The cafe had a double door, and always smelled of grease, and was fifteen degrees too warm, and Sandy Wolf called out, "Hey, baby Ruth."
"Hi." Ruth nodded shyly. She wasn't a hail-fellow, like Wolf, but she enjoyed the other woman's heartiness. Another woman sat halfway down the counter… not a woman, though, Ruth thought, but a girl, eating a piece of pie. Letty West.
"Letty?" Ruth stepped down the bar, smiling. She'd liked the girl the first time they met, and had talked to her a dozen times since. "How are you?"
Letty returned the smile, waved her fork. "I'm fine. Had a press conference this afternoon."
"Oh, I heard." Ruth went solemn, looked for the right words. "Heard that you found the… people."
"We was just talking about it," Wolf said. "Letty says they was frozen like Popsicles."
"They put them in the black bags to carry them out, and they were in there like a sackful of boards," Letty said.
"Do the police have any ideas who did it?" Ruth asked.
Letty shook her head. "Nah. They know a heck of a lot less than I do. They don't know anything about Broderick-I been filling them in. There's these guys, Lucas and Del, I'm helping them out. We ate up at the Bird this afternoon."
"What… did you actually see? At the murder scene?"
Sandy Wolf leaned on the counter and Ruth plopped on the stool next to the girl, and Letty went through the whole story, as she'd told it to the television cameras that afternoon. When she finished the story about finding the bodies, she added that the cameras were coming back the next day for a feature story. "They're gonna come along and run my traps with me. I had to go out this afternoon and put some traps in, just so I'll have some 'rats for the feature story tomorrow."
"Are they paying you?" Wolf asked.
"Maybe," Letty said. She wasn't sure-she hadn't thought of that angle.
"They oughta," Wolf said. "I mean, you got a product to sell. You could go on Oprah."
"You think?" Letty liked Oprah.
"You can't tell where this kind of thing will lead. You could be in Hollywood. Stranger things have happened," Wolf said.
"I don't know about Hollywood," Ruth said. She felt a tickle of concern. "Letty, do you have anybody staying with you out there, with you and your mom? I mean, a policeman?"
"No… You think we should?"
"Well." She nibbled at a lip.
"Okay. Now I'm scared," Letty said. She'd seen all the cop dramas. The killers always came back. "All I got is that piece-of-shit.22."
"The guy isn't coming back," Wolf said disdainfully. She'd been cleaning up the grill and she flapped her cleaning rag at Letty. "The guy who did this is a million miles from here. He's probably on Miami Beach by now."
"I hope," Ruth said. To Wolf: "Egg sandwich with raw onions?"
"Fried hard? Coming up," Wolf said. She asked Letty, "Another piece of pie? Short piece?"
"If you're buying," Letty said. She grinned at Ruth. "Got a free piece of pie for the story?"
"You'll get a free ride to jail if the state patrol sees that truck parked out back," Wolf grunted. To Ruth: "She's driving her mom's truck again. Little goddamn juvenile delinquent."
"Little goddamn juvenile delinquent who's gonna be on Oprah," Letty said. She looked at the wall clock. "Four-thirty. I gotta be out of here in ten minutes. They're telling me that we'll be on at five."
"Movie star," Wolf cackled, sliding a half-slice of cherry pie down the countertop.
WHEN RUTH GOT back to the church, she told Katina about Letty, smiling as she recounted the girl's enthusiasm. Katina wasn't so amused. "That kid's all over the place. If she's talking to the police, I hope she doesn't talk about us. Or about Gene's place."
"Not really much for her to know," Ruth said. "Bunch of cars getting fixed."
"I suppose. Just the way that she's always hanging around. I mean, Ruth-we're criminals. We should act like criminals, at least part of the time."
"She's having a good time. I don't think she's a danger to us," Ruth said. "She's a kid."
"If you say so," Katina said, letting her skepticism show.
"Besides-we've talked about this-sooner or later, one of us is going to get caught crossing the border. Or somebody will tell some ambitious little creep prosecutor what we're doing, and they'll come get all of us. We could go to jail, Katina. It's a fact of life."
Katina shook her head. "I never believed that. If we're careful. If we're really, really psychopathically careful, I don't think we will."
THE DISCUSSION HAD not quite been an argument, and nothing was resolved. Later on, Katina crossed the highway when she saw Singleton pull into Calb's parking lot. Singleton had a remote that worked the overhead door, and the door went up, and he pulled inside-to get the car out of sight, Katina supposed. There were still two cop cars and a state van at Cash's house, though it was so cold, all the cops had gone inside the house. Singleton saw Katina coming across the highway and held the door up for her, dropping it when she was inside.
"Gene's in the back," Singleton said.
Calb was in his cubbyhole, staring at an aging Dell computer. He looked up and said, "Loren," when Singleton came in, leaned back to look around him and said, "Hey, Katina."
"Talk to the state guys yet?" Singleton asked.
"Two sets of them. This afternoon. One set was okay and they were here for an hour, taking notes. The other set was just two guys who stood around with their hands in their pockets. Like the fuckin' gestapo."
"Davenport and Capslock," Singleton said. "Supposed to be heavy hitters. What'd you tell them?"
"The truth," Calb said. "I talked to Shawn down in Kansas City before they came in, told him what I was going to do, which was, tell the truth. That I knew Shawn in the Army and knew he had this troubled cousin and when the cousin got out of jail, I hired him as a favor. Then I told them I was about to fire him because he was a screw-up, and I suspected he used the drugs, but not that he sold them. I told them I thought the trouble might be coming from Jane's casino job… "
"Good," Singleton said. "I was going to suggest that. We've gotta reinforce it now that you got them thinking about it."
Katina pulled at her lip. "I'm worried about Letty West. She's spending a lot of time with the police, and she hangs around here."
Calb shook his head. "Nothing to worry about. She comes in to get warm, and I don't let her go in the shop because I don't want her getting hurt, all the shit laying around here. I don't believe she ever talked to Deon."
THEY CHATTED FOR a few more minutes, then, as they left, Singleton deflected a hint from Katina-she could have used some comforting in these troubled times-and headed back to Armstrong. He stopped at Peske's market to pick up a six-pack of caffeinated Coke, and ran into Roger Elroy, who was also looking into the cooler at the back of the store. "Anything happening?"
"They got him," Elroy said quietly.
"They got him?"
Elroy was young and eager and full of news. "They know who it is-those two BCA guys figured it out up at the casino," Elroy said. Singleton thought, the casino, and a wave of relief washed through him, and he leaned into the cooler for a six-pack. "It was that guy whose kid was kidnapped, Hale Sorrell, that guy from Rochester. Remember, last month?"
Singleton almost gave it away then. Might have, if Elroy had seen his face, but his face was in the cooler, as he reached deep inside. He stopped, got a grip both on himself and the six-pack, backed out, and said, "Where'd they come up with that?"
Elroy told him, briefly, then shook his head. "Anderson talked to the governor. They think the Sorrell girl's body might be out there at Deon Cash's place. You knew those guys, right?"
"Knew who they were," Singleton said. "Talked to Cash a couple of times… Jeez. So have they grabbed Sorrell yet?"