John Sandford - Naked Prey

"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 bury somebody 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? Singleton?"

"No, not that I remember."

"But you used to come out here all the time. Couple times a week, you said."

"Yeah."

Lucas to Del: "Jesus, what if he was afraid that Letty saw him? Then he sees us out here with her."

"Let's go take his shirt off," Del said.

Lucas shook his head. "Not yet. If he was wearing a vest, and that's what stopped the slug, then we'd tip him off and we wouldn't have anything. I'll tell you what: Why don't we get the California crew up here? They aren't finding anything around Cash's house. They could come up, pick a good spot, and start sweeping it. We'd know in a few hours."

Ruth said, "Loren did it?"

Lucas shook his head. "It's a possibility. Maybe one chance in three. We're really at the end of a long string here, but nobody can figure out why Letty and her mom were attacked, and why he came after Letty especially. It had to be something that she either knows, or that he was afraid she knew. And he saw us here, together, that afternoon, and then he hauled ass without a word. Turned around and took off."

Ruth looked at Letty in wonder, and Letty said, "Loren Singleton?"

Letty's house, six miles south, had been on the far fringe of the cell-phone net. The dump was out of it. "Gonna have to go get the FBI guys," Lucas said.

"I can run back with the truck, if you guys want to scrape around here," Del suggested.

"That'd be good." Lucas tossed him the keys. "The insurance certificate is in the door pocket. Don't use it."

"What am I gonna hit out here?"

Del took off, and Lucas, Letty and Ruth began walking around the dirt surface of the dump, Letty using her crutch on about every fifth step. She could feel the sprain, she said, but they'd packed her leg in ice at the hospital, and had kept the ice on it for most of the next day, and that had helped. "I'll be running in a week," she said.

"It probably wouldn't hurt to stay off it, though," Lucas said. "Much as you can, anyway."

"Drives me crazy."

"Yeah, well… I know. Always drove me crazy, too."

They chatted about old injuries for a while, as they wandered around. The dump was large, probably covering half a square mile, but most of the surface was covered with snow. Lucas had been to dumps before, and knew generally how they worked: the garbage and trash was dumped in the working area and was covered with a layer of dirt. Then another layer of trash went down, followed by another layer of dirt. When a predetermined level was reached, the whole thing was capped with an impervious layer of clay that would tend to sheet water off to the sides. The dump would also have a clay bottom, beneath all the layers of trash, to prevent contamination of the local groundwater.

It was, in a way, like a clay-and-garbage pie, with the clay acting as the crust, and the garbage the filling.

If Singleton was the killer, and if he'd buried his victims at the dump, he would have chosen an area already disturbed by the bulldozer, they decided. Over the rest of the area, the surface was frozen solid, and any grave-shaped hole would have shown through to the bulldozer driver.

"Do people come out here? I mean, other than the dump guy and you?" Lucas asked Letty.

"Oh, sure. Especially during hunting season. People want to get rid of deer hides and heads and so on, they'll put them in a garbage bag and bring them out and throw them in the pile. Or maybe they've got something too big to put out for the trash, they'll haul it over in their truck and throw it in. They're not supposed to, but they do."

"So it wouldn't be completely unusual to see somebody out here?"

"No. When I'm trapping out here, I probably see somebody half the time." She carried the rifle across the cast on her left arm, the muzzle pointing up at the sky. Lucas had been watching her handle the gun, and decided that she was safe enough.

"This all looks pretty raw," Ruth called. They walked over to her. She was standing on a patch of dirt thirty feet wide and fifty long, rumpled beneath the snow, softer-feeling-a bulldozer runway that led to the feeding edge of the landfill.

Lucas kicked some of the snow off, then stooped and picked up some dirt, looked at it, tossed it aside, and brushed his hands. "We oughta get the dump guy out here," he said. "Maybe he saw something strange."

After exploring the area of raw dirt, they drifted back toward the shooting range, and Lucas borrowed Letty's rifle and bounced one of the cans around. Then Letty asked about his pistol, and Lucas took out the.45 and showed her how it worked.

"Same kind of sight picture as with the rifle," he said. He stepped away from her, aimed at one of the cans, which was now about forty feet away, and fired once, missing right by three inches. He frowned, fired again, and again missed right, by only a half-inch this time, but also a little high. A third shot sent the can skittering away.

"Let me try," Letty said.

"It's gonna feel heavy, with only one hand on it," Lucas said. He gave her the pistol, showed her how the safeties worked.

She held the pistol out straight from her side, her head turned so that she was looking over her right shoulder. After a moment, she said, "Squeeze," and fired a round. She missed the can by three feet to the right, a foot low. "Holy cow," she said. "What'd I do?"

"Try once more," Lucas said. He heard truck noises back at the gate.

Letty pointed the pistol, but the barrel was shaking, and after a few seconds she took it down. "I'm not strong enough one-handed," she said.

Lucas took the gun from her, spent a couple of seconds pulling down on the can, let out a half-breath and smashed the can a second time.