Naked Prey by John Sandford

knew, though, that something was missing in his life. He felt that all the details were there, but not the color. He felt like a black-and-white photograph—only when he met Katina did a little color begin to bleed into his life.
    In other people’s minds, Loren Singleton was, when they thought of him at all, a loner, a familiar outsider, a man always standing on the edges. A few women had tried to talk with him—he wasn’t bad looking, and the cowboy clothes seemed to give him some kind of personality—but they’d found him unresponsive, emotionally stunted. As a deputy, he had a reputation for casual brutality that seemed to go with his essential coldness. Even his cars, his Caddys, tended to cold, brilliant colors that could set your teeth on edge.
    Everybody nodded to him on the street; almost nobody spoke to him.
    T HEN K ATINA L EWIS had arrived to work with the nuns. Singleton wasn’t sure that he’d ever loved anyone before he met Lewis. He thought about it sometimes. He probably loved Lewis, he thought—there was no other explanation for the way he felt when he was around her—but did he love his mother? Had he ever? She was the only other possibility for love in his life, and everyone was supposed to love his mother. People got “Mom” tattooed on their arms. People ate at places called “Mom’s,” because Mom would never hurt you, would always have that extra piece of pie for her little boy.
    But Singleton’s mom had whacked the shit out of him for years; had beat him up so badly when he was sixmonths old that an uncle had taken him to the hospital, told the doctor that he’d crawled out of his playpen and had fallen down the stairs.
    His father, Edgar Singleton, had died in a live-steam accident at the chipboard plant when Loren was two years old. Singleton had heard his mother telling stories, with some relish, about “poached Eg,” how his father had been poached from the neck down when a steam line broke in a processing tank, and how he lay in the hospital, burned over 95 percent of his body, waiting to die, without pain, but also without a mind: he’d rambled on for seven days about haying on the old farm, then he’d died.
    When Eg was gone, Mom began dressing Singleton in girl’s clothes. She’d wanted a girl; girls were more manageable. She did her damnedest to make Singleton into one—would have done better if the nosy old school principal hadn’t gotten a restraining order against her, requiring her to dress her kindergartener in gender-appropriate clothing.
    Singleton vaguely remembered all of that. After the court order, she still made him put on a dress, occasionally, and serve tea at one of her ladies’ poker parties. That ended when he was eleven, big for his age. She’d ordered him into a dress, and he’d refused. She’d begun to hit him with a broomstick that she’d used to beat him in the past, and he’d fled into the winter darkness.
    When he came back, she was in the bathtub. He’d gone into the bathroom, and she’d screamed at him and tried to cover her nakedness, but he didn’t care about that. He, a big, tough, abused eleven-year-old, had grabbed her hair and shoved her head under water. She’d thrashed and fought and clawed at him, but he’d held her under until she quit struggling.
    Then he held her under for another fifteen seconds. When he finally let her up, she lay back against the end ofthe tub, apparently without breath. Then, she breathed in, a small breath, and then another one. In five minutes, still weak, she tried to climb out of the tub. Singleton heard her, came back in, shoved her head under water again, until she passed out a second time.
    The second time she revived, she was quiet about it: crept over the edge of the tub and crawled to the bathroom door and managed to get it locked. She lay there, naked, until the next morning, when she heard him whistling out the door on his way to school.
    When he came home that night, he found she’d