Buried Prey

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.”