Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  The image of the dead girls hung in his eyes, the stony smiles asking, “What’ll you do about this?”

  Lucas pulled a wastebasket over beside his desk and propped his feet on it, tilted his chair back and closed his eyes, and let himself slip back to the first days of the Jones case. He took the investigation a day at a time, as best as he could remember it, and there wasn’t much that he’d forgotten.

  And when he got to the end of the review, he decided that right at the beginning, he’d done something worse than anything else he’d done in his entire career since then—even though some of the things he’d done since then were technically criminal. Criminal, but not immoral. What he’d done back then was immoral: he’d caved.

  He’d been a still-impressionable kid eager to get into plainclothes, and a path had been laid out for him. That path meant putting the early days of his career in the hands of Quentin Daniel, a very smart and occasionally quite a bad man. Daniel wanted to be chief of police, and maybe mayor.

  The Jones case was an ugly one, with all kinds of frightening undertones, and as the head of violent crimes—Homicide—Daniel was on the hot seat. He’d pushed a strong and legitimate investigation, but when a suspect popped up, somebody who was essentially unable to defend himself, and against whom there was substantial evidence, Daniel had grabbed him and held on tight.

  Then the suspect got himself killed, and once you kill a guy, you own him, for good or evil. If he’s innocent, and you kill him, your career may be over; if he’s guilty, well, then, no harm done.

  Scrape, Lucas thought, had seemed to him innocent even at the time; and now, almost certainly so. He could have pushed harder, he could have slipped more information to the Star Tribune, he could have publicly challenged the verdict on Scrape . . . but he hadn’t.

  He’d done some poking around, but then, as the youngest member of Daniel’s team, he hadn’t rocked the boat. Daniel hadn’t been dumb enough to forbid him from continuing an investigation, but had simply joked about his efforts—and kept him on the hop with daily investigative chores in the middle of the crack explosion—and Lucas had eventually let the Jones case go.

  Had caved, had given up. Had put the Jones girls in his personal out-basket.

  God only knew what the killer had done after that. In the best of all worlds, he might have frightened himself so badly that he never again committed a crime. But in the real world, Lucas feared, his own . . . negligence . . . had allowed the killer to continue to kidnap and murder kids. That’s what these guys usually did, after they started.

  A thin cold blanket of depression fell over Lucas’s thoughts. He ran his hand through his hair, once, twice, again and again, trying to make the train of thought go elsewhere.

  The Jones girls, back for their summer reunion tour.

  THEN

  2

  There was an instant, just before the fight, when Lucas Davenport’s overweight partner said, “Watch it, he’s coming,” and he pulled his nightstick and Lucas had time to set his feet. Then Carlos O’Hearn came steaming down the bar, through the stink of spilled beer and hot dogs with relish and boiled eggs in oversized jars, came knocking over bar stools like tenpins, a beer bottle in his right hand, while the bartender leaned away and said, “Noooo . . .”

  Ten feet out, O’Hearn pitched the bottle at Lucas’s head. Lucas tipped his head to the right and the bottle went by and bounced down the bar, taking out glasses and ashtrays and silverware as it went, so it sounded like somebody had dropped a kitchen tray. A woman made a scream-like sound, but not quite a scream, because it seemed more interested than terrorized. Lucas didn’t register much of that, because he was focused on O’Hearn, who’d spent some time as a Golden Gloves fighter, in what must have been the germ-weight class.

  O’Hearn was one of three siblings known as the asshole brothers to cops working the south side. They also had an asshole mother, but nobody knew for sure about the father. Fleeing Mother O’Hearn may have been simple self-preservation by whoever had made the mistake of impregnating her three times, because she was as violent and crooked and generally rotten and no-good as her sons.

  The O’Hearns usually did minor strong-arm robbery, but they’d gotten ambitious and had gone into the back of a True Value hardware store, from which they’d stolen a pile of power tools. Everybody knew exactly what they’d taken because of the video cameras that the asshole brothers hadn’t noticed, up on the ceiling behind silvered domes. The cameras had taken photos that would have made Ansel Adams proud, if Ansel Adams had ever taken pictures of assholes.

  Enzo and Javier were already in the Hennepin County jail, and the bar owner had called 911 to report that Carlos had come in, and was in a bad mood, which usually led to a fight and broken crockery.

  So Lucas and his partner rolled, and here they were, O’Hearn coming down the bar with a Golden Gloves punch. Lucas set his feet, dodged the bottle, and, with a reach about nine inches longer than the Golden Glover’s, and with an extra eighty pounds or so, and with a fist loaded with a roll of nickels, tagged O’Hearn in the forehead.

  The punch had been aimed at his nose, but O’Hearn, too, could dodge, and though the punch crossed his eyes, his momentum kept him coming and they collided and O’Hearn got in two good licks to Lucas’s ribs as they went to the floor, where Lucas pinned his arms and his partner started playing the Minnesota Fight Song on O’Hearn’s back and right leg with his nightstick.

  O’Hearn took about six shots before he whimpered the first time, then Lucas got back just enough to pop him in the nose with the weighted fist, and blood exploded across the bar floor and O’Hearn went flat.

  After that, it was routine.

  ALL OF WHICH EXPLAINED WHY, when Lucas rolled out of bed and stretched, a lightning stroke of pain shot through his left side, from the cracked ribs he’d taken from those two quick Golden Gloves punches. He stretched again, more carefully, then looked down at the soft round ass of a blond-haired woman and said, “DeeDee. Rise and shine.”

  “What?” She sounded drugged. She wasn’t getting much sleep, she said, between her law practice and keeping two guys happy.

  Lucas said, “Get up. You got a bitter woman to talk to.”

  DeeDee McAllister groaned and said, “Go away.”

  He smacked her on the bottom and said, “C’mon. You told me not to let you sleep. Let’s go. You got a client. You got a three o’clock.”

  She pushed up and looked at the clock on the bedstand: two o’clock. Dropped back and said, “Ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes,” Lucas agreed.

  They’d rendezvoused in his first-floor apartment in an old brick house in Minneapolis’s Uptown. He had two rooms, and a three-quarters bath, with a compact kitchen at one end of his living room, and an oversized leather chair that faced an undersized television.

  He headed for the bathroom—a shower, no tub—scrubbed his face, brushed his teeth, hopped in the shower, sudsed up, rinsed, and was out in five minutes.

  He stopped to look at himself in a full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door: he was tall, dark-haired, broadshouldered, heavily muscled from twenty years of hockey, the last few as a first-line defenseman for the Minnesota Golden Gophers.

  He’d lost some muscle since graduation, but that was okay. He’d stopped the obsessive muscle-building workouts, at the advice of the team trainers, and started spending more time on endurance workouts, with lighter weights and more reps. And he was running more.

  “You think my dick is bigger than average?” he asked, looking at himself.

  McAllister pushed herself up, saw him posing in the mirror, said, “Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” and fell flat again.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “You’ve seen about a million times more penises than I have, since you spent your entire friggin’ life in locker rooms,” she said. “I’ve seen about four.”

  “Four?” He sounded doubtful.

  “Okay, six. Or eight. No more th
an eight. You’ve seen a million.”

  “Yeah, but they weren’t, you know, erect,” Lucas said. He looked in the mirror again. “I think I’m fairly big.”

  “I’d say you’re on the big side of average,” she said. “Now let me get my last minute.”

  “You think I’m big,” he said.

  “Big side of average. Maybe. Now gimme my goddamn one minute.”

  He stood sideways: Big.

  HE STEPPED around a pile of hockey gear next to the bed, got out a fresh pair of shorts and a T-shirt. As he was pulling on a T-shirt, McAllister sat up and said, “One thing is, your body gets me hot.”

  “Gets me hot, too,” Lucas said. He rubbed his nipples with the palms of his hands.

  “Ah, Jesus.” She rubbed her face. “He plays with his own tits.” She watched him dress, and smacked her lips and scratched her ass.

  “C’mon,” he said. The apartment bedroom had a tiny closet, too small for his growing collection of clothes, so he’d bought an old oak clothing rack from a used furniture store. From it, he selected a clean pair of uniform pants and a shirt. DeeDee got out of bed and went into the bathroom, stared at her face in the mirror above the sink, and said, finally, “I almost look happy.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I wish Mark could see me this way,” she said.

  “Would I have to be standing here?” Lucas asked. Mark was her husband; McAllister was a divorce attorney. She sometimes talked about Mark’s gun collection.

  “I’d have to think about that,” she said. She stepped back into the bedroom and picked up her underpants. “He has a nasty temper and you could protect me. Make me kinda hot seeing two guys fighting over me. Like a princess.”

  “Everything gets you hot. A domestic protection order gets you hot,” Lucas said. They both knew he was telling the truth.

  “On the other hand,” she continued, “it’s considered somewhat déclassé for a prestigious divorce attorney like myself to be caught screwing a humble cop. Even one with an average dick.”

  “Large.” Lucas checked himself in the mirror: Hair still damp, uniform shirt tight across the shoulders and loose around the waist, tightly pressed slacks. Chicks liked pressed slacks, even the hippies; or at least, he suspected they did. His study of women continued. “So you’d have to decide whether you’d rather get beaten up, or be considered déclassé.”

  “Yeah. I hate to think which way I’d go,” she said. “Getting beat up only hurts for a while.” He turned and watched her get dressed: she’d draped her clothes neatly on wooden clothes hangers, and hung them on a curtain rod: a woman’s business suit, navy blue jacket and skirt over a white blouse, big pads in the jacket shoulders, a narrow red ribbon tie. She had fairly wide, feminine hips, and the combination of shoulder pads and hips made her look, from the back, like a duck.

  Lucas didn’t say so. His study of women had gotten that far. Quack.

  Instead, he picked up his duty belt and strapped it around his waist, pulled the Glock from its holster, did an automatic check. He didn’t much like the weapon—too white-bread, in his opinion—but that was what he’d been issued and was required to carry. When he made detective, he’d change to something classier. European or something.

  McAllister was back in the bathroom, checked herself in the mirror, and came out, smiled, not shyly, but said, “Don’t kiss me, you’ll mess up my lipstick.”

  “I’d like to throw you back on the bed and do you one more time,” Lucas lied. She was attractive, all right, and she wasn’t short on enthusiasm, but he was itching to get out in the car. He liked working nights, and this night was going to be interesting. Early August, people all over the street, and the heat had been building for a week. Rock-out. “Or maybe twice.”

  “Save it,” she said. “I gotta go talk to the bitter woman.”

  Lucas stuck a finger through the Venetian blind and peeked out: the sky was clear and blue and shimmering with humidity. No sign of her husband.

  Party time.

  LUCAS HAD BEEN A COP for three years. He’d graduated from the University of Minnesota after five years of study, and four years of hockey—he’d been a rare redshirt the first year, to pick up weight and muscle—with a major in American studies, which, he quickly discovered, qualified him to go back to school. He considered law, but after talking to a few law students, decided that life might be too short.

  One of his AmStud professors suggested that he look at law enforcement. “My old man’s a cop,” the professor said. “You’ve got the attitude. I think you’d like it. Do it for a few years, then look at law school.”

  His mother was against it: “You’ll get shot. Then there’ll be nobody left.”

  She meant, nobody left in the family. His father had died of congenital heart disease when Lucas was in fifth grade. His mother had now been diagnosed with breast cancer, and had convinced herself that she wasn’t going to make it.

  Lucas had looked into it, sitting up in the university’s medical library, and thought she was probably right. He tried not to dwell on that conclusion, because there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.

  Stopping cancer, he thought, was like throwing your body in a river to stop the water. You could weep, scream, demand, research, and pray, and nothing seemed to help. The only help he’d found was in denial: he didn’t think about it, particularly when she seemed to be in remission.

  He also didn’t worry about his own heart—his father’s mother had German measles during the pregnancy, he’d been told, and that accounted for the defect that eventually killed him. No genetics involved.

  LUCAS WENT OFF to the police academy, scored at the top of his class—would have been at the top in any class anyone could remember—spent a few weeks on patrol, spent six months working dope, then went back on patrol.

  Dope was interesting, but he didn’t get to do much investigation. He mostly hung out, a white guy in a letter jacket who always knew the spread on college sports, and tried to buy dope in commercial quantities by making friends with the dealers he met. The dealers were everywhere—meeting them wasn’t a problem. The problem was, some of them didn’t seem like bad guys. They were more like guys his age who couldn’t get real jobs. So they’d come up with a kilo, or a pound, and then the real narcs would move in, and bust the dealer. . . .

  The whole thing smacked too much of betrayal. You made friends, you bought dope from them, you busted them. The accumulating bad taste moved him back to patrol, which was fun for an ex-jock, a hockey defenseman. There was some excitement, new sights—new insights—and the sense that he was doing something worthwhile.

  But after three years, he’d decided he wouldn’t do it for too much longer. They’d make him a detective, and pretty quickly, or he’d find something else to do.

  What, he didn’t know.

  Law school. Something. The military? There were no decent wars in sight. . . .

  LUCAS WAS OUT sitting on the hood of his assigned squad when Fred Carter, his partner, finally showed up. Carter had missed the second-shift briefing, said he’d been caught in traffic, but he smelled of an Italian meatball sandwich.

  “What’re we doing?”

  “Usual,” Lucas said. “Homer’s pissed at you.”

  “I’ll talk to him. It was unavoidable,” Carter said.

  Lucas said, “You got some tomato sauce under your lip. I’d wipe it off before you talk to him.”

  Carter was a fleshy, bull-necked man who looked like a cabdriver, with blunt features and fingers, and a growing gut. He wasn’t stupid, but he was going nowhere in the police department. He knew it, and didn’t care. He was in for twenty, and then out. He’d gotten fourteen, and now his main concern was to avoid injury, and to plot out his move to state government, for a second dip in the pension stream.

  That attitude was the main bone of contention between them: Lucas enjoyed the occasional fight and didn’t mind chasing a man through dark backyards. Carter said, “I don’t
care if you get your ass kicked, but the problem is, you pull me into it. Stop doing that.”

  “We’re cops,” Lucas said.

  “We’re peace officers,” Carter snapped back. “Try to keep a little fuckin’ peace, okay?”

  Yeah, keep a little peace. But what did it mean if a guy went through life thinking about nothing but football—Carter was a big Vikes fan—and a pension? What kind of life was that?

  ON THIS AFTERNOON and evening, they checked out their squad and started rolling around in south Minneapolis, taking in the sights; it was one of those late afternoons in the city when everything smelled like melting Juicy Fruit, spilled Orange Crush, and hot tar. Then a drunk Ojibwa, down from Red Lake, climbed up on a fire hydrant, for reasons unknown, gave a speech, fell off, and gashed his head on the top nut. They thought for a moment that he’d been shot, until a witness explained. They called an ambulance and had him transported to Hennepin General, and rolled again.

  Carter was short of his quota on traffic tickets that month, so they hid at the bottom of a hill and knocked off three speeders in forty-five minutes, which put him back square. It wasn’t a quota, it was a performance metric. The chief said so, with a straight face.

  They hit a convenience store on Lyndale, scowled at the dope dealers, who moseyed off, and Carter got a fried cherry pie and a Pepsi. They rolled away, and the dope dealers moseyed back. A half-hour later, they checked out a report of a fight in the parking lot of a bar. There’d been one, all right, but everybody ran when the car pulled up, and there were no bodies and no blood, and nobody knew who was involved.

  They got a couple more soft drinks, Diet Coke for Lucas, another Pepsi for Carter, and moved along, arguing Coke versus Pepsi, took a call about another fight, this one at an antique store.