Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  When they got there, two women, one heavy and one thin, both with fashionable blond haircuts, were squared off on the sidewalk, the dealer between them, a clerk peering out from the gold-leafed doorway. The fight hadn’t actually taken place yet, and Lucas and Carter separated the two women, one of whom told the other, “You’re lucky the cops got here, or I would have stuffed that chiffonier right up your fat butt.”

  “Oh, yeah, bitch-face, let me tell you . . .” What she told her couldn’t be reported in any of the better home furnishings magazines, Lucas thought, as it included four of the seven words George Carlin said you couldn’t use on television. The fat one was definitely ready to go, until Carter said, “If we have to take you in, they will discover any chiffoniers you got up there. It’s called a body-cavity search, and you won’t like it.”

  That cooled them off, and they left in their respective Mercedeses.

  “It’s the heat that does it,” Carter observed to the antique dealer.

  “Maybe not,” the dealer said. “It’s a gorgeous chiffonier.”

  “WHAT THE FUCK is a chiffonier?” Lucas asked, as they rolled away.

  “One of those coffee-serving things,” Carter said. “You know, that go around in circles.”

  Lucas studied him for a moment, then said, “You got no idea what a chiffonier is.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But I liked the way you handled it. That strip-search line,” Lucas said. “Took it right out of them.”

  “Like I said: keep the peace,” Carter said.

  “Really. You shoulda been a cop or something.”

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK, Lucas spotted a man named Justice Johnson, who’d beaten up his old lady once too often; a warrant had been issued. They corralled him in the recessed entry of a locksmith’s shop. He’d been eating a raw onion, as though it were an apple, and it bounced away into the gutter as they cuffed him. He didn’t bother to fight, and bitched and moaned about his woman, who, he said, did nothing but pick at him.

  “Bitch said I’m a dumbass,” Johnson said from the backseat of the squad. He was breathing out onion fumes, which were not diminished in any way by his overindulgence in Drakkar Noir.

  “You are a dumbass, Justice,” Carter said.

  “Hey, she ain’t supposed to say it,” Johnson said. “She’s supposed to take my side, but she never does. All she does is bitch, you ain’t done this, you ain’t done that. . . .”

  “So you beat her up,” Lucas said.

  “I slapped her.”

  “Broke her nose,” said Carter.

  “Didn’t mean to do that.”

  “Shut up, dumbass,” Lucas said. “And quit breathing on me.”

  He didn’t. He sat looking out the window for a minute, then said, “I think I’m peeing my pants.”

  “Ah, Jesus, don’t do that,” Lucas said.

  “Gotcha, cop,” Johnson said. He laughed for a minute, going huh-huh-huh, then said, “And my name ain’t Jesus. You think I look like a fuckin’ Puerto Rican?”

  “You shoulda made the cuffs tighter,” Carter said.

  “I shoulda put them around his fuckin’ windpipe,” Lucas said.

  They booked him into the Hennepin County jail.

  AT TWENTY MINUTES after six o’clock, they took a call on two missing girls. It was still full daylight, and the dispatchers sent them down to the Mississippi, below the I-94 bridge. The two girls had been known to play along the river, although they’d been warned against it by their parents.

  In the three years Lucas had been a cop, he’d seen most of what he’d ever see from a patrol car: murders, actual and attempted, the aftermath of robberies and burglaries, and even a couple of those in progress, as well as suicides, fights, mini-riots, car and foot chases, even an emergency pregnancy run, the woman screaming for help from the backseat. The baby arrived one minute after Lucas put the car at the emergency room door, delivered by a doc and a couple of nurses right on the gurney. The baby, rumor had it, had been named Otto, after the car ride.

  Carter said, “That’s always the rumor. That they called him Otto.”

  “It’s a pretty good rumor,” Lucas said. “I’ve been telling it to everybody.”

  There’d been a couple of lost kids over the years, but they’d been quickly found. These two had vanished between four and five o’clock, when kids were walking home for dinner, not heading down to the river.

  They parked the car and headed over to the slope down to the Mississippi. The river at that point was a few hundred yards across, a sullen dark green, with streaks of foam from the falls just up the river. The bank down to the water was steep and overgrown with brush, cut by slippery dirt paths down the slope worn by walkers, marked with thrown-away food wrappers, and here and there, a wad of toilet paper back in the bushes.

  A concrete walk ran along the river’s edge, leading both north and south, with an informal beach area where Lucas and Carter came down to the river. A fat woman in shorts was wading in the water up to her knees, and a kid in cutoff jeans was farther out, with a spin-fishing rod, casting out into deeper water. A few more people were scattered along the edge of the water, sitting, wading, or swimming.

  None of them had seen the girls.

  They’d finished talking with people at the beach when they were joined by cops from another squad, and the four of them split up, two north and two south, up and down the Mississippi, from the access path that the girls would have taken to the water. Three hundred yards downstream Lucas and Carter came upon a group of gays, at the gay beach. One of the men said that they hadn’t seen the girls, either on the bank or in the water, and they’d been there all afternoon.

  Lucas and Carter walked back upstream, Carter fulminating about the gays: “Fuckin’ queer motherfuckers, buncha goddamn fudge-punchers walking around in jockstraps in the middle of the day. Did you see that guy? He didn’t give a shit. . . .”

  “You sound kind of excited about it, Fred,” Lucas observed. “Kind of aroused.”

  “Screw you, skate boy,” Carter said. “Where in the hell are the sex guys, is what I want to know.”

  “They didn’t see the kids,” Lucas said. “If the kids’d gone in the water, you’d think they would have seen them. They say the kids could swim.”

  “Yeah.” Carter hooked his thumbs over his belt and looked out at the water, which was low and flat and smelled of carp. “Not very deep here, either. I got a bad feeling about this, Lucas. I don’t think they’re in the river.”

  “No?”

  “I think somebody took them,” Carter said. “I think they’re getting raped, right now, while we’re standing here with our thumbs up our asses.”

  “Gut feeling?”

  “Yep.”

  Carter wasn’t much of a cop, but his gut had a record of good calls. Fourteen years rolling around on the street seemed to have given him—or his gut, anyway—a sense of the rightness of particular behavior. If his gut said that he and Lucas were doing the wrong thing, they probably were, and Lucas had come to recognize that fact. “What do you think we oughta be doing?”

  “Looking up there,” Carter said, pointing at the top of the bank, but meaning the south side in general. “The kids were walking past a lot of houses with a lot of weirdos in them. We oughta be shaking them out.”

  “Somebody’s doing it,” Lucas said.

  “Everybody ought to be doing it,” Carter said.

  The other two cops, who’d walked upstream, came back with nothing to report. “You get down to the fruit market?” one of them asked Carter.

  “Yeah, they saw nothin’,” Carter said. “Bunch of bare-assed perverts . . .”

  THEY WERE TALKING to a bum who’d appeared from under the I-94 bridge when a thin, freckled, red-haired man came jogging down the bank and called, “You find them? Anybody see them?”

  Lucas asked, “Who are you?”

  “George Jones. I’m their father, I’m their dad. Did anybody see them?” He was in his mi
ddle to late thirties, panting, and his sweatshirt, sleeves ripped off at the shoulder, was soaked in sweat, which they could smell coming off him, in waves. He was wearing a green army baseball cap with a combat infantryman’s badge on it, and was breathing hard. One of the other cops stepped up and said, “You gotta take it easy—we’ll find them.”

  “They’ve never done this,” Jones said, his eyes and voice pleading with them for help. “Never. They’re always on time. They’re three hours late, nobody’s seen them . . .”

  Carter said, “I don’t believe they’re down here, Mr. Jones. We’ve talked to people all along here; they didn’t see them. Quite a few people down here on a hot Saturday, they would have been seen.”

  Jones said, “All right. All right, thanks. They’re probably . . . goddamnit, I’m going to beat their butts when they get back; they’re probably at a friend’s house.” Still talking to himself, he jogged back up the bank and they heard him shout to someone out of sight, “They’re not down there . . . nobody’s seen them.”

  One of the other cops said, looking out at the dark, drifting river, “Coulda stepped in a hole and got sucked under . . .”

  Carter shook his head. “They ain’t down here,” he said. “We’re wasting our time.”

  GEORGE JONES, the girls’ father, belonged to a lefty ex-military organization, and he’d put out a call for help. Members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War began showing up at seven o’clock, still not dark: a miscellaneous collection of hauntedlooking men wearing pieces of military uniform, mixed with antiwar buttons and patches. A few dozen strong, they began working their way through alleys and backyards, within a half-mile of Jones’s house, staying in touch by calling back and forth.

  Just before it got seriously dark, Lucas and Carter were flagged by a vet off Thirty-fourth Street. When they stopped, the vet leaned into the car window and said, “We got a girl’s blouse. Nobody touched it, but somebody needs to take a look.”

  They parked and called in, and Lucas walked down to an alley to where a bunch of vets had gathered around what looked like a rag, lying beside a hedge, as though somebody had thrown it out a car window. Lucas squatted next to it, and shined his flashlight on it. A girl’s blouse, all right, blue with little white speckles. He called in again, on his shoulder set. Then he stood up and said, “We got some detectives coming. I don’t know if it’s anything, but good work, guys.”

  Carter said, “Good eyes.”

  “I hope it’s not hers, I hope it’s not,” said a thin, crazy-looking man with a six-day beard. He was wearing an army OD uniform shirt with the sleeves cut off just below a buck sergeant’s blackon-green stripes. “I got girls of my own, I mean . . .”

  A car turned in at the mouth of the alley, and a man got out: Harrison Sloan, a youngish detective not long off patrol. He ambled down the alley, and Lucas pointed. Sloan squatted, as Lucas had, and Lucas put his flashlight on the blouse. Sloan looked at it for a minute, then said, “Goddamnit.”

  “Is it one of theirs?” asked one of the vets.

  Sloan said, “Could be.” He stood and looked around, and then asked, “Who found it? Who exactly?”

  One of the vets raised his hand.

  Sloan worked the group, taking notes, and a couple more plainclothes guys showed up, then Quentin Daniel, the Homicide lieutenant, and Carter muttered to Lucas, “It’s her shirt. They know it. They’re gone.”

  Daniel took his own long look at the shirt, shook his head, said a few words to the three detectives now talking to the vets, then turned and walked back to Lucas and Carter. “We need to go over this whole block, foot by foot. Carter, I already talked to Phil”—Phil Blessing was the head of the uniform section—“and he’s rounding up twenty guys to get down here and walk it off. You think you can organize that?”

  “Sure, I guess,” Carter said.

  Daniel turned to Lucas. “This is gonna be a mess. I’m borrowing you. Go home and put on a shirt and tie. You got a shirt and tie?”

  “Sure.”

  “All right. I’m hooking you up with Sloan. I want you guys door-to-door. We’re gonna interview every swinging dick for a half-mile around. Take the squad: I want you back here in twenty minutes.”

  “You got it, Chief,” Lucas said.

  Daniel had been his boss when he was working dope, just out of the academy. Daniel had taken an interest, enough that Lucas wondered briefly if he was queer. But he realized after a while that Daniel was interested in the way other people saw the world; other people including new cops. He also learned that Daniel expected to be chief, one day, and didn’t mind being called that.

  And Lucas knew that he wasn’t being promoted. He was being used to pump up the apparent number of detectives working the case. There’d be four or five more patrolmen walking around in shirts and ties before the night was done.

  He could think about that later. He climbed in the squad, drove it to the end of the block before he hit the lights and sirens, and took off, the traffic clearing out in front of him, pedestrians stopping with their toes on the curb, watching him go by. Wondering, maybe, about the smile on his face.

  HE WAS BACK at his apartment in six minutes, and took another thoughtful six minutes to get into a pair of light khaki slacks, a short-sleeve white shirt, and a navy blue linen sport coat with a wine-colored tie. He hesitated over the short-sleeve shirt, because Esquire magazine despised them; but then, Esquire editors probably didn’t have to walk through slum neighborhoods in ninetydegree heat.

  He accessorized with black loafers, over-the-calf navy socks, and, from behind his chest of drawers, a Smith & Wesson Model 40 revolver with a belt-clip holster. He checked himself in the mirror again.

  Lucas liked clothes—always had. They were, he thought, the chosen symbols of a person’s individuality, or lack of it; not a trivial matter. They were also uniforms, and it paid a cop to understand the uniform of the person with whom he was dealing, to distinguish between, say, dope dealer, hippie, gangbanger, biker, skater, artist, and bum.

  In addition to his intellectual interest, he liked to look good.

  He did, he thought, and was out the door.

  Still a little worried about the short sleeves.

  3

  Lucas worked with Sloan late into the night, slogging up and down the dark, declining residential streets, pounding on doors. Ordinarily, there might have been enough bad people around—crack cocaine had arrived that spring, and was spiraling out of control—to inject some extra stress into the work. On this night, there were so many cops on the street that the bad people moved over.

  “Weird thing happened with crack,” Sloan observed, as they tramped between houses, and the dark shadows between streetlights and elm trees. “The pimps got fired. We used to think that the hookers were slaves. Turns out it was more complicated than that.”

  “I gotta say, I haven’t seen some of the boys around,” Lucas said.

  “They’re gone. They’ve been laid off. Had to sell their hats,” Sloan said.

  Lucas said, “When I was working dope, nobody even heard of crack. You had a few guys freebasing, but other than that, it was right up the nose.”

  “Chemical genius out there somewhere,” Sloan said.

  “Sales genius,” Lucas said. “Toot for the common people.”

  Sloan was a few years older than Lucas, a narrow-slatted man who dressed in earth colors from JCPenney. When he wore something flashy, it was usually a necktie, probably chosen by his wife; and it was usually a glittery, gecko green. He’d been developing a reputation as an interrogator, because of a peculiar, caring, softtalking approach he took to suspects. He was as conservative in lifestyle as in dress, having gotten married at eighteen to his highschool sweetheart. He had two daughters before he was twenty-one, and worried about insurance. As different as they were, Lucas liked him. Sloan had a sense of humor, and a good idea of who he was. He was quiet and cool and smart.

  “The word is, you’re moving to plainclothes
right away,” Sloan said, as they moved across the dark end of a block, ready to start on another circle of houses. “Compared to patrol, it’s a different world. Patrol is like football; plainclothes is like chess.”

  “Or like hockey,” Lucas said.

  Sloan looked at him suspiciously. “I’ll have to assume that’s your sense of humor talking,” he said.

  “Why’s that?” Lucas asked.

  “It’s well known that hockey guys are almost as dumb as baseball players.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Lucas said.

  “It’s true,” Sloan said. “In the major college sports, football’s at the top of the intelligence ratings, then wrestling, then basketball, then golf, swimming, hockey, baseball, and tennis, in that order.”

  “Tennis is at the bottom?”

  “Yup. Not only that, the further west you go, the dumber the athletes get,” Sloan said. “By the time you get to the Midwest, tennis players are dumber’n a box of rocks. Across the Rockies? Don’t even ask. The tennis players out there are not so much human, as dirt.”

  “Dirt?”

  “Dirt.”

  “Something else I didn’t know,” Lucas said.

  “Well, you were a hockey player.”

  THEY PUSHED through the gate on a chain-link fence, toward a clapboard house with a narrow front porch with a broken-down couch sitting on it, and a light in one window. Sloan pointed his flashlight into the side yard, at a circle of dirt around an iron stake, and said, “Bad dog.”

  “Could be a horseshoes pit,” Lucas said.

  Sloan laughed. “So you go first.”

  Lucas moved up to the door and knocked, and a dog went crazy behind the door.

  “Bad dog,” Sloan said behind him. “Sounds like one of those bull terriers.”

  Nobody answered for a minute, then two. Lucas pounded again, and a light came on at the back of the house. Another minute, and a man appeared, opening the door just an inch, looked at them over a heavy chain lock. “Who’re you?”