Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  “That doesn’t happen much,” Lucas assured her. “You gotta make up your own mind—I won’t say it never happens—but we can usually take the guy off in the corner, and whisper into his ear, and he’ll leave you alone. Unless he’s nuts.”

  “El-Ron is nuts,” the older woman said. She looked at her daughter. “But I don’t know if he’s crazy enough to go after you.”

  “Especially after what he did to your sister,” Lucas offered.

  The two women turned back to him, faces gone hard, and Mom asked, “What’d you know about that?”

  “I heard about it,” Lucas said. Nobody said anything for a long time, and Lucas took out his notebook and said, “So . . . to start, what does the L. stand for?”

  “What L?” Delia White asked.

  “In L. Ron Parker?”

  “It’s not L, like the letter,” Delia said. “It’s El. E-L. His name is El-Ron Parker. E-L-dash-R-O-N. That’s his name.”

  “Did he kill your sister?” he asked Delia.

  She said, “Can’t prove it, but he did it.”

  “What was her name?”

  “CeeCee.”

  “Did he stab Mr. Rice?” Lucas asked.

  The story came out slowly. Delia and a man named George Danner had gone out to get some tacos and were eating in a parking lot by the Taco Bell when El-Ron Parker went by in a hurry, and they could tell he was looking for trouble, right there. They stepped around the Taco Bell, and they saw Parker approach Rice between two cars. They started arguing even before they got close, and then Parker went after the other man. They thought he was hitting him, but when Parker came running out from between the cars, they saw the knife in his hand.

  “Does he know you saw him?”

  “He does. He came over the next day and tried to make friends with me again.”

  “What about your friend, this Danner guy?” Lucas asked. “Wouldn’t he testify against him?”

  “George went back to St. Paul, and I haven’t seen him since. He’s a pretty peaceful man.”

  “But he knows El-Ron.”

  “Yeah, he does.”

  Lucas said, “Huh. What about Mr. Rice? Has he identified Parker as the one who stabbed him?”

  “Stop calling him mister,” the older woman said. “Ronald Rice is just another fool. But, he ain’t woke up yet. He might not wake up, is what the newspaper says.”

  Lucas looked at his watch: time to go get pizza. He said, “This whole deal wasn’t my reason for being here. But I’m gonna look into it. We’ll protect you. He probably won’t even remember you by the time he gets out of prison. Has El-Ron got any prior arrests?”

  “About a hundred,” said the older woman.

  “There you go. He’ll be going on vacation for a long time, if you’re willing to testify,” Lucas said. “Think about your sister . . . and I’ll come back and talk to you some more. Think about CeeCee.”

  HE WAS TEN MINUTES late to the Star Tribune’s loading dock. Brown said, “I thought you’d forgotten. I was about to go back upstairs,” and they climbed the back stairs with the pizza box. She was a moderately overweight blonde wearing a thin blue cottonpaisley dress, almost but not quite a hippie dress, which let the roundness of her figure shine through. He watched her hips as they went up the stairs and began breathing a little harder than the climb warranted.

  There was hardly anyone in the building, and they walked down a couple of dark hallways toward the light coming out of a single office; Lucas could hear the police radios as they came up.

  The radios were in a small room down the hall, and the blind man who monitored them said, as they went by, “Hello again, Catherine,” and she said, “Yup, it’s me,” and they went on into the library. She closed and locked the door behind her, though if there were any reporters left in the building, the guy in the monitoring room could buzz them through.

  They got the pizza inside and they messed around for a couple minutes, squeezing and petting, then she buttoned her bra and they settled behind the counter to eat the pizza. Catherine asked, “What have you been up to?”

  “This has gotta come from an anonymous source,” Lucas said, around a pepperoni and mushroom.

  “I’ve already gotten you in the paper about six times. . . .”

  “No, no. This time, I don’t want to be in the paper,” Lucas said. “In fact, you can’t mention my name. Maybe you could feed it through the radio guy?”

  “What is it?”

  He told her how he’d been put in plainclothes to look for the girls, how he’d been switched to the Smith investigation, and how the two investigations might become one—how there was at least a possibility that Smith had been killed by the same person who took the girls.

  “You figured this out? Wow,” she said. Her eyes were large. “Wait a minute, I just clipped the story. . . .”

  She went through a file of stories clipped from the next day’s paper, and said, “Here . . .” She scanned it, and then looked up: “There’s not a single word about a suspect. About this street guy.”

  “We’ve been holding it tight. But here’s the thing: instead of giving it all to the reporter, have them ask the question: Did you arrest a bum, a transient, and then let him go? Are you looking for him? Do you have a photo? And ask if the Smith murder was involved.”

  “What do you get out of this?”

  Lucas grinned at her: “Friendship?”

  She blushed and said, “I could use a little friendship. But I’ve got to finish clipping.”

  LUCAS WATCHED her clip the rest of the papers, stuffing the day’s stories in little green envelopes, and thought about the stuff he’d given her, and smiled to himself. A few questions about Scrape would crank up the pressure, might bring in some tips about where he was and how he got loose after his arrest, and keep Lucas on the job.

  He really didn’t want to go back to the patrol car. Not after the taste he’d had; and he wanted to stay in front of Daniel as long as he could.

  As Catherine finished the clipping, Lucas went into the vault, an inner room of the newspaper library, and pulled a tied bundle of papers off a shelf. Some historic issue about Hubert Humphrey, judging from the headlines. Well, fuck a bunch of Hubert Humphrey. He spread the papers out on the floor, an inch or so thick.

  When he came back out, she said, “What were you doing?”

  “Hubert Humphrey’s suffered a tragedy,” he said. “Only a trained librarian could put it right.”

  She came to look in the vault, turned to him and said, “This is a disgrace.”

  AN HOUR LATER, on their way out of the building, Catherine leaned in the door of the radio room and said, “Roy . . . listen, I was talking to a guy—”

  “The guy with you?”

  “No, no. This is just a friend,” she said.

  The radio guy said, “Hi, friend.”

  Lucas: “Hi.”

  Catherine said, “Anyway, this guy says there was a ruckus down in his neighborhood tonight, right around midnight. There were some cops there—”

  “Got that. The fight down at the Mill?”

  “No. Listen, here’s the thing. My guy says somebody should ask the cops if it’s true that they arrested a transient in the case of the Jones girls, and then let him go, and now are trying to get him back. And they should ask if it’s true that the killing of the black kid the other day, Bobby’s story, if that guy was killed by the same transient who took the girls, at the same time.”

  “The cops think a transient killed Smith, and kidnapped the girls?” The blind guy was skeptical.

  “That’s what my guy heard. They were searching that alley where Smith got killed, at midnight, and they weren’t looking for evidence about Smith—they were looking for evidence about the girls. And he says they found some. They say Smith might have tried to interfere in the kidnapping. He might be a hero, not some dead dope dealer.”

  “Pretty heavy-duty if it’s true,” the blind guy said.

  “Thought you might
get some cred if you pass it along,” Catherine said.

  “I’ll do that. Thanks, Kate.”

  They went down the back stairs, and Lucas walked her to her car in the parking lot across from the front of the building. She said, “You never come to my place. I think you’re afraid it might turn into a relationship.”

  “That’s completely wrong,” he said. “With my hours . . .”

  “You’re not going anywhere now,” she said. “So follow me.”

  “Kate . . .”

  But she was already rolling.

  THE THING ABOUT BIG GIRLS, Lucas thought, the next morning, as he parked his Jeep outside the entrance to the alley, is that sometimes they can take more punishment than you’re prepared to hand out. He half limped around the corner and found Daniel, Sloan, Hanson, and Del staring through the open garage door at the trash can.

  “Jesus, what happened to you?” Del asked. “You look like you fell out a window.”

  Lucas shook his head: “Just tired. Been working too hard.” He looked into the garage, where a guy had pulled the flip-flop out of the trash can and set it on a plastic bag, and now was probing deeper into the trash. “Is that . . . have you talked to the Joneses? Were they wearing flip-flops?”

  “Mary was,” Daniel said. “They were red and white, like this one, Miz Jones thinks. They got them at a Kmart, and we’ll be checking for size and brand and style.”

  “Well, hell, it’s her flip-flop,” Lucas said. “What are the chances?”

  “There’s always a chance it isn’t,” Hanson said. “The problem is, we got that box.”

  “And?”

  “We got some prints on it. They look like Scrape’s.”

  Daniel said that they’d gotten a dozen partials off the box, none good—but when compared to the prints they’d taken from Scrape the day before, there seemed to be a few apparent matches.

  Lucas scratched his ear and said, “Huh.”

  Daniel said to Lucas, “We’re gonna take this flip-flop around to Miz Jones and have her look at it, and Sloan will check the Kmart connection. For you—that chick who knew where Scrape lived. I want you to find her again, and tour her around to all the places that he might have gone.”

  “He could be halfway to California,” Hanson said.

  Daniel: “He could be, but I doubt it. He had four dollars when we picked him up and he skipped at night. I think he’s hiding. We’ve got the highway patrol and every cop in Minnesota looking at hitchhikers.”

  “Look at the trains,” Lucas said.

  “What?”

  “Have somebody check the train yards over by the university,” Lucas said. “Bums still ride trains—I was talking to a railroad security guy last year, after that guy got his legs chopped off. He said they still got all kinds of bums riding the boxcars. Especially out to the West Coast.”

  Daniel said to Hanson: “Check that. Like right now. Get onto railroad security.”

  Lucas said, “I’ve got a phone number in my notebook.”

  Daniel said to Del, “I want you down at the place where he was living. Knock on all the doors, talk to the residents. Anything they know . . .” Del nodded, and Daniel said, “So let’s go. Go, everybody. Go away.”

  AFTER A COUPLE of phone calls, Lucas found the blue-haired Karen Frazier standing at a bus stop just down the street from her office. He pulled up, leaned across, and popped the door and said, “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “What do you want?” she asked, not getting in.

  “More help,” he said. “Come on, get in. I’m not gonna bite.”

  She got in and pulled the door shut: “So?”

  “So where’re you going?”

  “Back home. I live in Uptown.”

  “So do I,” Lucas said. “But listen—this is confidential. We found a box last night with some of the girls’ clothes in it. Their mom fainted when she saw it.”

  “Oh, no.” Her hands went to her face. “It was theirs? For sure?”

  “For sure. One of them was wearing a bra with a kitty face on it.”

  “Ah, God. I don’t want to hear that,” Frazier said.

  “What I need is, a tour of the places where you think Scrape might go to hide. He took off in the night, after we let him go. He had no money, we’re checking hitchhikers and the freight trains, but we think he’s probably hiding out somewhere. Somewhere he could get in the dark.”

  She thought for a minute, then said, “Scrape’s pretty good at hiding. He doesn’t go where the other transients go. Doesn’t hang out with them, doesn’t use the Mission. He’s not stupid, either—he’s just really schizophrenic, which can make him look stupid, but he’s not. If he wants to hide . . .”

  She thought for another minute, then said, “The idea of the trains . . . I don’t think he rides trains. I’ve never heard him say that. I think he hustles around for bus money. . . . But there’re abandoned sheds and buildings all over that area, north of University Avenue, and some of them are built up on stilts and you can get under them. And there are old shipping containers all over the place, that you can get into, and old truck trailers at some of the trucking companies . . . Guys who ride the trains use them to hide—the train cops know most of them, but that would be one place. He could walk there from his room in a couple of hours.”

  “Where else?”

  “Well, he was living under that tree. He likes it outdoors, and there are all kinds of little caves and nooks and holes where he could be, along the river. There are some sewer tunnels you can get into, and they cross through old caves and things. Some of the guys know those places; Scrape does. But most of them smell pretty bad, from sewage and gas, so they stay out. If he’s hiding in there, it’d be hell to get him out. I went down in one once, and you could walk right past him, and never know he’s there.”

  “Where else?”

  “Well, the other places—you’d never find him unless people see him coming or going. They go under houses, in old garages, anyplace that has a roof and they can’t be seen. Apartment neighborhoods, with old houses, like over by the university. You find gangs of guys under the main highway bridges; they’ll be camping out, hanging out together.”

  “Where would you go, if you were Scrape and you thought the cops were after you?”

  “Honestly, there’s no way to tell, exactly,” she said. “He could go to any of those places.”

  “C’mon.”

  She sighed. “I’d go with the river. That’s where he always lives, except when he can get a gig like this apartment. If you get set up in a cave, especially one with water, you can be safe, dry, hidden, and you can even keep yourself clean. Scrape likes to stay clean, when he can.”

  Lucas said, “Huh. Where are these caves and sewer things?”

  “All along the riverbank. Best thing to do is, find people who are living there now,” she said. “Ask them. They’ll know.”

  “And if they don’t want to talk to me?”

  She looked out the side window and said, “I hate telling you this stuff.”

  “Why? The girls . . .”

  “I feel terrible about the girls, which is why I’m talking to you at all. But talking to cops, if any of the guys see me, and figure I’m a snitch . . . it doesn’t help my work, and might even cause me trouble. Most of them are harmless, but some of them are crazy. Very crazy. If they thought I was working with the cops, I don’t know what they’d do.”

  “Okay. I see that,” Lucas said. He waited a beat, and then said, “You were going to tell me something, that you didn’t want to.”

  She turned back to him. “They hate going to jail. They don’t do well there, not well at all, because of their handicaps. If I were desperate to find somebody, and wanted to get information from these guys, I’d threaten them. You know—‘How’d you like to spend a couple weeks in jail?’ That kind of thing.”

  “Good,” Lucas said. “Specifically, the riverbank . . .”

  “I’d start at Hennepin Avenue, and work
south. Like I said, he’s not stupid: I don’t think he’d go back to the part of the riverbank where he was before.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Where can I drop you?”

  She popped the door. “Thanks anyway, I’ll just take the bus.”

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Lucas stood on the edge of the Mississippi River, looking up and down the bluffs, and realized that the idea that he might search it himself was ridiculous. He also realized that if he were running from the cops, and needed to hide out for a couple of days, he’d head for the river.

  And that’s what he told Daniel, at police headquarters.

  “There are all those bridges, there’s two spans to each one of them, I could see at least one catwalk under a bridge, which means people could be living up there, right under the road deck. If we’re gonna do a search, we’re gonna need twenty guys, and it’s gonna take a couple of days, at least. We’ll probably need people from St. Paul—”

  “I’ll have to talk to the chief,” Daniel said. “The problem is, the Strib is all over us. They know something happened. They know we picked somebody up and turned him loose again. I think the Joneses might be talking to them . . . so the shit’s about to hit the fan.”

  “I could go back out alone . . .” Lucas yawned.

  “No, no, I hear what you’re saying about the river,” Daniel said. “We got railroad security checking the rail yard, but the riverbank is just too big.”

  “Maybe you ought to talk to the paper, call a press conference,” Lucas suggested. “Get yourself some airtime. We got a good mug of Scrape, put it out there. The more eyes the better.”

  Daniel thought about it, then said, “That’s an idea. I’ll talk to the chief. You, go home. Get some sleep. You been up for two days.”

  “I can handle it for a while.”

  “Ah, you did pretty good. We’ll take it from here.”

  Lucas saw himself back in uniform, searching the riverbank in a line of cops: “Wait a minute. I don’t want to quit this. We got this other possibility to think about, that Scrape didn’t do it. That the kids were picked up in a vehicle. I’ve got this guy I’m looking for. I got this feeling . . .”