Naked Prey

a way, they’d been lucky.
    N OW THEY HAD the Sorrell problem. It wasn’t Joe; it was Sorrell. And there was only one way, as far as he could see, that Sorrell could possibly have found out about Deon and Jane, and that was through Joe. Sorrell had gotten him.
    Had Joe given up his name as well? Or Mom’s? Had Deon or Jane given them up?
    Damn. Like a sweater unraveling. He thought about it for a few more minutes, and then called Mom.

9
    D EL HAD GOTTEN them rooms in a Motel 6, but after Small Bear identified Sorrell with the photos, they decided to head back to the Cities. The helicopter had already gone, so they’d be driving.
    “We have to put together an approach,” Lucas told Dickerson, as they rode back to Armstrong in Anderson’s truck. “You gotta stay right on top of the DNA samples. The lab’ll want to take three or four days, but you can get them in two days if you push. Also: we need that formal statement from Small Bear. Get her while she’s hot.”
    “You gonna bust him?”
    “I’ll talk to the governor,” Lucas said. “I’d rather have the DNA done first, so we know that what we’ve got is good. But there’s some politics in this, so—I dunno. If the DNA’s good, we’ll have him cold, and what I’d like to do is talk to him without any lawyers around. Find out what the hell happened. How did he pin them down? What was the sequence? Were there more people involved?”
    Dickerson nodded. “All right. He was in the Army, so he’ll have prints on file. I’ll get them and run them against everything we’re taking out of his hotel room, so we’ll have that, too. I’ll get all the tapes from Moose Bay, see if we can get him following her out of the casino . . . ”
    “Need statements from everybody . . . ”
    “I wish you’d stay around for when Washington gets up here,” Anderson said to Lucas. Anderson was behind the wheel. “I don’t know exactly what to do with him.”
    “Don’t talk to the guy,” Lucas said. “Be too busy solving the crime. This guy makes a living with confrontation, and you cannot win. Have somebody designated to handle your information and to deal with him—a woman would be best, somebody a little older and motherly, so if he really ripped on her, he’d seem like an asshole. But you oughta stay away.”
    “I gotta say something,” Anderson protested. “It’s my town.”
    “Man, I’m telling you, if you go out there and meet him, he’s gonna fuck you,” Lucas said. “If you want to be on TV, that’s okay. Have somebody keep an eye on Washington, and talk to the TV people while he’s taking a nap, or eating. Be really polite about him—welcome him to the community—but do not talk to him.”
    Anderson looked at Dickerson. “What do you think?”
    “Lucas is right. If you talk to him with a TV camera around, he’ll hand you your ass. If you gotta talk to him, do it privately, in your office. Don’t let the cameras in.”
    “If you can hold him off until the day after tomorrow, then the whole thing may be moot,” Lucas said. “We’ll jump on Sorrell, and leak the story like crazy. Washington probably won’t want to be identified as defending people who kidnapped and murdered a little girl.”
    “All right, all right,” Anderson said. He mutteredsomething under his breath, then said, “You guys are treating me like the village idiot.”
    After a moment of silence, Lucas asked, “Think you could do pretty good surgery?”
    “What?” Anderson said.
    “Surgery. You think you could do a heart bypass tomorrow if you had to?”
    Now Anderson was pissed. “Is this leading to something?”
    “Yeah. This: Washington is to confrontation and publicity what a heart surgeon is to bypass surgery. You shouldn’t be embarrassed if you’re not as good at it as he is. None of us are. It’s his specialty. He’s not interested in getting to know you, or understanding the problem, or solving the crime. He’s here to fuck somebody and raise some money for himself. If you give him a target, he’ll fuck you. Nothing personal—it’s just his job.”
    They rode in silence for a while, then Dickerson said, “I’m seeing stars, I think.”
    “Supposed to clear off just long enough to get really cold, then tomorrow, we got more clouds coming,” Anderson said.
    D EL CALLED THE Motel 6 from the Law Enforcement Center and canceled their rooms, and Lucas talked to the car dealer, Holme, about taking the Oldsmobile south to the Cities.