Naked Prey

painted his cars up there.”
    “How many points did you have? Six?”
    “Six,” Lucas agreed.
    Del nodded. “Then here’s number seven. If you were running a major car-theft ring, there’d be nothing more valuable than having a cop inside the only major police agency for miles around. In fact, you’d just about have to have one.”
    T HEN L UCAS SAID, “I got another list.”
    “Yeah?”
    Lucas said, “One: You’re a friendly looking guy like Gene Calb, maybe with a spy inside the department, or maybe not—it’s a small town, and word gets around. He bluffs his way into Sorrell’s house, kills him, and gets back here.
    “Two: He goes after Letty. We don’t know the specific reason, but we do know that Letty hung around his shop and maybe he’s afraid that she saw or heard something. And Calb is a friendly guy, everybody likes him, and if he knocks on the door, maybe Martha West lets him in—Letty told me one time that Martha’d had a crush on Calb.
    “Three: Calb kills Katina Lewis. Why? We don’t know, but suppose that Letty really did shoot him, and hit him in the chest like she said. He was hurt, but not badly. Maybe his wife patched him up or something. But suppose he bled through his shirt, or did something that tipped Katina that his chest was hurting. Heck, maybe she patted him on the chest. Anyway, the instant that she suspected, he’d have to get rid of her, because all she’d have to do is tell any cop, and we’d go straight to Calb and take his shirt off. We find a bullet hole or even a bruise, he’d be toast. So he’d have to kill her. Maybe that was done so spontaneously that he panicked, and ran.”
    D EL LAY BACK on the bed, and after a minute said, “I like the first one better. The cop.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it all goes back to kidnapping the girls, and everybody says that Calb wouldn’t do that. He might have been a criminal, but he wasn’t a nut. Because if this car ring worked like we think it did, he was up to his ass in money—why’d he need to kidnap somebody? And most of all, he really seemed to think that Deon Cash and Jane Warr were stupid assholes. Would he get involved in a kidnapping with partners he thought were stupid assholes? I don’t think so.”
    L UCAS THOUGHT ABOUT that for a while, then said, “Let’s go talk to Letty and Ruth Lewis. They’re up at the church. I think we ought to stay away from the sheriff’s office until we’ve got something solid.”
    “I don’t think Ray Zahn,” Del said. “He’s one of our guys.”
    “Yeah, well. I don’t think so either, but . . . we gotta keep him on the list. And we gotta think about the possibility that it’s nobody we know yet. Maybe a cop, but nobody we know yet.”
    “Think we’ll have him by midnight?” Del said, joking.
    “I don’t know. If I were gonna bet, I’d say a week. Or less.”

22
    T HE OLDER WOMAN came to the door of the church and said, “If you’re looking for Letty and Ruth, they went up to the dump to shoot that gun you bought.” Her tight lips suggested that she didn’t approve.
    “Another fan,” Del said, as they got back in the car. “Dump?”
    R UTH L EWIS’S T OYOTA Corolla was parked at the dump gate, and they could hear the little .22 banging away. “You don’t think they’d shoot back this way, do you?” Del asked.
    “Jesus, I hope not.” He hadn’t thought of that. “Where are they?”
    “Sounds like they’re over to the left.”
    T HEY WALKED CAREFULLY toward the sound of the shooting. A .22 long-rifle slug makes a distinctive whip sound as it goes by, and they didn’t hear anything like that. Eventually, they crossed the high point of the dump and spotted Letty and Ruth at the far left edge of the raw dirt, shooting into a mound of clay. Ruth had the gun.
    “May have been a conversion here,” Lucas said. “Lewis wasn’t that happy about buying the gun.”
    “Oughta get her an NRA membership,” Del said. “My cold dead hands . . . ”
    “From what I’ve seen of her, she’d probably take the damn thing over,” Lucas said.
    L ETTY AND R UTH saw them coming and stopped firing. Letty’s crutch was lying on the ground, so her ankle must have been feeling better. When they got close, Lucas saw that they were shooting at Campbell’s soup cans, which made good reactive targets. He called, “How you doing?”
    As they came up, Letty said, “The gun’s not as bad as I thought.”
    “She hit the can every time, right