"Like what? Like he might hurt you?"
"Like he might try to make me do something with him," she said.
"Okay." He didn't comment; he simply filed it until he knew her better. Young girls, in his experience, were sometimes psychic in their ability to pick out predators. At other times, they were capable of straight-faced accusations against the absolutely innocent. "He's been replaced by lesbians?"
"That's just my mom," Letty said. "I know that Ruth's sister is going out with a guy in town. The word is, she's no lesbian."
Lucas said, "Huh," and took another look at her, and thought she might have blushed. She hurried on, pointing over the dashboard. "Those two big yellow buildings belong to Gene Calb, he fixes up cars and trucks. He's a real good guy. If I'm out with my traps, he'll let me come in and warm up. I can't go into the bar or the cafe because sometimes I'm a little stinky, but he doesn't care. I think Mom had a crush on him once, but he's married. I heard that sometimes the lesbians drive for him, like when he needs a car delivered somewhere. I could do that, if I had a license."
"And you probably ought to wait for the license," Lucas said.
"Yeah-yeah." She pointed: "That's the bar, the guy who runs it is named Pete. Mom used to go there when Randy Pearce ran it, but she says she doesn't feel welcome anymore. She says it's a dive now, a bunch of paint sniffers from the body shop. She says they're all jailbirds."
"Are they?"
She shrugged. "Some of them been in jail, I guess, but they seem like pretty good guys."
On the other side of the highway: "The diner is run by Sandra Wolf, she's pretty nice, and John McGuire has the gas station, he's okay. And down there, right across from the barn… " She pointed down a side street, where a low rambling house sat across a graveled street from a small white barn. "… I don't know what those guys do, but if I was a cop, I'd take a close look at them."
"Yeah? Why?"
"I was walking through there, taking a shortcut back from the lake, and the guy came out of the house and yelled at me to get off his property. I was only about ten feet on it. And he's got dogs, big black-and-brown ones. He had these little paper flags around his property for a while. They said, 'Dog Training, Invisible Fence,' but I think if he sicced one of those dogs on you, that invisible fence wouldn't do any good. They'd go through it like it was, you know, invisible. "
"But all he did was yell at you."
"I thought it was pretty suspicious. I mean, he's got ten acres there, and I was about three steps on it."
"What's the guy do for a living?"
"Works at Calb's. Sometimes he's got a woman in there. I've seen a couple of them, different ones. He sure does keep you off his property."
They were coming to the north end of town, and the house where Jane Warr and Deon Cash had lived. Two sheriff's cars were parked outside now, along with one of the BCA cars from Bemidji.
"If you want to stop, I can wait," Letty said. "You might want to ask me some more questions after you look inside."
HE WAS BEING steered, Lucas thought-she'd shown signs of the female steering gene during the interview at the LEC, and even more on the way to Broderick. On the other hand, she was right. He pulled in and parked. A sheriff's deputy stepped off the porch and walked toward them. Lucas got out, said, "I'm Davenport, with the BCA."
The deputy nodded. "Okay. One of your guys is inside."
Lucas stuck his head back inside the car and said "Wait," shut the door, and followed the deputy up to the porch.
"Where'd you get the kid?" the deputy asked, bending down a bit to get a look at Letty. She lifted a hand to him.
"She was downtown making a statement. You know her?"
"Sure. I know everybody around here. She's a pretty interesting kid. Don't let no grass grow under her feet, that's for sure. Gonna wind up rich."
"Got a nice line of bullshit," Lucas said.
"First thing you notice," the deputy said. He pushed the door open and Lucas stepped into the house, into an entry with a coat closet to one side. He continued into a living room, where one of the BCA guys he'd been introduced to that morning was standing at the bottom of a double-wide staircase, talking on a cell phone. He saw Lucas and held up a finger. Lucas nodded and looked around.
The place smelled of macaroni, cheese, marijuana, and blood, not a new smell in the few hundred houses he'd been through on homicide cases. To his right, in the corner, was a wide-screen Panasonic television, and on a table next to it, a big Sony. A game console was plugged into the Sony, while the Panasonic had boxes for a DVD and satellite dish. A love seat and a leather chair faced the TVs.
Straight ahead, behind the BCA guy, on the other side of the staircase landing, a hallway led to the kitchen. Lucas could see a breadmaker sitting on a counter next to a microwave.
To the right, an archway led into another room, with a dining table in the center of it. The table was stacked with boxes, most of them from small electric appliances. Fifty or sixty magazines, mostly on sex, European cars, or travel, were in heaps along one wall. A Bose Wave Radio sat upside down under the table, as though it had fallen off; it was still plugged into a wall socket. A set of earphones, one earmuff broken off, lay on the other side of the table, along with a generic-brand bottle of ibuprofen. A box of Wheat Thins sat on top of the litter of boxes on the table.
The generally upset state didn't have the look of deliberation, of a search-it simply looked like bad housekeeping.
"Hey… " The BCA guy came up behind him. "Look at this." He led the way to the kitchen. On the way he said, "I'm Joe Barin, by the way, we were introduced… "
"This morning," Lucas said.
"Here," Barin said. "Be careful where you put your feet. We've got some blood spatter."
He was pointing into a wastebasket on the floor by the kitchen door. When Lucas looked inside, he saw two tiny Ziploc-type bags, the kind used by hardware stores to hold small collections of screws, washers, cotter pins, and the like, and by dope dealers to parcel out measured amounts of cocaine, heroin, and crystal methadrine. There were no cotter pins in sight.
"You pull one out?"
"Not yet. You can see there's some residue. I wouldn't stake my child's life on it, but it's coke."
"They were dealing?"
"We looked around, can't find any more baggies. So maybe just using. Or maybe we'll find more stuff later… and then, we've got these clothes." He pointed to another corner, at a heap of clothing. "It's all cut to shreds. This is where the killer cut the clothes off them."
"So he comes in with a gun, cuffs them up, tapes them up, then cuts the clothes off them."
"Beats the shit out of the guy, of Cash."
"Beats the shit out of Cash, and then drags them both out the door, and throws them into his truck, and takes them down the road, and hangs them."
"Yeah."
"Tough guy."
"Fruitcake."
LUCAS LOOKED AROUND the kitchen for a few more seconds: nothing for him here, that he could see. The crew might get something. "What's upstairs?"
"Three bedrooms and two bathrooms," Barin said. "One of the bedrooms doesn't look too used. One of the other ones has a double bed, and there's some clothes hanging in a closet, a man's clothes, and some stuff in the bathroom, but it doesn't look like it's been used lately. The clothes are not Cash's, they're for a bigger guy. The third bedroom, the big one, was their regular bedroom. Clothes for both Warr and Cash. Lots of clothes. Lots of cashmere."
"Let's get the crime scene crew over quick as we can," Lucas said. "Tear this place apart. If they were dealing, that would explain a lot. Could be punishment killings."
"Okay." Barin hesitated. "I don't exactly understand the chain-of-command here… "
"Where's Dickerson?"
"Still out at the scene, I guess."
"He's in charge on your side, I'm running my own thing. What I just suggested was… a suggestion." Lucas grinned at him. "Of course, I do talk to the commissioner five or six times a day."