Naked Prey

” and then his voice was lost in the noise of the flushing toilet.
    L EWIS CAME OUT of the bathroom, pulling her cotton nightgown down over her hips, her heavy legs jiggling at him: she was annoyed. She didn’t like being shouted at, being told to shut up.
    She opened her mouth to say so, when Singleton, still staring at the radio, said, “Did you hear that?”
    “I heard you shouting at me,” she said, letting a little of the annoyance seep into her voice.
    “Somebody killed Deon and Jane,” Singleton blurted.
    The irritability vanished. “What?”
    “Gotta call . . . ” he said. Over his shoulder he added, “They were found hanged in a tree.”
    He trotted naked out of the bedroom and down the hall. Nothing bounced or bobbled when he moved: he was solid. Lewis looked at the radio, which was now firmly into the weather. More gloom. That was the essence of it. Cold and gray and maybe, if we were unlucky, a lot of snow, followed by more cold and gray.
    Jane and Deon? She called after him, “What did the radio say? What did they mean, hanged?”
    Then she heard him talking on the phone, and turned around, like a dog in its bed, looking for her jeans, couldn’t find them, and heard the phone clatter back on the hook. A moment later, Singleton came back. “Deon and Jane were found hanging in a tree across the Nine Mile Ditch. That Letty kid found them. This morning, about two minutes after I went off duty. They were naked and dead. Somebody beat the shit out of them before they were hanged.”
    “No.” She was astonished, but not distraught.
    “Yup. People are coming in from all over. State police are flying in from St. Paul. They might already be here. Ray Zahn’s going up to meet them, take them around.” He had a few more details, but not much.
    “I’ve got to go,” Lewis said. She turned her back, stepped toward the bathroom and he said, “You smell like vanilla,” and she said, absently, “That perfume . . . I wonder if your mom knows anything?”
    “Don’t know.”
    Katina hadn’t known Cash or Warr very well, and hadn’t liked either one, but their deaths could create problems. “I’ve got to get down to the church. We had some sisters getting ready to make a run. I better call Ruth right now.”
    She disappeared, half-dressed, down the hallway, and Singleton stood there, puzzling over it, staring at the very expensive cowboy boots that sat at the end of his bed. Deon and Jane?
    Lewis came thundering back. “She already heard, five minutes ago. I gotta get down there. What’re you doing, cowboy?”
    “I don’t know. Still gotta get some sleep. Then maybe see what’s going on.”
    S INGLETON SAT DOWN on the edge of the bed and ran his hands through his hair, worried. What the hell had happened? Hanged? He couldn’t get past that part. Maybe he should go look, but too much curiosity . . . who exactly knew that he’d spent time with Jane and Deon?
    Katina knew some of it, of course. Calb knew some of it, knew that he’d been at their house a few times. Maybe some of the other body shop people—the shop was just down the highway, and they may have seen him turning in Deon’s driveway.
    But he’d taken a little care not to be seen. When he was there, he’d always parked on the slab beside the garage, where you really couldn’t see the car. That hadn’t been a matter of foreboding, but just common sense. Now the common-sense care might pay off.
    W HAT ’ RE YOU DOING , cowboy? Lewis had asked.
    Loren Singleton was a cowboy, though without a horse or a ranch. He wanted to like horses, but horses always tried to bite him, sooner or later, and he’d quit trying to ride. Besides, Cadillacs were even better—old, over-the-top, seventies and eighties Cadillacs, which, for a cowboy, was close enough.
    In his own mind, Singleton was a cowboy and an artist with automotive lacquer, and only in a secondary, unimportant way, a sheriff’s deputy and a lookout for a band of car thieves. He knew, though, that something was missing in his life. He felt that all the details were there, but not the color. He felt like a black-and-white photograph—only when he met Katina did a little color begin to bleed into his life.
    In other people’s minds, Loren Singleton was, when they thought of him at all, a loner, a familiar outsider, a man always standing on the edges. A few women had tried to talk with him—he wasn’t bad looking, and the cowboy clothes seemed to give him some