Buried Prey p-21

by John Sandford

  “Dave… these guys are with the Minneapolis PD. They need to talk to whoever runs Letter Man.”

  “Rob Packard… what’d he do?” Small moths were batting around the porch light, and the older man moved his hand inside the door and turned the light off.

  Del said, “Nothing, as far as we know. We’re looking for somebody who he might know, either as a customer or an employee.”

  “He’s only got three or four employees, far as I know,” the man said. “His wife and daughter and a couple of girls.”

  “Does Packard live around here?”

  “Yeah, he lives up north of here. Let me get the phone book.”

  They got an address and the deputy led the way north, eight blocks, into a circle of the newer, suburban, ranch-style homes. There were lights in the window, and they got out and knocked on the door.

  Rob Packard wasn’t John Fell: Packard was a short, thin man, maybe fifty, wearing jeans and a University of Minnesota sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves, and he didn’t know a John Fell. Neither did his wife, but his daughter, whose name was Kate, said that judging from Fell’s description, she might.

  “There was a guy who came around three or four times. He bought some shirts, asked me about getting some made,” she said.

  Her father said, “Katie runs the front counter and does the design.”

  Kate said, “I think he works around here. He sort of hit on me, but you know-I wasn’t interested.”

  “Why not?” Lucas asked. He was checking her as she spoke: in her mid-twenties, he thought, but slender, and white-blond with small breasts: and he thought of the young Jones girls.

  “He just was… I don’t know. Not my style,” she said.

  “Creep you out?” Del asked.

  “Oh, he never did anything. But, yeah, you know…”

  Lucas: “Did he tell you jokes?”

  “Every time,” she said. “Really stupid ones.”

  Lucas said to Del, “That’s him.” And to Katie: “A fat man?”

  “Yeah, that too… sort of like a young Alfred Hitchcock.”

  Del asked, “Do you have any idea where he works?”

  “No, really, I don’t. I can tell you that he drives a black van, like a plumber or a contractor… but I don’t think he’s a plumber. Or a contractor. He sorta doesn’t talk like one.”

  “How about a teacher?” Lucas asked.

  She thought for a moment, then said, “Maybe. Yeah, maybe.”

  “What kind of shirts did he want?”

  “The first time, he said he was checking prices for a rock band, some stupid name, I forget.” She paused, her eyes floating up, then dropping back to Lucas: “No, wait: it was ‘Baby Blue.’ Or ‘Baby Blues.’”

  “Never heard of them,” Lucas said.

  “Neither have I, and I still haven’t,” she said. “He came in again, about that, about the band, then the next time he came in, he was asking about buying seconds. We’ve always got some seconds, that we sell cheap. The last time, I don’t know. I think he was just looking me over. He took some seconds. They were for Wyman Archery. Says ‘Wyman Archery’ in a target, with a hunting arrow under the words.”

  “He’s an archer? A bow hunter?”

  She shook her head, “No, it was kind of a wicked-looking shirt. He just pulled them out of the seconds basket.”

  Lucas asked her about the Letter Man shirt he’d been wearing. “We have samples, we sell them at cost-four dollars. I don’t remember selling him one, but maybe I did. He did buy some shirts.”

  She hadn’t seen him around town, didn’t know whether he was going east or west when he arrived. “What time did he come in?” Lucas asked. “Same time?”

  “Middle of the afternoon,” she said. “Yeah. Every time, around two or three. Between two and three. It’s our slowest time of day.”

  Lucas said to Del, “He might be doing factory work, going in to the second shift.”

  Del asked Kate, “You get any feeling that he was watching you? You know…”

  She was shaking her head: “I never saw him outside the store. He’d come in, he’d go away. I thought he was interested in talking to me, you know, but… he got the idea.”

  “You never saw a black van around when you were out walking?”

  “Now you’re scaring me,” her father said.

  “I don’t remember any, especially, but… there are vans all over the place. I guess you see them all the time. You don’t even look at them.”

  There wasn’t anything more-a bit of a description, but nothing significant. The Packards knew of three or four assembly plants in the area, mostly smaller places putting together electronics, the kinds of places that came and went every few months. And she hadn’t seen Fell for at least four or five months, Kate said.

  On the way back to the Cities, Lucas said, “I’m coming back up here tomorrow. I’m going to hit every one of those factories. If we get a time card, there’ll be eight ways to track him, even if he’s not working there anymore.”

  But he didn’t do that.

  8

  They spent the drive back to the Twin Cities speculating about John Fell. Lucas said, “He’s at least as good a suspect as Scrape. Look, think about this: Somebody needs a fall guy. Who’s better than a guy like Scrape, who can’t even defend himself, because he’s crazy? And he looks crazier’n hell, who’d believe him? So this guy tracks both Scrape and the girls, steals stuff that Scrape has used, like that box in the pizza dumpster, and then he calls nine-one-one to feed us the clues.”

  “Sounds too much like a movie,” Del said.

  “It does,” Lucas admitted.

  “I’ve never known one of those movie plots to work out,” Del said.

  Lucas looked out the window at the rural darkness, just a scattering of lights off to the west. “Neither have I.”

  Del had a list of eight more people he wanted to interview about Smith, with addresses. Though it was late, they found four of them with the lights on, but got no help. After the last one, Lucas followed Del back down the street to the car, and Del asked, “You know what the perfect crime is?”

  “You’re gonna tell me, right?”

  “It’s when you walk up to a guy you don’t know that well, because you want the crack in his pocket. You look around, there’s nobody watching. You pull your gun and Bam! you kill him. You take the crack and you walk away,” Del said. “Nobody gives two shits about a crack dealer, so there’s not gonna be a big deal investigation. There’re gonna be two guys walking around with notebooks, for maybe a week. There’s a million potential suspects, and no real connection between the killer and the killee, and an hour after the killing, the evidence has already gone up somebody’s pipe.”

  “But somebody could see you-”

  “Eh-no. Or they turn away. Smith wouldn’t be standing out in the middle of the street, handing it off. That’s why dope dealers get killed. Get killed all the time. Because they’re vulnerable and they’re worth killing. The guys doing it are desperate for a hit, they don’t have a hell of a lot to lose, and they don’t have two brain cells to rub together. So, they don’t worry about it, they don’t talk about it, they don’t plan it. It’s just walk up, look around, pull out the piece, pop him, and go.”

  “All right-but when was the last time you picked up a dead black crack dealer in the alley behind a bunch of houses where all the people are white?” Lucas asked.

  Del held up an index finger. “That’s another reason I like your whole spontaneous, semi-accidental murder theory. It’s possible that our crack-freak killer doesn’t exist. At least, not this one. So we’re looking for the wrong dude. He doesn’t exist. Maybe your dude does.”

  “My dude exists-he snatched the girls,” Lucas said.

  “Unless Scratch did it,” Del said.

  “Scrape.”

  “Yeah, Scrape. The point remains: we are wasting our time, right now,” Del said. “We aren’t gonna hang the Smith murder on a neighborhood guy
unless an eyewitness turns up, and even then, we’d probably need to kick a confession out of the guy. Because (a) there’s no link to follow, and (b) nobody gives a shit. There’s no logic to a crack killing. No puzzle you can figure out. Only hunger.”

  “You got me convinced,” Lucas said. “But you gotta keep your eye on the other ball, too.”

  “What ball?”

  “The political ball,” Lucas said. “The ball that requires two white guys to be out roaming around the black community so it looks like somebody cares, when nobody does.”

  “I don’t like that ball,” Del said.

  After a while, when the lights started going out around the neighborhood, they went home. Lucas thought about the case while waiting for sleep to catch up with him. It was confusing, but in a pleasant way: it was intricate, like a puzzle, like a really magnificent game. You could make a million moves, and prove yourself a complete fool.

  He was still sleeping soundly at eight o’clock the next morning when his phone rang. The comm center was calling to say that some woman was trying to get in touch, and she’d said it might be an emergency. Lucas dialed the number she left, not recognizing it, and the blue-haired Karen Frazier picked up.

  “All right, Scrape’s name is all over the place and the whole street is all freaked out, and I was talking to a guy named Millard and he told me that he saw Scrape last night sneaking along the riverbank across from the falls. On the east side.”

  “Where are you?” Lucas asked.

  “Right there, on Main. I was looking around for him.”

  “For Christ sakes, don’t do that,” Lucas said. “Even if he didn’t do it, he’s still nuts and we took a great big long knife off him. He’s probably got another one by now.”

  “I thought of that. That’s why I’m calling you,” Frazier said. “You think he did it?”

  “I don’t know-there’s some other stuff going on, but there’s some evidence, too. Against him, I mean. So you sit tight: I’m coming over. Give me twenty minutes. I’ll meet you at the end of the bridge there.”

  He’d planned to go back to Stacy, to look for Fell. Instead, he rolled out, brushed his teeth, skipped the shave, was in and out of the shower in one minute, and in two more, was dressed. He thought about calling in, as long as the phone was right there. On the other hand, if he picked up Scrape on his own…

  He gave the phone a last look, and with only the slightest of misgivings, was on his way.

  Frazier was sitting on a bench south of the Central Avenue bridge. Lucas pulled in, flipped his “Police” card onto the dash, locked the door, and walked over. She saw him coming and stood up.

  “Everybody’s scared,” she said. “The newspaper had this huge story about letting him go, and how maybe he stabbed some black man. And you guys are hassling everybody. People are running out of town-”

  “We’re still thinking about the girls,” Lucas said. “There’s not much chance anymore, but we gotta try.”

  She looked doubtful: “It seems more like you’re doing it for television, than really looking.”

  “We’re really looking,” Lucas said. “And I haven’t rousted anyone. I’ve been working the Smith killing.”

  She turned away and looked off down the river.

  “Anyway,” Lucas said. “There’s a guy named Millard, right? Where is he?”

  “I don’t want you to talk to Millard, because he’ll put two and two together, and figure out where you got his name.”

  Lucas shook his head: “I gotta know. I’ll cover you. But I gotta talk to him.”

  “I can tell you what he said. He said, Scrape was right under the bridge when he saw him, but then he started walking down the bank. Millard said there are a bunch of old cave openings and drains down there, that go up under the bank. He thinks Scrape is in there.”

  “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 o
ut 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?”