Naked Prey

“But I think it’ll hold up. They’re just bringing the bodies out of the woods now.”
    “Any film?”
    Lucas told him about the helicopters: “I don’t know what they could see from out there. They’ll be able to get pictures of the bodies coming out in the body bags.”
    “But nothing of the trees?”
    “I don’t know. I’ll ask and get back to you.”
    “We’re pretty anxious,” Mitford said.
    “I’ll get back,” Lucas said. He rang off and turned to Letty: “This time, you stay in the car.”
    “It’s a free country,” she said.
    “You step out on the crime scene, which this is, and I’ll put you in a sheriff’s car and send you back to Armstrong to sit in the sheriff’s office and think about it for a few more hours,” he said.
    “Not fair,” she said.
    “So take a couple aspirins and lie down,” Lucas said.
    As he started climbing out again, Letty said, “Ex-con with bags of cocaine, huh? That’s a pretty picture.”
    “Stay,” Lucas said.
    A S HE GOT out of the car, Lucas spotted Ray Zahn leaning on the fender of his patrol car at the far end of the line. Zahn was watching the body bag being loaded into a Suburban. Lucas walked toward him. Zahn turned his head, nodded, and called, “Bringing them out.”
    “ME still in there?”
    “Yeah, he helped take them down. He had them cut the rope so they could keep it around their necks to make sure that this rope was what killed them.”
    “You think any of the TV helicopters got pictures?” Lucas asked as he turned into the trees. Zahn trailed behind.
    Zahn said, “Yeah. I don’t know how much they could see, but if you go over there diagonally, look out over toward the field, there was an open line into the hanging tree. You don’t see it right away because of the brush, but if you’re up fifteen or twenty feet, looking down at an angle . . . that’s exactly where the choppers were. They kept moving in and out of that hole.”
    “Shit.”
    “Maybe couldn’t see too much.”
    “Anything was too much.” They could see the hanging tree and a group of men around it. “The ME’s the guy in the black coat?”
    “Yeah. Henry Ford.”
    “Really? Henry Ford?”
    “Yeah. He’s out of Thief River. Good guy. Doesn’t know shit about cars.”
    A NDERSON, THE SHERIFF, Dickerson, the BCA supervisor, and a few other men were huddled to the left of the second black bag, cigarette smoke streaming away from them.
    “Cold,” Zahn mumbled from behind him. “Radio says it’s two below.”
    “I heard,” Lucas said. “But it’s gonna warm up tonight. Then maybe snow.”
    “We could use it,” Zahn said.
    Anderson had spotted them coming through the trees and turned to the ME, who had what looked like an unfiltered cigarette hanging from one lip, and said something, and Ford looked toward them. He was a white-haired man, hardly old enough to be so white—thirty-five, Lucas thought—with round gold grandpa glasses. Lucas came up, with Zahn a step behind, nodded and said, “Dr. Ford? Lucas Davenport.” They shook gloved hands, and Lucas said, “Anything useful?”
    “They almost certainly died here, if that’s useful,” Ford said, talking around the cigarette. “Cash’s neck was cut by the rope and he bled down the length of his body and there were a few drips on the ground, in the snow under his right foot, so he was alive when they hung him up. I assume the same was true with Warr, but we’ll know for sure later. Theblood on Warr’s face—I don’t believe it’s hers. I was worried about jarring anything loose, taking her down, so I took some swabs on the spot. We’ve got three short blond hairs, not hers, not Cash’s.”
    “Good. Excellent. Any signs of drug use?”
    Ford took the cigarette out of his mouth. “Both of them were raw around the nostrils, like they might be if they used cocaine. Cash had some scars on both of his forearms and Warr on her right forearm and both feet, that could be from needles. I couldn’t swear to the cocaine because we haven’t seen much of that here lately. We’ll need a few hours to verify all of this. We’ll do the full range of toxicology, of course.”
    “Okay. Quicker is better, though.” He looked out toward the choppers, still hanging south of the crime scene. He could see them clearly, just above the brush. They would have had a straight shot of the bodies hanging from the tree. To Dickerson: “There’s no chance that you had the bodies down before the