Naked Prey

sort of a big deal for both of us. When we were both off at the same time, we’d eat lunch together, here in the canteen, sometimes. But most of the time, just in a group, only once or twice, when there was just the two of us.” He looked at Hoffman: “Clark, I wouldn’t bullshit you.”
    “All right,” Hoffman said.
    Del said, “Did you ever meet any of her friends, Deon Cash or Joe Kelly?”
    “I didn’t really meet them, but I knew who they were, because they were black,” Anderson said. To Hoffman: “That’s another reason I wouldn’t do it, Clark. Even if I’d wanted to. You ever see her boyfriend? The guy was like some kind of ghetto killer or something.”
    “All right,” Hoffman said again.
    “She ever say anything about them?” Lucas asked. “Or was she worried about anything? Did she seem apprehensive, or scared?”
    “A few weeks back, I don’t know, three or four weeks, the Joe guy took off. Or disappeared. She didn’t know where he went, she said he just vanished. She was pretty worried about him, but that’s all I know. She never did say if he ever showed up.”
    “She seemed scared about it?”
    Anderson dipped his chin, thinking, scratched his head, straightened his hair—a little relieved grooming, Lucas thought—and said, “Maybe scared. Sort of more freaked out, like when you find out something weird about someone. Like if somebody told you your best friend was a child molester, or something.”
    “Did you see a guy watching her last night? A big guy.”
    “Wasn’t here last night. I was out with my wife,” Anderson said, leaning on the wife.
    “Okay,” Lucas said. “Tell me this: how much coke was she pushing out on the floor here?”
    “What?”
    “Cocaine,” Del said.
    Anderson looked at them like they were crazy. “She wasn’t dealing cocaine. No way. I woulda known about that. You get a bunch of dealers and one of them is pushing, everybody knows. There was nothing like that about Jane.”
    “She use it?” Lucas asked.
    Anderson’s eyes flicked away. “Maybe . . . I never saw her use it.” He unconsciously rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “But she used to get a little cranked, and once or twice I thought she might’ve gone back to the ladies’ can and done something.”
    “You didn’t tell us,” Hoffman said.
    “I didn’t know,” Anderson said. “Hell, you even hint at something like that around here, and the next thing you know, somebody’s looking for a job. And I kinda liked her.”
    “But not too much,” Hoffman said.
    “No. Jesus, Clark.” Then his eyes narrowed, and he turned to Lucas. “Did that asshole Bud Larson put you on me?”
    Lucas kept his face straight and shook his head. “Haven’t heard any Larsons mentioned,” he said. “Why?”
    “Nothin’,” Anderson said. To Hoffman: “He was the guy who complained that we cold-decked him. Last week? Mean-looking guy?”
    Del looked at Lucas and shook his head.
    W HEN THEY WERE finished with Anderson—still a worried man, despite Hoffman’s assurances that he believed him—they went looking for other employees who remembered the big man. Les, the computer operator, brought down the first printout of the man’s face: it was fuzzy, but would be recognizable in context.
    Nobody else remembered talking to him.
    By the time they finished talking with other employees, Les had saved a dozen shots of the man, and two stitched-together composites, to a CD that could be opened on any PC with the Imaging program, which he said was most of them.
    “We still need the actual tapes,” Lucas told him.
    “We’re pulling them; we’ll hang on to them,” he said.
    T HEY’D BEEN IN the casino for an hour and a half when Mitford called back. “We’re running with Amex. They accepted a faxed subpoena and they’re putting the list together now. They say they’ll have it in half an hour. I’m having copies faxed to the sheriff’s office up there, and another one down here. They say there might be a couple hundred names.”
    “We’ll head downtown,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a CD with some photos on it.”
    “We’d like to see some down here.”
    “I’ll e-mail them to you. You gonna be there?”
    “Until you guys go to bed,” Mitford said. “Washington just had a press conference in Grand Forks and he says the law enforcement agencies must be complicit in this crime—I’m reading this—either actually or morally. Then . . . ah, blah blah blah. I