Letty said, "The Red Red Robin."
"That's the best? God help us." Johnson said, and he was gone.
Letty put her hands on her hips and looked at Lucas. "Hey! What's that supposed to mean?"
LUCAS TOLD LETTY and Martha West what they needed: any hint of an irregularity around the Cash-Warr property. "There is no body in the house-we took the place apart after we found the money and the dope."
"So they must've buried her," Letty said, crossing her lips with both of her forefingers, thinking. Martha shivered at the thought, and looked at her daughter. Letty seemed more interested than scared.
"I imagine they did," Lucas said. "But out here… there's ten thousand square miles of unbroken dirt and bog."
"Yeah, but even out here, there's always people going by. You couldn't just drive out somewhere and spend an hour digging a grave and be sure nobody saw you," Letty said. "People see you out here, because-wherever you are-you're unusual. They notice you. I'll be walking across the lake down by the old dump and two days later somebody'll say, 'Saw you down by the dump with your gun.' And I never saw them."
"Gives me the creeps," Martha West said. "You got no privacy."
Letty looked out the window, the white winter light picking out her blue eyes. Still not much snow. "Why don't we go look around?" she asked. "I'll come with you, see if I can see anything. I walk up and down there all the time, on my way to the crick. If we wait until tomorrow, there might be too much snow."
"Must've been snow since the girl was taken," Del said. "She was taken before Christmas."
"There's been some, but not much," Letty said.
"If you guys are gonna take Letty, could I get you to buy her some lunch or something?" Martha West asked. "I've got to run into town for a while."
"Sure," Del said. "Down to the Bird."
MARTHA WEST WAS suddenly in a hurry, and Del looked past Letty at Lucas, catching his eye, with an uh-oh twist of his head: Martha West needed a drink right now. Lucas nodded and said to Letty, "Get your coat."
"Want me to bring the.22?"
"That won't be necessary."
"Piece of crap, anyway," she said, and headed up the stairs to her bedroom.
Martha West was gone before Letty came back down. Letty came down wearing a slightly too big parka, pac boots, and carrying a pair of mittens. "S'go," she said, clumping through the living room to the door.
"Your mom's already gone," Del said.
"Straight to the Duck Inn," Letty said. She added, without irony, in a voice that sounded older than her twelve years, "It's a tragedy."
THEY DROVE BACK down to the Cash/Warr house in the Acura, Letty fascinated by the CRT screen in the dashboard. "Can you play movies on it?"
"Nope-you get the information screen and the map screen, and that's it. Unless you have to eject." Lucas kept his voice flat. He was a firm believer in lying to children. "If you need to eject, you go to the information screen, and push History, and one second later, you're history. Throws you right out of the car, through the moon roof."
Letty, in the back seat, thought about it for a second, then said, "It's not nice to fuck with kids."
Del twisted and said, "Jesus Christ. Watch your mouth, little girl."
TWO VEHICLES WERE sitting in the driveway at the Cash/Warr house: a BCA crime scene van, and a sheriff's department car. Lucas pulled in behind them. They all climbed out, and a deputy sheriff came out on the stoop and said, "Your guys are out in the garage, if you're looking for them."
"Thanks," Lucas called back. They trudged up the driveway to the garage, and went in through the side door. A BCA tech was standing at the open trunk of Jane Warr's car, and said, "Hey, guys." When he spoke, another man, shorter and stockier, backed out of the trunk. He was holding a plastic bag and a pair of forceps. A magnifying hood was pulled down over his glasses, and his eyes appeared to be the size of ashtrays.
"Doing any good?" Lucas asked.
"The trunk is full of stuff-we've got hair for sure, we might have some blood, but it could be something else, too," the shorter man said. "Typical trunk."
"How about Cash's car?"
"Same thing. All kinds of stuff."
"How long before we know if anything's good?"
The taller tech shrugged. "Depends on how much stuff there is… a week or two. Anything we can do for you?"
"We're gonna look around the grounds," Lucas said. "See what there is to see."
"Uh, Dickerson called this morning, said something about a guy with ground-penetrating radar."
"Could happen," Lucas said. "But he can't do the whole place. That'd take weeks. We're gonna see if we can find a place to start."
"Good luck."
LUCAS, DEL, AND Letty went back outside, and Lucas turned around once, looking at the house, the garage, an old dying tree line that once marked the southern boundary of the farmyard, a fence that might have marked the western end.
"If you had to bury somebody… " Letty said.
"I wouldn't do it here," Del said, turning like Lucas. "I'd take her someplace."
"Everybody in the state was looking for her."
"Probably not yet, when they killed her. If they killed her before Sorrell brought in the FBI… "
"But they couldn't be absolutely sure that he hadn't done that right away," Lucas said. "If they had her here, in that cell, they wouldn't want to take her too far. Especially if, like Letty says, everybody sees things here. Everybody would remember a black guy with a little blond girl, up here, even if they thought it was innocent."
"Keep her in the trunk?"
"Too many things to go wrong," Lucas said.
"They drove her all the way up here from Rochester."
"What can I tell you? They did that. Maybe. But when it came to getting rid of her, do you think they'd drive her all the way back down, and take another big risk?"
"Dunno," Del said. "I just don't know where we could start looking."
LETTY POINTED: " OUT there in the trees. That's the crick. Five-minute walk. You could carry a bag. If you walked out there right at dark, nobody would see you, and you could walk back in the dark. How old was she?"
"Eleven."
"Skinny?"
"Not fat," Lucas said. "Sort of fleshy."
"Minnesota skinny."
"That's it."
"So she weighs seventy or eighty pounds. Five-minute walk."
"You'd leave footprints," Del said.
"Not in December. I remember how cold it was, but it wasn't snowing. We had hardly any snow at Christmas."
"Let's go look," Lucas said.
THE CREEK BEGAN as a swale in a farm field, narrowed into a line, not really a depression, toward the back of the Cash/Warr land, and finally deepened into a knee-deep notch in the black earth, surrounded by willows and box elders.
They started with the first tree, at the north end of the property, and followed the deepening notch into the thicker line of trees and brush, walking on the ice of the little creek itself. The band of trees was no more than thirty yards wide. They followed the creek for two hundred yards, until it ended in a bog. They saw nothing unusual-no disturbed earth, and the only tracks they found had probably been left by Letty.
They finally walked back up the creek; halfway back, three dogs began barking from the back of a house that lay down the highway from Cash's place. They were black and brown, square-faced, crazy: pit bulls. "That's the dogs I've been telling you about," Letty said.
"Scare the heck out of me," Del admitted. To Letty: "They ever let them out on you, you shoot first and ask questions later."