Mortal Prey

know that he knew Clara.”
    “He did,” the teacher said. “Don’t tell anybody I said so.”
    McCoy said he knew where they could find Baker. “If he’s not at the landfill, shootin’ rats, or out pluckin’ chickens, he’s usually around his house. He’s got some new dogs, and he’s training them.”
     
    MCCOY DROVE THEM from Hopewell back to Tisdale. They stopped at a Dairy Queen and got chocolate-dipped cones, agreeing that they must be low-cal because they were ice milk, not ice cream, and then rode out the west side of town on the county road. Baker’s house was a close cousin to the Rinker homestead, a beat-up, seventy-year-old frame house with a tired garage off to the side. The house was surrounded by a waist-high chain-link fence, and two young German shepherds were staked out behind it.
    McCoy ran down the driveway as far as the gate, then leaned on his horn. Baker, a rawboned man with shaggy brown hair and a two-week beard, stepped out onto the porch. He had a can of Budweiser in his hand, squinted at them, pointed a finger at the dogs, who dropped back to their stomachs, and walked up the driveway.
    They talked over the fence.
    “Never occurred to me that it could have been Clara, though it sounds stupid to say it,” he told them when Lucas explained why they were there. “I didn’t even hear about her coming back to St. Louis until a couple weeks after I was hit. I never put it together.”
    “You think it was her?” McCoy asked. “You got some crazy friends running around out there.”
    Baker grinned at them through light-green teeth and said, “Shit, McCoy, there’s nothing wrong with those boys.”
    “Yeah, like Harvey?”
    “Well, Harv…” Baker considered the name reluctantly.
    “Harv’s a couple cans short of a six-pack, is what he is,” McCoy said.
    “Well, Harvey…tell you the truth, it crossed my mind that it might be one of them, except I can’t think who’d shoot the dogs. Takes a cold man to shoot the dogs. Even Harvey wouldn’t.”
    “You think Clara could do it?” Lucas asked.
    “I’ll tell you what,” Baker said. “The last time I seen Clara was five or six years ago—she came through to see her mama, and I bumped into her down to the root-beer stand. She asked me what I was doing, and I said, ‘Shootin’, and working at Logan’s,’ and that’s about the end of it. We wasn’t, like, good friends, not that I wouldn’t have liked to fuck her, if you know what I mean.”
    “Know what you mean,” McCoy said, hitching up his khakis.
    “She had these nice little hard tits like cupcakes,” Baker continued. “And you got the feeling she’d probably fuck back at you.”
    “The dogs?” Lucas repeated.
    “I don’t know. If she can shoot all those people she’s supposed to, I guess she could shoot the dogs. Somebody did,” Baker said. “Right in the head, bam bam.”
    “Anybody figure out what kind of gun it was?”
    “It were a .22,” Baker said. “I couldn’t bring myself to dig out the slugs, but I looked at the holes and I’d say it was a standard-velocity .22. Good tight entry wounds, no sign of bullet breakup, no exit wound. Good shootin’, too. They never knew what hit them.”
    “And you haven’t seen her for all that time.”
    “Nope. Kinda like to, though, if you catch her. I might go see her in jail. She was a nude dancer before she was a killer. I bet she’s got some stories to tell.”
    “Bet she does,” McCoy said, nodding. His tongue flickered over his lips. Tasty stories.
    “Did she know about your guns?” Lucas asked.
    “Oh, sure. Pretty much everybody around here knows I got an interest,” Baker said. “I used to hang with her brother, and she was over here a time or two when we were gunnin’. I’m the one who taught her brother how to reload.”
    “So you were friends,” Andreno said.
    “Nah. Not with Clara. She was around, because Roy took her around—I personally think Roy may have been knocking a little off her, you know what I mean?—but she was standoffish, even when she was little. She’d just look at you. I didn’t have much to do with her.”
    “Did you know any of her friends?” Lucas asked.
    “I don’t think—” Then he stopped and looked from Lucas to Andreno. “You know about Patsy Hill, right?”
    Lucas and Andreno shook their heads, and Lucas said, “Haven’t seen the name.”
    “Jeezus.” Baker looked at McCoy. “You know about Patsy Hill?”
    McCoy shook his