Naked Prey

to them in the diner, when I see them, but my mom says I should stay away from them because they might be lesbians. They claim that they’re church people, and say that they take food and clothes to poor people.”
    “Do they?”
    She nodded: “I guess. I got some jeans from them once. Chics. I know a couple of them, the nuns, and one of them, Ruth Lewis . . . I really like her. She doesn’t take any shit from anyone. She says I’m as good as anybody and I should remember that.”
    “How about the Sanders guy? Why do you say he’s crazy?”
    “I just don’t like the way he looks at me. I get a bad feeling.”
    “Like what? Like he might hurt you?”
    “Like he might try to make me do something with him,” she said.
    “Okay.” He didn’t comment; he simply filed it until he knew her better. Young girls, in his experience, were sometimes psychic in their ability to pick out predators. At othertimes, they were capable of straight-faced accusations against the absolutely innocent. “He’s been replaced by lesbians?”
    “That’s just my mom,” Letty said. “I know that Ruth’s sister is going out with a guy in town. The word is, she’s no lesbian.”
    Lucas said, “Huh,” and took another look at her, and thought she might have blushed. She hurried on, pointing over the dashboard. “Those two big yellow buildings belong to Gene Calb, he fixes up cars and trucks. He’s a real good guy. If I’m out with my traps, he’ll let me come in and warm up. I can’t go into the bar or the cafe because sometimes I’m a little stinky, but he doesn’t care. I think Mom had a crush on him once, but he’s married. I heard that sometimes the lesbians drive for him, like when he needs a car delivered somewhere. I could do that, if I had a license.”
    “And you probably ought to wait for the license,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah-yeah.” She pointed: “That’s the bar, the guy who runs it is named Pete. Mom used to go there when Randy Pearce ran it, but she says she doesn’t feel welcome anymore. She says it’s a dive now, a bunch of paint sniffers from the body shop. She says they’re all jailbirds.”
    “Are they?”
    She shrugged. “Some of them been in jail, I guess, but they seem like pretty good guys.”
    On the other side of the highway: “The diner is run by Sandra Wolf, she’s pretty nice, and John McGuire has the gas station, he’s okay. And down there, right across from the barn . . . ” She pointed down a side street, where a low rambling house sat across a graveled street from a small white barn. “ . . . I don’t know what those guys do, but if I was a cop, I’d take a close look at them.”
    “Yeah? Why?”
    “I was walking through there, taking a shortcut back from the lake, and the guy came out of the house and yelled at me to get off his property. I was only about ten feet on it. And he’s got dogs, big black-and-brown ones. He had these little paper flags around his property for a while. They said, ‘Dog Training, Invisible Fence,’ but I think if he sicced one of those dogs on you, that invisible fence wouldn’t do any good. They’d go through it like it was, you know, invisible. ”
    “But all he did was yell at you.”
    “I thought it was pretty suspicious. I mean, he’s got ten acres there, and I was about three steps on it.”
    “What’s the guy do for a living?”
    “Works at Calb’s. Sometimes he’s got a woman in there. I’ve seen a couple of them, different ones. He sure does keep you off his property.”
    They were coming to the north end of town, and the house where Jane Warr and Deon Cash had lived. Two sheriff’s cars were parked outside now, along with one of the BCA cars from Bemidji.
    “If you want to stop, I can wait,” Letty said. “You might want to ask me some more questions after you look inside.”
    H E WAS BEING steered, Lucas thought—she’d shown signs of the female steering gene during the interview at the LEC, and even more on the way to Broderick. On the other hand, she was right. He pulled in and parked. A sheriff’s deputy stepped off the porch and walked toward them. Lucas got out, said, “I’m Davenport, with the BCA.”
    The deputy nodded. “Okay. One of your guys is inside.”
    Lucas stuck his head back inside the car and said “Wait,” shut the door, and followed the deputy up to the porch.
    “Where’d you get the kid?” the deputy asked, bending down a bit to get a look at Letty. She lifted a hand to