Naked Prey

fingerprint on the .380 shell. “We’ll do the Super Glue trick but it’s about the best single print I’ve ever seen,” the tech said. “We’ll have something for you.”
    Lucas, going through Mrs. Calb’s bedroom closet, found two shoeboxes that contained virtually new shoes, with perhaps an evening’s worth of wear on the soles. In Calb’s closet, on the floor under some shoes, he found a steel box, and inside the box, a thousand dollars in ten-dollar bills and a loaded .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.
    “I’m getting a bad vibe,” Del said. “He might leave the gun, if he’s got another one. Why would he leave the money?”
    A FEW MINUTES after noon, the sheriff came back, trailing a tall cowboy-looking cop who the sheriff introduced as Loren Singleton.
    “Loren was seeing Ms. Lewis,” Anderson said.
    “I’m sorry,” Lucas said. “About your friend.”
    Singleton was distant, a little vague. Lucas had seen it before. “I’m, a, you know, we were . . . hell, we were sleeping together. But, I, uh . . . ” A tear ran down hischeek and he wiped it with his shirt sleeve. “Goldarnit. Why’d this have to happen? You think it was Gene that did it?”
    “Can’t find him. Do you know any reason he’d have a problem with Ms. Lewis?”
    “No, I don’t,” Singleton said. “I know what Katina was doing . . . I know what those women were doing, and I’m sure Gene knew . . . but how in the heck, I mean, what would that mean to Gene?”
    “What were the women doing?” Anderson asked, taking a half-step back from his deputy.
    “Bringing prescription drugs across the border from Canada,” Lucas said. “They had a little distribution thing going, giving out drugs to the poor.”
    Anderson nodded, glanced at Singleton, and said, “Well, tell you the truth, half the people in town do that sometimes. No point in smuggling, though—you can order on the Internet.”
    “Gotta have the Internet,” Lucas said. “Most of their clients are poor, and a lot of them are older—probably not too big on the Internet.”
    “How well did you know Gene Calb?” Del asked.
    “I grew up here, so I knew him pretty well,” Singleton said. “I didn’t think . . . I don’t know that he’d do anything like this. I mean, I refinish cars as a hobby, and once a year or so, I’d rent one of his paint booths to do some painting . . . That’s how I met Katina. At Calb’s.”
    “What was she doing there?” Lucas asked.
    Singleton shook his head—“Just chatting, I guess. I mean, there’re only forty or fifty people in that town. You tend to chat when you can.”
    “You know anything about Toyotas?” Lucas asked.
    “Toyotas?” Singleton looked at Anderson, who frowned at Lucas.
    “Toyotas?” Anderson asked.
    “There are some people down in Kansas City, associated with Deon Cash—members of his family—who apparently steal a lot of Toyotas. They’re never found again.”
    “Toyotas,” Singleton said. He scratched his breast bone. “You know, I never thought about this, but there were a lot of Toyotas going through Gene’s shop. You don’t see that many around here, but you’d see them in Gene’s shop. Just about every time I went up there, when I think about it. Didn’t seem strange then, but it seems kinda strange when you mention it.”
    “What were they doing to them? Rehabbing them . . . what?”
    “Sometimes, it seemed like they had some parts off, but they weren’t chopping them or anything. They were like fixing them. And painting them. Man, they painted a lot of Toyotas.”
    “Aw, Jesus,” Del said. To Lucas: “That’s where the hot Toyotas went.”
    “When the girls . . . the women . . . came back across the border, they were always in a Toyota Land Cruiser or maybe some old beat-up 4Runner. There’s always one of them around the church, up there.”
    “You didn’t think anything was weird about that?” Lucas said.
    Singleton wagged his head. “Well, sure. But I knew what they were doing, and I . . . guess I didn’t have much problem with it. I mean, gosh, everybody around here does it. Everybody’s drugstore is over there.”
    T HEY TALKED FOR a few more minutes, then Singleton went to look at Katina Lewis. He came back down the stairs two minutes later, even more shaky, sweating a bit. “Jeez . . . Jeez almighty . . . ”
    “Go home and lie down for a while,” Lucas said.
    “That’s gonna help?”
    “No, not much,