Naked Prey

it’s her blood,” Del said. “Some of it’s off to the side, and on her upper lip and nose.”
    “We’ll get the lab to check,” Lucas said. “That’d be a break, if it’s the killer’s.”
    Payton said, “D-D-D-DNA. We did a DNA in a rape last year.”
    “Catch the guy?”
    “N-N-No,” Payton said.
    Lucas said, “Look, why don’t you go sit in a car for a while and get warmed up, for Christ’s sakes? You’re shaking like a leaf.”
    “ ’Cause Anderson’d have a cow,” Payton said.
    “We’re taking over the crime scene,” Lucas said. “The BCA is. I’m ordering you to leave, okay?” He looked at the other guys, who were watching him, some hope in their eyes. “All of you. Get some place warm. Get some coffee.”
    Payton bobbed his head, said, “Aye aye, cap’n.” The four men hurried in a wide circle around the hanging bodies, another of them muttered, “Thanks,” and then they all scuttled off through the naked trees toward the cars.
    “A NDERSON COULD BE a problem,” Del said, conversationally, when the deputies were out of earshot. He and Lucas were still looking at the dead people. The ghastly fact was that Cash and Warr hung only a few inches off the ground, and neither one had been tall—Lucas and Del were looking almost straight into their dead, half-open eyes, at their purplish faces, and the two bodies swayed together as though dancing on the same floor where the two cops werestanding. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Del continued. “Half the goddamn crime scene is stuck to the bottoms of the deputies’ boots. Then he left them out here to freeze.”
    “Yeah.” Lucas decided that they were gawking at the bodies. “We’re gawking,” he said.
    “I know,” Del said, looking at Warr. “How many dead people we seen in our lives? You think a thousand?”
    “Maybe not a thousand,” Lucas said, still looking.
    “I don’t dream about any of them, except maybe one burned guy I saw, all black and crispy but still alive . . . died while we were waiting for the ambulance. And a little kid who drowned in a creek, she was my first one right after I went on patrol.”
    “I remember my first kid.”
    “Everybody does,” Del said. He did the cold-weather tap dance, and blew some steam. “I’m gonna remember this one for a while.”
    “T HEY’RE ON DISPLAY, ” Lucas said after a while. “You think it could be a biker thing? Bikers do this kind of shit, sometimes.”
    “I’ve never seen it,” Del said doubtfully. A gust of wind came through, and both of the bodies slowly rotated toward them.
    “Neither have I, but I’ve read about it,” Lucas said.
    “Read about it, or seen it in the movies?”
    “Maybe the movies,” Lucas admitted. “The thing is, the guy who did this wanted everybody to freak out. This isn’t just a murder. This is something else. The guy was making a point.”
    “No clothes around,” Del said. “Must’ve pulled the clothes off somewhere else, or took them with him.”
    “Somewhere else. This was all planned,” Lucas said. “The killer wasn’t struggling around in the dark, pullingtheir clothes off. He didn’t have to look for this place, off the top of his head. He knew what he was going to do. He worked it all out ahead of time.”
    T HEY WERE TALKING about the line the killer took through the trees, and the angle down to the kid’s house and the distance from the town, and more about the display of the bodies, when they heard people coming in. Anderson was pushing through the brush with Braun and Schnurr, followed by three more men in bulky uniform parkas and insulated pants. “Must be the guys from Bemidji,” Del said.
    They were. Dickerson, a tall man in a tan parka, with straw-colored hair and gold-rimmed glasses, introduced himself and the other two agents, Barin and Woods. All of them gawked at the bodies as they talked. “The crime scene and special operations guys are about five minutes behind us,” Dickerson said. “The ME’s out on the road right now. The special ops guys’ll get it on film and we’ll process the scene, then we’ll get those folks out of the trees.”
    “We need a careful sweep,” Lucas said. “I mean like, crazy careful.”
    “Pretty screwed up already,” Dickerson said. Then he second-thought himself, with the sheriff right there, and diplomatically added, “We’re getting set up now. We’re bringing in a propane heater, and after we get finished crawling the