Naked Prey

said to Del.
    “That’s a good thing,” Del said.
    O UT IN THE car, Del asked, “You gonna tell me?”
    “Yeah.” Lucas put the car in gear, sighed, and said, “We’ve gotta talk to the sheriff, and the crime scene guys from Bemidji, start looking through their paper, see if there’s anything. Gotta think about it. ’Cause it ain’t these guys.”
    “So . . . what’re they doing?” Del asked.
    Lucas told him. When he was done, Del said, “I actually heard rumors about them. Down in the Cities. Never made the connection with these guys. I just thought it was somekind of feminist-wicca-earth-goddess-conspiracy urban-legend bullshit. Huh.”
    “Where’d you hear it?”
    “My old lady.”
    “Yeah? You know where Lewis said I should go for more information?”
    “Where?”
    “My old lady.”
    They laughed about that for a very short time, and Lucas said, “Let’s go talk to the feds.”

17
    O N THE WAY up the street, Lucas got back on his cell phone and called the sheriff’s office. He got the sheriff on the line, explained what he needed.
    “That’s not a bad idea,” the sheriff said. “I’ve got three guys on duty at the schools, but that’s not critical—I could have everybody who’s in town down here in forty-five minutes.”
    “That’d be great,” Lucas said. “We need the help. We’re really stuck.”
    T HE FBI SQUAD was led by Lanny Cole and Jim Green, the agents they’d met at Hale Sorrell’s home. Cole was standing in the yard, talking to a man in an Air Force snorkel parka, the fur-rimmed snout sticking eight inches out from the man’s face. Lucas and Del got out, and Cole came over with the parka and they shook hands.
    “This is Aron Jaffe from Hollywood,” Cole said,nodding at the parka. The parka nodded back. “He’ll run the GPR search team.”
    “Can you hear me in there?” Lucas asked, talking at the snorkel.
    “I can hear you fine,” Jaffe said. “Only my legs are frostbitten.”
    “Is the frozen ground gonna screw you up?”
    “Naw. Might help,” he said. “We might see some seriously unconsolidated stuff.”
    They talked for another minute, then Cole said, “The second girl, Burke—her parents are driving up here from Lincoln. They want to look at the locket, although I don’t think there’s any doubt.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. “Are you all straight with the BCA crew?”
    “Yeah, we’re fine. You got anything going at all?”
    Lucas shook his head. “Not much. You know about the fire last night.”
    “Went up and looked at the hole this morning.”
    “The girl who was hurt says the killer sounded like he was from here. His voice did, the way he spoke.”
    “The Fargo accent,” said the guy from Hollywood.
    “Yeah. We know that three of the kidnappers worked for the Calb auto-body place, and the whole Cash family down in Kansas City is supposedly heavy into car theft. So . . . there’s a thing here.”
    “A nub,” Del suggested.
    “A nexus,” said the guy from Hollywood.
    “Whatever. I think it’s about fifty-fifty that the killer’s not more than two or three hundred yards away from us. Somebody from here, connected to Calb’s.”
    “You wanna jack the guy up? I could come along, add a little federal heat.”
    “Probably. But I’m going down to the sheriff’s office first. We need to talk to the deputies, to everybody thatknows anybody up here. There’s gotta be some kind of edge we can get our fingernails under.”
    Before they left, they walked Jaffe around the place, and pointed out spots along the creek, behind the house, where bodies could have been buried. “That’s a sizable chunk of ground. Gonna take a while,” Jaffe said.
    T HEY LEFT THE FBI men, stopped at Wolf’s Cafe, found it empty except for Wolf, ordered pancakes, and asked her to name everybody she knew in every building in the town. “Please God, don’t tell anybody I helped. That poor goddamned Martha West, getting roasted.”
    “Nobody’ll hear it from us,” Lucas said.
    She started reciting names, and Lucas got a piece of paper from his notebook and drew an outline map of the town and slotted the names in cartoon houses. They took the map south, to the sheriff’s office, and found twenty or so deputies milling around. The sheriff came out and said, “I got a courtroom upstairs. Already some people up there, I’ll send the rest of them up now. Only got two or three who can’t make it.”
    Thirty people, half of them in uniform, had