Buried Prey p-21

by John Sandford

  “Somebody must have seen something,” Lucas said. “Seen the kids getting in a car. Seen them going through a door. They can’t just go away.”

  “Somebody would have called, if they were gonna talk,” Sloan said. “When we found that blouse… we should have looked around at the baddest guy on the block, and squeezed his pimple head until he coughed them up.”

  Lucas shook his head. “That blouse wasn’t right.”

  “What?”

  “Wasn’t right. Why in the hell would you throw a blouse out a car window? I can see throwing the girl out, if nobody was looking. But why would you throw a blouse out? Tell me one reason.”

  Sloan thought for a moment and said, “The guy killed her, took her blouse as a trophy. The bodies are already in a dumpster somewhere, and he was driving around with the blouse over his face, smelling the chick, getting off on it. At some point, he gets tired of it, or can’t smell her anymore, so he throws it out the window.”

  Lucas grinned at him and said, “That’s perverted. I kinda like it.”

  The night was still warm, for August, with a hint of rain in the still air. They drove back to Lucas’s place in Sloan’s Dodge, arms out the side windows, Lucas thinking how quiet the city was, and for all they knew, somewhere in its quiet heart, two little girls were being tortured by a monster.

  Sloan dropped him, and went on his way. Lucas went inside, got a beer, sat at the kitchen table and looked at a blue three-ring binder stuffed with paper. In school, he’d lived in an apartment inhabited mostly by nerds from the computer center. Despite his jock status, he had been pulled into some of their role-playing games. Then he wrote a module, which had impressed the nerds, who said it was as good as the commercial modules.

  Talking around with the computer guys, he developed an idea for a football-based strategy game, similar to the war games popular in the seventies, but that would be played on a computer. A computer guy promised to program it, if Lucas could write the scenarios. The work had been harder than he’d expected, and had been delayed when he’d had to take a course in statistics: he wanted the game to be real.

  He sat and looked at paper, which, after the day hunting for the girls, looked like silly paper. Games. Something awful was happening outside, and he was sitting at the kitchen table looking at silly paper.

  He fooled with the coaching modules for a while, then gave up and got a second beer, glanced at the clock. Two o’clock in the morning. He wondered if Cherry and McGuire had gone down to Kenny’s, and what they’d found.

  Restless, he picked up his sport coat, climbed in his Jeep, and headed downtown, left the car at the curb, and walked into City Hall. The place was dark but busy, with cops all over the hallways. Lucas stopped a uniformed guy named Morgan and asked what had happened. “Nothing,” Morgan said. “No sign of them. People are talking about the river again.”

  “I don’t think they’re in there,” Lucas said. “How many guys are working it?”

  “Right now? A half-dozen. Daniel’s still here, but people are starting to freak-the TV people are driving around in their truck. It’s turning into a circus.”

  “You seen Cherry or McGuire?” Lucas asked.

  “Not for a while.”

  Lucas went down to Homicide, stuck his head in the office, spotted Daniel with his feet up on a desk, talking to a couple of detectives. Lucas went in, idled off to the side for a minute, until Daniel said, “Davenport. What’s happening?”

  “I wondered if Cherry and McGuire got anything at Kenny’s?”

  Daniel shook his head and said, “Not much more than you got.” He looked at a piece of paper on his desk. “The place was closed, but they talked to the manager. He says it’s a guy named John. Nobody knows where he lives, or how to get in touch. Just a guy.”

  “So they struck out,” Lucas said.

  “Well, it’s something,” Daniel said.

  “Right,” said one of the detectives. “We’ve got a suspect named ‘John.’ That narrows it down.”

  Daniel ignored him: “How come you’re still running around?” he asked Lucas.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Lucas said. “I was thinking, you know, if it’s all right with you… I might go down and hit that massage place across from Kenny’s. Unless Cherry and McGuire already did.”

  “No, they didn’t,” Daniel said. “Why would they?”

  “Didn’t they get that? That John knows some of those chicks? Maybe that’s why they call him John. Maybe he is one,” Lucas said.

  An annoyed look crept across Daniel’s face. “I guess they didn’t get that. You didn’t mention it?”

  “They told us to take a hike,” Lucas said. “So… I’m not doing much.”

  “Step outside with me,” Daniel said, standing up.

  In the hall, he said, quietly, but showing some teeth, “You’re not fuckin’ with us, are you? Withholding information so you can get a shot at it? With these two girls, this wouldn’t be the time to make points.”

  “Hell no,” Lucas lied. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “You should have told Cherry and McGuire what the woman said.”

  “They didn’t want to hear it,” Lucas said. “They were like, ‘Uh-huh, go knock on doors, rook.’”

  Daniel looked at him for a minute, then said, “I can’t pay you overtime. But if you go down there, I’ll back you up if anything comes out of it.”

  Lucas nodded. “Okay. How long you gonna be here?”

  “Not much longer. Don’t call me unless you get something serious-but call me if you do.” He gave Lucas his office and home phone numbers.

  “Did we get anything tonight? Anything?”

  Daniel shook his head. “We got that blouse, and it was Mary’s. Nobody knows how it got there. We think the kids might have walked past Andy’s Cleaners. One of the desk girls says she saw them. That’s only about a block from their house, so maybe she did. It was early, before they were missing.”

  “But they were together?”

  “That’s what the girl says,” Daniel said.

  “Were they walking toward their house, or away?”

  “Away.”

  “Any blood on the blouse?” Lucas asked.

  “Not sure. There’s a small discoloration, could be blood that somebody tried to wash out. We’ll know tomorrow morning.”

  “You think they’re dead?” Lucas asked.

  “Probably not yet. But they will be, soon.”

  Paul’s therapeutic massage occupied the end store in a fivebusiness strip that included a movie rental place, a coin laundry, a dog groomer, and a medical-oxygen service. Lucas parked in front of the massage parlor. A light shone from one window, but a red neon “Open” sign had been turned off.

  When Lucas climbed out of the Jeep and slammed the door, a curtain moved in the window, and he caught the pale flash of a woman’s face. He walked up to the entrance, tried the handle: the heavy steel-cored door was locked. He pounded on it, got no answer. He pounded louder, still got no answer, so he kicked it a few times, shaking the door in its frame, and heard a woman shout, “We’re closed. Go away.”

  Lucas pounded again and shouted, “Police. Open up.”

  He waited for a minute, then kicked the door a few more times-carefully, with the heel, since he was still wearing the loafers-stopped when he heard a bolt rattling on the other side of the lock. The door opened a couple of inches, a chain across the gap, and a narrow blond woman asked, “Cop?”

  Lucas held up his badge: “We’re looking for two missing girls. I need information about a guy you know.”

  “What guy?”

  “His name is John. You guys hang out with him sometimes at Kenny’s. That’s all I know,” Lucas said.

  The door opened another couple of inches. “Did he do it?”

  “He was telling people that he knows who did,” Lucas said. He pushed the door with his fingertips, and she let it swing open a bit more. “So who is he?”

  She looked back over h
er shoulder and shouted, “Sally.”

  Lucas pushed on the door again, and she let it open. He took that as an invitation, and stepped into a ten-foot-long room with a Formica counter and yellowing white-plaster walls, like in a drycleaning shop. A couple of chairs sat against the window wall, with a low wooden table between them, holding an ashtray and a table lamp with a shade that had a burned spot on one side. A gumball machine sat in a corner, half empty, or half full, depending. Not a place that people would linger for long, Lucas thought.

  A short dark-haired woman came out of the back, behind the counter, looked at Lucas and said, “I’m all done.”

  “He’s a cop,” the blonde said. “He’s looking for this guy John.. you know, John, the joker.”

  Sally shook her head: “Why would I know where he is?”

  The blonde said, “You’d know better than me. They’re looking for him about those two girls.”

  Sally’s right hand went to her throat: “He took them?”

  “He’s been talking about who might have,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to him.”

  “I really don’t know him,” Sally said. “He’s come in a few times, I got him, you know, gave him a massage. He’s kinda funny, tells jokes and shit.”

  “He ever say where he lives? Ask you to come over? Give you any hint…?”

  She shook her head: “No, but I’ll tell you what. He charged the massage last time. I bet we got the slip.”

  Lucas ticked a finger at her: “Thank you. Who do I see about the slip?”

  “Me,” the blonde said. “But since we don’t know his last name, I don’t know how we figure out…”

  Sally pressed her palms to her eyes and said, “Let me think,” and a minute later said, “Fourth of July. He was joking about fireworks, you know, when… never mind. Anyway, the night of the fourth. Don had a baseball game on the radio, so it couldn’t have been too late.”

  The blonde went around the counter, took out a metal box, and began running through charge slips. Lucas said to Sally, “You said he’s okay. That means, what? He didn’t want anything peculiar?”

  “Hey, it was a therapeutic massage.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Lucas said. “Look, I don’t care what he wants, or what you do. I’m trying to figure out these girls and whether he might be weird. Can you tell me that? Is he weird?”

  Sally shrugged: “He wants the Three-start with a hand job, end with a blow job. Is that weird? I dunno. A hundred and twenty bucks, plus tip. I don’t remember the tip, but it wasn’t…” She dug for a word, and came up with one: “Memorable.”

  “So he’s got some money.”

  “He’s got some, anyway,” the woman said. “But I ain’t going to Vegas on a tip I can’t remember.”

  The blonde said, “I got a one-forty at eight forty-five Friday.. that’s it, probably. Says his name is John…”

  “That’s gotta be him,” Sally said.

  Lucas took the slip and walked it to the table lamp. The ink imprint was shaky-the name was John Fell, Lucas thought, but the number was clear. Lucas took down the information, then asked, “You got a Xerox machine?”

  “No…”

  “I’m gonna take this,” he said, waggling the paper slip. “You need the information to make the charge?”

  “We already made it,” the blonde said. “We send it in while you’re still in the room.”

  “Okay.” Lucas flipped a page in his notebook: “I need both your names. I want to see driver’s licenses. I need to know how often he comes in.”

  The blonde began, “You said…”

  Lucas shook his head: “I’m not arresting anybody. If he turns out to be somebody, I need to know who I talked to.”

  The blonde’s name was Lucy Landry, and Sally’s name was Dorcas Ryan. John Fell had come in at least once in the past ten days, had been cheerful, funny, even, had been satisfied with the service and paid cash. Ryan had seen him at Kenny’s afterward, and he’d bought her a drink.

  “He bought you a drink, but he didn’t chat? Didn’t tell you about himself?”

  Ryan frowned: “You know what? Almost all he does is tell jokes. Like, ‘You heard the one about the priest who caught the sonofabitch?’ That’s what he does. He’s got a million of them.”

  Lucas used their telephone to call Daniel at home, who answered and, when Lucas identified himself, said, “This better be good.”

  “The guy’s name is John Fell and I’ve got a credit card slip on him. How do I get an address off the credit card?”

  There was a moment of silence, then Daniel said, “What I usually do is call Harmon Anderson, and he does something on the computer.”

  “So we gotta wait until he comes in?”

  “No, no, I’ll bust him out of bed,” Daniel said. “Where’re you?”

  “Down at the massage place,” Lucas said.

  “Go on downtown. I’ll have Anderson meet you there.”

  He hung up, and Ryan was telling Landry, “… so the Pope takes off his hat, puts his feet up on the table, and says, ‘You know what? You fuckers are all right.’”

  Landry only half smiled: “It’s not that funny.”

  “I didn’t say it was great,” Ryan said. She looked at Lucas. “I told her John’s sonofabitch joke.”

  Lucas shrugged: “I missed it. Can you break a dollar? I need a gumball.”

  Bottom line, Lucas thought, on his way downtown: he didn’t know how to get an address for a credit card. He needed to fix that. He chewed through the gumball in two minutes, threw the wad of gum out the window and drove faster.

  He got there before Anderson, and had to wait. Anderson showed up twenty-five minutes later, sleepy and annoyed, sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. Lucas was looking over his shoulder and asked, “What’re you doing here?”

  “A credit check,” Anderson said. “All the credit information is in computers. I can get in and look at some of the information for credit card holders. Including addresses and so on.”

  “Neat,” Lucas said. “I’m thinking of getting a Macintosh.”

  “Wait awhile-there’re rumors that they’re going to 512K this fall. The 128K just isn’t enough.”

  “Can’t afford it for a while, anyway,” Lucas said.

  “You patrol guys know all the crack freaks,” Anderson said. “You oughta be able to get one wholesale.”

  “Pretty fuckin’ funny,” Lucas said.

  “No offense,” Anderson said.

  He sounded insincere, Lucas thought. He shut up and watched Anderson work. Five minutes after he started, Anderson had a name and address: “It’s a post office box.”

  “That’s not good.” He wasn’t a detective yet, but he knew that much.

  “The post office will have a name and address for the renter,” Anderson said. “But the thing is, credit card companies don’t usually take post office boxes. Did the hookers get paid?”

  “They said so,” Lucas said.

  “Huh. Well, something’s not right.”

  The post office worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The front end was closed, but Lucas found his way in through the loading dock in the back and showed his ID to a couple of guys throwing canvas mail bags off a truck. One of them went inside and came back with a bureaucrat.

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said. He was a fat little man, fish-pale with what must have been a permanent night shift. “It’s privileged information.”

  “We got two girls missing-”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s against the law for me to give you that information,” the bureaucrat said. “Come back with a search warrant and give it to the postmaster.”

  “This guy could be killing them,” Lucas said.

  “The law says-”

  “Then give me the number for the postmaster,” Lucas said.

  “I can’t do that. It’s the middle of the night.”

  At some level, Lucas realized, the man was enjoying himself, sticking i
t to the cops. It was possible and even likely that there was a law or regulation about releasing the names of post office box renters; but, he thought, there sure as hell wasn’t a law about calling up the postmaster, even in the middle of the night.

  Lucas got his face close to the bureaucrat’s. “I’ll tell you what. One way or another, I’m gonna get the name off the box. And if these girls are killed, I’m gonna take this conversation to the newspapers and I’m gonna hang it around your neck like a dead skunk. When they find these girls’ bodies, you’ll have reporters standing in your front yard yelling at you.”

  The man flushed: “You can’t threaten me. The law-”

  Lucas crowded closer: “The law doesn’t say you can’t wake up the postmaster. Does it? Does the law say that?”

  The man was furious, and said, “On your head.”

  “On yours,” Lucas said. “You’re now gonna come out looking like an asshole no matter what you do.”

  The bureaucrat said, “Wait here,” and disappeared into the post office.

  One of the truck loaders said, “He is an asshole. That’s his job.”

  “Yeah, well, I got no time for it,” Lucas said.

  The bureaucrat came back a minute later, and said, “I got the superintendent of mails on the phone.”

  Lucas talked to the superintendent of mails, who said, “I’m waiving the confidentiality reg in this case because of the emergency, but I’m going to need a letter from your chief outlining the problem. I need to file it.”

  “You’ll get it,” Lucas said.

  “Put Gene back on the line.”

  Lucas left the post office ten minutes later with the paper in his hand: John Fell at an address on Sixth Street SE, Minneapolis. Five minutes away, the sun coming up over St. Paul.

  In his first year as a cop, working patrol and then, briefly, as a dope guy, he’d felt that he was learning things at a ferocious rate: about the street, life, death, sex, love, hate, fear, stupidity, jealousy, and accident, and all the other things that brought citizens in contact with the cops.

  Then the learning rate tailed off. He’d continued to accumulate detail, to see faces, to interpret moves, but at nothing like the rate of his first ten or twelve months.