"Two: Thirty hours after he hanged two people in Armstrong, Sorrell lets his own killer into his house, with his wife standing right there with him. He's unarmed and is shot down in cold blood. He takes no precautions, he never thinks that the guy at the door might be connected to the murders.
"Three: Why did the guy attack Letty? We don't know. But we do know that Letty's mother let him in the house after midnight, when both she and Letty knew there was a killer running around loose.
"Four: Letty claims she shot the guy, but none of the hospitals inside two hundred miles report a guy shot in the chest with a.22, that might possibly be our guy. Why is that?
"Five: I talk to Burke, Annie's dad, and he shows us stuff that looks like it came from the FBI. It looks real. How'd they know how to do that?
"Six: I talk to Letty last night after you head back to the Cities… Hey, did you get laid?"
"Yeah." Del nodded. "It was wonderful."
"I have fantasies about Cheryl. Maybe you could tell me… Never mind."
"C'mon, wiseass."
"All right. Anyway, I talk to Letty, and one thing leads to another, and we buy her a replacement rifle down at Ace Hardware. And she says to me that if this asshole comes back, quote, 'He better be wearing a bulletproof vest,' unquote."
Lucas looked at Del and raised his eyebrows. Del asked, "That's it?"
"That's it."
Del shook his head. "Maybe I can get a refund on some of them pens. Looks like you only used red and green."
"Think about it for a minute," Lucas said. "What are the chances that… the guy is a cop?"
DEL THOUGHT ABOUT it for a minute. "If the guy is a cop, he would have heard about Sorrell really early. If he was wearing a uniform, people would let him in their house any time of day. He'd see FBI stuff, so he'd know the format. And if he was wearing a bulletproof vest… it would explain all of that shit."
"We know that there are at least two cops who were friendly with Gene Calb-Ray Zahn and this other guy, the boyfriend of Katina Lewis. Zahn sometimes hung out there, and the boyfriend painted his cars up there."
"How many points did you have? Six?"
"Six," Lucas agreed.
Del nodded. "Then here's number seven. If you were running a major car-theft ring, there'd be nothing more valuable than having a cop inside the only major police agency for miles around. In fact, you'd just about have to have one."
THEN LUCAS SAID, "I got another list."
"Yeah?"
Lucas said, "One: You're a friendly looking guy like Gene Calb, maybe with a spy inside the department, or maybe not-it's a small town, and word gets around. He bluffs his way into Sorrell's house, kills him, and gets back here.
"Two: He goes after Letty. We don't know the specific reason, but we do know that Letty hung around his shop and maybe he's afraid that she saw or heard something. And Calb is a friendly guy, everybody likes him, and if he knocks on the door, maybe Martha West lets him in-Letty told me one time that Martha'd had a crush on Calb.
"Three: Calb kills Katina Lewis. Why? We don't know, but suppose that Letty really did shoot him, and hit him in the chest like she said. He was hurt, but not badly. Maybe his wife patched him up or something. But suppose he bled through his shirt, or did something that tipped Katina that his chest was hurting. Heck, maybe she patted him on the chest. Anyway, the instant that she suspected, he'd have to get rid of her, because all she'd have to do is tell any cop, and we'd go straight to Calb and take his shirt off. We find a bullet hole or even a bruise, he'd be toast. So he'd have to kill her. Maybe that was done so spontaneously that he panicked, and ran."
DEL LAY BACK on the bed, and after a minute said, "I like the first one better. The cop."
"Why?"
"Because it all goes back to kidnapping the girls, and everybody says that Calb wouldn't do that. He might have been a criminal, but he wasn't a nut. Because if this car ring worked like we think it did, he was up to his ass in money-why'd he need to kidnap somebody? And most of all, he really seemed to think that Deon Cash and Jane Warr were stupid assholes. Would he get involved in a kidnapping with partners he thought were stupid assholes? I don't think so."
LUCAS THOUGHT ABOUT that for a while, then said, "Let's go talk to Letty and Ruth Lewis. They're up at the church. I think we ought to stay away from the sheriff's office until we've got something solid."
"I don't think Ray Zahn," Del said. "He's one of our guys."
"Yeah, well. I don't think so either, but… we gotta keep him on the list. And we gotta think about the possibility that it's nobody we know yet. Maybe a cop, but nobody we know yet."
"Think we'll have him by midnight?" Del said, joking.
"I don't know. If I were gonna bet, I'd say a week. Or less."
22
THE OLDER WOMAN came to the door of the church and said, "If you're looking for Letty and Ruth, they went up to the dump to shoot that gun you bought." Her tight lips suggested that she didn't approve.
"Another fan," Del said, as they got back in the car. "Dump?"
RUTH LEWIS'S TOYOTA Corolla was parked at the dump gate, and they could hear the little.22 banging away. "You don't think they'd shoot back this way, do you?" Del asked.
"Jesus, I hope not." He hadn't thought of that. "Where are they?"
"Sounds like they're over to the left."
THEY WALKED CAREFULLY toward the sound of the shooting. A.22 long-rifle slug makes a distinctive whip sound as it goes by, and they didn't hear anything like that. Eventually, they crossed the high point of the dump and spotted Letty and Ruth at the far left edge of the raw dirt, shooting into a mound of clay. Ruth had the gun.
"May have been a conversion here," Lucas said. "Lewis wasn't that happy about buying the gun."
"Oughta get her an NRA membership," Del said. "My cold dead hands… "
"From what I've seen of her, she'd probably take the damn thing over," Lucas said.
LETTY AND RUTH saw them coming and stopped firing. Letty's crutch was lying on the ground, so her ankle must have been feeling better. When they got close, Lucas saw that they were shooting at Campbell's soup cans, which made good reactive targets. He called, "How you doing?"
As they came up, Letty said, "The gun's not as bad as I thought."
"She hit the can every time, right from the start, even with the cast. Now she's trying to hit the gold medal thing every time," Ruth said. "I haven't hit the can once."
"I can't even see the gold medal thing from here," Del said. The cans were twenty-five yards away.
"It's sure a lot quicker than that old piece of shit," Letty said. "Even one-handed."
"Letty… " Ruth said.
"I know; watch my mouth." She took the gun from Ruth with her good hand, braced it over the cast on the other, and sighted down the barrel at one of the cans. She pulled the trigger and the can hopped across the ground. She turned the gun upside down with her good hand, got the pump under the upper part of her bad arm, trapped it, pumped, aimed and fired again, hit the can. She looked nonchalantly at Lucas. "So what's going on?"
"We stopped at the church, they said you were out here." He looked around. "Whatever happened to those traps you put out before the fire? Are they still out here?"