Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  “I need to talk to Millard,” Lucas insisted. “I need to bring him down here.”

  They argued for a minute, but Lucas knew her soft spot—the chance the girls were still alive somewhere—and she finally agreed to ride around with him, looking for Millard, and said she’d point him out.

  “I feel like a Judas,” she said, as they walked back to the car.

  “Yeah, I know,” Lucas said. He told her about working undercover on drugs, and the bad feeling he’d gotten from it. “Drugs kill people. Getting the dealers off the street is important. But I didn’t want to do it.”

  And a few minutes later, “Is Millard his first name, or last name?”

  “Don’t know,” she said. “He’s just Millard.”

  “Like Madonna.”

  She didn’t smile.

  THEY FOUND MILLARD at a free store a half-mile off the river, a place run by a bunch of old hippies who’d drifted into charitable work. Millard was sitting on a stoop at one end of the store, next to a table full of used shoes. He had a stack of shoes on the steps next to him, and he was trying them on, one pair at a time. A battered backpack sat on the sidewalk next to him.

  Lucas dropped Frazier a block away, out of sight, then went around the block, pulled up across the street from the store, hopped out of the car, and walked across the street.

  “Hey, Millard,” he said.

  Millard looked up, and then sideways, as if trying to figure out a place to run. Lucas said, “Don’t run. I’d catch you in thirty feet and then I’d have to take you downtown.”

  “Cop,” Millard said. He was a tall man, emaciated, windburned, with a long gray beard, and pale blue eyes under white eyebrows. He wore a thirties-style gray felt fedora, crushed on his skull like an accordion bellows, and a gray cotton shirt under an ancient navy blue wool suit.

  Lucas said, “Yeah,” and then, “Donny White saw you with Scrape this morning, over by the Hennepin Bridge,” he said.

  Millard was confused. “I never . . . Who? White?”

  “The newspaper guy,” Lucas said, inventing as he went along. “Said he saw you with Scrape. The fact is, my man, you’re going off to prison, if that’s true.”

  “I didn’t . . . I wasn’t with Scrape,” Millard said.

  “You were seen,” Lucas said.

  “I wasn’t with him,” Millard said, his voice rising toward a shout. “I wasn’t . . .”

  One of the old hippies came out of the store, a short, square man with a red beard, and he asked, “Is there a problem?”

  “Minneapolis police,” Lucas said. “I’m talking to Millard, here. You can go on back inside.”

  “Could I see some ID?”

  “Sure.” Lucas pulled his ID, hung it in front of the hippie for a moment, then slipped it back in his pocket.

  “Maybe I should call a lawyer.”

  Lucas shrugged. “Do what you want; but right now, go away. This is an official investigation.”

  The hippie said, “I’ll be back.”

  Lucas turned back to Millard. “So, I’m probably gonna have to arrest you. At least you’ll get three squares a day.”

  “Look . . . look . . . I might have seen him, but I wasn’t with him,” Millard said. “I might have seen him down the river from the bridge.”

  “Where’d he go? If you can show me, I’ll cut you loose.”

  Millard shuffled around in a half-circle, thinking about it, eyes averted, and then said, “I can show you. But no jail.”

  “Put on your shoes,” Lucas said.

  LUCAS WALKED HIM across the street, put him in the Jeep, threw his pack on the backseat. Millard hadn’t washed for a while, and Lucas dropped the windows. “How long you known Scrape?”

  “I don’t know him,” Millard said. “I just know who he is.”

  “You ever see him with a basketball?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s had a basketball all year,” Millard said. “I don’t know where he got it. Pretty good ball, though.”

  He took Lucas to the riverbank, and then south a couple hundred yards, farther than Lucas expected. “Right down there,” Millard said, pointing over the embankment. “There’s a cement thing that sticks out of the hill. That’s where I seen him.”

  “I want you to sit right here, on the Jeep,” Lucas said. “If you run, I’ll catch you, and then you will go to jail. We ain’t fooling around here, Millard. You help me out, you’ll be okay. You fuck with me, you’re going to jail. Okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “You sure you got it?”

  “Yeah, I’ll sit here on the Jeep.”

  Lucas skidded down the embankment, through brush and broken glass, holding on to weeds to keep his balance. Two-thirds of the way down, he found what looked like the end of an old concrete storm sewer set into the riverbank. A barrier made of steel bars had been bolted to the concrete, but had rusted over the years, and one side of it had been broken free. The drain was dark, but Lucas could see trash from food wrappings inside the mouth of it, as well as the remains of campfires. If it no longer functioned as a drain, it’d be dry and safe, or at least easily defensible, with the iron bars over the entrance.

  The floor was covered with a layer of sand, and what appeared to be new footprints were going in and out. He called, “Scrape? Scrape? Come out of there.”

  He saw nothing in the dark, but a minute after he called, he heard a scuttling sound. Somebody was headed farther back into the tunnel.

  “Scrape? I can hear you. Don’t make me come get you.”

  Nothing but dark.

  Lucas climbed back to the top of the riverbank, half expecting Millard to be gone; but he was still sitting on the Jeep, looking worried. Lucas asked, “Where are you staying? And don’t lie.”

  “Mission,” he said.

  “All right. You hang out here, in case I need to talk to you again. I don’t want to have to come find you, okay? If I have to come find you, I’ll pick you up and put you in jail, so I can find you when I need you. Okay? You hide or run, you go to jail. You understand?”

  “Yeah . . . Was he in there?”

  “Somebody is,” Lucas said.

  “It’s him. He goes all over in there.”

  “How deep is it?”

  “Oh, it’s way deep,” Millard said. “You can go all over the place, in there. It’s like a big cave. There’s like water in there; you don’t want to be in the deep part when it’s raining—it fills up.”

  “All right. You sit tight.”

  “You got a couple bucks for a coffee?” Millard asked. “I’ll just go to the Lunch Box.”

  Lucas considered cuffing him to the bumper of the Jeep, but the guy might freak and scratch up the truck. So he fished in his pocket, came up with a ten and a twenty, looked at them for a moment, then gave the ten to Millard and put the twenty back in his pocket. “You hang at the Lunch Box. If I need you, you better be there.”

  LUCAS WALKED BACK down the riverbank, looked in the entrance to the drain, shouted, “Scrape? Don’t make me come in there. . . .”

  He was trying to push Scrape back into the drain, to let him know that there was still somebody waiting, while he found a phone. That done, he climbed back up the riverbank, saw Millard a block away, headed toward the Lunch Box. He jogged across the street to Jay’s Electronic Salvage. A half-dozen people were browsing through racks of electronic circuitry. Lucas went to the back, showed his ID to a clerk, and got the phone.

  Daniel was at his desk. Lucas said, “I got a line on that Scrape guy. He’s in a sewer.”

  After a moment of silence, Daniel said, “Sewer?”

  “Yeah, he’s hiding in a big sewer pipe south of the Central Avenue Bridge, by that power thing. I guess it goes back into some kind of cave. We’re gonna need some lights. A lot of lights.”

  “A cave? Is it too much fuckin’ trouble to find him in a supermarket or something? What’s this cave shit?” But Daniel sounded happy.

  “I guess there’s some water in ther
e, too,” Lucas said. “Probably gonna need some boots. And some sewer guys. Guys with sewer maps. You know. That kinda stuff.”

  He gave Daniel the details, and in the next hour, got six cops and four sewer guys, in boots ranging from green-rubber Wellingtons to buckle-front galoshes. Daniel was there, in a suit, and had no interest in going into the cave. Instead, he went down and looked at the entrance. “I’m more of an administrator,” he told Lucas. “You’re more of a guy who totes the barge. And goes into dumpsters and sewers and so on.”

  One of the sewer guys had an extra pair of Wellingtons that were too large for Lucas, but better than nothing. Sloan showed up with a pair of galoshes; the sewer guys had work lights, instruments for detecting lethal gas, and maps.

  One of them, named Chip, laid the maps out on the hood of Lucas’s Jeep. “This isn’t actually a sewer. It used to be part of a drainage system for the old power plant. It’s been closed up for years.”

  “If it’s not a sewer, how do you know about it?” somebody asked.

  Chip said, “There are some connections between the storm sewers and the tunnels, caused by erosion. We’re planning to go in there, when we can get the money, and block everything up. We’ve had bums work their way a half-mile from the river, and come popping up through a manhole in the middle of a street.”

  He began tracing the sewer routes out of the city down to the river, with the cops looking over his shoulder. “The power plant part is pretty much in this area,” he said, tapping the map with an index finger. “And there are a couple of different levels and some old abandoned machinery. Your guy could be hiding in there—we’ve found campfires and litter and stuff in there. But there’s also a broken-down abutment and a crack in the rock that breaks into the sewer system . . . here.” He pressed a thumbnail into the map. “If he’s gone through the crack into the sewer system, then he could get quite a way back, and maybe up through a loose manhole somewhere.”

  “What’s the floor of the sewers like?” Lucas asked. “Is there sand, or water, or what?”

  “Some water, and there’s always some sand. . . . It hasn’t been raining, so there’ll be quite a bit of sand, a thin layer on the bottom.”

  “So we’ll be able to track him,” Sloan said.

  “If he’s in the sewer, you can do that. He’s really got no way out and no way to cover his tracks. Though, in some of the older sewers, there are also erosional features . . . holes and gaps and little caves . . . where he could hide. But there’ll be tracks leading up to them.”

  “What about the smell? Are we gonna be wading in shit?”

  “Nah, not so much,” Chip said. “The first part is the power plant, and that’s just damp. The sewer part is storm sewers, not sanitary sewers, and they’re not so bad right now.”

  They looked at the maps for another couple of minutes, then Daniel said, “Let’s get the show on the road. And, the most important thing, nobody gets hurt. Okay? Watch for this guy, we know he carries a knife. Take him down easy, don’t get yourself hurt.”

  Everybody nodded, and Chip said, “Check your lights,” and they all checked their lights, and then Daniel said, “Altogether now, what’d I say was the most important thing?”

  Somebody said, “Don’t get hurt.”

  9

  Chip led the way down the bank to the entrance. There were nine of them, sliding down the dirt track, seven cops including Lucas and Sloan, plus Chip and one more sewer guy, everybody with flashlights, Chip and the other sewer guy carrying heavy battery-powered work lights. They spent a moment pulling back the metal grate, then squeezed through the enlarged opening.

  Lucas was the third man through, into the dark, damp air, smelling of wet sand, dead fish, old concrete, and an undertone of sewage.

  “Been somebody here,” one of the leading cops said, shining his light toward the ceiling. There were bench-like shelves at the top of the concrete walls on either side of the entrance. A plastic garbage bag, fat with weight—clothing, apparently—sat on each of the walls. The floor was littered with paper, some old, some new: wrappers from packages of cookies, crackers, candy bars, along with plastic wrappers for fast-food meat, wieners, sausages, adding their own rank, rotten-grease odor to the underground mélange. A few steps inside, the concrete ended, and the walls became cave-like, cut through natural rock.

  They edged inside, slowly, climbed a cave-in, found themselves in a wider section with a rusted metal superstructure overhead, its use obscured by the rust and damage. They played their lights over it, and something flapped past them, and they all ducked, and the second sewer guy, whose name was Russ, said, “We got bats.”

  “Scared the shit out of me,” one of the cops said.

  Somebody else said, “You fire a gun in here, it’s gonna ricochet all over the place.”

  “So don’t be shootin’ any guns,” somebody else said.

  “We oughta be armed with tennis rackets,” said a fourth voice.

  Chip said, “Bats can have rabies—let them go, don’t mess with them.”

  Sloan, who was a step behind Lucas, said, “This is a good afternoon. I’m chasing a bum through a sewer filled with rabid bats. I can’t wait to tell my wife.”

  “See, this isn’t a sewer—” Russ began.

  Sloan said, “It was a figure of speech. Let’s keep going, or get out of here.”

  Up ahead, a dark hole.

  They left two cops to guard the exit, while the rest moved on until Chip said, “Look.”

  Lucas looked where he was shining his light. A thin stream of water cut across the floor, coming from who-knows-where, bordered on both sides by a half-inch of fine sand. A single set of tracks were pressed into the damp sand, heading deeper into the dark.

  They went past a short shaft going straight up, like an upsidedown well. An intersecting shaft went off to the right, perhaps fifteen feet up. “If he had a rope, he could get up there and nobody could get at him,” somebody said.

  But Chip said, “Yeah, but . . . see?” He pointed to a partial track in the sand, six feet past the intersection, going deeper into the tunnel. “And I’ve never seen a rope or anything going up there.”

  They moved on, then somebody spotted a hole in a wall to the left. Lucas climbed a short slope to the hole, pushed his light in: there was a low-ceiling space, a kind of pot full of water. He could hear more running water, but couldn’t see anything inside the room except a pile of metal trash and some rotting wooden beams.

  He hopped down and said, “Nothing.”

  They found another hole, and this one carried a human stench. Sloan looked and he said, “Somebody’s using it as a can. Hang their ass off the wall, and let go.”

  “More tracks,” somebody called, from up ahead.

  SCRAPE WAS FAR AHEAD of them, carrying a cheap aluminum flashlight with a weak bulb: but he knew where he was going. He got in the main room, under the power plant, tiptoed across the wet concrete, careful not to leave footprints, boosted himself up on a damp concrete revetment, then onto a rusting steel beam that sat on top of it. Once on top, he slid down into a narrow space on the other side, and lay on top of the concrete revetment. He barely had room to move his shoulders and hips, but he was practically invisible. They wouldn’t find him unless they climbed a ladder that led up toward the power plant, and then shined a light down. . . .

  If they did that, he was cooked.

  As he lay there, in the dark, listening to the cops coming down the tunnel, he began to feel his muscles clenching up and down his body, in fear and anger. If they caught him, they’d put him in a hospital, and the hospital people would do experiments on him, as they had in the past. Experiments . . .

  He’d known when the cops released him that they’d be back. Scrape was crazy—and knew it, and regretted it, and suffered for it, nothing to be done about it—but not stupid. Once they had a taste of him, he believed, they’d be back if they didn’t find the little girls with somebody else. He was just too good a target, and i
n his experience, if cops couldn’t solve a bad crime, they began to look for somebody they could hang it on.

  An old story on the street. Some people said it was bullshit; others swore it was true, said it had happened to them. Scrape believed it to be true. He’d been arrested too many times for nothing, for simply being there, crazy, on the sidewalk, to have any faith in the honesty or efficiency of cops.

  What good did it do to take him down to court? He didn’t have any money, putting him in jail didn’t cure anything, so why did they do it?

  Because, he thought, that’s what cops did. They got grades on a paper, somewhere, on how many arrests they got. He was an easy one.

  The night before, he’d tricked them, sliding out a side window after dark, creeping like a shadow down the hedge and across the yard, staying in backyards for half a mile, before breaking to the river. He’d thought he’d be safe, for a while, in his tunnels, but somebody had talked. . . .

  Now they were coming for him again, and they’d put him in a hospital and they’d strap him to a bed, and they’d do more experiments; he lay behind his beam and closed his eyes and tried to pretend that they weren’t there.

  That the nightmares weren’t there: but this time, they were.

  WHILE SCRAPE SETTLED into his hiding place, the cops pushed on, like a National Geographic caving expedition made up of stupid people, splashing through pools of water, stumbling over debris and rotting lumber, swearing, shining their lights around. They turned a couple of corners, explored shafts going left and right. One of them showed what appeared to be an attractive, golden-brown wall. Then the wall twitched, and a cop, looking closer, suddenly back-pedaled and said, “Jesus, those are cockroaches. Millions of them.”

  “Don’t mess with them, don’t mess with them . . .” The wall shimmered and they all backed up.

  Moving ahead, they found more footprints, which Lucas now recognized from a series of round treads on the bottom—running shoes—and followed them.