Naked Prey

concrete block and exposed joists, but with a new-looking furnace, a new hot-water heater, and new wiring and fluorescent lights. In one corner, a new bathroom had been built in a beige-painted cubicle, with a standard toilet and a sink, and a fiberglass shower booth with sliding glass doors.
    Del said, “Well?”
    “Well, they just remodeled it,” Lucas said. He looked around, saw nothing of obvious interest. Del had to be thinking about the bathroom, and Lucas went that way. The bathroom was bare, and smelled of disinfectant. Large, lots of room to move around. Lucas swung the entrance door, then knocked on it. Looked like wood, sounded like a metal fire door. Knocked on the walls: not drywall, as he’d expected, but painted plywood. And heavy, probably three-quarter inch. Yale keyhole lock with a bolt, lockable from the outside. No keyhole on the inside . . .
    He stepped back and said to Del and Dickerson, “It’s a goddamn cell.”
    Del turned to Dickerson. “You heard it here first.”
    T WENTY MINUTES LATER, Lucas, Del, and Dickerson walked through the gathering collection of cop cars in the yard. Letty was sitting on the hood of the car again, while her mother waited inside. When she saw them coming, sheclimbed out, and Lucas introduced Dickerson. “Hank will help you with the TV commentary. And he’ll get you home.”
    “Cops say you found a bundle of money in there,” Letty said to Del. “That right?”
    “Just a rumor,” Del said.
    Dickerson, looking from Lucas to Del, asked, “What’re you guys doing next?”
    “Gonna talk to St. Paul, and maybe wander around some more,” Lucas said. He looked back at the house. “This thing is getting interesting.”

7
    F REE OF L ETTY and her mother, Lucas and Del caucused at the cars. “Moose Bay?” Del asked.
    “That’s a big topic,” Lucas said. “Why don’t we talk to this Calb guy?”
    They both looked across the highway at the yellow metal buildings with the trucks parked out front, and Del nodded.
    Calb had two buildings, an auto-body and tow building, and a truck-rehab building, connected by an unheated shed-like walkway. They went into the auto-body building, which consisted of a small office and a series of repair bays at the back; a woman in the office directed them through the walkway to the truck-rehab wing. The truck area was bigger and more open, forty feet long and thirty wide, with a thirty-foot ceiling; it smelled of diesel and welding fumes. A row of red toolboxes sat at the back, and an electric heater was mounted high on one wall and glowed down over a burgundy Peterbilt. Three men were clusteredaround the open door of the truck, peering inside, and one of them asked, “What the fuck were they carrying in there? You think there was some acid dripping in there?”
    “I don’t know . . . ” Then one of the men saw Lucas and Del, and nudged the heavyset man who was deepest into the truck. He backed up, saw them, stood upright, and asked, “Can we help you fellas?”
    “We’re with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Lucas said. Del held up an ID case. “We need to talk to Gene Calb.”
    “That’s me . . . I’ll be with you in just a second.” He turned to one of the other men. “I don’t know, Larry. I’d go after it with a grinder, and if you don’t get good metal . . . we’ll cut another piece off a wreck and weld ’er in. There’s a hulk down in Worthington, out of a fire, oughta work.”
    “Looks like it’s rotten all the way to the bottom. I could push a nail through it,” said an emaciated man in oil-stained Mr. Goodwrench coveralls.
    “Well, cut through it and find out.”
    Calb shook his head as he turned to Lucas and Del. “The whole floor of the passenger side is eaten away. Not the driver’s side, just the passenger side. It’s not rust, exactly, but it’s rotten. Like they spilled acid on it or something and then let it soak for a few years.”
    One of the other men said, “Cat pee? Cat pee’ll rot holes in hardwood floors.”
    “Well, Jesus, how could he stand the smell?” Calb shook his head once more. “If I were you, Larry, I’d keep my hands out of it.”
    “You sure as shit can count on that,” said the man called Larry.
    T O L UCAS AND Del, Calb said, “C’mon this way, fellas. We’ll go back to my office. You want to know about Deon?I already talked to some of you guys. With the BCA, right?”
    “We’re doing a little back-checking,” Lucas