Naked Prey

from the start, even with the cast. Now she’s trying to hit the gold medal thing every time,” Ruth said. “I haven’t hit the can once.”
    “I can’t even see the gold medal thing from here,” Del said. The cans were twenty-five yards away.
    “It’s sure a lot quicker than that old piece of shit,” Letty said. “Even one-handed.”
    “Letty . . . ” Ruth said.
    “I know; watch my mouth.” She took the gun from Ruth with her good hand, braced it over the cast on the other, and sighted down the barrel at one of the cans. She pulled the trigger and the can hopped across the ground. She turned the gun upside down with her good hand, got the pump under the upper part of her bad arm, trapped it,pumped, aimed and fired again, hit the can. She looked nonchalantly at Lucas. “So what’s going on?”
    “We stopped at the church, they said you were out here.” He looked around. “Whatever happened to those traps you put out before the fire? Are they still out here?”
    Letty shook her head. “Naw. I had Weather call Bud, from down at the hospital. He came and picked them up the next morning. We already checked, and they’re all gone. I gotta get them from him.”
    Lucas nodded. “Okay. Listen. We need to talk to both of you about . . . mmm . . . whoever might have done all this. We were wondering specifically—do you know anything about any police officers who might have been connected with Gene Calb or with Deon Cash and Jane Warr?”
    Letty looked at Ruth, and then Ruth asked, “Do you think this . . . person . . . might be a police officer?”
    “There are some things,” Lucas said. To Letty: “Who would your mom let in the door after midnight? We know it wasn’t her boyfriend, because he was still down at the Duck Inn. Who else?”
    Letty thought. “A guy? There might be a couple of guys, but I don’t know. It never happened.”
    “How about a cop that she knew?”
    “You’d always let a cop in,” Letty said. “Especially since all the trouble.”
    “Ray Zahn? Or how about that boyfriend of Katina’s?” Lucas looked at Ruth.
    “Loren Singleton,” she said, slowly. She pinched her bottom lip, thinking. Then, to Lucas: “I . . . oh, God.”
    “Look, we’re interested in one thing: finding the killer,” Del said to her. “We don’t care about all this other happy horseshit, the cars and the drugs and all that. If you know something about a cop . . . ”
    “Loren kept an eye out for us at the sheriff’s office,” Ruth said.
    Letty said, “Really?”
    “Was that because of his relationship with your sister?” Lucas asked.
    “No. They met at Calb’s. Loren was being paid by Gene before Katina got here. I don’t think he’d . . . ” She stopped, they waited, and then she said, “I was going to say that I don’t think that Loren would hurt Katina, but when I think about it now, I’m not sure. But I can tell you one thing: I’ve talked to Loren since the fire at Letty’s, and he certainly wasn’t shot.”
    Lucas said, “Huh.” Then, “I talked to him, too, and I didn’t see any holes in him. He seemed pretty freaked out by what happened to your sister.”
    “He was—I talked to him that night. He was really shaky.”
    “Do you see him as a kidnapper?” Del asked.
    “I don’t . . . You know, I’m not sure he’s creative enough, if that’s the word. If he’s ambitious enough. I didn’t know Deon very well, but Deon was this ocean of want. He wanted money and he wanted dope and he wanted cars and he wanted clothes and he wanted to go to Vegas and LA and he wanted season tickets for basketball . . . I don’t think, I mean, Loren didn’t seem to want anything. He didn’t seem to care about anything, or even do anything, other than sleep with Katina.”
    “He had his Caddys,” Letty chipped in. “He was always driving one old Caddy while he worked on another one. I heard he made some good money selling them.”
    “A Caddy,” Lucas said. He looked at Del. “Where’d we see that Caddy? You said something about it . . . ”
    “Right here,” Del said, jabbing a thumb back at the gate. “When Letty brought her traps up here.”
    “Day of the fire,” Lucas said. He looked around at all the raw black dirt of the dump. “If you were gonna burysomebody in the wintertime, with snow around, and you didn’t want a hole that looked like a grave . . . ”
    Del asked Letty, “You ever see him out here?