Naked Prey

there. They twisted.” She made a twisting motion with her fingers.
    They thought about that some more, Lucas groping for something to say that might comfort her, but he couldn’t think of anything. After a moment, he asked, “Listen, why’d you think it was your mom’s car going down the road?” Lucas asked. “Anything about it?”
    She thought for a second, then nodded. “Yeah. It was a Jeep. I think it was. A Jeep Cherokee’s got this big square red taillight . . . ” She drew a big square taillight in the air. “And then a big square yellow light under that, that’s your turn signal. Then there’s a little white light which is the backup light, inside the yellow light. That’s what I saw on the road. Those red taillights like my mom’s, and then, when he was backing around down there, when I was afraid she’d go in the ditch, it had those white lights inside the big square yellow light—the yellow lights didn’t come on, but you could see them because of the white light inside them.”
    “Jeep Cherokee,” Lucas said.
    “Yup. I didn’t think of it this morning, when I was talking to the other cops.”
    They talked for a few more minutes, and Lucas finally smiled at her and said, “Okay. I’m out of questions.”
    “I got one,” Del said. “I’m a city guy. How do you trap muskrats?”
    She told them quickly, about the difference between feeding platforms and houses. “The houses look like little tepees made out of sticks and cattails and stuff. You see them all over on marshes. Little piles. I went down to the Cities once with my mom and I saw a place by the airport that had more houses and feeders than I ever saw in my life.”
    “Really.” Del was charmed. “By the airport?”
    “Yup. Anyway, after freeze-up, you can open the houses and some of the big feeders with a machete or a hay knife and slip a trap right inside; there’s a whole bunch of rooms in a big house. So you put the trap inside, and there’s a chain off the trap, and you pin that down outside the house. Then you patch the hole in the house, so it’s dark in there, and they’ll walk right into the trap. Then, there’s a hole in the bottom of the house that leads under the ice—that’s how they get around after freeze-up—and when the trap snaps, they jump through the hole to try to get away, and they drown. I use mostly Number 1 jump traps.”
    “So, what do you do, pull on the trap to see if there’s a body . . .  ?”
    She shook her head, groped in her pocket, found a pencil stub, and got a napkin. “The chain comes out of the house like this . . . ” She drew a chain with a bigger circular link at the end. “Then you put your pin through this circle, so that the ’rat can’t pull it free. But you keep the pin in the middle of the circle, when you set it, so if something hits the trap inside, it’ll pull the circle against the pin. That way, you can walk up to a house and see right away if anything has hit the trap.”
    “Huh.”
    “You can usually get four or five of them out of a house. You always got to leave some breeders.”
    “How much do you make during a winter?” Lucas asked.
    She grinned at him and shook her head. “That’s not polite.”
    “You’re a kid,” he said.
    “Tell that to the feds when they want their taxes.”
    “T HINK YOU COULD give me a ride home?” Letty asked. She crushed the empty Pepsi can in her hands, and tossed it into a waste basket.
    “What about your mom?” Lucas asked.
    “She can always get a ride from one of her friends,” Letty said. “I don’t want to hang around all day.”
    Lucas nodded. “Okay. But let’s go check with Mrs. Holme, see if they had anything else set up.”
    “I’d rather ride with you,” Letty said. “I don’t like the deputies. They give me a hard time.”
    “You get in trouble?”
    “Mostly about driving my mom’s car. But I got no other way to get around, and it’s too far to walk to town.”
    “How old are you?” Del asked.
    “Twelve,” she said.
    “That’s a little young to be driving, don’t you think?”
    “Might be for some people,” she said. Then, “If you give me a ride, I could show you around Broderick. I know every house in the place.”
    “Sounds like a deal,” Lucas said.
    H OLME WAS HAPPY enough to let Lucas take Letty home. Outside, in the parking lot, they decided that Del would hit the local motels, and ask about strangers driving Jeeps. Lucas would take a look at the