Stolen Prey

said he never had a real home.
    She had to think about all of that.
    L UCAS COPIED David Rivera’s LCN files and photos to his computer, then gave the thumb drive to Shaffer to read. Shaffer said he’d put the six LCN mug shots on television that night and ask people to keep an eye out. When Lucas was done with that, he made a few more calls on the case, learned nothing useful, then went home early and collected Letty and a couple of pistols.
    Lucas was an excellent shot. Part of that came from being a good athlete, with the kind of long-term training in hockey and basketball that allowed him to quickly grasp the essentials of accurate rifle and pistol work. Just as, in basketball, there had to be an instant of focus before the ball was released, a focus that excluded almost everything but the basket itself, good shooting required that same moment of mental exclusion, that moment when you saw nothing but the target. The athletic background also taught him that patience was needed to get good in any difficult endeavor. He developed the patience.
    He wasn’t particularly fond of guns, but he was effective, and he believed that since guns were one of the ubiquitous tools of violence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it behooved one to know how to use them.
    Weather disagreed; Letty did not.
    Letty, in her previous life, had been severely neglected. She’d grown up in an isolated house, far out in the countryside in northwestern Minnesota. She had, at times, literally been required to hunt for her dinner. She also had been a fur trapper, a preteen wandering in rubber boots and a Goodwill parka around the muskrat swamps of northwest Minnesota, trying to make a buck. Then her mother was murdered, and she met Lucas, who eventually adopted her; in the course of that case, Letty had shot a cop. On two different occasions—the same crooked cop. She had no regrets or second thoughts whatsoever.
    O N THIS AFTERNOON , they got Lucas’s Colt .45 Gold Cup and Beretta 92F, and drove up to the St. Paul police pistol range in Maplewood, where a half dozen guys were going through annual testing. Lucas had a standing arrangement with the department to use the range, and had gotten a quiet okay to bring Letty along.
    On the way up, they talked about her school, and about the Wayzata case, and Lucas gave her the details that he had.
    “Nothing there for me,” she said, thinking about the possibilities for her television job. “The cop reporters got all that stuff.”
    “I talked to Jen, and she said you were working on some Apple computer thing.”
    “Yeah, boring, boring,” she said. “I’m doing a review of favorite laptops of the rich and fashionable kids, for the next school year.” She pitched up her voice, “Oh, my God, she’s got only four gigs of RAM.”
    “Girls don’t talk like that,” Lucas ventured.
    “They do now. Everybody’s got a Mac, an iPhone, and maybe an iPad, and God help you if you show up with a Dell,” Letty said. “Then you’re really socially f-worded.”
    “Really.”
    A T THE RANGE , they put on ear and eye protection, got the okay from the range officer, and began working with the .45, and then the Beretta. The Beretta offered more firepower, in terms of sheer number of rounds, but Lucas had sent the .45 to a Kansas gunsmith to be tuned, and it was more accurate. Because of the relatively mild recoil, and smaller grip, Letty had no problem handling it.
    “If you’re shooting for real, shoot at the smallest spot you can see clearly,” Lucas said, as he was looking at one of her targets. The bullet holes were scattered in a loose group around the center of the target. “A button is good. The smaller the aiming point, the tighter your group will be, but you still want a substantial target behind the aim point. Like the chest triangle: nipples and navel. An eye is small, and you naturally look at an eye, but the overall target, the head, is small, and it’s always moving. The nipple-navel triangle doesn’t move so much. Whatever you do, you don’t want to just start whaling away, because if you do, you’ll have a whaled-away group.”
    “I knew that,” she said. “When I’d kill a rat, I’d always aim at that little white spot in their eye. ’Course, I was using a twenty-two, from two inches. Still like that gun.”
    “Lot to like about it,” Lucas agreed. “Saved your life.”
    He got into his gun bag and brought out a round red sticker about the