Wicked Prey

cops,” Letty said. “I even shot one. Twice. I mean, I shot him two different times, a couple days apart. I used to get busted by the highway patrol because I’d drive around when I was too young . . .”
    Briar was looking at her openmouthed. “You shot a cop?”
    “Yup. You can look it up on the Internet. My name is Letty West and you can look it up,” she said.
    “Okay,” Briar said. “But we don’t have an Internet.”
    Letty hooked her arm with Briar’s. “Now. When I was in all that trouble, all the time, I had to tell a few fibs. Well, lots of fibs. The way I did this is, I made a little box in my mind, and I put the truth in that, and then I made the box small. So I knew what the truth was. But then, I imagined, you know, another truth. What might have happened. What people would rather have had happen. So, if the highway patrolman saw me downtown, and asked me if I was driving, and I was, I’d just say, ‘No, my mom brought me.’ That was a better truth for everybody, see? Then I didn’t get in trouble, and he didn’t have to give me a hard time . . . Way back in my head, I knew what the truth was, but the fib was at the head of the line. That’s what everybody wants to hear, anyway. Randy doesn’t want to hear that I’m talking to you—he wants to hear that you, you know . . .”
    “Gave a guy a blow job,” Briar said.
    “Yeah. Okay?”
    “Okay.” Another helpless head bob.
    “So let’s go sit on that bench, across the street,” Letty said, pointing at a bench in a riverfront park. “We can practice. I’ll teach you how to lie to Randy. Like I lied to the cops. You can tell me about blow jobs.”
    She really did sort of want to know.

    LUCAS, TALKING with the women at the hospitality committee, felt the ice going out: the break.
    Lucy, the third woman, had said, “Raphael is dead.”
    Lucas and Dickens, the Secret Service agent, looked at each other, and another look passed between the three nervous women, and then Lucas said, “Who’s Raphael?”
    Cheryl Ann, the second woman, said, “Raphael Sabartes, this Latino guy . . .”
    “Spanish,” Fumaro said. “From Spain.”
    Lucy said, “He was part-time tech support back in the Washington office and he died. In June. June twenty-first, midsummer’s day. They said alcohol and pills. The cops did. The police.”
    Lucas’s eyebrows went up: “You think different?”
    “Well, it was a lot of pills,” Lucy said. “A lot of pills. Couldn’t hardly have been an accident.”
    “Police said it could have been an accident,” Fumaro said. “You’re drinking, you can’t get to sleep, so you take a pill. The pill makes you confused, and you don’t think you’ve taken the pill, so you take another one. And so on.”
    “Thirty pills?” Lucy said. “He took thirty pills by mistake?”
    Cheryl Ann said, “Then there was his girlfriend.”
    Dickens: “What about the girlfriend?”
    “Very pretty Latina, Mexican, I think, but older than Raphael,” Cheryl Ann said. “Raphael was about twenty-five; this woman, I think, might have been in her thirties.”
    Lucy snorted. “She’d never see forty again, if you ask me. She took care of herself, but she was no spring chicken.”
    “Raphael liked her,” Fumaro said.
    “Raphael loved her,” Lucy said. To Lucas: “I don’t think Raphael was very sexually experienced.”
    “He was sort of odd-looking,” Cheryl Ann confirmed.
    “Like a Picasso,” Fumaro said.
    “So this good-looking older woman who shares his heritage . . . well, some of it, anyway, she can speak Spanish . . . she eats him up,” Lucy said. She leaned toward Lucas: “Then he died, and she never even came to the memorial service. ”
    Lucas said, “He could have put together these rooms and names and organizations . . . ?”
    Cheryl Ann snapped her fingers: “Like that. You know what? He was moody, that’s what we told the police, he was moody, but we never saw him happier than after he hooked up with this woman. Why would he commit suicide?”
    Lucy said, “What if she broke it off with him that night? That could be a reason . . .”
    Dickens had taken a chair; now he leaned back and put his hands behind his head, stared up at the ceiling, thinking, then said, “You know what?”
    Lucas: “What?”
    “Just between you and me, the biggest street-money guy, I happen to know, is named Chuck Prince. He works for America-United Aerospace Association, which is a lobby group for all the big