Buried Prey p-21

by John Sandford

  She’d never seen him with anybody else, male or female. “He was always bouncing a basketball, but he didn’t seem especially good at it. He was always losing it, and chasing it around.”

  “He’s not just a bum, though,” Lucas said. “People say he’s crazy.”

  “Schizophrenic, I think,” Alice said. “You could hear him yelling some nights. It sounded like an argument, like a violent argument, but he was all by himself, yelling and jumping up and down, like he was fighting somebody. Like fighting an invisible man. If you just heard it, and didn’t see it… it was pretty convincing. It sounded like a fight. He’d be cursing and screaming…”

  “You never saw him with any girls, or women?”

  “I never saw him with anybody. Ever.”

  “Did he ever show up in a car? Or a truck?”

  “Never. Not that I saw.”

  Lucas wrote it all down in his notebook, and fifteen minutes after he’d spoken to Daniel, walked down to wait in the street.

  Daniel took nearly a half-hour to arrive; before he got there, an unmarked car pulled up, and a couple of homicide detectives got out, John Malone and Frank Lester. Lester asked, “Where’s this stuff?”

  Lucas pointed through the fence at the tree. “Right there. Under the washed-out roots.”

  Malone said to Lester, “We’re gonna need better access,” and to Lucas, “You get your prints all over everything?”

  “On some of it,” Lucas admitted. “The boxes were mostly empty, just a bunch of crap lying around. He hasn’t been here for a couple of weeks, according to the neighbors. They had the park cops run him off. There’s like a… cupboard… thing cut into the back. I needed to go inside and see if there was anything in it.”

  “Hope you didn’t fuck up a crime scene,” Malone said.

  “Get off his back,” Lester snapped at Malone. “You would have done the same goddamn thing.” To Lucas: “You did good, rook.”

  “I hope,” Lucas said.

  “Still need access,” Malone said, tacitly conceding the point. “I’m gonna get some snappers.”

  He made a call from his car, and a squad showed up five minutes later. A uniformed cop named Willis climbed out, said, “Hey,” to Lucas, and got a commercial bolt-cutter from the trunk. The cutter had steel handles almost as long as a baseball bat, and was mostly used for cutting the shackles off padlocks. Willis started cutting a man-shaped hole in the fence, and was finishing the job when Daniel arrived, driving a yellow, ten-year-old Corvette. Daniel nodded at Lucas and asked Lester, “Whaddya got, Frank?”

  “Haven’t been down yet,” he said. “We’re just going now.”

  Willis dragged the arc of cut wire out of the hole, and Lucas led the way down the slope to the base of the oak tree. “Smells like shit,” Malone said.

  “It is shit,” Lucas said. “His toilet’s right down the slope.”

  When they got to the mouth of the two boxes, they all squatted and Lucas pointed toward the niche in the back. “It’s like a little cupboard cut into the dirt. That’s where the paper is-I only pulled one out. That’s it right there.”

  Daniel got down on his knees, crawled a couple feet into the sleeping box, picked up the paper, and backed out. They all looked at it, and Lester said, “That’s not Playboy or Penthouse. That’s really rough. That’s a kid.”

  “No tits,” Malone said. “But she could be older than she looks.”

  Daniel said, “That doesn’t make any difference. The point is, she looks like a kid, and she’s aimed at people who want to fuck kids.”

  They all looked at it for a few more seconds, then Daniel asked Lester, “You got some gloves?”

  “Yeah.” He took a pair of white latex gloves from his pocket, the kind surgeons used.

  “Give them to Davenport,” Daniel said. And to Lucas: “Crawl back in there and get the rest of the paper.”

  Lucas took the gloves, pulled them on, crawled to the back of the box, pulled the flap down, and retrieved the sheaf of paper. As he was backing out of the box, Daniel asked, “We got your prints, right?”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said.

  “We’ll need them to separate them from the prints this asshole left here. Let me see that stuff.”

  The porn was more of the same: young-looking girls having sex with older men.

  Daniel said to Lucas, “He’s our guy. We need to get all over this. I want you to find him.”

  “I go on at three o’clock…”

  “I fixed that. You’re working for me for a while,” Daniel said. “I want you to find this guy.”

  Lucas nodded, but said, “You know, I don’t, uh…”

  “I want you to think about it,” Daniel said. “Think about it. And maybe go talk to the welfare guys or whatever. We need a description, we need everything you got…”

  “I got a description, but the main thing is, he’s a street guy. He goes around dribbling a basketball,” Lucas said. “The neighbor said that every time they saw him, he had the ball. That’s the only street guy I ever heard of doing that. If you get the patrol guys looking for him, that’d be our best chance.”

  Daniel said, “We’ll do that.” To Lester, “We need to get some guys down here; we need to walk up and down this riverbank. If he killed them, he could have left them around here. He knows the area, he might have felt safe here. We need to look in the boxes and see if there’s blood. We need to check old culverts down by the water, look for caves, holes… we need the whole riverbank swept.”

  “What about the kids’ father?” Lucas asked. “Just out of curiosity.”

  “What about him?” Daniel asked.

  “Is somebody taking a close look at him?”

  “Yeah. Somebody is,” Daniel said. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Get downtown, find somebody who knows this guy, and where he is. We want him.”

  “The girls are gone,” Lester said.

  “Maybe not,” Daniel said. “There was that guy who kept the girl chained to the toilet. He didn’t kill her for a week.”

  “One guy,” Malone said. Then he said to Lucas, “You better hurry and find him.”

  Pressure. Lester grinned at him: “Life ain’t fair, is it?”

  By the time he left the scene, Lucas was feeling a little tattered. His clothes felt dirty, and he needed some sleep-he’d started twenty-two hours earlier with some vigorous sex, followed by an evening on patrol, then an overnight banging on doors, and then into the new day… and now he had the feeling that he was being judged by Daniel.

  But he liked it: liked the pressure.

  He didn’t like the feeling of being slowed down. He’d spent most of his life playing hockey at a high level, and had grown to know the feeling of being not-quite-sharp. When you felt like that-not much off, but with a slightly blurred edge-you were looking at a bad game.

  There were ways to take care of that. Instead of heading straight downtown, he detoured home, took a fast shower and washed his hair. As his hair dried, he went into the apartment’s compact kitchen, dug a flat-bladed screwdriver out of a drawer, went to the entryway, and carefully popped off a baseboard. From behind the board, he removed an amber prescription-pill bottle he’d picked up on the street, shook out two Dexedrine tabs, tossed one to the back of his throat and swallowed.

  He put the baseboard back in place and took the other pill back to his bedroom, where he dressed in a blue oxford-cloth shirt, chinos, and blue blazer. He dropped the second pill into a shirt pocket: he disliked taking three, because they pushed him out too far. But one or two were fine: by the time he got back to the Jeep, he was already building a new edge.

  Which was wasted over the next couple of hours: he worked through four separate welfare-related agencies, and found no one that knew, or had seen, a street guy with a basketball. He got the impression that most of their work was done in the offices, and that the people he spoke to had little regular contact with the street.

  Later, he went down to the 911 center
and started calling patrol cars. They’d all been put on the alert, to look for the guy, and he found two patrolmen who remembered seeing him at one time or another.

  They agreed that he was usually in the neighborhoods adjacent to the river, between the I-94 bridge and the Marshall Lake bridge to the south. “I think he might have been camping out along the railroad tracks behind Brackett Park, but we went down there, and there’s no sign of a camp. Maybe he split,” one of the cops said.

  At noon, he walked over to Hennepin Avenue to get a sandwich, but mostly to get away from the bureaucrats in City Hall, and to think. That’s what Daniel had told him to do, and he hadn’t been doing enough of it.

  He took with him a file of arrest reports involving street people: the guy was so completely gone that it occurred to Lucas that he might be in jail. If he were, and that was discovered at some later date, they would all be embarrassed. He needed to check that…

  He was sitting in Henry’s, a shabby bar-restaurant with a decent cheeseburger, flipping through the paper, finding nothing, when somebody said, “Jesus, they’re letting the cops in here.”

  A thin man with wild blond hair and skinny paper-thin jeans stood in the dim light coming through the front door, fingertips in his jeans pockets, grinning down at him.

  Lucas half stood and they slapped hands, and he said, “I caught you at Seventh Street. You guys are out of control.”

  “I saw you in the crowd…” The man laughed, and said, “I love watching you dance. It’s like watchin’ a bear gettin’ electrocuted.”

  “Hey… I’m physically talented.”

  Dave Pirner was the lead singer in the band Soul Asylum. He was a couple years younger than Lucas. They’d met in the rock clubs along Minneapolis’s Hennepin Avenue when Lucas was at the university. Pirner slid into the booth: “So what’re you up to?”

  “I’m working on that thing with the missing girls,” Lucas said. “Plainclothes, for a while, anyway.”

  “Read about the kids,” Pirner said. He waved at a waitress. “They just take off? Or they get kidnapped?”

  “Kidnapped, I think,” Lucas said. “Some people say they fell in the river.” Pirner made a rude noise, and Lucas nodded: “That’s what I think.”

  The waitress came over and said to Pirner, “I love your hair,” and Lucas leaned into the conversation, said, “Thanks, I cut it myself,” and she rolled her eyes, and Pirner grinned at her and said, “Gimme a Grain Belt. He’s paying for it.”

  “I’m not paying for a Grain Belt,” Lucas said. “Give him a Leinie’s.”

  They sat and drank beer, talked about Prince and Purple Rain, and Morris Day’s feud with Prince, and about Madonna getting hot.

  Pirner said Prince had come into Seventh Street with his entourage, and, “There was a bodyguard about the size of a mountain; he went through the crowd like a ship going through the ocean”; and he said Prince was interesting but “it’s not really our kind of music, you know?” He said he was working on a rerelease of the first Soul Asylum album.

  Lucas told him about the investigation of the missing girls.

  “No suspects?”

  “I’m trying to find a guy,” Lucas said. He told him about the schizophrenic with the basketball.

  Pirner leaned across the table and pointed the end of his Leinie’s bottle at Lucas. “There’s this chick… what’s her name? She’s kind of a groupie.”

  “Groupie for who?”

  “For us, wickdick.”

  “Now I know you’re lying…”

  “Karen… Blue hair. I’ll think of it. She’s a social worker for somebody. Some foundation or something. She knows every goddamn street guy in Minneapolis. She practically lives with them. There’s a guy, she…” He straightened and snapped his fingers. “Karen, uh, Foster. Or Frazier. Something like that. Frazier, I’m pretty sure. Works for some foundation, but she went to the U for a long time. Like, years. Blue hair. She’s at every show.”

  Lucas scrawled the name on a piece of paper. “I’ll talk to her. We got nothin’ else.”

  “She’ll know the guy,” Pirner said. “I swear to Jesus.”

  They finished a second beer, Pirner said they had another gig coming up, and Lucas said he’d be there. Pirner was meeting a couple of friends at Rifle Sport to do some shooting and invited Lucas to come along.

  “I can’t, man, I got this thing going, I can’t stop,” Lucas said, standing up.

  He dropped some money on the table and Pirner headed out. Lucas went to the back of the bar to find a phone. He checked through a couple of supervisors in the welfare department and found a guy who told him that Karen Frazier worked for Lutheran Social Services.

  Lucas got an address and headed that way.

  A woman at Lutheran Social Services told him that Karen Frazier was on the street somewhere, and when Lucas became persistent, went through the offices until she found somebody who said that Frazier planned to talk to a group of Hmong women about cultural violence, at an Asian grocery store in St. Paul.

  Xiong’s was on University Avenue, a near-slum of aging stores and small mechanical shops, now in the process of becoming a Hmong shopping district. Xiong’s had once been a drugstore, then a secondhand shop, then abandoned, and now was back as a supermarket that smelled funny to Lucas’s Western nose; an earth smell, like unfamiliar root vegetables. He found Frazier, with her blue hair, at the center of a group of Hmong women.

  Lucas was a foot taller than any of them, and attracted some attention as he worked through the store: he waggled his fingers at Frazier, who frowned and asked, “Me?”

  “I’m a police officer. I gotta talk to you right now-it’s urgent,” he told her.

  “Me? About what?”

  “About a transient over in Minneapolis. I was told you could help me,” Lucas said.

  “By who?”

  “Dave Pirner. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “Dave’s a friend?” Now she was interested. She excused herself from the Hmong ladies, and they moved into an aisle of canned goods.

  “I’m looking for a street guy who goes around bouncing a basketball,” Lucas said. “We think he might know something about the two girls who disappeared last night. We really need to talk to him.”

  “You think he took them?”

  “We heard some things in that direction,” Lucas said. “And we found an old camp of his, under a tree…”

  “… off West Mississippi. I’ve been there,” she said.

  “So you know him?”

  “Yeah, but why do you think he’s involved?” she asked.

  “Something a guy said, a guy we think knows him. Then, we were digging around under that tree, and we found a bunch of porn, with really young girls.”

  “Ah, boy,” she said. She turned away from him and scratched her nose, working through the equities, decided, and said, “Okay… okay. His name’s Terry Scrape. S-c-r-a-p-e. He was born around here, and he comes back in the summer. Most of the year he’s out in California. Los Angeles. He’s schizophrenic, he thinks he’s in the movie business, he thinks he’s an actor, he sees movie stars everywhere. The last time I saw him, he was into Harrison Ford and Michael J. Fox.”

  Lucas was making notes: “Any history of violence?”

  “Not as far as I know-but you guys have busted him a bunch of times on marijuana charges,” Frazier said. “Using, not dealing. Self-medicating. He does carry a knife, but most of them do, somewhere.”

  “He never threatened you, or anything?”

  She shook her head: “No. He’ll freak out sometimes. It’s like.. he has nightmares when he’s awake. He might hurt somebody inadvertently, but he’s not a bad guy. He’s suspicious, he’s paranoid at times. He won’t take his meds, they mess him up too bad.”

  “Where is he now?” Lucas asked.

  “He’s got a room. He had a room-I haven’t seen him for a few weeks, so he’s probably still there, or he’s gone back to LA. Anyway, the big corporations-Target, Nor
west-got their employees to kick in money to house the homeless, and he got one of the spaces. A Target employee handles the money and finds the rooms.”

  She fumbled in her purse, took out a worn black address book, paged through it and said, “The Target guy’s name is Mark Chakkour…” She spelled the name and gave Lucas a phone number.

  She had a few more details, and Lucas thanked her, got a phone number, used the phone in the back of the store to call Chakkour. He caught him on his way to a late lunch: “Yeah, we’ve got a Terry Scrape. What’d he do?”

  “We don’t know if he did anything, but we need to locate him,” Lucas said. After a little more evasion, he got an address, and headed that way, and thought about his next step.

  He was tempted to go in himself, just as he had been in the morning; no guts, no glory. On the other hand, Daniel already suspected that Lucas had held back information so he could work it himself. Maybe it was time to show some team spirit.

  Scrape’s apartment was in south Minneapolis, a mile west of the river, not far from Lucas’s apartment in Uptown-a neighborhood mostly inhabited by people recently out of school, and working downtown. Lucas spotted the house, counted the mailboxes on the front porch, then went out to a shopping center and got on the phone to Daniel.

  Another cop picked up, and yelled at Daniel that Lucas was on the line: “You find him yet?” Daniel asked without preamble, when he picked up.

  “His name’s Terry Scrape,” Lucas said, straining to keep his voice nonchalant. “He’s got a charity place in Uptown, one of those old houses converted to apartments. I’m standing outside. I haven’t gone in yet.”

  “Don’t go in. We’ll be there. You say Terry Scrape?”

  “Yeah. S-c-r-a-p-e. We should have a sheet on him. My source says he’s been picked up a bunch of times. Possession of marijuana… carries a knife. Paranoid, schizophrenic, has waking nightmares. Not on his meds.”

  Daniel took down the address and said, “Fifteen minutes.”

  This time he was fifteen minutes. He and two other detectives came in two unmarked cars, Daniel alone, the second car driven by Sloan, the detective Lucas had worked with the night before. The third guy was a long-timer named Hanson, who wore a gray felt hat like men wore before John Kennedy changed the fashion; a hat with a brim.