"Simple," Letty said.

"Not simple, but effective. There was this chick who used to work for a Lutheran social services group; she'd take underage hookers away from their pimps. I helped her out a couple of times, this way. We could do it with Whitcomb, too. Back him off Juliet, back him off Lucas, tell him he goes back to prison…"

Letty was shaking her head. "I actually thought about that. He's on parole. I figured that we could send him back, because she's underage. Then Juliet told me about him being paralyzed, and ' He can't do it. They don't have sex because he can't. He makes her work the street, and sometimes he makes her have sex with another guy, and he watches, and gets all worked up ' but she could walk away if she wanted to. Just leave him. He can't drive, either. So, everything she's been doing' I mean, it looks voluntary. The other thing is ' I'm not positive she'd testify against him."

"Ah, man."

"We need to get him," Letty said. She held Carey with an intense stare, and Carey felt almost unable to move out of it. "For sure. Randy is crazy. I've talked to Juliet a lot, about Randy, and he's crazy. If we don't get him, maybe he'll try to shoot Dad. Or me. Or Mom, or somebody But he's crazy and he's getting crazier, so we've got to get him."

"How?"

"What I'm trying to do is…" Letty looked away from Carey, up into the tree branches, away from Carey's eyes.

"What?"

"I thought I might get Randy to ' do something to her," Letty said.

"What?"

"When he gets mad, he makes her get down on her hands and knees, naked, and then he beats her with this stick," Letty said. "I've seen the stick-it has blood on it. He hasn't done it for a month and ' I mean, I don't know how evidence works, fingerprints and all that. But if he finds out she's been lying to him, and he beats her with that stick, and she calls me, and we call the cops ' He'll go back, right? Her blood will be on the stick, fresh, and her back will have the marks, and his fingerprints will be on the stick?"

Carey stared at her for a long fifteen seconds, then said, "Juliet is supposed to be your friend."

"My dad is my friend," Letty said.

"But Juliet'" Carey's jaw worked. "Letty, that's appalling. What you're thinking. That's the coldest thing I ever heard of."

"You do what you gotta do," Letty said, her eyes cutting back into Carey's.

Carey recoiled: "Not that."

"Look," Letty said. "She's gonna get beat, sooner or later. All we're doing is taking advantage."

"You're setting her up," Carey said.

"I'm taking care of Dad. Okay? That's what I'm doing. So let's take care of Don, and get Juliet a place to go if ' this other thing happens."

"Letty! I can't do this. This is awful," Carey said.

"It's already going. There's nothing you can do to stop it that wouldn't help Randy, and hurt Juliet and Dad and me." Letty stepped back and said, "So make your pick. Who do you help?"

Lucas, bored, called Jenkins and Shrake, and found them, bored, getting nowhere. He got some names from them and hit a dozen condo buildings himself, running down the presidents of the condo associations, getting head shakes and uh-uhs from each of them: nobody had seen anybody who looked like Cohn or the woman in the cell-phone photograph.

One of them said, "You might be on the right trail, though. We've only got twelve units here, and two of them are rented out. Bought on spec, can't be sold-might be foreclosed. Same thing all over town, so there's lots of space to hide out."

Lucas had stayed in touch with Mitford all afternoon, and on the last call, Mitford said, "I have six names for you. If they're going to hit again, there's a good chance it'll be one of these six guys. They've got the most money and they all got early reservations-before this Sabartes guy died in D.c."

"All six?"

"Well, I actually got eleven names, but five got reservations too late," Mitford said. "You shouldn't need those."

"All right. E-mail me the names: we'll set up with them this evening."

Chapter 13

Randy Whitcomb sat in the back of the van as they cruised Davenport's place, the sun going down across the Mississippi Valley They went around and around the neighborhood looking for the girl, until Ranch said, "Man, she ain't here. We been doing this for hours." They'd been doing it for half an hour.

"Gotta be a better way," Whitcomb said. As he looked out the van window, he saw a woman who'd been digging in a garden stand up to look at them as they went by. They'd gone by her a half-dozen times, and were starting to attract attention. "We need a plan."

Juliet Briar didn't say anything; she just drove.

"I thought you were gonna bullshit her over to the house," Ranch said.

"I don't think the bullshit was working," Whitcomb said. He'd read the distance in Letty's eyes during their few words at the McDonald's. Whitcomb wasn't the sharpest knife in the dishwasher, but he had an exquisite sense of class, and Letty was several class steps above him. The chances that she'd fall for his bullshit were fairly thin, he'd decided. She was like one of the prom queens back in high school-they'd look right through him. They couldn't even see him; they couldn't even hear his bullshit. He was like a mosquito buzzing around their heads.

He scratched his nose, breaking open a scab left by the Pollish twins, when they rolled him down the front steps onto the sidewalk. He looked at the blood on his fingertips, shook his head and wiped it on his pants leg.

Ranch said, "Maybe we just oughta do it."

"Do what?"

"Just grab her," Ranch said. "Me "not Juliet. See her on the street, pick her ass up, throw her in the van."

"She'd scream and moan and piss and fight'"

"Whack her on the head," Ranch said. "Put a bunch of pennies in a sock, punch her out or whack her on the head. Throw her in the van."

"You ever done anything like that?"

"Used to whack fags down on Hennepin," Ranch said, a lie so transparent that his voice wavered halfway through it.

"You never whacked a fag in your life," Whitcomb said.

"Well-I heard about it," Ranch said. "Swat them with a sock full of pennies, you don't kill them, you knock them out. Hit them with a pipe, you kill them."

"You probably are a fag," Whitcomb said.

"I'm not a fuckin' fag, man, you seen me fuck Juliet."

"Yeah, well, when we get this chick, you're gonna have to fuck her."

Ranch nodded. "I can do that." Ranch would use any drug he could find, but methamphetamine was his drug of choice. He could no longer fuck on reefer or cocaine, but crank would still do it for him. Enough crank, and Ranch tipped over the edge into sexual insanity, and other kinds of insanity, for that matter: Whitcomb once saw him run full-tilt, face-on into a garage door, as a joke. He'd never flinched or slowed down. The impact had knocked him out, and somebody had to call an ambulance to come get him.

"What if we have Juliet call her up and pretend she's a friend whose car broke down…"

Whitcomb came up with a half-dozen plans and Juliet and Ranch took turns punching holes in them: like, how would they find out the name of a friend of the girl?

Finally, Ranch rubbed his throat, then smacked his lips. "Wonder where George is?"

George sold crank outside the X Center, but his business had been displaced by the Republicans.

Randy's brain switched tracks. Formerly on the Letty track, now it was on the crank track. "Probably down by the park. When they get too many cops at the X, he walks over to the park."

"Maybe we could find him," Ranch said.