Naked Prey

him.
    “She was downtown making a statement. You know her?”
    “Sure. I know everybody around here. She’s a pretty interesting kid. Don’t let no grass grow under her feet, that’s for sure. Gonna wind up rich.”
    “Got a nice line of bullshit,” Lucas said.
    “First thing you notice,” the deputy said. He pushed the door open and Lucas stepped into the house, into an entry with a coat closet to one side. He continued into a living room, where one of the BCA guys he’d been introduced to that morning was standing at the bottom of a double-wide staircase, talking on a cell phone. He saw Lucas and held up a finger. Lucas nodded and looked around.
    The place smelled of macaroni, cheese, marijuana, and blood, not a new smell in the few hundred houses he’d been through on homicide cases. To his right, in the corner, was a wide-screen Panasonic television, and on a table next to it, a big Sony. A game console was plugged into the Sony, while the Panasonic had boxes for a DVD and satellite dish. A love seat and a leather chair faced the TVs.
    Straight ahead, behind the BCA guy, on the other side of the staircase landing, a hallway led to the kitchen. Lucas could see a breadmaker sitting on a counter next to a microwave.
    To the right, an archway led into another room, with a dining table in the center of it. The table was stacked with boxes, most of them from small electric appliances. Fifty or sixty magazines, mostly on sex, European cars, or travel, were in heaps along one wall. A Bose Wave Radio sat upside down under the table, as though it had fallen off; it was still plugged into a wall socket. A set of earphones, one earmuff broken off, lay on the other side ofthe table, along with a generic-brand bottle of ibuprofen. A box of Wheat Thins sat on top of the litter of boxes on the table.
    The generally upset state didn’t have the look of deliberation, of a search—it simply looked like bad housekeeping.
    “Hey . . . ” The BCA guy came up behind him. “Look at this.” He led the way to the kitchen. On the way he said, “I’m Joe Barin, by the way, we were introduced . . . ”
    “This morning,” Lucas said.
    “Here,” Barin said. “Be careful where you put your feet. We’ve got some blood spatter.”
    He was pointing into a wastebasket on the floor by the kitchen door. When Lucas looked inside, he saw two tiny Ziploc-type bags, the kind used by hardware stores to hold small collections of screws, washers, cotter pins, and the like, and by dope dealers to parcel out measured amounts of cocaine, heroin, and crystal methadrine. There were no cotter pins in sight.
    “You pull one out?”
    “Not yet. You can see there’s some residue. I wouldn’t stake my child’s life on it, but it’s coke.”
    “They were dealing?”
    “We looked around, can’t find any more baggies. So maybe just using. Or maybe we’ll find more stuff later . . . and then, we’ve got these clothes.” He pointed to another corner, at a heap of clothing. “It’s all cut to shreds. This is where the killer cut the clothes off them.”
    “So he comes in with a gun, cuffs them up, tapes them up, then cuts the clothes off them.”
    “Beats the shit out of the guy, of Cash.”
    “Beats the shit out of Cash, and then drags them both out the door, and throws them into his truck, and takes them down the road, and hangs them.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Tough guy.”
    “Fruitcake.”
    L UCAS LOOKED AROUND the kitchen for a few more seconds: nothing for him here, that he could see. The crew might get something. “What’s upstairs?”
    “Three bedrooms and two bathrooms,” Barin said. “One of the bedrooms doesn’t look too used. One of the other ones has a double bed, and there’s some clothes hanging in a closet, a man’s clothes, and some stuff in the bathroom, but it doesn’t look like it’s been used lately. The clothes are not Cash’s, they’re for a bigger guy. The third bedroom, the big one, was their regular bedroom. Clothes for both Warr and Cash. Lots of clothes. Lots of cashmere.”
    “Let’s get the crime scene crew over quick as we can,” Lucas said. “Tear this place apart. If they were dealing, that would explain a lot. Could be punishment killings.”
    “Okay.” Barin hesitated. “I don’t exactly understand the chain-of-command here . . . ”
    “Where’s Dickerson?”
    “Still out at the scene, I guess.”
    “He’s in charge on your side, I’m running my own thing. What I