Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  “I didn’t say it was great,” Ryan said. She looked at Lucas. “I told her John’s sonofabitch joke.”

  Lucas shrugged: “I missed it. Can you break a dollar? I need a gumball.”

  BOTTOM LINE, Lucas thought, on his way downtown: he didn’t know how to get an address for a credit card. He needed to fix that. He chewed through the gumball in two minutes, threw the wad of gum out the window and drove faster.

  He got there before Anderson, and had to wait. Anderson showed up twenty-five minutes later, sleepy and annoyed, sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. Lucas was looking over his shoulder and asked, “What’re you doing here?”

  “A credit check,” Anderson said. “All the credit information is in computers. I can get in and look at some of the information for credit card holders. Including addresses and so on.”

  “Neat,” Lucas said. “I’m thinking of getting a Macintosh.”

  “Wait awhile—there’re rumors that they’re going to 512K this fall. The 128K just isn’t enough.”

  “Can’t afford it for a while, anyway,” Lucas said.

  “You patrol guys know all the crack freaks,” Anderson said. “You oughta be able to get one wholesale.”

  “Pretty fuckin’ funny,” Lucas said.

  “No offense,” Anderson said.

  He sounded insincere, Lucas thought. He shut up and watched Anderson work. Five minutes after he started, Anderson had a name and address: “It’s a post office box.”

  “That’s not good.” He wasn’t a detective yet, but he knew that much.

  “The post office will have a name and address for the renter,” Anderson said. “But the thing is, credit card companies don’t usually take post office boxes. Did the hookers get paid?”

  “They said so,” Lucas said.

  “Huh. Well, something’s not right.”

  THE POST OFFICE worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The front end was closed, but Lucas found his way in through the loading dock in the back and showed his ID to a couple of guys throwing canvas mail bags off a truck. One of them went inside and came back with a bureaucrat.

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said. He was a fat little man, fish-pale with what must have been a permanent night shift. “It’s privileged information.”

  “We got two girls missing—”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s against the law for me to give you that information,” the bureaucrat said. “Come back with a search warrant and give it to the postmaster.”

  “This guy could be killing them,” Lucas said.

  “The law says—”

  “Then give me the number for the postmaster,” Lucas said.

  “I can’t do that. It’s the middle of the night.”

  At some level, Lucas realized, the man was enjoying himself, sticking it to the cops. It was possible and even likely that there was a law or regulation about releasing the names of post office box renters; but, he thought, there sure as hell wasn’t a law about calling up the postmaster, even in the middle of the night.

  Lucas got his face close to the bureaucrat’s. “I’ll tell you what. One way or another, I’m gonna get the name off the box. And if these girls are killed, I’m gonna take this conversation to the newspapers and I’m gonna hang it around your neck like a dead skunk. When they find these girls’ bodies, you’ll have reporters standing in your front yard yelling at you.”

  The man flushed: “You can’t threaten me. The law—”

  Lucas crowded closer: “The law doesn’t say you can’t wake up the postmaster. Does it? Does the law say that?”

  The man was furious, and said, “On your head.”

  “On yours,” Lucas said. “You’re now gonna come out looking like an asshole no matter what you do.”

  The bureaucrat said, “Wait here,” and disappeared into the post office.

  One of the truck loaders said, “He is an asshole. That’s his job.”

  “Yeah, well, I got no time for it,” Lucas said.

  THE BUREAUCRAT CAME BACK a minute later, and said, “I got the superintendent of mails on the phone.”

  Lucas talked to the superintendent of mails, who said, “I’m waiving the confidentiality reg in this case because of the emergency, but I’m going to need a letter from your chief outlining the problem. I need to file it.”

  “You’ll get it,” Lucas said.

  “Put Gene back on the line.”

  Lucas left the post office ten minutes later with the paper in his hand: John Fell at an address on Sixth Street SE, Minneapolis. Five minutes away, the sun coming up over St. Paul.

  In his first year as a cop, working patrol and then, briefly, as a dope guy, he’d felt that he was learning things at a ferocious rate: about the street, life, death, sex, love, hate, fear, stupidity, jealousy, and accident, and all the other things that brought citizens in contact with the cops.

  Then the learning rate tailed off. He’d continued to accumulate detail, to see faces, to interpret moves, but at nothing like the rate of his first ten or twelve months.

  Now, investigating, the feeling was back: getting credit card numbers off computers—cool. Manipulating hookers. Threatening bureaucrats. He was crude, and he knew it, but it was interesting and he’d get better at it.

  HE’D LEARN ABOUT DISAPPOINTMENT, too, he found out a few minutes later.

  The address on Sixth Street was a shabby old three-story Victorian house that smelled of rot and microwave food, with six mailboxes nailed to the gray clapboard on the porch. All but one of the mailboxes had names, none of which was Fell. None of them had a John or a J.

  The one unlabeled mailbox was for Apartment Five. He curled up a long zigzag stairway, half blocked at one landing by a bicycle chained to the banister, and pounded on the door to Apartment Five until a woman shouted from Six, “Nobody lives there. Go away.”

  He stepped across the hall and rapped on her door: “Police. Could you open the door, please?”

  “No. I’m not crazy,” the woman shouted back. “What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for a John Fell,” Lucas said.

  “There’s nobody here named John Fell. Or anything Fell,” she shouted.

  “You mean, in your apartment, or in the house?”

  “In the house. There’s nobody named John Fell. Go away or I’ll call nine-one-one.”

  “Call nine-one-one. Tell them there’s a cop at your door named Lucas Davenport. I’ll call them on my handset. . . .”

  She did that, and opened the door three minutes later, a woman in her early twenties with bad sleep hair. “It is you. You played hockey with a friend of mine. Jared Michael? I’d see you on the ice.”

  “Oh, hell, yes,” Lucas said. “I haven’t seen him lately, maybe a couple years . . .”

  “He’s in marketing at General Mills,” she said. “He works twenty-two hours a day. You’re looking for those girls? I didn’t even know you were a cop now.”

  “Yeah, I am, and we’re looking for a guy named John Fell,” Lucas said. He described Fell, and she was shaking her head.

  “Everybody in this house is a student. Three apartments are Asians, I’m by myself, Five is empty and has been empty all year—it’s got a bad smell they can’t get out. The previous tenants put rat poison inside their walls because they could hear rats running, and I guess all the rats died and now they’re in the walls rotting and there’s no way to get them out.”

  “Nice story,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, well.” She took a moment to sweep her hair back from her face. “The last apartment, One, is Bobby and Vicki Arens, and Bobby’s got red hair and he’s about six-six.”

  “Who’s been here the longest?”

  “Well, me . . . and the Lees, in Four. We both got here two years ago. The Lees, you know, are Chinese, they’re studying medicine. They’re really nice.”

  “Okay. Shoot. I’m sorry I woke you up,” Lucas said.

  “Listen, come on in for some Rice Krispies
,” she said. “We can think about it. I won’t be able to get back to sleep anyway.”

  “Huh,” he said. He looked at his watch. A little after five-thirty, and he could use a bite, and she was a pretty woman. “All right.”

  IN ADDITION TO a bowl of Rice Krispies, he advanced another inch in his education. The woman’s name was Katie Darin, and she suggested that a student house would be the perfect place to set up a fake credit card, or a mail drop.

  “Nobody knows who’s coming and going—people move in and out all the time,” she said. “The post office still delivers mail to my box for people who haven’t lived here for years. So, you know, you want a fake ID, you have it delivered here. The post office doesn’t know. Everybody’s in class when the mailman comes. He comes at ten o’clock, and this place is empty.”

  “The guy I’m looking for set up his Visa account two years ago,” Lucas said.

  “When did he set up the post office box?” she asked.

  “Six months ago.”

  “So he was picking up his mail here, for a year and a half?”

  “I guess,” Lucas said. “He didn’t charge much, but he did from time to time.”

  “So the mail gets sent to Apartment Five, or wherever, and the mailman doesn’t care, he just sticks it in the Apartment Five box,” Darin said. “There’s probably mail in it right now. This guy probably knows what day his Visa bill would get here, and he’d just come by and pick it up. No problem.”

  “The question is, why would he set up a fake ID?” Lucas asked.

  “Because he’s a criminal of some kind,” she answered. “Or maybe, political.”

  “Political?”

  “Yeah, you know, somebody who’s underground,” she said. “Somebody left over from the seventies.”

  Lucas scratched his nose: “I gotta think about it.”

  “How long have you been a detective?” she asked.

  Lucas looked at his watch: “About eight hours.”

  She smiled and said, “So you got thrown in the deep end.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” he said. “You don’t remember anybody like Fell? Do you think the Lees might? They overlapped by a year and a half.”

  “We could ask them.” She looked at the stove clock. Six o’clock. “They’ll be up.”

  THE LEES LOOKED like twins, same height, same haircuts, same dress; except that one of them had breasts. The one with breasts remembered Fell. “He was not supposed to take mail. He didn’t live here. I ask him once, why do you take mail? He say, the post office still brings it by mistake. But after I ask him, I don’t see him again.”

  That was, she guessed, about six months earlier. She added two details:

  —Fell was missing the little finger on his left hand. “I see it when he opened the mailbox.”

  —He drove a black panel van.

  Lucas took a few minutes to establish that the van wasn’t a minivan, but Mrs. Lee was clear. He drove a panel van, with no windows in the sides. Lucas didn’t say so, but it occurred to him that whoever took the girls must have had a vehicle, and a panel van would be perfect. More than perfect—almost necessary. It’d be tough to kidnap a couple of kids with a convertible.

  When they left, Darin suggested that if Lucas became obsessed with finding Fell, he’d taken his eye off the ball. “You’re looking for him because he said something about a crazy guy, and other people know the crazy guy. Maybe the other people would be easier to find.”

  “Good thought,” Lucas said. She was not only pretty, she was smart. He looked at his watch again. Ten after six. He was due back in uniform in eight hours. “I gotta roll. Thanks for everything . . . maybe you oughta give me your phone number, in case I need more advice.”

  She smiled, then said, “All right.”

  HE WENT BACK to City Hall, to the licensing department, prepared to wait until somebody showed up. But when he got there and looked through the glass panel on the door, he saw a light coming out of an office. He banged on the door for a moment, until a man in a flannel shirt came out of the office and shook his head and waved him off. Lucas held up his badge, and the guy came over. Through the glass, he asked, “What?”

  “I need a name.”

  The guy wasn’t the right guy, but he knew how to work the computer, and he pulled up the owners of Kenny’s, the bar where Fell had been hanging out, as a Steve and Margery Gardner from Eagan. A half-hour later, Lucas pulled into their driveway and pounded on the door until an irritated Steve Gardner came out from the back of the house in a bathrobe.

  “What the hell?” he asked.

  Lucas held up his badge: “We’re looking for the two lost girls. You’ve got a customer named Fell, who was talking about a crazy guy. . . .”

  They talked in the house’s entry, and Margery came out after a minute. Neither one had any idea who Fell was. “You gotta talk to the manager, Kenny Katz,” Steve Gardner said. “We own six bars, we’re in Kenny’s about three times a week for an hour a time. Talk to Kenny.”

  They had seen the crazy man. “He’s been around all summer. He’s tall, thin, he’s been dribbling a basketball around. I’ve seen him down by the river a couple times, and he used to stand by the ramp onto I-94 with a sign asking for money. Said he was a homeless vet, but he doesn’t look like a vet. I don’t know how you’d find him—just drive around, I guess.”

  Lucas went back to his Jeep. Just drive around, I guess. Patrol cops—guys like him—could do that, of course, and probably would be doing that, if he couldn’t come up with anything better.

  He looked back at the Gardner house and filed away another fact: just because you figured out a possible source of information, and then figured out how to find them, and then rousted them out of bed . . . didn’t mean they’d know a single fuckin’ thing. He’d used up an hour learning that.

  A thought popped in: the post office. There’s probably a guy who systematically walks around the neighborhood every day. . . .

  He headed back downtown, around to the back of the post office again. The old bureaucrat had gone at seven o’clock. The new bureaucrat decided that he wouldn’t be breaking any regulation by letting Lucas talk to the mail carriers, who were sorting mail into the address racks. The new bureaucrat took him down to one wing of the post office and introduced him to four mail carriers who carried the near south side.

  Two of them had seen the crazy man.

  One of them knew where he lived.

  4

  A dilemma: Lucas could call the information to the overnight guy in Homicide, or continue to push it on his own. If he’d already been a detective, he would have called it in, and gotten some help. As a patrolman, temporarily in plainclothes—not even temporarily, as much as momentarily—he’d probably have the whole thing taken away from him, and given to people with more experience in investigation.

  That had already happened once, and he didn’t want it to happen again. He mulled it over only as long as it took him to get back to his Jeep. There was no way that Daniel would be back in his office yet, and since Daniel was his sole contact on the case, Lucas felt justified in running along on his own, until Daniel pulled him off.

  Or until he turned back into a pumpkin, at three o’clock, and had to put his uniform back on.

  HE’D BEEN UP for twenty hours, but still felt fairly clean. He climbed in the Jeep and headed over to the Mississippi, well downstream from the spot where, the day before, he’d been sent to look for the kids.

  The crazy guy with the basketball, the mailman said, lived in a couple of plastic-covered Amana refrigerator boxes that he’d jammed in a washed-out space under an oak tree. The thick gnarled tree roots held, covered, and concealed the boxes, and the plastic sheets kept the water off when it rained.

  The site should be easy enough to find, the carrier said, because it was right across a chain-link fence a few hundred yards north of Lake Street. “There’s a big yellow house, the only one up there, and there’s a hole under the fence about forty
or fifty yards south of it, where you can scrape under. He’s the only guy I’ve seen down there. The only bum.”

  The sun was getting hot, promising another warm day. Lucas drove down West River Parkway, into a neighborhood of older, affluent homes, carefully kept, spotted with flower gardens and tall overhanging trees. He parked his Jeep in a no-parking zone just south of the yellow house, put a cop card on the dashboard. When he got out, a man on the sidewalk, who was retrieving a Star Tribune, called, “You can’t park there.”

  “I’m a cop,” Lucas said, walking down toward him. He nodded toward the bluff. “There used to be a homeless man, living under a tree around here. The other side of the fence.”

  “He’s gone,” the man said. “We had the park cops out here, and they ran him off. Three or four weeks ago.”

  Damn it. “Where was he?” Lucas asked. “I need to take a look.”

  “You can take a look, but he’s gone,” the man said. He was a little too heavy, with a successful lawyer’s carefully tanned face. He came down the sidewalk, his sandals flapping on the concrete; he was wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts, his black hair slicked back. He reminded Lucas a little of Jack Nicholson. “This way.”

  Lucas followed him up the street, and the man asked, “What’s this all about?”

  “We want to talk to him about some missing kids,” Lucas said.

  “The girls? He’s the one?”

  “Don’t know that,” Lucas said. “You ever see the guy around any kids?”

  “No, I never did. But I never saw him much,” the man said. “I’m usually outa here by eight o’clock or so, and I don’t get home until six. My wife says he’d come out in the middle of the morning, go under the fence, but we never saw him come back. We figured he came back after dark.”

  The man pointed across the street to an aged, heavily branched oak: “He lived under that tree. There’s a place just down the road where you can slide under the fence. Might tear your clothes up.”