Read Naked Prey for Free Online

them—desperately not looking at them.
    As they came up, Del asked, quietly, “You ever noticed how hanged people sort of all look alike—like they losetheir race or something? They all look like they’re made out of clay.”
    Lucas nodded. He had noticed that. “Except redheads,” he added. “They always look like they came from a different planet.”
    Del said, “You’re right. Except for redheads. They just get paler.”
    The four orange-hatted men were spaced around the bodies at the cardinal points, as though they might be rushed from any direction. A short stepladder was set up beside the bodies, and the snow had been thoroughly trampled down for fifty feet around. Two of the men were doing the cold-weather tap dance, a slow shuffle that said they were freezing. When Lucas and Del came up, one of the orange-hats turned and asked, “Who’re you?”
    “BCA,” Lucas said. “Who’re you?”
    “Dave Payton.” The man turned back to the bodies and shivered. “D-Deputy sheriff.”
    “What’re you doing?” Del asked.
    “K-Keeping everybody out of a circle around the bodies. You guys are supposed to have a crime crew coming. You don’t look like them.”
    “They’ll be a bit,” Lucas said. His voice had turned friendly. “You get here early?”
    “I was the first car in, after the state patrol. Ass is freezin’ solid.”
    “Where’s the line they were brought in on . . . tracks or anything?”
    Payton jerked his arm toward the road. “Back that way, I guess. Pretty trampled down, now.”
    Lucas looked, and could see the kind of snaky break in the brush that often meant a game trail. If the bodies had been brought in along it, then the hangman had known exactly where he was going.
    Del had taken a couple steps closer to the dangling bodies. “Woman’s got blood on her face,” he said.
    “G-Guy’s pretty messed up, too,” Payton said. “Looks like somebody beat the heck out of him before he did . . . this.”
    “I don’t think it’s her blood,” Del said. “Some of it’s off to the side, and on her upper lip and nose.”
    “We’ll get the lab to check,” Lucas said. “That’d be a break, if it’s the killer’s.”
    Payton said, “D-D-D-DNA. We did a DNA in a rape last year.”
    “Catch the guy?”
    “N-N-No,” Payton said.
    Lucas said, “Look, why don’t you go sit in a car for a while and get warmed up, for Christ’s sakes? You’re shaking like a leaf.”
    “ ’Cause Anderson’d have a cow,” Payton said.
    “We’re taking over the crime scene,” Lucas said. “The BCA is. I’m ordering you to leave, okay?” He looked at the other guys, who were watching him, some hope in their eyes. “All of you. Get some place warm. Get some coffee.”
    Payton bobbed his head, said, “Aye aye, cap’n.” The four men hurried in a wide circle around the hanging bodies, another of them muttered, “Thanks,” and then they all scuttled off through the naked trees toward the cars.
    “A NDERSON COULD BE a problem,” Del said, conversationally, when the deputies were out of earshot. He and Lucas were still looking at the dead people. The ghastly fact was that Cash and Warr hung only a few inches off the ground, and neither one had been tall—Lucas and Del were looking almost straight into their dead, half-open eyes, at their purplish faces, and the two bodies swayed together as though dancing on the same floor where the two cops werestanding. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Del continued. “Half the goddamn crime scene is stuck to the bottoms of the deputies’ boots. Then he left them out here to freeze.”
    “Yeah.” Lucas decided that they were gawking at the bodies. “We’re gawking,” he said.
    “I know,” Del said, looking at Warr. “How many dead people we seen in our lives? You think a thousand?”
    “Maybe not a thousand,” Lucas said, still looking.
    “I don’t dream about any of them, except maybe one burned guy I saw, all black and