Buried Prey p-21

by John Sandford

  “Probably to neck,” Del suggested to the assistant superintendent.

  “At least,” the guy said.

  “No kids involved, I mean, no kids approached by Hosfedder,” Lucas said.

  “Nothing recorded here,” the assistant superintendent said, thumbing through the file.

  The second case had involved teacher-student sexual contact, a teacher named Lewis and a seventeen-year-old girl named Pelletson, but Del said, “Uh, we’ve got a problem, Houston.”

  He tapped a line in the personnel file: Lewis was fifty-three at the time of the contact.

  Lucas said, “Dirty old man,” and, to the school principal, “Thank you for your cooperation.”

  Marcy called as they were heading to Minneapolis. Lucas told her about Sandy finding the case involving Kelly Barker. “So I ran over there last night and talked to her, and I’ll tell you what-I think she was attacked by the same guy.”

  “By the guy you say set up Scrape.”

  “That’s right,” Lucas said.

  “Okay. Thanks for the call,” Marcy said. “I’ll have somebody run down and check.” She sounded bored.

  “Anything more on who lived in the house?”

  “Not at the moment,” she said. “We’ve got a name for somebody who lived next door, but we haven’t gotten to her yet. She moved out to Fargo.”

  “Let me know,” Lucas said.

  “What’s happening with them?” Del asked, when Lucas rang off.

  “Ah, they’re dead in the water,” Lucas said. “Marcy’s just not much interested yet.”

  “She’s usually a go-getter.”

  “She’s not a believer-doesn’t believe this is going to turn into anything except another pain in the ass. What she really likes is a nice run-and-shoot murder where she can put on a vest and smoke somebody out of a basement.”

  After a minute, Del said, “Well, that is pretty fun.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  The third school case, in Minneapolis, involved teacher-student, male-female contact again, but the teacher was black.

  “That doesn’t help,” Lucas said.

  They stopped at a McDonald’s for a quick lunch, got back to the office in the middle of the afternoon, just as Todd and Kelly Barker walked out the front door. “You do the Identi-Kit?” Lucas asked.

  “Just got done-it’s a lot better than it used to be,” she said. She handed Lucas a printout of the reconstruction. He looked at it, passed it to Del, and said, “We need to dig up the people who met Fell, way back when, and show them this-I hope somebody’s still alive.”

  “Well, we are,” Del said, handing the picture back to Kelly. “Must be some more. Maybe those hookers. They were pretty young. You still got their names?”

  “Gotta be in my reports from back then,” Lucas said.

  “You comfortable asking Minneapolis for that?”

  “Man’s gotta do…” Lucas said. He turned back to the Barkers. “Whatever happened to the TV thing? You talk to your agent?”

  “We’re waiting to hear back,” Kelly said. “I think it’s gonna fly, especially with this.” She flapped the computer likeness at them. “And especially now because of the Joneses.”

  “We’re not sure of that connection yet,” Lucas said.

  “All possibilities should be examined,” Kelly Barker said.

  Up in Lucas’s office, Del asked, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Check the Visa stuff under the John Fell name. We need to find out how he paid the account. If it’s postal money orders, we’re screwed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what it is. But if he had a checking account under the same name, then it gets more interesting. More complicated…”

  “He’d have to have an ID for that,” Del said. “Did anyone ever check to see if he went for a driver’s license under that name?”

  “Yeah, we checked at the time, but he didn’t have one,” Lucas said. “I suppose we could look again. But take a close look at how he paid those bills. If he had a checking account, we could probably find out quite a bit just by who he was paying.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Maybe talk to Marcy again,” Lucas said, “And then I’m going home for a nice vegetarian dinner with my wife and kids.”

  “Kill yourself now.”

  “No, no, it’s fine, a nice tofu steak with quince sauce, maybe, some corn,” Lucas said. “Organic applesauce for dessert.”

  “I’m having some pig,” Del said. “I’ll call you and tell you about it.”

  “God bless you,” Lucas said, and Del left.

  Had to do something. Right now.

  On the phone to Marcy: “I’d like to come over and look at the file on the Joneses, if that’s okay with you,” Lucas said.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “My notes. I wrote a couple of reports; I want to see if I can get some names.”

  “You’re really getting into this,” she said.

  “It’s interesting,” Lucas said. “I’m not working on anything hot right now, so I thought I’d hang around this for a while. If it doesn’t bother you.”

  “No, not really. As long as you don’t overreach, and keep us up to date. Come on over, the file’s on Buster’s desk.”

  Lucas made it over to Minneapolis in twenty minutes, and left his car in a police-only slot outside City Hall. He’d gone in and out of the Minneapolis City Hall probably ten thousand times during his career, and always marveled at how the original architects had managed to contrive a building that was at once ugly, inefficient, cold, sterile, charmless, and purple; and yet they had. Much of it was given over to the police department, and the long hallways of locked doors didn’t make the place any more cheerful.

  He walked back to Homicide through the empty corridors, peeked into Marcy’s office. Nobody home. A lone Homicide guy was reading a New York Times at his desk, had looked up to grunt when Lucas came in, and said, “She’s gone to talk budget,” when Lucas looked into Marcy’s office.

  “Where’s Buster’s desk?” Lucas asked.

  “The one with the big-ass files sitting on it,” the guy said. His name was Roberts or Williams or Richards or Johns or something like that; Lucas knew him, but couldn’t put his finger on the name. “Marcy said I should watch to make sure you didn’t steal too much.”

  “Just a few names,” Lucas said. A name popped into his head: Clark Richards. “How you been, Clark?”

  “I been fine. You need help?”

  Lucas looked at the five bankers’ boxes sitting on Buster’s desk: “If you got the time. I’m actually looking for my own written reports on the Jones kidnapping.”

  They started going through the boxes, which were pleasantly musty, and halfway through the first one, Lucas found two brown office-mail envelopes, fastened with strings, that said “911 Tapes” on them. He opened them and found two cassette tapes.

  “You have a cassette player around?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Rodriguez has one in his bottom drawer.”

  Lucas set the two tapes aside and continued looking. Richards found the reports in his second box, a big wad of cheap typing paper fastened with clasps. “Probably in here,” he said, thumbing through it.

  Lucas took the paper, sat down, began flipping, and found his own contributions two-thirds of the way to the end. The hookers’ names, he found, were Lucy Landry, Dorcas Ryan, and Mary Ann Ang, and he’d taken down their driver’s license numbers along with their names.

  “Just a child, but I was already so good,” he muttered, as he wrote them in a new notebook.

  “Got what you needed?” Richards asked.

  “Yes, I do,” Lucas said. “I wonder if you could get on your computer and look up some names for me, from the DMV. I want to listen to the nine-one-one tapes…”

  He sat in Marcy’s office with the tape recorder and a pair of earphones, made sure he was pushing the right buttons, and listened. Neither tape was longer than thirty second
s:

  The first one:

  “Nine-one-one. Is this an emergency?”

  “Maybe. I think so. I heard about those two girls who are missing, and I don’t want to get involved, but there’s a transient guy who walks around here dribbling a basketball, and the rumor is, he’s got a record for sex crimes.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “No, I don’t talk to him, I only see him. You guys need to pick him up.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “Not exactly. I know he used to live in some boxes down the river bluff off West River Road.”

  “What’s your name, sir?”

  “No, no, I don’t want to get involved. Find the guy with the basketball.”

  At that point the conversation ended, and two seconds later a different voice from the first two gave a time and date for the call, and added that it came from a number traced to a phone booth on southeast Fourth Street on the east bank of the Mississippi, a half-mile or so from the place where the girls had been buried.

  The second call:

  “Nine-one-one. Is this an emergency?”

  “Yes. I think so. You’re looking for Terry Scrape, that transient who kidnapped the Jones girls. I know who he is, because he dribbles a basketball all the time, and I saw him walking down an alley behind Tom’s Pizza last night, and he was carrying a box and he threw the box in a dumpster behind Tom’s Pizza. I don’t know if it’s important, but I thought I should call.”

  “Thank you. If we could get your name-”

  “I don’t want to get involved. Okay? Check the box.”

  Two seconds later, a different voice gave a time and date for the call, and said that it had been traced to a phone booth near the University of Minnesota-not the same place as the first, but close: walking distance.

  Lucas listened to the two calls, twice each, and made a few notes. He checked his notebooks, and found that the first call had come in about the time he and some other detectives-Sloan? Hanson or Malone? And Daniel? — had been looking across the street at Scrape’s apartment. The 911 call had been irrelevant at that point, not that the caller would know it. The second call had come in that night, while Lucas had been asleep. Sloan had gotten him out of bed to do the dumpster-diving…

  Richards came and leaned in the door frame as Lucas was taking off the headphones, and Lucas asked, “What’d you get?”

  “They all still live here-around here. One’s out in Stillwater,” Richards said. “I took them right from the ID numbers you have, up to the present. Names, addresses, phone numbers.”

  “Terrific,” Lucas said. “Now, I need something else. I need you to listen to these two tapes. Take you two minutes.”

  Richards sat down, put the headphones on, listened. When he was done, he frowned and asked, “A little strange-that was the same guy both times, right?”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Lucas said. He looked at his notes. “In both calls, the operator asks if the call is an emergency, and he says, ‘Maybe’ in the first one, and ‘Yes,’ in the second, but then, in both of them, he says exactly, ‘I think so.’ Then at the end of the tape, he refuses to give up his name, with almost the same words: ‘I don’t want to get involved.’”

  Richards said, “I was listening more to his voice. He’s got a kind of prissy way of talking, you know what I’m saying?”

  “English teacher,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, like that.”

  Lucas put the two tapes back in their envelopes, took out his cell phone, and called Marcy. She picked up and said, “I’m in a meeting.”

  “I know, but I needed to ask you something. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take the two tapes of the nine-one-one calls and have a voice guy look at them,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I think the two tips came from the same guy, which, if you listened to what he’s saying on the tapes, is unlikely, unless he’s the killer. So, if it’s okay with you… I’ll leave a receipt with Clark.”

  “Why don’t you just sit tight for five minutes?” She crunched on something, a carrot or a stalk of celery. “We’re about done here, and I’ll be back there.”

  “Really five minutes? Not twenty minutes?”

  “Really five minutes.”

  She was back in ten minutes, crunching on carrot slices from a Ziploc bag. They went in her office, and she listened to the 911 recordings, and said, “Same guy. Okay, take them.” She popped the second tape out of the recorder and pushed them across her desk.

  “Thank you,” Lucas said.

  “You’re really into this, huh?”

  “Yeah. I wish you were, a little bit more.”

  “I’m interested. I’ve got Hote working on it full-time, and if we see anything at all, I can pull another guy,” she said. “But I’ve got that Magnussen thing going, and we’re tracking Jim Harrison… you know.”

  “So you’re busy,” Lucas said. “So don’t give me any shit about looking at the Jones girls. I’ll keep you up to date, and if I can, and if we identify someone, I’ll get you there for the kill… if I can.”

  “Try hard,” she said, a little skeptically.

  He grinned and spread his arms and said, “I always do.”

  She laughed and asked about Weather, and about Letty, and the conversation rambled back to the good old days. They’d once gone off to the Minnesota countryside where Lucas had gotten in a fistfight with a local sheriff’s deputy. “If I hadn’t talked our way out of that, you’d probably still be on a road gang somewhere,” Marcy said.

  “You talked our way out of it? What are you talking about, I negotiated,” Lucas said.

  “Negotiated, my ass,” Sherrill said.

  “I did negotiate your ass, if I remember correctly,” Lucas said. “I was so weak when I got back from that trip I could barely crawl…”

  And they were laughing again, talking about taking down the LaChaise gang, and Sherrill said, “It was all pretty good, wasn’t it? I gotta tell you, by the way-just between you and me-the Democrats want me to run for the state senate. Rose Marie’s old seat, it’s coming up empty.”

  “You gonna do it?” Lucas asked.

  “Thinking about it,” she said. “I feel like where I am now-I mean, I kicked this job’s ass-I feel like I’m on a launchpad. I’m good on TV, I’ve got a rep. I could go someplace with politics.”

  “You’d have to hang around with politicians,” Lucas pointed out.

  “You say things like that, but you hang around with politicians yourself,” Sherrill said.

  “So go for it,” Lucas said. “You want me to whisper in the governor’s ear? He’s always had an eye for hot-chick politicians.”

  “Well, if you find your mouth pressed to his ear, someday, instead of that other area, and can’t think of what to say… you could mention my name.”

  Before he left, she patted the envelope with the tapes and asked how long it would take to confirm that the caller was the same man on both.

  “Maybe tomorrow, or the day after,” Lucas said.

  “So call me tomorrow and tell me what you got,” she said.

  “Yes, dear,” Lucas said.

  On the way home, he thought, Good old days. Not always so good: Marcy had been shot twice over the years, both times seriously. She was lucky she was still alive… but so was Lucas, for that matter.

  With that thought, he went home and had a vegetarian dinner and talked to his kids and spent some time in the bathroom with Sam, who was having a little trouble with toilet training-“He knows what to do, he’s just being stubborn,” Weather said. “He needs some encouragement from his father.”

  Then he sat alone in the den and thought more about the Jones case. They had a number of entries into the case, and any one of them might produce Fell. The most promising, he thought, was the probability that one of the massage-parlor women would identify Fell as Kelly Barker’s attacker, through the Identi-Kit picture.

  If that didn’t
work, he’d give the picture to the media; that might well produce an ID, especially if Fell had stayed in the area.

  And, he thought, if Barker talked Channel Three into putting her in front of a camera, and if Fell saw it, and believed that she was the only witness against him, and if he were genuinely mad… might he not be tempted to get permanently rid of the only witness who could identify him?

  Something more to think about.

  A trap?

  But probably not: too much like TV.

  12

  The Jones girls’ killer sat in his living room staring blankly at the TV, a rerun of a Seinfeld show, which he’d seen twenty times, the one about the Soup Nazi. He was dead tired, sat drinking a Budweiser, eating corn chips with cream cheese, trying to blink away the weariness as he waited for the old man to show up.

  The killer was a large man, dressed in oversized jeans and a gray T-shirt; rolls of fat folded over his belt, and trembled like Jell-O down his triceps. He had thick black hair, heavy eyebrows, dark eyes, a small, angular nose, and a petulant, turned-down mouth. A mouth that said that nothing had worked for him: nothing. Ever.

  His living room was small and cluttered. Off to one side, in a den not much larger than a closet, a half-dozen rack-mounted servers pushed the temperature in the room up into the eighties. He could take eighty-three or eighty-four, but any higher than that, he couldn’t sleep. He was right at that level, he thought, and sure enough, the air conditioner kicked on.

  And started eating his money.

  Not that he could sleep anyway.

  He’d never slept more than five or six hours a night, except when he was popping Xanax, and that might get him seven hours for a week or so. He suspected he needed eight or nine hours, long term, to stay alive. He wasn’t getting it. He’d get up tired, be tired all day, go to bed tired, and then lie there, staring at the dark.