Naked Prey

walked out there right at dark, nobody would see you, and you could walk back in the dark. How old was she?”
    “Eleven.”
    “Skinny?”
    “Not fat,” Lucas said. “Sort of fleshy.”
    “Minnesota skinny.”
    “That’s it.”
    “So she weighs seventy or eighty pounds. Five-minute walk.”
    “You’d leave footprints,” Del said.
    “Not in December. I remember how cold it was, but it wasn’t snowing. We had hardly any snow at Christmas.”
    “Let’s go look,” Lucas said.
    T HE CREEK BEGAN as a swale in a farm field, narrowed into a line, not really a depression, toward the back of the Cash/Warr land, and finally deepened into a knee-deep notch in the black earth, surrounded by willows and box elders.
    They started with the first tree, at the north end of the property, and followed the deepening notch into the thicker line of trees and brush, walking on the ice of the little creekitself. The band of trees was no more than thirty yards wide. They followed the creek for two hundred yards, until it ended in a bog. They saw nothing unusual—no disturbed earth, and the only tracks they found had probably been left by Letty.
    They finally walked back up the creek; halfway back, three dogs began barking from the back of a house that lay down the highway from Cash’s place. They were black and brown, square-faced, crazy: pit bulls. “That’s the dogs I’ve been telling you about,” Letty said.
    “Scare the heck out of me,” Del admitted. To Letty: “They ever let them out on you, you shoot first and ask questions later.”
    Lucas was annoyed. “You just stay away from there,” he said. “You don’t need to do any shooting.”
    “Maybe they fed the kid to the dogs,” Letty suggested.
    “Goddamnit,” Lucas said. And as they came to the top of the creek, “Goddamnit. We could be standing ten feet from the Sorrell kid and not know it.”
    “How would you do it?” Letty asked. She looked up at Del. “If you killed a little kid, and brought her out here, where would you put her?”
    Del said, “I don’t think you should be here.”
    “C’mon, Del. Look around. What’d you do?” she asked.
    Lucas looked around, then down at his feet. “Is there always water in the creek?”
    “No. But most of the time, there is.”
    “Under the creek?” Del asked, skeptically.
    “It’s a possibility,” Lucas said. “But if he was going to dig around here, I bet he’d be down here in the creek bed. Maybe digging in the bottom, or in the creek bank. Couldn’t be seen, but he could see people coming.”
    “Unless it was at night,” Letty said.
    They walked up and down the creek ice, looking at the banks, but couldn’t find anything unusual. Lucas probed alow cut-bank with a stick, then shook his head and threw the stick back into the trees. “We need the crime scene guys down here, and the radar guy, and maybe some dogs or something.”
    D ISCOURAGED, THEY WALKED across the thin crunchy snow back up to the house, and Lucas looked at his watch and said, “Little early for lunch, but we could get some breakfast.”
    “Can I see the cell?” Letty asked. “The room in the basement?”
    “Fuckin’ TV,” Del said. The cell had been mentioned prominently.
    “Watch your mouth around a kid,” Letty said, payback for the little girl comment. To Lucas: “I’d really like to go down there. I’m a kid, maybe I could think like a kid or something.”
    Lucas sighed, looked at Del, then said, “All right. Two minutes.”
    They trooped through the house, nodded to the deputy, and took Letty into the basement. Inside the bathroom—the cell—she turned round and round, then sat down on the floor, then lay down and looked at the ceiling, her arms outstretched as though she were making a snow angel. She closed her eyes, and a minute later, she said, “If they left me here alone—if they left me here alone—I would try to write my name somewhere.”
    She opened her eyes, found Lucas’s eyes, and asked, “What do you think?”
    “Sit up,” Lucas said.
    She sat up, and Lucas and Del sat down, and they began scrutinizing the walls. Nothing apparent. Lucas stood up, pulled the top off the toilet tank, and looked inside. Nothing visible. Lucas flushed, watched the water go down,pulled the float to stop water, and groped around the bottom of the tank with his hand. The shower stall was bare, not even a bar of soap. He pulled open the medicine cabinet, found it empty. Del looked inside the cabinet