Naked Prey

courthouse?”
    “Law Enforcement Center,” Zahn said. “Three years old, state-of-the-art, behind the courthouse and right across the street from Holme’s car lot. The LEC is the reason Dick Anderson’s the sheriff.”
    “He built it?” Lucas asked.
    “No. The last sheriff did. Bobby Carter,” Zahn said. He grinned at Lucas and pumped his eyebrows. “Don’t tell anybody I said so—Bobby’s a friend of mine—but he got a little too close to the construction process. Nobody went to jail, but people around here figure that a good chunk of money stuck to his fingers. He’s back to farming.”
    “What was Anderson? Not a deputy?”
    “He was a lawyer, private practice. Real estate, mostly.He worked with the county attorney, sometimes. When Bobby got into trouble and figured he better get out, he put up one of his good old boys to run. That pissed people off. Anderson jumped in at the last minute and got elected.”
    “A political wizard, huh?” Del said.
    Zahn smiled into his steering wheel as they bumped over the last set of ruts onto the highway, and turned south toward Broderick and Armstrong. “Never heard anybody use the word wizard around him,” he said. “He’s pretty much wholly owned by Barry Wilson, who’s the head of the county commission. That’s okay, most of the time. Doesn’t work too well when there’s an actual crime, or something.”
    T HE TOWN OF Broderick was a few hundred yards down the highway, and Zahn took them through it at a crawl.
    The town was built along two streets that intersected the highway at right angles. A big four-square farmhouse sat on the north edge of town, on the west side of the highway. A sheriff’s car sat in the driveway, in front of the garage, and Zahn said, “That’s the victims’ place.”
    “Okay.” It looked like a rural murder scene on a CNN report, a lonely white farmhouse surrounded by snow, with a cop car in the yard.
    Farther south, still on the west side of the highway, they passed Wolf’s Cafe, which looked like a shingle-sided rambler; the Night Owl Club; and a building with a wooden cross fixed above the door and a bare spot where a sign had been pulled down. “That used to be the Holy Spirit Pentecostal Church—holy rollers,” Zahn said. “They eventually rolled out of town. Now a bunch of women work there. Like religious women, do-gooders, I guess. Some Catholics and some Lutheran women from Lutheran Social Services, and I heard one of them’s a Quaker. One of the Catholics is a looker. The other ones are the blue-tights kind.”
    Scattered among the buildings were a half-dozen small houses, a couple of trailer homes, a corrugated-steel corn silo with a cone-shaped roof, and a red barn.
    The east side of the highway was sparser: a Handy Mart gas station and convenience store; Calb’s Body Shop & Tow, in a long yellow metal-sided pole barn; Gene’s 18, an over-the-road truck rehab place; and two more houses.
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it, that’s the town,” Zahn said, as they rolled out into the countryside.
    Del asked, “What’s with all the truck places, the body shops? Isn’t that pretty heavy industry for a place like this?”
    “Naw . . . I don’t know. Would you drive your car nine miles to get it fixed? We’re nine miles from Armstrong.”
    “I guess I would,” Del admitted. “Actually, I know I would, ’cause I have.”
    “And it was an inheritance deal. Gene inherited the body shop from his old man, and then he added the truck rehab business. Truck rehab, you can do anywhere. He does pretty good. He’s why the town started coming back. Most everybody who lives here works for him. Not a bad guy.”
    “A long way out,” Del said.
    “Some people like it lonely,” Zahn said. “Some people don’t.”
    Then they were out of town, out in the countryside. A crow or a raven was flying south, parallel to the highway, a fluttering black speck against the overcast sky, the only thing besides themselves that was moving. Del said, “Jesus Christ, it’s flat.”
    They rode in silence for a couple of minutes, then Zahn started a low, unconscious whistling. Lucas recognized the tune, probably from an elevator somewhere. “What’s that song you’re whistling?”
    “Didn’t realize I was whistling,” Zahn said. He thoughta minute. “It’s that thing from Phantom of the Opera.”
    “That’s right.” After a second, “You don’t seem to be too upset, you know, by the bodies.”
    “Well,