Naked Prey

been playing winter basketball with a group of aging jocks from Minneapolis. He was broad-shouldered, quick-moving, and not quite gaunt.
    H E BRUSHED BY a redheaded woman who was leading a muffin-sized red dog in a muffin-sized red Christmas sweater down the sidewalk. The woman smiled and said, “Hi, Lucas,” as they passed. He half-turned and blurted, “Hey. How ya doin’?” and smiled and kept going. Where’d he know her from? Somewhere. He was up the steps, inside the shopping mall that led to the DPS, in an elevator: A bartender, he thought. She used to be a bartender. Where? O’Brien’s? Maybe . . .
    R OSE M ARIE R OUX’S office was a twenty-foot square that she’d furnished with her own money: a good cherry-wood desk, two comfortable visitors’ chairs in green leather, a couch, a few prints and photographs of politicians, a bookcase full of reference books and state procedure manuals.
    Rose Marie was sprawled in a chair behind her desk, an overweight woman with improbably blond-tinted fly-away hair, wearing a rumpled blue dress, with an unlit cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. Word around town was that when she took the job, she’d moved the commissioner’s office across the building so she could get a window that opened. At any time of day, you were likely to see her head sticking out the window, it was said, with a plume of smoke hanging over it.
    “What?” Lucas asked.
    “Sit down,” she said. She pointed at a green leather chair. “The governor’s a couple of minutes out, but I can give you an outline.” She took a breath. “Well . . . ”
    “What?”
    “We’ve had a lynching.” The statement hung in the air like an oral Goodyear blimp.
    “Tell me,” Lucas said after a moment.
    “Up north, a few miles outside of Armstrong. You know where that is?”
    “By Thief River, somewhere.”
    “Very good. A black man and a white woman were found hanging from a tree out in the countryside. They were naked. Handcuffed, legs taped with strapping tape. They’d been living together in some flyspeck town north of Armstrong.”
    “Lynched,” Lucas said. He thought about it for a few seconds, then said slowly, “Lynched means that somebody is suspected of a crime. The townspeople take justice into their own hands and the law doesn’t do anything about it. Is that—?”
    “No. What actually happened is that they were murdered,” Rose Marie said, twisting in her chair. “Sometime last night. But it’s a black man and a blond woman and they’re hanging from trees, naked. When the word gets out, the shit’s gonna hit the fan, and we can say murder all we want, and the movie people are going to be screaming lynching. We need to get some shit up there.”
    “Does Bemidji know?” Lucas asked. The BCA’s Bemidji office handled investigations in the northern part of the state.
    “I don’t know—they don’t know from me. What we’ve got is an informal contact with Ray Zahn, the state patrolman out of Armstrong,” Rose Marie said. “He called in about forty-five minutes ago, and had the call switched to me, at home. He seems to be a smart guy. He was first onthe scene, a couple of minutes ahead of the first sheriff’s deputies.”
    “Maybe the sheriff’ll handle it,” Lucas suggested.
    “Zahn says no. He says the sheriff is a new guy who’s scared of his own shadow. Zahn says the sheriff’ll call us as soon as he looks at the scene.”
    “And I’m going.”
    “Absolutely. That’s the first thing the governor said when I called him. We’ve got a National Guard chopper getting ready. You can fly right into the scene.”
    “That’s all we know?” Lucas asked.
    “That’s everything,” Roux said.
    “Then I’ll get going,” Lucas said, pushing up from the green chair. He felt a hum, a little spear of pleasure breaking through the blue. An evil bastard to hunt: nothing like it to cheer a guy up. “You can call me in the air if anything changes.”
    “Wait for the governor. He’s only a minute or two away.”
    W HILE THEY WAITED, Lucas got on his cell phone and called Del: “Where are you?”
    “In bed.” Del Capslock had come over from Minneapolis with Lucas.
    “Get up. I’ll pick you up in fifteen or twenty minutes. Bring some clothes for a couple of days. Bring some boots, too. We’re going up north. We’re gonna be outside.”
    “Uh-oh.”
    “Yeah. Exactly right. I’ll tell you when I see you.”
    R OSE M ARIE’S TELEPHONE rang, and