Buried Prey (16 page)

“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 rusted 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 don’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.”

Sherlock Holmes, Lucas thought. He was the guy that Randy Whitcomb had been talking about. The cop with the backward hat.

LUCAS TOOK WHAT DANIEL told him, and moved into plainclothes the very next day. In his off-hours, for a while, he looked for Fell. With Anderson working the computer, he found that Fell never again used the Visa card.

Nor did he go back to Kenny’s, or the massage parlor. Lucas wondered, at the time, why he hadn’t. Did he know that Lucas was checking for him? Had somebody tipped him?

Lucas kept checking for nearly a year, but he got hot as an investigator, buried in cases that piled up with the crack craze.

After a year, he let it go.

NOW

10

Lucas shook himself out of his Jones girl reverie—was that the right word?—and called his researcher, and told her to find the girls’ parents. He gave her what he had about them, then spent ten minutes reviewing a series of proposed statements from the governor, concerning crime, and generally taking credit for its decline. He initialed them as he read, and dropped them with his secretary.

The researcher came back with names and addresses for the Jones girls’ parents, whose names were George and Gloria—he’d forgotten them—and he called Marcy Sherrill at Minneapolis.

He gave her the names and asked, “Are you going to call them, or have somebody else do it?”

“I’ll have a chaplain do it,” she said. “John Kling. He’s got a really nice manner and he was around back when the girls were killed. I already talked to him.”

“It’s gonna be on TV pretty quick,” Lucas said.

“He’s standing by—I’ll have him call right now. You still pretty bummed?”

“Ah, you know. Another day in the life.”

HE COULDN’T GET AWAY from the Jones girls all afternoon. He went to a long meeting, filled with lawyers, about the prospect of taking DNA samples from every person arrested in Minnesota, for crimes other than routine traffic offenses. Civil libertarians argued that it was a further intrusion into the privacy of the citizenry; those in favor argued that it was no different from taking a mug shot and fingerprints, which were routinely done on arrest.

Lucas’s position was supine: that is, whenever he heard people arguing about it, he wanted to lie down and take a nap.

Still mulling over the discovery of the bodies, he told the story during dinner, which started a long, tangled discussion of forensics. In the evening, a banker named Bone stopped over with his wife, and they ate cookies and talked about portfolios and the stock market, and about fishing.

Lucas’s wife, Weather, a surgeon, was working the next morning, and went to bed shortly after the Bones left.

Lucas went for a walk around his neighborhood, chatted with a couple of dog walkers, spent some time at the computer when he got back, and finally went to bed and dreamed about the Jones girls.

Weather was sound asleep when he woke up at four o’clock, the dream popping like a bubble, gone forever. He tried to get it back for a moment, then gave up, opened his eyes, and rolled toward Weather. She’d thrown off the sheet and lay with her legs wrapped around a long, soft pillow, which propped up her distended abdomen. She was pregnant again, six months down the road, and the ultrasounds suggested they’d be getting a sister, rather than a brother, for their three-year-old Sam and fifteen-year-old Letty.

A Gabrielle rather than a Gabriel.

Lucas was as excited by the prospect as Weather: the idea of another daughter. Girls are always good. More girls are even better. Lucas already had one natural daughter, whom he saw only once or twice a month, for a few hours at a time, as she was settled in with her mother and a terrific second family; and he loved her to death.

And there was Letty, whom he and Weather had adopted. Letty was a handful, but Lucas loved her as much as he would any natural daughter; and was confident that she loved him back, despite her tendency to terrorize him.

Lucas turned toward Weather, watched her for a moment, her hip high on the pillow, her small body twisted toward the corner of the bed. She hadn’t been sleeping well, but she’d had a similar sleepless stretch in her first pregnancy, from about five and a half months, to about seven. Stress, anxiety, whatever . . . he hadn’t been able to help much, and he was pleased to see her sleeping so soundly this morning. He worried about her: neither one of them was a kid, with Weather edging into her forties, Lucas looking at fifty.

He closed his eyes, and dozed, and his dream seeped back: he was a young man again, driving around in a squad with Fred Carter. Carter’s grumpy disposition, his tendency to avoid conflict . . .

Lucas had seen him a few months before, working as a security guard at the Capitol, no longer youngish, still carrying a gun on his hip. Carter was generally happy with the work, but straining toward retirement, now only a year or so away.

“The thing is,” he’d told Lucas, “you can never tell where the terrorists will hit next. What if they decide on a big city, but one out of the limelight? One that no one expects?”

“Like Minneapolis or St. Paul,” Lucas had suggested.

“Yeah. And what would they hit? The Capitol.” Carter had looked up. “That big fuckin’ dome. Man, I can see it: I’m two days from retirement and some fuckin’ raghead with a dynamite belt drops the dome on my head.”

“Well, at least your wife would collect your retirement,” Lucas had said.

Carter waved his index finger like a windshield wiper: “Don’t even joke about that, man. Don’t even joke about it.”

Carter’s whole life had been pointed toward retirement; and he had such an enormous gut on him, Lucas thought it unlikely that he’d live for more than a few years into it.

The thought of Carter again brought up the faces of the dead Jones girls, grinning their bony smiles through the yellow plastic at the bottom of the condo excavation. The Jones girls . . .

JUST AFTER DAWN, Lucas rolled out of bed and padded down the hall in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, down the stairs to the front porch. He cracked the front door and peeked outside. There were three newspapers scattered down the walk, the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
, the
Star Tribune
, and the
New York Times
.

The
Times
, the one he didn’t want at the moment, was closest; the
Pioneer Press
was six feet farther out, the
Star Tribune
five feet beyond that. He didn’t want to go running out in his shorts if, say, a troop of Girl Scouts were passing by. No young girls were in sight, and he pushed the door open, trotted down the sidewalk to the
Star Tribune
, grabbed it, snatched the
Pioneer Press
on the way back, and got to the door two seconds before it closed and latched itself.

Someday, he thought, it’d snap shut with him outside. Probably in the winter. The obvious solution would be to unlock the door, but then he’d forget to lock it, as would everybody else, and the door would be open all the time.

Besides, he got a little thrill from beating the door in his underwear.

The
Star Tribune
had the Jones story on the front page, front and center. The
Pioneer Press
had it on an inside page. They’d missed the story, Lucas decided, probably saw it on the ten o’clock news, and then tried to recover. They hadn’t, very well.

Lucas dropped the
Pioneer Press
on the floor by the door and carried the
Star Tribune
into the den, kicked back in his work chair, read through the story. The
Strib
had gotten to the Jones girls’ parents—now divorced, the story said, both remarried, George Jones with more children, though his ex-wife was childless. A second tragic story there, Lucas thought, thinking of Weather, pregnant, up in the bed; of the children who would comfort him in his old age.

He finished the story, read through comments by the Minneapolis chief—they’d throw everything they had at the case. Right. Still sleepy, Lucas went back upstairs, and found Weather getting ready to go in to work.

“Where’re you working this morning?”

She yawned: “Regions.”

“Anything interesting?” he asked.

“It’s all interesting . . . but no.”

“I’m going back to bed,” Lucas said.

HE FELL ASLEEP immediately, woke up three hours later, feeling sharp, picked up his cell phone from the bedstand, turned it on, and dialed.

Del came up, and Lucas asked, “You read the paper this morning?”

“Yeah. I was wondering if you’d call.”

“I want to get in on this,” Lucas said.

“I wouldn’t mind, but the politics will be a little crude,” Del said. “It’s a Minneapolis case.”

“They won’t do it as well as you and I would,” Lucas said.

“That’s true,” Del said.

“Besides, we wouldn’t have to tell them . . . right away.”

They thought about that for a minute. An unstated rivalry existed between the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the cops in Minneapolis and St. Paul. If you asked a Minneapolis leadhomicide detective, he would say something like, “A guy at the BCA probably handles twenty murders in his career. I see twenty in a year.”

The BCA guy would say, “Yeah—gangbangers. You catch the guy sitting on a couch with a beer and a gun. When we go in, we go in late, and they’re always the hard ones.”

To which each side would say to the other, “Bullshit.”

Lucas asked, “You remember John Fell?”

“I remember the name. That’s the guy you were looking for,” Del said.

“There’s a good chance that he’s the killer. Even at the time, I thought there was some chance, but now that Terry Scrape is pretty much ruled out, I think we need to find him,” Lucas said.

“Long time ago,” Del said.

“Yeah.”

“We oughta get a cup of coffee, sit and think.”

“Give me an hour—I’ll see you down at the café.”

“Bring your notebook,” Del said. “We’re gonna need a list.”

SO THEY went down to the café on Snelling, sat in a booth with a coffee for Del and Diet Coke for Lucas, and Lucas opened a sketchbook that he used for planning, and they started making their list.

1. Fell was fairly young—in his twenties—in the mideighties. “That means he didn’t quit with the two girls,” Del said. “He might’ve quit by now—a lot of the psychos poop out in their forties. But he kept going for ten or fifteen years. We need to look at cold cases where young thin blondes vanished.”

2. He could have been arrested for a sex crime at some point—most sex criminals were. Lucas couldn’t remember everything about the description of the guy, but he was overweight, dark hair, told jokes instead of engaging in regular conversation. “I think he might be missing a finger,” Lucas said. “I think I remember that.” That combination might be enough to identify him either to investigators, or to serial offenders who had spent a lot of time in jail.

3. At the time the girls disappeared, he may have been fired as a high school teacher. “Since he wasn’t very old, he must’ve been fired fairly recently when I was looking for him,” Lucas said. “And if he was fired that quickly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a sex thing involved . . . or suspected, anyway. So we’re looking for a guy with a rap sheet involving sex, who was a local schoolteacher back in the early eighties.”

4. Del said, “If we can find old checks that he wrote to cover the John Fell Visa account, we might pick up some DNA—and if he’s in the sex database, we’d have him.” Lucas shook his head: “I don’t think they keep paper checks anymore. We can look.”

5. “We gotta check every utility record we can find on that house,” Lucas said. “His name should be somewhere.” Del nodded, but said, “Minneapolis will be all over that angle.” Lucas said, “Wonder if they’ll check on next-door neighbors?” Del: “They will if they really pull out all the stops, like they say. But, we oughta check.”

“Think Marcy will let us look at the Jones case file?” Del asked.

Lucas said, “I don’t know how she could turn us down, if we asked, but she might get pissed.”

Del suggested that they might find a pressure point, and Lucas asked, “How about this . . . you know James Hayworth at St. Paul?”

Del nodded.

Lucas said, “He just came back from Quantico. He’s really big on the behavioral science stuff. He’ll know that guys like Fell don’t quit . . . so what if we feed him to the
Star Tribune?
He’s all fired up right now, all that new information in his head, he’ll tell them a story that’ll scare the shit out of everybody.”

Del half smiled and shrank back into the booth: “Man, if Marcy found out, she’d shoot you.”

Lucas said, “Yeah, but if she doesn’t, and we perform just the right amount of suck . . . I’ll bet we get invited in. You know, to spread the blame.”

“Where do we start?” Del asked.

“I can get Sandy to do the research on missing children,” Lucas said. “She’d get it a lot faster than we would. We don’t want to bump into any Minneapolis guys any sooner than necessary, so . . . I think maybe we start with the schools.”

“When?”

“I’ll get Rose Marie to yank you off the task force for a while, and we can start this afternoon. What I’m thinking is, it’ll be an employment record, which the bureaucrats hold pretty close, so we might need a subpoena. Maybe we just get a subpoena that applies to all school board employment records in this area . . . we need to know how many school districts there are, and where they’re at.”

“You find that out, and get the paper,” Del said. “I’ve got some task force stuff I have to clean up. I’ll be ready to go tomorrow morning.”