Buried Prey

“Jesus, what happened to you?” Del asked. “You look like you fell out a window.”

Lucas shook his head: “Just tired. Been working too hard.” He looked into the garage, where a guy had pulled the flip-flop out of the trash can and set it on a plastic bag, and now was probing deeper into the trash. “Is that . . . have you talked to the Joneses? Were they wearing flip-flops?”

“Mary was,” Daniel said. “They were red and white, like this one, Miz Jones thinks. They got them at a Kmart, and we’ll be checking for size and brand and style.”

“Well, hell, it’s her flip-flop,” Lucas said. “What are the chances?”

“There’s always a chance it isn’t,” Hanson said. “The problem is, we got that box.”

“And?”

“We got some prints on it. They look like Scrape’s.”

Daniel said that they’d gotten a dozen partials off the box, none good—but when compared to the prints they’d taken from Scrape the day before, there seemed to be a few apparent matches.

Lucas scratched his ear and said, “Huh.”

Daniel said to Lucas, “We’re gonna take this flip-flop around to Miz Jones and have her look at it, and Sloan will check the Kmart connection. For you—that chick who knew where Scrape lived. I want you to find her again, and tour her around to all the places that he might have gone.”

“He could be halfway to California,” Hanson said.

Daniel: “He could be, but I doubt it. He had four dollars when we picked him up and he skipped at night. I think he’s hiding. We’ve got the highway patrol and every cop in Minnesota looking at hitchhikers.”

“Look at the trains,” Lucas said.

“What?”

“Have somebody check the train yards over by the university,” Lucas said. “Bums still ride trains—I was talking to a railroad security guy last year, after that guy got his legs chopped off. He said they still got all kinds of bums riding the boxcars. Especially out to the West Coast.”

Daniel said to Hanson: “Check that. Like right now. Get onto railroad security.”

Lucas said, “I’ve got a phone number in my notebook.”

Daniel said to Del, “I want you down at the place where he was living. Knock on all the doors, talk to the residents. Anything they know . . .” Del nodded, and Daniel said, “So let’s go. Go, everybody. Go away.”

AFTER A COUPLE of phone calls, Lucas found the blue-haired Karen Frazier standing at a bus stop just down the street from her office. He pulled up, leaned across, and popped the door and said, “I’ll give you a ride.”

“What do you want?” she asked, not getting in.

“More help,” he said. “Come on, get in. I’m not gonna bite.”

She got in and pulled the door shut: “So?”

“So where’re you going?”

“Back home. I live in Uptown.”

“So do I,” Lucas said. “But listen—this is confidential. We found a box last night with some of the girls’ clothes in it. Their mom fainted when she saw it.”

“Oh, no.” Her hands went to her face. “It was theirs? For sure?”

“For sure. One of them was wearing a bra with a kitty face on it.”

“Ah, God. I don’t want to hear that,” Frazier said.

“What I need is, a tour of the places where you think Scrape might go to hide. He took off in the night, after we let him go. He had no money, we’re checking hitchhikers and the freight trains, but we think he’s probably hiding out somewhere. Somewhere he could get in the dark.”

She thought for a minute, then said, “Scrape’s pretty good at hiding. He doesn’t go where the other transients go. Doesn’t hang out with them, doesn’t use the Mission. He’s not stupid, either—he’s just really schizophrenic, which can make him look stupid, but he’s not. If he wants to hide . . .”

She thought for another minute, then said, “The idea of the trains . . . I don’t think he rides trains. I’ve never heard him say that. I think he hustles around for bus money. . . . But there’re abandoned sheds and buildings all over that area, north of University Avenue, and some of them are built up on stilts and you can get under them. And there are old shipping containers all over the place, that you can get into, and old truck trailers at some of the trucking companies . . . Guys who ride the trains use them to hide—the train cops know most of them, but that would be one place. He could walk there from his room in a couple of hours.”

“Where else?”

“Well, he was living under that tree. He likes it outdoors, and there are all kinds of little caves and nooks and holes where he could be, along the river. There are some sewer tunnels you can get into, and they cross through old caves and things. Some of the guys know those places; Scrape does. But most of them smell pretty bad, from sewage and gas, so they stay out. If he’s hiding in there, it’d be hell to get him out. I went down in one once, and you could walk right past him, and never know he’s there.”

“Where else?”

“Well, the other places—you’d never find him unless people see him coming or going. They go under houses, in old garages, anyplace that has a roof and they can’t be seen. Apartment neighborhoods, with old houses, like over by the university. You find gangs of guys under the main highway bridges; they’ll be camping out, hanging out together.”

“Where would you go, if you were Scrape and you thought the cops were after you?”

“Honestly, there’s no way to tell, exactly,” she said. “He could go to any of those places.”

“C’mon.”

She sighed. “I’d go with the river. That’s where he always lives, except when he can get a gig like this apartment. If you get set up in a cave, especially one with water, you can be safe, dry, hidden, and you can even keep yourself clean. Scrape likes to stay clean, when he can.”

Lucas said, “Huh. Where are these caves and sewer things?”

“All along the riverbank. Best thing to do is, find people who are living there now,” she said. “Ask them. They’ll know.”

“And if they don’t want to talk to me?”

She looked out the side window and said, “I hate telling you this stuff.”

“Why? The girls . . .”

“I feel terrible about the girls, which is why I’m talking to you at all. But talking to cops, if any of the guys see me, and figure I’m a snitch . . . it doesn’t help my work, and might even cause me trouble. Most of them are harmless, but some of them are crazy. Very crazy. If they thought I was working with the cops, I don’t know what they’d do.”

“Okay. I see that,” Lucas said. He waited a beat, and then said, “You were going to tell me something, that you didn’t want to.”

She turned back to him. “They hate going to jail. They don’t do well there, not well at all, because of their handicaps. If I were desperate to find somebody, and wanted to get information from these guys, I’d threaten them. You know—‘How’d you like to spend a couple weeks in jail?’ That kind of thing.”

“Good,” Lucas said. “Specifically, the riverbank . . .”

“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.

“So do I. One interesting thing: that chick who didn’t like to sit next to Fell. Women have a feel for freaks. Makes him more interesting.”

On the way across the street, Del burped, said, “Excuse me.”

“What do you expect? You ate about fifteen of my twenty-one shrimp, and all of yours, and most of two orders of fries.”

“I’m still growing,” he said.

Lucas said, “I don’t want to sound like an asshole, but you know what fries are? They’re a stick of starch, which is basically sugar, designed to get grease to your mouth. Those shrimp are mostly breading, which is starch, also designed to get grease to your mouth. And, of course, shrimp are an excellent source of cholesterol.”

“You sound like an asshole,” Del said.

“Ask me about cigarettes sometime,” Lucas said.

“Mmm, Marlboros,” Del said.

THERE WERE FOUR WOMEN working at the massage parlor: three waiting for customers, one with a customer. Lucas went back and knocked on the door where the fourth woman was with the customer, and called, “Police—we need to talk. No big hurry, though. Take your time.”

Back in the front room, Del said, “Very funny,” in a grumpy voice, but then he started a low rolling laugh, almost like a cough, and the three women giggled along with him. One of the women was Dorcas Ryan, whom Lucas had already interviewed; the other one, Lucy Landry, was off.

Ryan said, “I’ve been thinking about him, ever since we talked to you. I can tell you, I think he works with his hands, because they’re rough, and his fingernails need cleaning. Not like he doesn’t clean them, but like, they get dirty again every day.”

“Never said what he does, though.”

“Not that I remember,” Ryan said.

“Does he spook you guys?” Del asked. “If you were here alone, and he showed up, would you let him in?”

Ryan said, “Not me.” Another one of the girls said, “I’ve only seen him a couple of times, but he has . . . a cruel lip. You know, his top lip: it’s really tight and cruel-looking. I wouldn’t let him in.”

“But he’s never done anything? Anything rough?” Lucas asked.

Ryan shook her head: “He gets his rub and goes on his way.”

The fourth woman came out of the back and said, “Okay, that was mean. You scared the poor guy half to death.”

“He’s gone?” Ryan asked.

“Yeah, I let him out the back.” She was a thin woman, with an overtanned face already going to wrinkles, though she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and an out-of-style Farrah Fawcett hairdo. She looked at Lucas, then at Del: “So what’s up with the cops? You need a little shine?”

“We’re looking for John Fell,” Lucas said.

“I heard that,” she said. “I think he works at Letter Man.”

“What’s Letterman?” Del asked.

“A silkscreen place, up off I-35 by Stacy. I used to go by there, on my way to school. He came in wearing a Letter Man shirt, and I mentioned I used to live up there, and I like the shirt, and he said he could get as many as I wanted. He never did get me any, though.”

“When was this?” Lucas asked.

“A month ago, maybe . . . No wait, longer than that. Maybe . . . May. I remember thinking it was still a little cool for T-shirts. But he’s one of those stout guys, who doesn’t feel the cold.”

“Letterman is one word? Or two words?” Del asked.

“Two,” the woman said. “Letter Man. Like a man who has letters. You know, they do advertising T-shirts and hats and shit.”

“He ever get rough with you?” Lucas asked.

“No, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he did,” she said. “He seemed like he might . . . like to, but was holding back. I think he could be a mean bastard.”

THEY USED THE PHONE in the massage parlor to call Letter Man, but it was apparently closed for the evening, and the woman who knew about the place didn’t know who ran it.

When the conversation ran down, Del looked at Lucas and said, “So let’s go see if Anderson got anything.” He gave the women his business card: “Don’t mess with this guy. If he comes in, call me. I won’t give you away, I’ll catch him later, on the street. But call. We’re thinking, he could be dangerous.”

Outside, Lucas said, “Dangerous,” and, “I gotta get some business cards.”

“I am getting a bad vibe from the guy,” Del said. “I’d just like to see him. Have a few words. I think you might be on to something.”

“We ought to go up to Stacy right now,” Lucas said. “We could be there in a half-hour, forty minutes. If we knock on enough doors, we’ll find the guy who runs the Letter Man place. We’ll be talking to him in an hour.”

“Anderson—”

“Anderson’s stuff will be there when we get back,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”

“Checking Anderson will take five minutes, and we can have the comm center run down the Stacy cops for us—find out who we can talk to.”

“You think they got cops?”

“That’s why you check before you go,” Del said.

ANDERSON’S FILE SHOWED seventy-two charges to the Visa account over its lifetime, the last a month before, at the massage parlor. They scanned down the list of charges; a dozen or so were local, at what Del said were three different massage parlors. The others were apparently mail-order places scattered around the country.

“A bunch of them in Van Nuys, California, different places . . . you know what? I bet it’s pornography,” Del said. “I bet he’s using the card for sex stuff that he doesn’t want attached to his name.”

“Because why? He drives around in a van, he’s not some big shot,” Lucas said.

“I don’t know why, maybe he’s just embarrassed,” Del said. “But if it is porn, it’s another thing to throw in the pot. Porn addiction, goes to hookers . . . and you said Scrape denied that the porn you found was his.”

Lucas nodded. “Fell doesn’t know we’re checking on him,” Lucas said. “We talk to the post office guys, watch the box when he picks up the next bill.”

“Two weeks away,” Del said.

“But we know he’s up to something crooked.”

“Not good enough. I know two hundred people who are up to something crooked, but I can’t prove it,” Del said.

“All right. But if we know who he is, then we got something to work with,” Lucas said.

“Good point. You always want to know the players. Even if you can’t prove anything against them.” Del looked at his watch. “Let’s talk to the commo guys. Get up to Stacy.”

STACY DIDN’T HAVE COPS: the city was patrolled by the Chicago County sheriff’s office. The comm center got in touch with the night duty officer at the sheriff’s department, and between them they arranged to have a patrol officer meet Del and Lucas at County Highway 19, just off the I-35 exit.

They took a city car, and left Del’s truck parked: the tranny needed work, he said, and he didn’t trust it for the ninety-mile round-trip. The drive north took forty-five minutes, and just before they got there, the comm center radioed to say that the cop they were supposed to meet had to take a call, and he’d be a few minutes late. They turned off the highway and drove around town, looking for the Letter Man office; Stacy was a small place, a few blocks of houses this way and that, mostly new, ten or fifteen years old.

“People getting out of the Cities,” Del said.

“Long commute.”

“But pretty fast . . .”

They saw a guy walking a dog, stopped, and he told them that the Letter Man was a small storefront back on County 19. They drove back, found it. Dark, nobody around.

“This isn’t that much like the movies,” Lucas said, as they leaned back against the trunk of the car. “I’m thinking, ‘law school.’”

“Man . . .”

The sheriff’s deputy showed up five minutes later, introduced himself as Ron Howard, said he had no idea of who ran Letter Man, but knew who would: a local city councilman who knew everybody. They followed him to an older house, with a porch light on, where he knocked; a gray-haired man came to the door, saw Howard, smiled, and said, “Hey, Ron, what’s up?”

“Dave . . . these guys are with the Minneapolis PD. They need to talk to whoever runs Letter Man.”

“Rob Packard . . . what’d he do?” Small moths were batting around the porch light, and the older man moved his hand inside the door and turned the light off.

Del said, “Nothing, as far as we know. We’re looking for somebody who he might know, either as a customer or an employee.”

“He’s only got three or four employees, far as I know,” the man said. “His wife and daughter and a couple of girls.”

“Does Packard live around here?”

“Yeah, he lives up north of here. Let me get the phone book.”

They got an address and the deputy led the way north, eight blocks, into a circle of the newer, suburban, ranch-style homes. There were lights in the window, and they got out and knocked on the door.

Rob Packard wasn’t John Fell: Packard was a short, thin man, maybe fifty, wearing jeans and a University of Minnesota sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves, and he didn’t know a John Fell. Neither did his wife, but his daughter, whose name was Kate, said that judging from Fell’s description, she might.

“There was a guy who came around three or four times. He bought some shirts, asked me about getting some made,” she said.

Her father said, “Katie runs the front counter and does the design.”

Kate said, “I think he works around here. He sort of hit on me, but you know—I wasn’t interested.”

“Why not?” Lucas asked. He was checking her as she spoke: in her mid-twenties, he thought, but slender, and white-blond with small breasts: and he thought of the young Jones girls.

“He just was . . . I don’t know. Not my style,” she said.

“Creep you out?” Del asked.

“Oh, he never did anything. But, yeah, you know . . .”

Lucas: “Did he tell you jokes?”

“Every time,” she said. “Really stupid ones.”

Lucas said to Del, “That’s him.” And to Katie: “A fat man?”

“Yeah, that too . . . sort of like a young Alfred Hitchcock.”

Del asked, “Do you have any idea where he works?”

“No, really, I don’t. I can tell you that he drives a black van, like a plumber or a contractor . . . but I don’t think he’s a plumber. Or a contractor. He sorta doesn’t talk like one.”

“How about a teacher?” Lucas asked.

She thought for a moment, then said, “Maybe. Yeah, maybe.”

“What kind of shirts did he want?”

“The first time, he said he was checking prices for a rock band, some stupid name, I forget.” She paused, her eyes floating up, then dropping back to Lucas: “No, wait: it was ‘Baby Blue.’ Or ‘Baby Blues.’”

“Never heard of them,” Lucas said.

“Neither have I, and I still haven’t,” she said. “He came in again, about that, about the band, then the next time he came in, he was asking about buying seconds. We’ve always got some seconds, that we sell cheap. The last time, I don’t know. I think he was just looking me over. He took some seconds. They were for Wyman Archery. Says ‘Wyman Archery’ in a target, with a hunting arrow under the words.”

“He’s an archer? A bow hunter?”

She shook her head, “No, it was kind of a wicked-looking shirt. He just pulled them out of the seconds basket.”

Lucas asked her about the Letter Man shirt he’d been wearing. “We have samples, we sell them at cost—four dollars. I don’t remember selling him one, but maybe I did. He did buy some shirts.”

She hadn’t seen him around town, didn’t know whether he was going east or west when he arrived. “What time did he come in?” Lucas asked. “Same time?”

“Middle of the afternoon,” she said. “Yeah. Every time, around two or three. Between two and three. It’s our slowest time of day.”

Lucas said to Del, “He might be doing factory work, going in to the second shift.”

Del asked Kate, “You get any feeling that he was watching you? You know . . .”

She was shaking her head: “I never saw him outside the store. He’d come in, he’d go away. I thought he was interested in talking to me, you know, but . . . he got the idea.”

“You never saw a black van around when you were out walking?”

“Now you’re scaring me,” her father said.

“I don’t remember any, especially, but . . . there are vans all over the place. I guess you see them all the time. You don’t even look at them.”

THERE WASN’T ANYTHING MORE—a bit of a description, but nothing significant. The Packards knew of three or four assembly plants in the area, mostly smaller places putting together electronics, the kinds of places that came and went every few months. And she hadn’t seen Fell for at least four or five months, Kate said.

On the way back to the Cities, Lucas said, “I’m coming back up here tomorrow. I’m going to hit every one of those factories. If we get a time card, there’ll be eight ways to track him, even if he’s not working there anymore.”

BUT HE DIDN’T DO THAT.

8

They spent the drive back to the Twin Cities speculating about John Fell. Lucas said, “He’s at least as good a suspect as Scrape. Look, think about this: Somebody needs a fall guy. Who’s better than a guy like Scrape, who can’t even defend himself, because he’s crazy? And he looks crazier’n hell, who’d believe him? So this guy tracks both Scrape and the girls, steals stuff that Scrape has used, like that box in the pizza dumpster, and then he calls nine-one-one to feed us the clues.”

“Sounds too much like a movie,” Del said.

“It does,” Lucas admitted.

“I’ve never known one of those movie plots to work out,” Del said.

Lucas looked out the window at the rural darkness, just a scattering of lights off to the west. “Neither have I.”

DEL HAD A LIST of eight more people he wanted to interview about Smith, with addresses. Though it was late, they found four of them with the lights on, but got no help. After the last one, Lucas followed Del back down the street to the car, and Del asked, “You know what the perfect crime is?”

“You’re gonna tell me, right?”

“It’s when you walk up to a guy you don’t know that well, because you want the crack in his pocket. You look around, there’s nobody watching. You pull your gun and Bam!, you kill him. You take the crack and you walk away,” Del said. “Nobody gives two shits about a crack dealer, so there’s not gonna be a big deal investigation. There’re gonna be two guys walking around with notebooks, for maybe a week. There’s a million potential suspects, and no real connection between the killer and the killee, and an hour after the killing, the evidence has already gone up somebody’s pipe.”

“But somebody could see you—”

“Eh—no. Or they turn away. Smith wouldn’t be standing out in the middle of the street, handing it off. That’s why dope dealers get killed. Get killed all the time. Because they’re vulnerable and they’re worth killing. The guys doing it are desperate for a hit, they don’t have a hell of a lot to lose, and they don’t have two brain cells to rub together. So, they don’t worry about it, they don’t talk about it, they don’t plan it. It’s just walk up, look around, pull out the piece, pop him, and go.”

“All right—but when was the last time you picked up a dead black crack dealer in the alley behind a bunch of houses where all the people are white?” Lucas asked.

Del held up an index finger. “That’s another reason I like your whole spontaneous, semi-accidental murder theory. It’s possible that our crack-freak killer doesn’t exist. At least, not this one. So we’re looking for the wrong dude. He doesn’t exist. Maybe your dude does.”

“My dude exists—he snatched the girls,” Lucas said.

“Unless Scratch did it,” Del said.

“Scrape.”

“Yeah, Scrape. The point remains: we are wasting our time, right now,” Del said. “We aren’t gonna hang the Smith murder on a neighborhood guy unless an eyewitness turns up, and even then, we’d probably need to kick a confession out of the guy. Because (a) there’s no link to follow, and (b) nobody gives a shit. There’s no logic to a crack killing. No puzzle you can figure out. Only hunger.”

“You got me convinced,” Lucas said. “But you gotta keep your eye on the other ball, too.”

“What ball?”

“The political ball,” Lucas said. “The ball that requires two white guys to be out roaming around the black community so it looks like somebody cares, when nobody does.”

“I don’t like that ball,” Del said.

AFTER A WHILE, when the lights started going out around the neighborhood, they went home. Lucas thought about the case while waiting for sleep to catch up with him. It was confusing, but in a pleasant way: it was intricate, like a puzzle, like a really magnificent game. You could make a million moves, and prove yourself a complete fool.

He was still sleeping soundly at eight o’clock the next morning when his phone rang. The comm center was calling to say that some woman was trying to get in touch, and she’d said it might be an emergency. Lucas dialed the number she left, not recognizing it, and the blue-haired Karen Frazier picked up.

“All right, Scrape’s name is all over the place and the whole street is all freaked out, and I was talking to a guy named Millard and he told me that he saw Scrape last night sneaking along the riverbank across from the falls. On the east side.”

“Where are you?” Lucas asked.

“Right there, on Main. I was looking around for him.”

“For Christ sakes, don’t do that,” Lucas said. “Even if he didn’t do it, he’s still nuts and we took a great big long knife off him. He’s probably got another one by now.”

“I thought of that. That’s why I’m calling you,” Frazier said. “You think he did it?”

“I don’t know—there’s some other stuff going on, but there’s some evidence, too. Against him, I mean. So you sit tight: I’m coming over. Give me twenty minutes. I’ll meet you at the end of the bridge there.”

He’d planned to go back to Stacy, to look for Fell. Instead, he rolled out, brushed his teeth, skipped the shave, was in and out of the shower in one minute, and in two more, was dressed. He thought about calling in, as long as the phone was right there. On the other hand, if he picked up Scrape on his own . . .

He gave the phone a last look, and with only the slightest of misgivings, was on his way.

FRAZIER WAS SITTING on a bench south of the Central Avenue bridge. Lucas pulled in, flipped his “Police” card onto the dash, locked the door, and walked over. She saw him coming and stood up.

“Everybody’s scared,” she said. “The newspaper had this huge story about letting him go, and how maybe he stabbed some black man. And you guys are hassling everybody. People are running out of town—”

“We’re still thinking about the girls,” Lucas said. “There’s not much chance anymore, but we gotta try.”

She looked doubtful: “It seems more like you’re doing it for television, than really looking.”

“We’re really looking,” Lucas said. “And I haven’t rousted anyone. I’ve been working the Smith killing.”

She turned away and looked off down the river.

“Anyway,” Lucas said. “There’s a guy named Millard, right? Where is he?”

“I don’t want you to talk to Millard, because he’ll put two and two together, and figure out where you got his name.”

Lucas shook his head: “I gotta know. I’ll cover you. But I gotta talk to him.”

“I can tell you what he said. He said, Scrape was right under the bridge when he saw him, but then he started walking down the bank. Millard said there are a bunch of old cave openings and drains down there, that go up under the bank. He thinks Scrape is in there.”

“I need to talk to Millard,” Lucas insisted. “I need to bring him down here.”

They argued for a minute, but Lucas knew her soft spot—the chance the girls were still alive somewhere—and she finally agreed to ride around with him, looking for Millard, and said she’d point him out.

“I feel like a Judas,” she said, as they walked back to the car.

“Yeah, I know,” Lucas said. He told her about working undercover on drugs, and the bad feeling he’d gotten from it. “Drugs kill people. Getting the dealers off the street is important. But I didn’t want to do it.”

And a few minutes later, “Is Millard his first name, or last name?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “He’s just Millard.”

“Like Madonna.”

She didn’t smile.

THEY FOUND MILLARD at a free store a half-mile off the river, a place run by a bunch of old hippies who’d drifted into charitable work. Millard was sitting on a stoop at one end of the store, next to a table full of used shoes. He had a stack of shoes on the steps next to him, and he was trying them on, one pair at a time. A battered backpack sat on the sidewalk next to him.

Lucas dropped Frazier a block away, out of sight, then went around the block, pulled up across the street from the store, hopped out of the car, and walked across the street.

“Hey, Millard,” he said.

Millard looked up, and then sideways, as if trying to figure out a place to run. Lucas said, “Don’t run. I’d catch you in thirty feet and then I’d have to take you downtown.”

“Cop,” Millard said. He was a tall man, emaciated, windburned, with a long gray beard, and pale blue eyes under white eyebrows. He wore a thirties-style gray felt fedora, crushed on his skull like an accordion bellows, and a gray cotton shirt under an ancient navy blue wool suit.

Lucas said, “Yeah,” and then, “Donny White saw you with Scrape this morning, over by the Hennepin Bridge,” he said.

Millard was confused. “I never . . . Who? White?”

“The newspaper guy,” Lucas said, inventing as he went along. “Said he saw you with Scrape. The fact is, my man, you’re going off to prison, if that’s true.”

“I didn’t . . . I wasn’t with Scrape,” Millard said.

“You were seen,” Lucas said.

“I wasn’t with him,” Millard said, his voice rising toward a shout. “I wasn’t . . .”

One of the old hippies came out of the store, a short, square man with a red beard, and he asked, “Is there a problem?”

“Minneapolis police,” Lucas said. “I’m talking to Millard, here. You can go on back inside.”

“Could I see some ID?”

“Sure.” Lucas pulled his ID, hung it in front of the hippie for a moment, then slipped it back in his pocket.

“Maybe I should call a lawyer.”

Lucas shrugged. “Do what you want; but right now, go away. This is an official investigation.”

The hippie said, “I’ll be back.”

Lucas turned back to Millard. “So, I’m probably gonna have to arrest you. At least you’ll get three squares a day.”

“Look . . . look . . . I might have seen him, but I wasn’t with him,” Millard said. “I might have seen him down the river from the bridge.”

“Where’d he go? If you can show me, I’ll cut you loose.”

Millard shuffled around in a half-circle, thinking about it, eyes averted, and then said, “I can show you. But no jail.”

“Put on your shoes,” Lucas said.

LUCAS WALKED HIM across the street, put him in the Jeep, threw his pack on the backseat. Millard hadn’t washed for a while, and Lucas dropped the windows. “How long you known Scrape?”

“I don’t know him,” Millard said. “I just know who he is.”

“You ever see him with a basketball?”

“Uh-huh. He’s had a basketball all year,” Millard said. “I don’t know where he got it. Pretty good ball, though.”

He took Lucas to the riverbank, and then south a couple hundred yards, farther than Lucas expected. “Right down there,” Millard said, pointing over the embankment. “There’s a cement thing that sticks out of the hill. That’s where I seen him.”

“I want you to sit right here, on the Jeep,” Lucas said. “If you run, I’ll catch you, and then you will go to jail. We ain’t fooling around here, Millard. You help me out, you’ll be okay. You fuck with me, you’re going to jail. Okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You sure you got it?”

“Yeah, I’ll sit here on the Jeep.”

Lucas skidded down the embankment, through brush and broken glass, holding on to weeds to keep his balance. Two-thirds of the way down, he found what looked like the end of an old concrete storm sewer set into the riverbank. A barrier made of steel bars had been bolted to the concrete, but had rusted over the years, and one side of it had been broken free. The drain was dark, but Lucas could see trash from food wrappings inside the mouth of it, as well as the remains of campfires. If it no longer functioned as a drain, it’d be dry and safe, or at least easily defensible, with the iron bars over the entrance.

The floor was covered with a layer of sand, and what appeared to be new footprints were going in and out. He called, “Scrape? Scrape? Come out of there.”

He saw nothing in the dark, but a minute after he called, he heard a scuttling sound. Somebody was headed farther back into the tunnel.

“Scrape? I can hear you. Don’t make me come get you.”

Nothing but dark.

Lucas climbed back to the top of the riverbank, half expecting Millard to be gone; but he was still sitting on the Jeep, looking worried. Lucas asked, “Where are you staying? And don’t lie.”

“Mission,” he said.

“All right. You hang out here, in case I need to talk to you again. I don’t want to have to come find you, okay? If I have to come find you, I’ll pick you up and put you in jail, so I can find you when I need you. Okay? You hide or run, you go to jail. You understand?”

“Yeah . . . Was he in there?”

“Somebody is,” Lucas said.

“It’s him. He goes all over in there.”

“How deep is it?”

“Oh, it’s way deep,” Millard said. “You can go all over the place, in there. It’s like a big cave. There’s like water in there; you don’t want to be in the deep part when it’s raining—it fills up.”

“All right. You sit tight.”

“You got a couple bucks for a coffee?” Millard asked. “I’ll just go to the Lunch Box.”

Lucas considered cuffing him to the bumper of the Jeep, but the guy might freak and scratch up the truck. So he fished in his pocket, came up with a ten and a twenty, looked at them for a moment, then gave the ten to Millard and put the twenty back in his pocket. “You hang at the Lunch Box. If I need you, you better be there.”

LUCAS WALKED BACK down the riverbank, looked in the entrance to the drain, shouted, “Scrape? Don’t make me come in there. . . .”

He was trying to push Scrape back into the drain, to let him know that there was still somebody waiting, while he found a phone. That done, he climbed back up the riverbank, saw Millard a block away, headed toward the Lunch Box. He jogged across the street to Jay’s Electronic Salvage. A half-dozen people were browsing through racks of electronic circuitry. Lucas went to the back, showed his ID to a clerk, and got the phone.

Daniel was at his desk. Lucas said, “I got a line on that Scrape guy. He’s in a sewer.”

After a moment of silence, Daniel said, “Sewer?”

“Yeah, he’s hiding in a big sewer pipe south of the Central Avenue Bridge, by that power thing. I guess it goes back into some kind of cave. We’re gonna need some lights. A lot of lights.”

“A cave? Is it too much fuckin’ trouble to find him in a supermarket or something? What’s this cave shit?” But Daniel sounded happy.

“I guess there’s some water in there, too,” Lucas said. “Probably gonna need some boots. And some sewer guys. Guys with sewer maps. You know. That kinda stuff.”

He gave Daniel the details, and in the next hour, got six cops and four sewer guys, in boots ranging from green-rubber Wellingtons to buckle-front galoshes. Daniel was there, in a suit, and had no interest in going into the cave. Instead, he went down and looked at the entrance. “I’m more of an administrator,” he told Lucas. “You’re more of a guy who totes the barge. And goes into dumpsters and sewers and so on.”

One of the sewer guys had an extra pair of Wellingtons that were too large for Lucas, but better than nothing. Sloan showed up with a pair of galoshes; the sewer guys had work lights, instruments for detecting lethal gas, and maps.

One of them, named Chip, laid the maps out on the hood of Lucas’s Jeep. “This isn’t actually a sewer. It used to be part of a drainage system for the old power plant. It’s been closed up for years.”

“If it’s not a sewer, how do you know about it?” somebody asked.

Chip said, “There are some connections between the storm sewers and the tunnels, caused by erosion. We’re planning to go in there, when we can get the money, and block everything up. We’ve had bums work their way a half-mile from the river, and come popping up through a manhole in the middle of a street.”

He began tracing the sewer routes out of the city down to the river, with the cops looking over his shoulder. “The power plant part is pretty much in this area,” he said, tapping the map with an index finger. “And there are a couple of different levels and some old abandoned machinery. Your guy could be hiding in there—we’ve found campfires and litter and stuff in there. But there’s also a broken-down abutment and a crack in the rock that breaks into the sewer system . . . here.” He pressed a thumbnail into the map. “If he’s gone through the crack into the sewer system, then he could get quite a way back, and maybe up through a loose manhole somewhere.”

“What’s the floor of the sewers like?” Lucas asked. “Is there sand, or water, or what?”

“Some water, and there’s always some sand. . . . It hasn’t been raining, so there’ll be quite a bit of sand, a thin layer on the bottom.”

“So we’ll be able to track him,” Sloan said.

“If he’s in the sewer, you can do that. He’s really got no way out and no way to cover his tracks. Though, in some of the older sewers, there are also erosional features . . . holes and gaps and little caves . . . where he could hide. But there’ll be tracks leading up to them.”

“What about the smell? Are we gonna be wading in shit?”

“Nah, not so much,” Chip said. “The first part is the power plant, and that’s just damp. The sewer part is storm sewers, not sanitary sewers, and they’re not so bad right now.”

They looked at the maps for another couple of minutes, then Daniel said, “Let’s get the show on the road. And, the most important thing, nobody gets hurt. Okay? Watch for this guy, we know he carries a knife. Take him down easy, don’t get yourself hurt.”

Everybody nodded, and Chip said, “Check your lights,” and they all checked their lights, and then Daniel said, “Altogether now, what’d I say was the most important thing?”

Somebody said, “Don’t get hurt.”

9

Chip led the way down the bank to the entrance. There were nine of them, sliding down the dirt track, seven cops including Lucas and Sloan, plus Chip and one more sewer guy, everybody with flashlights, Chip and the other sewer guy carrying heavy battery-powered work lights. They spent a moment pulling back the metal grate, then squeezed through the enlarged opening.

Lucas was the third man through, into the dark, damp air, smelling of wet sand, dead fish, old concrete, and an undertone of sewage.

“Been somebody here,” one of the leading cops said, shining his light toward the ceiling. There were bench-like shelves at the top of the concrete walls on either side of the entrance. A plastic garbage bag, fat with weight—clothing, apparently—sat on each of the walls. The floor was littered with paper, some old, some new: wrappers from packages of cookies, crackers, candy bars, along with plastic wrappers for fast-food meat, wieners, sausages, adding their own rank, rotten-grease odor to the underground mélange. A few steps inside, the concrete ended, and the walls became cave-like, cut through natural rock.

They edged inside, slowly, climbed a cave-in, found themselves in a wider section with a rusted metal superstructure overhead, its use obscured by the rust and damage. They played their lights over it, and something flapped past them, and they all ducked, and the second sewer guy, whose name was Russ, said, “We got bats.”

“Scared the shit out of me,” one of the cops said.

Somebody else said, “You fire a gun in here, it’s gonna ricochet all over the place.”

“So don’t be shootin’ any guns,” somebody else said.

“We oughta be armed with tennis rackets,” said a fourth voice.

Chip said, “Bats can have rabies—let them go, don’t mess with them.”

Sloan, who was a step behind Lucas, said, “This is a good afternoon. I’m chasing a bum through a sewer filled with rabid bats. I can’t wait to tell my wife.”

“See, this isn’t a sewer—” Russ began.

Sloan said, “It was a figure of speech. Let’s keep going, or get out of here.”

Up ahead, a dark hole.

They left two cops to guard the exit, while the rest moved on until Chip said, “Look.”

Lucas looked where he was shining his light. A thin stream of water cut across the floor, coming from who-knows-where, bordered on both sides by a half-inch of fine sand. A single set of tracks were pressed into the damp sand, heading deeper into the dark.

They went past a short shaft going straight up, like an upsidedown well. An intersecting shaft went off to the right, perhaps fifteen feet up. “If he had a rope, he could get up there and nobody could get at him,” somebody said.

But Chip said, “Yeah, but . . . see?” He pointed to a partial track in the sand, six feet past the intersection, going deeper into the tunnel. “And I’ve never seen a rope or anything going up there.”

They moved on, then somebody spotted a hole in a wall to the left. Lucas climbed a short slope to the hole, pushed his light in: there was a low-ceiling space, a kind of pot full of water. He could hear more running water, but couldn’t see anything inside the room except a pile of metal trash and some rotting wooden beams.

He hopped down and said, “Nothing.”

They found another hole, and this one carried a human stench. Sloan looked and he said, “Somebody’s using it as a can. Hang their ass off the wall, and let go.”

“More tracks,” somebody called, from up ahead.

SCRAPE WAS FAR AHEAD of them, carrying a cheap aluminum flashlight with a weak bulb: but he knew where he was going. He got in the main room, under the power plant, tiptoed across the wet concrete, careful not to leave footprints, boosted himself up on a damp concrete revetment, then onto a rusting steel beam that sat on top of it. Once on top, he slid down into a narrow space on the other side, and lay on top of the concrete revetment. He barely had room to move his shoulders and hips, but he was practically invisible. They wouldn’t find him unless they climbed a ladder that led up toward the power plant, and then shined a light down. . . .

If they did that, he was cooked.

As he lay there, in the dark, listening to the cops coming down the tunnel, he began to feel his muscles clenching up and down his body, in fear and anger. If they caught him, they’d put him in a hospital, and the hospital people would do experiments on him, as they had in the past. Experiments . . .

He’d known when the cops released him that they’d be back. Scrape was crazy—and knew it, and regretted it, and suffered for it, nothing to be done about it—but not stupid. Once they had a taste of him, he believed, they’d be back if they didn’t find the little girls with somebody else. He was just too good a target, and in his experience, if cops couldn’t solve a bad crime, they began to look for somebody they could hang it on.

An old story on the street. Some people said it was bullshit; others swore it was true, said it had happened to them. Scrape believed it to be true. He’d been arrested too many times for nothing, for simply being there, crazy, on the sidewalk, to have any faith in the honesty or efficiency of cops.

What good did it do to take him down to court? He didn’t have any money, putting him in jail didn’t cure anything, so why did they do it?

Because, he thought, that’s what cops did. They got grades on a paper, somewhere, on how many arrests they got. He was an easy one.

The night before, he’d tricked them, sliding out a side window after dark, creeping like a shadow down the hedge and across the yard, staying in backyards for half a mile, before breaking to the river. He’d thought he’d be safe, for a while, in his tunnels, but somebody had talked. . . .

Now they were coming for him again, and they’d put him in a hospital and they’d strap him to a bed, and they’d do more experiments; he lay behind his beam and closed his eyes and tried to pretend that they weren’t there.

That the nightmares weren’t there: but this time, they were.

WHILE SCRAPE SETTLED into his hiding place, the cops pushed on, like a National Geographic caving expedition made up of stupid people, splashing through pools of water, stumbling over debris and rotting lumber, swearing, shining their lights around. They turned a couple of corners, explored shafts going left and right. One of them showed what appeared to be an attractive, golden-brown wall. Then the wall twitched, and a cop, looking closer, suddenly back-pedaled and said, “Jesus, those are cockroaches. Millions of them.”

“Don’t mess with them, don’t mess with them . . .” The wall shimmered and they all backed up.

Moving ahead, they found more footprints, which Lucas now recognized from a series of round treads on the bottom—running shoes—and followed them.

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 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.”

AT THE OFFICE, Lucas found Sandy, the researcher, told her his theories about Fell, about what may have been a fight in an alley between Fell and Smith, the crack dealer, and outlined what he needed to know about missing girls; she would start immediately.

Then Lucas started working the schools by telephone—and found there were more than fifty school districts in the metro area, and he’d have to go after them individually. He began with the larger, close-in districts, was told that he would need a subpoena to look at the employment records.

He asked the first record keeper, “Do I need a subpoena to find out if you fired anyone in that period of time? Or could you just tell me ‘yes’ or ‘no’?”

“Sure, I could tell you that,” he said. “Let me look at my records, and I’ll get back in an hour or so.”

So he sat for five hours, breaking for lunch, patiently dialing phone numbers, reciting the same set of facts to all the various record keepers, and by the end of it, he’d learned that twelve of fifty-five districts had fired male schoolteachers during the relevant period.

“I can’t give you the name, but I can tell you that this guy’s record suggests that there may have been a parental complaint without any follow-through . . . which could mean sex,” one man said.

“Straight sex?”

“Uh, can’t tell. Didn’t occur to me that it might be otherwise, but I can’t tell. The thing to do is, get your subpoena, and we’ll dig everything out and you can take a look at what we’ve got.”

“See you tomorrow,” Lucas said.

Two more of the twelve districts also had fired or released male teachers under unclear circumstances, which the record keepers thought might suggest a sexual basis for the dismissals. “That stuff doesn’t get talked about or written down, because there’s the possibility of legal action.”

The other nine were fired for a variety of behavior, most often drunkenness or drug charges, which were clearly not sexual.

AT THE END of the day, he called Marcy Sherrill at Minneapolis: “You get anything on the Jones girls?”

“We’re working it—things are a little slow, so we had some folks we could throw at it,” she said.

“Shit hit the fan with the media?”

“Maybe not as much as I expected,” she said. “This whole thing happened before the Channel Three reporter was born, and anything that happened before she was born is obviously not important . . . so, yeah, people are calling up, but it’s been reasonable.”

Lucas said, “So you’re saying you got the media under control, and you haven’t got jack shit on the Jones case.”

“I wouldn’t say that. Not yet. The ME thinks there’s a chance they might take some DNA off the girls.”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Lucas said.

“Well, if it’s there, we could be all over this guy in a couple of days. I mean, any strange DNA that we find on them would almost have to belong to him. They were gone for two days, probably getting raped multiple times, so . . . there should be some DNA somewhere.”

“Good luck. Did you get any names off the houses in the neighborhood?”

“A few. We’re looking at utilities, of course, but they seem to have all been paid by Mark Towne, the Towne House guy. Apparently they were all rented with utilities paid . . . though not telephone. But, we’ve got no telephone for that address at that time. So, we’re looking. Trying to find old neighbors and so on.”

“All right. Well, keep me up on it.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Lucas,” Sherrill said. “I know damn well you’re looking at something over there. What is it?”

“Doing some research, is all. I’ve got a woman looking for other missing children of the same appearance from the same time. We’re doing the metro area, then I’ll have her do the state, then surrounding states. I don’t know if it’ll be of any use.”

“That’s fine,” Marcy said. “That’s the kind of support we appreciate. If she finds anybody, let me know.”

“It’s not a matter of finding anybody,” Lucas said. “She’s already got about twenty possibilities. Probably have fifty by the time she’s done. The problem is, figuring out who ran away, who snuck off to the other parent, and who got murdered. It’s pretty murky.”

“Well, keep pluggin’,” she said.

Lucas hung up a minute later and thought, She’s really gonna be pissed when she finds out.

However dark the killer might have been, Lucas thought, the case lacked the urgency of a crime that happened yesterday: it was interesting in an archaeological way. Solving it would be a feather in Marcy’s cap, but she didn’t have the visceral drive she would if she’d been chasing a guy who was operating right now.

Lucas did—a little, anyway, because he’d been there when the mistake had been made. After talking to Marcy, he leaned back in his office chair and closed his eyes, trying to remember those faroff days. Where had the time gone? Parts of it seemed so close he should be able to go outside and see it; but, on the other hand, it simultaneously seemed like ancient history.

He remembered that during that summer, when the Jones girls disappeared, he’d had a brief and satisfactory relationship with a divorce attorney in her late thirties, and not long ago, he’d heard that she’d retired to Florida.

Retired . . .

SANDY POKED HER HEAD in the office: “Got a minute?”

“Sure.” He pointed at his visitor’s chair.

“Something interesting,” she said. She had sandy hair that was neither really blond nor really brown; so she was well-named, Lucas thought. She was a self-described hippie, who showed up in shapeless, ankle-length paisley dresses and sandals, under which she had a figure that Lucas found interesting. She was pretty, in a bland way, with brown eyes that were touched with amber, behind old-fashioned round hippie glasses. Beneath it all was an intelligence like a cold, sharp knife.

Lucas’s agent Virgil Flowers had once dallied with her, Lucas thought, and had gotten cut . . .

She fussed with a yellow legal pad, then said, “I’ve got one very interesting case, so interesting I pulled it out for a special look. A stranger molestation, or attempted kidnapping, 1991 in Anoka County. The girl’s name was Kelly Bell, and from the photos we have, she looks like a sister to the Joneses. She was twelve, thin, blond, she got jumped while she was crossing a park on her way home from school. A man wielding a knife. Dark-haired, overweight. He tried to force her into a van, but she started screaming and fought back. He slashed her, cut her hands and forearms, but she ran away from him. She thinks the vehicle was a red cargo van, and you mentioned black cargo van when you briefed me. The colors are different, but if you’re right about how the kidnapping happened, and the murder . . . technique’s the same, and the description of the guy is perfect for this Fell person.”

Lucas said. “They ever ID the guy?”

“No. Which I thought was another interesting aspect. It was like the Jones thing—where nobody saw anything. Same here. He picked out a place where he knew she’d be, and jumped her,” Sandy said. “It was too well-planned to be a mistake. The sheriff’s deputies got some tire tracks, which they identified as Firestones, replacement tires, and fairly worn. The van was old enough that it needed an alignment—there was some cupping on one of the tires.”

“This woman’s name was . . . ?”

“Kelly Bell.”

“I need to know where Kelly Bell lives, and the cops who did the investigation. I take it we weren’t involved?”

“No. Anoka PD,” she said. “Vital records shows Kelly Bell got married in oh-five, changed her name to Barker. Husband’s name is Todd Barker. They live down in Bloomington.”

“You got the address?”

“Of course. And their phone number,” Sandy said.

“You ever think about getting your ass certified, and becoming a cop?” Lucas asked. “You’d get paid more, and we’d find a place for you here.”

She was shaking her head. “I’m going to law school. When I finish there, maybe the feds.”

“Like Clarice Starling . . . Silence of the Lambs.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” she said, with her shy, hippie smile.

BECAUSE IT WAS LATE in the day, and the pressure was not that intense, Lucas went home for dinner—his daughter Letty was experimenting with vegetarianism, so they ate wheat-based fakechicken cutlets, which Lucas secretly thought weren’t too bad—got the latest news on the pregnancy, and the gossip from the hospital, and then, when the housekeeper was hauling the dishes away to the dishwasher, he slipped into his den and called Kelly Barker.

She picked up on the third ring, and when he explained who he was, and that he’d like to talk to her about the attack in ’91, she asked, “Does this have anything to do with those girls they dug up?”

“It might have,” Lucas said. “The man I suspect of killing the Jones girls would have been fairly young at that time, and these kinds of predators don’t usually give up when they’re young. If they don’t get caught, they keep doing it, and the attack on you is pretty similar to what I think might have happened to the Jones girls. And the guy sounds the same. We don’t know who he is, but we may have a description. So if I could sit and talk for a bit . . .”

“Would we be talking to any TV stations?” Barker asked.

Lucas leaned back, surprised a bit. “Well, I wouldn’t. That’s not really part of an investigation track.”

“I ask because I have an ongoing relationship with Channel Three. They did my biography after the stabbing, and I was on several times, few years ago, when Michael McCannlin got arrested for those child murders.”

Lucas remembered McCannlin, who’d killed three children and wounded two adults in a shooting spree that involved property lines and a kids’ soccer game.

“I don’t . . .” Lucas began, then, “McCannlin didn’t have anything to do with your case, did he?”

“No, it’s just because of my attack, I’ve been asked to comment on other ones,” she said.

“I’m not looking for television, although Jennifer Carey is an old friend, if you know her,” Lucas said.

“Oh my God, I love her,” Barker said. “So, sure—come on over. When do you want to do it?”

RIGHT NOW, he’d said. She lived about twenty minutes from Lucas’s house in St. Paul, so he checked out with Weather, climbed into his Porsche 911, and headed across the Mississippi to Bloomington.

Another warm night, a night like those when the Jones girls were taken, stars drifting through a hazy ski, humidity so thick you could almost drink the air. Lucas flashed back to the night he’d gone dumpster diving, and had come up with the box of clothing that would kill Scrape; the same kind of night.

He took I-494 west past the airport and the Mall of America, through Bloomington, then south, and more west, into a neighborhood of sixties ranch-style houses, many of them still lived in by the original owners: not so many kids around, few bikes or trikes, a single Big Wheel over by a lamppost, looking discarded.

The Barkers lived in a gray-and-white rambler with a cracked driveway and a narrow two-car garage. A sidewalk curled from the driveway up to the front door.

Lucas got out, rang the bell, and Todd Barker opened the door. “Don’t want to be impolite, but have you got some kind of ID?” he asked.

“Sure.” Lucas fished out his ID and handed it over. Barker glanced at it, and said, “Okay. Come on in. . . . Uh, I have a pistol here that I’m going to put away. We didn’t know for sure who you might be.”

“Okay.”

A woman was sitting on a couch facing a television, which had been muted. She said, “Todd was a little upset that you were coming over.”

Todd said, “Not exactly upset . . .” He put a Smith & Wesson Airweight in a drawer that popped out of the side of a six-foot-tall grandfather clock, and pushed the door shut. “More like careful. We try to stay in Condition One at all times. Cocked and locked . . . Can I ask what you carry?”

“Uh, sure,” Lucas said. He pulled back his jacket to show his pistol in its shoulder rig. “Colt Gold Cup.”

“Terrific,” Todd said, enthusiasm showing in his face. “Cocked and locked, or . . .”

“No, I don’t keep a shell in the chamber; I keep the—”

“Israeli draw,” he said. “Not quite as quick that way.”

“I’ve never really needed a quick draw,” Lucas said. “If I think something is coming, I take the gun out and jack a shell into the chamber.”

“Yeah, yup, yup,” Todd said. “I got a carry permit, myself, but my employer doesn’t allow guns on the premises; a mistake I hope he never lives to regret.”

BOTH THE BARKERS appeared to be in their early thirties. The house had a starter-home feel to it, with mass-market furniture and inexpensive carpeting, an unpainted-furniture-style hutch in one corner, full of old dishes. An antique buffet, carefully polished, had pride-of-place in the living room, under a wall-mounted flat-screen television.

Todd Barker dropped onto the couch beside his wife, and gestured at an easy chair for Lucas. Lucas took it, gave them a quick summary of the Jones case, including the recovery of the girls’ bodies, and recited the details, as he remembered them, of the descriptions he’d accumulated on the man who’d called himself John Fell.

“Fairly big guy, but chunky to fat,” Lucas said. “Dark hair, black or dark brown, and curly. Broad face. If he’s the one who took the Joneses, he might also have killed a drug dealer who witnessed the kidnapping. The drug dealer was stabbed several times—many times—and that murder was never solved, either. But, if it’s him, he used a knife.”

“That sounds like him, and he used a knife on me, that’s for sure,” Kelly Barker said. She stretched her arms toward Lucas, and traced a finger down thin white scars on her forearms. “He really cut me up. He stuck my hand, too, right through my palm.” She held up her left hand so Lucas could see a wedge-shape scar in the palm. “I kept screaming, and trying to run backwards, and he stumbled and that gave me room and I ran. He ran after me for a little way, but then, he was too fat, he couldn’t catch me, and he ran back to his van. I ran out of the park and waved at people on the street and this man stopped and took me to the hospital.”

“Weird that you got in a car with somebody after that,” Todd said. “You know, a strange man.”

“He was a really nice guy, actually. His name was Nathan Dunn, he was a salesman, an older guy,” she said. “Anyway, he took me right to the hospital. I got blood all over his car. I was afraid I was going to bleed to death.”

Hospital officials had called the Anoka police, and the cops had quickly started a search for a red van driven by a dark-haired fat man. “They never found him.”

“Do you remember him well enough that if I put you with a police artist, you could put together a picture of him?”

“The Anoka police already did that,” she said. “Way back when it happened. Wait just one minute . . .”

She hopped off the couch, went into a side room; Lucas heard a file drawer open, and a minute later she came back, digging through a manila folder. “Here.”

She passed Lucas a sheet of paper, with a man’s face done with an old-fashioned Identi-Kit. He took it in, blinked: the face fit the description of Fell, though the Identi-Kit made it thinner. That wasn’t uncommon with eyewitness photo-sketches—police artists tended to go to averages, and if somebody was fat, they tended to lose weight in the sketches.

“We’ve got a little better computer tech now,” Lucas said, passing the sketch back to her. “If you have any time at all to come up to St. Paul . . .”

She did, and she would.

He dug for more details, and she had a few. Her attacker had parked the van off the park road, backing it into the bushes so it was right up against the walking path. “I saw it really close—it looked like some kind of . . . prisoner thing. There was a screen behind the driver, so you couldn’t get at him from the inside,” Kelly said. “I remember the screen. And there was more screen on the back windows, hung off bars, so you couldn’t break the glass. There were no side windows. That’s what I remember . . . the inside of the van. It was like a prison van.”

“What’d he say when he tried to grab you?” Lucas asked.

“I don’t really remember that. Even right afterwards. I was walking down this sidewalk in the park, and there was this place where bushes closed in—lilacs, I think—and he came out of them and grabbed me and waved the knife at me, and I saw the van and he was pulling at me and I was fighting him, and I broke out of his hand, and started backing up and he was trying to talk to me but he was slashing, too, and then he tried to grab me again and I yanked away and I ran. . . . He came after me a little but I ran faster and faster, and I looked back and I saw him going into the bushes and then I heard the van, and I got off the sidewalk because I was afraid he’d chase me, and I could see the street up ahead and I ran as hard as I could . . . but he never came after me.”

“But you were right there: face-to-face.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “He was talking and . . .” She put a hand to her face. “. . . spitting. He got some spit on me, he was so close.”

“Do you remember what kind of knife?”

She shuddered: “Do I ever. It was this long curved meat knife, like you use for cutting roasts or something. Not like a big heavy butcher knife, but a long curved knife.”

“A kitchen knife, not a hunting knife or a jackknife.”

“Definitely a kitchen knife. Like one of those Chicago Cutlery things, with the wooden handle.”

“Then you ran and the Dunn guy came along. Did he get a look at the attacker?”

“Oh, no—I had to run down this path, through the bushes. Mr. Dunn didn’t even see me until the last minute. He almost ran over me. And I went to the hospital,” Kelly said. “But I can tell you, when I was fighting the guy, I scratched him, and I had blood and skin under my fingernails, and the police took it away. And there was a hair—I remember the guy at the hospital took it out from under my fingernail and he said, ‘Got a black hair.’”

“Ah—that could be important. Thank you,” Lucas said.

“Can you still get, you know, DNA from stuff that old?” Todd asked.

“If they’ve still got it, we can,” Lucas said. “The good thing is, people who do this kind of thing usually get caught, sooner or later, and we’ve got a DNA bank for sex criminals. So does the FBI. If he’s been arrested and convicted, he could be in the bank.”

“That is so exceptionally excellent,” Kelly said.

They talked for a few more minutes, but she had nothing more that really contributed to the case. Didn’t remember anything about a missing finger.

The DNA possibility was interesting. DNA had been used to clear quite a few men improperly convicted of rape or murder, but had been used to nail just as many who thought they’d gotten away with it, only to have a long-ago crime snatch them right off the street.

Barker also convinced Lucas that Fell, whatever his real name, was the killer, and that he’d continued operating after the Jones murders. If the Jones girls’ kidnapping was his first killing—and it might or might not have been—and Barker was another attempt, there’d be more.

As he was leaving, Kelly Barker asked, “Listen, do you mind if my agent gets in touch with Channel Three, and they give you a call? I’m pretty sure they’d be interested.” She said it earnestly, one showbiz personality to another.

“I can’t talk to them on the record, at least at this point,” Lucas said. “If you do talk to them, and they want to do some film, be sure you let me know. I mean, this guy might be watching. And there’s a woman at the Minneapolis Police Department, Marcy Sherrill, the head of Homicide—you should call her. She might have some ideas for you. Remember—you might be the only living person who could identify him.”

“I think we can take care of ourselves,” Todd Barker said, with a square-chinned grin. “Look around—there are four guns in this room. I can get to one of them in two seconds, from the threatalert to trigger.”

Lucas nodded: “Hope you have the two seconds.”

“Two seconds is nothing,” Barker said.

“Average high school kid, on a track, can run a hundred yards in twelve seconds or so,” Lucas said. “That’s about fifty feet in two seconds . . . from your front door to your backyard.”

“You think I should get a shotgun?” Barker asked.

“I think you should get good locks,” Lucas said.

LUCAS WALKED BACK down the dark sidewalk to the Porsche, stood there for a minute, looking up at the sky, thinking. Gun nuts made him a little nervous. He always had the feeling that they were looking for something to shoot. They had a kind of tight-jawed routine—“Better to have a gun and not need it, than need one and not have it”—but behind that, he thought, was an urge.

And the idea that they could take care of themselves was an illusion: put an asshole behind a bush, in the night, with a shotgun, and you were gonna get shot.

Lucas had shot a number of people in his life, and found shootings always involved a bureaucratic nightmare and sometimes a few lawsuits; all in all, with a couple of exceptions, he’d prefer not to shoot. For Lucas, shooting wasn’t important; what was important was the hunt.

Now he felt a quickening at the heart.

Because he’d gotten a sniff of the quarry, he thought. John Fell was eighty percent the man who’d attacked Barker. The hunt was under way.

11

Del was playing with a new camera when Lucas came in the next morning. “That fuckin’ Flowers got me interested,” Del said. “I’m taking a photography class at night.”

“Weather gave me one,” Lucas said. “Kinda interesting. Wish I had more time for it. . . . So did you get free?”

“I’m cool,” Del said. “What’d you find out yesterday?”

Lucas told him about talking to Marcy Sherrill, about calling the schools, about Sandy finding Kelly Barker, and his conversation with Kelly and Todd Barker.

“I may be wrong, but I’ve got the feeling that if we go to a full-court press, we’ll track him down pretty quickly,” Lucas said. “I’m at least eighty percent that it’s Fell who went after Barker, and ninety-five percent that Fell killed the Jones girls. If we get a name, all we need to do is get a DNA sample and run it against the Anoka sample.”

“Won’t necessarily get him for the Jones killings that way,” Del said.

“You told me back the first time I met you, that knowing was pretty important. Once we know . . .”

“Sure—but it’s a bigger deal with drug dealers and burglars and people like that,” Del said. “People who are committing crimes five times a week. If you know, you’ll get them, sooner or later. But if they’re committing a crime once a year, and if they quit doing it ten years ago, that’s a whole different problem.”

“It is,” Lucas agreed. “But not an insoluble one.”

THEY SAT in Lucas’s office for an hour, plotting and making phone calls. The first went out to Anoka County, where, after some runarounds, Lucas talked to a detective named Dave Carson. He gave Carson a quick explanation of the Jones case, and then got the bad news: “There was apparently some tissue collected at the time, but the DNA analysis got screwed up . . . by, uh, you guys,” Carson said. “It was right after the lab opened, and there wasn’t much tissue, and the test failed. I don’t know why.”

“Was any tissue saved?” Lucas asked.

“No. It’s gone. We’ve been told since then that if we’d stored it for a few months, or a year or so, until techniques got better, we’d have been okay,” Carson said. “As it is . . . we got nothing.”

“Who knows about it?”

“Well, a couple of us guys here,” Carson said. “And maybe a couple guys at the BCA, if they’re still at the lab. I mean, it was twenty years ago, pretty near.”

“Okay. Listen, if the question comes up, don’t mention this,” Lucas said. “We might want to put a little pressure on the suspect—let him think that we’ve got the DNA.”

“Fine by us,” Carson said.

“That didn’t sound good,” Del said, when Lucas got off the phone.

“It wasn’t.” He explained what Carson had told him. “Goddamnit, if we had the DNA, all we’d have to do is identify the guy, and we’d have him.” He turned and looked out his window, where a police van was just pulling up to evidence intake.

Another nice day. Hot, but not too hot.

They sat and thought about it.

“Are you going to talk to Ruffe? See if you can light a fire under Minneapolis?” Del asked after a while. Ruffe Ignace was a moderately trustworthy reporter at the Star Tribune. Trustworthy because he had an acute sense of where, how, and by whom his bread got buttered; but only moderately trustworthy because he was intensely ambitious.

Lucas said, “Yeah. If we do it now . . .” He looked at the clock, found Ignace’s number on his computer, picked up the phone, and punched in the number.

Ignace came up on his cell: “What?”

“This is Davenport, over at the BCA.”

“Tall guy, dark hair, constantly relives his glory days as an amateur hockey player,” Ignace said, “while overestimating his abilities on a basketball court.”

“That’s me,” Lucas said. “I got something you may be interested in, or maybe not.”

“I got nothing today—if you got a cat in a tree, I’m interested,” Ignace said. “In fact, I’d encourage you to put a cat in a tree.”

“What about the Jones case?”

“Day before yesterday’s news. Nobody’s got anything,” Ignace said. “We got one guy, called up Scrape’s relatives, and asked them if they were going to sue. They said no, they weren’t the suin’ kind. Our guy said they didn’t remember him very well.”

“Won’t sue? My God, where do they live?”

“I don’t know, but it must be someplace so primitive they haven’t even developed trial lawyers.”

“Pretty fuckin’ primitive,” Lucas said.

Ignace said, “Okay, I’m starting to yawn, here. Always happy to talk to a source, of course, but I gotta polish my shoes. . . .”

“This can’t come from me,” Lucas said. “There’s a guy over at St. Paul who just got back from the FBI school at Quantico.”

“James Hayworth. ‘Call me James.’ Yeah, but I’d cut my wrists before I wrote about some guy doing an FBI school,” Ignace said.

“The thing is, he got really freaked out by the behavioral science thing. He now sees serial killers in his garbage can,” Lucas said. “So: I think if you called him about the Jones case, he’d probably tell you that the killer didn’t stop with the Jones girls. That he’s probably been killing right along. That there are God-onlyknows how many victims, buried in lonely old basements.”

“Huh. But it’s a Minneapolis case, and he’s St. Paul,” Ignace said, not uninterested. “You think he’d say something anyway?”

“He’d talk to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer if Rudolph asked him about sex killers,” Lucas said. “I’m thinking you could talk to him, take what he has to say, and then blow it all out of proportion.”

“That’s true, and a worthy goal in itself,” Ignace said. “But an equally interesting question is, what does Davenport get out of it?”

“Just trying to help out an old newspaper friend,” Lucas said.

“You too often lie by reflex,” Ignace said. “You should consider your lies more carefully.”

“Well, hell, I’m dealing with the press,” Lucas said. “So, what do you think?”

“If I go with this, will I wind up looking like a fool? Or will it turn out that he actually has killed more people?”

“Off the record?”

“For now,” Ignace agreed.

“We think we have at least one more attack,” Lucas said. “So we think he kept doing it. And you won’t wind up looking like a fool anyway, because if it doesn’t pan out, nobody’ll remember it: just another piece of paper for the bottom of the birdcage.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. So what do you think?”

“I think it’ll be on the front page tomorrow,” Ignace said.

“There you go,” said Lucas.

DEL SAID, “If Marcy finds out . . .”

“Ah, Ruffe can keep his mouth shut,” Lucas said. “But, I oughta call Marcy and tell her about Barker.” He got back on the phone, was told that Marcy Sherrill was in a budget meeting. He left a call-back.

“Want to do schools?” he asked Del.

“No, but what else have we got?”

Armed with a batch of subpoenas set up by Sandy, the researcher, they started with the schools the farthest out, in south Washington County, then drove north to Mounds View schools, then over to Minneapolis.

The first firing, of a forty-four-year-old male teacher named Hosfedder, in south Washington County, was actually a double firing. Hosfedder and a female teacher named Dubois, who had also been fired, had been involved in an extramarital affair, according to an assistant superintendent. The affair had been consummated, at least once, on a table in the chemistry lab on a dim Saturday afternoon in the late fall. Unfortunately for them, the coupling had been witnessed by a group of students who’d been in the school for a music program, and who’d gone quietly down to the lab for reasons not disclosed and presumably not relevant.

“Probably to neck,” Del suggested to the assistant superintendent.

“At least,” the guy said.

“No kids involved, I mean, no kids approached by Hosfedder,” Lucas said.

“Nothing recorded here,” the assistant superintendent said, thumbing through the file.

The second case had involved teacher-student sexual contact, a teacher named Lewis and a seventeen-year-old girl named Pelletson, but Del said, “Uh, we’ve got a problem, Houston.”

He tapped a line in the personnel file: Lewis was fifty-three at the time of the contact.

Lucas said, “Dirty old man,” and, to the school principal, “Thank you for your cooperation.”

MARCY CALLED as they were heading to Minneapolis. Lucas told her about Sandy finding the case involving Kelly Barker. “So I ran over there last night and talked to her, and I’ll tell you what—I think she was attacked by the same guy.”

“By the guy you say set up Scrape.”

“That’s right,” Lucas said.

“Okay. Thanks for the call,” Marcy said. “I’ll have somebody run down and check.” She sounded bored.

“Anything more on who lived in the house?”

“Not at the moment,” she said. “We’ve got a name for somebody who lived next door, but we haven’t gotten to her yet. She moved out to Fargo.”

“Let me know,” Lucas said.

“What’s happening with them?” Del asked, when Lucas rang off.

“Ah, they’re dead in the water,” Lucas said. “Marcy’s just not much interested yet.”

“She’s usually a go-getter.”

“She’s not a believer—doesn’t believe this is going to turn into anything except another pain in the ass. What she really likes is a nice run-and-shoot murder where she can put on a vest and smoke somebody out of a basement.”

After a minute, Del said, “Well, that is pretty fun.”

“Well, yeah.”

THE THIRD SCHOOL CASE, in Minneapolis, involved teacher-student, male-female contact again, but the teacher was black.

“That doesn’t help,” Lucas said.

They stopped at a McDonald’s for a quick lunch, got back to the office in the middle of the afternoon, just as Todd and Kelly Barker walked out the front door. “You do the Identi-Kit?” Lucas asked.

“Just got done—it’s a lot better than it used to be,” she said. She handed Lucas a printout of the reconstruction. He looked at it, passed it to Del, and said, “We need to dig up the people who met Fell, way back when, and show them this—I hope somebody’s still alive.”

“Well, we are,” Del said, handing the picture back to Kelly. “Must be some more. Maybe those hookers. They were pretty young. You still got their names?”

“Gotta be in my reports from back then,” Lucas said.

“You comfortable asking Minneapolis for that?”

“Man’s gotta do . . .” Lucas said. He turned back to the Barkers. “Whatever happened to the TV thing? You talk to your agent?”

“We’re waiting to hear back,” Kelly said. “I think it’s gonna fly, especially with this.” She flapped the computer likeness at them. “And especially now because of the Joneses.”

“We’re not sure of that connection yet,” Lucas said.

“All possibilities should be examined,” Kelly Barker said.

UP IN LUCAS’S OFFICE, Del asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“Check the Visa stuff under the John Fell name. We need to find out how he paid the account. If it’s postal money orders, we’re screwed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what it is. But if he had a checking account under the same name, then it gets more interesting. More complicated . . .”

“He’d have to have an ID for that,” Del said. “Did anyone ever check to see if he went for a driver’s license under that name?”

“Yeah, we checked at the time, but he didn’t have one,” Lucas said. “I suppose we could look again. But take a close look at how he paid those bills. If he had a checking account, we could probably find out quite a bit just by who he was paying.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Maybe talk to Marcy again,” Lucas said, “And then I’m going home for a nice vegetarian dinner with my wife and kids.”

“Kill yourself now.”

“No, no, it’s fine, a nice tofu steak with quince sauce, maybe, some corn,” Lucas said. “Organic applesauce for dessert.”

“I’m having some pig,” Del said. “I’ll call you and tell you about it.”

“God bless you,” Lucas said, and Del left.

HAD TO DO SOMETHING. Right now.

On the phone to Marcy: “I’d like to come over and look at the file on the Joneses, if that’s okay with you,” Lucas said.

“What are you looking for?”

“My notes. I wrote a couple of reports; I want to see if I can get some names.”

“You’re really getting into this,” she said.

“It’s interesting,” Lucas said. “I’m not working on anything hot right now, so I thought I’d hang around this for a while. If it doesn’t bother you.”

“No, not really. As long as you don’t overreach, and keep us up to date. Come on over, the file’s on Buster’s desk.”

Lucas made it over to Minneapolis in twenty minutes, and left his car in a police-only slot outside City Hall. He’d gone in and out of the Minneapolis City Hall probably ten thousand times during his career, and always marveled at how the original architects had managed to contrive a building that was at once ugly, inefficient, cold, sterile, charmless, and purple; and yet they had. Much of it was given over to the police department, and the long hallways of locked doors didn’t make the place any more cheerful.

He walked back to Homicide through the empty corridors, peeked into Marcy’s office. Nobody home. A lone Homicide guy was reading a New York Times at his desk, had looked up to grunt when Lucas came in, and said, “She’s gone to talk budget,” when Lucas looked into Marcy’s office.

“Where’s Buster’s desk?” Lucas asked.

“The one with the big-ass files sitting on it,” the guy said. His name was Roberts or Williams or Richards or Johns or something like that; Lucas knew him, but couldn’t put his finger on the name. “Marcy said I should watch to make sure you didn’t steal too much.”

“Just a few names,” Lucas said. A name popped into his head: Clark Richards. “How you been, Clark?”

“I been fine. You need help?”

Lucas looked at the five bankers’ boxes sitting on Buster’s desk: “If you got the time. I’m actually looking for my own written reports on the Jones kidnapping.”

They started going through the boxes, which were pleasantly musty, and halfway through the first one, Lucas found two brown office-mail envelopes, fastened with strings, that said “911 Tapes” on them. He opened them and found two cassette tapes.

“You have a cassette player around?” he asked.

“Yeah. Rodriguez has one in his bottom drawer.”

Lucas set the two tapes aside and continued looking. Richards found the reports in his second box, a big wad of cheap typing paper fastened with clasps. “Probably in here,” he said, thumbing through it.

Lucas took the paper, sat down, began flipping, and found his own contributions two-thirds of the way to the end. The hookers’ names, he found, were Lucy Landry, Dorcas Ryan, and Mary Ann Ang, and he’d taken down their driver’s license numbers along with their names.

“Just a child, but I was already so good,” he muttered, as he wrote them in a new notebook.

“Got what you needed?” Richards asked.

“Yes, I do,” Lucas said. “I wonder if you could get on your computer and look up some names for me, from the DMV. I want to listen to the nine-one-one tapes. . . .”

HE SAT in Marcy’s office with the tape recorder and a pair of earphones, made sure he was pushing the right buttons, and listened. Neither tape was longer than thirty seconds:

The first one:

“Nine-one-one. Is this an emergency?”

“Maybe. I think so. I heard about those two girls who are missing, and I don’t want to get involved, but there’s a transient guy who walks around here dribbling a basketball, and the rumor is, he’s got a record for sex crimes.”

“Do you know his name?”

“No, I don’t talk to him, I only see him. You guys need to pick him up.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“Not exactly. I know he used to live in some boxes down the river bluff off West River Road.”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“No, no, I don’t want to get involved. Find the guy with the basketball.”

At that point the conversation ended, and two seconds later a different voice from the first two gave a time and date for the call, and added that it came from a number traced to a phone booth on southeast Fourth Street on the east bank of the Mississippi, a half-mile or so from the place where the girls had been buried.

The second call:

“Nine-one-one. Is this an emergency?”

“Yes. I think so. You’re looking for Terry Scrape, that transient who kidnapped the Jones girls. I know who he is, because he dribbles a basketball all the time, and I saw him walking down an alley behind Tom’s Pizza last night, and he was carrying a box and he threw the box in a dumpster behind Tom’s Pizza. I don’t know if it’s important, but I thought I should call.”

“Thank you. If we could get your name—”

“I don’t want to get involved. Okay? Check the box.”

Two seconds later, a different voice gave a time and date for the call, and said that it had been traced to a phone booth near the University of Minnesota—not the same place as the first, but close: walking distance.

Lucas listened to the two calls, twice each, and made a few notes. He checked his notebooks, and found that the first call had come in about the time he and some other detectives—Sloan? Hanson or Malone? And Daniel?—had been looking across the street at Scrape’s apartment. The 911 call had been irrelevant at that point, not that the caller would know it. The second call had come in that night, while Lucas had been asleep. Sloan had gotten him out of bed to do the dumpster-diving. . . .

RICHARDS CAME and leaned in the door frame as Lucas was taking off the headphones, and Lucas asked, “What’d you get?”

“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 said, 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 around 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.

The killer was tired. Really tired. While he’d waited for the old man to show, he’d worked out his next steps, and those had made him even more tired. Nevertheless, they had to be taken.

He went back up the stairs, picked up the old man’s hat, put it on his head, turned off his porch light, and when he was sure there was nobody out in the street, walked out to the Caddy, got inside, and backed it down the drive.

Really tired.

FOUR HOURS LATER, at ten minutes before one in the morning, with the lights of Tower, Minnesota, in the distance, he took a hard left out to Lake Vermilion. The old man had a cabin there, one of a line of small cabins on the south shore of a peninsula. He pulled up the drive next to the cabin, went inside, turned on a light, waited a bit, and turned it off. Realized he was about to fall asleep: set an alarm clock for three o’clock in the morning, and two hours later, was knocked out of a sound sleep.

Getting off the couch was painful, but he did it. Moving as quietly as he could in the dark, he went down to the dock, lifted the kayak that sat on the dock into the sixteen-foot Lund that was tied next to it, then untied the Lund and, using the kayak paddle, began to paddle out into the lake.

The night sky was clear, with twenty million stars twinkling down at him. The lake was flat, and quiet, other than the odd plonks and plunks you always heard around lakes. He saw one other boat, a long way north, running at some speed from left to right, and then out of sight. Vermilion was a big place, and it was easy to get lost. . . .

He paddled for ten minutes, a few hundred yards offshore, then fired up the four-stroke engine, which was relatively quiet, and motored another half-mile out. Somewhere out here was a reef, he thought, where the old man often went walleye fishing. Didn’t matter too much . . .

Black as pitch; only a few lights on shore to guide him. He dropped the old man’s hat in the boat, lifted the kayak over the side, and eased into it. When he was settled, he horsed the boat around until it pointed back out into the lake, pushed the tiller more or less to center, and shifted the engine back into forward. The boat puttered off. He watched it for a minute, then turned the kayak back to shore. A half-hour later, he lifted the kayak back onto the dock and walked in the dark back up to the cabin.

He’d been out an hour. Couldn’t risk any more sleep. He locked the cabin, went to the garage, opened the side access door, and wheeled the dirt bike out onto the gravel. Closed the door, and started pushing the bike up the drive toward the road.

Heavier work than it looked, and he was sweating heavily by the time he got to the blacktop. Once there, he fired it up, and took off.

It’d be a long trip back to the Cities.

And he was so tired . . . so dead tired.

13

Lucas got up early the next morning, shaking out of bed as the Jones killer hit the northern suburbs on his bike; neither would ever know about that. But the killer was hurting. To ride a dirt bike from Vermilion to the Twin Cities was absurd, even for a regular rider. The killer wasn’t a regular rider, and on top of that, he was fat. He felt at times like the bike’s seat was about three feet up his butt.

When he finally got back to his house, he pushed the bike into the garage at the back and staggered inside, left his clothes in a heap and lurched into a shower. He had saddle sores, he thought; he couldn’t see them, but he could feel them, flat burns on the inside of his legs. As to the hemorrhoids . . .

LUCAS, ON THE OTHER HAND, was completely comfortable, and perhaps even self-satisfied, especially after he went out to recover the Star Tribune. As Ignace had suggested, his story was on the front page: “Cop Says Jones Killer Probably Murdered More Girls.” Excellent. Marcy would have a spontaneous hysterectomy when she read that, and the Minneapolis cops might actually start working the case.

He left the house an hour later with three names and addresses written in his notebook—the three former massage-parlor women, Lucy Landry, Dorcas Ryan, and Mary Ann Ang, whose last name was now Morgan. He’d interviewed the first two on his own, back in the eighties, and the third one with Del. He hadn’t remembered any of their names or what they looked like, but recognized Dorcas Ryan when she opened the screen door of her St. Paul Park home and he introduced himself. She said, “Man, it’s been a while.”

“Yes, it has,” Lucas said.

Ryan’s house was a little run-down, and not the neatest of places, but no less tidy than his would have been if he’d been living alone, Lucas thought. Like most people, he carried certain models in his head for old acquaintances. He’d often seen hookers go from fresh-faced high school girls to broken-down, sorrylooking creatures of twenty-two or twenty-three, with coke or meth habits, who seemed destined to slide into a grave before they were thirty.

Ryan, on the other hand, looked pretty much like a schoolteacher or bookkeeper in her late forties or early fifties, one who took care of herself. She was dressed in jeans, a neat collar blouse, and loafers. She invited him inside, offered him a Coke. He declined, sat in her one easy chair while she took the couch.

“You remember why I came to talk to you back then?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. The Jones kids. I was amazed when they were dug up—I guess you were, too.”

“I was,” Lucas said. “You remember the guy I was looking for? John Fell.”

“Sure. We were talking about him for weeks. He never came back.”

Lucas took a bundle of papers out of the briefcase he’d brought with him, and handed them to her. “I want you to look at a bunch of faces, and see if Fell is one of them.”

“All right . . . Huh. Not real photographs . . .” She began shuffling through the Identi-Kit pictures, taking them one at a time, slowly. “They’re all pretty much alike. . .”

Lucas had chosen a dozen faces, all with dark hair and round, heavy faces. She went through them, pulled a couple, compared them, and handed one to Lucas. “There’s something about this face. It’s got something. I think it might be him.”

She’d chosen the face that Barker had put together, and Lucas felt the hunter’s pleasure uncoil in his stomach. Most cases had a moment or two when a fact or an idea snapped into focus, when you knew you’d just taken a large step, and this was one of those times.

He nodded at her: “Thank you,” he said.

“Are you looking up the rest of the girls?”

“Lucy Landry and Mary Ann Ang,” Lucas said. “Those were the ones I could find, along with you.”

“Lucy’s had a hard time,” Ryan said. “First she got Jesus, probably fifteen years ago, and that didn’t work out, so she tried Scientology, and that didn’t help, but it cost a lot of money, so she tried Buddhism and yoga, and those didn’t work, so she started drinking. I think that helped, because she’s still drinking.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Lucas said. “What about Mary Ann Ang?”

She shook her head. “Haven’t thought about her in years. I can barely remember her face. I do remember that she married a rich guy—like maybe a doctor. Had some kids. I’m not sure that anybody knows that she ever worked with us. She was only there a couple of months.”

“Think it would mess her up if I interviewed her?”

Ryan tipped her head: “That was not a good time, back then, you know . . . for any of us. We’re lucky we lived through it. If she’s doing good, jeez, it’d be an awful shame to mess her up.”

LUCY LANDRY LIVED in an apartment on the edge of St. Paul’s Lowertown, one of those districts of old brick warehouses that the planners thought they could make artsy. He called her from the street, got lucky. She was home and buzzed him into the lobby. She was on the eighth floor, and he went up in an old freight elevator that groaned and stank of onions and took its own sweet time.

Landry came to the door in a dressing gown, looked at him through half-drunk morning eyes, and said, “Yep, it’s you. You look tougher than you used to.”

“You okay?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, pulling the gown tight around herself. “Come on in. I work late, I should be sleeping for another couple of hours.”

She had one bedroom, a small living room with a kitchen to one side, a round wooden table to eat at, a corduroy-covered couch to sit on, and a TV peering across the couch. Lucas sat on one end of the couch and took out his pictures.

She went through them, pulled out the same picture that Ryan had. “That’s the closest,” she said.

“Just close, or do you think that’s him?”

“If I were putting a face on him, with this computer or whatever it is, that’s what I’d draw. There’s something not quite right around the mouth, but it’s pretty good.” She stood up, absently scratched her crotch while looking around the living room, then tottered off to the kitchen area and came back with a pencil and a book. She put the paper on the book and then used the pencil to touch up the mouth. After one try and an erasure, she said, “There. That’s better.”

She handed it back to Lucas: she’d made only a small change, but one of significance—she’d changed the line of his lips, from squared-off, to a descending curve. She asked, “Do you think he killed the Jones girls?”

Lucas said, “I think maybe he did. I think this time I’m going to get a chance to ask him.”

“I saw on a Channel Three promo that some woman was attacked by him and got away. She’s on at noon.”

Kelly Barker had gotten her wish, Lucas thought. “She’s the one who gave us this picture,” he said.

“So he was still trying to snatch girls like years later,” Landry said. “You think he got some that nobody knows about?”

Lucas stood up, stuffed the pictures of Fell back in his briefcase. “I hate to think about that,” he said.

He took the stairs down instead of the elevator and was slowed by two men, artists, he supposed, carrying a four-by-eight sheet of plywood down the stairs. When they turned it around the corner, he saw that it was painted with a picture of a dancing man, like Lucas had seen on tarot cards.

Back at his car, he decided not to go after Mary Ann Ang/ Morgan. He might have screwed up a few lives through simple inexperience, way back when, but he didn’t need to screw up another, by showing up on her doorstep with questions about a massage parlor.

He would locate and identify Fell—he probably had enough now, he thought—and doubted that Ang/Morgan would be able to speed that up much. Now, it was all research.

WHILE LUCAS WAS TALKING to Landry, the killer was lying facedown on his couch. Just as he had gotten out of the shower, he’d suffered a series of muscle spasms in his back and legs, and he was afraid the ride might have done something to his spine. He found a bottle of oxycodone, left over from an oral surgery, popped three of them.

After an hour on the couch, he felt good enough to eat. He turned on the TV and headed into the kitchen. He was putting together three fried-egg-and-onion sandwiches on Wonder bread when he heard a promo for a woman who might be able to identify the killer of the Jones girls.

He went into the living room to watch, eating the sandwiches, swilling Diet Pepsi. He had to wait ten minutes, through the last part of a gardening show, before the noon news came up. Kelly Barker was the first story.

He remembered the bitch with perfect clarity. He’d cut her up, but she got away—one of only two women to get away from him. The other had been in Kansas, under similar circumstances. But he’d made his move too soon then, and never got close enough to touch.

With Barker, he’d gotten close enough, but she’d fought him and then she’d gotten a couple of steps on him, and she’d run like the wind. He’d made the executive decision to get the fuck out of there.

Now she was on TV—and she had a picture that looked something like him.

He unconsciously licked egg and grease off his fingers, shook his head, and when she’d finished, went off to lie down and think about it.

LUCAS GOT BACK to his office at five minutes to twelve. He turned on the TV, to Channel Three, for the Midday Report. Del wandered in as he was waiting for the show to come on: “I talked to a security guy at Wells Fargo,” he said. “They have a file of three cards they issued at different times, and they think they might all be linked to the same guy. John Fell was the first one. The others were a Ronald James Hubbard and a Tom Piper.”

“Nursery rhyme names,” Lucas said. “Mother Hubbard and Tom the piper’s son.”

“Yeah, the Wells Fargo guy picked that up, too. He wasn’t working with them, then, Norwest Bank issued the cards before it took over Wells Fargo, but the old Norwest file had all three guys already pulled out. No idea who he was, but he did the same thing with all three of them: had an address to start it, had it linked to a checking account he’d opened a couple of years earlier, changed the address to a post office box, emptied out the account, and skipped on the last credit-card bill. The first two final bills were small change, but the last one, he skipped on four thousand dollars. He worked it as a con, that last time.”

“Checks?” Lucas asked.

Del shook his head: “It’s all electronic. We can get facsimiles, but not the originals. They’ve all been recycled.”

“But we know what he was paying for . . .”

“Yeah, we got that. But it’s all pretty obscure. Small amounts, scattered all over the place. Maybe porn, like we were thinking. Could be books or records. That kind of money. Except that last one, toward the end, he bought a lot of stereo and TV stuff—stuff he could sell, I think.”

“But why would he hide books or money on a fake account?”

“That’s why I’m thinking porn, or something like it. Sex toys or something. I can’t find any of the account names at their address, so they were small-time, whatever they were. I’ll keep looking.”

The news came up on Channel Three, and Lucas used his remote to push the volume. After a story about a woman who cleaned out the accounts of a local charity to support her Vegas habit, Barker came up, sitting on a couch, talking to Jennifer Carey, the woman with whom Lucas shared a daughter.

“She’s on some kind of anti-aging sauce,” Del said. “She looks terrific.”

“Got the cheekbones,” Lucas agreed.

Barker said, “. . . came as a complete surprise. I agreed to cooperate, of course, so I went to the BCA office in St. Paul, and talked to an imaging expert named John Retrief, who helped me put together the image of the man who attacked me.”

The image of Fell flashed up full-screen, stuck for a moment, then pulled back, and down, to reveal the two women again.

“And this man they’re looking for, this John Fell—he matches that image?” Carey asked.

“He matches exactly, according to Agent Davenport,” Barker said, with a solemn turn of her lips and eyes.

“Jesus, I didn’t say that,” Lucas said.

Del said, “You did now.”

She continued, “And if you read the Star Tribune this morning, there’s a story on the case, where a serial-murder expert says he almost certainly killed more girls.” The camera shot changed to catch her square in the face: “I’m probably the only survivor. . . .” She began to shake, and tears appeared on her cheeks, and she said, “And I’m permanently scarred . . .” and held up her hands.

“She can do it,” Del said. “She’s only about an inch away from Oprah.”

“She might get Oprah, if we find Fell and pin the Jones murders on him,” Lucas said.

“Hope her alligator mouth don’t get her hummingbird ass in trouble,” Del said. “If Fell sees her . . .”

“I thought about that,” Lucas said. “I didn’t do anything about it.”

Jennifer Carey said, “If any of our viewers have any idea who this John Fell might possibly be, his real name, or his current name, notify the Minneapolis Police Department or BCA agent Lucas Davenport immediately, at the numbers on your screen. Do not attempt to apprehend . . .”

After the Channel Three broadcast, the other four stations jumped on the Identi-Kit picture, and Barker did tape for both KSTP and KARE for the evening news, variations on Channel Three; KARE also ran tape of James Hayworth, the St. Paul cop interviewed by the Star Tribune. Hayworth repeated his contention that there were almost certainly more dead girls.

During the afternoon, Del found four successor companies to the ones who took charges from Fell. “We were right—they were porn and sex toys,” he told Lucas. “None of them have records from back then. Just too long ago.”

During the afternoon, too, seven calls came in for Lucas, based on the Channel Three broadcast, with tips on people who resembled John Fell. Minneapolis got twelve more.

Lucas worked biographies on all of them during the afternoon, pulling criminal records, driver’s licenses, credit reports, personal histories. Four had minor criminal records, none for sex. Judging from driver’s license photos and data, two of the seven didn’t have dark hair, and four, including one of the brown-haired candidates, were too young. He was left with two possibilities, and he didn’t have much faith in either.

He talked to Marcy Sherrill, who said of the twelve tips they got, three were still considered possibilities. “We’ll have more calls coming in overnight,” she said. “I figure the chances we’ll get him are like four to one, against.”

“That’s about right,” Lucas said. “But if he’s still around, we’re gonna scare the shit out of him. That might get us somewhere.”

He took another tip, shifted up by the BCA operator. A man who said, “I don’t want to say my name, but the guy you want is named Robert Sherman. He’s a sex freak and he’s the spitting image of the guy on TV, and he’s the right age—early fifties.”

Lucas checked the number: the guy was calling from a bar.

The guy said, “He lives on Iowa Avenue. In St. Paul.”

And was gone.

Lucas looked at his watch: he could hit Iowa on the way home, check the guy out. Or maybe after dinner . . .

He did a quick dip into the driver’s license records, decided the guy did look like Fell, but Fell with a mustache. He got an address and date of birth, went out to NCIC to check criminal records, found nothing.

No record, but he was a sex freak?

Called Del on his cell. “What’re you doing?”

“I’m on my way home for dinner. What’s up?”

“You got time after dinner to make a quick stop up in north St. Paul?”

“Sure, as long as I don’t get shot. What’re you doing?”

“Going home,” Lucas said. “But I got a guy I want to look at. Pick you up at your place, at seven?”

“See you then.”

HE WAS HOME by six; watched the KARE broadcast with Letty and Weather.

“All in all,” Lucas told them, “a fairly satisfactory day. We’ve got the guy’s nuts in a vise.”

“Lucas, watch the language,” Weather said.

The housekeeper stuck her head in from the kitchen: “Everybody come on. Food’s getting cold.”

“Okay, testicles,” Lucas said, as they all headed for the dining room.

“What do you think about the whole concept of nuts-in-a-vise?” Letty asked.

“Letty . . .” Weather began.

Letty said to her mother, “Something I’m curious about. You see these movies where a guy gets racked in the nuts, and they fall down. But I once shot a guy and he didn’t fall down. In fact, he walked away. So what I want to know is, is racking a guy in the nuts really that powerful? Or is that a myth? I mean, what if I’m attacked someday? Should I kick the guy in the nuts, or what?”

Weather said, “Speaking as a medical doctor . . .”

Lucas waved her down and focused on his daughter. “Here’s the thing. If you give a guy a really good shot in the nuts—like, if he doesn’t see you coming, and you kick him from behind, right in the crotch, you’re gonna hurt him. He’s gonna hurt bad.

“But—and this is what you need to know: First, guys whack themselves in the nuts every once in a while, by accident, from the time they’re young. We develop really good reflexes for protecting ourselves. You try to kick a guy in the nuts from the front, all he has to do is flinch, and you wind up kicking him in the leg, instead. And, you piss him off.

“Second, when you hit a guy in the nuts, from the front, even if you give him a solid shot, it takes a couple of seconds for the full reaction. You don’t drop him like a sack of . . . rocks. And what you’ve done, by kicking him, is you’ve gotten close enough that he can get his hands on you. And no matter how bad his nuts hurt, he can hang on to you. And he can kill you. With all the pain, he is seriously pissed, and he just might do that.

“Thing to remember: the average guy is a lot bigger and stronger than the average woman. Best way to protect yourself is to scream and run. If he gets you and pulls you in, go with it. Go in, and go for his nose—try to bite it. Hard—like you were trying to bite through an overdone steak. He’ll let go of you, to try to push you off. When your hand comes free, go for his eyes with your nails. A kick in the nuts, it’s too hard to score, and even if you do, there’s a good chance he’ll still take you down.”

“What if you don’t want to really hurt him, you just want him to quit what he’s doing?” Letty asked.

“If a guy’s a serious threat, you hurt him,” Lucas said. “If he’s not a serious threat—if he’s just messing you around—don’t hurt him. Don’t rip his nose off or his eyes out, don’t kick him in the nuts. But if he’s serious, tough shit. Take him any way you can. Okay? Is that what you wanted to know?”

“That about covers it,” Letty said.

“I hope the new one didn’t hear that,” Weather said, patting her baby bump.

WHILE LUCAS AND LETTY were reviewing testicular vulnerabilities, the killer was cruising Barker’s home in Bloomington. He’d looked her up on Facebook, had taken her husband’s name from that, and then looked them up in the phone book.

And there they were.

He had the old man’s Glock with him. Didn’t need to be a genius to use it. He’d fired it any number of times up at the cabin, back in the woods. Thirteen rounds. Enough to start a war.

Just point and shoot.

He was a little scared, but not too. Quiet neighborhood, close to a freeway where he could quickly get lost.

If he decided to do it.

14

Letty was going to a snobby friend’s prejunior-year party. Letty wasn’t a snob, but something about the whole insider-clique idea appealed to her sense of investigation. She’d dressed carefully, and carefully suggested that it might be good if she were to arrive at the party in a Porsche. With the top down.

Letty had Lucas whipped, so Weather took her in the Porsche, with the top down. And so Lucas was driving the Lexus SUV when he pulled over to pick up Del. Del was standing at the curb outside his house, talking to a guy in a St. Paul Saints hat who had a wiener dog on a leash. Del said goodbye to the guy, climbed in the car, and said, “Maybe I oughta get a wiener dog.”

“You got a toddler, why would you need a dog?” Lucas asked. “Teach the kid to retrieve.”

“Wiener dogs don’t retrieve. They were bred to go down into badger dens and fight the badgers.”

“Hey, that’d be right up your kid’s alley, from what I’ve seen.”

Del refused to rise to the bait: “No, really, I think a kid ought to grow up with a pet. It’s another way to get socialized.”

“When the hell did everybody start worrying about socialization?” Lucas asked. “Look at you. You’re not socialized, and you’ve done okay. Well, I mean, you’re not in jail, anyway.”

“I’m trying to make a serious point,” Del said.

So they talked about it on the way to Robert Sherman’s house on Iowa Avenue. Lucas knew where he was going, he thought, and, despite St. Paul’s insane method of assigning street addresses, didn’t bother to punch the address into the truck’s navigation system. When they ran out of street before they got to the number, they wound up driving around, running into more dead-end streets, muttering to each other, until finally Lucas pulled over and laboriously punched the address into the navigation system.

Iowa Avenue, it turned out, existed in several pieces. The piece that they’d been looking for was a nice-enough neighborhood of older clapboard houses, with a touch of brick here and there, garages added later, full-grown maple and ash trees along the streets, and mailboxes out at the curb.

Sherman’s house sat ten feet or so above the street, with a newer concrete driveway leading to a four-car garage in what had once been the backyard. There were lights in the window. Lucas and Del got out of the car, and Del hitched up his pants, which gave him a chance to touch his pistol, making sure it was in exactly the right spot.

Lucas said, “Somebody’s playing a piano,” and they both turned and looked for the source. The sound was coming from a house across the street, Lucas decided, where somebody was playing a familiar tinkly movie theme that he couldn’t quite name. Something old.

“And somebody’s cooking pork chops,” Del said.

Lucas said, “That’s it—we’re cooking out next weekend. Brats and sweet corn. If nobody wants to eat with me, I’ll eat it all myself.”

“Attaboy,” Del said.

They went on up Sherman’s driveway, the music notes falling about them like raindrops.

SHERMAN CAME to the screen door, a heavyset man wearing sweatpants and a St. Thomas T-shirt, and as soon as Lucas saw him coming, he thought, Wrong guy. He looked like the Identi-Kit picture of Fell, but he also had a cheerful, hang-out face, and that was not Lucas’s idea of John Fell. He had a can of beer in one hand.

Sherman, behind the screen, said, “You don’t look like Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

Del said, “No, we’re with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” and held out his ID. “We’d like to have a word with you, if we could.”

Sherman peered at Del’s ID, then opened the screen and stepped out on the porch. “What’s up?”

“We got a call from a source who said you might be able to help us with our investigation of the murder of the two Jones girls—”

“Ah, man, you think I look like that guy, don’t you?” Sherman said. “My wife said that. She saw the picture on TV and said, ‘You look like that guy.’”

He had a wife; Lucas didn’t think John Fell would be married. “Our source said that you may have had some problems with sexual issues,” Lucas said.

Sherman started getting hot: “Sexual issues? What does that mean? You mean, somebody said I was a pervert? Is that what?”

“Well, somebody suggested—” Lucas began.

Del said, “Take it easy—”

Sherman said, his voice rising, “That’s bullshit. I never . . . I’ve never been arrested, I mean, I got some speeding tickets back a few years ago, but I never . . .” And then he swiveled his head to the left, looking over Del’s head, and shouted, “You motherfucker.”

Lucas looked that way and saw another man, looking out from the open door of his garage. On his face was an expression compounded of rage and glee, and he shouted back, “Now you’re gonna get it, dickhead. Now you’re gonna get it.”

Del said, “Ah, man . . .”

Sherman took three quick running steps down the porch and Lucas tried to grab his arm, but Sherman was heavy and moving fast, and Lucas fumbled it, and Sherman was loose and heading across the lawn. The other man, who was much smaller but just as angry, came out to meet him, and when they were ten feet apart Sherman threw his beer can at the other man’s head, and a half-second later they were wrapped up on the ground, ineffectively punching at each other, and tearing at each other’s hair.

As Lucas and Del ran across the lawn to separate them, a woman came out behind them and shouted, “No, no, Bob, don’t . . .”

And then a thin woman with fly-away hair popped out of the neighboring garage and shouted, “You shut up, you whore,” and she started for the property line.

The neighbor was shorter and lighter than Sherman, so Lucas grabbed him by the collar and yanked him away from Sherman and threw him at Del, who grabbed one of the neighbor’s flailing arms and levered him onto the grass, facedown, his arm locked straight up behind him.

Sherman was trying to get up, and Lucas shouted, “Stay down, stay down,” and then the women started, circling each other like a couple of Mexican fighting cocks, yelling at each other. Lucas pushed Sherman down and got between the two women, who were getting the nails out. He shouted, “Everybody shut up, or you’re all going to jail. Everybody shut up.”

The neighbor, still pinned, was shouting, “You’re killing me, you’re killing me,” and Sherman, now on his feet, wild-eyed, said to Lucas, “It’s the fucking garage. It’s the fucking garage.”

Lucas had the two women separated, and he looked at Sherman and said, “You think you could hang on to your wife here?” Sherman hustled over and got his wife around the waist and walked her back to the porch, and then came back and shouted at the neighbor, still on the ground, “It’s the fucking garage, isn’t it? You called them because of the fuckin’ garage.”

They took five minutes to get the story. The two couples had never liked each other, and Sherman’s kid had been a high school football star, and the neighbor’s kid had been cut in tenth grade, and then Sherman built the Taj Ma-Garage in his backyard, looming over the neighbor’s backyard, throwing half of it into shadow.

“Where’m I supposed to grow my tomatoes?” the neighbor bleated at Lucas. “You can’t grow tomatoes in full shade. And he goes back there with that saw all the time and it used to be all peaceful back here and now he runs that saw at all times of day and night.”

And, he thought, Sherman was a dead ringer for the guy who killed the Jones girls and attacked Barker.

When the neighbor had calmed down, Del had let him up, and the two men were shaking grass off their clothes. The two women were standing with arms crossed twenty feet away from the circle of men, on opposite sides, throwing in an occasional word of encouragement.

Lucas finally said, “Look—no harm done at this point. Okay? You want to sue each other, that’s your problem. But I don’t want to take you downtown, and you don’t want to go. It’s really unpleasant. Okay . . .”

And they were nodding and muttering around, and Lucas suggested that they shake hands. Sherman stepped forward, and so did the neighbor, and when Sherman stuck out a hand, the neighbor hit Sherman flat in the nose, and the big man staggered and one second later they were at it again and the women were screaming, and Lucas ripped the neighbor off Sherman and threw him at Del again and said, “Cuff him, he’s under arrest.”

Two more neighbors from down the street came running in, and Lucas held up his hands and said, “Police . . . we’re police . . . stay off the lawn, stay off.”

One of the new guys said, “This is about the garage, isn’t it?”

Sherman was bleeding from his nose, but not too bad. He was trying to pinch it off, and Lucas said, “Go inside, lie down, put some ice on it. If it doesn’t stop, get your wife to take you down to the emergency room, okay? Got that?”

Sherman said, “Ah, I’b hab a bloody nose before,” and asked, “Wha’ ’bout Berg?”

“He’s going downtown,” Lucas said.

THEY HAD THE NEIGHBOR, whose name was Eric Berg, in the backseat of the Lexus when Lucas took a cell phone call from an agent named Jenkins, who shouted into his phone, over what sounded like a screaming car engine, “Where are you?”

“Up on Iowa Avenue, off Rice Street.”

“We’ll meet you at the corner of Rice and Maryland, in that tire company lot, lights and sirens, man. . . . Get down here.”

“What’s going on?”

“Just . . . just get your ass down here. We’ll be there in two minutes. . . . Fuckin’ get down here. Go.”

15

Marcy Sherrill missed Kelly Barker’s performance on the noon news, but heard about it, and then caught her on KARE at six o’clock. She’d known the Jones case was going to be a headache, and the headache had only gotten worse with Davenport working it.

She appreciated the fact that he had a personal stake in the investigation, and when that happened, it was usually like Sherman’s March on Atlanta: nothing stood in his way. Among other things, she believed, he was manipulating the media to put pressure on the Minneapolis PD to dig up every scrap of information they could find on the mystery man, John Fell.

Davenport really didn’t care about their other problems—though, to be fair, their problems weren’t all that bad. The murder rate was continuing to drop, rape and armed robbery were down, the gangs were continuing to fade. Part of that, she thought, was that coke and meth sales were down, while the quality of marijuana continued to increase.

In her humble opinion, a guy lying on his living room floor with a B.C. blunt, a bag of nachos, and Wheel of Fortune on the TV was less likely to do serious civic damage than some freaked-out tweaker looking for another hit.

And, to be doubly fair, Davenport had generally played the media as much when he was a Minneapolis cop, as when he’d left for the BCA. In fact, Marcy thought, she’d helped him do it often enough. . . .

But, annoying. The chief was going to call her up and ask, in his sideways, we’re-all-pals voice, “Have you had a chance to talk to that Barker woman? I’ve seen her on all the channels.”

The chief spent a lot of time watching all the channels.

SHE WAS SITTING in her office, feet up on her desk, looking at a small flat-panel TV when Barker came on. When Barker was done, she called out to Buster Hill, in the next room, “Hey, Buster. Get me an address and phone number for this Kelly Barker. She’s someplace down in Bloomington.”

Buster, a man who claimed to be an endomorph, rather than simply fat, came and leaned in her doorway and asked, “We gonna talk to her?”

“Got to,” Marcy said. “She’s been all over the TV, she’s got that BCA face . . . we gotta talk to her.”

“For real, or for PR?”

Marcy yawned. Her boyfriend was in Dallas, and she was restless and a little lonely: “PR, mostly . . . she’s told that story so often I got it memorized.”

“You want me to do it?”

“I want you to come along when I do it—follow me over there. I can go home from there. You can take notes. Somebody’s got to take notes.”

Buster got the address from the DMV, and a cell phone number from someplace else. Kelly Barker would be pleased to talk to Sherrill; she’d be at home all evening.

So Marcy and Buster headed out in two cars, down I-35W through south Minneapolis, past the airport and then west on I-494 and south again, a half-hour of easy driving, the sun slanting down toward the northwestern horizon.

Marcy thought about Davenport—he really was an arrogant bastard in a lot of ways, good-looking, rich, flaunting it with the car and the outrageously gorgeous Italian suits. But they’d once been involved in a case that led more or less directly to bed . . . forty days and forty nights, as Davenport referred to their affair. It had been short but sweet, and she still had a soft spot for him.