Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  “Not tonight. Not so far.”

  HE’D JUST HUNG UP when George Jones, followed by a frightened-looking woman who Lucas recognized from the papers as his wife, Gloria, stepped into the office, trailed by Hanson, who’d apparently gone to meet them at the door. Hanson said, “This is Detective Davenport, who recovered the box for us.”

  The two nodded vaguely at Lucas, and they all went into Daniel’s office. Daniel, Lester, and Sloan were all on their feet, and Daniel said a few words about how hard it all was, and then opened the top of the box.

  Gloria Jones, a slightly too-heavy woman with red-tinted hair, began to tremble and her husband took her arm. Together, they peered into the box, and then Gloria reached into it and picked up the brassiere and said, “The kitty bra,” and fainted.

  She would have fallen if Lucas hadn’t caught her, under the arms, and he eased her into a chair, but she was unconscious, and Daniel was shouting about an ambulance, and everybody but Lucas and George Jones went running.

  Daniel was back in a few seconds and said, “We’ve got an ambulance on the way; it’ll be here in a minute.”

  “I think she fainted,” Lucas said. “She’s coming back.”

  “Can’t take a chance,” Daniel snapped. “It could be her heart.”

  She came back, but then the medics were there to take care of her, and the cops all moved to the outer office. George Jones said, “The kitty bra—it was Nancy’s first bra. It has a kitty face in the front.”

  And it did.

  GLORIA JONES WAS WHEELED to the ambulance for the oneminute ride to the emergency room, and George went with her. The cops gathered back in Daniel’s office, and Daniel said, “We’re looking at a double murder, now. Anybody doubt that?”

  They all shook their heads.

  “There’s gonna be tremendous heat,” Daniel said. “We’ve gotta get Scrape back, right now. We need to know who called nine-one-one, even if we have to tear the neighborhood apart. I don’t give a shit if the guy doesn’t want to get involved, we find him.”

  Hanson: “Best to do it right now, everybody home from work but still awake . . .”

  Sloan: “Oughta get an entry team this time, gettin’ Scrape.”

  Daniel began issuing orders, and the detectives started moving, and Hanson turned back to Daniel’s desk and looked into the box, and Lucas, who hadn’t been told anything, asked, “What am I doing?”

  Daniel looked up at him and said, “Uhhh . . . Lucas, man, you did really good. And I’m keeping you around for a few more days. But we’ve got something else for you.”

  Lucas didn’t understand. “Something else? What the hell? I’m all over this one,” he said.

  “But this one, we’re just chasing the guy down. We . . . don’t need you to do that. So now, you’re gonna get all over the other one,” Daniel said. “And it’s important. The Smith murder. Capslock caught it this morning, but Sandola is on vacation, and we don’t want Capslock wandering around by himself interviewing gangbangers.”

  “Smith murder? What’s the Smith murder? What’re you talking about?” Lucas was tired, and now was a little pissed.

  Daniel spread his hands, as if explaining the real world to a moron: “Life goes on, even when kids get kidnapped. Billy Smith, a little dipshit gangbanger and crack salesman, got his ass stabbed to death. We found him this morning. He’s over at the ME’s office right now. We need to get a clean white face on it, and you’re the guy.”

  “A clean white face?”

  Hanson stepped in: “See, Billy had him some friends in the community, and if we don’t step up and take it seriously, they’ll call the mayor and their councilman, and they’ll call the chief, and the chief will call QD here . . .”

  “And I hate that,” Daniel said. “I hate to get called. So even though we know we won’t catch the killer unless somebody calls us, we gotta look like we’re serious about it. That means sending white guys in good clothes down there, to talk to folks, and take notes on what they say. Capslock caught it, and he needs a partner.”

  “Fuck me,” Lucas said, his hands on his hips.

  “Yesterday, you were walking around with a flashlight picking up drunks. Today you’re investigating a murder. Just take it,” Daniel said. And: “Capslock’s getting dinner at the XTC. You need to get over there and introduce yourself.”

  “Goddamnit,” Lucas said.

  Daniel: “You taking it?”

  Lucas ran his hands through his hair, walked a tight circle around the office, then said, “Yeah, I’ll take it—I’m taking it. Right in the ass. I oughta be on the girls, because I’m all over that. But I’ll take it.”

  Sloan came back: “We’re pulling the team together. They’re coming in. Dick and Tim are down on his door, so there’ll be eight or ten of us; should be enough for one guy.”

  “Let me just come for the entry,” Lucas said to Daniel.

  Daniel said, “Lucas, just . . . help me out here. Get on over to XTC. There’s not a damn thing you could do when we pick him up. You’d just be another guy standing there with his thumb up his ass. Go see Del.”

  HE DID, STILL PISSED.

  The XTC was a gentleman’s club that used to be a strip joint on a side street where Minneapolis turned into St. Paul. During the day, it looked like a piece of shit, a purple-painted concrete-block single-story building with a cracked-blacktop parking lot that usually had a couple of used rubbers cooking on the tarmac. At night, it looked only slightly better. Lucas had been there a few times, called by the bouncer when a gentleman got too rowdy or was suspected of carrying a gun, or objected too strenuously to the champagne bill.

  He’d never been there in civilian clothes, and felt a little sleazy as he went slinking down the street toward the entrance, hoping that no past, present, or future women friends saw him going in.

  When the strip joint became a gentleman’s club, the owner took down the NUDE-NUDE-NUDE red-blinking neons and put up a green one that said, “Gentlemen.” Other than that, not much had changed; the first bar stool by the door still had a strip of duct tape covering a slash in the vinyl cover, and it still smelled of cheap disinfectant, layered over by even cheaper lilac perfume.

  Del was in the back, playing shuffleboard bowling with a tall, heavyset man with a drunk-red face under a white Sparkle Drywall hat with the bill turned up. A dozen empty Bud bottles were sitting on a table behind them. Lucas marched past the three main poles, two with active dancers, one down to her G-string. The other peeled a pastie as Lucas went by, then cupped her breasts and pointed them at him.

  “Stick ’em up,” she said.

  He kept going, not amused.

  Del was looking at a six-seven split on the shuffleboard machine, and Lucas came up, crossed his arms, and stared at the back of his head. He’d worked with Capslock a couple of times as a drug decoy, and he’d seemed a little out there.

  After a couple of practice strokes, Del let the puck slide, took out the six and cleanly missed the seven, said, “Rat poop,” and without turning around, reached for his beer.

  The drywall guy, peering through small drunk eyes at Lucas, asked, “What’re you looking at, college boy?”

  Lucas, still pissed at being pulled off the Jones kidnapping case, snapped, “Not you, fat man. I got better taste.”

  The drywall guy put down his beer and started around Del, as Del straightened, saw Lucas, put his arm across the other man’s chest, and said, “Whoa. Slow down, Earl. He’s a cop, he was third team all-Big Ten in hockey, he can press three twenty-five and he likes to fight.”

  “And if you keep coming, I’ll beat your ass into one big bruise and then put it in jail,” Lucas said. “I am not in a good mood right now.”

  Earl saw it in Lucas’s eyes, and slowed down. “I’d kick your ass if I wasn’t so drunk,” he said.

  “Go away,” Lucas said. “I got business with this clown.”

  Earl picked up his beer and went to stare at a pole dancer. Del said, “Clown?”r />
  “Third team?”

  Del smiled, his teeth still yellow in the subdued light: “So we’re even.”

  “I didn’t know if the fat guy knew you were a cop,” Lucas said. “Or I woulda called you Ossifer Capslock.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  DEL WAS A THIN, middle-height man with salt-and-pepper hair that seemed premature, and a short, neatly trimmed beard. His face was weathered, and his arms were dark with the sun. He was dressed in jeans and an antique Bob Dylan T-shirt ripped at the neckline, with a silver Rolex on one wrist. He led the way out of the bar to his vehicle, a ’77 Scout pickup convertible that somebody had painted white with a brush. He settled in his seat and said, “We’ve got four interviews—friends and relatives.”

  “Why in the middle of the night?”

  “Because that’s when they’re home and we can find them,” he said, as he put the truck in gear. “They don’t have straight jobs.”

  They found friends and relatives, but nobody knew anything about the killing, and Lucas tended to believe them. Smith, they said, was out doing his thing, which mostly involved wandering around, talking to his homeys. Everybody knew he’d been pounding the crack, and sometimes sold it, and was often holding. So the belief was, somebody needed some crack and they took it.

  One guy angrily told them that “That shit is everywhere and it’s fuckin’ up everybody and you ain’t doing a damn thing about it. Not a damn thing.”

  Del told him, “I don’t know what to do. You tell me what to do.”

  “Do something,” the guy said. “Anything. Arrest them. Put them in jail. They’re a buncha animals, they’re fuckin’ up the whole neighborhood. If we were white, you’d be all over it.”

  His wife was standing behind him, arms crossed, nodding.

  MOVING AROUND with Del felt weird.

  As a uniformed cop, Lucas generally assumed that the people with whom he came in contact were the enemy, until proven different. In the course of covering traffic accidents or making traffic stops, breaking up fights, chasing down robbers or burglars, calling ambulances, talking to victims, uniforms really didn’t need to project much empathy. They were like the army: not there to make friends. And sometimes, rolling through the dark across hostile neighborhoods, inside a car filled with weapons, radios, and lights, he felt like he was in an army, and in hostile territory.

  Del, on the other hand, solicited help, listened carefully, displayed great patience, and when the guy went off about crack, he was nodding in agreement, and when the guy finished, he said, “Don’t tell the boss I said this, but I agree with you.”

  And he got some cooperation, but no real information, probably, Lucas thought, because nobody had any.

  AT TEN O’CLOCK, Del had gotten involved in a convoluted discussion with a minister who’d once run a church that Smith and his mother had gone to. Lucas had drifted off down the street, toward the corner where they’d parked, when he saw a thin young white man walking toward the same corner, from the right-angle street. The man was wearing what cops had called a pimp hat, a widebrimmed fuzzy thing that had gone out of fashion sometime in the seventies, when disco died. Long knotted Rasta braids flowed out from under the hat, and Lucas said, aloud, “Randy.”

  The man stopped, saw Lucas, did a double take, turned, and started running. Lucas went after him, fifty yards behind.

  The thing was, Randy Whitcomb could hoof it, like skinny people often can. He wasn’t in the same class athletically as Lucas, but he wasn’t carrying the weight, either. Lucas heard Del shout, “Hey! Hey!” as he went around the corner, and then the race was on. Lucas could close by ten yards or so every short block, but there was traffic. Sometimes he caught it wrong, going across the street, and Randy stretched his lead, and sometimes Randy caught it wrong, and lost ground. Five blocks and Lucas was getting close, fifteen yards back, and Randy swerved into an alley and as he turned, Lucas caught a flash of plastic going over a hedge; so Randy had off-loaded his crack, coke, or grass, hoping that Lucas hadn’t seen it.

  Toward the end of the block, Lucas was four feet behind him, then two feet: Randy glanced back in desperation, hearing the footsteps, and lost another foot in looking, and Lucas hit him between the shoulder blades. Randy went down on his face and Lucas was on top of him, one hand on Randy’s neck, his weight on Randy’s upper back.

  “You little cocksucker, I told you to get out of my part of town,” Lucas said. He banged Randy’s face on the alley’s concrete one time, then maneuvered to put the cuffs on. “What’d you throw in that bag, Randy? Yeah, I saw it. You got a little crack in there? You got five years in there?”

  “I’m gonna kill you, you motherfucker,” Randy said. “I’m gonna cut your fuckin’ nuts off.”

  Randy Whitcomb was a twenty-year-old refugee from suburban St. Paul. He gave every sign of believing that he was a black pimp, though he was so pale that he almost glowed in the darkness of the alley. Not only did he believe that he was black, but a stereotypical TV gangster black, with the fuzzy hat, the cocaine fingernails, the braids, and even a ghetto accent, picked up from MTV. It might have been laughable, if he hadn’t been such an evil little fuck, attempting to recruit runaway girls to hustle for him, beating them blue when they failed or didn’t work hard enough or held out on him.

  Lucas got the cuffs on and jerked Randy to his feet, and started marching him back down the alley to the hedge where he’d thrown the bag. “You know what’s in the bag, dickhead? There’s one-half ounce of weed, which will get me about, uh, an hour in jail, you piece of shit,” Randy said. “Good going, Davenport, you’re a real fuckin’ . . . you know . . . that guy with the hat.”

  “What?”

  “The fuckin’ cop with the fuckin’ backwards hat.”

  “Fuck you, Randy,” Lucas said, with no idea of what Randy was talking about. But if he was telling the truth, the weed hadn’t been worth the chase.

  Then Lucas said, “You can take that weed and stick it up your ass, as far as I’m concerned. You’re going down for the Billy Smith murder, you little shit.”

  “What? What the fuck?”

  “We just got fuckin’ tired of you,” Lucas said. “We got the knife he was stabbed with, and guess whose fingerprints are gonna be on it? Man, I been waiting three years for this day. . . .”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Randy said, trying to twist around to see Lucas’s face.

  “Bullshit, I wouldn’t,” Lucas said. “So would every other cop on the south side. We solve a murder, we put you away for eighteen fuckin’ years, get you outa our hair.”

  “But I didn’t do it,” Randy said. “I didn’t do it.”

  “But you’ve done all kinds of other shit. We’ll just call it even,” Lucas said. “You get away with that, we frame you for this. Everybody’s happy. Especially those three-hundred-pound weightlifting homos out at Stillwater. They’re gonna love your little red ass.”

  They came to the point in the hedge where Randy had tossed the bag, and Lucas steered him through a hurricane fence gate, and found the bag sitting on the back lawn of a darkened house. Lucas picked it up between two fingers, not getting prints on it: weed, all right, and probably not much more than a half-ounce. He stuck it in Randy’s back pocket. “Oh, look—he’s still got the weed.”

  “You fuck.”

  “And you murdered that poor Billy Smith boy.”

  Then Randy said, “Davenport, listen, goddamnit. I got something for you. You know when Rice got stabbed the other week? I know who done that.”

  “Rice?” Lucas knew about a guy named Ronald Rice getting stabbed on the north side, out of his territory, but hadn’t heard much more about it.

  “Yeah. I know who done that, and I know who’ll tell you about it. You let me go . . . you got nothing here with this little bit of weed . . . you let me go, I’ll give you the name. Just you and me.”

  “Randy, you’re going to prison. Right now. You’re off—”

  Randy smelled the
interest. “No, no, no, man, I got these names. They’re good names, honest to God. I just don’t want to go to jail tonight, and I don’t like this asshole anyway, he gives me a lot of shit, so I’ll give the name to you. And the name of the chick who can back it up.”

  Lucas thought about it, standing in the alley. Then he said, “If there’s one thing I hate more than you, it’d be you punkin’ me,” Lucas said. “You punkin’ me, Randy? If you are, I swear to God, I’ll find you and I’ll choke you to death and I’ll throw your body in the fuckin’ Mississippi River.”

  Randy felt the deal coming: “Okay. Okay. Here’s the name: Delia White. She lives on the corner of Cornwall and Eighteenth, in a big red house. You know that big red house?”

  Lucas did. “Delia White.”

  “That’s right. The guy who stabbed Rice is her brother-in-law, which name is El-Ron Parker. And she’ll talk, because she thinks El-Ron killed her sister two years ago.”

  “Did he?”

  “How in the fuck would I know? And who cares?”

  Lucas looked at Randy for a minute, then said, “How do you know this?”

  “Because I sell a little medicine to Delia and her friends.”

  “Crack?” Lucas asked. A crackhead wouldn’t be the best witness.

  “Not crack, just a little weed.”

  “If you’re punkin’ me . . .”

  “I’m not, I swear to God.”

  Lucas looked at him another moment, then said, “You get off the south side. I don’t care where you go. You go up north, you go over to St. Paul. I don’t want to see you on my turf.”

  “I’m outa here,” Randy said. He held his cuffed hands out to the side. Lucas looked at him for another long moment, moved him over into the light from a streetlight, and popped the cuffs. Randy rubbed his wrists, moving away, then turned and ran. Lucas moved more under the light, wrote “Delia White” and “L. Ron Parker” in his notebook, circled them, and drew a line to “Ronald Rice.”