Naked Prey

place, we’ll melt out the snow and make sure nothing was trampled down into it.”
    “Excellent.”
    “You and I ought to go off somewhere, and decide who’s going to do what.” Again, a bureaucratic wariness.
    “Del and I don’t have anything to do with crime scenestuff,” Lucas said. “That’s all yours—but make sure the ME takes a close look at the woman’s mouth. That blood on her face looks likes it might not be hers. We’ll want a DNA on it and we’ll want her mouth cleaned out.”
    “Sure.”
    “Otherwise, we can chat if you want, but basically, Del and I just go around and talk to people.” Lucas said. “Your guys should do the same thing—interview whoever you want. Duplicate us. No problem.”
    “So we’re not . . . one investigation.” Dickerson looked skeptical.
    “Nope.” Lucas shook his head. “Del and I have done this a lot, in Minneapolis. We find it’s handy, with the hard ones, to have two investigations running side by side, if you can do it without a lot of in-fighting. You get different ideas going.”
    Dickerson shrugged. “It’s all right with me. These two guys”—he turned a thumb to Barin and Woods—“will be doing all the work. I’m going to get us set up, hang around today and maybe tomorrow, and then I’ll be on call down in Bemidji. I understand the governor’s taken an interest.”
    Lucas said, “He has. He’s worried about the image. Two people hanged, naked, the man’s black.”
    “Got a pretty good dick on him, too,” said Schnurr, the sheriff’s deputy.
    Lucas turned on him, his teeth showing. “Shut the fuck up. Honest to Christ, if I hear anybody talking like that, I’ll personally slap the shit out of him.”
    “Didn’t mean nothin’,” Schnurr said. He shuffled his feet like a child who’d been bad in class; but he had mean eyes.
    “If a reporter heard that, or even heard you’d said it, sheriff’s deputies making cracks like that, we’d have twice as much trouble as we do now. So keep your fuckin’ mouthshut,” Lucas finished. To Anderson: “I don’t know how much you like your job, but your whole goddamn county is about to get smeared in the national media. Do you understand that?”
    “I . . . don’t know,” Anderson said, uncertainly.
    “Believe me, it’s gonna happen. And one asshole making comments like this guy, it could mean that you don’t only lose your job, but you gotta move to Arizona and change your name.”
    Anderson glanced nervously at Schnurr and said, “We’ll keep a lid on it.”
    Dickerson was peering up at the bodies, embarrassed, Lucas thought, to be from the same agency as Lucas. “You better,” Lucas snarled. He looked again at Schnurr, nailing him in place, then asked Anderson, “The little girl who found the bodies—is she in town?”
    “Giving a statement,” Anderson said.
    “We’d appreciate it if you’d have somebody call in, tell them to keep her there until Del and I have a chance to talk to her.”
    Anderson nodded.
    Lucas said to Dickerson, “Good luck. You guys got it.”
    “We got it,” Dickerson said.
    “N EED TO GET to that little girl,” Lucas said, as they walked back out to the line of cars. “If the sheriff’s crew is as bad as it looks, we need to talk to her before somebody fucks her up.”
    “Gotta get some wheels,” Del said.
    “Get them at a car dealer, probably, if we get there fast,” Lucas said. “Tomorrow morning, you won’t be able to rent a car anywhere north of Fargo.”
    “Zahn oughta know.”
    Z AHN DID KNOW. “Holme’s Motors in Armstrong,” he said. “Fix you right up. How many do you want?”
    “Two?”
    As they bounced slowly down the dirt road, past the girl’s house to the highway, Zahn fumbled out a cell phone, pushed a speed-dial button, and said, “This is Ray Zahn. Let me talk to Carl.” And a moment later, “Hey. I gotta couple of cops in town from St. Paul. They need two cars, good shape. Uh-huh.” He turned to Lucas: “What kind of credit card?”
    “American Express or Visa, whatever they take,” Lucas said.
    “American Express or Visa . . . yeah. Yeah. Ten minutes. Yeah, see you then.” He hung up. “All fixed,” he said. “One of you gets a loaded three-year-old Oldsmobile, the other one gets a six-year-old five-liter Mustang.”
    “I’ll take the one with the best heater,” Del said.
    “We need to get over to the sheriff’s department, quick as we can,” Lucas said. “Is that the