Naked Prey

West asked. “I’ve got to run into town for a while.”
    “Sure,” Del said. “Down to the Bird.”
    M ARTHA W EST WAS suddenly in a hurry, and Del looked past Letty at Lucas, catching his eye, with an uh-oh twist of his head: Martha West needed a drink right now. Lucas nodded and said to Letty, “Get your coat.”
    “Want me to bring the .22?”
    “That won’t be necessary.”
    “Piece of crap, anyway,” she said, and headed up the stairs to her bedroom.
    Martha West was gone before Letty came back down. Letty came down wearing a slightly too big parka, pac boots, and carrying a pair of mittens. “S’go,” she said, clumping through the living room to the door.
    “Your mom’s already gone,” Del said.
    “Straight to the Duck Inn,” Letty said. She added, without irony, in a voice that sounded older than her twelve years, “It’s a tragedy.”
    T HEY DROVE BACK down to the Cash/Warr house in the Acura, Letty fascinated by the CRT screen in the dashboard. “Can you play movies on it?”
    “Nope—you get the information screen and the map screen, and that’s it. Unless you have to eject.” Lucas kept his voice flat. He was a firm believer in lying to children. “If you need to eject, you go to the information screen, and push History, and one second later, you’re history. Throws you right out of the car, through the moon roof.”
    Letty, in the back seat, thought about it for a second, then said, “It’s not nice to fuck with kids.”
    Del twisted and said, “Jesus Christ. Watch your mouth, little girl.”
    T WO VEHICLES WERE sitting in the driveway at the Cash/Warr house: a BCA crime scene van, and a sheriff’s department car. Lucas pulled in behind them. They all climbed out, and a deputy sheriff came out on the stoop and said, “Your guys are out in the garage, if you’re looking for them.”
    “Thanks,” Lucas called back. They trudged up the driveway to the garage, and went in through the side door. A BCA tech was standing at the open trunk of Jane Warr’s car, and said, “Hey, guys.” When he spoke, another man, shorter and stockier, backed out of the trunk. He was holding a plastic bag and a pair of forceps. A magnifying hood was pulled down over his glasses, and his eyes appeared to be the size of ashtrays.
    “Doing any good?” Lucas asked.
    “The trunk is full of stuff—we’ve got hair for sure, we might have some blood, but it could be something else, too,” the shorter man said. “Typical trunk.”
    “How about Cash’s car?”
    “Same thing. All kinds of stuff.”
    “How long before we know if anything’s good?”
    The taller tech shrugged. “Depends on how much stuff there is . . . a week or two. Anything we can do for you?”
    “We’re gonna look around the grounds,” Lucas said. “See what there is to see.”
    “Uh, Dickerson called this morning, said something about a guy with ground-penetrating radar.”
    “Could happen,” Lucas said. “But he can’t do the whole place. That’d take weeks. We’re gonna see if we can find a place to start.”
    “Good luck.”
    L UCAS, D EL, AND Letty went back outside, and Lucas turned around once, looking at the house, the garage, an old dying tree line that once marked the southern boundary of the farmyard, a fence that might have marked the western end.
    “If you had to bury somebody . . . ” Letty said.
    “I wouldn’t do it here,” Del said, turning like Lucas. “I’d take her someplace.”
    “Everybody in the state was looking for her.”
    “Probably not yet, when they killed her. If they killed her before Sorrell brought in the FBI . . . ”
    “But they couldn’t be absolutely sure that he hadn’t done that right away,” Lucas said. “If they had her here, in that cell, they wouldn’t want to take her too far. Especially if, like Letty says, everybody sees things here. Everybody would remember a black guy with a little blond girl, up here, even if they thought it was innocent.”
    “Keep her in the trunk?”
    “Too many things to go wrong,” Lucas said.
    “They drove her all the way up here from Rochester.”
    “What can I tell you? They did that. Maybe. But when it came to getting rid of her, do you think they’d drive her all the way back down, and take another big risk?”
    “Dunno,” Del said. “I just don’t know where we could start looking.”
    L ETTY POINTED: “ O UT there in the trees. That’s the crick. Five-minute walk. You could carry a bag. If you