Buried Prey p-21

by John Sandford

  “You really want to be a fuckin’ lawyer?” Del asked. “Look in the yellow pages. There are thousands of them. They’re like rats.”

  “Yeah, I know. I don’t know what to do. I used to think I could be a defense lawyer, but now, you know, after looking at four years of dirtbags, maybe not,” Lucas said. “So then I’m thinking about being a prosecutor, but then I see the prosecutors we work with, and the political bullshit they put up with, and I’m thinking…”

  “Maybe not,” Del finished.

  “But there’s gotta be something in there,” Lucas said. “Maybe get a law degree, I could go to the FBI.”

  “Ah, you don’t want the FBI. Maybe ATF or the DEA, and you don’t need a law degree for that,” Del said. “The FBI… there’s not much there. They mostly call each other up on the telephone. If you want to hunt, you need to be a big-city cop.”

  “I wrote a role-playing game when I was in college,” Lucas said. “I was in this nerd class, introduction to computer science, and these guys were playing Dungeons and Dragons. I got interested and wrote a module for them, and they played it, and they liked it. There’s some money in that… I’m writing another one, on football. I don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff out there that I could do. I think I could be an investigator, but if I’ve got to spend much more time on patrol, I’m not gonna do it.”

  “Daniel likes you and he’s got clout,” Del said. “Have a serious talk with him. Something’ll get done.”

  Sally, the uniformed cop, stopped on her way out, patted Lucas on the shoulder and said, “Thanks for all that. I gotta think. Maybe we could get a cup of coffee.”

  “Anytime,” Lucas said. “But hey: stay loose. And if you need help, call.”

  She patted his shoulder again and when she left, Del said, “I can barely stand it.”

  Lucas grinned and said, “Sincerity. That’s all it is. So-let me tell you about John Fell, and you can tell me how to find him.”

  When Lucas finished explaining his ideas about Fell, Del said: “Interesting. So we’ve got a bunch of people who know him, who’ve seen him. Let’s go talk to them.”

  “I talked to them-”

  “But from what you tell me, you haven’t conversed with them,” Del said. “You interviewed them, you got a bunch of facts. What we want is all the ratshit they’ve seen and know about. Have they seen him in the neighborhood? What kind of a car does he drive? Does he smoke dope? Snort cocaine? If he does, I might get something on him, with my people out on the town. Oh-and we get Anderson in again, and instead of a credit check, we get his Visa bills. We want to know where he spends his money.”

  Lucas said, “That’s good.”

  Del said, “No, it’s not-it’s just a bunch of words. We’re just sitting here bullshitting.”

  They called Anderson, the computer guy, and asked him to try to get Fell’s Visa bills. Anderson said he’d go back to the office and see what he could do, and leave the results on his desk, in a file marked for Del.

  Then they headed over to Kenny’s, and found Katz, the manager: “Haven’t seen him-it’s been a while now.”

  “Since the night the kids were kidnapped,” Lucas said.

  “That’s right,” Katz agreed.

  Lucas said to Del, “See. That’s part of the pattern. We can’t find the tipsters. Or tipster-maybe there’s only one.”

  “Who else ever met him?” Del asked Katz. “Any other people here?”

  Fifteen or twenty people were sitting around the bar: Katz checked the faces, then said, “Yeah, there are a few people here who knew him. I’d rather not point them out, you know…”

  “Be all right if I made an announcement?” Del asked.

  Katz shrugged. “Be my guest.”

  Del dragged a chair from a side table into the middle of the bar and stood on it: conversation stopped, and he looked around and said, “I’m a Minneapolis police detective, my name’s Capslock, and my partner and I are looking into the disappearance of the two Jones sisters. We need to get in touch with John Fell, who has been a semi-regular here. He provided some very useful information about the key suspect, but now we can’t find Mr. Fell. We’re asking that anybody who knew him, come chat with me and Detective Davenport, in the back booth. No big deal, just a chat. We pretty desperately need the help.

  … If you’ve been watching TV, you know what I’m talking about. Anyway-in the back.”

  He hopped down off the chair and walked with Lucas to the back of the bar. In a minute, four people had pulled up next to their booth, and a fifth had moved down to the end of the bar, from where he could watch and listen.

  “Anything will help: nothing’s too small,” Del repeated.

  Two of the people said they’d seen Fell getting into a black commercial van; one thought it was a Chevy, with cargo doors. One of those two said he thought Fell worked in electronics, that he’d said something about that. But a third, a woman, said she thought he might have been a teacher-now an ex-teacher.

  “He said something about having tried teaching when he got out of school, but found out he couldn’t stand high school kids. He said they never thought about anything but themselves, that they were a bunch of little assholes, and that teaching them was impossible.”

  “So he’s a college grad,” Lucas suggested.

  “I think so.”

  “You know where he taught?” Lucas asked.

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “He never said much about it.”

  “He’s got a Minnesota accent,” said one of the men. “He says ‘a-boat,’ like a Canadian.”

  “But you don’t think he’s a Canadian?” Lucas asked.

  “No, I got the same feeling that Linda did-that he’s from here.”

  “He didn’t really talk about himself that much. He mostly told jokes,” the fourth man said.

  The fifth man slid down from the bar stool and came over with a beer in his hand. “I think he might’ve got fired from the school.”

  “Why’s that?” Lucas asked.

  “One time he went on a rant about school administrators. It sounded like stuff you say when you get fired. You know, they didn’t know what they were doing, they were incompetent, they were jealous, all of that. Like when you get fired.”

  Del bobbed his head: “Okay. That’s good. Anybody ever see him on the street? Outside the bar?”

  “I might’ve,” the woman said. “I think I saw him down by the university, walking down the street.”

  “Just walking?” Lucas asked.

  “Yes, like he was going to lunch or coming back from lunch. Didn’t have anything in his hands, he was just walking along. But-I’m not completely sure it was him. It just seemed to me that it was. I didn’t think about it.”

  “Has he been in with women?”

  “Girls from across the street,” one of the men said. “The hookers.”

  “They hang out here?”

  “They’ll come in for a drink. You know. Kenny doesn’t allow any hustling, or anything. But, they knew him,” the man said.

  “I get the feeling that he’s from right around here,” Lucas said. “Sees the girls across the street, hangs out here.”

  “Doesn’t hang here much,” a man said. “He only came in, the first time, maybe a month ago.” The others nodded in agreement. “Then he was here pretty often. I haven’t seen him for a few days, though.”

  “He was talking about seeing this transient-” Lucas began.

  “The Scrape guy,” the woman said.

  “Yeah. What’d he say about Scrape? Any of you guys hear about that?”

  “He said Scrape had some sort of sex record,” one of the men said. “Is that true? You guys oughta know…”

  “He’s been arrested about a hundred times, but we haven’t found anything about sex so far,” Lucas said. “It’s mostly just, you know, loitering, or sleeping outside, pot, that sort of thing.”

  “He’s one weird-lookin’ dude,” one of the men said. “And weird-a
ctin’.”

  “So’s John Fell,” the woman said.

  Del pounced on it: “Why?” he asked her. “Why do you say that?”

  “He just makes me… nervous,” she said. “I don’t like to sit around with him. You have the feeling he’s always sneaking looks at you. And then, he goes across the street. And that, you know… that’s kinda freaky.”

  There was a little more, but nothing that would nail Fell down. Del said to Lucas, “So let’s go talk to the girls again.”

  On the way out the door, a guy with a waxed mustache and muttonchops held up a finger and said, “Hey, you know about Dr. Fell?”

  Del: “What?”

  The guy said, “It’s a nursery rhyme: ‘I do not like thee, Dr. Fell / The reason why I cannot tell / but this I know, and know full well / I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.’”

  Lucas said, “Uh, thanks.”

  The guy shrugged. “I thought you should know about it. It was written about a guy named John Fell.”

  Dell frowned. “But it was like a… nursery rhyme?”

  “Yeah. About a professor. Way back, hundreds of years ago. In England. Dr. Fell.”

  Lucas said, “Huh,” and, “How’d you know about it?”

  “I’m an English teacher.”

  “Okay. You ever talk to John Fell? This John Fell?”

  The teacher shook his head. “No, I never did.”

  “All right.” He nodded at the guy, and they went out. He asked Del, “What do you think?”

  “You say there is no John Fell-that it’s a phony name. A guy who sets up a phony name is a criminal. So he picked a name for himself.. and who’d know about a Dr. Fell?”

  “Maybe he likes nursery rhymes… or maybe he was a teacher.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Del said. They jaywalked across the street to the massage parlor, and he added, “Maybe… I don’t know. There wasn’t much in that nursery rhyme, the way the guy said it. So maybe it’s a coincidence.”

  “Hate coincidences,” Lucas said.

  “So do I. One interesting thing: that chick who didn’t like to sit next to Fell. Women have a feel for freaks. Makes him more interesting.”

  On the way across the street, Del burped, said, “Excuse me.”

  “What do you expect? You ate about fifteen of my twenty-one shrimp, and all of yours, and most of two orders of fries.”

  “I’m still growing,” he said.

  Lucas said, “I don’t want to sound like an asshole, but you know what fries are? They’re a stick of starch, which is basically sugar, designed to get grease to your mouth. Those shrimp are mostly breading, which is starch, also designed to get grease to your mouth. And, of course, shrimp are an excellent source of cholesterol.”

  “You sound like an asshole,” Del said.

  “Ask me about cigarettes sometime,” Lucas said.

  “Mmm, Marlboros,” Del said.

  There were four women working at the massage parlor: three waiting for customers, one with a customer. Lucas went back and knocked on the door where the fourth woman was with the customer, and called, “Police-we need to talk. No big hurry, though. Take your time.”

  Back in the front room, Del said, “Very funny,” in a grumpy voice, but then he started a low rolling laugh, almost like a cough, and the three women giggled along with him. One of the women was Dorcas Ryan, whom Lucas had already interviewed; the other one, Lucy Landry, was off.

  Ryan said, “I’ve been thinking about him, ever since we talked to you. I can tell you, I think he works with his hands, because they’re rough, and his fingernails need cleaning. Not like he doesn’t clean them, but like, they get dirty again every day.”

  “Never said what he does, though.”

  “Not that I remember,” Ryan said.

  “Does he spook you guys?” Del asked. “If you were here alone, and he showed up, would you let him in?”

  Ryan said, “Not me.” Another one of the girls said, “I’ve only seen him a couple of times, but he has… a cruel lip. You know, his top lip: it’s really tight and cruel-looking. I wouldn’t let him in.”

  “But he’s never done anything? Anything rough?” Lucas asked.

  Ryan shook her head: “He gets his rub and goes on his way.”

  The fourth woman came out of the back and said, “Okay, that was mean. You scared the poor guy half to death.”

  “He’s gone?” Ryan asked.

  “Yeah, I let him out the back.” She was a thin woman, with an overtanned face already going to wrinkles, though she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and an out-of-style Farrah Fawcett hairdo. She looked at Lucas, then at Del: “So what’s up with the cops? You need a little shine?”

  “We’re looking for John Fell,” Lucas said.

  “I heard that,” she said. “I think he works at Letter Man.”

  “What’s Letterman?” Del asked.

  “A silkscreen place, up off I-35 by Stacy. I used to go by there, on my way to school. He came in wearing a Letter Man shirt, and I mentioned I used to live up there, and I like the shirt, and he said he could get as many as I wanted. He never did get me any, though.”

  “When was this?” Lucas asked.

  “A month ago, maybe… No wait, longer than that. Maybe… May. I remember thinking it was still a little cool for T-shirts. But he’s one of those stout guys, who doesn’t feel the cold.”

  “Letterman is one word? Or two words?” Del asked.

  “Two,” the woman said. “Letter Man. Like a man who has letters. You know, they do advertising T-shirts and hats and shit.”

  “He ever get rough with you?” Lucas asked.

  “No, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he did,” she said. “He seemed like he might… like to, but was holding back. I think he could be a mean bastard.”

  They used the phone in the massage parlor to call Letter Man, but it was apparently closed for the evening, and the woman who knew about the place didn’t know who ran it.

  When the conversation ran down, Del looked at Lucas and said, “So let’s go see if Anderson got anything.” He gave the women his business card: “Don’t mess with this guy. If he comes in, call me. I won’t give you away, I’ll catch him later, on the street. But call. We’re thinking, he could be dangerous.”

  Outside, Lucas said, “Dangerous,” and, “I gotta get some business cards.”

  “I am getting a bad vibe from the guy,” Del said. “I’d just like to see him. Have a few words. I think you might be on to something.”

  “We ought to go up to Stacy right now,” Lucas said. “We could be there in a half-hour, forty minutes. If we knock on enough doors, we’ll find the guy who runs the Letter Man place. We’ll be talking to him in an hour.”

  “Anderson-”

  “Anderson’s stuff will be there when we get back,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”

  “Checking Anderson will take five minutes, and we can have the comm center run down the Stacy cops for us-find out who we can talk to.”

  “You think they got cops?”

  “That’s why you check before you go,” Del said.

  Anderson’s file showed seventy-two charges to the Visa account over its lifetime, the last a month before, at the massage parlor. They scanned down the list of charges; a dozen or so were local, at what Del said were three different massage parlors. The others were apparently mail-order places scattered around the country.

  “A bunch of them in Van Nuys, California, different places… you know what? I bet it’s pornography,” Del said. “I bet he’s using the card for sex stuff that he doesn’t want attached to his name.”

  “Because why? He drives around in a van, he’s not some big shot,” Lucas said.

  “I don’t know why, maybe he’s just embarrassed,” Del said. “But if it is porn, it’s another thing to throw in the pot. Porn addiction, goes to hookers… and you said Scrape denied that the porn you found was his.”

  Lucas nodded. “Fell doesn’t kno
w we’re checking on him,” Lucas said. “We talk to the post office guys, watch the box when he picks up the next bill.”

  “Two weeks away,” Del said.

  “But we know he’s up to something crooked.”

  “Not good enough. I know two hundred people who are up to something crooked, but I can’t prove it,” Del said.

  “All right. But if we know who he is, then we got something to work with,” Lucas said.

  “Good point. You always want to know the players. Even if you can’t prove anything against them.” Del looked at his watch. “Let’s talk to the commo guys. Get up to Stacy.”

  Stacy didn’t have cops: the city was patrolled by the Chicago County sheriff’s office. The comm center got in touch with the night duty officer at the sheriff’s department, and between them they arranged to have a patrol officer meet Del and Lucas at County Highway 19, just off the I-35 exit.

  They took a city car, and left Del’s truck parked: the tranny needed work, he said, and he didn’t trust it for the ninety-mile round-trip. The drive north took forty-five minutes, and just before they got there, the comm center radioed to say that the cop they were supposed to meet had to take a call, and he’d be a few minutes late. They turned off the highway and drove around town, looking for the Letter Man office; Stacy was a small place, a few blocks of houses this way and that, mostly new, ten or fifteen years old.

  “People getting out of the Cities,” Del said.

  “Long commute.”

  “But pretty fast…”

  They saw a guy walking a dog, stopped, and he told them that the Letter Man was a small storefront back on County 19. They drove back, found it. Dark, nobody around.

  “This isn’t that much like the movies,” Lucas said, as they leaned back against the trunk of the car. “I’m thinking, ‘law school.’”

  “Man…”

  The sheriff’s deputy showed up five minutes later, introduced himself as Ron Howard, said he had no idea of who ran Letter Man, but knew who would: a local city councilman who knew everybody. They followed him to an older house, with a porch light on, where he knocked; a gray-haired man came to the door, saw Howard, smiled, and said, “Hey, Ron, what’s up?”