Lucas was annoyed. "You just stay away from there," he said. "You don't need to do any shooting."
"Maybe they fed the kid to the dogs," Letty suggested.
"Goddamnit," Lucas said. And as they came to the top of the creek, "Goddamnit. We could be standing ten feet from the Sorrell kid and not know it."
"How would you do it?" Letty asked. She looked up at Del. "If you killed a little kid, and brought her out here, where would you put her?"
Del said, "I don't think you should be here."
"C'mon, Del. Look around. What'd you do?" she asked.
Lucas looked around, then down at his feet. "Is there always water in the creek?"
"No. But most of the time, there is."
"Under the creek?" Del asked, skeptically.
"It's a possibility," Lucas said. "But if he was going to dig around here, I bet he'd be down here in the creek bed. Maybe digging in the bottom, or in the creek bank. Couldn't be seen, but he could see people coming."
"Unless it was at night," Letty said.
They walked up and down the creek ice, looking at the banks, but couldn't find anything unusual. Lucas probed a low cut-bank with a stick, then shook his head and threw the stick back into the trees. "We need the crime scene guys down here, and the radar guy, and maybe some dogs or something."
DISCOURAGED, THEY WALKED across the thin crunchy snow back up to the house, and Lucas looked at his watch and said, "Little early for lunch, but we could get some breakfast."
"Can I see the cell?" Letty asked. "The room in the basement?"
"Fuckin' TV," Del said. The cell had been mentioned prominently.
"Watch your mouth around a kid," Letty said, payback for the little girl comment. To Lucas: "I'd really like to go down there. I'm a kid, maybe I could think like a kid or something."
Lucas sighed, looked at Del, then said, "All right. Two minutes."
They trooped through the house, nodded to the deputy, and took Letty into the basement. Inside the bathroom-the cell-she turned round and round, then sat down on the floor, then lay down and looked at the ceiling, her arms outstretched as though she were making a snow angel. She closed her eyes, and a minute later, she said, "If they left me here alone-if they left me here alone-I would try to write my name somewhere."
She opened her eyes, found Lucas's eyes, and asked, "What do you think?"
"Sit up," Lucas said.
She sat up, and Lucas and Del sat down, and they began scrutinizing the walls. Nothing apparent. Lucas stood up, pulled the top off the toilet tank, and looked inside. Nothing visible. Lucas flushed, watched the water go down, pulled the float to stop water, and groped around the bottom of the tank with his hand. The shower stall was bare, not even a bar of soap. He pulled open the medicine cabinet, found it empty. Del looked inside the cabinet under the sink, and found four rolls of toilet paper. He looked through all the toilet paper tubes. Empty. Lucas checked the rim on the top of the medicine cabinet, and got his fingers dusty.
"I would write something," Letty said, a little defensively. "I would scratch it with something."
She crawled around on her hands and knees, peering at the baseboard. Then Del, who'd crawled over to the toilet, said, "Got something here."
"What?" Lucas got down on his stomach, and Letty crawled over.
Del was lying face up. "Something twisted around the water line… it's a chain. Let me… " He fumbled under the tank, said, "Uhhh… " Then: "Got it."
He slid out from under the toilet. A silver locket, a small oval, dangled from his fingers on a short silver chain.
"Aw, Jesus," Lucas said. "Don't fuckin' move. Don't even twitch."
Lucas ran up the stairs, dashed through the house to the mudroom door, outside to the garage, and said, "You guys… get some shit, get some baggies and those tweezers… c'mon."
BACK DOWN IN the basement, the stocky crime scene guy grabbed the locket with his forceps, held it sideways to one of the overhead lights and said, "There's a partial print on the back. If it's not yours… "
He looked down at Del, who shook his head: "Not mine. I never touched the locket part, only the chain."
"Looks like a good print," the tech said. He turned it in the light. "It's got an inscription. The locket does."
"What?"
The tech's lips moved as he worked through the script. Then he frowned and asked, "Who the heck are Jean and Wally?"
Lucas scratched his head. "Maybe somebody the Sorrell kid knew. Her grandparents, or somebody?"
"Whoever, she put it down there," Del said. "The locket didn't just fall in there."
"Where'd you find it?" the tech asked.
Del explained, and the tech looked around and finally said, "Did you check the mirror? And the shower booth walls? If she used hot water in here, they'd get steamed up, and she'd write in the steam. If she had soap or shampoo or oil on her fingers, you might get the image back."
"I do that every time I'm in the bathtub," Letty said. "I write on the mirror when I get out."
Lucas said, "Worth a try, I guess."
The tech said, "Let me put this away, and get my camera. Huh. Wally and Jean."
WHILE THE TECH went to put the locket away, Lucas, trailed by Letty, went out to the car, got his address book out of his briefcase, and looked up the numbers for the FBI agents on the Sorrell case. He got Lanny Cole's wife on the second ring, and she said Cole was out shoveling the walk. "Just had a quick two inches," she said. "Of snow."
Lucas heard her calling her husband, then some stomping around, and then Cole was on the line. He didn't know the names on the locket. "We were told that she probably wasn't wearing any jewelry when she was taken-she was just a kid, and she had a pretty limited set of stuff. Nothing like a locket, far as I know. Sorry."
"Thought we had something," Lucas said. "It's weird."
"I'll ask around," Cole said. "I wouldn't hold my breath. Maybe the print will turn out to be something."
Lucas hung up and Letty said, "No luck?"
"Not yet."
"It's gotta be something," Letty said. "It didn't belong to the plumber."
BOTH TECHS WERE in the basement with Del, the hot water pouring out of the shower, when Lucas and Letty got back down the stairs. They half-closed the door of the bathroom, waited fifteen seconds. The mirror steamed, and showed several finger-drawn lines, but nothing they could make sense of. The tech took a picture anyway. The walls of the shower showed what looked liked sponge marks: "Somebody cleaned up," the tech said.
"Good try, guys," Lucas said.
Feeling a little morose, they all wandered back up the stairs, and the burly tech said that he'd recheck the walls with his magnifying hood as soon as the humidity cleared. "Maybe somebody wrote really small-it'd be about the only thing you could do. It was a good idea, looking for a name. It turned up the locket. That'll be something."
Lucas looked at Letty. "Maybe you oughta be a cop."
Letty shook her head. "Nope. I'm going to be a reporter. It's decided."
Lucas said to Del, "We could be responsible for that."
"I'll never feel clean again," Del said. "Want to head down to the Bird? My gut says it's lunchtime."
They rode down to the Red Red Robin in near silence, all thinking about the house and where the Sorrell kid's body might be. Del finally said, "If they thought they ever might be suspected of anything, they wouldn't want a body anywhere around. They must've driven it out into the countryside. All right, if they're seen, they're seen, but they could fix it so they weren't. Scout out a spot ahead of time, dig a hole, drop the body during the night, fill the hole-it'd only take a couple of minutes-and get out of there."