"Yeah, I know," Lucas said. "She's probably gone for good."
THE BIRD WAS as below-average as it was the first couple of times: below-average coffee, below-average food. Below-average: Letty ate everything in sight, with the shifty-eyed compulsion of a kid who'd gone to bed hungry a few times, who was afraid the food might disappear.
"You okay with your mom?" Del asked halfway through the meal.
"Gettin' this far with her was the hard part," Letty said, working around the edges of the mashed potatoes, so the gravy wouldn't spill out of the center cup. "Now that I'm in middle school, things are smoother. I ride the bus back and forth, she can do what she needs to."
"Just checkin'," Del said. "I've had a little trouble with alcohol myself. It's a bitch to get off your back, but it can be done."
"You drink?" Letty asked Lucas, holding his eyes. Lucas shook his head. "A bottle of beer, few times a week. I never got the hang of it."
"That's good," Letty said.
THE PHONE IN Lucas's pocket rang, and he pulled it out. "Davenport."
"Hey, Lucas, this is Lanny Cole." The FBI man sounded like he was having a hard time catching his breath. "You said Wally and Jean on that locket. It was a white gold oval locket with a white gold chain and the names in script in the front oval. Picture of an elderly couple inside."
"We didn't look inside because of the print, but you got the rest of it, except that I thought it was silver," Lucas said. "Was it Tammy Sorrell's?"
"No."
"No?"
"It belonged to a girl named Annie Burke, fifteen, daughter of the owner of a chain of nursing homes from Lincoln, Nebraska. One of our guys downtown remembered the locket thing. She was kidnapped last April. A million-dollar ransom was paid, but she was never returned, never heard from again. The deal was, the kidnappers told Burke's father that they had an in with the FBI, and they left him a pack of papers that looked like FBI printouts. They told him that if he contacted the FBI or any police agency, they would know. He bought it, made the payoff. And get this: he got the money in Vegas, same way Hale did."
"Oh, boy."
Letty said, "What?"
"We're coming up there," Cole said. "We need that locket, we need that fingerprint. I'll talk to your boss. What do you need up there?"
"You got people who can look for soft spots in the ground, under the snow?"
"We got that. We have a team in California who do exactly that. They can be here in forty-eight hours."
"Bring them in," Lucas said.
13
AFTER LUNCH, THEY took a protesting Letty back to her house. "I can still help you."
"If we need you, we'll stop by," Lucas said. "We really do appreciate what you've done."
Her face anxious, she asked, "If I get my traps real fast, could you drop me at the dump? It's only five minutes in the car. I can walk back."
Lucas said, "We're pretty busy."
"I helped you," she said. "I need to get some clothes. TV might come back."
Lucas sighed. "Get the traps."
She took ten minutes, getting into an old pair of jeans, her boots and her parka. She got a can of generic-brand tuna cat food from under the kitchen sink-bait-the gunny sack with her traps, and her.22. The.22 was an old Harrington amp; Richardson bolt action single-shot, probably made in the 1940s. She tossed it all in the back of the Acura.
Six miles north of Broderick, on a back road, the landfill was marked by a clan of crows flapping overhead like little specks of India ink thrown against the gray sky. Lucas pulled into the entrance road, next to a sign that said "Quad-County Landfill," and stopped by a locked gate. Inside the landfill, a small Caterpillar sat at the base of a wall of garbage.
Lucas got out of the truck at the same time Letty did, and looked over the locked gate. The dump was bigger than he'd expected, covering a half of a square mile. Much of the garbage appeared to be pizza boxes, though it smelled more like old diapers. Letty walked around to the back of the truck to get her gear.
"Six miles," Lucas said, as he walked back around the truck and popped the lid for her. "How're you gonna get back home?"
"Walk, or hitch a ride," she said. She dragged the sack of traps out, stuck the rifle under her arm. "I won't have my traps. Do it all the time."
"Aw, Jesus." Lucas looked around at the weird, cold landscape, the spitting snow, the circling crows, and the piles of trash.
"I'm not asking for a ride back," Letty said. He could feel the manipulation.
"How long will it take to set out the traps? Minimum?" Lucas asked.
"Hour, hour and a half, do it right," she said.
"You got a watch?"
"No."
"Goddamnit. You need a watch." Lucas took his watch off and handed it to her. "If you lose the watch, I'll poison you. My wife gave it to me. We'll be back in an hour and a half."
"Thanks."
"Be careful."
A car pulled into the entryway, stopped, and they both looked at it. The man inside put up a hand, a hello, then turned and backed away. He got straight on the road, and headed back toward the highway. An old Cadillac.
Letty said, "See you," and walked away.
Lucas slammed the lid, got back in the truck. "She's more goddamn trouble than women ten years older than she is," he said.
"What're we doing?" Del asked.
"Let's start tearing Broderick down."
"Starting with…?"
"Gene Calb. Go back and hit him again. Nail him down. And maybe those church women, if we can find them. Letty said they worked for Calb, sometimes, delivering cars. They're church women, so maybe they'll tell us the truth."
"Fat fuckin' chance," Del said. And a while later, as they headed back toward Broderick, "That was a nice Caddy, you know? I've thought about buying an old one myself. You see them in the Sunday paper: you can get a good one for six or seven thousand, ten years old, some old guy drove it until he died, put thirty thousand miles on it, or something. You can drive it for another ten years."
"Of course, you'd have spent ten years driving a pig," Lucas said.
"Go ahead, tarnish my dream."
CALB'S SHOP WAS locked, and Del said, "It is Sunday. Not everybody works."
"Yeah. There're a couple of cars over at the church, though," Lucas said. They both looked across the highway, where two '90s Toyota Corollas, both red, sat in the driveway next to the church. Electric cords ran out to both of them, firing the block heaters. "Let's check them out."
"Nuns make me nervous," Del said.
"Except for Elle," Lucas said.
"Elle makes me nervous," Del said. "I'm always afraid she's gonna start shaking and moaning and screaming about Jesus."
"Wrong religion," Lucas said dryly, as they trudged across the empty highway toward the church. "She screams about the archbishop. Jesus, she doesn't scream about."
"It could happen, though," Del said. "She's one of those skinny women with big eyes. They can start shaking anytime. That's my experience."
Elle Kruger was Lucas's oldest friend, a nun and professor of psychology at a St. Paul women's college. He'd known her before kindergarten-they had walked together with their two mothers, carrying their tin lunch boxes, on the first day they'd ever gone to school. Later, when he was with Minneapolis homicide, she'd consulted on a number of his cases; and when Lucas began writing role-playing games as a way to make extra money, she'd created a group at her college to test-play the games.
WHICH MADE THE coincidence seem even stranger-that they should be talking about Elle Kruger as they crossed the highway, and then…