Naked Prey

stepped out of sight, behind the truck.
    “Coffee,” Del said.
    “Like to talk to that woman,” Lucas said. “Want some coffee?”
    “Take a cup,” Del said. They got out of the Acura and walked over to the Toyota. More firemen and cops were clustering around the back of it, taking cups, and Lucas and Del edged into the line. When they got their coffee, Lucas took a sip and stepped over next to Lewis.
    “You heard what happened? You heard about Letty?”
    “Some of it. I heard she was at the hospital, that you took her in,” Lewis said.
    “She’s hurt,” Lucas said. “She was shot, not too bad, but when she was getting away, she had to jump out her window. She slashed her hand open, really bad—we’re flying her down to the Cities so a hand guy can look at her. Her ankle is either busted or twisted so bad that she can’t walk.”
    “That’s terrible. I heard her mom . . . ” Lewis’s eyes went to the house, “ . . . might still be in there.”
    “We’re waiting, but Letty thinks she was shot to death.Right at the beginning of it. She apparently fought the guy long enough for Letty to get away.”
    “This doesn’t happen in Custer County,” Lewis said. “Somebody told me that the last murder here was fifteen years ago.”
    “Our operating theory is that Deon Cash, Jane Warr, and probably Joe Kelly kidnapped the Sorrell girl and killed her, and probably another girl named Burke.”
    “Two of them?”
    “Yes. We think that Hale Sorrell somehow grabbed Joe Kelly and tortured him and got the names of Cash and Warr. We think he found out that his daughter was already dead. We think he then waited until their guard might be down a little, then he came up here, took them and hanged them for the murder of his daughter. But we think there was at least one more person involved, and that person is afraid that somebody will give him away. It’s a him, by the way, not a her— he spoke to Letty.”
    She smiled quickly, a flitting smile that was gone as quickly as it came. “Thanks for the briefing.”
    “I’m not just chatting,” Lucas said. “Something complicated is going on around Broderick, and I don’t know what it is. But it’s the cause of all these deaths. And people in Broderick are evading us, they’re not telling us what they know. I don’t know why they’re doing that, but they are.”
    “I more or less know everybody in Broderick. Some of the men from the body shop keep to themselves, but nobody I know well would have done this. Kidnapped those girls or . . . ” She gestured at the burned-out hole in the ground.
    Three firemen were standing in the ruins of the basement, and as Lewis gestured and they looked that way, one of them called up to another man, who was standingoutside the hole, and he turned and trotted toward one of the fire trucks. Two more firemen dropped into the basement.
    “Aw, shit,” Lucas said. “I think they found her.”
    T HEY HAD. L UCAS and Del hung around for another hour, watching as the medical examiner crawled down into the basement. Ten minutes later, he climbed back out.
    “Martha West?” Lucas asked.
    “I assume so, from what I’ve been told. No way to tell by looking at the body. We’ll have to do DNA on the body and on her daughter, and make some comparisons. But—it’s her.”
    “All right.” They lingered a few more minutes, then headed back to Armstrong. There was actually traffic on the highway, cop cars and fire department vehicles, and maybe rubberneckers running up to see what had happened.
    On the way back, Del asked, “What’d you tell Ruth Lewis?”
    “I gave her something to be guilty about. Those kind of women, they guilt-trip pretty easily.”
    “Just gonna let it percolate?”
    “Yeah, overnight. Then I’m gonna go up there tomorrow and ask Lewis if she’ll go down to the Cities and tell Letty that her mother is dead.”
    “Mmm,” Del said. Then after a minute, “Hitting her with a hammer.”
    “Maybe she’ll break,” Lucas said.
    They stopped at the hospital, found it quiet. The duty nurse told them that the resident had gone back to bed, and that Letty was in the air. “They got here really quickly,” she said. She glanced at a wall clock. “She should be at Hennepin in a half-hour.”
    After leaving the hospital, they drove over to the Law Enforcement Center, where two people were sitting in thecomm center eating microwave pizza. Lucas borrowed a computer and wrote a memo to the sheriff,