Buried Prey (13 page)

“I’d start at Hennepin Avenue, and work south. Like I said, he’s not stupid: I don’t think he’d go back to the part of the riverbank where he was before.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Where can I drop you?”

She popped the door. “Thanks anyway, I’ll just take the bus.”

TEN MINUTES LATER, Lucas stood on the edge of the Mississippi River, looking up and down the bluffs, and realized that the idea that he might search it himself was ridiculous. He also realized that if he were running from the cops, and needed to hide out for a couple of days, he’d head for the river.

And that’s what he told Daniel, at police headquarters.

“There are all those bridges, there’s two spans to each one of them, I could see at least one catwalk under a bridge, which means people could be living up there, right under the road deck. If we’re gonna do a search, we’re gonna need twenty guys, and it’s gonna take a couple of days, at least. We’ll probably need people from St. Paul—”

“I’ll have to talk to the chief,” Daniel said. “The problem is, the
Strib
is all over us. They know something happened. They know we picked somebody up and turned him loose again. I think the Joneses might be talking to them . . . so the shit’s about to hit the fan.”

“I could go back out alone . . .” Lucas yawned.

“No, no, I hear what you’re saying about the river,” Daniel said. “We got railroad security checking the rail yard, but the riverbank is just too big.”

“Maybe you ought to talk to the paper, call a press conference,” Lucas suggested. “Get yourself some airtime. We got a good mug of Scrape, put it out there. The more eyes the better.”

Daniel thought about it, then said, “That’s an idea. I’ll talk to the chief. You, go home. Get some sleep. You been up for two days.”

“I can handle it for a while.”

“Ah, you did pretty good. We’ll take it from here.”

Lucas saw himself back in uniform, searching the riverbank in a line of cops: “Wait a minute. I don’t want to quit this. We got this other possibility to think about, that Scrape didn’t do it. That the kids were picked up in a vehicle. I’ve got this guy I’m looking for. I got this feeling . . .”

Daniel was shaking his head. “We can cover that. This is turning into a snake hunt. When we find Scrape—”

Lucas leaned forward: “Listen, Chief, I’ll take vacation days. I’ll work free. Just back me up for a shot at this other guy.”

Daniel pursed his lips, eyebrows up, then he said, “All right. Don’t take vacation, though. I’ll keep you on for three days. I got Del still working on Smith; get with him, talk this thing over, and between the two of you, figure out Smith and figure out this missing guy you got. I’d like to know who he is, myself—and what the hell is he doing?”

“I’m outa here,” Lucas said.

“Hey, hold on,” Daniel called after him. “Del works late. Get some sleep. You really do look like shit.”

LUCAS CALLED DEL, who answered on the eighth or ninth ring. “What?”

“This is Davenport. You up?”

“Jesus, it’s not even noon yet,” Del said. “What do you want?”

“We’re hooking up, looking for Mysterio,” Lucas said. “What time do we meet?”

“Ah . . . six o’clock. Meet me at six. No, wait: seven. Downtown. Don’t call back.”

7

Five hours of sleep wasn’t enough—he would have killed for seven—but the alarm blew him out of bed at five-thirty. Lucas cleaned up, put on khaki slacks, a black golf shirt and a sport coat, regulation black steeltoed uniform shoes, with the Model 40 in a shoulder rig.

When he got downtown, he found Daniel in his office, cleaning off his desk, ready to go home. “What happened?” Lucas asked.

“The chief had his press conference, we’re still looking for Scrape,” Daniel said. “We got fifteen guys on the street, and we’re getting jack shit. Don’t know where he could’ve gone. His face is all over the TV.”

“We get a hard time about turning him loose?” Lucas asked.

“Not yet, but we will, sooner or later,” Daniel said. He kicked back in his chair, put his feet on his desk. “But the chief can tap-dance. He made it sound like brilliant police work, picking him up the first time. Then, we’re civil liberties heroes, letting him go. Now we’re all working together, the people and the police, hand in hand, getting him back.”

“Wish I’d seen it,” Lucas said.

“Taught me one thing: I gotta learn how to tap-dance,” Daniel said. “What’re you doing here?”

“Waiting for Del. We’re going out on the Smith thing again. Different angle this time. Was Smith a hero? Maybe loosen some people up. And we’re gonna see what we can find out about Fell.”

“Good luck. I don’t think there’s anything there, but—good luck.”

DEL SHOWED UP at six-thirty, yawning, rubbing his unshaved face with the back of his hand. “You look like a cocker spaniel, your tongue is hangin’ out,” he said to Lucas. “Let’s get some coffee, somewhere. Something to eat. Fries. Figure out what we’re doing. Maybe you could do some push-ups, or something.”

“I could attract some women for us,” Lucas offered. “Just as a personal favor to you.”

“Coffee. Fries. You can fantasize on your own time.”

“Jealousy is hard to live with,” Lucas said. “But there are government programs for the handicapped. Maybe I could find one for you. . . .”

They walked over to the Little Wagon, ordered coffee, two twenty-one shrimp baskets with fries, and Lucas sat for a few minutes beside a uniformed cop named Sally, working through her latest romantic trauma, before moving back to Del when the food arrived.

“You
are
a goddamned hound,” Del said.

“Just trying to help her out,” Lucas said. “Her boyfriend smokes a little dope, but now she thinks he might be moving into retail. She’s wondering if she should bust him, and if she does, if that would adversely affect their relationship.”

“I’d get one last terrific piece of ass before I did it,” Del said, pouring a quarter bottle of ketchup on a mound of fries. “Of course, that’s the male viewpoint. And that assumes that the guy’s terrific in bed. ’Course, most dope dealers are. That’s what I hear.”

“And that’s why you don’t get laid. You see everything from the male point of view,” Lucas said, around a mouthful of shrimp breading, and not much shrimp. “I try to see these things from the woman’s point of view. That’s why I got women crawling all over me. That and my good looks and charisma.”

“One: I get laid all the time, and, two, that sounds pretty fuckin’ cynical for a fifteen-year-old, or however old you are.”

“Not cynical. I’m sincere,” Lucas said. “I really do try to see it from their point of view.”

Del looked skeptical.

“Really,” Lucas said. “I’m serious. I try.”

THEY SAT AND TALKED, getting acquainted. Del had been on the force for nine years, after two years of college, and had worked patrol for only six months.

“I went on in October, got off in April. Coldest winter in twenty years,” he said. “Honest to God, there were nights so cold that the car wouldn’t heat up. I’d walk down the street, and my nuts would be banging together like ball bearings. I was directing traffic around a big fire downtown one night, it was nineteen below zero with a thirty-mile-an-hour wind. The fire guys were spraying the building, and we had
icicles
blowing back on us.”

Like Lucas, he’d done drug decoy work out of the academy, but unlike Lucas, he’d liked it, and stayed on, started working with intelligence and the sex unit, off and on, before his short stint on patrol. “They had a nasty long-term intelligence thing come up. I took it, and the payoff was, I got to stay on with Intel,” he said.

Lucas told him about his time on patrol, and how he’d like to get off, the sooner the better: “If I’m not off in the next couple of months, I’m gonna apply for law school for next year. I already took the LSATs and I did good.”

“You really want to be a fuckin’ lawyer?” Del asked. “Look in the yellow pages. There are thousands of them. They’re like rats.”

“Yeah, I know. I don’t know what to do. I used to think I could be a defense lawyer, but now, you know, after looking at four years of dirtbags, maybe not,” Lucas said. “So then I’m thinking about being a prosecutor, but then I see the prosecutors we work with, and the political bullshit they put up with, and I’m thinking . . .”

“Maybe not,” Del finished.

“But there’s gotta be something in there,” Lucas said. “Maybe get a law degree, I could go to the FBI.”

“Ah, you don’t want the FBI. Maybe ATF or the DEA, and you don’t need a law degree for that,” Del said. “The FBI . . . there’s not much there. They mostly call each other up on the telephone. If you want to hunt, you need to be a big-city cop.”

“I wrote a role-playing game when I was in college,” Lucas said. “I was in this nerd class, introduction to computer science, and these guys were playing Dungeons and Dragons. I got interested and wrote a module for them, and they played it, and they liked it. There’s some money in that. . . . I’m writing another one, on football. I don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff out there that I could do. I think I could be an investigator, but if I’ve got to spend much more time on patrol, I’m not gonna do it.”

“Daniel likes you and he’s got clout,” Del said. “Have a serious talk with him. Something’ll get done.”

SALLY, THE UNIFORMED COP, stopped on her way out, patted Lucas on the shoulder and said, “Thanks for all that. I gotta think. Maybe we could get a cup of coffee.”

“Anytime,” Lucas said. “But hey: stay loose. And if you need help, call.”

She patted his shoulder again and when she left, Del said, “I can barely stand it.”

Lucas grinned and said, “Sincerity. That’s all it is. So—let me tell you about John Fell, and you can tell me how to find him.”

When Lucas finished explaining his ideas about Fell, Del said: “Interesting. So we’ve got a bunch of people who know him, who’ve seen him. Let’s go talk to them.”

“I talked to them—”

“But from what you tell me, you haven’t
conversed
with them,” Del said. “You interviewed them, you got a bunch of facts. What we want is all the ratshit they’ve seen and know about. Have they seen him in the neighborhood? What kind of a car does he drive? Does he smoke dope? Snort cocaine? If he does, I might get something on him, with my people out on the town. Oh—and we get Anderson in again, and instead of a credit check, we get his Visa bills. We want to know where he spends his money.”

Lucas said, “That’s good.”

Del said, “No, it’s not—it’s just a bunch of words. We’re just sitting here bullshitting.”

They called Anderson, the computer guy, and asked him to try to get Fell’s Visa bills. Anderson said he’d go back to the office and see what he could do, and leave the results on his desk, in a file marked for Del.

Then they headed over to Kenny’s, and found Katz, the manager: “Haven’t seen him—it’s been a while now.”

“Since the night the kids were kidnapped,” Lucas said.

“That’s right,” Katz agreed.

Lucas said to Del, “See. That’s part of the pattern. We can’t find the tipsters. Or tipster—maybe there’s only one.”

“Who else ever met him?” Del asked Katz. “Any other people here?”

Fifteen or twenty people were sitting around the bar: Katz checked the faces, then said, “Yeah, there are a few people here who knew him. I’d rather not point them out, you know . . .”

“Be all right if I made an announcement?” Del asked.

Katz shrugged. “Be my guest.”

Del dragged a chair from a side table into the middle of the bar and stood on it: conversation stopped, and he looked around and said, “I’m a Minneapolis police detective, my name’s Capslock, and my partner and I are looking into the disappearance of the two Jones sisters. We need to get in touch with John Fell, who has been a semi-regular here. He provided some very useful information about the key suspect, but now we can’t find Mr. Fell. We’re asking that anybody who knew him, come chat with me and Detective Davenport, in the back booth. No big deal, just a chat. We pretty desperately need the help. . . . If you’ve been watching TV, you know what I’m talking about. Anyway—in the back.”

He hopped down off the chair and walked with Lucas to the back of the bar. In a minute, four people had pulled up next to their booth, and a fifth had moved down to the end of the bar, from where he could watch and listen.

“Anything will help: nothing’s too small,” Del repeated.

Two of the people said they’d seen Fell getting into a black commercial van; one thought it was a Chevy, with cargo doors. One of those two said he thought Fell worked in electronics, that he’d said something about that. But a third, a woman, said she thought he might have been a teacher—now an ex-teacher.

“He said something about having tried teaching when he got out of school, but found out he couldn’t stand high school kids. He said they never thought about anything but themselves, that they were a bunch of little assholes, and that teaching them was impossible.”

“So he’s a college grad,” Lucas suggested.

“I think so.”

“You know where he taught?” Lucas asked.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “He never said much about it.”

“He’s got a Minnesota accent,” said one of the men. “He says ‘a-boat,’ like a Canadian.”

“But you don’t think he’s a Canadian?” Lucas asked.

“No, I got the same feeling that Linda did—that he’s from here.”

“He didn’t really talk about himself that much. He mostly told jokes,” the fourth man said.

The fifth man slid down from the bar stool and came over with a beer in his hand. “I think he might’ve got fired from the school.”

“Why’s that?” Lucas asked.

“One time he went on a rant about school administrators. It sounded like stuff you say when you get fired. You know, they didn’t know what they were doing, they were incompetent, they were jealous, all of that. Like when you get fired.”

Del bobbed his head: “Okay. That’s good. Anybody ever see him on the street? Outside the bar?”

“I might’ve,” the woman said. “I think I saw him down by the university, walking down the street.”

“Just walking?” Lucas asked.

“Yes, like he was going to lunch or coming back from lunch. Didn’t have anything in his hands, he was just walking along. But—I’m not completely sure it was him. It just seemed to me that it was. I didn’t think about it.”

“Has he been in with women?”

“Girls from across the street,” one of the men said. “The hookers.”

“They hang out here?”

“They’ll come in for a drink. You know. Kenny doesn’t allow any hustling, or anything. But, they knew him,” the man said.

“I get the feeling that he’s from right around here,” Lucas said. “Sees the girls across the street, hangs out here.”

“Doesn’t hang here much,” a man said. “He only came in, the first time, maybe a month ago.” The others nodded in agreement. “Then he was here pretty often. I haven’t seen him for a few days, though.”

“He was talking about seeing this transient—” Lucas began.

“The Scrape guy,” the woman said.

“Yeah. What’d he say about Scrape? Any of you guys hear about that?”

“He said Scrape had some sort of sex record,” one of the men said. “Is that true? You guys oughta know. . . .”

“He’s been arrested about a hundred times, but we haven’t found anything about sex so far,” Lucas said. “It’s mostly just, you know, loitering, or sleeping outside, pot, that sort of thing.”

“He’s one weird-lookin’ dude,” one of the men said. “And weird-actin’.”

“So’s John Fell,” the woman said.

Del pounced on it: “Why?” he asked her. “Why do you say that?”

“He just makes me . . . nervous,” she said. “I don’t like to sit around with him. You have the feeling he’s always sneaking looks at you. And then, he goes across the street. And that, you know . . . that’s kinda freaky.”

THERE WAS a little more, but nothing that would nail Fell down. Del said to Lucas, “So let’s go talk to the girls again.”

On the way out the door, a guy with a waxed mustache and muttonchops held up a finger and said, “Hey, you know about Dr. Fell?”

Del: “What?”

The guy said, “It’s a nursery rhyme: ‘I do not like thee, Dr. Fell / The reason why I cannot tell / but this I know, and know full well / I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.’”

Lucas said, “Uh, thanks.”

The guy shrugged. “I thought you should know about it. It was written about a guy named John Fell.”

Dell frowned. “But it was like a . . . nursery rhyme?”

“Yeah. About a professor. Way back, hundreds of years ago. In England. Dr. Fell.”

Lucas said, “Huh,” and, “How’d you know about it?”

“I’m an English teacher.”

“Okay. You ever talk to John Fell? This John Fell?”

The teacher shook his head. “No, I never did.”

“All right.” He nodded at the guy, and they went out. He asked Del, “What do you think?”

“You say there is no John Fell—that it’s a phony name. A guy who sets up a phony name is a criminal. So he picked a name for himself . . . and who’d know about a Dr. Fell?”

“Maybe he likes nursery rhymes . . . or maybe he was a teacher.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Del said. They jaywalked across the street to the massage parlor, and he added, “Maybe . . . I don’t know. There wasn’t much in that nursery rhyme, the way the guy said it. So maybe it’s a coincidence.”

“Hate coincidences,” Lucas said.