Naked Prey

raspberry. Barely five feet tall, shewas jolly and fat, with black eyes and brilliant white teeth; she wore boot-cut jeans with a western shirt and a turquoise necklace. She remembered the man in the watch cap. “He looked lonely and sad,” she said. “Pretty good-looking, though. Polite.”
    “Any particular characteristics that might tell us about him?” Del asked.
    “Maybe,” she said. “You think he killed Jane Warr?”
    “We need to talk to him,” Lucas said.
    “Jane was a big pain in the ass,” Small Bear said.
    “You don’t hang people for being a pain in the ass,” Del said. “You wouldn’t have wanted to see her this morning when they cut her down.”
    Small Bear exhaled and said, “I know one thing that might be important. When he opened his billfold to give me some bills, I saw that he had a black card. One of those American Express black cards.”
    Del looked at Lucas and Lucas shrugged.
    Small Bear looked from Lucas to Del to Lucas and said, “You don’t know about the black cards?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lucas said.
    “We get every card in the world in here,” Hoffman said. “The black card is called the Centurion Card. To get one, you gotta spend a hundred and fifty thousand bucks a year with American Express. I bet there aren’t a hundred of them in Minnesota.”
    “You’re kidding me,” Lucas said. “A hundred and fifty thousand a year?”
    “That’s what I hear.”
    Del said to Lucas, “That ought to narrow the list.”
    L UCAS STEPPED AWAY, took out his cell phone, found a slip of paper with Neil Mitford’s personal cell-phone number and punched it in. Mitford answered on the secondring: “This is Davenport. Things are moving here. We could have a photo and maybe a name pretty quick—but we need some help.”
    “What?”
    “We need somebody to get to American Express. Maybe there’s a local office or a local official we can give a subpoena to, but we need all the names of all the Centurion Card members from Minnesota and the Kansas City area. Maybe somebody could feed them a list of ZIP codes. We need it quick as we can.”
    “Wait a minute, let me jot this down.” After a second of silence, Mitford said, “What the fuck is a Centurion Card?”
    “Some kind of exclusive card,” Lucas said. “The casino people say they’re pretty rare.”
    “I’ll find out the fastest way to do it, and get it to you.”
    “See if you can get a printable list from them, and fax it to the sheriff’s office here. And tell them, you know, it involves a multiple murder. Put a little heat on them.”
    “I can do heat,” Mitford said. “I’ll call you.”
    H OFFMAN HAD WALKED away while Lucas was talking; when he got off the phone, Del said, “Hoffman’s gone to get Anderson. His brother-in-law.”
    “Damnit. I would have liked to have been there, see how the guy takes it.”
    “He went over there . . . he said he’d be right back, maybe we could catch him.”
    T HEY FOUND H OFFMAN and Anderson just outside an employee’s canteen off the main floor. Anderson was a thin, dark-haired white man with big crooked teeth and a small narrow mustache. He was waving his arms around,his face harsh and urgent, as he talked to Hoffman, who leaned against a wall with his arms crossed. Lucas heard, “Goddamnit, Clark, you know me better than that, I just ate lunch . . . ”
    Lucas came up, with Del trailing, and said, “There you are.”
    Hoffman turned and pushed away from the wall. To Anderson he said, “These are the cops.”
    Anderson pushed a finger at Lucas: “What the hell are you doing, telling Clark that I’ve been cheating on Suzie?”
    “Didn’t exactly say that,” Lucas said. “We heard from a guy in town that you were pretty friendly with Jane Warr.”
    “What guy?”
    “Can’t tell you, unless we bust you. Then you’d have a right to know,” Lucas said, hardening up. “Your lawyer could get the name.”
    Anderson shriveled back. “My lawyer? What the hell is going on?”
    Del edged in, the beat-up good guy. “Listen: just tell us—how well did you know her?”
    “I wasn’t screwing her, if that’s what you mean.”
    “How well?” Del pressed.
    Anderson took a step back, and the stress in his voice dropped a notch. “A little bit. She used to deal in Vegas and I worked out there for a while, years ago. I didn’t know her then—we weren’t even there at the same time—but you know, working in Vegas was