Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  “I don’t think he did it,” Sloan said. “But I’d be more sure if he wasn’t nuts. Do you think it’s possible that he could have done it, and then forgot he did it?”

  “Doesn’t seem like it,” Hanson said. “He gets stuff confused, but he remembers it all.”

  Daniel looked at Lucas, who shrugged. “He looked like he was really confused when Sloan first asked him about them—it looked to me like he had no idea who we were talking about. I don’t think he’s smart enough to fake it. Or sane enough. Then, I’ve got to wonder about the prints on the porn. Are we looking at that?”

  “We will,” Daniel said. “So, we got a problem. I mean, we got nothing. We picked him up on a rumor started by a guy we can’t find, and Davenport, here, thinks that guy’s a crook of some kind, with fake addresses and phony credit cards. We can’t even arrest Scrape on the knife, since he was in his own room, and he never had a chance to threaten anyone.”

  “They find anything else out at his camp?” Lucas asked.

  Daniel shook his head: “I talked to Lester twenty minutes ago. They combed the riverbank for a half-mile, both directions, and didn’t find anything. Not a thing.”

  “We gonna cut him loose?”

  Daniel said, “If Sloan doesn’t squeeze anything out of him.” He looked at Sloan and said, “I want you to keep him going for another hour. Run through it, all over again, and if nothing comes up, cut him loose. I’m going to get a couple guys to track him. If he took the kids, he’ll fuck up, and pretty quick.”

  “What if he just runs?” Hanson asked.

  “We don’t let him. He tries to get on a bus or hitch a ride out of town, we bust him again,” Daniel said. “We don’t let him get anywhere.”

  “If he gets to LA, he’s pretty much gone,” Sloan said.

  Hanson picked up Daniel’s phone and punched in a couple of numbers, listened, identified himself, then asked, “You got any inquiries about busts in the missing girls thing? Uh-huh. No, there’s nothing here. Keep me up, though.”

  He hung up and said, “The papers don’t know we picked him up. Not yet, anyway.”

  “So we cut him loose, in an hour or so, and tag him,” Daniel said. “Put somebody on the house, front and back. We wanna be inside his sweatshirt.”

  Lucas asked, “What about me? You want me to follow him?”

  Daniel said, “Nah. Go on home, get some sleep. We’re done. I expect we’ll be seeing you around.”

  LUCAS, DISMISSED, left Daniel’s office a little down. He thought he’d done something with Scrape, and instead, they had, as Daniel said, “nothing.” He went out to the Jeep, sat for a moment, thinking about the guy who started the rumor about Scrape. He’d like to find Fell, just to see if he could. To see what was going on there.

  The Dexedrine was beginning to fade, but Lucas was still too jacked to sleep. Instead of going home, he drove down to Kenny’s bar and introduced himself to the manager, Kenny Katz, who was sitting in a back office working over an old-fashioned mechanical adding machine. He looked at Lucas’s badge and pointed him at a chair, and Lucas told him the story about John Fell and the panhandler named Scrape.

  “John usually comes in about six or seven, stays for an hour or so,” Katz said. “He showed up here three weeks or a month ago, and maybe every other night since. Usually around six or seven. He’s not exactly what I’d call a regular, though . . . he doesn’t exactly fit in.”

  “Why not?”

  Katz hesitated, then said, “I don’t know. There’s something off-center about him. He comes in, has a couple of drinks, talks with people. But it’s like it’s not natural to him. The bullshit. It’s like he went to a class. He tells a lot of jokes, and it’s like he’s got a joke book that he reads. It’s not like he’s got pals who tell him the jokes.”

  “Huh.” They sat looking at each other for a moment, then Lucas asked, “You ever see this bum around? The guy with the basketball?”

  “Oh, sure. He used to come in every once in a while, and ask to use the bathroom. I didn’t encourage him, but if it’s early in the day, and there aren’t many customers around . . . You know, what are you gonna say?”

  “Haven’t seen him lately?”

  “He stopped by maybe two weeks ago, said he got a room somewhere, wouldn’t need our bathroom anymore,” Katz said. “He said thanks. Kind of surprised me. I said, ‘You’re welcome,’ and that seemed to make him happy.”

  “You think he took those girls?”

  Katz said, “Hell, I don’t know. I mean, I just don’t know.”

  “John Fell sort of put us on his trail.”

  Katz shook his head, his jowls waggling: “That’s something else I don’t know about. Why he’d think that? He doesn’t seem like a guy who’d talk to bums.”

  “Fell used to go to the massage place across the street . . . and the girls sometimes come in here . . .”

  “They do not solicit in here,” Katz said. “This is a neighborhood place. They know better.”

  “But they come in,” Lucas said. “Do they hang with Fell? Do they come in for him?”

  “Not especially. But I’ll tell you what, a guy that goes to a hooker, on a regular basis, isn’t quite right,” Katz said. “You know what I mean?”

  Lucas nodded. “I think so.”

  “I mean, if you’re really ugly, or you’re handicapped, and can’t get a regular woman, then, maybe. You gotta let off steam,” Katz said. “But John, there’s nothing physically wrong with him, not that you can see, anyway. Okay, he’s a little fat, but a lot of guys are fat now. But if there’s something wrong with him, it’s up here.” Katz tapped his temple.

  “You say he’s in around six or seven?”

  “Most days,” Katz said. “You plan to come back?”

  “I’d like to talk to him,” Lucas said. “We’re pushing every button we got, and he’s one of them.”

  “You think you’ll get those kids back?” Katz asked.

  Lucas said, “Most of the experienced guys don’t think so. I’m too new and dumb to give up.”

  LUCAS WENT BACK out to the street and sat in his Jeep. The sun was still high, and it was hot, and he couldn’t think of what to do. He finally headed home, cranked up the air conditioner, and fell on his bed, certain that he wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  He didn’t for half an hour: his mind kept moving, looking for any crack that he could get ahold of, anything he could do. There wasn’t much: as long as he was pulling on the Scrape thread, he had a line to work along. But that thread ran out, and he was deadended on Fell. There had to be some other way to get at Fell, but he could feel his own ignorance there. He knew that if he’d only been working longer, he would have thought of something.

  Instead, he felt marinated in ignorance.

  THE PHONE SURPRISED HIM: caught him asleep, and for quite a while, he thought. He popped up on his hands, in a half-push-up, disoriented, in the dark, his shirt twisted around his neck.

  He found the phone, and Sloan was on the other end of the line: “Thought you might be interested. Nine-one-one got a tip that says ol’ Scrape was seen throwing a box of stuff in a dumpster behind Tom’s Pizza on Lyndale, yesterday about dark. You want to do some diving?”

  “Aw, man, no,” Lucas said. He’d gone dumpster-diving a few times on patrol. “I mean, I’d like to be there. . . .”

  “Daniel’s looking for one of us to go in,” Sloan said. “You know, one of his guys. Junior guy usually does it.”

  “Who’s junior if I don’t do it?” Lucas asked.

  “That’d be me,” Sloan said.

  Lucas smiled into the phone. “What’s it worth to you?”

  “C’mon, man. I’m in good clothes, I don’t have time to change,” Sloan said. “You’re at home, you could just throw on some old shit.”

  “All right, all right,” Lucas said. “I hope it’s not for nothing.”

  “Bring a flashlight,” Sloan said. “Listen, weren’t you there last night when that
soldier guy found the blouse?”

  “Yeah, that was us.”

  “Well, Tom’s is about two blocks up that alley. I think this could be something.”

  “Twenty minutes,” Lucas said. “I gotta stop at Walgreens and get some Vicks.”

  He changed into an old pair of jeans and high-topped hiking boots, a T-shirt with terminally stained underarms, and a year-old canvas fishing shirt, still new enough to be stiff.

  His biggest fear wasn’t the filth of a dumpster; it was AIDS. The disease was exploding in the Cities, and the papers said that a major component in its spread, besides gay sex, was blood-toblood contact with needles used by junkies.

  And needles wound up in dumpsters.

  Five minutes after Sloan’s call, he was back in his Jeep. He made a quick stop at a Walgreens, picked up the thickest pair of yellowplastic kitchen gloves they had, and a jar of Vicks VapoRub.

  TOM’S PIZZA WAS a failing storefront pizza joint distinguished by its low prices and juicy bluebottle flies. The flies looked a little too much like Tom’s pizza ingredients for the high-priced trade, though some argued that they added a certain je ne sais quoi to the cheese-and-mushroom special.

  Lucas parked on the street at the side of the building and walked around back, carrying the bag with the gloves and the Vicks, and the heavy shirt, and found Sloan, Hanson, Lester, and Jack Lacey, the owner of Tom’s, standing in the alley looking up at the dumpster. The bright motion-sensor light shone down from the roof, onto the space around the store’s back entrance, half illuminating the dumpster. A stepladder stood next to it.

  Lucas said, “Hey,” as he walked up, and Sloan said, “I owe you,” and Lucas said, “You really do.” Lucas made the mistake of sniffing at the dumpster and gagged and turned away: “Holy shit; when was this thing dumped?”

  “They get it once a week,” Lacey said. “It goes out tomorrow. It’s been hot.”

  “Maybe they ought to get it twice a week,” Lucas said. “This is disgusting.”

  “Only in the summer . . .”

  “Listen, it’s been nice chatting,” Lester said. “So, let’s get your ass in there.”

  Lucas looked at the dumpster, sighed, pulled on the heavy canvas shirt, unscrewed the jar of Vicks, put a daub in each nostril.

  “He’s a goddamned pro,” Sloan said, with false heartiness.

  “Gonna ruin everything I’m wearing,” Lucas said.

  Lester said, “Put in for it. I’ll approve it.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Lucas climbed the ladder and looked into the dumpster—and looking was almost as bad as smelling. The basic component of the mess inside was rotten cheese, along with rotten meat, rotten crusts, rotten grease, rotten greasy cardboard, and flies. He’d always wondered where flies went at night, and now he knew. He could see a couple of cylindrical cartons that once contained tomato sauce; and a rat, with tiny black ball-bearing eyes, each with a highlight from the overhead alley spot.

  The rat saw him coming and ran up the far corner and over the side. Lester cried, “Man, look at the size of that sonofabitch,” and Hanson said, “Don’t get bit. It might have rabies.”

  Hanson had his pistol out, tracking the rat. Sloan shouted, “Don’t shoot it, don’t shoot it, the ricochet . . .”

  Lester said, “Remind me to bring my old lady here for dinner.”

  Lacey: “Hey. There aren’t any rats inside. . . .”

  When the excitement died, and Hanson put his gun away, Lucas said, “Ah Jesus,” put his hips on the edge of the dumpster, swiveled, and let himself drop inside. The mass of cardboard—it was mostly cardboard—was saturated with various fluids, and was soft and slippery underfoot, almost like walking on moss.

  He was breathing through his mouth, but with a nose full of Vicks, couldn’t smell much of the crap anyway. He said, “Get out of the way,” and bent and started throwing cardboard over the side, watching carefully where he put his fingers, looking for needles. In two minutes, his gloves and lower legs were covered with rotting cheese and tomato sauce, and another rat made a break for it, running up the corner, and again the guys outside yelled at it, and Lucas threw more crap over the side.

  He’d been digging for five or six minutes when a patrol car turned into the alley and the light bar flared, and Lester walked around and yelled, “Turn the goddamn light off,” and the light died. A patrol cop shouted back, “We got a call on you guys. . . . What’s going on?”

  “Had to check the dumpster,” Lester said.

  Lucas peered over the edge of the dumpster at the car, and one of the cops inside said, “Hey, it’s Davenport.”

  The other guy started laughing, and then called, “Hey, plainclothes.”

  “Fuck you,” Lucas shouted back, and started throwing more crap out.

  The car left, and Sloan asked, “How’s it going?”

  “Fuck you.”

  They all laughed.

  HALFWAY DOWN, Lucas found the box.

  It was sitting flat on its bottom, as though it had been carefully placed inside the dumpster, a box that you might use to move books, its top flaps carefully interleaved. “Got something,” he reported.

  “Get it out,” Lester said.

  “Sort of stuck in here . . .” He threw more crap over the side, excavating around it. The box had been soaked in sludge on one side—mostly grease, with a little tomato sauce—and had weakened. He cleared a space all the way around it, then slipped a hand beneath it, and lifted it out.

  He put the box on the top of the stepladder, boosted himself onto the edge of the dumpster, swung his legs over, and carried the box down. He put it on the ground under the door light, moth shadows flicking crazily across it, and as the other four crowded around, pulled the flaps apart.

  Inside were two small pairs of jeans, carefully folded, a small brassiere, and a white blouse.

  “Motherfucker,” Lester said.

  “They’re dead. I told you they were dead,” Hanson said.

  Sloan’s hands were in his hair, holding on, as though he couldn’t stand his thoughts. Lacey had been smoking a cigarette, and turned away, dropped it in the alley and stomped it out, as though he were angry at the butt.

  Lucas carried the soggy box around to Hanson’s car and put it in the trunk, and asked, “When are you gonna get Mr. Jones down there?”

  “I’ll call him from the office after I talk to Daniel,” Lester said.

  “I want to be there,” Lucas said. “But I gotta get cleaned up. Wait for me.”

  “You’re not important enough to wait for,” Hanson said. “So you better hurry.”

  Lucas headed for his Jeep, and Lacey called after him, “Who’s going to throw this shit back in the dumpster?”

  “I investigate, I don’t clean up,” Lucas yelled back, and then he was in his Jeep and rolling.

  AT HIS APARTMENT, he stripped naked, put all the clothes except his boots and the newer canvas shirt in a garbage bag and threw it at the door. He put the shirt in another garbage bag, and left it on the kitchen table; he’d take it to a laundromat and wash it for an hour or so. The boots he carried back to the shower, and washed them with soap and hot water, until they looked clean, then left them on the floor to dry out. He scrubbed himself down, washed his hair, dried, dressed, picked up the garbage bag by the door, threw it in the trash on the way out, and headed downtown.

  The box was on Daniel’s desk, sitting on top of a pile of newspaper. Daniel was sitting behind his desk, while Sloan and Lester took the two guest chairs. Hanson wasn’t around. An amused look flitted across Daniel’s face when Lucas walked in, and he said, “They tell me you smelled worse than the box.”

  “They were right,” Lucas said. “I ruined about fifty bucks’ worth of clothes, if I manage to save the boots. You’ll be getting the bill.”

  “Go ahead and put in for the boots,” Daniel said. “A little bonus.”

  “Is Jones on the way?” Lucas asked.

  “Talked to him five
minutes ago,” Sloan said. “He’s coming.”

  “But it’s theirs,” Daniel said. “The girls’.” There was no doubt in his voice.

  They all sat there, for a moment, in silence, and then Lucas said, “I’d like to know a little more about that nine-one-one tip.”

  The tip, Daniel said, had come from somebody who identified himself as a neighbor who didn’t want to get involved. He said he’d gone into the alley to move his car, and saw the guy with a basketball and a box, and saw him stop and loft the box into the dumpster, and then walk around the corner at Tom’s. He said he knew about the basketball from neighborhood rumor—that the cops were looking for the guy with the basketball.

  “So everybody in the world knows Scrape,” Lucas said.

  “Not the whole world,” Sloan said. “But the neighborhood around Matthews Park is pretty contained—and when you’re talking about a pedophile, the word gets around fast.”

  Lester: “The thing about Scrape is, all he does is walk. He walks up and down every street down there, every day. They all know who he is.”

  “I still don’t like it,” Lucas said. “We get an anonymous tip that Scrape threw the clothes in the dumpster, and we’re only chasing him in the first place because of a tip from a guy we can’t find, who might be some kind of an asshole operating under a phony name.” He remembered, then, and looked at his watch: eight o’clock. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “I had an appointment at seven tonight. Gotta make a call.”

  “What you’re gonna find as you get into investigations,” Lester said, “is that all kinds of weird shit happens.”

  “I already learned that,” Lucas said. “Weird shit happens on the street, too—but there’s weird shit and then there’s weird shit. When it’s too weird, you gotta think about it some more. I need a phone.”

  He went into the outer office, to an empty desk, got Kenny’s number from the operator, and called. He asked for Katz, got him, identified himself. “Has John Fell been in? John Fell?”