Naked Prey

like he might once have been a lineman for Northwestern. “Mark Johnson.” He reached out to shake hands with Lucas, and then with Del. “You’re agents Davenport and Capslock?”
    Lucas nodded. “I’m Davenport and this is Capslock. I’m surprised you’re here. Your friends got out of town fast enough,” he said.
    “Mostly TV,” Johnson said, as if that explained everything.
    “We need to talk to Martha and Letty, but we don’t wantto disturb your interview,” Lucas said. “We can come back, if you’d like.”
    Johnson shook his head. “I got most of what I was looking for. I’m trying to figure out how in the hell Cash ever wound up here.”
    “Learn anything?”
    “No. The guy down in the car shop won’t talk because he’s afraid he’ll get busted, or even worse, get sued. The guy with the dogs won’t talk to me because of his American principles. And the women at the church think I’m probably a rapist because I’m black, but they’re too nice to say so.”
    “We can’t help you with Cash,” Lucas said. “We’d like to know ourselves. He just doesn’t fit.”
    “He was pure-bred city,” Johnson agreed. “I called some people down in KC and they tell me there’s no truck-driving job in the world that’d keep him up here. He’d rather have some cheap-ass job like robbing 7-Elevens.”
    “Interesting,” Lucas said.
    “It is,” Johnson said, gesturing with his notebook. “Now you tell me something. Do you really think Cash and this Joe guy and Jane Warr kidnapped the Sorrell girl? If they did, why in the heck would they be out in the country where everybody could see them coming and going, and know every move they made?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “But I think they were involved in the kidnapping. I think they did it for the money and we’ll eventually nail it down. We’ve got a state crime scene crew taking their cars apart, looking for DNA that might tie them to the girl.”
    “Can you tell me precisely why you think they were involved?” The notebook was poised again.
    Lucas thought it over, then asked, “Do you know Deke Harrison?”
    “Yeah, sure. He’s my guy at the Trib,” Johnson said. “He runs our desk.”
    “He used to come through the Cities,” Lucas said. “For years. We’d go out and get a drink.”
    “Yeah. That’s my job now. He moved up,” Johnson said.
    “Tell him to give me a call,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a cell phone.”
    L UCAS GAVE J OHNSON the cell phone number, Johnson said good-bye to Lucas and Del, went out through the door, and then a moment later stuck his head back inside. “Find a good place to eat?”
    Letty said, “The Red Red Robin.”
    “That’s the best? God help us.” Johnson said, and he was gone.
    Letty put her hands on her hips and looked at Lucas. “Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?”
    L UCAS TOLD L ETTY and Martha West what they needed: any hint of an irregularity around the Cash-Warr property. “There is no body in the house—we took the place apart after we found the money and the dope.”
    “So they must’ve buried her,” Letty said, crossing her lips with both of her forefingers, thinking. Martha shivered at the thought, and looked at her daughter. Letty seemed more interested than scared.
    “I imagine they did,” Lucas said. “But out here . . . there’s ten thousand square miles of unbroken dirt and bog.”
    “Yeah, but even out here, there’s always people going by. You couldn’t just drive out somewhere and spend an hour digging a grave and be sure nobody saw you,” Letty said. “People see you out here, because—wherever you are—you’re unusual. They notice you. I’ll be walking across the lake down by the old dump and two days latersomebody’ll say, ‘Saw you down by the dump with your gun.’ And I never saw them.”
    “Gives me the creeps,” Martha West said. “You got no privacy.”
    Letty looked out the window, the white winter light picking out her blue eyes. Still not much snow. “Why don’t we go look around?” she asked. “I’ll come with you, see if I can see anything. I walk up and down there all the time, on my way to the crick. If we wait until tomorrow, there might be too much snow.”
    “Must’ve been snow since the girl was taken,” Del said. “She was taken before Christmas.”
    “There’s been some, but not much,” Letty said.
    “If you guys are gonna take Letty, could I get you to buy her some lunch or something?” Martha