Free Naked Prey by John Sandford Page A

then it drove out.”
    “This was about midnight?”
    “Two minutes after. When I woke up I looked at my clock, and it said twelve-zero-two.”
    “You didn’t see the people?” Lucas asked.
    “I didn’t even see the truck, except for the lights. The wind was blowing and all I could see was snow and the lights.”
    “How long did you watch the lights?” Del asked.
    “Quite a while. I don’t know, exactly. I didn’t look at the clock before I went to bed.”
    “You didn’t see it again, after it drove out?”
    “Nope. Never saw it again.”
    In the morning, she told them, she’d gotten up to run her trap line. She ran thirty traps up the ditch, and in the surrounding marshes, for muskrat. She’d get up at five in the morning, collect the day’s catch of ’rats, reset the traps, dump the ’rats into a garbage bag, and haul them back to the house by seven. Since it didn’t get light until seven-thirty or so, she’d do it all by the light of a rechargeable flash.
    This morning, after she’d run the traps, she’d climbed the bank onto the ditch road to walk back to her house. She hadn’t been all that curious about the car from the night before, until she saw the tracks in the snow, and the lines in the snow where somebody had dragged something back into the trees.
    “What’d you think they were?” Lucas asked.
    “What I thought of was bodies,” Letty said, holding his eyes. “That’s the first thing I thought of. It scared me in the dark—but when people throw their garbage away out here, they don’t haul it down the ditch road. They just stop on the side of the highway and heave it into the ditch. They don’t hide it. So I couldn’t think of anything else but . . . bodies.”
    “So then . . . ”
    “W ELL, I WENT back there, and I didn’t see them at first, because it was still dark.” Her eyes were wide now, fixed on Lucas, as she remembered and relived it. “I came to this place where there was a big square of messed-up snow with nothing in it. I just, I don’t know, I guess I saw a dark thing, hanging, and I lifted up the light, and there they were. The black guy’s eyes were open. Scared me really bad. I ran back out to the road and got my ’rats and ran all the way back to the house and woke up my mom. She didn’t believe me at first, but then she did, and we called the cops.”
    “That was it?”
    “Yup.” She nodded and took a hit of the Pepsi.
    “Did your mom go down to the trees to look?”
    “No. She was afraid to. She doesn’t like dead things. She doesn’t even like to drop off my ’rats for me, and they’re inside a bag and everything.”
    “What do you, uh, do with the ’rats?” Del asked.
    “Sell them to Joan Wickery. She’s the fur-buyer in these parts,” Letty said.
    “How much do you get?” Lucas asked. He’d never met a trapper.
    “Depends on what it is,” Letty said. “She gives me $1.75 for average ’rats, and six dollars for ’coon. Problem with ’coon is, they’re smart and they catch on when you’re trapping them. I have to drive over to the dump to get them. So I only go over about two days a week, get maybe two or three at the most. I can get twenty ’rats out of the ditch, and the marsh across the road, and be done before school.”
    “You don’t have to skin them out or . . . whatever?” Lucas asked.
    “Nope. Joan’s boys do all of that. I just bring in the carcasses.”
    Del was fascinated. “What do they do with all the muskrat bodies?”
    “Grind them up. Turn them into feed. I don’t get paid for that, though. I only get paid for the fur. Joan says the carcasses pay her to keep the doors open, and the fur’s her profit.”
    Del asked, “Feed for what?”
    “Mink. Joan’s got a mink farm.”
    T HEY SAT AND looked at her for a minute, then Lucas asked, “Anything else you can tell us?”
    “I hope I don’t die by getting hung,” she said. They allthought about that for a moment, then she added, “They