Naked Prey

question.”
    “Go ahead,” she said cheerfully. She’d given Lucas advice on other cases.
    “You know a woman named Ruth Lewis, right? Used to be a nun? Sat in on a couple of games with us?”
    He sensed a hesitation, then: “I know Ruth.”
    “What’s going on with her?”
    “What’s going on with you?”
    Lucas was dumbfounded. Elle was his oldest, closest friend, and he was feeling resistance. That hadn’t happened before.
    “I’m trying to figure out the Sorrell kidnapping. A little girl was shot last night, almost had her hand cut off, and her mother was murdered, and then she had her house burned down around her. Lewis lives just a few blocks down the highway, and she knows something she’s not telling me. I can feel it. This guy, the guy who’s doing the killing—he’s not gonna stop if he thinks he’s in danger.”
    Another moment of hesitation, then: “Lucas, are you on your cell phone?”
    “Yes.”
    “Let me call you back.”
    “Elle? What the hell’s going on?”
    “I’ll probably tell you, but I want to talk to Ruth first. I want to make sure there’s no possibility that she’s involved with your case. She won’t be involved directly, but I want to make sure that there are no . . . ramifications from her job, that might create some, mmm, involvement.”
    Lucas was getting angry. “Elle, you’re bullshitting me.”
    “No, I’m not. You’ve just got me stuck. If I tell you why, you’ll understand, but I’ve got to talk to Ruth first.”
    “C’mon.”
    “I’ll call you back, Lucas, I promise. I will tell you something about Ruth, though. She wasn’t a very good nun because she was . . . too much. She demanded perfection,and she was the one who’d define what that was. The people she most admired were all martyrs. So . . . ”
    “She’s nuts.”
    “No. She’s not crazy, but she will do what she will do. And you won’t stop her. Nobody will stop her. If she winds up martyred because of it, that wouldn’t faze her. Wouldn’t slow her down. In some ways, she’s a throwback.”
    “To what, the fifties?”
    “I was thinking of the crusades,” Elle said. “Anyway, I’ll call you back.”
    T HEY WERE COMING up to the Bird when Lucas got off the phone, now as puzzled as he was angry. Del asked, “What was that all about?”
    “I’m getting stonewalled by Elle. She knows Lewis and she knows what’s going on, but she won’t tell me.”
    “I don’t know, man,” Del said. “That’s weird.”
    “I even told her about Letty,” Lucas said.
    “Now we know one thing—something’s going on and it probably ain’t legal. What are the chances of two big illegal things going on in a town the size of Broderick, that aren’t connected somehow?”
    “Slim and none,” Lucas said. “She’s gonna call me back.”
    S HE CALLED BACK as Lucas was in the middle of a low-voiced rant about the scrambled eggs. “How in the fuck can you screw up eggs? You just scramble them in a bowl with a little milk, and then pour them in a pan. These things are like burned yellow rubber. They even smell like burned yellow rubber. Where’d they get the fucking eggs, from a Firestone factory? Don’t even get me started on the goddamned danish. This feels like a piece of skin. Is that a prune? That looks like . . . ”
    “Don’t say it. I’m gonna eat it,” Del said.
    The phone rang and Lucas dug it out of his shirt pocket. “Davenport.”
    “Lucas, it’s Elle. Ruth is up at that church, or whatever it is. She wants to talk to you now.”
    “Elle, what the hell is going on?”
    “I don’t know the details, I only am . . . aware . . . of the outline of what she’s doing. But I promised her that you were going in as a citizen, and not exactly as a cop—that your conversation would be off the record. I don’t know if you’ll be able to go along with it, but that’s what I told her.”
    “Oh, boy. They’re smuggling grass, right? They’re using the money to regild the dome on the cathedral.”
    Another odd hesitation, and then Elle said, “Talk to her. I don’t know what she’ll say.”
    T HEY GAVE UP on the breakfast and headed for Broderick, Del still driving. On the way out of town, they got hung up in a four-car traffic jam behind a lift truck taking down Christmas lights. For the first time since they’d come to town, there were cracks in the clouds, and hints of sunshine. The car thermometer said it was six below zero, and the air was almost