Silken Prey

on the main drag, ate meat loaf and mashed potatoes, and then cruised on up to Iron Bay, a tiny town off Lake Superior.
    Iron Bay had once been the home for workers at a taconite plant, and when the plant went down, so did the town. At one time, a house could be bought for ten thousand dollars, and many had been abandoned. The town had seen better days since, but it was not yet a garden spot.
    Lucas threaded his way through a battered working-class neighborhood, and finally pulled into the driveway of a small ranch-style house. A heavy old man named James Corcoran came to the door, sucking on a cigarette, and said, “That car is a waste of money, in my opinion. You shoulda gone for the Boxster. All the ride, half the price.”
    “Got hooked on the looks,” Lucas said, checking out his car. “A Boxster is nice, but you know . . . a 911 is a 911.”
    “Come on in,” the old man said. “You want a beer?”
    “Sure.”
    •   •   •
    T HEY SAT IN THE living room and Corcoran, who’d once been the town’s only cop, said, “So, Lauren Watley. I do remember that girl and I hope she’s all right.”
    “Married to a millionaire artist,” Lucas said.
    “Good for her, good for her,” the old man said. “Her dad was one of the bigger jerks in town. Smart guy, engineer at the factory, but when he lost his job, he packed up, put it all in the car, and took off. Never looked back, as far as I know. Took every last cent, too. Janice Watley woke up one morning and didn’t have enough cash to buy cat food.”
    “How old was Lauren at the time?”
    “Don’t really know,” Corcoran said. “Junior high school, I guess. After her old man took off, the family went on welfare, and child support, but hell, that was nothing. Then, we started having some break-ins around town. Whoever was doing it knew what was going on, who had what, and where it was. For a long time, it was only money. But then, there was a guy here who ran the only thing in town that was worth a damn, a payday loan company. He had a coin collection, and it disappeared. Probably worth fifty grand.”
    “You thought Lauren was doing it?”
    “You know, it was one of those small-town things,” Corcoran said. “Everybody knew what their situation was over there. They had
no
money. Janice couldn’t find a job . . . hell, nobody could find a job after the plant went down. So they were hurting. But they weren’t hurting enough. They found the money for a used car. They paid cash for things . . . and the feeling was, money was coming from somewhere.”
    “But there was no proof.”
    “No proof. Lauren got to be in high school, and then this coin collection disappeared. The owner’s name was Roger Van Vechten. He sued the insurance company, because they only wanted to give him thirty thousand, and he wanted fifty. But that was later. Right after the coins disappeared, I happened to be in Duluth, for something else entirely, buying something, I can’t remember what . . . anyway, I see little Lauren coming out of the Wee Blue Inn. You know the guy there . . .”
    “Weenie . . .”
    “Yeah. Dead now,” Corcoran said. “He was the biggest fence in the Upper Midwest. Everybody knew it. The question was, what was Lauren doing coming out of the Wee Blue Inn? I thought I knew the answer to that and followed her back to Iron Bay, and we got to her house and I braced her. Made her turn her pockets out. She had two dollars and some change. I checked the car . . .”
    “You had a warrant?”
    Corcoran laughed, and then started coughing. When he recovered, he said, “Oh, hell, no. That was a different time, up here. I just did what needed to be done. Anyway, I checked her, and she was pissed, but she didn’t have a thing. Said she went down there to apply for a waitress job. I said, ‘Lauren, you ain’t no waitress.’ And she said, ‘Jim, you never been poor.’ She called me ‘Jim,’ when everybody else her age would have been calling me ‘Mr. Corcoran.’ She was fifteen and all grown up.”
    “I’ve known women like that, girls like that,” Lucas said, thinking of his Letty.
    “But that wasn’t the kicker,” Corcoran said. “The kicker was, we had some rednecks out here who made a connection down in the Cities, and got the local cocaine franchise. One day, I borrowed a couple deputies from the sheriff and we raided them, and we got a half-kilo of coke and eight thousand dollars in cash. I locked it up in the