Naked Prey

man.”
    “There’s a question about whether you hit him.”
    “I hit him.”
    “But if you’re shooting .22 shorts, it might not even have gotten through his coat. A cold night, he might have been all bundled up.”
    “Then why did he fall on his butt? You don’t fall on your butt if the bullet sticks in your coat.”
    “Maybe he was ducking.”
    “He wasn’t ducking. He fell on his butt. Then hecrawled for a while and then he ran back to the house and then the fire started.”
    When they finished talking, Lucas sent Letty to the TV with the older woman, who told Letty that she had to change for the service. “For the funeral,” Letty said, correcting her.
    Lucas wagged his head at Del, and they walked through the church to the kitchen, where they found Ruth at the kitchen table. She was red-eyed, red-faced. “Gene did this? With Gloria? That’s . . . that’s . . . Are you sure?” She had a brown cardigan wrapped around her shoulders.
    “We’re not sure. We just can’t find them. There was blood on a carpet, and we found your sister hidden up under the roof.”
    “Why bother to hide her if she was so easy to find?” Ruth asked.
    “Maybe they didn’t think anyone would come looking. Or that if somebody did, they couldn’t look too hard. Maybe all they expected was a head start.”
    “Hard to believe. Gene wasn’t a bad man. I didn’t think he was.”
    “Why didn’t you tell us?”
    “You know why,” she said, defensively. “You could let us go, when you knew what we were doing, but you could never let Gene go.”
    “How did you get hooked up with him, anyway?”
    She sighed. “One of our people up in Canada knew a man who bought a car from one of his . . . salesmen. We desperately needed different cars to bring the drugs across—you can’t keep going back and forth, two or three times a week, without somebody asking why. So when we figured out where the cars were coming from, I came down here and talked with Gene. He wasn’t too happy—but you know, if he’d done this, if he killed Katina . . . why didn’t he kill me way back then?”
    “Different situation,” Del suggested. “No pressure then.”
    “Maybe. Anyway, I talked to him. I told him that we would all be committing crimes together, so nobody could talk about anyone else. He really needed people to drive the cars across, since he was starting to do some . . . some volume. We were perfect. Older women, forties and fifties and sixties. Who would suspect? And Gene built some special . . . things . . . for us, that fit in the Toyotas, and let us bring the drugs across. It was all very smooth.”
    “Did you bring a Toyota through last night?” Lucas asked.
    “No. The last one was the one we had at the fire at the Wests’ house. You saw it. Gene took it. It was a wreck, though. I don’t think it would make another two hundred miles.”
    “You know what the license plates were?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “Okay . . . You got some people killed,” Lucas said. He said it in a soft voice, but a mean one, taunting, like a bully trying to pull another kid into a fight. Pushing her.
    “But there was no connection between the kidnappings, between Deon and Jane, and the car deal,” she said. She said, “Listen to me: no connection. I knew Gene pretty well, and he didn’t even like Deon or Jane. He didn’t trust them. Deon wasn’t a big shot in this thing, he was a driver. He was a gofer. ”
    “But if we’d had a piece of it . . . ”
    “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” she shouted, tears running down her face. “You’re not listening to me. The kidnappings and all the rest of it weren’t connected. They weren’t.”
    A LITTLE LATER, Lucas spoke to Neil Mitford. “I don’t think the governor necessarily would want to know about this conversation,” Lucas said, as an opener.
    “That’s why I work here,” Mitford said. “Talk to me.”
    Lucas outlined the situation, including the murder of Lewis, and the cover-up of the stolen-car ring. “The women covered up material information. We could bust them six different ways. The thing is, I’m not sure that if they had told us, it would have made any difference to the killer. He’s operating on some other schedule—I can’t figure out why Calb would kill Lewis and then run for it. As far as we can tell, she didn’t know anything that all the other women didn’t know. If he was going to kill Lewis, he should have been