Buried Prey p-21

by John Sandford

  “No problem,” Lucas said. “What’d he say?”

  “He said to go back and knock on every single door where the house shows lights,” Del said.

  “All right,” Lucas said. “Now we’re cooking with gas.”

  “I was cooking before,” Del said. “Now, we’re gonna be out here until two in the morning.”

  “I say we knock on every door, lights or not,” Lucas said.

  “Anybody ever tell you to go fuck yourself?”

  “All the time,” Lucas said. “Just about every fuckin’ day.”

  6

  They started with the house closest to the murder site, Lucas always in front, looking more like a detective than Del, Del sidling around the edges with follow-up questions. At the second house, they woke up a couple who, after listening to Lucas’s explanation, told them two things: they knew the two girls by sight, they believed. “If it was the same two girls, we were talking about it at the dinner table,” the wife said. But they hadn’t seen them for several days. The girls sometimes walked past the house, and, the husband said, he thought he’d seen them cutting through the alley.

  “You think that black guy getting killed had something to do with the girls?” the wife asked. She no longer looked sleepy, but she looked scared. “We’ve got girls.”

  “We don’t know, but there have been some indications that we can’t talk about,” Del said. “You should keep those girls tight.”

  Lucas took down their names and the details of the conversation in his notebook, and asked who had the sharpest eyes for the street. They were passed along to another couple, who they shook out of bed for another sleepy interrogation. Those two had also seen the girls, but not in the last few days. And they had definitely seen them in the alley.

  “I think they were back there pretty often, walking through,” the wife said. “I’ve seen them more than once, and I don’t go out there that much.”

  Lucas took down their details, and when they were back outside, said to Del, “Man, we’re onto something here.”

  Del said, “Don’t get excited. We got nothing yet. Nobody saw them the afternoon they disappeared.”

  “You think we got something or not?”

  “Maybe we got something,” Del conceded. “I’m glad I insisted on calling Daniel. At least I’ll get the credit.”

  Lucas said, “You can have it. Who’s next? Maybe we ought to do all the lights, then go back after the darks.”

  So they worked their way around the block, and found an elderly single woman who’d also seen the girls. As they were leaving, she said, “You know, I was driving down to park in my garage and I slowed down to look at the place where that colored boy was killed. I think it was there… I think I saw a little zori in the street, like somebody had thrown it away. Like a girl’s zori.”

  “A what?” Del asked.

  “A zori. A flip-flop. Like plastic shower shoes. It looked like it had been run over a bunch of times, so I thought maybe it fell out of a garbage can. But kids wear them.”

  Del looked at Lucas and asked, “Were the kids wearing flip-flops?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard anybody talking about flip-flops,” Lucas said. “Did you guys pick anything up when you were doing the crime scene?”

  “No flip-flops…”

  Lucas said to the woman, “Thank you, ma’am.” And when they got out in the street, to Del, “We need our flashlights.”

  They spent fifteen minutes working through the alley, until a man shouted out of the back of a house, opposite the house where they’d started, “Get out of there. We called the cops.”

  Lucas yelled, “We are the cops. We need to talk to you.”

  Lights came on in the house next door, and Del pointed at the house and said, “I’ll go talk to these guys.”

  The shouting man’s name was Mayer, and he and his roommate agreed that they’d seen the girls walking by the house, but knew nothing about a flip-flop. They had been in Eau Claire the day of the murder and the girls’ disappearance, they said, in answer to Lucas’s question, and hadn’t gotten back until that morning.

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, we’re not really interested in girls,” Mayer said.

  Del came pounding up the front steps and across the porch, and then he knocked and stuck his head through the door and said to Lucas, “C’mon. The guys next door said they got a flip-flop.”

  Lucas thanked Mayer and followed Del out the door, where an older man was waiting with a flashlight. They followed him down the side of his house and through a gate into the backyard, into his garage, and looked in his trash can. Inside was a single, badly beaten-up flip-flop.

  “Well, shit,” Del said.

  “But this is good,” Lucas said. “Maybe.”

  “This means we gotta call Daniel again.”

  “Okay, that’s not good.” But then Lucas laughed and slapped Del on the shoulder. “I’m so hot,” he said. “I’m so hot.”

  The old man said, “I don’t think you should be laughing about this. Those little girls, that boy being dead and all.”

  Daniel said, “Okay, Davenport, listen carefully. You listening?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Call a patrol car, get some crime-scene tape, and tape it to that garage. Leave the flip-flop in the garbage can, seal the garage, and go home. Okay? Go get some sleep. I will see you at that garage at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. You think you got that? Or do you want me to repeat it?”

  “I got it, Chief,” Lucas said.

  “Davenport, I’m not the chief.”

  “You will be,” Lucas said.

  “Okay. And I actually like the ass-kissing, so I won’t order you to stop,” Daniel said. “But you: go home.”

  On the way back to Lucas’s car, Del said, “I had a thought.”

  “Is it complicated?” Lucas asked. “You want to stop driving while you tell me?”

  “Stop wiseassing me for a minute,” Del said. “If the kids were really taken in that alley…”

  “Then the kidnapper had to have a car or a truck of some kind, and Scrape the ragman doesn’t, and probably doesn’t even know how to drive. I thought of that.”

  They drove for another block, then Del asked, “What else did you think of?”

  “That we’ve been running on clues given to us by people we don’t know and can’t find. Everyone else we’ve talked to is happy to chip in whatever thoughts they have-not a single person has been unwilling to help. Even the hookers were out front about what they knew. But everything good that we’ve gotten, it’s all been anonymous, and perfectly timed, and it all points us at Scrape.”

  “Does seem too easy,” Del said.

  “And I’ve thought of the fact that Smith was killed by somebody who overpowered a muscular, violent young gang member without leaving a trace. Scrape has trouble dribbling a basketball.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Probably that Smith was killed by some other violent young gang member who he thought was a friend, and it has nothing to do with the girls,” Lucas said.

  “What else?”

  “That it would be a big fuckin’ coincidence, a HUGE fuckin’ coincidence that Smith got killed at the same time the girls were being kidnapped, in an alley that the girls used, without the two things being connected. You know what I mean?”

  “What else?”

  “That the first thing we should do tomorrow is find out if the flip-flop belonged to one of the girls, and where the girls would go down that alley. They had to be going somewhere, maybe out to Lake Street to buy shit. Popsicles, or something. Ding Dongs.”

  “Ho Hos.”

  “Sno Balls.”

  “Moon pies.”

  “Eight balls?”

  “Not eight balls,” Del said. Eight balls were one-eighth-ounce Saran-Wrapped cocaine favors.

  After another moment, Del said, “Half of what you think is internally contradictory.”

  “Does that bothe
r you?” Lucas asked.

  “No, but it does highlight the fact that half of what you think is, ipso facto, bullshit.”

  “Quid pro quo.”

  “Nolo contendere.”

  “Post hoc Ergo propter hoc.”

  “Bullshit,” Del said. “There’s no such thing as that.”

  “Sure there is. Logic one-oh-one. After this therefore because of this. Look it up,” Lucas said.

  “Fuck that. I’d rather get my balls busted than waste time looking it up.”

  Del left Lucas on the street looking at his watch. One-thirty in the morning. He should be ready for bed, but the afternoon nap, and his normal night-shift life, had him awake. He could hit a couple clubs, or find a party at the university; on the other hand…

  He went back to the XTC, found the phone, and dialed a number from memory. Catherine Brown answered: “Library.”

  He asked, “So you clipping the papers?”

  “That’s what I’m doing. And it’s very cold and lonely up here.”

  “Bet it’s boring, too,” he said.

  “But they depend on me,” she said. “What would happen if the reporters actually had to file their own stories, instead of having me clip them for them?”

  “I can’t begin to contemplate the awfulness of it,” Lucas said. “You like mushrooms?”

  “Love mushrooms-and pepperoni. I’m starving. But I don’t get off for another hour and a half.”

  “I can get four slices and be there in an hour,” Lucas said.

  “I’ll be down by the door at exactly three o’clock.”

  He had an hour to kill, not much to do: he could pick up the pizza anytime, at Red’s, an all-night pizza place on Hennepin Avenue. He looked at his watch, then pulled the notebook from his pocket. Red house, corner of Cornwall and Eighteenth. He headed back across town, farther south and a bit west of where he and Del had been working. Traffic was light, and he was cruising Cornwall in fifteen minutes: the big red house showed a light. Just one, but that, he thought, was enough for a knock on the door.

  He parked at the curb in front of the house, looked up and down the street, then crossed the lawn, climbed the porch steps and knocked on the door; he could hear a radio or a stereo playing inside, and then he heard somebody say something, and he knocked again, louder.

  A pretty woman came to the door, pulled back the curtain that covered the glass inserts, looked at him, turned on the yellow bug light, looked at him again, obviously puzzled that a guy who looked like Lucas would be knocking on her door at two in the morning, and she asked, through the glass, “What?”

  Lucas held up his badge and said, “I need to talk to Delia White. That you?”

  “What do you want to talk to Delia for?”

  “She might be able to help me with an investigation,” Lucas said.

  “It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

  Lucas looked at his watch, frowned, and said, “Jeez, I must have lost track of time.”

  A smile flicked across her face and she turned and called back into the house, “Mom!”

  Another woman came out, the first one turned away and met her a few steps from the door. Lucas couldn’t see them anymore because of the curtain, but he could hear them talking, and then the second woman pulled the curtain back, looked at him, and snapped, “What do you want?”

  “I’m a police officer. I need to talk to Delia.”

  “About what?”

  Lucas wanted to get inside, but didn’t really know how, so he just said it: “I understand Delia saw L. Ron Parker stab Ronald Rice. I need to talk to her about it.”

  The curtain slid back across the glass, and he could hear the women talking, but couldn’t make out the words. Then the curtain slid back again, and the older woman, Mom, gave him a long look, then unlatched the door.

  Once inside, sitting on the front room couch, Lucas reapologized for running so late, but told them about the Jones investigation, and said, “So I was talking to a guy and he said that Miz White might be able to help me with this L. Ron Parker thing.”

  “If El-Ron thought I was talking to the police, he’d stick me,” the pretty woman said, and Lucas understood that she was Delia.

  “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 lef
t 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.