Naked Prey

along.”
    “All right. I wish I’d known about the funeral. I might have tried to push it a couple of days.”
    “I don’t know about that,” Lewis said. “The sheriff said the arrangements had been made . . . and that’s what I know.”
    “Come and see me when you get up here,” Lucas said. “We’ve got more to talk about.”
    “Maybe,” she said.
    D EL CAME BY. “We doing Calb?”
    “I’ve got nothing else,” Lucas said.
    They got in the car and loafed up to Broderick, across the gray landscape, heading for Wolf’s Cafe, where they’d found that the pancakes were edible. The snow had gotten heavier, and a North Dakota radio station said there could be four to six inches by evening. There were a half-dozen cars parked outside Cash’s house—BCA crime scene guys, the FBI, and at least one deputy sheriff, Lucas guessed.
    Wolf’s was quiet, with only two other customers, bothon stools at the bar, one talking with Wolf about going to Palm Springs, the other eating cherry pie and drinking coffee and eavesdropping. Lucas and Del took the furthest booth so they could talk. Through the window they could see the front of Calb’s body shop, and could see people coming and going.
    “Hate waiting,” Del said. “We’re just waiting for somebody to get killed so we’ve got something more to work with.”
    “We’d know what we were doing if we could figure out why he went after Letty. If he went after Letty. We’re assuming that, but what if he was after Martha? We’re thinking it was Letty because we’ve been hanging around with Letty.”
    “No, no. We think it’s Letty because after he killed Martha, he went after Letty,” Del said. “He tried to hunt her down out there, after he killed Martha. Letty says her mother was yelling at her to get out . . . Martha just got in the way.”
    Lucas nodded. “Okay. So what does Letty know that makes it necessary to kill her? Must be something.”
    “Maybe she doesn’t know she knows,” Del said.
    “We’ll talk to her again tomorrow. I keep going back to your theory that there can’t be two big separate crimes in one small town without them being related, somehow,” Lucas said. “We’ve got two big separate crimes—the drug running and the kidnappings—and they don’t seem to be related.”
    “Could be an exception, I guess,” Del said. “But . . . ” He rubbed his chin, sipped at his coffee. “Maybe we ought to get with Ruth, or one of the other women, and do a whole history of how they got here. Why here? How did they get involved with Calb? Can’t be just a coincidence that Calb has these ties down to Kansas City car thieves and these women . . . ”
    He trailed off, and Lucas said, “What?”
    “What, ‘what’?”
    “Where were you going with that? ’Cause you gotta be right. How did they hook all this together? How did they land on Calb, out here in the middle of the prairie? There’s gotta be more to it.”
    “That cheer you up?”
    “Gives us something to think about,” Lucas said. “Something to pull at.”
    W OLF BROUGHT THE pancakes over, and a couple of minutes later, as they were eating, a black Lexus backed out of the Cash house, rolled south, and pulled into the parking lot next to Lucas’s Acura. A white-haired man got out of the driver’s side, and a moment later, Jim Green, the FBI agent, got out of the passenger side. Green pointed at Lucas’s Acura and said something to the white-haired man, who went back into the Lexus and fished out a briefcase.
    They clumped inside and looked around, and Lucas lifted a hand. The two men came down and squeezed into the booth.
    “Tom Burke—Lucas Davenport, Minnesota BCA,” Green said. “You’ve already met Del.”
    “The FBI crew hasn’t found anything, any gravesites,” Burke said. “We don’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.”
    Lucas shook his head.
    Burke said, “I have some paper that Jim said you may be interested in. When Annie was taken, the kidnappers told us that if we contacted the FBI or any other police agency, they would know, because they had a source inside the FBI. They sent us these papers . . . ” He produced a neatly Xeroxed stack of papers and handed the stack to Lucas. “I took them to my attorney, who had worked with theJustice Department before he went into private practice, and he said they looked authentic. So we paid up, without calling in the FBI. I felt a little foolish even at the time, but I