Naked Prey

victims’ house in Broderick. Later on, they’d hook up for an afternoon snack, and then go out to the casino and talk with Warr’s coworkers.
    Letty listened to them talk, then told Del, “There’s four motels. You want to know where they’re at?”
    Del said yes, and Letty started to explain the layout of the town, drawing with a piece of gravel on the blacktop, her hands rough, red, but apparently impervious to the cold. Halfway through the explanation, Lucas cut her off, and they walked over to the courthouse, found the county clerk, and bought maps of both the town and the county. Letty read the maps well enough and, with the clerk, pinpointed the motels.
    Outside again, Del took off in the Mustang, and Lucas and Letty headed back toward Broderick. As they crossed the river, Lucas noticed a dense spread of ice-fishing shacks at a bend to the north. A few were simply flat-topped boxes with doors, while others were more elaborate, with pitched roofs and American flags on door poles. Then the river was behind them and they followed the railroad tracks past the pastel Cape Cods and the dwindling businesses and quickly were back on the prairie.
    “You ever been out here before?” Letty asked after a while.
    “Not exactly here,” Lucas said. “Been over to Oxford.”
    “You got a gun with you?”
    “Yes.”
    “You ever shoot anybody?”
    “Maybe,” Lucas said.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “It means you should mind your own business,” Lucas said.
    He tried not to be mean about it, but Letty stayed on top of him. “Don’t want to talk about it?” Letty asked.
    He looked at her. “Why don’t we change the subject?”
    She shrugged. “Okay, if you don’t want to talk about it.”
    A FTER A WHILE, “You got any kids?”
    “Two,” Lucas said. “A daughter, and my wife just had a baby boy.”
    “What’s your wife do?”
    “She’s a doctor.”
    “I’d like to be a doctor,” Letty said, looking out at the countryside. The countryside reminded Lucas of a modern painting he’d once seen at the Walker Art Center as a young cop, out on a sexual assault call. The painting had been done in two colors—a narrow band of black on thebottom, a wider band of gray above it. He still remembered the name: Whistler in the Dark: Composition in White and Gray. If the artist had known about it, he could have called it Winter Landscape, Broderick, Minnesota.
    “Or maybe run a beauty salon,” Letty was saying. “We’ve got three beauty salons in Armstrong, two good ones and one bad one.”
    “Mmm,” Lucas said.
    “If I was a cop, I’d put secret agents in every beauty shop in town. Teach them to be hairdressers, but, y’know, they’d all have tape recorders and cameras hidden away. Like spies.”
    “Take a lot of cops,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, but you’d know everything. I go to Harriet’s Mane Line with my mom, and the salon ladies know everything that’s going on. Everything. That’d be pretty good for a cop.”
    Lucas looked at her again, more carefully. “You’re right. That’s absolutely right. Maybe you’ll grow up to be a cop.”
    “I could do that,” she said comfortably. “Wouldn’t mind carrying a gun. If I’d had a real gun this morning, I wouldn’t have been scared at all. All I had was that crappy .22.”
    T HE THING THAT made traveling across the land so strange, Lucas realized, was that you did nothing: you simply sat in the car and time passed. Driving almost anywhere else, the road moved: you went up and down hills and around curves and past houses, speed zones came and went, cars and trucks went by, and something new was always popping up. Out here, the road was dead straight, with hardly anything on it, or at the sides. Rather than whipping around a curve over the crest of a hill, andfinding a town tucked away, surprising you, here the towns came up as a slowly growing lump on the horizon; you could see them, it seemed, for hours before you arrived.
    Though Broderick arrived quickly enough: Lucas slowed as they came into town. “So what’s where?”
    “Okay. So there’s the church,” she said, pointing across the highway. “It used to be run by Don Sanders. He’s kinda crazy and I stay away from him. For the last, I don’t know, maybe two or three years, there are a bunch of women living there. People call them the nuns.”
    “Are they nuns?”
    “A couple of them are. They wear old-fashioned dresses.”
    “Okay. You know them?”
    “I talk