Naked Prey

didn’t think we could take the chance. We never heard another word from the kidnappers.”
    Lucas riffled through the stack of papers, and Burke added, “Those aren’t the originals. The originals are back home, with the FBI.”
    “It looks like stuff I’ve seen from the FBI,” Lucas said.
    Green said, “Whoever did it had some idea of how the paperwork looks, but it’s not quite right. The fonts aren’t quite right, the formats aren’t quite right. It’s like they made them on a computer . . . ”
    “Cash and Warr had a computer . . . ”
    “Nothing on it but games,” Green said. “Not even a word processor. What those are, are supposed memos inside some kind of kidnapping unit. It’s all bullshit: the kidnappings they talk about never occurred. It’s just good enough to convince Mr. Burke not to talk to the authorities before he paid the money.”
    “Because we didn’t care about the money,” Burke said. “One million dollars, in unmarked, nonsequential fifties and hundreds. We thought that if we paid, maybe they wouldn’t kill her. It was worth the chance.”
    “If you didn’t care about the money,” Del said.
    “We didn’t. Not too much, anyway.” He showed a quick, thin grin, dug into his briefcase and pulled out another stack of Xeroxes. “I gave one of these to Jim. They’re checking the bills they got from Deon Cash’s house . . . I understand one of you gentlemen found them.”
    “Del did,” Lucas said. He took the second stack of sheets. They were legal-sized Xeroxes, each showing several fifty- and hundred-dollar bills. “What we did is, we got the money from the casinos, new bills, in stacks of sequential numbers. There were twenty bills in each stack. WeXeroxed all those stacks—the way it broke down, there were eight hundred and fifty of them—and from those, you can figure out all the serial numbers. You’ve got the top serial number, and the additional nineteen bills follow in order. Then we mixed them all up, so they’d appear to be nonsequential. But you can look at any bill, and tell if it came from the Vegas money.”
    “Pretty smart,” Lucas said. “The money in Cash’s place came from you?”
    “Don’t know yet,” Green said. “The money’s locked up in the bank, and we had to wait until it opened this morning. Time lock on the safe deposit. There was no great hurry anyway. We’ve got a guy over there now, looking.”
    “Did you ever have anything to do with Kansas City, or a Cash family in Kansas City?” Del asked Burke.
    “We have nursing homes in the Kansas City area,” Burke said. “I own six different chains of nursing homes in Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. But when Jim told me about the Kansas City connection . . . as part of our public-relations campaigns, we donate money to various hospitals and medical schools for research on age-related illnesses. About a month before Annie was taken, we’d given two million dollars to the University of Missouri medical schools. Our public-relations people tried to get it in all the papers where we have nursing homes. They did very well—I suspect those stories were the proximate cause of Annie’s kidnapping.”
    “Oh, boy,” Lucas said.
    Del asked, “Where do you have nursing homes in Minnesota? Around here?”
    “Yes, in Armstrong, down in Red Lake Falls, Crookston, Detroit Lakes, Fergus Falls.”
    “And there was a story in the Armstrong paper?”
    “Yes. I’m afraid so,” Burke said. “I have to say that if I’d found out who they were, I wouldn’t have done whatMr. Sorrell did, but I understand it, and I applaud it. I wish to God I could have shaken his hand. Now we’ve got to get this last one, or the last ones. We have to root out all of them.”
    “Doing our best,” Green said. “We’ll get them.”
    “Him,” Lucas said. “It’s one guy.”
    “How do you know?” Green asked.
    “The feel of the killings. It’s one guy.” Lucas looked out the window toward Calb’s shop. Little bits of icy snow were drifting across the highway.
    “Cold up here,” Burke said.
    T HEY FINISHED EATING and were pulling on their coats when Green got a call on his cell phone. They were at the door when Green said, “Hey,” and waved them back. They stepped back and he said, “Numbers match. On the ransom money.”
    Burke had tears in his eyes, but didn’t seem to know it.
    L UCAS PUT THE paper from Burke in the car, and they rolled across the highway to