Naked Prey

wanted him vouched for.”
    “You vouching for him?”
    “Yeah. He’s a good guy, knows what he’s doing. Takes care of his sources.”
    “I might chat with him, then.”
    “Excellent. If you ever run for governor of whatever hick state you’re in—Minnesota?—you’ll know that the Tribune stands behind you.”
    “Far behind.”
    “You stepped on my line,” Harrison said.
    “Yeah, I know,” Lucas said. “It was such an original. Go back to the sandwich.”
    S ANDY W OLF, WHO ran the cafe, told them that Deon Cash liked coconut cream pie and that Jane Warr was allergic to sulfites used as a preservative. She said that she’d never seen them argue. Every time they left the cafe together, she said, Warr would go through the door first and that Cash would reach out and squeeze her ass. Wolf also knew that Cash liked basketball and was a Los Angeles Lakers fan, and that he didn’t care for football and especially hated the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings. She once had a Vikings game on the television, and Cash asked her to turn it off. “He had a mean look in him, so I turned it off,” she said.
    THE CONVENIENCE STORE/GAS station was run by John McGuire and McGuire’s sister, Shelly. McGuire was a lean man who might have been taken for a farmer; his sister, equally lean, reminded Lucas of a pool shark he’d known in Minneapolis, who eventually became a successful rug-cleaning franchisee. Both of them knew Cash, who, in addition to whatever dope habits he might have had, alsowas attracted to the orange Halloween Hostess cupcakes, and had bought four dozen of them last Halloween, all that the store had in stock.
    They had also known Joe Kelly and said that he seemed like a shy man. Every night when they saw his car parked at Cash’s place, Kelly came in and bought a twelve-pack of Budweiser. “We think he had alcohol issues,” Shelly McGuire said.
    “I should have offered to take him to my AA meeting,” McGuire said, “but I wasn’t sure he was drinking it by himself, and I couldn’t get him talking. And I thought, you know, him being colored, maybe colored people can drink more than white people.”
    The bar was closed.
    T HE DOG HOUSE on the side street was a manufactured home, built in a factory and trucked to the homesite, where it was hammered together on a prepoured slab. The siding felt like tin. Del knocked, and a man in a sleeveless undershirt came to the door while the dogs went crazy in a back room. Lucas, without looking, could feel Del loosening up his Glock.
    The man said, “Yep?” He propped himself in the door, and Lucas could smell tomato sauce and dog shit in the overheated air streaming out. The man had an American flag tattooed on one shoulder, and on the other, a skull with a dagger through its eye, and the legend, Death From Above.
    “We’re with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We’re investigating a series of crimes . . . ”
    “Got an ID?”
    A woman in the house yelled, “Who is it, Dick?”
    Lucas held out his ID and Dick glanced at it and yelled, “Cops, asking about Cash,” and stepped out on the porch. “What can I do for you?”
    “Don’t want you to freeze,” Lucas said. He would have liked a look inside.
    “I’m fine,” the man said. His arms were turning red. “Don’t feel the cold.”
    “We understand you work at Calb’s, and we’re looking for any information . . . ”
    The man’s name was Richard Block, and the woman inside was his girlfriend, Eurice. He was a prep specialist who set the trucks up for painting.
    “I didn’t have nothin’ to do with the drivers,” he said. “I was always back in the sanding booth; I ain’t management. I don’t think I talked to Cash more than once in my life. Never did meet his old lady, except to nod at her in the store. She never came to the bar. Talked to Joe, once or twice. He was interested in the prep business, he wanted to paint his own car. Don’t know anything about him, though.”
    They bounced a few more questions off him, looking for an edge, and found nothing but genuine ignorance.
    “You ever meet any of the nuns, er, whatever, over at the church?” Del asked.
    “Never saw them, except at the cafe and maybe at the store. Call them the rug-munchers, over to the shop,” he said.
    “I thought they drove for Calb?” Lucas said.
    “Not that I know of,” Block said, his eyes shifting away, momentarily. He was lying. “You have to talk to Gene about his