Naked Prey

that.”
    “I’ll never feel clean again,” Del said. “Want to head down to the Bird? My gut says it’s lunchtime.”
    They rode down to the Red Red Robin in near silence, all thinking about the house and where the Sorrell kid’s body might be. Del finally said, “If they thought they evermight be suspected of anything, they wouldn’t want a body anywhere around. They must’ve driven it out into the countryside. All right, if they’re seen, they’re seen, but they could fix it so they weren’t. Scout out a spot ahead of time, dig a hole, drop the body during the night, fill the hole—it’d only take a couple of minutes—and get out of there.”
    “Yeah, I know,” Lucas said. “She’s probably gone for good.”
    T HE B IRD WAS as below-average as it was the first couple of times: below-average coffee, below-average food. Below-average: Letty ate everything in sight, with the shifty-eyed compulsion of a kid who’d gone to bed hungry a few times, who was afraid the food might disappear.
    “You okay with your mom?” Del asked halfway through the meal.
    “Gettin’ this far with her was the hard part,” Letty said, working around the edges of the mashed potatoes, so the gravy wouldn’t spill out of the center cup. “Now that I’m in middle school, things are smoother. I ride the bus back and forth, she can do what she needs to.”
    “Just checkin’,” Del said. “I’ve had a little trouble with alcohol myself. It’s a bitch to get off your back, but it can be done.”
    “You drink?” Letty asked Lucas, holding his eyes. Lucas shook his head. “A bottle of beer, few times a week. I never got the hang of it.”
    “That’s good,” Letty said.
    T HE PHONE IN Lucas’s pocket rang, and he pulled it out. “Davenport.”
    “Hey, Lucas, this is Lanny Cole.” The FBI man sounded like he was having a hard time catching his breath. “Yousaid Wally and Jean on that locket. It was a white gold oval locket with a white gold chain and the names in script in the front oval. Picture of an elderly couple inside.”
    “We didn’t look inside because of the print, but you got the rest of it, except that I thought it was silver,” Lucas said. “Was it Tammy Sorrell’s?”
    “No.”
    “No?”
    “It belonged to a girl named Annie Burke, fifteen, daughter of the owner of a chain of nursing homes from Lincoln, Nebraska. One of our guys downtown remembered the locket thing. She was kidnapped last April. A million-dollar ransom was paid, but she was never returned, never heard from again. The deal was, the kidnappers told Burke’s father that they had an in with the FBI, and they left him a pack of papers that looked like FBI printouts. They told him that if he contacted the FBI or any police agency, they would know. He bought it, made the payoff. And get this: he got the money in Vegas, same way Hale did.”
    “Oh, boy.”
    Letty said, “What?”
    “We’re coming up there,” Cole said. “We need that locket, we need that fingerprint. I’ll talk to your boss. What do you need up there?”
    “You got people who can look for soft spots in the ground, under the snow?”
    “We got that. We have a team in California who do exactly that. They can be here in forty-eight hours.”
    “Bring them in,” Lucas said.

13
    A FTER LUNCH, THEY took a protesting Letty back to her house. “I can still help you.”
    “If we need you, we’ll stop by,” Lucas said. “We really do appreciate what you’ve done.”
    Her face anxious, she asked, “If I get my traps real fast, could you drop me at the dump? It’s only five minutes in the car. I can walk back.”
    Lucas said, “We’re pretty busy.”
    “I helped you,” she said. “I need to get some clothes. TV might come back.”
    Lucas sighed. “Get the traps.”
    She took ten minutes, getting into an old pair of jeans, her boots and her parka. She got a can of generic-brand tuna cat food from under the kitchen sink—bait—the gunny sack with her traps, and her .22. The .22 was an old Harrington & Richardson bolt action single-shot, probably made in the 1940s. She tossed it all in the back of the Acura.
    Six miles north of Broderick, on a back road, the landfillwas marked by a clan of crows flapping overhead like little specks of India ink thrown against the gray sky. Lucas pulled into the entrance road, next to a sign that said “Quad-County Landfill,” and stopped by a locked gate. Inside the landfill, a small Caterpillar sat at the base