Naked Prey

choppers arrived?”
    “No.” The BCA man shook his head. “If they’ve got the right cameras, they got the shot. If we’d had another twenty minutes . . . ”
    “They tried to come right in and we waved them off,” Anderson said. “Not much more we could do.”
    “Spilled milk,” Lucas said.
    T HE BCA CRIME scene crew was already working the site, and Lucas drifted over and spoke for a moment to the supervisor. “Nothing. No good footprints—everything is frozen, and the snow didn’t hold anything,” the man said. “The length of stride and the size of the foot would make the killer a male, but hell . . . we didn’t think a woman dragged them back there anyway. Looks like just one guy, if that means anything.”
    “Yeah, it does,” Lucas said.
    “So it’s one guy. Not much else—we’re gonna clean the whole place out, though, right down to the dirt.”
    L UCAS TURNED TO go back to Dickerson, but the phone rang again and he pulled it out and punched it up.
    “You’re not going to believe it,” Del said. “There was a guy staying at the Motel 6 the night before last, driving a ’95 Jeep Cherokee, paid with cash. I’ve got his registration card, he shows Minnesota plates, including the tag number. I’m gonna run it, see what happens. The night clerk says he saw the guy again last night—that he pulled into the parking lot as if he were going to check in again, but he didn’t. He just sat in the lot for a few seconds, then pulled away. The clerk says he was a white guy with a short beard, big guy, well-spoken. He was wearing a dark blue parka and a watch cap. If Letty’s right on the time, he would have been in the motel parking lot about an hour earlier. Maybe a little less.”
    “Huh. Anybody else stay in the room since him?”
    “One guy last night, who already checked out, and the room’s been cleaned. We’ve got a credit card on the guy who checked out, so we should be able to get him for some prints. I locked up the room and put some duct tape on the doors.”
    “What else?”
    “If I don’t get something to eat in the next twelve minutes, my ass is gonna fall off.”
    “Got a place?”
    “There’s a cafe called the Red Red Robin. It comes reluctantly recommended.”
    “See you there in fifteen,” Lucas said.
    He went back to Dickerson and they stepped away from the crowd to talk. Lucas told him about the dope baggies atthe Cash farmhouse. “I was just heading back down there,” Dickerson said. “Anything else?”
    “We interviewed the kid and she thinks the killer’s car was a Jeep Cherokee,” Lucas explained and outlined the conversation with Del. “So the guy at the motel saw the Jeep not long before Letty saw the lights out here on the road. It makes me nervous to say it, but it fits.”
    “Gotta process the room,” Dickerson said. He was interested now. “Priority one.”
    “It’s sealed with official duct tape,” Lucas said. “Feel free.”
    “Do any good for us to talk with the kid?”
    “I don’t think so. She mostly just found them,” Lucas said. “You can take a crack at her if you want.”
    “We got other stuff to do, if you think you got it all.”
    “I’m taking her back downtown, to see if I can keep her away from the reporters for a while,” Lucas said. “We’ll talk to her some more.”
    L ETTY WAS SITTING on the hood of the Oldsmobile, apparently impervious to the cold, when Lucas got back to the road. “Couldn’t breathe inside the car,” she said. “But I stayed right here.” She hopped off the passenger side, popped the door, and climbed in. “The bodies in the bags looked stiff, like bags full of boards,” she said, as Lucas got in and fumbled out the key.
    “Uh. You know a place called the Red Red Robin?”
    “The Bird. Downtown. Nice place. My mom and I went there once for Thanksgiving.”
    “I’m going in to get a bite to eat with Del. I hate to leave you without your mother.” He didn’t mention that he hated even more to leave her with a pack of reporters outside her door. “Want to come?”
    “Sounds good to me,” Letty said. “If you’re buying.”
    “I’m buying.”
    On the way, Letty asked, “They were stiff in the bags. Is that like, rigor mortis?”
    Lucas shook his head. “No. They were frozen. Like Popsicles.”
    T HE R ED R ED Robin was a storefront cafe with a robin painted on a swinging wooden sign outside the door, like the sign on an English pub. Inside, a dozen red-topped stools