Naked Prey

”
    “ . . . and I know when there’s a round in the chamber.”
    Lucas stood firm, and the manager said, “You know, I’ve got a Remington pump in the back. It’s used, but it’s in perfect shape. I could let you have it for three hundred bucks.”
    Lucas and Letty looked at each other, and Letty said, “Bring it out.”
    They took the pump, but Letty got it for two seventy-five, with five boxes of .22 long-rifle shells thrown in as a deal-sweetener. She said to Lucas, “I’ve had enough of that .22 short bullshit. Next time this jerk comes around, he better be wearing a bulletproof vest.”
    L UCAS ENJOYED POETRY. Couldn’t help himself. He was especially fond of haiku, the Japanese form, and in reading haiku from time to time, he’d encountered talk of Zen Buddhism, and the concept of the koan. A koan was a kind of a riddle, or paradox, without a solution. They were used by the Zen master to demonstrate the ultimate futility of logic, and to provoke—with some pupils, anyway—instant enlightenment.
    Lucas heard Letty say bulletproof vest and took a steptoward enlightenment, though later he thought the enlightenment might have been provoked by the way she’d orally italicized the better be.
    D EL ARRIVED BACK the next day at one o’clock, knocked on the door. Lucas was lying on the bed with the door unlocked and called, “Come in.”
    Del pushed the door open, stuck his head in, and said, “Am I too early? Or have you figured it out?”
    “I don’t have a name yet,” Lucas said. He held up the art pad, and the top page was covered with red and green squares and arrows. “I’ve got some thoughts.”
    Del tossed his duffel in the corner, sat on the second bed. “Give.”
    Lucas said, “One: We figure out in the evening that the killer was probably Sorrell. Then we drive home, and about twelve hours after we leave Armstrong, we arrive at the Sorrell house. He’s dead, and he’s been dead for at least a little while. That means that the killer had to hear that we’d figured out Sorrell, had to make a plan, and had to drive seven hours, at least—Rochester is more than an hour south of the Cities—and then he has to find Sorrell’s house, where the phone number is unlisted, do the killing, and get away. That’s pretty amazing, when you think about it.
    “Two: Thirty hours after he hanged two people in Armstrong, Sorrell lets his own killer into his house, with his wife standing right there with him. He’s unarmed and is shot down in cold blood. He takes no precautions, he never thinks that the guy at the door might be connected to the murders.
    “Three: Why did the guy attack Letty? We don’t know. But we do know that Letty’s mother let him in the house after midnight, when both she and Letty knew there was a killer running around loose.
    “Four: Letty claims she shot the guy, but none of the hospitals inside two hundred miles report a guy shot in the chest with a .22, that might possibly be our guy. Why is that?
    “Five: I talk to Burke, Annie’s dad, and he shows us stuff that looks like it came from the FBI. It looks real. How’d they know how to do that?
    “Six: I talk to Letty last night after you head back to the Cities . . . Hey, did you get laid?”
    “Yeah.” Del nodded. “It was wonderful.”
    “I have fantasies about Cheryl. Maybe you could tell me . . . Never mind.”
    “C’mon, wiseass.”
    “All right. Anyway, I talk to Letty, and one thing leads to another, and we buy her a replacement rifle down at Ace Hardware. And she says to me that if this asshole comes back, quote, ‘He better be wearing a bulletproof vest,’ unquote.”
    Lucas looked at Del and raised his eyebrows. Del asked, “That’s it?”
    “That’s it.”
    Del shook his head. “Maybe I can get a refund on some of them pens. Looks like you only used red and green.”
    “Think about it for a minute,” Lucas said. “What are the chances that . . . the guy is a cop?”
    D EL THOUGHT ABOUT it for a minute. “If the guy is a cop, he would have heard about Sorrell really early. If he was wearing a uniform, people would let him in their house any time of day. He’d see FBI stuff, so he’d know the format. And if he was wearing a bulletproof vest . . . it would explain all of that shit.”
    “We know that there are at least two cops who were friendly with Gene Calb—Ray Zahn and this other guy, theboyfriend of Katina Lewis. Zahn sometimes hung out there, and the boyfriend