Naked Prey (26 page)

“Give him a ring,” Lucas said. To Zahn: “Could you run down to the LEC and talk to the sheriff, and ask him to get a search warrant up here? You’ll have to swear that we were looking for Calb for questioning in connection with a crime . . . which we are.”

“On my way.”

“Let’s go talk to the Carlsons,” Lucas said to Del.

L
INDA
C
ARLSON WAS
a good-looking, blond forty-five-year-old whose husband worked as a State Farm agent. She had large eyes, slightly tilted upward, that made her looked sleepy, as though she’d just been rolling around in bed with someone. Lucas saw her and thought,
Mmm.
“I called over there last night, but didn’t get an answer,” she said, putting a hand on Lucas’s sleeve. She was a toucher, too. “I was kinda surprised that there was nobody home, because I talked to Gloria yesterday afternoon and they weren’t planning to go anywhere . . . ” She was wearing a fuzzy angora V-necked sweater and her hand crept up the V until it stopped at her throat, and she said in a hushed voice, “You don’t think anything’s happened?”

“We’re just trying to get in touch,” Lucas said.

“I’ve got a key,” Carlson said. “I can go down there anytime . . . ”

Lucas spread his hands—“We can’t go in without a search warrant. If you could just take a peek, if you don’t think the Calbs would care. All we want to know is that they’re okay.”

“They wouldn’t care. Let me get my coat.”

She went to get her coat and Del muttered, “You’ve got drool dripping out the side of your mouth, marriage-boy.”

“Just looking,” Lucas said.

B
ACK AT THE
Calbs’, the deputy said, “I talked to Loren. He was on duty last night and didn’t see Lewis. He said he thought she was coming over before he went on duty, but she never showed up. He called the church and she wasn’t there.”

“Okay.”

Carlson’s key was for the back door. She went in, as Lucas, Del, and the deputy waited on the back porch. She called, “Gloria? Gloria? Gene?” She disappeared into the interior of the house, then came back and said to Lucas, “Maybe you better come in.”

“What? Are they . . . ”

“Nobody’s home,” she said. She was nervous, turning pink. “I don’t know about these things, but Gloria’s a very neat housekeeper . . . If this . . . ”

She led Lucas to a hallway off the kitchen and pointed down. There was a dark spot on the carpet, about the size of a paper pie plate. Not coffee, not Coke. Heavier than that, crusty-looking.

Lucas squatted next to it, then said, “Please don’t touch anything. Keep your hands by your side and carefully walk back out through the door, okay?” He followed her out to the porch and said to the deputy, “Wait out here, okay?” and to Del, “C’mere.”

Del followed, and when Lucas showed him the rug, he squatted, as Lucas had, then said, “Yeah.” He stood up, went into the kitchen, tore a small sheet of paper towel off a roll by the sink, tapped it under the faucet head to
get it damp, then stepped back to the hallway and touched the dark spot with the damp point of the paper towel.

He held it up to Lucas. The towel showed a diluted blood-red. “That’s a problem,” Del said.

L
UCAS PULLED OUT
his cell phone and dialed the LEC, asked for the sheriff. Anderson came on and he asked, “Have you seen Ray Zahn?”

“He’s here now, we’re working out a warrant.”

“Listen, a friend of the Calbs from down the street had a key and permission to go into the house. She went in, found blood, and invited us in. I don’t know the legal aspects of it, but it looks bad. We need that warrant down here right now, before we start pulling the house apart. But we need it
now.
”

“Ten minutes,” Anderson said. “I’ll walk it around myself.”

Lucas called Green, the FBI agent, told him about the blood. “Send our crime scene guys down here, will you?” Lucas asked. “We may have another scene for him to process.”

“Right now,” Green said.

Lucas rang off and Del said, “Over here.”

He was squatting in a corner of the kitchen, and Lucas stepped over. A pistol shell lay against a molding.

“A .380,” Del said.

“Yeah. Goddamnit. Listen, let’s do a walk-through. We’re okay on that—the blood’s fresh enough. Quick trip through the house.”

T
HE HOUSE WAS
large, but they did the first pass in five minutes. No bodies, but the house had been stirred around.
“Closets are halfway cleaned out,” Del said. “Lot of stuff gone, and they were in a hurry.”

“Whose blood is it, if the Calbs were running?”

“How did they run, if both of their cars are in the garage?”

“Taxi to the airport?”

“Do they have a taxi here? Do they have airplanes that go anywhere?”

“Shit, I don’t know.”

They were snapping at each other, feeling the pressure. Three people on the line—the Calbs and the church woman, Katina Lewis.

“Where’s the goddamn sheriff?”

A
NDERSON ARRIVED TEN
minutes later—“Couldn’t find the judge. He was in, but he was down in the surveyor’s office, bullshitting. Took forever to find him.”

“We’re okay to dig around?”

“Go ahead,” Anderson said. “You need more people?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “The BCA crime scene people are coming down from Broderick. The FBI may be with them . . . First thing, we’ve got to figure out if the Calbs are really gone.”

“Where’s that blood?”

Lucas showed him, and Anderson shook his head. “That’s a lot of blood.”

“But whose blood is it?” Lucas asked.

H
AVING GIVEN THE
house a quick run-through, they checked the cars. The engines were cold, so they hadn’t been used in the past couple of hours. There was nothing in either one of them that helped.

The lead crime scene guy arrived, with one of his
subordinates, and with Del and Lucas trailing, they began in the basement and slowly worked their way to the top of the house. The subordinate noticed the strands of wool on the hatchway that led to the space under the eaves.

“They wouldn’t hang there forever,” he said. “If they were in a hurry, what were they doing up there?”

“Had something hidden?” Del suggested.

They got a chair, and then an ottoman to stack on top of it, and Lucas and Del helped him balance as the crime scene guy stood on top of the ottoman, pushed the hatch up, clicked on his flashlight, and froze. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Aw, Jesus Christ.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Get me down.”

The tech hopped down and Lucas clambered on top of the ottoman. When he stuck his head through the opening, Katina Lewis’s face was four inches from his. Her dead eyes looked straight through him and he instantly flashed back to the hanging scene, the dead eyes of Cash and Warr; and he saw the face of the other woman, Ruth Lewis, in this woman.

“Lewis,” he told Del. “Just like the other ones.”

“Only her?”

Lucas couldn’t see past her, but he could see the rest of the area, and there was nothing but pink insulation. “I don’t see anyone else. I need to get a little higher . . . ” He grabbed the edges of the hatch, pulled himself up a foot, but didn’t have the leverage to get any farther. He could just see over Lewis’s body, and there was nothing but insulation. “Nope. I think it’s just her.”

“I’ll get something out on the Calbs,” Anderson said. “You think it’s Gene doing this?”

“Looks like it,” Lucas said. He climbed down off the ottoman and chair. “Whoever it is, he’s breaking up—he’s going through a psychotic break. If it’s Calb, I’d say his wife is in big trouble. He could kill anyone, now.”

T
HE CRIME SCENE
crew had suspended work at Cash’s house and had moved down to Calb’s. Lewis’s body was still in the crawl space under the eaves and nobody knew exactly when they could move her—removing the body would be a job, and they wanted as few people as possible going in and out of the house until it was fully processed.

Lucas and Del carefully probed through the life the Calbs had left behind. Calb had a small home office, and one of the file drawers was open. Files had been taken, Lucas thought. He found income tax returns for 1996–99, but nothing newer. None of the files related directly to the body-shop business, but when they’d talked to Calb the first time, Lucas had noticed a row of filing cabinets in his office, so business papers might well be there.

Del came in after a while, with a small zippered bag. He handed it to Lucas, who said, “What?” and zipped the bag open. An insulin kit.

“Somebody’s a diabetic and didn’t take his or her shit,” Del said.

“Unless this is a backup.”

“Still.”

A deputy came through, and they asked him about the airport; it was small planes only, and Calb wasn’t a flier, as far as the deputy knew. Nor were there any taxis in town.

One of the BCA investigators from Bemidji, who’d been working at the Cash house, called to say that he and his partner had walked across to Calb’s place and had frozen it—all the employees were there, and they were detaining any more who showed up.

Then the crime scene crew at Calb’s house found a fingerprint on the .380 shell. “We’ll do the Super Glue trick but it’s about the best single print I’ve ever seen,” the tech said. “We’ll have something for you.”

Lucas, going through Mrs. Calb’s bedroom closet, found two shoeboxes that contained virtually new shoes, with perhaps an evening’s worth of wear on the soles. In Calb’s closet, on the floor under some shoes, he found a steel box, and inside the box, a thousand dollars in ten-dollar bills and a loaded .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.

“I’m getting a bad vibe,” Del said. “He might leave the gun, if he’s got another one. Why would he leave the money?”

A
FEW MINUTES
after noon, the sheriff came back, trailing a tall cowboy-looking cop who the sheriff introduced as Loren Singleton.

“Loren was seeing Ms. Lewis,” Anderson said.

“I’m sorry,” Lucas said. “About your friend.”

Singleton was distant, a little vague. Lucas had seen it before. “I’m, a, you know, we were . . . hell, we were sleeping together. But, I, uh . . . ” A tear ran down his
cheek and he wiped it with his shirt sleeve. “Goldarnit. Why’d this have to happen? You think it was Gene that did it?”

“Can’t find him. Do you know any reason he’d have a problem with Ms. Lewis?”

“No, I don’t,” Singleton said. “I know what Katina was doing . . . I know what those women were doing, and I’m sure Gene knew . . . but how in the heck, I mean, what would that mean to Gene?”

“What were the women doing?” Anderson asked, taking a half-step back from his deputy.

“Bringing prescription drugs across the border from Canada,” Lucas said. “They had a little distribution thing going, giving out drugs to the poor.”

Anderson nodded, glanced at Singleton, and said, “Well, tell you the truth, half the people in town do that sometimes. No point in smuggling, though—you can order on the Internet.”

“Gotta
have
the Internet,” Lucas said. “Most of their clients are poor, and a lot of them are older—probably not too big on the Internet.”

“How well did you know Gene Calb?” Del asked.

“I grew up here, so I knew him pretty well,” Singleton said. “I didn’t think . . . I don’t know that he’d do anything like this. I mean, I refinish cars as a hobby, and once a year or so, I’d rent one of his paint booths to do some painting . . . That’s how I met Katina. At Calb’s.”

“What was she doing there?” Lucas asked.

Singleton shook his head—“Just chatting, I guess. I mean, there’re only forty or fifty people in that town. You tend to chat when you can.”

“You know anything about Toyotas?” Lucas asked.

“Toyotas?” Singleton looked at Anderson, who frowned at Lucas.

“Toyotas?” Anderson asked.

“There are some people down in Kansas City, associated with Deon Cash—members of his family—who apparently steal a lot of Toyotas. They’re never found again.”

“Toyotas,” Singleton said. He scratched his breast bone. “You know, I never thought about this, but there
were
a lot of Toyotas going through Gene’s shop. You don’t see that many around here, but you’d see them in Gene’s shop. Just about every time I went up there, when I think about it. Didn’t seem strange then, but it seems kinda strange when you mention it.”

“What were they doing to them? Rehabbing them . . . what?”

“Sometimes, it seemed like they had some parts off, but they weren’t chopping them or anything. They were like fixing them. And painting them. Man, they painted a lot of Toyotas.”

“Aw, Jesus,” Del said. To Lucas: “That’s where the hot Toyotas went.”

“When the girls . . . the women . . . came back across the border, they were always in a Toyota Land Cruiser or maybe some old beat-up 4Runner. There’s always one of them around the church, up there.”

“You didn’t think anything was weird about that?” Lucas said.

Singleton wagged his head. “Well, sure. But I knew what they were doing, and I . . . guess I didn’t have much problem with it. I mean, gosh, everybody around here does it. Everybody’s drugstore is over there.”

T
HEY TALKED FOR
a few more minutes, then Singleton went to look at Katina Lewis. He came back down the stairs two minutes later, even more shaky, sweating a bit. “Jeez . . . Jeez almighty . . . ”

“Go home and lie down for a while,” Lucas said.

“That’s gonna help?”

“No, not much, but it’s better than walking around with everybody staring at you. You look kinda messed up.”

“Aw, man . . . ”

L
UCAS SAID TO
Del, “They bought old Toyotas across the border, brought them down here, took what they needed off the bodies, junked what was left, then transferred the papers to the ones they’d just stolen and moved them back across the border. Probably sold them out in the woods somewhere, where nobody would ever give them a second look. Even if somebody looked, the papers would match, ’cause they were legitimate papers. You’d have to take the car apart to figure out something was wrong.

“The women took them back and forth, and the body shop guys probably rigged up some kind of plug-in carriers for the drugs—a false floor, some kind of undercarriage box, that you could move from one vehicle to the next. With their tools, they could build anything. You could get a million pills into a one-inch deep false floor in the back of a Land Cruiser.”

“Don’t get two big crimes in a small town, without them being related,” Del said.

“So the women would know about Calb’s little sideline, which was bringing in a few million a year,” Lucas said. Del nodded, and they both thought about it.

“Okay—I can see Calb for doing Lewis,” Del said, after a moment. “But why in hell would he do the Sorrells, or Letty?”

“Because Sorrell tortured one of their guys, Joe Kelly. Who knew what Kelly told him about the whole Kansas City arrangement? That’s why they had to act so fast—if Sorrell found a way to tip the cops . . . I mean, all we’d need is about three words, and we’d know all of it. If Sorrell
called and said, ‘Hey, a guy named Gene Calb is buying cars across the border and switching them with cars stolen in Kansas City by the Cash gang,’ and if we’d called around, it’d take us fifteen minutes to put the parts together.”

“How about Letty?”

“I don’t know about Letty—but what if it was Letty’s mother? She’d lived there for a long time. Would she know something was going on at the body shop? Maybe even knew exactly what it was, the stolen Toyotas? So then, her kid is hanging around with us, and again, all she’d have had to say was about three words, and we’d have been on Calb like Holy on the Pope.”

“Gonna be interesting talking to Ms. Lewis today,” Del said. He looked at his watch. “Funeral in two hours. They oughta be getting here.”

R
UTH
L
EWIS CALLED
the Calb house a half-hour later. A deputy answered, and she asked for Lucas. The deputy handed the phone to Lucas and said, “Ruth Lewis.”

“I’ll take it.”

“How did it happen?” Ruth asked, when Lucas came on. She was croaking, as though she’d spent the morning crying.

“We don’t know, yet. We didn’t know about the stolen car ring, so we didn’t lean hard enough on Calb. Something happened here last night—we think your sister was killed here and the Calbs are gone. If you’d told me about this, we might have avoided it.”

“Oh my God.”

“Is there anything else I need to know right away?”

“Oh, god . . . ” Ruth was weeping. Then a different woman’s voice: “I don’t think she can talk any more.”

“Where are you? Is Letty there?”

“We’re up at the church: Letty’s here.”

“Tell Ruth to stay there. We’ll be there in ten or fifteen minutes.”

T
HE SNOW WAS
steady, but not getting any worse. There were a few little drifts around the edges of buildings and down in the ditches, and the highway was slick.
Maybe an inch and a half, maybe two inches,
Lucas thought. Letty was waiting by the church door with the older woman who’d watched
Night of the Living Dead
with Del. Letty was happy to see them. She held up her hand, in a fiberglass cast, smiled automatically, but then her lower lip came out and tears started and she said, “My mom’s dead.”

Lucas was not good around tears, even little-girl tears, and he tried to pat her on the back and she threw her arms around his waist and squeezed. “They say Gene Calb . . . ”

Lucas pried her off and walked her away from the older woman, sat on a chair, and asked, “Letty, think about it. Was the guy you shot at . . . was that Gene Calb?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head. “I would have known him. He was fat, and I couldn’t see the man, but I don’t think he was fat. I don’t think his voice was right. Was Gene shot? Because I shot the man.”

“There’s a question about whether you hit him.”

“I
hit
him.”

“But if you’re shooting .22 shorts, it might not even have gotten through his coat. A cold night, he might have been all bundled up.”

“Then why did he fall on his butt? You don’t fall on your butt if the bullet sticks in your coat.”

“Maybe he was ducking.”

“He wasn’t ducking. He fell on his butt. Then he
crawled for a while and then he ran back to the house and then the fire started.”

When they finished talking, Lucas sent Letty to the TV with the older woman, who told Letty that she had to change for the service. “For the funeral,” Letty said, correcting her.

Lucas wagged his head at Del, and they walked through the church to the kitchen, where they found Ruth at the kitchen table. She was red-eyed, red-faced. “Gene did this? With Gloria? That’s . . . that’s . . . Are you sure?” She had a brown cardigan wrapped around her shoulders.

“We’re not sure. We just can’t find them. There was blood on a carpet, and we found your sister hidden up under the roof.”

“Why bother to hide her if she was so easy to find?” Ruth asked.

“Maybe they didn’t think anyone would come looking. Or that if somebody did, they couldn’t look too hard. Maybe all they expected was a head start.”

“Hard to believe. Gene wasn’t a bad man. I didn’t think he was.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“You know why,” she said, defensively. “You could let us go, when you knew what we were doing, but you could never let Gene go.”

“How did you get hooked up with him, anyway?”

She sighed. “One of our people up in Canada knew a man who bought a car from one of his . . . salesmen. We desperately needed different cars to bring the drugs across—you can’t keep going back and forth, two or three times a week, without somebody asking why. So when we figured out where the cars were coming from, I came down here and talked with Gene. He wasn’t too happy—but you know, if he’d done this, if he killed Katina . . . why didn’t he kill me way back then?”

“Different situation,” Del suggested. “No pressure then.”

“Maybe. Anyway, I talked to him. I told him that we would all be committing crimes together, so nobody could talk about anyone else. He really needed people to drive the cars across, since he was starting to do some . . . some
volume.
We were perfect. Older women, forties and fifties and sixties. Who would suspect? And Gene built some special . . . things . . . for us, that fit in the Toyotas, and let us bring the drugs across. It was all very smooth.”

“Did you bring a Toyota through last night?” Lucas asked.

“No. The last one was the one we had at the fire at the Wests’ house. You saw it. Gene took it. It was a wreck, though. I don’t think it would make another two hundred miles.”

“You know what the license plates were?”

“I have no idea.”

“Okay . . . You got some people killed,” Lucas said. He said it in a soft voice, but a mean one, taunting, like a bully trying to pull another kid into a fight. Pushing her.

“But there was no connection between the kidnappings, between Deon and Jane, and the car deal,” she said. She said, “Listen to me:
no connection.
I knew Gene pretty well, and he didn’t even
like
Deon or Jane. He didn’t trust them. Deon wasn’t a big shot in this thing, he was a
driver.
He was a
gofer.
”

“But if we’d had a piece of it . . . ”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” she shouted, tears running down her face. “You’re not listening to me. The kidnappings and all the rest of it weren’t connected. They weren’t.”

A
LITTLE LATER,
Lucas spoke to Neil Mitford. “I don’t think the governor necessarily would want to know about this conversation,” Lucas said, as an opener.

“That’s why I work here,” Mitford said. “Talk to me.”