Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  Chip took them down a branch and over a wall, then through a narrow natural crack half filled with dirt. They were squatwalking now, under a four-foot ceiling, which led to a hole in the top of a dry storm sewer. They shined their lights down the hole and found another thin stream of water, and more sand, with no sign of footprints.

  “He could have gotten down there, but I can’t believe he’d have landed in the water and never made a print,” Chip said.

  Lucas said, “If he did, he could have gotten out, right?”

  “Yeah, he could’ve walked back into town, got out at a drain, if he could find a loose one. There probably are a couple. Or, he could follow it out to the river, but the exit is barred.”

  Lucas looked both ways and said, “He can’t dribble a basketball. He didn’t jump down there and not make tracks. Let’s back out.”

  THEY BACKED OUT of the crack and found that the other cops had pushed on, down a ledge and into a cavernous room that might have been a dungeon in a post-industrial vampire’s castle. The ceiling was invisible in the murk, and the place was full of huge rusty pipes, more unidentifiable superstructure, and a couple of shafts, with steel ladders and wrist-thick ropes that disappeared into the gloom. “They go up to the power plant,” Chip said. “You can get up there, but the entrance at the top is always blocked off. Didn’t used to be, but they had some bums set up housekeeping a few years back.”

  Somebody called in the dark, “I got some tracks.”

  They went over and looked, and found the prints they’d been following in. They went even farther back into the room.

  Sloan asked Chip, “Is there any way out of here?”

  “There are some tunnels, but they’re all dead ends, and not far now. There’s a pretty good storage cave over there to the left. That’s probably where he’s hiding. Little nooks and crannies back in there.”

  Sloan said, “All right, everybody, we think he’s still in front of us. Take it slow, keep your lights way out in front of you. No hurry—we take it slow.”

  They spread out and checked the rest of the big room, eventually moving to a cluster in the back, around a seven-foot-high tunnel, maybe twenty feet long, that showed a black patch to the left, down at the end—a big dark space. Lucas and Sloan led the way in, and as they came up to the cave, found another smaller branch going off to the right. A uniform cop crawled down it, came back a few seconds later: “Nothing. Dead end.”

  Lucas and Sloan shined their lights into the cave. As Chip said, it was deep, and fairly wide. Squared off, it had been carved into the sandstone by humans, rather than by water. They couldn’t see quite to the end of it.

  “It smells awful,” a cop said.

  “Like something’s been dead for a while,” Lucas said.

  “Bat shit,” Chip called, from the end of the line. “Lots of bat shit. Guano.”

  “If he’s in there, and he’s got a gun, we’re done,” one of the cops said.

  “I don’t think he’s ever had a gun,” Lucas said. He turned: “Hey, Chip, Russ? Could we get those lanterns up here?”

  The two sewer guys came up, and the extra light was enough to show them the end of the cave. There was no sign of Scrape, not even footprints. Lucas pointed at a band of sand ten feet in: “He either flew over that, or he’s behind us.”

  Russ the sewer guy said, “There’s a small side room down to the left. He could be in there—it’s about the only place left.”

  Lucas nodded, moved ahead with the light. Another cop pulled his gun and said, “If he comes after you with something, just get flat and out of the way.”

  Lucas went in, saw the side hole, again as a patch of black. He edged up to it: “Scrape? Hey, Scrape? We don’t want to hurt you, man. Come out of there. . . .”

  Not a sound. He stuck his head around the edge of the hole, shined the light in. Empty. There seemed to be a cavity in the roof. He got on his knees, crawled inside, and shined the light up the hole: just enough space to stand up in, and it was empty, and smelled of water and something else, like clothes left too long in a washer. And the wall moved, and he realized his face was inches from another school of cockroaches, or whatever they were. He quailed, and knelt, and got out.

  He said to Sloan: “He’s behind us.”

  At that moment, a cop called, “Hey, Jesus, Jesus,” and a swarm of bats flew through them, spiraling out of the cave and into the large outer room. Lucas froze, creeped out, and when they were gone, moved back to the tunnel. They’d left two cops in the outer room, and the two of them shouted warnings at each other as the bats came through.

  IN THE MAIN ROOM, Scrape remained hidden until he heard what he’d feared: one of the cops said, “I think I’ll climb up there and look around. Maybe he’s in one of those crannies behind those pipes.”

  Another voice: “You’ll fall on your ass.”

  “Shoot, I use to climb up on top of water towers just to look around.”

  “If you’re gonna do it, take the big flash.”

  “Let me see . . . ladder feels fine.”

  “Careful, there . . .”

  A cop was climbing, and in two minutes, he’d put a light on Scrape. He was behind them, his only chance was to drop down and run for it. Maybe more guys outside, but he’d have to take the chance, Scrape thought. He shivered with fear: have to take the chance. If he just lay there, they’d get him and put him in the hospital and they’d tie him down and do their experiments. . . .

  He could hear the cop climbing up the ladder, one step at a time, the other cop shining a light up on the higher rungs. Then he could see the cop, still climbing. When he turned, with the flashlight, Scrape would be right there.

  Scrape pushed himself up on his elbows, cocked his knees. When the cop seemed to have turned his head away, he pushed himself to his feet and looked down at the other cops. He was in luck: the other cop had his back to him.

  He hooked a hand around a piece of rebar to brace himself, felt the rebar move; and he jumped, holding on to the rebar to keep himself upright, and hit with a thud. He saw the cop turn, and Scrape took off, the rebar still in his hand. He’d pulled it out, he realized, maybe he’d have a use for it, maybe God put it there.

  He had a good lead going into the tunnel, and he knew where he was going. . . .

  LUCAS WAS THIRD in line again, heading back out. He said to Sloan, “Another ten million cockroaches . . .” Then there was a clatter, metal on metal, and one of the cops in the big room shouted, “Hey, stop, stop,” and a second later, “There he is . . . there he is . . . he’s coming out, he’s coming out. He’s coming out. . . .”

  Lucas and Sloan ran back to the big room, too late to see what had happened, but saw the two cops they’d left behind, running toward the exit, their guns drawn. They shouted again, “Watch out, he’s coming.”

  Sloan said, “Oh, shit.”

  And three seconds later, a single shot: BAM. The noise was muffled by the branching of the caves, but there was no question of what it was, and the cops all headed toward the exit tunnel, trailed by the sewer guys. They could hear more shouting, and two or three minutes later, back at the exit, they found four cops crouched over a body.

  Lucas came up and looked down: Scrape, lying faceup, looking not so much tired, as resigned. His eyes were moving, but glazed, and his heels scraped at the sand, as though trying to push himself out into the light. He had a hand-sized patch of blood on his chest.

  “Get a goddamn ambulance,” Lucas said. Lucas headed for the entrance, but another cop was there, shouting, “What? What?” and had a gun out.

  “He’s dead,” said a crouching cop, from behind him. Lucas turned, took a step back, and looked again. Scrape was gone, his eyes still open, but deathly still.

  Another one, the shooter, said, “Jeez, I never even aimed. He had that iron thing—”

  “It’s not you, man, you did the right thing,” a third cop said. “He was coming right for you.”

  A two-foot-long piece of rus
ted rebar lay just down the tunnel from Scrape’s body.

  Sloan said, “Jesus. Okay. Freeze everything. You guys back off. We need an ambulance down here.”

  “He’s dead, Sloan,” one of the cops said.

  “I’d rather have a doctor tell me that,” Sloan said. “ ’ Cause if he blows a bubble five minutes from now, and the papers ask us why we didn’t get a doc on him, I don’t want to say because Larry Plant told me so.”

  Lucas pushed through, squeezed past the bars, saw Daniel at the top of the bank, and shouted, “We need an ambulance. Right now.”

  Daniel shouted back, “Who’s hurt?”

  “Scrape. He came out with an iron bar in his hands. He’s dead, but Sloan is asking for a doc.”

  Daniel nodded and hurried off, and Lucas went back into the cave.

  A cop was saying, “The only bad thing about it is, we can’t ask him where he stashed the girls.”

  Somebody said in a hushed voice, “Christ, remember that thing down in Florida where that girl was buried alive?”

  They all thought about that and looked at the body, and then the cop who did the shooting said, “I saw him coming with the bar and I didn’t know if it was a rifle or something and he lifted it up . . .”

  “Like a baseball bat,” said another cop. “If he’d hit you with that, that’d be you laying there. . . .”

  DANIEL CAME DOWN and moved them all out of the cave, except for one guy to keep an eye on the body, although there would be nobody to interfere with it, except the bats. A few minutes later, an ambulance arrived. Two medics were taken down the riverbank, and a minute later were back: Scrape was dead.

  The crime-scene specialists showed up next, went down to the cave. Daniel, who’d been talking to the shooter, took Lucas aside. “How’d you find him?”

  Lucas told the story about Karen Frazier calling him at home, about his interview with Millard, about hearing somebody moving in the entrance.

  “You think this Millard guy is still down at the Lunch Box?”

  “Yeah. I had him pretty scared,” Lucas said. “If he’s not, he’ll be easy enough to find. He’s staying at the Mission.”

  Daniel slapped him on the back. “You did good on this, Lucas. I’m gonna talk to the chief. Del tells me you’re pretty hot to get out of uniform.”

  “I am,” Lucas said. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure Scrape took the girls. There are too many questions.”

  “There are a few,” Daniel said. “What I need for you to do is, I need you to give a complete statement, with everything you think. I got some of it from Del, and it worries me. Don’t leave anything out.”

  “If we could just put hands on this Fell dude. That’s all I want—just to talk to him.”

  “What I need to do is find those girls,” Daniel said. “I’m not gonna rest right until we do it. We need to turn this cave inside out, we need to search every goddamn cave on these bluffs. . . .

  “He couldn’t get them down here without a vehicle,” Lucas said. “I keep stumbling over that. Where’s his vehicle? He couldn’t have just marched them down here.”

  Daniel said, “Yeah, yeah. I need to get you back to the office. Goddamnit, too much to do. Tell you what: you go down and get this Willard guy. Is that right, Willard?”

  “Millard,” Lucas said.

  “Get him, and bring him back here. We’re gonna need to squeeze him. Ah, Christ, look at this . . .”

  And here came the media: the Channel Three truck. They were quick and close, but the other stations would be right behind them.

  Daniel took Lucas by the arm and steered him up the slope. “You get Millard, get him back to my office. Just sit him there. I’ll be back as quick as I can. And we’re gonna need statements. Lots of statements . . .”

  LUCAS FOUND MILLARD sitting outside the Lunch Box. “They never let me sit inside, even when I got money.”

  “I gotta take you downtown to make a statement,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”

  “You’re not gonna put me in jail?”

  “No, no—just need a statement. No jail, as long as you keep your shit together.”

  “What happened to Scrape?” he asked, as Lucas pushed him toward the Jeep. There were eight or ten squad cars around the shooting scene, two TV trucks, thirty or forty spectators.

  “Got himself shot,” Lucas said. “Went after a cop with an iron bar.”

  “Don’t sound like Scrape. He was afraid of everybody,” Millard said.

  “Well, that’s what happened.”

  “How bad was he shot? Is he gonna be okay?”

  “No, I don’t think, uh . . . it’s gonna work out that well.”

  A DOZEN COPS were standing around outside the Homicide office, not knowing what to do, now that a suspect was down. Lucas turned Millard over to another cop, got an empty desk and started typing up a statement. Daniel came back, and he and another cop talked to Millard for ten minutes, then sent him on his way. Lucas gave Daniel his statement, and Daniel read it, came back with a half-dozen questions, and told him to rewrite it.

  Lucas was working on the rewrite when he heard one of the cops talking to Daniel about Ronald Rice. He turned and looked at them, and the other detective was flipping through a stack of paper, explaining something, and Lucas said, “Hey.”

  Daniel looked over and Lucas asked, “What about Ronald Rice?”

  “He got stabbed,” Daniel said, and he started to turn back to the other cop.

  “I know that,” Lucas said. “Did he wake up?”

  Daniel: “No.”

  The other guy said, “He croaked.”

  Lucas: “He died?”

  “Lucas, write the statement,” Daniel said.

  “But I got a guy who told me who stabbed Rice, and who the witnesses were, but I sorta let it go—he wasn’t dead,” Lucas said. He held his hands out in a “What the hell?” gesture: “I was gonna bring it up,” he said.

  The other cop said, “What?”

  Lucas gave them a quick summary, and Daniel shook his head. “Okay. Give it all to Dick.” He turned to the first cop. “Dick, you go talk to this Delia. I mean . . .” He turned back, and sputtered: “Jesus Christ, Davenport, you were gonna bring it up?”

  BY THE TIME Lucas finished, Daniel had gone off to talk to the chief and the mayor.

  Del came in. “I hear you bagged him,” he said to Lucas.

  “Not me. It was Ted Hughes,” Lucas said. “I don’t think he meant to, he sort of jerked off a shot.”

  “I meant, you were the guy who tracked him.” Del sat down in a chair across from Lucas’s desk.

  Lucas said, “You know what? Daniel was telling me about the evidence they got—that box from the pizza place. I kinda don’t believe it. I want to find this Fell guy.”

  “Maybe you can work it some other time,” Del suggested.

  “I was thinking, tonight . . .”

  Del was shaking his head. “Look, Lucas . . . They’ve got a dead suspect, and they’ve got all kinds of evidence against him. If there was a little less evidence, or if he was a little less dead, then maybe they’d let you look for Fell. But now that Scrape is dead, they need him to be the bad guy.”

  “The girls—”

  “The girls are gone,” Del said. “Everybody knows it. That was blood on the blouse . . . man, they can’t afford to have Scrape be innocent. That’d open a huge can of worms. They’d have shot an innocent guy, and screwed up the investigation. What I’m telling you is, I guess, it’s done.”

  “Doesn’t seem right,” Lucas said.

  “I’m just sayin’. Not sayin’ it’s right.” Del shook his head. “It happens, and I can smell it coming.”

  “What do you think?” Lucas asked.

  “I’d like to find Fell,” Del said. “I’d really like to find him. But there’s a lot of evidence against Scrape. So, I don’t know. I just don’t.”

  Lucas ran his hands through his hair. “I’ll tell you what. I’m gonna find the guy. I do
n’t give a shit what anybody says. I’m tracking his ass down.”

  Del shrugged. “Good. Nice to have a hobby. C’mon. Let’s go get a Coke. You gotta tell me about this whole Ronald Rice thing. I just got the story from Roy Patterson. You were gonna bring it up?” Del started laughing. “You broke a murder case in your spare time, and you were gonna bring it up?”

  Lucas got the feeling that he’d done something unusual.

  THERE WAS a press conference later that day, Lucas standing in the back of the crowd, in which a mournful chief of police said, “We know we got the killer, and there’s every sign that the little girls are gone. Have been killed. We haven’t found them yet, and will press on with every available man. We will find them. . . .”

  BUT THEY NEVER DID.

  THAT NIGHT, Daniel took Lucas aside and said, “I talked to the chief. You’ll be temporarily assigned to Intelligence, but you’ll be working with me. Can’t promote you yet, we don’t have the slot, but you’re the next guy up—you’ll have it in six months, max, and you’ll be working in plainclothes until then. You’re gonna be a goddamned fantastic detective, Lucas. You broke this case, and you took the Rice case and stuffed it. Un-fuckin’-believable. I’ve never seen anybody do it better, and you’re a rook.”

  “I never found my guy,” Lucas said, with some bitterness riding on his voice. “I never found Fell.”

  “You need to evaluate,” Daniel said. “Fell is a person of interest, all right? But we have that cardboard box with Scrape’s fingerprints on it, and we’re looking for the witness who saw Scrape throw the box in the dumpster. We’re really looking.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Listen: in every case you have, for the rest of your career, there’ll be loose ends. Things you can’t explain,” Daniel said. “This isn’t the kind of job where everything ties up in a knot. We’re walking in a fog, man. Every once in a while, it clears up enough that you can see something, but then it comes right back down. You’ll have to learn to live with that. But I’ll tell you what, it’s more interesting than any other job you could ever find. More complicated. Sherlock Holmes was a fuckin’ piker compared to us, compared to what we do.”