"How about Letty?"
"I don't know about Letty-but what if it was Letty's mother? She'd lived there for a long time. Would she know something was going on at the body shop? Maybe even knew exactly what it was, the stolen Toyotas? So then, her kid is hanging around with us, and again, all she'd have had to say was about three words, and we'd have been on Calb like Holy on the Pope."
"Gonna be interesting talking to Ms. Lewis today," Del said. He looked at his watch. "Funeral in two hours. They oughta be getting here."
RUTH LEWIS CALLED the Calb house a half-hour later. A deputy answered, and she asked for Lucas. The deputy handed the phone to Lucas and said, "Ruth Lewis."
"I'll take it."
"How did it happen?" Ruth asked, when Lucas came on. She was croaking, as though she'd spent the morning crying.
"We don't know, yet. We didn't know about the stolen car ring, so we didn't lean hard enough on Calb. Something happened here last night-we think your sister was killed here and the Calbs are gone. If you'd told me about this, we might have avoided it."
"Oh my God."
"Is there anything else I need to know right away?"
"Oh, god… " Ruth was weeping. Then a different woman's voice: "I don't think she can talk any more."
"Where are you? Is Letty there?"
"We're up at the church: Letty's here."
"Tell Ruth to stay there. We'll be there in ten or fifteen minutes."
THE SNOW WAS steady, but not getting any worse. There were a few little drifts around the edges of buildings and down in the ditches, and the highway was slick. Maybe an inch and a half, maybe two inches, Lucas thought. Letty was waiting by the church door with the older woman who'd watched Night of the Living Dead with Del. Letty was happy to see them. She held up her hand, in a fiberglass cast, smiled automatically, but then her lower lip came out and tears started and she said, "My mom's dead."
Lucas was not good around tears, even little-girl tears, and he tried to pat her on the back and she threw her arms around his waist and squeezed. "They say Gene Calb… "
Lucas pried her off and walked her away from the older woman, sat on a chair, and asked, "Letty, think about it. Was the guy you shot at… was that Gene Calb?"
"I don't think so," she said, shaking her head. "I would have known him. He was fat, and I couldn't see the man, but I don't think he was fat. I don't think his voice was right. Was Gene shot? Because I shot the man."
"There's a question about whether you hit him."
"I hit him."
"But if you're shooting.22 shorts, it might not even have gotten through his coat. A cold night, he might have been all bundled up."
"Then why did he fall on his butt? You don't fall on your butt if the bullet sticks in your coat."
"Maybe he was ducking."
"He wasn't ducking. He fell on his butt. Then he crawled for a while and then he ran back to the house and then the fire started."
When they finished talking, Lucas sent Letty to the TV with the older woman, who told Letty that she had to change for the service. "For the funeral," Letty said, correcting her.
Lucas wagged his head at Del, and they walked through the church to the kitchen, where they found Ruth at the kitchen table. She was red-eyed, red-faced. "Gene did this? With Gloria? That's… that's… Are you sure?" She had a brown cardigan wrapped around her shoulders.
"We're not sure. We just can't find them. There was blood on a carpet, and we found your sister hidden up under the roof."
"Why bother to hide her if she was so easy to find?" Ruth asked.
"Maybe they didn't think anyone would come looking. Or that if somebody did, they couldn't look too hard. Maybe all they expected was a head start."
"Hard to believe. Gene wasn't a bad man. I didn't think he was."
"Why didn't you tell us?"
"You know why," she said, defensively. "You could let us go, when you knew what we were doing, but you could never let Gene go."
"How did you get hooked up with him, anyway?"
She sighed. "One of our people up in Canada knew a man who bought a car from one of his… salesmen. We desperately needed different cars to bring the drugs across-you can't keep going back and forth, two or three times a week, without somebody asking why. So when we figured out where the cars were coming from, I came down here and talked with Gene. He wasn't too happy-but you know, if he'd done this, if he killed Katina… why didn't he kill me way back then?"
"Different situation," Del suggested. "No pressure then."
"Maybe. Anyway, I talked to him. I told him that we would all be committing crimes together, so nobody could talk about anyone else. He really needed people to drive the cars across, since he was starting to do some… some volume. We were perfect. Older women, forties and fifties and sixties. Who would suspect? And Gene built some special… things… for us, that fit in the Toyotas, and let us bring the drugs across. It was all very smooth."
"Did you bring a Toyota through last night?" Lucas asked.
"No. The last one was the one we had at the fire at the Wests' house. You saw it. Gene took it. It was a wreck, though. I don't think it would make another two hundred miles."
"You know what the license plates were?"
"I have no idea."
"Okay… You got some people killed," Lucas said. He said it in a soft voice, but a mean one, taunting, like a bully trying to pull another kid into a fight. Pushing her.
"But there was no connection between the kidnappings, between Deon and Jane, and the car deal," she said. She said, "Listen to me: no connection. I knew Gene pretty well, and he didn't even like Deon or Jane. He didn't trust them. Deon wasn't a big shot in this thing, he was a driver. He was a gofer. "
"But if we'd had a piece of it… "
"It wouldn't have made any difference," she shouted, tears running down her face. "You're not listening to me. The kidnappings and all the rest of it weren't connected. They weren't."
ALITTLE LATER, Lucas spoke to Neil Mitford. "I don't think the governor necessarily would want to know about this conversation," Lucas said, as an opener.
"That's why I work here," Mitford said. "Talk to me."
Lucas outlined the situation, including the murder of Lewis, and the cover-up of the stolen-car ring. "The women covered up material information. We could bust them six different ways. The thing is, I'm not sure that if they had told us, it would have made any difference to the killer. He's operating on some other schedule-I can't figure out why Calb would kill Lewis and then run for it. As far as we can tell, she didn't know anything that all the other women didn't know. If he was going to kill Lewis, he should have been up here, trying to wipe out the church."
"And if we bust the women, that's the end of their little drug-running enterprise," Mitford said.
"That's right. I don't feel too good about that-and to tell the truth, I think we could smell a little stinky afterward. We bust them, and four or five thousand women don't get their cancer pills."
"Let me rephrase that for you," Mitford said. "Four or five thousand registered voters won't get their cancer pills and they'll complain to one of the biggest interest groups in the country, the breast-cancer coalition."
"You think we should let it slide?"
"I don't think anything. I'm not a law enforcement officer. I don't even recall having this conversation. The governor certainly never knew about it."
"So I'm working on my own book."
"Welcome to state government," Mitford said.
LUCAS AND DEL left the church, so Letty and the other women could get ready for the funeral, and walked across the highway to Calb's. The two BCA investigators were in the shop, working through the office. A deputy was sitting in the work bay, with a half-dozen employees scattered around the bay on folding chairs.