John Sandford - Wicked Prey

Lucy said, "What if she broke it off with him that night? That could be a reason…"

Dickens had taken a chair; now he leaned back and put his hands behind his head, stared up at the ceiling, thinking, then said, "You know what?"

Lucas: "What?"

"Just between you and me, the biggest street-money guy, I happen to know, is named Chuck Prince. He works for America-United Aerospace Association, which is a lobby group for all the big air-defense manufacturers. He probably has four times as much money with him as all these other guys ' why didn't they hit him? I know he's in town."

Fumaro reached forward and called up a form. "He registered with us on twenty-nine June."

Cheryl Ann said, her voice hushed and conspiratorial, "They don't know about him. Because Raphael was dead. They killed him too soon. Holy shit. It's just like in Clue. Colonel Lesbo did it, with the poison in the drink at the hotel."

Dickens ventured a smile. "Lesbo?"

Cheryl Ann said, "The three of us saw them once-just once-at the Hamilton, in the bar, which is a weird place for Raphael, now that I think about it." The other two women nodded.

"They saw us and we saw them, and we stopped to say hello and look her over and I got a very definite lesbian radio wave from her," Cheryl Ann said. "Not that I'd really know."

"You'd recognize her again?" Lucas asked.

"Maybe-but you know what? There's a photograph of her," Cheryl Ann said. "He took a picture of her with his cell phone, sent it to himself at the office, and printed it out, and pinned it up on the wall of his cubicle. After he died, we took the stuff off the walls and put it in a box and gave it to the police, when they came around. They might still have it."

"What about the body?" Dickens asked.

"I think the Spanish embassy shipped it back to Spain," Fumaro said.

Lucas said, "Time to call the cops, I guess. were these District cops, or are you over in Virginia, or what?"

"Right in the District," Fumaro said. "The guy who came to get the box was Detective Sams."

Lucas wrote it down and went home to confront Letty.

Letty was standing in the living room with her arms crossed, one foot all but tapping, a pose that Lucas recognized from encounters with more women, over the years, than he cared to remember. Before he could say a single word, Letty said, "I'm trying to get to be what Jennifer calls a Real Fuckin' Reporter, and I do not want to hear about this story."

"What story?" Weather asked.

Lucas, fists on his hips, looking at Letty but talking sideways to Weather: "Your daughter here is running down hookers, in St. Paul, and I won't tell you what kind of questions she's asking them, because it embarrasses me."

Weather said, "Hookers?"

Lucas said to Letty, "I'm putting my foot down. I let you run all over me, but this time, by God, you are not going to go around this town looking for hookers. I mean, do you have any idea what those people could do to you? Of course not. You're a teenager and you don't have a single fucking idea what you're getting into…"

"I do have a fucking idea because I tracked down one of these girls-on my own-and she's no older than I am…"

"Watch your language," Lucas said, getting loud. He knew he was about to start waving his arms, so he put his hands in his pockets, afraid that he might frighten her.

"You started it," she said.

"Technically, you said "fuck" first," Weather told Letty. Ellen came in from the kitchen, carrying Sam: "What the heck is going on here?"

"Letty's interviewing hookers," Weather told her. "Hookers?"

"Aw, for Christ's sakes," Lucas said. To Letty: "You, young lady, are grounded."

That wasn't the end of it, of course. Lucas had never grounded anyone before, so the term "grounded" had to be defined. He couldn't actually restrict her to the house, because she had to go to school the next week, and there was some slack there, and he actually approved of the idea of Letty working with Jennifer Carey. Besides, he wasn't a jailer.

When everything was hashed over, Letty had negotiated it down to one restriction: she was not allowed to go downtown on her own, and anytime she went out of the house, she had to tell somebody specifically where she was going. If she violated the deal, she'd be restricted to the house for the rest of the week, including the weekend.

"All right. It's not fair, it's not right, but you're the dictator," she said.

Lucas said, "What do you mean it's not right? You're going around…"

"I'm reporting the news," Letty snarled.

Weather jumped in: "Both of you shut up. A deal's a deal. All right? All right."

Ellen said, "Hookers? In St. Paul?"

"Aw, for Christ's sakes…"

Letty stomped off to her bedroom to mope, but she didn't stomp as hard as she might: she had no intention of keeping the agreement.

Lucas, on the way home, had called his secretary and told her to chase down the Washington cop, Sams, who'd looked into Raphael Sabartes's death.

"It's Sunday," Carol said. "I might not be able to get him."

"Try," Lucas said. "Have we heard anything at all about this Justice Shafer guy?"

"No…"

"Of course not," Lucas said. "If we had, you'd have called me instantly."

"Right."

"So find Sams."

As it turned out, Sams was working nights, and was due to come on at 11 p.m. Lucas called the number Carol got, and left a note with Sams's supervisor that he'd be calling right at 11 o'clock.

The rest of the evening was fairly tense, with Letty trudging up and down the stairs between her room and the refrigerator, stopping only once to say, "All my friends say it's unfair."

"All your friends are teenagers," Lucas said.

Letty said, "You told me one time that you had a beer in a hockey bar when you were fourteen."

"That was different," Lucas said.

"How was that different?"

"There were adults around," Lucas said.

"Huh, great. Adults giving a fourteen-year-old a beer," Letty said.

Weather said, "Shut up, shut up, shut up, both of you, shut up."

On her last trip down, she went to the refrigerator, got a bottle of water, and on the way back through the family room, where Weather and Lucas were watching the news, stopped and gave Lucas a kiss on the forehead, and went on her way.

"I think you're okay," Weather said.

At ten o'clock, eleven Eastern, Lucas called Sams, got him, gave him the history, and told him about the interview with the women at the hospitality committee.

"Well, they might be right, but we couldn't prove it," Sams said. "No sign of violence, the kid was lying on his back on his bed, his shoes off, his hands crossed on his chest. Bottle of rum in the kitchen, glass by the bed."

"But no note."

"Nothing," Sams said. "We never did find the woman. We didn't know where to start, because nobody knew her name."

"Find any DNA in the apartment?"

"There might have been some semen stains, but we didn't run it-I mean, it didn't come from the woman," Sams said. "We didn't do a full process, because ' there didn't seem to be any reason to. Everything in the apartment was pretty neat and clean."

"No references to the woman ' cell phone, date book?"

"Okay, here's one thing. The kid's cell phone had a lot of calls on it to one number, and the number was in the three-two-three area code. That's LA. Pretty much downtown LA. We ran the phone down, and it was a dead end-one of those over-the-counter pay-as-you-go phones. We called it, but it was out of service. It never came back, as long as we called it."

"So you don't even know that it's the woman's phone," Lucas said.

"Nope. We don't. But: I talked to his uncle, from Spain, because his folks don't speak English, and we figured out between us that he'd never been to California, and as far as anybody knew, he didn't know anybody from there. But he was calling the number six times a day for two months."