Naked Prey

cops on the porch, shouted, “All right. All right.”
    “Jesus Christ, calm down,” Shrake said, from where hewas leaning on the porch rail. He blew a stream of cigarette smoke at the kid. “We’re really important state cops and you’re just a kid who’s not important at all.”
    That confused the deputy, and slowed him down. “Where are the casualties?” he asked, no longer shouting.
    “There are two dead bodies inside: Hale Sorrell and, we think, his wife,” Lucas said.
    “Oh, God.” The kid jumped back inside the car and they could see him calling in.
    Lucas’s cell phone rang, and Rose Marie was on the line. “You gotta be kidding me.”
    He moved down the walkway under the eaves. “We’re not. We don’t know anything except that there’s probably nobody inside the house, except the dead people. I haven’t had a chance to think about anything.”
    “Sorrell for sure?”
    “Yeah. You ever meet his wife?”
    “A time or two—Sorrell’s age, mid-forties, probably, dark hair, a little heavy, short.”
    “That’s her, ninety-nine percent,” Lucas said.
    “Do I need to be there?”
    “No. The locals are arriving, and I’ve got Henderson’s direct line. If I were you, I’d get next to the governor and guide his footsteps, so as to avoid the dogshit.”
    “I’ll do that. Call if you need anything,” she said, and was gone.
    T HE SHERIFF’S NAME was Brad Wilson, and he arrived ten minutes after the first car came in. By that time, there were four sheriff’s deputies on the scene, two of them on the porch, two more sent around to “cover the back—just in case,” but mostly to get them out of Lucas’s hair.
    The sheriff was an older, barrel-chested man wearing a pearl-handled .45 on a gunbelt. He and Lucas had metonce, when Lucas was working with Minneapolis. Lucas thought him competent, and maybe better than that. “You attract more goddamned trouble, Davenport,” the sheriff said as he came up. “Hale’s dead? And Mary?”
    “Come on and take a look. We’ve been keeping everybody out so the crime scene guys’ll have a chance.”
    The sheriff nodded and followed Lucas inside, stepping carefully. They stood back, but the sheriff, leaning over Sorrell, said, “That’s Hale. And that’s Mary. God bless me. How’d you come to find them?”
    “We came up here to arrest him on murder charges,” Lucas said. “Sorrell’s the guy who hanged those two people up north.”
    The sheriff’s mouth dropped open, then snapped close. After a moment, he said, “You wouldn’t be pulling my leg, would you?”
    “No. The two people he hanged were probably the people who kidnapped his daughter.”
    “You better tell me,” the sheriff said. He looked a last time at the two figures on the floor. “Holy mackerel.” And, “I got to call the feds. They are going to wet their pants.”
    A FTER THE SHERIFF called the FBI, Lucas got him to dispatch pairs of deputies to local homeowners. “We want to know if anybody saw a car or any other kind of vehicle here, this morning or late last night. Or anything else, for that matter. Ask them if they ever saw Sorrell in a red Jeep Cherokee.”
    The first media trucks from Rochester began arriving fifteen minutes later. Twenty minutes after that, a Twin Cities media helicopter flew over. Hale Sorrell’s parents and Mary Sorrell’s mother were notified of the deaths by the sheriff’s chaplain, and said that they would notify otherfamily members. Lucas called Henderson. “You’re good to go. Next of kin are notified.”
    “Excellent. How are things down there?”
    “We’re just mostly standing around, waiting for the medical examiner. He was off somewhere, but he’s on his way now.”
    A T ELEVEN O’CLOCK, still waiting for the medical examiner, they filed into a home theater, turned on the fifty-inch flat-panel television, and watched Henderson do the interview with CBS. Somebody—Mitford, probably—had roughed him up. His hair wasn’t quite as smooth as it usually was, and a fat brown file envelope sat on the table in front of him. He looked like the harried executive with bad news, and he delivered it straight ahead, no punches pulled.
    “Jesus, he looks almost . . . tough,” Del said.
    Washington came on, a moon-faced black man with a dark suit and white shirt, a man who knew he’d been seriously one-upped. The dead people were dope dealers and kidnappers? The hangman and his wife had been executed in their hallway?
    “I