Naked Prey

The pink dots made her look like Ronald Reagan. When they explained what they wanted, she said, “You’d have to talk to Ruth. Come in.”
    When the two men hesitated, her bottom lip twitched and she said, “This isn’t a nunnery or a dormitory. You’re allowed to come in.”
    “Thanks,” Lucas said, feeling a little lame. They followed her through the back of the church, which had been cut into sleeping cubicles, reminding Lucas of an old Washington Avenue flophouse in Minneapolis, except that it didn’t smell like wine vomit; past a side room where two women were sitting on a couch, watching the movie Fight Club; and into the kitchen. A small woman sat at a kitchen table, peering through gold-rimmed glasses into a notebook. A pile of what looked like insurance forms sat to one side. She looked up and the woman who’d met them at the door said, “Ruth, these gentlemen are from the police. They wanted to speak to somebody.”
    “Lucas Davenport,” the woman said, closing the notebook. She showed him a thin, cool smile.
    Lucas, surprised, said, “I’m sorry . . . ”
    She stood up and put out a hand. As they shook, her hand small and cool, she said, “I’m Ruth Lewis. I’m sure you don’t remember, but I’m a friend of Elle Kruger. I once played a game with your gaming group, maybe ten years ago, when Elle was running it. I got to be George Pickett at Gettysburg.”
    “I remember that,” he said; and he did, clearly, and with pleasure. She’d learned fast and had been determined to win. “You kept taking out Buford,” Lucas said. “No matter how many times we played it, you’d kick Buford out of the way and then you’d get on top of the hills.”
    “And that was that,” she said, dusting her hands together. “The South wins the battle and maybe the war.”
    “Bad design,” Lucas said. “You never came back for Stalingrad.”
    “Nobody invited me,” she said. “I thought maybe it was because I kept messing up the first one.”
    “No, no, no,” Lucas said. “You were invited back, you just didn’t come.”
    “Have you seen Elle?”
    “Just the other day . . . ”
    T HEY CHATTED FOR a few minutes—she’d known Lucas as a Minneapolis cop, and he told her about his move to the state; and Lucas had known her as a nun, and she told him about her migration away from the sisterhood. “I made the mistake of going to the Holy Land,” she said. “I saw that the Sea of Galilee was a big, dirty lake and that the Mount of Olives was a neighborhood. Then Jesus didn’t seem divine. He seemed more real, but he seemed like another one of the guys that the Old Testament is full of. Down in my heart, I didn’t believe anymore—in Jesus, I mean.”
    “So you quit?”
    “Yup. Moved over to Catholic Charities. Got a boyfriend—though that didn’t last long. I think he just liked the idea of sleeping with an ex-nun.”
    Lucas was embarrassed. “Some people,” he said.
    She smiled, letting him off the male hook, and said, “You’re here investigating the lynchings.”
    “Murders,” Lucas said hastily. “Not really—we know who did those—”
    “The man from Rochester. I heard about that, the man and his wife. It’s hard to believe.”
    “Yeah. Now we’re trying to figure out who killed them. We were told that you guys sometimes make money driving cars for Gene Calb. Since Deon Cash worked over there as a driver, we thought you might have known him.”
    She was nodding. “I did know him, and he was a bad man. A bad man. Gene was going to fire him, because he thought Deon was taking dope, and Gene was worried about some insurance issues. Like if Deon was driving for him and got in an accident, driving under the influence. Gene was afraid he’d get sued for everything.”
    “So everybody knew about the drugs?”
    “Some of us, anyway,” Ruth said. “There was a womanhere, Jeanette Raskin, she used to work for Lutheran Social Services down in Minneapolis and she knows a lot about drugs—she said he once had a crack pipe in his car. I wouldn’t know what one looked like, but that’s what she said. I have her phone number if you need it. She’s back in the Cities.”
    “I know Jeanette,” Del said, and to Lucas: “You do, too. She used to run the Love Bug place, the free clinic.”
    “Oh, yeah,” Lucas said. “She would know about drugs.”
    “How come you guys drive for Calb?” Del asked Ruth.
    Ruth shrugged. “Extra money. Pizza money. Easy money. We follow