Naked Prey

Outdoor Life magazine.
    “Letty, dear?” Holme said. “You’ve got visitors.”
    L ETTY W EST TURNED her head and took them in.
    She was blond, her hair pulled back tight in a short ponytail. She had warm blue eyes that Lucas thought, for an instant, he recognized from somewhere else, some other time; and an almost oval face, but with a squared jaw and freckles. She wore jeans and a blue sweatshirt and dirt-colored gym shoes that had once been white nylon. A Cokecan sat on an end table at her right hand. She might have been a female Huckleberry Finn, except for a cast of sadness about her eyes—a Pietà-like sadness, strange for a girl so young. Lucas had seen it before, usually in a woman who’d lost a child.
    A good-looking kid, Lucas thought, except for the weathering. Her face and hands were rough, and if you hadn’t been able to see her preteen figure, you might have thought she was a twenty-year-old farmer’s daughter, with too much time hoeing beans.
    “These gentlemen are here to see you from St. Paul,” Holme said. She was stooping over like older women did when they approached younger children, her voice too kindly.
    “Cops?” Letty asked.
    “State policemen from St. Paul,” Holme said.
    “Cops,” Letty said.
    Lucas looked at the kid and said, “Hi,” and then to Holme, “We can take it from here.”
    “Okay,” she said. Holme looked once at Del, as though he might be carrying a flea, and went back out the door. Lucas had the impression that she might have stopped just outside, so he said to Del, “Did I see a water fountain in the hallway?”
    “Let me check,” Del said, smiling. He stuck his head out, looked both ways, and then said, “Nope. Nothing there.” More quietly, “She’s going.”
    T HE LOUNGE HAD two candy machines and two soda machines—one Coke, one Pepsi—and smelled like floor wax and spilled coffee, with a hint of flatulence. Lucas asked the girl, “You want another Coke?”
    “This one wasn’t mine,” she said, indicating the Coke with her elbow.
    “Well, you want a first one then?”
    “If you’re buying,” she said.
    He had to smile—something about her dead-seriousness made him smile—and he got a Diet Coke for himself, tossed a can of sugared Coke to Del, and she said, “I’ll take a Pepsi, if that’s okay.”
    “That’s fine.” He slipped a dollar into the machine and pushed the Pepsi button.
    “Where’s your mother?” Del asked, as he popped the top on his Coke.
    “Probably down at the Duck Inn,” Letty said. “We figured I could handle this on my own.”
    “Yeah?” Del’s eyebrows went up.
    “She gets a little out of control sometimes,” Letty said.
    Lucas asked, “She’s still your mother. We could call her.”
    “Not much point,” Letty said. “She’s probably pretty drunk by now. She’s been at it since ten o’clock.”
    “She drinks a little, huh?” Del asked. Del had dropped onto a couch next to the door.
    Letty took a delicate sip of her Pepsi, and then said, “No, she drinks a lot. Almost all the time.”
    “Where’s your father?”
    She shrugged. “Who knows? Last anybody heard, he was in Phoenix. That was when I was a little kid.”
    “Ah,” Lucas said. “That’s tough . . . Listen, did you talk to some sheriff’s deputies this morning? Make a statement?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So what’d you tell them?”
    Her face went dark and her blue eyes skittered away from his. “About the bodies.”
    “Let’s start right from the beginning. Last night you were in your house . . . ”
    T HE NIGHT BEFORE, Letty said, she had been in bed on the second floor of the house, just across the drainage ditch from West Ditch Road. Although the windows on the north and west sides of the house had been boarded up, and the rooms closed to cut heating bills, she had her own room on the east side of the house, and still had a window.
    She was in bed, asleep, when a vehicle went past the house on West Ditch Road. That never happened in the winter. The road was used by a local farmer as back access to a couple of fields, but was used mostly for ditch maintenance, and the strangeness of a passing vehicle was enough to wake her up.
    “When I heard the car, I was afraid it was Mom,” she said. “She was out last night and it was windy and there was a little snow and if she missed the driveway . . . sometimes . . . I don’t know. If she was drinking and she tried to turn around on that ditch road, she could roll