Naked Prey

under the sink, and found four rolls of toilet paper. He looked through all the toilet paper tubes. Empty. Lucas checked the rim on the top of the medicine cabinet, and got his fingers dusty.
    “I would write something,” Letty said, a little defensively. “I would scratch it with something.”
    She crawled around on her hands and knees, peering at the baseboard. Then Del, who’d crawled over to the toilet, said, “Got something here.”
    “What?” Lucas got down on his stomach, and Letty crawled over.
    Del was lying face up. “Something twisted around the water line . . . it’s a chain. Let me . . . ” He fumbled under the tank, said, “Uhhh . . . ” Then: “Got it.”
    He slid out from under the toilet. A silver locket, a small oval, dangled from his fingers on a short silver chain.
    “Aw, Jesus,” Lucas said. “Don’t fuckin’ move. Don’t even twitch.”
    Lucas ran up the stairs, dashed through the house to the mudroom door, outside to the garage, and said, “You guys . . . get some shit, get some baggies and those tweezers . . . c’mon.”
    B ACK DOWN IN the basement, the stocky crime scene guy grabbed the locket with his forceps, held it sideways to one of the overhead lights and said, “There’s a partial print on the back. If it’s not yours . . . ”
    He looked down at Del, who shook his head: “Not mine. I never touched the locket part, only the chain.”
    “Looks like a good print,” the tech said. He turned it in the light. “It’s got an inscription. The locket does.”
    “What?”
    The tech’s lips moved as he worked through the script. Then he frowned and asked, “Who the heck are Jean and Wally?”
    Lucas scratched his head. “Maybe somebody the Sorrell kid knew. Her grandparents, or somebody?”
    “Whoever, she put it down there,” Del said. “The locket didn’t just fall in there.”
    “Where’d you find it?” the tech asked.
    Del explained, and the tech looked around and finally said, “Did you check the mirror? And the shower booth walls? If she used hot water in here, they’d get steamed up, and she’d write in the steam. If she had soap or shampoo or oil on her fingers, you might get the image back.”
    “I do that every time I’m in the bathtub,” Letty said. “I write on the mirror when I get out.”
    Lucas said, “Worth a try, I guess.”
    The tech said, “Let me put this away, and get my camera. Huh. Wally and Jean.”
    W HILE THE TECH went to put the locket away, Lucas, trailed by Letty, went out to the car, got his address book out of his briefcase, and looked up the numbers for the FBI agents on the Sorrell case. He got Lanny Cole’s wife on the second ring, and she said Cole was out shoveling the walk. “Just had a quick two inches,” she said. “Of snow.”
    Lucas heard her calling her husband, then some stomping around, and then Cole was on the line. He didn’t know the names on the locket. “We were told that she probably wasn’t wearing any jewelry when she was taken—she wasjust a kid, and she had a pretty limited set of stuff. Nothing like a locket, far as I know. Sorry.”
    “Thought we had something,” Lucas said. “It’s weird.”
    “I’ll ask around,” Cole said. “I wouldn’t hold my breath. Maybe the print will turn out to be something.”
    Lucas hung up and Letty said, “No luck?”
    “Not yet.”
    “It’s gotta be something,” Letty said. “It didn’t belong to the plumber.”
    B OTH TECHS WERE in the basement with Del, the hot water pouring out of the shower, when Lucas and Letty got back down the stairs. They half-closed the door of the bathroom, waited fifteen seconds. The mirror steamed, and showed several finger-drawn lines, but nothing they could make sense of. The tech took a picture anyway. The walls of the shower showed what looked liked sponge marks: “Somebody cleaned up,” the tech said.
    “Good try, guys,” Lucas said.
    Feeling a little morose, they all wandered back up the stairs, and the burly tech said that he’d recheck the walls with his magnifying hood as soon as the humidity cleared. “Maybe somebody wrote really small—it’d be about the only thing you could do. It was a good idea, looking for a name. It turned up the locket. That’ll be something.”
    Lucas looked at Letty. “Maybe you oughta be a cop.”
    Letty shook her head. “Nope. I’m going to be a reporter. It’s decided.”
    Lucas said to Del, “We could be responsible for