Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  Sloan explained, and the man started shaking his head halfway through the explanation. “I didn’t see no white girls doin’ nothin’,” he said. The dog was snuffling at the man’s pant leg, its toenails scratching anxiously on the linoleum. “I gotta go to bed. I gotta get up at five o’clock.”

  Walking back down the sidewalk, Sloan asked, “You hear what happened to Park Brubaker?” Brubaker was a Korean-American detective, now suspended and looking at time on federal drug charges.

  “Yeah. Dumb shit.”

  “He had problems,” Sloan said.

  “I got problems,” Lucas said. “I don’t go robbing people for their Apple Jacks.”

  They came to a door on Thirty-fifth Avenue, answered by a heavyset white man with a Hemingway beard and a sweaty forehead and an oversized nose. A fat nose. He said, “We didn’t see nothin’ at all. Except what was on TV.” A woman standing behind him said, “Tell them about John.”

  “Who’s John?” Lucas asked.

  “Dude down at Kenny’s,” the man said, with reluctance. “Don’t know his last name.”

  “He’s got a suspect,” the woman said.

  The man scowled at her, and Lucas pressed: “So what about John?”

  “Dude said that there was a crazy guy probably did it,” the man said. “Crazy guy’s been running around the neighborhood.”

  “You know the crazy guy?” Sloan asked.

  “No. We heard John talking about him.”

  “We’ve seen him, walking around, though. The crazy guy,” the woman said.

  “Did John say why he thought the crazy guy did it?” Lucas asked.

  “He said the guy was always lookin’, and never gettin’ any. Said the guy had a record, you know, for sex stuff.”

  “He call the cops?” Sloan asked.

  “I dunno. I don’t know the guy. I don’t know the crazy guy, either, except that I see him on the street sometimes.”

  “Gotta call it in,” Sloan said.

  He had a handset with him, and walked back down the sidewalk while Lucas talked to the man, and especially past him, to the woman. He asked, “What do you know about John? We really need to find him. If he knows anything . . . I mean, these two girls might not have much time. . . .”

  He got a description—John was an overweight man of average height, with an olive complexion and dark hair that curled over his forehead. “Italian-looking,” the woman said.

  Lucas said, “You mean good-looking?”

  “No. He’s too fat. But he’s dark, and he wears those skimpy T-shirts—the kind Italians wear, with the straps over the shoulders?—under regular shirts that he wears open. He’s got this gold chain.”

  The last time they’d seen him, he was wearing jeans and a blue long-sleeved shirt, open over the wife-beater. She added that he liked some of the girls who came in, and she put a little spin on the word “girls.”

  “You mean, working girls,” Lucas said. “I didn’t know they hung at Kenny’s.”

  “They don’t, but there’s that massage place across the street,” she said. “They come over, sometimes, when they don’t have clients. I don’t like to see them in there, myself. I mean, what if somebody thought I was one of them.”

  The guy said, “I wouldn’t mind a massage,” and the woman punched him on the arm, and he said, “Ouch.”

  THEY DIDN’T HAVE much else. A moment later, Sloan came back up the walk. “Cherry and McGuire are coming over,” he said.

  “What for? We got what there is,” Lucas said.

  “Because they don’t think we got what there is,” Sloan said. “We’re supposed to wait until they get here, then knock on some more doors.”

  “Fuck that,” Lucas said. “We need to get over to Kenny’s.”

  “Closed two hours ago,” the man said.

  “Might still be somebody there,” Lucas said.

  Everybody shrugged, and Sloan said, “They want us to finish knockin’ on the doors.”

  CHERRY AND MCGUIRE showed up, two fortyish veterans, and took over. Lucas and Sloan moved on down the block, and got nowhere, Lucas fuming about being knocked off the only positive hint they’d gotten.

  “We did the work, man, they oughta let us take it.”

  “Get used to it,” Sloan said. “Takes about four years before you’re a pro. That’s what they’re telling me. I got three to go.”

  “Fuck a bunch of four years,” Lucas said. He hadn’t told the older detectives about the massage parlor girls who might know John. Let them find it out themselves.

  They worked for two more hours, and Sloan finally quit at the end of his shift and went home to his wife. “I don’t even know what we’re doing,” he said. “We think the kidnapper’ll come to the door and confess?”

  “Somebody must have seen something,” Lucas said. “Seen the kids getting in a car. Seen them going through a door. They can’t just go away.”

  “Somebody would have called, if they were gonna talk,” Sloan said. “When we found that blouse . . . we should have looked around at the baddest guy on the block, and squeezed his pimple head until he coughed them up.”

  Lucas shook his head. “That blouse wasn’t right.”

  “What?”

  “Wasn’t right. Why in the hell would you throw a blouse out a car window? I can see throwing the girl out, if nobody was looking. But why would you throw a blouse out? Tell me one reason.”

  Sloan thought for a moment and said, “The guy killed her, took her blouse as a trophy. The bodies are already in a dumpster somewhere, and he was driving around with the blouse over his face, smelling the chick, getting off on it. At some point, he gets tired of it, or can’t smell her anymore, so he throws it out the window.”

  Lucas grinned at him and said, “That’s perverted. I kinda like it.”

  THE NIGHT WAS still warm, for August, with a hint of rain in the still air. They drove back to Lucas’s place in Sloan’s Dodge, arms out the side windows, Lucas thinking how quiet the city was, and for all they knew, somewhere in its quiet heart, two little girls were being tortured by a monster.

  Sloan dropped him, and went on his way. Lucas went inside, got a beer, sat at the kitchen table and looked at a blue three-ring binder stuffed with paper. In school, he’d lived in an apartment inhabited mostly by nerds from the computer center. Despite his jock status, he had been pulled into some of their role-playing games. Then he wrote a module, which had impressed the nerds, who said it was as good as the commercial modules.

  Talking around with the computer guys, he developed an idea for a football-based strategy game, similar to the war games popular in the seventies, but that would be played on a computer. A computer guy promised to program it, if Lucas could write the scenarios. The work had been harder than he’d expected, and had been delayed when he’d had to take a course in statistics: he wanted the game to be real.

  He sat and looked at paper, which, after the day hunting for the girls, looked like silly paper. Games. Something awful was happening outside, and he was sitting at the kitchen table looking at silly paper.

  He fooled with the coaching modules for a while, then gave up and got a second beer, glanced at the clock. Two o’clock in the morning. He wondered if Cherry and McGuire had gone down to Kenny’s, and what they’d found.

  Restless, he picked up his sport coat, climbed in his Jeep, and headed downtown, left the car at the curb, and walked into City Hall. The place was dark but busy, with cops all over the hallways. Lucas stopped a uniformed guy named Morgan and asked what had happened. “Nothing,” Morgan said. “No sign of them. People are talking about the river again.”

  “I don’t think they’re in there,” Lucas said. “How many guys are working it?”

  “Right now? A half-dozen. Daniel’s still here, but people are starting to freak—the TV people are driving around in their truck. It’s turning into a circus.”

  “You seen Cherry or McGuire?” Lucas asked.

  “Not for a while.”
<
br />   Lucas went down to Homicide, stuck his head in the office, spotted Daniel with his feet up on a desk, talking to a couple of detectives. Lucas went in, idled off to the side for a minute, until Daniel said, “Davenport. What’s happening?”

  “I wondered if Cherry and McGuire got anything at Kenny’s?”

  Daniel shook his head and said, “Not much more than you got.” He looked at a piece of paper on his desk. “The place was closed, but they talked to the manager. He says it’s a guy named John. Nobody knows where he lives, or how to get in touch. Just a guy.”

  “So they struck out,” Lucas said.

  “Well, it’s something,” Daniel said.

  “Right,” said one of the detectives. “We’ve got a suspect named ‘John.’ That narrows it down.”

  Daniel ignored him: “How come you’re still running around?” he asked Lucas.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Lucas said. “I was thinking, you know, if it’s all right with you . . . I might go down and hit that massage place across from Kenny’s. Unless Cherry and McGuire already did.”

  “No, they didn’t,” Daniel said. “Why would they?”

  “Didn’t they get that? That John knows some of those chicks? Maybe that’s why they call him John. Maybe he is one,” Lucas said.

  An annoyed look crept across Daniel’s face. “I guess they didn’t get that. You didn’t mention it?”

  “They told us to take a hike,” Lucas said. “So . . . I’m not doing much.”

  “Step outside with me,” Daniel said, standing up.

  In the hall, he said, quietly, but showing some teeth, “You’re not fuckin’ with us, are you? Withholding information so you can get a shot at it? With these two girls, this wouldn’t be the time to make points.”

  “Hell no,” Lucas lied. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “You should have told Cherry and McGuire what the woman said.”

  “They didn’t want to hear it,” Lucas said. “They were like, ‘Uh-huh, go knock on doors, rook.’”

  Daniel looked at him for a minute, then said, “I can’t pay you overtime. But if you go down there, I’ll back you up if anything comes out of it.”

  Lucas nodded. “Okay. How long you gonna be here?”

  “Not much longer. Don’t call me unless you get something serious—but call me if you do.” He gave Lucas his office and home phone numbers.

  “Did we get anything tonight? Anything?”

  Daniel shook his head. “We got that blouse, and it was Mary’s. Nobody knows how it got there. We think the kids might have walked past Andy’s Cleaners. One of the desk girls says she saw them. That’s only about a block from their house, so maybe she did. It was early, before they were missing.”

  “But they were together?”

  “That’s what the girl says,” Daniel said.

  “Were they walking toward their house, or away?”

  “Away.”

  “Any blood on the blouse?” Lucas asked.

  “Not sure. There’s a small discoloration, could be blood that somebody tried to wash out. We’ll know tomorrow morning.”

  “You think they’re dead?” Lucas asked.

  “Probably not yet. But they will be, soon.”

  PAUL’S THERAPEUTIC MASSAGE occupied the end store in a fivebusiness strip that included a movie rental place, a coin laundry, a dog groomer, and a medical-oxygen service. Lucas parked in front of the massage parlor. A light shone from one window, but a red neon “Open” sign had been turned off.

  When Lucas climbed out of the Jeep and slammed the door, a curtain moved in the window, and he caught the pale flash of a woman’s face. He walked up to the entrance, tried the handle: the heavy steel-cored door was locked. He pounded on it, got no answer. He pounded louder, still got no answer, so he kicked it a few times, shaking the door in its frame, and heard a woman shout, “We’re closed. Go away.”

  Lucas pounded again and shouted, “Police. Open up.”

  He waited for a minute, then kicked the door a few more times—carefully, with the heel, since he was still wearing the loafers—stopped when he heard a bolt rattling on the other side of the lock. The door opened a couple of inches, a chain across the gap, and a narrow blond woman asked, “Cop?”

  Lucas held up his badge: “We’re looking for two missing girls. I need information about a guy you know.”

  “What guy?”

  “His name is John. You guys hang out with him sometimes at Kenny’s. That’s all I know,” Lucas said.

  The door opened another couple of inches. “Did he do it?”

  “He was telling people that he knows who did,” Lucas said. He pushed the door with his fingertips, and she let it swing open a bit more. “So who is he?”

  She looked back over her shoulder and shouted, “Sally.”

  Lucas pushed on the door again, and she let it open. He took that as an invitation, and stepped into a ten-foot-long room with a Formica counter and yellowing white-plaster walls, like in a drycleaning shop. A couple of chairs sat against the window wall, with a low wooden table between them, holding an ashtray and a table lamp with a shade that had a burned spot on one side. A gumball machine sat in a corner, half empty, or half full, depending. Not a place that people would linger for long, Lucas thought.

  A short dark-haired woman came out of the back, behind the counter, looked at Lucas and said, “I’m all done.”

  “He’s a cop,” the blonde said. “He’s looking for this guy John . . . you know, John, the joker.”

  Sally shook her head: “Why would I know where he is?”

  The blonde said, “You’d know better than me. They’re looking for him about those two girls.”

  Sally’s right hand went to her throat: “He took them?”

  “He’s been talking about who might have,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to him.”

  “I really don’t know him,” Sally said. “He’s come in a few times, I got him, you know, gave him a massage. He’s kinda funny, tells jokes and shit.”

  “He ever say where he lives? Ask you to come over? Give you any hint . . .?”

  She shook her head: “No, but I’ll tell you what. He charged the massage last time. I bet we got the slip.”

  Lucas ticked a finger at her: “Thank you. Who do I see about the slip?”

  “Me,” the blonde said. “But since we don’t know his last name, I don’t know how we figure out . . .”

  Sally pressed her palms to her eyes and said, “Let me think,” and a minute later said, “Fourth of July. He was joking about fireworks, you know, when . . . never mind. Anyway, the night of the fourth. Don had a baseball game on the radio, so it couldn’t have been too late.”

  The blonde went around the counter, took out a metal box, and began running through charge slips. Lucas said to Sally, “You said he’s okay. That means, what? He didn’t want anything peculiar?”

  “Hey, it was a therapeutic massage.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Lucas said. “Look, I don’t care what he wants, or what you do. I’m trying to figure out these girls and whether he might be weird. Can you tell me that? Is he weird?”

  Sally shrugged: “He wants the Three—start with a hand job, end with a blow job. Is that weird? I dunno. A hundred and twenty bucks, plus tip. I don’t remember the tip, but it wasn’t . . .” She dug for a word, and came up with one: “Memorable.”

  “So he’s got some money.”

  “He’s got some, anyway,” the woman said. “But I ain’t going to Vegas on a tip I can’t remember.”

  The blonde said, “I got a one-forty at eight forty-five Friday . . . that’s it, probably. Says his name is John . . .”

  “That’s gotta be him,” Sally said.

  Lucas took the slip and walked it to the table lamp. The ink imprint was shaky—the name was John Fell, Lucas thought, but the number was clear. Lucas took down the information, then asked, “You got a Xerox machine?”

  “No . . .”

  “I’m
gonna take this,” he said, waggling the paper slip. “You need the information to make the charge?”

  “We already made it,” the blonde said. “We send it in while you’re still in the room.”

  “Okay.” Lucas flipped a page in his notebook: “I need both your names. I want to see driver’s licenses. I need to know how often he comes in.”

  The blonde began, “You said . . .”

  Lucas shook his head: “I’m not arresting anybody. If he turns out to be somebody, I need to know who I talked to.”

  The blonde’s name was Lucy Landry, and Sally’s name was Dorcas Ryan. John Fell had come in at least once in the past ten days, had been cheerful, funny, even, had been satisfied with the service and paid cash. Ryan had seen him at Kenny’s afterward, and he’d bought her a drink.

  “He bought you a drink, but he didn’t chat? Didn’t tell you about himself?”

  Ryan frowned: “You know what? Almost all he does is tell jokes. Like, ‘You heard the one about the priest who caught the sonofabitch?’ That’s what he does. He’s got a million of them.”

  Lucas used their telephone to call Daniel at home, who answered and, when Lucas identified himself, said, “This better be good.”

  “The guy’s name is John Fell and I’ve got a credit card slip on him. How do I get an address off the credit card?”

  There was a moment of silence, then Daniel said, “What I usually do is call Harmon Anderson, and he does something on the computer.”

  “So we gotta wait until he comes in?”

  “No, no, I’ll bust him out of bed,” Daniel said. “Where’re you?”

  “Down at the massage place,” Lucas said.

  “Go on downtown. I’ll have Anderson meet you there.”

  He hung up, and Ryan was telling Landry, “. . . so the Pope takes off his hat, puts his feet up on the table, and says, ‘You know what? You fuckers are all right.’”

  Landry only half smiled: “It’s not that funny.”