Naked Prey

North Dakota or Canada.
    Now the pilot dropped the chopper in a circle, to look at the highway where they’d land. At the same time, a state patrol car, followed by a sheriff’s car, rolled down the side road and, at the intersection, blocked the main highway north and south.
    “Better button up tight,” the copilot called back to them. “It’s gonna be chilly.”
    The chopper put down on the tarmac between the two cop cars, and the copilot came back to slide the door. Lucas and Del climbed out into the downdraft of the rotors.
    The air was bitterly cold. Dirt and ice crystals scoured them like a sandblaster, and, unconsciously ducking away from the rotors, they ran with their bags back to the state patrol car, their pants plastered to their legs, the icy air lashing their exposed skin. The patrolman popped the back and passenger doors, and as they climbed in, the chopper took off in another cloud of ice crystals.
    “That really sucked,” the patrolman said as they settled in. He was in his late forties, with white eyebrows and graying hair, his face as weathered as a barn board.“Didn’t even think about the goddamned prop wash, or whatever it is.”
    He buckled up and looked back at Del, nodded, then held out a hand to Lucas and said, “Ray Zahn. Sorry to get you up so early.”
    “Lucas Davenport, that’s Del Capslock in the back,” Lucas said, as they shook hands. “They haven’t taken the bodies out yet?”
    “No. They’ve been waiting for the ME. Couldn’t find him for a while, but he’s on his way now.” Zahn did a U-turn and they bumped off the highway onto the gravel road, and the sheriff’s car fell in behind them.
    “You know the people? The ones that got hanged?” Del asked.
    Zahn got the car straight and caught up with Lucas’s question. “Yeah. It’s a couple from down in Broderick. We’ve IDed them as a Jane Warr and a Deon Cash. They were living in an old farmhouse down there.”
    “Cash is black?”
    “Yup.” Zahn grinned. “Only black dude in the entire county and somebody went and hung him.”
    “That could piss you off,” Del ventured.
    “Got that straight,” Zahn said with a straight face. “Our cultural diversity just went back to zero.”

3
    W EST D ITCH R OAD was frozen solid, but sometime during the winter there’d been a thaw, and a tractor had cut ruts in the thinly graveled surface. As they bumped through the ruts, now frozen as hard as basalt, Zahn pointed to a house across the ditch and said, “That’s where the girl’s from.”
    “What girl?” Lucas asked. He and Del looked out the windows. A thirty-foot-wide drainage ditch ran parallel to the road and showed a steely streak of ice at the bottom. A narrow, two-story farmhouse, its white paint gone gray and peeling, sat on the other side of the ditch. The house faced the highway, but was a hundred feet back from it. A rusting Jeep Cherokee squatted in the yard in front of the sagging porch.
    Zahn glanced over at him. “How much you know about this? Anything?”
    “Nothing,” Lucas said. “They threw us on the chopper and that’s about it.”
    “Okay,” Zahn said. “To give it to you quick, a girl named Letty West lives in that house with her mother. She’s this little twerp.” He thought that over for a second, then rubbed an eyebrow with the back of his left hand. “Naw, that’s not right. She’s like a little Annie Oakley. She wanders around with an old .22 and a machete and a bunch of traps. Caught her driving her mother’s Jeep a couple of times. Got a mouth on her. Anyway, last night—she looked at her clock when she woke up, and she says it was right after midnight—she saw some car lights down the road here, and wondered what was going on. There’s nothing down here, and it was blowin’ like hell. This morning, about dawn, she was walking her trapline along the ditch, and went up on top to look at that grove of trees. That’s how she found them. If she hadn’t, they might’ve hung there until spring.”
    T HEY WERE ALL looking out the windows at the girl’s house. The place might have been abandoned, but for a light glowing from a window at the front door, and foot tracks that led on and off the porch to the Jeep. The yard hadn’t been cut in recent years and clumps of dead yellow prairie grass stuck up through the thin snow. A rusting swing-set sat at the side of the house, not square to anything, as though it’d been dumped there. A single swing hung from the