Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  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, Norwest—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.

  Sloan asked Lucas, “You chicken out of going in by yourself?”

  Lucas said, “I wanted to share the glory with you guys.”

  “Smart move,” Daniel said.

  They were parked a block from the apartment house, standing between the nose of Sloan’s car and the trunk of Daniel’s. “You seen anything moving over there?” Hanson asked.

  “Nope. Not a single person, coming or going, since I got here. He’s in Apartment F. The guy who got it for him says he thinks it’s on the first floor, at the back.”

  “Where’d you get the information?” Daniel asked.

  “I got it all written down,” Lucas said. “I’ll give you a list when we get back. Social worker, was the main one.”

  “There was a rumor that you were fucking a librarian at the Star Tribune,” Hanson said.

  Lucas shook his head. “Jeez, I hate that word.”

  “Then you’re in the wrong fucking job, fuckhead,” Sloan said.

  “I meant ‘librarian,’” Lucas said.

  They all laughed, a little nervously, getting cranked for an entry, maybe even finding the Jones girls, dead or alive. They looked down the street some more, until Daniel said, “Well, hell.” He looked at Lucas. “You wearin’ your steel toes?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Might want you to kick the door, and I’ve got plantar fasciitis. Let’s go on down there.”

  THEY WALKED DOWN the street two-by-two, looking enough like cops that a passing bicyclist checked them over, the way people check cops. They stayed on the opposite side of the street until they were directly across from the house’s front door, then crossed and climbed the stairs to the porch. Lucas looked at the mailbox marked F, but there was no name on it. He opened it: no mail.

  Daniel led the way inside, where they found a small foyer, with a stair going up, and a hall going back; smelling of boiled cabbage, or maybe broccoli. There were doors on either side of them, to front apartments, one marked A, the other B. Lucas held up a finger to the others, stopping them, and moved carefully down the hall, the wooden floor creaking underfoot. He found C and D opposite each other, halfway down the hall, and then saw E and F at the end.

  He tiptoed back and said, “End of the hall, on the right.”

  They tiptoed back down the hall, the floor creaking, until they were opposite F, and Lucas breathed, “Knock, or kick?”

  “Y
ou think you could get it with one shot?”

  Lucas looked at the door. Some doors could be opened with a cough, but others resisted even sledgehammers. This house was a rehab, and the door looked like it might be trouble, at least for a kick: the lock was modern. He shook his head and muttered, “I don’t know.”

  Sloan moved up and said, “I’ll knock.”

  Lucas noticed that he had a gun in his hand, as did Hanson. He’d forgotten about his gun, put his hand back on it, then left it. Two guns were enough. Sloan looked at the three of them, then knocked and called, “Mr. Scrape? You’ve got a package. Mr. Scrape?”

  They heard nothing for a moment, then the sound of heels, somebody either barefoot, or in stocking feet, coming to the door. Lucas said, “Stand back.”

  The others got behind him, and when Scrape opened the door—it was Scrape, the picture of the man described to him by Alice Prose—Lucas kicked it as hard as he could. The door smashed open, hitting Scrape in the face, and the man went down, screaming with pain, fear, and confusion, and Lucas and Hanson were on top of him. Hanson’s hat popped off and rolled in a half-circle across the bare floor.

  Scrape was an average-sized man, maybe an inch under six feet, with a long prematurely gray beard and pale blue eyes; he was extremely thin, and as he struggled with the cops, the ligaments stood out in his arms. He was screaming and thrashing and Lucas pulled his cuffs, and they rolled him, ignoring his thrashing, and bent his arms and Lucas got the cuffs on; and thought that Scrape smelled like some weird combination of smoke, rancid butter, and dirt.

  Lucas patted him down, found an empty plastic baggie that might once have held some grass. Hanson spotted a butcher knife in a leather sheath on a rickety table next to the bed. He said, “Knife, over there.”

  They were all breathing hard, Scrape facedown on the floor, squealing now, and Daniel did a quick circuit of the spare room, looking for anything connected to the girls. Nothing. Daniel shook his head and said, “Let’s get him downtown.”

  Sloan and Hanson helped Scrape get up, and Sloan brushed off his shirt and said in a soft voice, “If you’ve still got them, you could give them up. It’d be a big help to everyone.”

  Scrape asked, “Who? Who?”

  Lucas would remember the tone of his voice: the utter confusion in it.

  SLOAN KEPT TALKING to Scrape like a man talking to a nervous horse, and he and Hanson took him out the door. Daniel’s eyes cut to Lucas and he said, “We had no time for a search warrant, I figured we were sort of in hot pursuit. We’ve got to have a warrant before we tear the place up.”

  Lucas thought that sounded a little shaky, but took a look around: one room, with a bed, a chest of drawers, a nightstand, and a wooden table and chair that might have been rescued from Goodwill. A key ring, with a bunch of keys, sat on the nightstand. A backpack, open at the top, and stuffed full of clothes, lay in the middle of the floor, with a basketball. There were two doors other than the one that went into the hallway: one stood half open, to reveal an empty closet. The other led to a compact three-quarters bath.

  He asked Daniel, “Think it’d be okay if I took a leak?”

  “If you don’t see any blood, and if you really have to go . . .”

  Lucas went in the bathroom, closed the door, checked the medicine cabinet—it was empty—and the shower booth, which showed only a sliver of soap, a miniature bar like those from hotels. No shaving cream or even toothpaste. There was a roll of unwaxed floss on the ledge behind the sink.

  He flushed the toilet and stepped back out. Daniel, with no witness, had had time to check the closet, under the bed, the chest of drawers, and the nightstand. The clothes in the pack had been pulled out and stuffed back in. Daniel said, “Get the knife and let’s go. We’ll get some guys back to check his pack.”

  So he’d found nothing.

  Lucas nodded. He picked up the knife, and the keys from the bedstand. They went out, and Lucas selected the newest-looking key, found that it worked, and locked the door behind them.

  Daniel said, “Be nice to know what those other keys do.”

  Lucas jangled them—a lot of them were old-fashioned skeleton keys, but some were modern. “We gotta ask him. And not nice.”

  5

  They took Scrape, frightened, panicked, back to police headquarters, took his picture, printed him, tagged his knife, sat him at Sloan’s desk, and Sloan went to work on him, with Hanson crowding in at Scrape’s side, the bad guy. Lucas, Daniel, and a couple of other cops sat back and watched.

  Scrape started out scared, but when Sloan asked him about the girls, he said he didn’t know what they were talking about: and his confusion seemed real. He didn’t read newspapers, watch television, or listen to radio. When Sloan gave him the news about the girls, he got angry, twisting in his chair to look each of them in the face, one after another, as if searching for an ally—or simply for understanding.

  “I never would touch no girls like that,” he said. “I never touch no good girls. You can ask anybody.”

  “You do like girls, though, right? You’re not queer,” Sloan said, leaning toward him.

  “Heck no, I’m not queer. I got problems.” He made a circling motion with his index finger, by his temple. “My meds don’t help. But I’m not queer. I just . . . don’t do much of that.”

  “Much of what?”

  “You know. Girls,” Scrape said.

  “When was the last time you did?”

  Scrape eased down in his chair, his eyes scanning the cops, calculating an answer. Finally, he said, “There was this woman down in the river . . .”

  He stopped, and Sloan asked, quietly, “Where on the river? Down by your tree place?”

  Scrape was puzzled again for a second, then snorted, as if at a joke, and he said, “Not this river. The LA river. I got run out of there by TVR, but that was the river.”

  “What’s TVR?” Hanson asked. “That some kind of TV station?”

  Scrape cocked his head. “What TV station?”

  Hanson said, “You said, ‘I got run off by TVR.’ What’s TVR?”

  “Everybody knows that,” Scrape said, taking on a slightly superior aspect. “The Toonerville Rifa. Bad dudes, man. I got the heck out of there.”

  They figured out that he was talking about a street gang in Los Angeles, and that he had never been around a woman on the Mississippi.

  “So you backed down on a gang guy,” Hanson sneered. “You yellow? You a chickenshit?”

  “I’m just not a big-boned man,” Scrape pleaded. “He was a big-boned guy. The only reason I’d ever back down, is if they’re bigger-boned than me, then I disengage.”

  “They used to hear you yelling and screaming down there, by that box you had,” Hanson said. “Were you yelling at the girls? Is that where you had them?”

  “I never had any girls; I never did. When I’m having a bad day, I might do some yelling. They come crowding in on me, and I try to keep it to myself, but sometimes I can’t. I have to yell it somewhere—”

  “When who crowds in?” Hanson asked. “When the girls crowd in?”

  “I don’t know any girls,” Scrape said, a miserable, yellowtoothed grimace pulling on his face.

  THE QUESTIONING WAS MADE more difficult by Scrape’s illness: he spoke his thoughts—“These cops are gonna kill me”—as a kind of oral parenthesis in the middle of answering a question. He claimed to have been in places where he couldn’t have been—Los Angeles, that morning—and to have spoken to people that he hadn’t spoken to—Michael J. Fox and Harrison Ford. When Sloan made the point that the conversations were fantasies, Scrape became further confused.

  “But I just talked to Harrison this morning. Or maybe . . . maybe yesterday. He was going to . . .” He paused, then said, “He was coming over with some friends. He was going to bring beer.”

  “Harrison Ford, the movie star,” Sloan said.

  “Yeah, he’s a good friend. He loans me money sometimes.”

  He became co
nfused by logical inconsistencies in what he was saying; became confused by the fact that he was in Minneapolis, and not Los Angeles, though at other times he knew for sure that he was in Minneapolis.

  They brought out the porn they’d taken from his boxes above the river. He could barely look at them. “Not mine. Not mine. Somebody else’s,” he said, turning his eyes away, in what seemed like embarrassment.

  “We found them in your place,” Sloan said. “Your boxes, down by the river.”

  “You did not,” Scrape said.

  “We did,” Sloan insisted.

  “Where am I gonna get that?” he asked. “I’m gonna mail away for it, so they could bring it to my mailbox? I’m gonna spend good money on it when I got no food? Where am I gonna get that shit?”

  Then he said something that did make sense: “Hey, if I had those in my box, wouldn’t my fingerprints be on them?”

  “Maybe,” Sloan said.

  “Sure they would,” Scrape said. “I ain’t got no gloves. You look at them pictures, they won’t have no prints on them. Not my prints. You look.”

  “We will,” Sloan said. “We’ll look.”

  “That’s the proof, right there,” Scrape said. “No prints.”

  SLOAN WAS THOUGHTFUL and forgiving and mild-mannered, offered cigarettes and Cokes and coffee. Hanson was rude and demanding and skeptical. Between them, they tore everything Scrape said to shreds, except for three things: he’d never seen the porn, he’d never seen the girls, and he was a friend of Harrison Ford’s.

  He didn’t know the girls, had never seen them, had never touched them.

  So angry that he was shaking, his face red as a bullfighter’s cape, he kept his hands down and his story straight: “NO: I NEVER SEEN THEM.”

  The ring of keys, he said, he collected: “I find keys, I put them on the ring. I like to listen to them at night. They’re like bells. And who knows when I might need one? Maybe I could sell one, or something.”

  They gave it two hours, more or less, then Daniel brought in another cop to sit with Scrape, and he, Sloan, Hanson, and Lucas went into Daniel’s office and shut the door.