt of the dump. “If you were gonna bury
somebody in the wintertime, with snow around, and you didn’t want a hole that looked like a grave . . . ”

Del asked Letty, “You ever see him out here? Singleton?”

“No, not that I remember.”

“But you used to come out here all the time. Couple times a week, you said.”

“Yeah.”

Lucas to Del: “Jesus, what if he was afraid that Letty saw him? Then he sees us out here with her.”

“Let’s go take his shirt off,” Del said.

Lucas shook his head. “Not yet. If he was wearing a vest, and that’s what stopped the slug, then we’d tip him off and we wouldn’t have anything. I’ll tell you what: Why don’t we get the California crew up here? They aren’t finding anything around Cash’s house. They could come up, pick a good spot, and start sweeping it. We’d know in a few hours.”

Ruth said, “Loren did it?”

Lucas shook his head. “It’s a possibility. Maybe one chance in three. We’re really at the end of a long string here, but nobody can figure out why Letty and her mom were attacked, and why he came after Letty especially. It had to be something that she either knows, or that he was afraid she knew. And he saw us here, together, that afternoon, and then he hauled ass without a word. Turned around and took off.”

Ruth looked at Letty in wonder, and Letty said, “Loren Singleton?”

L
ETTY’S HOUSE, SIX
miles south, had been on the far fringe of the cell-phone net. The dump was out of it. “Gonna have to go get the FBI guys,” Lucas said.

“I can run back with the truck, if you guys want to scrape around here,” Del suggested.

“That’d be good.” Lucas tossed him the keys. “The insurance certificate is in the door pocket. Don’t use it.”

“What am I gonna hit out here?”

Del took off, and Lucas, Letty and Ruth began walking around the dirt surface of the dump, Letty using her crutch on about every fifth step. She could feel the sprain, she said, but they’d packed her leg in ice at the hospital, and had kept the ice on it for most of the next day, and that had helped. “I’ll be running in a week,” she said.

“It probably wouldn’t hurt to stay off it, though,” Lucas said. “Much as you can, anyway.”

“Drives me crazy.”

“Yeah, well . . . I know. Always drove me crazy, too.”

They chatted about old injuries for a while, as they wandered around. The dump was large, probably covering half a square mile, but most of the surface was covered with snow. Lucas had been to dumps before, and knew generally how they worked: the garbage and trash was dumped in the working area and was covered with a layer of dirt. Then another layer of trash went down, followed by another layer of dirt. When a predetermined level was reached, the whole thing was capped with an impervious layer of clay that would tend to sheet water off to the sides. The dump would also have a clay bottom, beneath all the layers of trash, to prevent contamination of the local groundwater.

It was, in a way, like a clay-and-garbage pie, with the clay acting as the crust, and the garbage the filling.

If Singleton was the killer, and if he’d buried his victims at the dump, he would have chosen an area already disturbed by the bulldozer, they decided. Over the rest of the area, the surface was frozen solid, and any grave-shaped hole would have shown through to the bulldozer driver.

“Do people come out here? I mean, other than the dump guy and you?” Lucas asked Letty.

“Oh, sure. Especially during hunting season. People want to get rid of deer hides and heads and so on, they’ll put them in a garbage bag and bring them out and throw them in the pile. Or maybe they’ve got something too big to put out for the trash, they’ll haul it over in their truck and throw it in. They’re not supposed to, but they do.”

“So it wouldn’t be completely unusual to see somebody out here?”

“No. When I’m trapping out here, I probably see somebody half the time.” She carried the rifle across the cast on her left arm, the muzzle pointing up at the sky. Lucas had been watching her handle the gun, and decided that she was safe enough.

“This all looks pretty raw,” Ruth called. They walked over
to her. She was standing on a patch of dirt thirty feet wide and fifty long, rumpled beneath the snow, softer-feeling—a bulldozer runway that led to the feeding edge of the landfill.

Lucas kicked some of the snow off, then stooped and picked up some dirt, looked at it, tossed it aside, and brushed his hands. “We oughta get the dump guy out here,” he said. “Maybe he saw something strange.”

After exploring the area of raw dirt, they drifted back toward the shooting range, and Lucas borrowed Letty’s rifle and bounced one of the cans around. Then Letty asked about his pistol, and Lucas took out the .45 and showed her how it worked.

“Same kind of sight picture as with the rifle,” he said. He stepped away from her, aimed at one of the cans, which was now about forty feet away, and fired once, missing right by three inches. He frowned, fired again, and again missed right, by only a half-inch this time, but also a little high. A third shot sent the can skittering away.

“Let me try,” Letty said.

“It’s gonna feel heavy, with only one hand on it,” Lucas said. He gave her the pistol, showed her how the safeties worked.

She held the pistol out straight from her side, her head turned so that she was looking over her right shoulder. After a moment, she said, “Squeeze,” and fired a round. She missed the can by three feet to the right, a foot low. “Holy cow,” she said. “What’d I do?”

“Try once more,” Lucas said. He heard truck noises back at the gate.

Letty pointed the pistol, but the barrel was shaking, and after a few seconds she took it down. “I’m not strong enough one-handed,” she said.

Lucas took the gun from her, spent a couple of seconds pulling down on the can, let out a half-breath and smashed the can a second time.

“You got a string tied to the can, right?” Del called from the direction of the gate.

Lucas turned around, and saw Del with four of the California FBI crewmen walking across the dump toward them. Lucas popped the magazine from the .45, jacked the shell out of the chamber, thumbed it back in the magazine, then took a fresh magazine out of his holster and seated it in the pistol butt. The half-used magazine went into the holster.

“Good time to quit,” one of the Californians said, talking through the snorkel of his snorkel parka. “If you’d kept it up, I would have been tempted to take out my piece and kick your sorry ass. No offense, ladies.”

“I don’t want to seem insulting, or vulgar, but none of you fuckin’ FBI humpty-dumpties can shoot half as well as Del over there, and I personally can shoot several times better than Del,” Lucas said.

“Au contraire,”
Del said. “You can hold your end up on the nice, heated, lighted range. But out here, in the real world, you can’t hold a candle to me. Though you’re right about the fuckin’ FBI humpty-dumpties.”

Ruth looked at Letty and said, “Oh, God. This is why you should never get married, honey. These people got a rivulet of testosterone running through them, and anything can set it off. A cheese sandwich can set it off.”

The lead Californian was digging under his parka and produced a .40 Smith. “You are a bunch of rural people who have never seen good shooting, so you don’t have to apologize for what you just said.”

One of the other Californians jerked the back of his coat and he turned, and they conferred, snorkel to snorkel. Then the lead Californian turned back to Lucas and said, “Uh, are we doing this for free? Or is there some money in it?”

They spent twenty minutes banging away at cans, without conclusion, but they all felt better afterward. Lucas
then showed the crew the area that needed to be surveyed, and the lead man suggested that they needn’t survey all of it. “We can do stripes; we don’t even have to set up guidelines, because on that thin snow, we can see where we’ve been . . . We can do it in a couple of hours, quick and dirty. Done before dark, anyway.”

T
HE CREW HAD
a radar set mounted on a wagon, which the Californians rolled back and forth over the raw patch. The radar was pointed down into the dirt, and returned echoes from lumps of differing density. The data was fed into a memory module, which was dumped into a laptop back in one of the FBI trucks. The laptop then produced a density map of the surface covered.

Striping the dirt patch took an hour and a half. Halfway through, Ruth and Letty, bored and a little cold, decided to head back to the church and eat. “Stop by when you’re going back to Armstrong,” Letty said. “I want to know how it comes out.”

When the striping was done, the lead Californian dumped the data to the laptop, let it churn for a few minutes, then tapped a few keys and a map began scrolling up. Two-thirds of the way from the back edge of the dirt strip, toward the working edge of the landfill, he said, “Whoops.”

“Got something?”

“Got a hole. We got it on the third and fourth runs. It looks like it’s, uh, four feet long and three feet wide.”

“Anything else?”

“Mostly what look like tread tracks from the bulldozer, both current ones and some buried ones . . . but the hole cuts through all of that. It looks like there’re a few inches of packed stuff, then it goes soft.” He tapped the computer screen. “You can see the edges of it.”

“Better get some shovels out here,” Lucas said. “Why
don’t you guys pin down the edges of the hole, and Del and I’ll get the shovels.”

“Get some sandwiches,” one of the Californians said. “There’s a place in town called Logan’s . . . ”

“Fancy Meats,” Lucas said. “Give me your orders. Might as well do it right. I’ll get some lights, too.”

T
HEY WENT THROUGH
Broderick without slowing down and as soon as they were within cell-phone range, Lucas called Ray Zahn. “I need to get the guy who runs the dump bulldozer. Know where we can find him?”

“Yeah, he’s about three blocks from me, if he’s home,” Zahn said. “What do you want him for?”

“We need him to show us around the dump,” Lucas said. “It’s serious.”

“I’ll drag his ass up there,” Zahn said. “When do you want him?”

A
T THE
A
CE
Hardware, Lucas bought four long-handled shovels and four spotlights with cigarette-lighter adapters. “Haven’t sold that many spotlights since deer season,” the counterman said. “Pick out a deer at two hundred yards.”

Lucas thought about that for a moment, then went to the back of the store and found four two-by-four-foot pressed-board handy panels with one white side, and a roll of duct tape. “Reflectors,” he said to Del. Outside, it was getting dark.

B
ACK AT THE
dump, the Californians had outlined the hole, and using a long-bladed screwdriver, had determined that there were about six to eight inches of compressed dirt over a looser fill.

Lucas used a tire-iron to pop the lock off the dump gate, and they drove Lucas’s truck and the two FBI vehicles into a circle around the dig site. Lucas brought the spotlights out, the Californians set up the white panels, and when the lights were plugged in, Lucas focused them on the panels, and the dig-site was bathed in a smooth reflected light.

“Cool,” one of the Californians said.

T
HEY STARTED DIGGING,
three at a time—four shovelers was one too many—and cleared out the ’ dozer-compacted cap in ten minutes.

“Looks like a grave,” Del said from the sidelines.

Another set of headlights swept over the dump, and a minute later, Ray Zahn had pulled in beside Lucas’s Acura. Zahn and another man got out, and Zahn said to Lucas, “This is Phil Bussard. He runs the ’dozer.”

“You remember seeing anything that looked like a hole, or a dug spot, right here, this morning?”

“Nothing like that,” Bussard said. “Did see a bunch of truck tracks. Somebody unloaded something back here. Didn’t think nothing of it.”

“How did they get through the gate?” Lucas asked. “Is it always locked when you’re not here?”

“Yeah, but about half the people in town know the combination,” Bussard said. “All kinds of people are authorized to get in here, and the number gets around. It’s ten-twenty-thirty.”

“So why lock it at all?”

“For the lawyers. If somebody works the lock and gets in here, and gets hurt, I guess it’s breaking and entering, or something. They committed a crime, and if they get hurt doing it, it ain’t the county’s fault.”

“Where were you working a month ago? Around Christmas?”

“Right over on the other side there,” Bussard said, pointing. “If you look at the edge, you can see some Christmas wrap. That’s where it’d be.”

“See any holes over there?”

“Not that I remember. See truck tracks all the time.”

Zahn came back from the widening hole. “Sure does look like a grave,” he said.

T
HE PEOPLE IN
the hole were slowing down, so the last Californian, Bussard, and Lucas took the shovels, and continued down. At three feet, the Californian said, “Somebody hand me that screwdriver.”

He took the screwdriver, squatted, and pushed it into the dirt at the bottom of the hole, probed for a minute, then stood up. “I’d say we’re eight inches off the garbage level.”

“That’d be about right,” Bussard said, bobbing his head.

Eight inches down, Lucas cut through a white garbage sack, and could smell the garbage inside. “Smells like old pizza,” he said. “Like from a Dumpster out behind a pizza joint on a hot summer night.”

“Lucky you didn’t get one of them diaper bags,” Bussard said. “They smell like old shit on a hot summer night.”

The Californian said, “I got something here.” He was probing at a dark green garbage bag. They cleared away a little more dirt, then Bussard took a Leatherman tool off his belt, flicked open a blade, and slashed through the green bag.

A woman’s bare leg, flexed; her toenails were painted red.

“There you go,” Zahn said. “There you go.”

D
EL SAID,
“L
OREN
Singleton. Here we come.”

“I’m coming with you,” Zahn said. “I want to see what that sonofabitch has to say for himself.”