Naked Prey (8 page)

“Sounds like you knew her pretty well,” Del said.

“Just to play blackjack,” the trapper dude said. “She was the main dealer up at Moose Bay.” He hesitated, then said, dropping his voice, “You know what you ought to do when you get up to the casino, is talk to a guy named Terry Anderson. He knew Warr
real
well.” He leaned on
real
just enough.

Lucas nodded and said, “I’ll do that. Thanks. Terry Anderson.”

“Any relation to the sheriff?” Del asked.

The trapper was puzzled, looked at Letty and then back to Del. “Terry? Why would he be?”

“Both Andersons?” Del suggested.

The trapper cackled: “Shit, buddy, half the people up here are Andersons.”

They talked for another fifteen seconds, then Bud retreated to the counter and got a menu.

“Heck of a trapper, and he’s supposed to be an unbelievable hunter, too. He knows more about animals than they know themselves,” Letty said. “He’s been number one around here for years.”

“Taught you everything you know?”

She shook her head: “He doesn’t teach anything to anybody. He’s got his secrets and he keeps them.”

Lucas dropped his voice to match hers: “Think he might have had anything going with Jane?”

“No.” Now she was almost whispering. “Don’t look at him, he’ll know we’re talking about him. But, uh, everybody says Bud’s a little . . . gay.”

W
HEN THEY’D FINISHED
the meal, Lucas sent Del to Broderick, to look for dope hideouts. “We’re gonna pick up Letty’s mother,” Lucas said. “Then, I’ll see you up there.”

As he and Letty were about to get in the car, he remembered Mitford. “Damnit . . . why don’t you go look in a store window for a minute?” he suggested to Letty, and pulled out his phone.

Mitford picked up on the first ring, and Lucas gave him the bad news: “They’ve got pictures. I don’t know how good, because they were a couple hundred yards away, but they’ve got something.”

“Aw, man. That’s terrible. Anything on the dope?”

“Not yet. My partner’s on the way up to the house. If there’s anything, he’ll find it. What about Cash, and the jail business?”

“We’re getting that now, through Rose Marie,” Mitford said. “We got a summary: he’s had a whole list of minor stuff, some drug-related, disorderly conduct, like that. Then this last one, he was originally charged with ag assault. He beat on some other guy with a steel coat tree in a hotel. They pled it down and he took a year in the county lockup on some lower-level assault. Served nine months.”

“Doesn’t sound like something you get hanged for.”

“I got Missouri trying to figure that out. They said they’d get back to us this afternoon, with whatever they can find,” Mitford said. “Oh, and I got two more words for you.”

“What words?”

“Washington Fowler.”

“You’re joking.” Washington Fowler was a civil rights attorney from Chicago, who’d mostly given up the law in favor of incitation to riot.

“I’m not,” Mitford said. “He’s having a press conference here, at the airport, in an hour, and he’s flying out to Fargo in a private plane in an hour and a half. The governor invited him over to the mansion for a conference, but he told us to go fuck ourselves. You should see him up there tonight.”

“Aw, jeez.”

“Yeah. Lucas—we need to hit Cash hard. The woman, too. Before the news. Before that film gets down here. Before Fowler gets up there.”

“We’re looking.”

W
HEN
L
UCAS GOT
off the phone, Letty suggested that they might find her mother at the Duck Inn, two blocks over. They ambled over, Lucas looking in the storefronts. Small towns, he’d realized a long time ago, were a little like spaceships, or ordinary ships, for that matter—they generally had to have one of everything: one McDonald’s or Burger King (couldn’t support one of each), a department store, a quick oil change, a hardware store, a feed store, a satellite-TV outlet, a bar or two. Everything needed for survival. Armstrong was like that, a lifeboat, one of everything necessary for life, all packaged in yellow-brick and red-brick two-story buildings. About one in four of the storefronts was empty, and the owners hadn’t bothered to put “For Rent” signs in the windows.

The Duck Inn was a cliché, a plastic faux-hunter’s haven smelling of beer, with a fake old-fashioned jukebox that played CDs next to the twin coin-op pool tables. A cliché, and Letty’s mother wasn’t there. “Cop came and got her. I think they went over to the courthouse,” the bartender said.

The courthouse was just down the block, and they found Martha West leaving the Law Enforcement Center. She was
a natural blond, like Letty, but her hair had been tinted an improbable rust color. She wasn’t weathered like Letty, but there were explosions of tiny red veins on her cheeks, so that she would always look rosy-cheeked. She wore a parka and khaki slacks, with pointed boots, and was carrying a beaten-up guitar case. She saw Letty and Lucas, and called to Letty, “Where you been? I been looking all over for you.”

“Cops have been taking me around,” Letty said, jerking a thumb at Lucas. “This is Agent Davenport.”

“Lucas Davenport,” Lucas said.

“Martha West.” West’s eyes were moving slowly, and then jerking back, like a drunk drifting out of his lane, then jerking the car back straight. She was loaded, but controlling it.

“I was about to drop Letty at your place, but I didn’t want to leave her alone,” Lucas said.

“We ate at the Bird,” Letty said, with a slight sophisticated deprecation in her voice.

“Really?” The mother looked at Lucas like he might have done something incorrect.

“She had an open-faced meatloaf sandwich, mashed potatoes, green beans, and apple pie,” Lucas said. “And about six Cokes.”

“Two,” Letty said. “They were free refills.”

They loaded Martha and her guitar into the back seat of Lucas’s car, and on the way north, he caught her eyes in his rearview mirror and said, “There’ll be some reporters who want to talk with you. If I were you, I’d get in the house, get your heads straight, clean up a little bit. I can get a guy from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to talk with you about your statement. About what you should or shouldn’t say or about whether you should talk at all. You could always tell them to go away.”

“TV?” asked Martha. She straightened, touched her hair.

“For sure,” Lucas said. “But they can be aaa . . . ” He changed directions. “ . . . jerks. Be a good idea if you talked with a BCA guy who knows how to deal with the media.”

“All right. I’ll talk to him,” Martha said. “But I’ve been on TV many times.”

“Okay. Then you know how to handle it.”

“I used to work with the Chamber of Commerce, and the TV would come to me for comment.” Her eyes rolled toward the westside ditch. “And I’ve always been a singer. So I’ve been around.”

“Okay.”

“But I’ll talk to your person. That wouldn’t hurt.”

As they went through Broderick, they saw a collection of media trucks at the cafe, and, just down the highway, Lucas saw Del’s Mustang at the victims’ house, next to Dickerson’s car. He slowed, did a U-turn, and said, “The guy I’m going to introduce you to is Hank Dickerson, who is the head of the whole Bureau for the northern part of the state. He’ll help you out.”

H
E LEFT THEM
in the car, and as he crossed the yard, the cop outside said, “You won’t believe what they found.”

“Yeah?”

Joe Barin, the BCA agent, was standing at the bottom of the stairs, and when he saw Lucas, pointed up. “Take a look,” he said.

Lucas went up the creaky stairs, and found Del with Dickerson and one of Dickerson’s crime scene crew in the main bedroom. The bedroom smelled of makeup and aftershave; a framed Michael Jordan poster hung on one wall, opposite a fake antique beer sign. The cops turned to Lucas when he walked in, and Dickerson said, “Del found their hidey-hole.”

The hidey-hole was in the bedroom closet, and was custom-made. What appeared to be a cross-brace for the closet pole was, in fact, a cover for a four-foot-long, six-inch-high wall cache. Inside the cache, Lucas could see what appeared to be a one-kilo bag of cocaine, separated into dozens of smaller baggies; a Colt Magnum Carry Revolver, like one he had in his gun safe at home; and cash. The cash was wrapped in paper bands and took up three running feet of the cache between the bag of cocaine and the back wall.

“Holy cats. How much?”

“We don’t want to take it out until we get pictures, but I figure something upward of three hundred thousand, if it’s all hundreds,” Del said. “All the top bundles are hundreds—and all used. Not a single new bill, as far as you can tell from looking at the sides.”

Lucas said to Dickerson, “You need to have three guys here with the money all the time, until it’s counted. Make sure one or two of them are sheriff’s deputies. You want both agencies involved. People are gonna ask how much of the money went into cops’ pockets.”

Dickerson nodded. “Right, we’ll do that. Another thing. I walked across the highway and talked to Gene Calb, at the truck place. He was Cash’s boss. He said he had no idea what was going on, but he said there was another guy living here, part time, named Joe Kelly. He said Kelly disappeared a month ago and nobody’s heard from him since. The clothes in the other bedroom are Kelly’s. We got a couple charge-card receipts with his name on them.”

“Check the companies for new activity.”

“Under way,” Dickerson said.

“We got another thing,” Del said. “Maybe.”

“What?”

“I want you to look at it,” Del said. “Then you tell me.”

Lucas followed him, Dickerson trailing, down through the house to the basement. On the way down, he told Dickerson about Washington Fowler. Dickerson was unmoved.

“You’re pretty calm about it,” Lucas said. “The guy goes around starting fires.”

Dickerson smiled. “That’s your problem, general, not mine. You’re the guy who’s supposed to fix shit.”

T
HE BASEMENT WAS
unfinished concrete block and exposed joists, but with a new-looking furnace, a new hot-water heater, and new wiring and fluorescent lights. In one corner, a new bathroom had been built in a beige-painted cubicle, with a standard toilet and a sink, and a fiberglass shower booth with sliding glass doors.

Del said, “Well?”

“Well, they just remodeled it,” Lucas said. He looked around, saw nothing of obvious interest. Del had to be thinking about the bathroom, and Lucas went that way. The bathroom was bare, and smelled of disinfectant. Large, lots of room to move around. Lucas swung the entrance door, then knocked on it. Looked like wood, sounded like a metal fire door. Knocked on the walls: not drywall, as he’d expected, but painted plywood. And heavy, probably three-quarter inch. Yale keyhole lock with a bolt, lockable from the outside. No keyhole on the inside . . .

He stepped back and said to Del and Dickerson, “It’s a goddamn cell.”

Del turned to Dickerson. “You heard it here first.”

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER,
Lucas, Del, and Dickerson walked through the gathering collection of cop cars in the yard. Letty was sitting on the hood of the car again, while her mother waited inside. When she saw them coming, she
climbed out, and Lucas introduced Dickerson. “Hank will help you with the TV commentary. And he’ll get you home.”

“Cops say you found a bundle of money in there,” Letty said to Del. “That right?”

“Just a rumor,” Del said.

Dickerson, looking from Lucas to Del, asked, “What’re you guys doing next?”

“Gonna talk to St. Paul, and maybe wander around some more,” Lucas said. He looked back at the house. “This thing is getting interesting.”

F
REE OF
L
ETTY
and her mother, Lucas and Del caucused at the cars. “Moose Bay?” Del asked.

“That’s a big topic,” Lucas said. “Why don’t we talk to this Calb guy?”

They both looked across the highway at the yellow metal buildings with the trucks parked out front, and Del nodded.

Calb had two buildings, an auto-body and tow building, and a truck-rehab building, connected by an unheated shed-like walkway. They went into the auto-body building, which consisted of a small office and a series of repair bays at the back; a woman in the office directed them through the walkway to the truck-rehab wing. The truck area was bigger and more open, forty feet long and thirty wide, with a thirty-foot ceiling; it smelled of diesel and welding fumes. A row of red toolboxes sat at the back, and an electric heater was mounted high on one wall and glowed down over a burgundy Peterbilt. Three men were clustered
around the open door of the truck, peering inside, and one of them asked, “What the fuck were they carrying in there? You think there was some acid dripping in there?”

“I don’t know . . . ” Then one of the men saw Lucas and Del, and nudged the heavyset man who was deepest into the truck. He backed up, saw them, stood upright, and asked, “Can we help you fellas?”

“We’re with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Lucas said. Del held up an ID case. “We need to talk to Gene Calb.”

“That’s me . . . I’ll be with you in just a second.” He turned to one of the other men. “I don’t know, Larry. I’d go after it with a grinder, and if you don’t get good metal . . . we’ll cut another piece off a wreck and weld ’er in. There’s a hulk down in Worthington, out of a fire, oughta work.”

“Looks like it’s rotten all the way to the bottom. I could push a nail through it,” said an emaciated man in oil-stained Mr. Goodwrench coveralls.

“Well, cut through it and find out.”

Calb shook his head as he turned to Lucas and Del. “The whole floor of the passenger side is eaten away. Not the driver’s side, just the passenger side. It’s not rust, exactly, but it’s rotten. Like they spilled acid on it or something and then let it soak for a few years.”

One of the other men said, “Cat pee? Cat pee’ll rot holes in hardwood floors.”

“Well, Jesus, how could he stand the smell?” Calb shook his head once more. “If I were you, Larry, I’d keep my hands out of it.”

“You sure as shit can count on that,” said the man called Larry.

T
O
L
UCAS AND
Del, Calb said, “C’mon this way, fellas. We’ll go back to my office. You want to know about Deon?
I already talked to some of you guys. With the BCA, right?”

“We’re doing a little back-checking,” Lucas said. “How well did you know Mr. Cash?”

They pushed through a door into another small office and Calb gestured at a couple of guest chairs, then settled behind his desk as he answered. A caution flag signed by Richard Petty, and a Snap-on tools calendar from the 1980s hung on a wall. Everything else was parts books.

“He worked for me,” Calb said earnestly, leaning across the desk to Lucas. He had a big head and a blunt nose and square, mildly green teeth the size of Chiclets—the face of a plumber or a carpenter or a character actor playing a hardworking joe. “We weren’t friends. An old Army buddy down in KC asked me if I could get him a driver’s job. I knew he was just out of jail and, tell you the truth, I’m not sure he was that much reformed. With what’s happened, it looks like he wasn’t.”

“What do you think happened?” Del asked.

Calb said, “Well—you know. Somebody took him out and hung him. I know it wasn’t none of my boys, because none of my boys could do that. Jane too, killing both of them. I think it’s gotta come out of KC. He was in jail, that’s what it’s gotta be. Somebody back there.”

“How about Jane Warr?” Lucas asked. “How well did you know her?”

“Not real well. She didn’t hang around or anything. She came up with Deon, from KC. She wasn’t much—she was a card dealer up at Moose Bay, I’m sure you know.”

“So . . . were they renting that house? Own it? What was the situation there?”

“They bought it, cheap—thirty-six thousand, I think. Then they fixed it up. Joe Kelly did some of the work, he’d once worked as a handyman, and they had a couple guys in from town, they did some of it.”

“There are rumors around town that she might have had a relationship with a guy up at the casino,” Del said.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Calb said, shaking his head. “Like I said, she wasn’t that bright, but I don’t think she’d be dumb enough to play around on Deon. Deon had a mean streak. That’s why he was in jail. If he’d found out something like that, he would have beat on her like a big bass drum.”

“Mmm.”

Calb picked up a piece of paper from his desk, something with a printed IRS seal, looked at it, flicked it off to the side. “Then there’s the whole thing about Joe. Joe’s gone—and nobody knows where he went. Never said a word to anyone. One day he was here, and the next day, he wasn’t. He was from KC, too.”

“You think it might be possible that Joe did this? That there was some kind of an argument, and for some reason . . . ”

Calb shook his head. “Nah. To tell you the truth, Joe just didn’t have the
grit
to do this. Not hanging them, where he had to look them in the face.”

“So maybe he just took off,” Del said. “Or maybe . . . ”

“Something else I thought of, after the other BCA boys was here,” Calb continued. “If this whole thing didn’t come out of the Kansas City jail—and that’s gotta be it, in my opinion, but if it didn’t—then you oughta get up to Moose Bay. That would be the place to look, along with KC.”

“Why?” Del asked.

“The word around town is that Letty West saw them out there at the stroke of midnight,” Calb said. “Is that right?”

Lucas nodded. “Close to that.”

“Jane worked the three-to-eleven shift. She couldn’t have got home much before half-past eleven, and last night, with that ground blizzard, it was probably later. If he
took them up there to hang them at midnight, he must have grabbed her the minute she got home. So he was waiting for her—or followed her home.”

Lucas and Del both nodded. They talked for another five minutes, and Lucas got the impression that Calb was genuinely confused by the killings. Cash had had some words from time to time with coworkers, but never anything serious, nothing that had even led to a confrontation. “Just that, you know, mechanics and guys like Deon don’t mix. He thought he was a basketball star. One of those bad gangsta dudes, whatever they call them. That’s what he thought.”

O
UTSIDE, WALKING BACK
across the highway, Lucas said, “I thought about her getting off at eleven, and being hanged at twelve.”

“I did too,” Del said. “I was saving it up.”

“Pig’s ass,” Lucas said. “Anyway, somebody thought of it.”

“Maybe Warr was the target,” Del said. “We’ve been doing nothing but talking about Cash.”

“Got to get on her, get some background going. I’ll talk to Dickerson.”

“Gotta get up to Moose Bay,” Del said. “How’s the heater in the Olds?”

“Fine.”

“Then let’s take your car. Mustang heater wouldn’t soften up butter.”

M
OOSE
B
AY WAS
run by the Black River band of the Chippewa, on the banks of a river whose water was stained so absolutely black by decomposing vegetation that when
it froze over, even the ice looked black. From Cash’s house to the res was twenty-four minutes, nine minutes down to Armstrong, then another fifteen minutes through Armstrong and out the county road to the casino.

“Tell me your theories,” Del said, on the way out. “You give good theory.”

“I’m thinking . . . drug deal,” Lucas said. “Calb was probably right both ways: it’s connected with Kansas City and Cash’s jail contacts, and it’s probably connected with the casino. The casino Indians don’t have much truck with drugs, but the people who come in to gamble, have a good time . . . they’d do a little coke.”

“So the money’s drug money,” Del said. “All in cash, all bundled up, but not fresh bricks. Cash makes the wholesale contacts, driving for Calb back and forth. Warr has the contacts up here, delivers it out to the individual dealers. Or deals it herself.”

“Then they fuck with somebody. Or, somebody knows they’ve got that money, and they come looking for it.”

“But then they’d just shoot them—they wouldn’t hang them,” Del said.

“Trying to get them to talk?”

“More likely they fucked with somebody and got made an example of,” Del said. “A bigger network that’s still up and running, where they need an occasional example.”

“Maybe,” Lucas said. “Where does Calb come in?”

“He doesn’t. Not necessarily.”

“Look at the farmhouse—there was a lot of work done in there, new work, and it cost a bundle. Believe me, I know.” The Big New House back in St. Paul had cost $870,000. “If Calb knows Cash is only getting paid for driving, and if Warr is just dealing cards, where’d he think they got the money to fix that place up? There’s a hundred grand in work in there, minimum, and a ten-thousand-dollar television set.”

“Tell you what—if the total’s a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars, that’s not much for a house, with two incomes, and a guy upstairs who might be paying rent,” Del said.

“C’mon,” Lucas scoffed. “How many drug dealers do you know who have a mortgage? How many have bought a house?”

“Jimmy Szuza bought a house for his mother.”

“Jimmy Szuza was working for his mother, the treacherous old bitch. He was fronting for her.”

“Still.” After a couple of minutes: “And what about the cell?”

“Beats the shit outa me.”

“C
ALB WAS RIGHT
about the travel time,” Lucas said, glancing at his watch as they rolled into the casino’s parking lot.

The casino looked like a larger version of Calb’s truck shop, but a truck shop on steroids: a huge, rambling, two-story yellow-and-green metal building with a prism-shaped glass entry built to resemble a crystal tepee. “Liquor in the front, poker in the rear,” Del said.

“Bumper sticker,” Lucas said. “But I don’t think they sell booze.”

T
HE
M
OOSE
B
AY
security chief was a cheerful Chippewa man named Clark Hoffman, who hurried down to meet them after a call from the reception desk. “Figured you’d get here sooner or later,” he said, shaking their hands. He looked closely at Del. “Did you hang out at Meat’s in the Cities?”

“Yeah, I’d go in there before it closed,” Del said.

“It closed? Shit.”

“Couple years back.”

Hoffman thought about that for a moment, then said, “I used to kick your ass at shuffleboard. I thought you were a wino.”

Del grinned and shrugged. “I remember. You told me you were at Wounded Knee.”

“That’s me,” Hoffman said. “Sneaking through the weeds with a hundred pounds of frozen brats in a backpack. Fuckin’ FBI—no offense. C’mon this way.”

They followed him upstairs to his office, Del filling him in about Meat’s. “Trouble with the health inspectors,” Del told him. “You name it, they had it: mice, rats, roaches, disease. The only thing that kept you from dyin’ was the alcohol.”

“Everything did have a . . . particular flavor,” Hoffman said. “Ever notice that?”

“Yeah.”

“I always sorta liked it. What happened to Meat?”

“He moved to San Clemente and opened a porno store.”

“Not much money in retail porno anymore,” Hoffman said, shaking his head. “Not since they started piping it into every motel room in the country.”

J
ANE
W
ARR’S EMPLOYMENT
file sat in the center of Hoffman’s desk. He pushed it across at Lucas and said, “Not much there. She learned to deal at a school in Vegas, held a couple of jobs there, worked at a Wal-Mart for a while, outside of Kansas City, then came up here.”

“We heard a rumor that she might have had a relationship here with a guy named Terry Anderson.”

Hoffman frowned. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Downtown. Can’t tell you exactly who mentioned it,” Lucas said.

“I’ll check, and I’ll find out. I hadn’t heard anything, but then—I might not have. About anyone else, but not about Terry.”

“Why not Terry?” Del asked.

“He’s my brother-in-law,” Hoffman said. He grinned at Lucas, but it wasn’t a happy face. “He’s married to my sister.”

“Aw, shit,” Lucas said. “Listen, all we heard was one guy, who didn’t like Warr, but maybe got turned down by her and knew we’d be up here talking to you. Maybe just a wise guy.”

“One way or the other, I’ll know in the next half hour,” Hoffman said. He interlinked his fingers, stretched his arms out in front of him, and cracked his knuckles. “I’ll let you know.”

“Take it easy,” Del said.

“I’ll take it easy,” Hoffman said. “My sister, on the other hand, might kill his ass. If it’s true.”

“Tell her to take it easy, too,” Del said. “I mean, Jesus.”

“You have any cocaine going through here?” Lucas asked after an awkward pause.

Hoffman spread his hands. “Sure. On the res, and some of the customers bring it in. We try to keep it out—we make so much money that we try to keep everything spotless. We don’t need to give some asshole state senator an excuse to build state-run casinos. When we see it, we call the cops. Anybody caught with it is banned, no matter what the cops do.”

“Any chance Warr was dealing?” Del asked.

“Not in here,” Hoffman said. “We watch the dealers, and they know it. We tape them every minute they’re working.”

“Really? Do you still have last night’s tapes?” Lucas asked.

“Sure do. We’ve got tapes for the last month, and tapes
of anything that might ever come up in the future. Catch people stealing, they’ll be on tape until the next glacier comes through.”

Del said, “We don’t have a line on who did this, but we’d sort of like to see a guy, big guy, new beard, dark watch cap or ski cap, dark parka and jeans, drives a Jeep Cherokee.”

“I don’t know about the Cherokee, but I know who you’re talking about. We’ve got him on tape,” Hoffman said.