Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  “They all still live here—around here. One’s out in Stillwater,” Richards said. “I took them right from the ID numbers you have, up to the present. Names, addresses, phone numbers.”

  “Terrific,” Lucas said. “Now, I need something else. I need you to listen to these two tapes. Take you two minutes.”

  Richards sat down, put the headphones on, listened. When he was done, he frowned and asked, “A little strange—that was the same guy both times, right?”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Lucas said. He looked at his notes. “In both calls, the operator asks if the call is an emergency, and he says, ‘Maybe’ in the first one, and ‘Yes,’ in the second, but then, in both of them, he says exactly, ‘I think so.’ Then at the end of the tape, he refuses to give up his name, with almost the same words: ‘I don’t want to get involved.’”

  Richards said, “I was listening more to his voice. He’s got a kind of prissy way of talking, you know what I’m saying?”

  “English teacher,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, like that.”

  Lucas put the two tapes back in their envelopes, took out his cell phone, and called Marcy. She picked up and said, “I’m in a meeting.”

  “I know, but I needed to ask you something. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take the two tapes of the nine-one-one calls and have a voice guy look at them,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I think the two tips came from the same guy, which, if you listened to what he’s saying on the tapes, is unlikely, unless he’s the killer. So, if it’s okay with you . . . I’ll leave a receipt with Clark.”

  “Why don’t you just sit tight for five minutes?” She crunched on something, a carrot or a stalk of celery. “We’re about done here, and I’ll be back there.”

  “Really five minutes? Not twenty minutes?”

  “Really five minutes.”

  SHE WAS BACK in ten minutes, crunching on carrot slices from a Ziploc bag. They went in her office, and she listened to the 911 recordings, and said, “Same guy. Okay, take them.” She popped the second tape out of the recorder and pushed them across her desk.

  “Thank you,” Lucas said.

  “You’re really into this, huh?”

  “Yeah. I wish you were, a little bit more.”

  “I’m interested. I’ve got Hote working on it full-time, and if we see anything at all, I can pull another guy,” she said. “But I’ve got that Magnussen thing going, and we’re tracking Jim Harrison . . . you know.”

  “So you’re busy,” Lucas said. “So don’t give me any shit about looking at the Jones girls. I’ll keep you up to date, and if I can, and if we identify someone, I’ll get you there for the kill . . . if I can.”

  “Try hard,” she said, a little skeptically.

  He grinned and spread his arms and said, “I always do.”

  She laughed and asked about Weather, and about Letty, and the conversation rambled back to the good old days. They’d once gone off to the Minnesota countryside where Lucas had gotten in a fistfight with a local sheriff’s deputy. “If I hadn’t talked our way out of that, you’d probably still be on a road gang somewhere,” Marcy said.

  “You talked our way out of it? What are you talking about, I negotiated,” Lucas said.

  “Negotiated, my ass,” Sherrill said.

  “I did negotiate your ass, if I remember correctly,” Lucas said. “I was so weak when I got back from that trip I could barely crawl. . . .”

  And they were laughing again, talking about taking down the LaChaise gang, and Sherrill said, “It was all pretty good, wasn’t it? I gotta tell you, by the way—just between you and me—the Democrats want me to run for the state senate. Rose Marie’s old seat, it’s coming up empty.”

  “You gonna do it?” Lucas asked.

  “Thinking about it,” she said. “I feel like where I am now—I mean, I kicked this job’s ass—I feel like I’m on a launchpad. I’m good on TV, I’ve got a rep. I could go someplace with politics.”

  “You’d have to hang around with politicians,” Lucas pointed out.

  “You say things like that, but you hang around with politicians yourself,” Sherrill said.

  “So go for it,” Lucas said. “You want me to whisper in the governor’s ear? He’s always had an eye for hot-chick politicians.”

  “Well, if you find your mouth pressed to his ear, someday, instead of that other area, and can’t think of what to say . . . you could mention my name.”

  Before he left, she patted the envelope with the tapes and asked how long it would take to confirm that the caller was the same man on both.

  “Maybe tomorrow, or the day after,” Lucas said.

  “So call me tomorrow and tell me what you got,” she said.

  “Yes, dear,” Lucas said.

  ON THE WAY HOME, he thought, Good old days. Not always so good: Marcy had been shot twice over the years, both times seriously. She was lucky she was still alive . . . but so was Lucas, for that matter.

  With that thought, he went home and had a vegetarian dinner and talked to his kids and spent some time in the bathroom with Sam, who was having a little trouble with toilet training—“He knows what to do, he’s just being stubborn,” Weather said. “He needs some encouragement from his father.”

  Then he sat alone in the den and thought more about the Jones case. They had a number of entries into the case, and any one of them might produce Fell. The most promising, he thought, was the probability that one of the massage-parlor women would identify Fell as Kelly Barker’s attacker, through the Identi-Kit picture.

  If that didn’t work, he’d give the picture to the media; that might well produce an ID, especially if Fell had stayed in the area.

  And, he thought, if Barker talked Channel Three into putting her in front of a camera, and if Fell saw it, and believed that she was the only witness against him, and if he were genuinely mad . . . might he not be tempted to get permanently rid of the only witness who could identify him?

  Something more to think about.

  A trap?

  But probably not: too much like TV.

  12

  The Jones girls’ killer sat in his living room staring blankly at the TV, a rerun of a Seinfeld show, which he’d seen twenty times, the one about the Soup Nazi. He was dead tired, sat drinking a Budweiser, eating corn chips with cream cheese, trying to blink away the weariness as he waited for the old man to show up.

  The killer was a large man, dressed in oversized jeans and a gray T-shirt; rolls of fat folded over his belt, and trembled like Jell-O down his triceps. He had thick black hair, heavy eyebrows, dark eyes, a small, angular nose, and a petulant, turned-down mouth. A mouth that said that nothing had worked for him: nothing. Ever.

  His living room was small and cluttered. Off to one side, in a den not much larger than a closet, a half-dozen rack-mounted servers pushed the temperature in the room up into the eighties. He could take eighty-three or eighty-four, but any higher than that, he couldn’t sleep. He was right at that level, he thought, and sure enough, the air conditioner kicked on.

  And started eating his money.

  NOT THAT he could sleep anyway.

  He’d never slept more than five or six hours a night, except when he was popping Xanax, and that might get him seven hours for a week or so. He suspected he needed eight or nine hours, long term, to stay alive. He wasn’t getting it. He’d get up tired, be tired all day, go to bed tired, and then lie there, staring at the dark.

  He suffered from anxiety, and felt that he had a right to. He had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, was grossly overweight, and had a set of vicious, burning hemorrhoids that might someday put him on an operating table.

  And now the Jones girls had come back to haunt him.

  Then there was the old man.

  THE KILLER, back in the day, had been an almost-college-graduate; and then, after college, he’d worked at a half-dozen jobs in electronics. Computers, everybody had sai
d, were the machines of the future, and people with a computer education were assured of success.

  The reality, the killer found out, was that a half-dozen courses in electronics would get you the same status and income as a TV repairman—not even that, after people began to accept the idea that computers were disposable. Then, they simply threw them away, rather than fix them when they broke.

  He trudged around the edge of the computer business for ten years, and finally, and almost inevitably, given his deepest interests, he wound up selling porn. He ran a half-dozen porn sites out of his den, collecting barely enough to pay for food, taxes, and the mortgage. Porn supposedly was a mainstay of the Internet, an easy way to get rich. Maybe it was, but if so, where was his money? Back at the beginning, when the Net was just starting up, he’d worked hard at it, gathering hundreds of thousands of porno shots from around the world, plus thousands of short videos.

  Now, he let the servers do the work. He had a computer kid over at the U who kept the site going—turning over the daily offerings so they didn’t recur too quickly, and stealing videos and photos from other sites when he could—in return for free access to the porn for himself and his friends, and a hundred dollars a week. The Jones killer did the books, processing the credit card numbers as they trickled in, a few every day, but, it seemed, fewer every day.

  He had money worries.

  The porn brought in two grand a month, after expenses. Nothing, really.

  He made the rest of his money on eBay, reselling almost anything he could turn up that might be of value to somebody, somewhere. Over the years, he’d developed an eye for moneymakers collecting dust in the back of junk stores; knew the back rooms of every junk store between the Ozarks and the Canadian line, from the Mississippi to the Big Horns. His latest score had been a bunch of silk kimonos that turned up in a bundle of rags from Japan. He bought sixty of them for twelve dollars each, sold them for an average of fifty to a hundred, depending on color and condition.

  Enough to keep going for another couple of months.

  But he needed money for his travel, and he needed to travel. The need was growing. He really would like to go first class, because he’d become large enough that tourist class was starting to hurt, especially on the long flights.

  THE KILLER WAS a borderline manic-depressive, currently sliding down the slope into depression. That hadn’t been helped when the cops turned over the basement of his old house by the university, and found the bodies of the Jones girls.

  He was mostly worried about the neighbors from back then. He’d never been a social butterfly, but still, some might remember him, if the cops could find them. He didn’t worry too much about the landlord, who was dead, and had been for years; and he’d always paid the rent in cash, for a ten percent discount, which the landlord had recouped by not paying taxes on the cash.

  In his manic phases, the killer had spent twenty years running his porn sites and collecting both junk for resale, and incautious young girls. He’d taken seven of them between the middle eighties and the middle nineties, and once kept one for almost a month before she died. Three, including the Jones girls, had come from Minnesota. The others had come from Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois. The Illinois girl had been an experiment, a bone-thin black girl from East St. Louis, taken to see if black girls were sexually different, like he’d heard. They weren’t, and he decided he didn’t like black. He cut her throat the same night he took her, and threw her body in a ditch off the Mississippi up in Granite City.

  Then, in the middle nineties, he’d discovered the sex tours to Thailand.

  You could get whatever you wanted in Thailand, if you had the right contacts. No fuss, no muss, no risk . . . and he liked the little yellow ones.

  HEADACHE.

  He stood up, went into the bathroom, pulled off six feet of toilet paper, folded it into a pad, and used it to pat sweat off his forehead and the top of his chest. The house smelled, he thought. Pizza and beer and black beans and beer-and-black-bean farts. He’d open the window, but it was just too damn hot.

  He went into the second bedroom, where he kept the junk, and retrieved a pair of antique wooden Indian clubs. He’d had them up on eBay for $99, but hadn’t gotten any bids; he’d wait for a week or two, and put them back up, under a different name, for $69 OBO.

  The clubs, originally used in exercise routines imported from India to Europe, and then from Europe to the U.S. at the end of the nineteenth century, were nineteen inches long and weighed almost exactly two pounds each—about the weight of a baseball bat, but less than two-thirds the length of a bat.

  Shaped vaguely like bowling pins, they were made to swing, and to juggle, and to build flexibility and muscle.

  He put them on the carpet under the couch table.

  A LIGHT FLASHED across his window, and he went to the front window and peeked out between the drape and the wall. The old man was getting out of his Cadillac. The killer watched as he stood in the driveway for a minute, scratching his ass—the hemorrhoids were another genetic gift passed down through the family—and then plodded up toward the door.

  Plodding, yet another gift. They all plodded.

  The killer went to the door and pulled it open. The old man came in, sniffed, looked around, then looked at the killer and almost shook his head. “What you up to?” he asked.

  “Nothing much,” the killer said. “Sit down. You want a beer? I got Budweiser and Budweiser.”

  “Yeah, I’ll take a Budweiser.” The old man dropped on the couch, looked at the TV. “What’s this shit?”

  “Seinfeld,” the killer said from the kitchen. He twisted the top off a Budweiser, brought it in, handed the bottle to the old man, who took a hit and said, “Hot outside.”

  “So what’s up?” the killer asked. He sat on a beanbag chair opposite the couch. “You sounded a little cranked up on the phone.”

  “You remember way back, twenty, twenty-five years ago, there were these two girls kidnapped in Minneapolis? Disappeared? The Jones girls? A tramp got shot, a bum, a couple days later, found his fingerprints on a box full of the kids’ clothes.”

  The killer shook his head. “I don’t remember it.”

  “You oughta read the papers,” the old man said. “You were pretty interested in it, at the time. We were talking about it every night.”

  “Okay, I’m thinking I remember that,” the killer said. “The tramp was shot in a cave?”

  The old man tipped a bottle toward him. “That’s it. The thing is, they found the girls’ bodies yesterday. They were putting some condos up, over off University, digging up some old houses, and they found them under the basement. Apparently, whoever did it buried them under the house, and poured concrete back on top of them.”

  Well, not Exactly, but pretty close, the killer thought. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t read the papers, much.”

  The old man looked at him, his eyes a watery, fading blue. “The thing is, the house is right near that place you used to live. I thought . . . you had that problem back when you were teaching school, you know, and if they start doing some research, there could be some questions coming at you.”

  “Well, Jesus, I didn’t have anything to do with that,” the killer said, letting the impatience ride up in his voice. “They had fingerprints on the bum, right? It’s all settled.”

  “Not all settled,” the old man said. “A couple of the old guys on the force say Marcy Sherrill, she runs Homicide . . . they’re saying she doesn’t think the bum could’ve done it. He didn’t have a car, so the question is, how’d he get them all the way across town from wherever he picked them up? Anyway, there’s a guy named Davenport, works with the BCA. He was on it back then, and I hear he’s all over it again. Between, they’re gonna push it to the wall. They’ll be talking to every swinging dick who lived within a mile of that house.”

  “Ah, man,” the killer said. He stood up, brushed his hand through his long hair, said, “This is just what I needed.” He wandered a
round behind the couch and picked up one of the Indian clubs.

  The old man said, “I don’t think you have—”

  AND THE KILLER HIT him in the temple with the club, a long flat snapping swing that crushed the old man’s skull and killed him before his body hit the floor.

  The killer took another hit on the bottle of Budweiser, looked at the body folded on the floor. He’d never much liked the old man, not even as a kid. As to this discussion, he’d seen it coming; he’d heard it in the whining tone of the old man’s voice, when he’d called earlier in the evening. And once the old man knew for sure, he’d be downtown talking to his pals on the force.

  No way that could happen.

  THE KILLER SIGHED, went over to the body, and dug the car keys out of the old man’s pocket. Took his wallet, his change, grabbed the body by the shirt collar, and dragged it down the stairs. No blood to speak of. Have to find a permanent place to put him . . .

  He felt not a single spark of regret. He’d noticed that when he killed the girls—he regretted not having the sex, of course, but the killing, that wasn’t a problem. Once they were dead, he rarely thought of them again.

  Now he hoisted the old man’s body into the freezer, dropped him on top of a dwindling pile of white-wrapped deer burger, and packages of frozen corn. When the old man was inside, he reached beneath him and swept the food packages out from under, folding and refolding the limp body until he’d gotten it as compact as he could. That done, he pushed the packages of venison and corn over the body. Didn’t really hide it, but maybe if somebody just glanced inside, they wouldn’t see it. Maybe. Have to get rid of it, but no rush. If the cops showed up and looked in his freezer, he was already finished.

  And as for the final disposal, he’d had some experience with that.