Naked Prey

said. “How well did you know Mr. Cash?”
    They pushed through a door into another small office and Calb gestured at a couple of guest chairs, then settled behind his desk as he answered. A caution flag signed by Richard Petty, and a Snap-on tools calendar from the 1980s hung on a wall. Everything else was parts books.
    “He worked for me,” Calb said earnestly, leaning across the desk to Lucas. He had a big head and a blunt nose and square, mildly green teeth the size of Chiclets—the face of a plumber or a carpenter or a character actor playing a hardworking joe. “We weren’t friends. An old Army buddy down in KC asked me if I could get him a driver’s job. I knew he was just out of jail and, tell you the truth, I’m not sure he was that much reformed. With what’s happened, it looks like he wasn’t.”
    “What do you think happened?” Del asked.
    Calb said, “Well—you know. Somebody took him out and hung him. I know it wasn’t none of my boys, because none of my boys could do that. Jane too, killing both of them. I think it’s gotta come out of KC. He was in jail, that’s what it’s gotta be. Somebody back there.”
    “How about Jane Warr?” Lucas asked. “How well did you know her?”
    “Not real well. She didn’t hang around or anything. She came up with Deon, from KC. She wasn’t much—she was a card dealer up at Moose Bay, I’m sure you know.”
    “So . . . were they renting that house? Own it? What was the situation there?”
    “They bought it, cheap—thirty-six thousand, I think. Then they fixed it up. Joe Kelly did some of the work, he’d once worked as a handyman, and they had a couple guys in from town, they did some of it.”
    “There are rumors around town that she might have had a relationship with a guy up at the casino,” Del said.
    “I wouldn’t know about that,” Calb said, shaking his head. “Like I said, she wasn’t that bright, but I don’t think she’d be dumb enough to play around on Deon. Deon had a mean streak. That’s why he was in jail. If he’d found out something like that, he would have beat on her like a big bass drum.”
    “Mmm.”
    Calb picked up a piece of paper from his desk, something with a printed IRS seal, looked at it, flicked it off to the side. “Then there’s the whole thing about Joe. Joe’s gone—and nobody knows where he went. Never said a word to anyone. One day he was here, and the next day, he wasn’t. He was from KC, too.”
    “You think it might be possible that Joe did this? That there was some kind of an argument, and for some reason . . . ”
    Calb shook his head. “Nah. To tell you the truth, Joe just didn’t have the grit to do this. Not hanging them, where he had to look them in the face.”
    “So maybe he just took off,” Del said. “Or maybe . . . ”
    “Something else I thought of, after the other BCA boys was here,” Calb continued. “If this whole thing didn’t come out of the Kansas City jail—and that’s gotta be it, in my opinion, but if it didn’t—then you oughta get up to Moose Bay. That would be the place to look, along with KC.”
    “Why?” Del asked.
    “The word around town is that Letty West saw them out there at the stroke of midnight,” Calb said. “Is that right?”
    Lucas nodded. “Close to that.”
    “Jane worked the three-to-eleven shift. She couldn’t have got home much before half-past eleven, and last night, with that ground blizzard, it was probably later. If hetook them up there to hang them at midnight, he must have grabbed her the minute she got home. So he was waiting for her—or followed her home.”
    Lucas and Del both nodded. They talked for another five minutes, and Lucas got the impression that Calb was genuinely confused by the killings. Cash had had some words from time to time with coworkers, but never anything serious, nothing that had even led to a confrontation. “Just that, you know, mechanics and guys like Deon don’t mix. He thought he was a basketball star. One of those bad gangsta dudes, whatever they call them. That’s what he thought.”
    O UTSIDE, WALKING BACK across the highway, Lucas said, “I thought about her getting off at eleven, and being hanged at twelve.”
    “I did too,” Del said. “I was saving it up.”
    “Pig’s ass,” Lucas said. “Anyway, somebody thought of it.”
    “Maybe Warr was the target,” Del said. “We’ve been doing nothing but talking about Cash.”
    “Got to get on her, get some background