Naked Prey

the delivery car in my Corolla. Fifty cents a mile, so we get fifty dollars for a hundred-mile round trip, and we can do that on three gallons of gas. We don’t have a lot of money here.”
    “You did it a lot?”
    “A couple of times a week,” she said.
    “Is Calb straight?” Lucas asked.
    “Yes. He’s a very nice man, in a . . . car-mechanic way,” Ruth said, meeting his eyes. She had pale eyes, like the moons you could see in daylight. “His wife sometimes helps us out, when we’re checking on older people, shut-ins.”
    “You don’t think . . . if Cash and Warr were involved in a kidnapping, you don’t think that Calb would have been involved?”
    “Good gosh, no. I mean, the girl . . . is dead, I guess.”
    Lucas and Del both nodded.
    Ruth continued. “Gene always wanted children, but he and his wife couldn’t have any. They’ve been foster parents, even, for like a half a dozen kids. There’s no way he’d ever hurt a child.”
    Lucas said, “All right. But Deon Cash could.”
    “Deon . . . Deon was crazy. I didn’t know him very well, but you didn’t have to. I once saw him kick a door for two minutes because it didn’t open right. He was reallycrazy-angry with it. With the door.” She looked away from them for a minute, thinking about it, then back, and nodded positively. “He could kill children.”
    “How about his pal, Joe?”
    “I hardly knew him, but he always seemed to be walking behind Deon. I think Deon impressed him. Deon impressed Jane, too—she liked him being crazy. Like it gave her status.” Again, she looked away, thinking, and then turned back. “We see that quite a bit, actually. Women taking status from the violence of their men.”
    “A sense of protection, if you live in a slum,” Lucas said.
    But she shook her head. “Not just in the slums. All kinds of women. Even nuns.”
    She showed a little smile and Del grinned at Lucas and said, “Ouch.”
    Lucas said, “Tell me one good fact. One thing that will point me somewhere. Something you know, way down in your head, about Deon.”
    “I’ve thought about this, ever since they found Jane and Deon,” she said. “I keep thinking, Deon was from the big city, Kansas City. So was Jane. They hated it here. I don’t think they even knew anybody, besides a couple of people at Calb’s. But they stayed, so there had to be a reason. Something they couldn’t do in Kansas City. Maybe they were selling the dope, maybe it was the kidnapping. Whatever it was, came from up here.”
    “Good,” said Lucas.
    O UTSIDE, D EL SAID, “Sister Ruth does a little dope herself.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I could smell it on her. Faintly. Raw, not smoke.”
    “Brownies.”
    “Maybe.” Del looked around at the white-on-whitelandscape, at their lonely car sitting in the empty, snow-swept parking lot outside the empty yellow building across the highway. “I can’t blame her. It’s like, it’s dope or network TV. There ain’t nothin’ else.”
    “I’ll ask Elle about her,” Lucas said. “I’m not sure the sister was entirely straight with us.”
    “What’d I miss?”
    Lucas shook his head. “Maybe nothing. I counted eight cots in there and most of the rooms seemed to be lived in. That’s a sizable operation. What would a hundred dollars a week mean to them? I mean, if they each worked one night in a Holiday store, they’d make three or four times as much. If they need the money that bad . . . ”
    “Maybe it’s just easy, casual. Pin money. Take it if they have somebody around, skip it if they don’t. Wouldn’t be tied to a schedule.”
    “Could be,” Lucas agreed. “She seemed pretty rehearsed . . . but then she might have expected us.” He looked at his watch, and found a patch of white skin where the watch face should have been. Not having a watch was going to drive him crazy, he realized. “The bar’s closed. Let’s go try the cafe, and then the grocery.”
    “It feels hopeless,” Del said. “Knocking on doors in nowhere.”
    O N THE WAY to the cafe, Lucas’s cell phone rang, and when he answered it, a voice said, “This is Deke Harrison. Is this Davenport?”
    “Yeah, it is. How are you, Deke?”
    “Interrupted. I was halfway through an anchovy, pepper-cheese, onion sandwich and you know what it’s like to be interrupted halfway through one of those.”
    “So are—”
    “Halfway through, when somebody called forsomebody else who got a call from Mark Johnson that said you