Naked Prey

know we’re talking about him. But, uh, everybody says Bud’s a little . . . gay.”
    W HEN THEY’D FINISHED the meal, Lucas sent Del to Broderick, to look for dope hideouts. “We’re gonna pick up Letty’s mother,” Lucas said. “Then, I’ll see you up there.”
    As he and Letty were about to get in the car, he remembered Mitford. “Damnit . . . why don’t you go look in a store window for a minute?” he suggested to Letty, and pulled out his phone.
    Mitford picked up on the first ring, and Lucas gave him the bad news: “They’ve got pictures. I don’t know how good, because they were a couple hundred yards away, but they’ve got something.”
    “Aw, man. That’s terrible. Anything on the dope?”
    “Not yet. My partner’s on the way up to the house. If there’s anything, he’ll find it. What about Cash, and the jail business?”
    “We’re getting that now, through Rose Marie,” Mitford said. “We got a summary: he’s had a whole list of minor stuff, some drug-related, disorderly conduct, like that. Then this last one, he was originally charged with ag assault. He beat on some other guy with a steel coat tree in a hotel. They pled it down and he took a year in the county lockup on some lower-level assault. Served nine months.”
    “Doesn’t sound like something you get hanged for.”
    “I got Missouri trying to figure that out. They said they’d get back to us this afternoon, with whatever they can find,” Mitford said. “Oh, and I got two more words for you.”
    “What words?”
    “Washington Fowler.”
    “You’re joking.” Washington Fowler was a civil rights attorney from Chicago, who’d mostly given up the law in favor of incitation to riot.
    “I’m not,” Mitford said. “He’s having a press conference here, at the airport, in an hour, and he’s flying out to Fargo in a private plane in an hour and a half. The governor invited him over to the mansion for a conference, but he told us to go fuck ourselves. You should see him up there tonight.”
    “Aw, jeez.”
    “Yeah. Lucas—we need to hit Cash hard. The woman, too. Before the news. Before that film gets down here. Before Fowler gets up there.”
    “We’re looking.”
    W HEN L UCAS GOT off the phone, Letty suggested that they might find her mother at the Duck Inn, two blocks over. They ambled over, Lucas looking in the storefronts. Small towns, he’d realized a long time ago, were a little like spaceships, or ordinary ships, for that matter—they generally had to have one of everything: one McDonald’s or Burger King (couldn’t support one of each), a department store, a quick oil change, a hardware store, a feed store, a satellite-TV outlet, a bar or two. Everything needed for survival. Armstrong was like that, a lifeboat, one of everything necessary for life, all packaged in yellow-brick and red-brick two-story buildings. About one in four of the storefronts was empty, and the owners hadn’t bothered to put “For Rent” signs in the windows.
    The Duck Inn was a cliché, a plastic faux-hunter’s haven smelling of beer, with a fake old-fashioned jukebox that played CDs next to the twin coin-op pool tables. A cliché, and Letty’s mother wasn’t there. “Cop came and got her. I think they went over to the courthouse,” the bartender said.
    The courthouse was just down the block, and they found Martha West leaving the Law Enforcement Center. She wasa natural blond, like Letty, but her hair had been tinted an improbable rust color. She wasn’t weathered like Letty, but there were explosions of tiny red veins on her cheeks, so that she would always look rosy-cheeked. She wore a parka and khaki slacks, with pointed boots, and was carrying a beaten-up guitar case. She saw Letty and Lucas, and called to Letty, “Where you been? I been looking all over for you.”
    “Cops have been taking me around,” Letty said, jerking a thumb at Lucas. “This is Agent Davenport.”
    “Lucas Davenport,” Lucas said.
    “Martha West.” West’s eyes were moving slowly, and then jerking back, like a drunk drifting out of his lane, then jerking the car back straight. She was loaded, but controlling it.
    “I was about to drop Letty at your place, but I didn’t want to leave her alone,” Lucas said.
    “We ate at the Bird,” Letty said, with a slight sophisticated deprecation in her voice.
    “Really?” The mother looked at Lucas like he might have done something incorrect.
    “She had an open-faced meatloaf