Naked Prey

down, crawl in the back seat and go to sleep.” But he turned the lights on, and they crossed the Red River into North Dakota thirty-three minutes after blowing out of Armstrong.
    L UCAS DROVE THE first two hours, then Del took two, and Lucas took them into the Cities six hours after leaving the Law Enforcement Center. He dropped Del at his house, then drove through the quiet streets to Mississippi River Boulevard and the Big New House. He left the Olds in the driveway, got his bag from the trunk, fumbled his house keys out of his pocket, and trudged inside.
    Weather woke when he tiptoed into the bedroom by the light from the hallway. “That you?”
    “No. It’s a crazed rapist.”
    “How’d it go?”
    “We cracked it.” He started to undress.
    “What?” She pushed herself up. “You can turn on a light. Here . . . ”
    Her bedstand light came on. “Are you workingtomorrow morning?” Lucas asked. Weather operated almost daily.
    “No. I might do a palate in the afternoon, but they’ve got to finish some tests on the kid, so it’s not a sure thing. What happened with the lynching?”
    “Not a lynching,” Lucas said. “It was a revenge killing. You remember that Hale Sorrell who was in the paper a month ago, his kid got kidnapped?”
    “Yeah?”
    “It was him.”
    She was amazed, and a little entertained. “Lucas, you’re joking.”
    “No. We haven’t made an arrest, but the bodies were really clogged up with somebody else’s DNA, and I’ll tell you what: it’s gonna be Sorrell’s. He found out who killed his kid, he tracked them down and he hanged them. I don’t know the details, but we’re gonna find out.”
    “Oh, God. That poor family. That poor family.”
    “You don’t really go around hanging people,” Lucas said.
    “What would you do if somebody kidnapped Sam and killed him?”
    Lucas got in bed but didn’t answer.
    She pressed him: “What would you do?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Oh, bullshit, Lucas, I know what you’d do and so do you,” she said. “You’d wait until the police weren’t looking, then you’d find them and kill them.”
    “All right,” Lucas said. Then, after a while, “Make a spoon.”
    She rolled away from him, and Lucas snuggled up behind her, arm around her waist. “See anything about it on TV?”
    “Yeah. That Washington man and the sheriff had a press conference, and Washington lost it and started screaming at the sheriff about being a redneck bigot and the sheriff kept apologizing. It was like he admitted it, or something.”
    “Aw, man, we told him . . . ”
    “It was pretty funny, if you like assassinations,” Weather said. “And this little girl was on. She had this amazing face, like in those pictures from the Dust Bowl.”
    “Letty West. I’ll tell you about her in the morning,” Lucas said. They snuggled for a while, and then Lucas rolled away and said, “I gotta sleep. I’m supposed to be downtown at seven o’clock or some fuckin’ thing.”
    “Set your clock,” Weather said. “Are you going to arrest him? Sorrell?”
    “No, no. It’s just that the goddamn governor’s aide is a maniac. He wants an early meeting. Nothing’s gonna happen with Sorrell for a day or two.”
    L OREN S INGLETON AND his mother, unaffected by the crystal clarity of the night and the rippling northern lights, were passing through Fargo as Lucas snuggled up against Weather’s butt. And as Lucas stirred under the drone of the alarm clock, and Weather kicked him and he groaned, and thrashed toward the snooze button, they were rolling up the long landscaped driveway at Hale Sorrell’s house in the countryside east of Rochester.
    Sorrell himself, wearing blue silk pajamas, let them in the house. Singleton, in his deputy sheriff’s uniform, asked, “Is your wife up yet?”
    “Oh, God. Oh, my God, you found her?” Sorrell asked, his eyes wide. They clicked over to Margery, but didn’t ask the question: maybe she was some kind of social worker. He turned and shouted, “Mary! Mary!”
    From up the stairs: “Who is it?”
    “You better come down.”
    “You have any relatives in the house?” Singleton asked. “Any help, any friends?”
    “No, no—Mary could call her mother . . . ” Mary Sorrell came down the stairs and said, “Is it Tammy?”
    “No, it’s not Tammy,” Singleton said. He thought about the warm bundle he’d carried outside.
    “Then what . . .  ?” Sorrell asked.
    Was there fear in his eyes? Did he think