Naked Prey

sandwich, mashed potatoes, green beans, and apple pie,” Lucas said. “And about six Cokes.”
    “Two,” Letty said. “They were free refills.”
    They loaded Martha and her guitar into the back seat of Lucas’s car, and on the way north, he caught her eyes in his rearview mirror and said, “There’ll be some reporters who want to talk with you. If I were you, I’d get in the house, get your heads straight, clean up a little bit. I can get a guy from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to talk with you about your statement. About what you should or shouldn’t say or about whether you should talk at all. You could always tell them to go away.”
    “TV?” asked Martha. She straightened, touched her hair.
    “For sure,” Lucas said. “But they can be aaa . . . ” He changed directions. “ . . . jerks. Be a good idea if you talked with a BCA guy who knows how to deal with the media.”
    “All right. I’ll talk to him,” Martha said. “But I’ve been on TV many times.”
    “Okay. Then you know how to handle it.”
    “I used to work with the Chamber of Commerce, and the TV would come to me for comment.” Her eyes rolled toward the westside ditch. “And I’ve always been a singer. So I’ve been around.”
    “Okay.”
    “But I’ll talk to your person. That wouldn’t hurt.”
    As they went through Broderick, they saw a collection of media trucks at the cafe, and, just down the highway, Lucas saw Del’s Mustang at the victims’ house, next to Dickerson’s car. He slowed, did a U-turn, and said, “The guy I’m going to introduce you to is Hank Dickerson, who is the head of the whole Bureau for the northern part of the state. He’ll help you out.”
    H E LEFT THEM in the car, and as he crossed the yard, the cop outside said, “You won’t believe what they found.”
    “Yeah?”
    Joe Barin, the BCA agent, was standing at the bottom of the stairs, and when he saw Lucas, pointed up. “Take a look,” he said.
    Lucas went up the creaky stairs, and found Del with Dickerson and one of Dickerson’s crime scene crew in the main bedroom. The bedroom smelled of makeup and aftershave; a framed Michael Jordan poster hung on one wall, opposite a fake antique beer sign. The cops turned to Lucas when he walked in, and Dickerson said, “Del found their hidey-hole.”
    The hidey-hole was in the bedroom closet, and was custom-made. What appeared to be a cross-brace for the closet pole was, in fact, a cover for a four-foot-long, six-inch-high wall cache. Inside the cache, Lucas could see what appeared to be a one-kilo bag of cocaine, separated into dozens of smaller baggies; a Colt Magnum Carry Revolver, like one he had in his gun safe at home; and cash. The cash was wrapped in paper bands and took up three running feet of the cache between the bag of cocaine and the back wall.
    “Holy cats. How much?”
    “We don’t want to take it out until we get pictures, but I figure something upward of three hundred thousand, if it’s all hundreds,” Del said. “All the top bundles are hundreds—and all used. Not a single new bill, as far as you can tell from looking at the sides.”
    Lucas said to Dickerson, “You need to have three guys here with the money all the time, until it’s counted. Make sure one or two of them are sheriff’s deputies. You want both agencies involved. People are gonna ask how much of the money went into cops’ pockets.”
    Dickerson nodded. “Right, we’ll do that. Another thing. I walked across the highway and talked to Gene Calb, at the truck place. He was Cash’s boss. He said he had no idea what was going on, but he said there was another guy living here, part time, named Joe Kelly. He said Kelly disappeared a month ago and nobody’s heard from him since. The clothes in the other bedroom are Kelly’s. We got a couple charge-card receipts with his name on them.”
    “Check the companies for new activity.”
    “Under way,” Dickerson said.
    “We got another thing,” Del said. “Maybe.”
    “What?”
    “I want you to look at it,” Del said. “Then you tell me.”
    Lucas followed him, Dickerson trailing, down through the house to the basement. On the way down, he told Dickerson about Washington Fowler. Dickerson was unmoved.
    “You’re pretty calm about it,” Lucas said. “The guy goes around starting fires.”
    Dickerson smiled. “That’s your problem, general, not mine. You’re the guy who’s supposed to fix shit.”
    T HE BASEMENT WAS unfinished