Buried Prey

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

THEN

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

NOW

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

Rules of Prey

Shadow Prey

Eyes of Prey

Silent Prey

Winter Prey

Night Prey

Mind Prey

Sudden Prey

The Night Crew

Secret Prey

Certain Prey

Easy Prey

Chosen Prey

Mortal Prey

Naked Prey

Hidden Prey

Broken Prey

Dead Watch

Invisible Prey

Phantom Prey

Wicked Prey

Storm Prey

KIDD NOVELS

The Fool’s Run

The Empress File

The Devil’s Code

The Hanged Man’s Song

VIRGIL FLOWERS NOVELS

Dark of the Moon

Heat Lightning

Rough Country

Bad Blood

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

Publishers Since 1838

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia • (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

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Copyright © 2011 by John Sandford

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sandford, John, date.

Buried prey / John Sandford.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-51503-7

1. Davenport, Lucas (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Minnesota—Minneapolis—Fiction. 3. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)—Fiction. 4. Serial murders—Fiction. 5. Serial murder investigation—Fiction.

6. Minneapolis (Minn.)—Fiction. I. Title. PS3569.A516B

813’.54—dc22

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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For Michele

1

The first machines on the site were the wreckers, like steel dinosaurs, plucking and pulling at the houses with jaws that ripped off chimneys, shingles, dormers, and eaves, clapboard and brick and stone and masonry, beams and stairs and balconies and joists, headers and doorjambs. Old dreams, dead ambitions, and lost lives, remembrance roses and spring lilacs, went in the dump trucks all together.

When the wrecking was done, the diggers came in, cutting a gash in the black-and-tan soil that stretched down a city block. A dozen pieces of heavy equipment crawled down its length, Bobcats and Caterpillar D6s and Mack trucks, and one orange Kubota, grunting and struggling through the raw earth.

Now gone silent as death.

The equipment operators gathered in twos and threes, yellow helmets and deerskin work gloves, jeans and rough shirts, to talk about the situation. Slabs of concrete lay around the trench, pieces of what once had been basement floors and walls. Electric wire was gathered in hoops, pushed into a corner of the hole, to await removal; survey stakes marked the lines where new concrete would go in.

None of it happening today.

At one end of the gash, twelve men and four women gathered around a bundle of plastic sheeting, once clear, now a pinkishyellow with age. It was still set down in the earth, but the dirt on top of it had been swept away by hand. A few of the people were construction supervisors, marked by yellow, white, and orange hard hats. The rest were cops. One of the cops, whose name was Hote, and who was Minneapolis’s sole cold-case investigator, was kneeling at the end of the bundle with her face four inches from the plastic.

Two dead girls grinned back at her, through the plastic, their desiccated skin pulled tight over their cheek and jaw bones, their foreheads; their eyes were black pits, their lips were flattened scars, but their teeth were as white and shiny as the day they were murdered.

Hote looked up and said, “It’s them. I’m pretty sure. Sealed in there.”

THE DAY WAS HOT, hardly a cloud in the sky, the July sun burning down; but the soil was cool and damp, and smelled of rotted roots and a bit of sewage, from the torn-up sewer lines leading out of the hole. Another woman, who’d walked into the pit in low heels and two-hundred-dollar black wool slacks that were now flecked with the tan earth, asked, “Can you tell what happened? Were they dead when they were sealed in?”

Hote stood up and brushed the dirt from her jeans and said, “I think so. It looks to me like they were hanged.”

“Strangled?”

“Hanged,” Hote repeated. “There appears to be some upward displacement of the cervical spine in both girls—but that’s looking through a lot of plastic. Their arms go behind them, instead of lying by their sides, so I think they’ll be tied or cuffed. Anyway—let’s get them over to the ME.”

“What else?”

“Marcy . . .” Hote was always reluctant to commit herself without all the facts; a personal characteristic. Most cops were willing to bullshit endlessly about possibilities, including alien abduction and satanic cults.

“Anything?”

“There’s a lot of tissue left,” Hote said. “They’re mummified—it’s almost like they were freeze-dried inside the plastic.”

“Will there be anything organic left by the killer?” The woman meant semen, but didn’t use the word. If they could recover semen, they could get DNA.

“If there was anything to begin with, it’s possible there are still traces,” Hote said. “Since hardly anybody had heard of DNA back then, we might find the killer’s hair on them. . . . But, I’m no scientist. So who knows? Let’s get them to the ME.”

One of the cops in the back said, “Marcy? Davenport’s coming down.”

Marcy Sherrill, head of Minneapolis Homicide, turned and looked over her shoulder. Lucas Davenport, a dark-haired, broadshouldered man in black slacks, French-blue shirt, his suit jacket hung by a finger over his shoulder, was trudging down the earthen ramp toward the group around the plastic sepulchre. He looked as though he’d just stepped out of a Salvatore Ferragamo advertisement, his eyes, shirt, and tie all entangled in a fashionable blue vibration.

She said, “Okay. This makes my day.”

An older man said, “He worked on it. This.” He gestured at the plastic.

“I don’t think so,” Sherrill said. “He’d have been too young.”

“I remember,” the old man said. “He was all over it. I think it was his first case in plainclothes.”

SHERRILL WAS THE SENIOR active Minneapolis cop on the scene, a solid, raven-haired woman in her late thirties, with a great slashing white smile and what an older generation of cops called a “good figure.” She’d had a reputation as a cop not afraid of a fistfight, and still carried a lead-weighted sap on a key ring. Sherrill had come on the police force at a time when women were still suspect when it came to doing street work. She’d erased that attitude quickly enough, and now was accepted as a cop-cop, rather than as a woman cop, or, as they were still occasionally called, a Dickless Tracy. She’d hardly mellowed as she moved up through the ranks and would someday, most people thought, either be the Minneapolis chief or go into politics.

There were five retired cops in the group around her, men who’d worked on the original investigation. As soon as the bodies had been discovered, the police had been called, and word of the find had begun leaking out. All over the metro area, aging cops and ex-cops got in their cars and headed downtown, to look for themselves, to see the girls, and to talk about those days: the hot summers, the cold winters, all the time on the sidewalks before high-tech came in, computers and cell phones and DNA.

DAVENPORT CAME UP, and the gray-hairs nodded at him—they all knew him, from his time in Minneapolis—and he shook hands with a couple of them, and a couple who didn’t like him edged away, and Sherrill asked, “How’d you hear?”

“It’s gone viral, at least in the cop shops,” he said, peering at the plastic sheeting. He worked for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and, with his close relationship with the governor, was probably the most influential cop in the state. Minneapolis was technically within his jurisdiction, but he was polite. He flipped a thumb at the sheeting and asked, “Do you mind if I look?”

“Go ahead,” Sherrill said.

Hote pointed and said, “They’re faceup, heads at that end.”

Lucas squatted in Hote’s knee prints at the end of the plastic, looked down at the withered faces for a full thirty seconds, then, paying no attention to the neat crease on his wool-blend slacks, got on his knees and crawled slowly down the length of the bundle, his face an inch from the plastic. After a moment, he grunted, stood up, brushed his knees, then said, “That’s Nancy on the left, Mary on the right.”

“Hard to know for sure,” Hote said. “It likely is them—the size is right, the hair coloring . . .”

Lucas said, “It’s them. Nancy was the taller one. Nancy was wearing a blouse with little red hearts on it, that she got from her father on Valentine’s Day. It was the last gift he gave her. It’s wadded up between her thighs. I can see the hearts.”

Sherrill looked up at the sides of the trench and said, “I wonder what the address was here? We need to pull some aerials and figure out which one was which. I thought the guy who did it . . .”

“Terry Scrape,” Lucas said. “He didn’t do it.”

She stared at him: “I thought that was settled. That he was killed . . .”

Lucas shook his head. “He was. I was there. I thought, back then, that there was a chance he was involved. But with this . . . I don’t think so. There was somebody else. Somebody with a lot more energy than Scrape ever had. Somebody pretty smart. I could feel him, but I could never find him. Anyway, he hung it on Scrape like a hat on a witch, and we had us a witch hunt.”

“I gotta look at the file,” Sherrill said.

“Scrape lived way over by Uptown,” Lucas said, remembering. “There’s no way he killed these kids and buried them in the basement of a private house, under the concrete floor. He was only here for a few weeks, homeless most of the time. He lived in a hole under a tree, for part of the time, for Christ’s sakes. He didn’t even have a car.”

“Gotta get the addresses, see who was living here,” Sherrill said again.

Lucas looked up out of the hole at the surrounding neighborhood, as Sherrill had, and said, “I knocked on two hundred doors. Me and Sloan. We never got within two miles of this place. Never crossed the river.”

“Mark Towne owned a bunch of these houses down here,” said one of the older cops. “The Towne Houses. I don’t know if these were his.”

Lucas said, “That seems right to me. Before the kids came in, it was mostly elderly. Retired railroad workers, lots of them. Towne was buying them up for a few thousand bucks apiece.”

Sherrill said, “We’ll check.”

“Towne got killed in a car crash, maybe ten, fifteen years ago,” somebody offered.

Lucas nodded at the bodies: “How’d they come out clean like this? So flat?”

A guy in a yellow helmet said, “I was pulling up the pieces of the basement slab, to load ’em up.” He gestured at his Cat. “I got hold of that one block and tipped it up, and there they were.”

“You could see them?” Lucas wasn’t disbelieving, just curious.

“I could see the plastic and something in the plastic. I had to check in case . . .” He stopped and looked around the hole, searching for a place that didn’t look back at him with bony eye sockets. “You know what? I got the creeps looking at it. I had a feeling it was something bad, before I ever got down to look.”

Lucas nodded at him, said, “Bad day,” and then turned back to Sherrill. “I’d keep the slabs around. He must’ve poured the concrete right over the top of them. You might find fingerprints, some kind of impressions. Something.”

She nodded. “We’ll do that.”

“And you gotta find the Joneses, the parents, and let them know, right away. Before the news gets out. If you want, I’ve got a researcher who can find them, and I can have her call you with the phone numbers. I heard they got divorced a couple years after the kids were killed . . . but I don’t know that for sure.”

“If you’ve got somebody who could do that . . . but have him call me.”

“Her,” Lucas said. And, “I will.”

SHERRILL AND DAVENPORT drifted away from the group, and Sherrill asked, “Haven’t seen you for a while. How’ve you been?”

“Busy, but nothing crazy,” Lucas said. He touched her on the shoulder, and added, “This Jones thing. It was amazing, if you worked it. Big news—cute little blond girls, vanishing like that. The way things are now, I doubt anybody will care. It was too long ago. But the guy who did it is still around. We can’t let it slide.”

“We won’t let it slide,” she said.

“But you’ve got other things to do, just like I do. And the girls are dead.”

“You sound like you’ve got a special interest,” Sherrill said.

Lucas looked over to the plastic-wrapped bodies: “You know, all those years ago . . . I kinda messed up. I’ve always thought that, and now . . . here it is, back in my face.”

A Channel Three TV truck slowed on the open street at the far end of the gash. One of the older cops called, “We got media.”

Lucas said to Sherrill, as they stepped back to the group around the grave, “You got my number if you need anything. I’ll get you that information on the Joneses.”

She said, “I’m still a little pissed about the last time.”

The winter before, Lucas had trampled all over a Minneapolis investigation of a series of murders that started in a Minneapolis hospital. It had all ended with a shoot-out in a snowstorm, to which Sherrill felt she had not been properly invited. Grenades had been involved.

Lucas grinned and said, “Yeah, well, tough shit, sweetheart. Listen, I remember a lot about this thing. If you need me, call. Really.”

She softened, but just half an inch—she and Lucas had once spent a month or so in bed, and that month had been as contentious as their hands-off relationship since then. “I will.” And, “How’s Weather feeling?”

“Getting better; she was pretty cranky last month.”

“Say hello for me.”

Lucas said he would, looked a last time at the hole with the plastic-wrapped bodies: “Man, it seems like it was a month ago. That was the year of Madonna. Everybody listening to Madonna. And Prince was huge. Soul Asylum was coming up. I used to go to the Soul Asylum concerts every time they played Seventh Street Entry. And we’d ride around at night, look at the crack whores, listen to ‘Like a Virgin’ and ‘Crazy for You’ and ‘Little Red Corvette.’ Hot that summer. And I mean, Madonna was young, way back then.”

“So were we,” said one of the old cops. “I used to dance.”

Another asked, “What’re you gonna do about this?”

“We’ve got one more guy to catch,” Lucas said. “I hate to think what this cocksucker’s done between now and then. Excuse the French.”

LUCAS WENT BACK to his office, in the BCA building on the north side of St. Paul. It was a solid, modern building, which felt more like a suburban office complex than a police headquarters. He climbed the stairs to his second-floor office, with a quick flash of a hand at a friend down a hallway. His secretary said, “Hi, I need to—” and he said, “Later,” and went into his office and closed the door.

The image of the dead girls hung in his eyes, the stony smiles asking, “What’ll you do about this?”

Lucas pulled a wastebasket over beside his desk and propped his feet on it, tilted his chair back and closed his eyes, and let himself slip back to the first days of the Jones case. He took the investigation a day at a time, as best as he could remember it, and there wasn’t much that he’d forgotten.

And when he got to the end of the review, he decided that right at the beginning, he’d done something worse than anything else he’d done in his entire career since then—even though some of the things he’d done since then were technically criminal. Criminal, but not immoral. What he’d done back then was immoral: he’d caved.

He’d been a still-impressionable kid eager to get into plainclothes, and a path had been laid out for him. That path meant putting the early days of his career in the hands of Quentin Daniel, a very smart and occasionally quite a bad man. Daniel wanted to be chief of police, and maybe mayor.

The Jones case was an ugly one, with all kinds of frightening undertones, and as the head of violent crimes—Homicide—Daniel was on the hot seat. He’d pushed a strong and legitimate investigation, but when a suspect popped up, somebody who was essentially unable to defend himself, and against whom there was substantial evidence, Daniel had grabbed him and held on tight.

Then the suspect got himself killed, and once you kill a guy, you own him, for good or evil. If he’s innocent, and you kill him, your career may be over; if he’s guilty, well, then, no harm done.

Scrape, Lucas thought, had seemed to him innocent even at the time; and now, almost certainly so. He could have pushed harder, he could have slipped more information to the Star Tribune, he could have publicly challenged the verdict on Scrape . . . but he hadn’t.

He’d done some poking around, but then, as the youngest member of Daniel’s team, he hadn’t rocked the boat. Daniel hadn’t been dumb enough to forbid him from continuing an investigation, but had simply joked about his efforts—and kept him on the hop with daily investigative chores in the middle of the crack explosion—and Lucas had eventually let the Jones case go.

Had caved, had given up. Had put the Jones girls in his personal out-basket.

God only knew what the killer had done after that. In the best of all worlds, he might have frightened himself so badly that he never again committed a crime. But in the real world, Lucas feared, his own . . . negligence . . . had allowed the killer to continue to kidnap and murder kids. That’s what these guys usually did, after they started.

A thin cold blanket of depression fell over Lucas’s thoughts. He ran his hand through his hair, once, twice, again and again, trying to make the train of thought go elsewhere.

The Jones girls, back for their summer reunion tour.

THEN

2

There was an instant, just before the fight, when Lucas Davenport’s overweight partner said, “Watch it, he’s coming,” and he pulled his nightstick and Lucas had time to set his feet. Then Carlos O’Hearn came steaming down the bar, through the stink of spilled beer and hot dogs with relish and boiled eggs in oversized jars, came knocking over bar stools like tenpins, a beer bottle in his right hand, while the bartender leaned away and said, “Noooo . . .”

Ten feet out, O’Hearn pitched the bottle at Lucas’s head. Lucas tipped his head to the right and the bottle went by and bounced down the bar, taking out glasses and ashtrays and silverware as it went, so it sounded like somebody had dropped a kitchen tray. A woman made a scream-like sound, but not quite a scream, because it seemed more interested than terrorized. Lucas didn’t register much of that, because he was focused on O’Hearn, who’d spent some time as a Golden Gloves fighter, in what must have been the germ-weight class.

O’Hearn was one of three siblings known as the asshole brothers to cops working the south side. They also had an asshole mother, but nobody knew for sure about the father. Fleeing Mother O’Hearn may have been simple self-preservation by whoever had made the mistake of impregnating her three times, because she was as violent and crooked and generally rotten and no-good as her sons.

The O’Hearns usually did minor strong-arm robbery, but they’d gotten ambitious and had gone into the back of a True Value hardware store, from which they’d stolen a pile of power tools. Everybody knew exactly what they’d taken because of the video cameras that the asshole brothers hadn’t noticed, up on the ceiling behind silvered domes. The cameras had taken photos that would have made Ansel Adams proud, if Ansel Adams had ever taken pictures of assholes.

Enzo and Javier were already in the Hennepin County jail, and the bar owner had called 911 to report that Carlos had come in, and was in a bad mood, which usually led to a fight and broken crockery.

So Lucas and his partner rolled, and here they were, O’Hearn coming down the bar with a Golden Gloves punch. Lucas set his feet, dodged the bottle, and, with a reach about nine inches longer than the Golden Glover’s, and with an extra eighty pounds or so, and with a fist loaded with a roll of nickels, tagged O’Hearn in the forehead.

The punch had been aimed at his nose, but O’Hearn, too, could dodge, and though the punch crossed his eyes, his momentum kept him coming and they collided and O’Hearn got in two good licks to Lucas’s ribs as they went to the floor, where Lucas pinned his arms and his partner started playing the Minnesota Fight Song on O’Hearn’s back and right leg with his nightstick.

O’Hearn took about six shots before he whimpered the first time, then Lucas got back just enough to pop him in the nose with the weighted fist, and blood exploded across the bar floor and O’Hearn went flat.

After that, it was routine.

ALL OF WHICH EXPLAINED WHY, when Lucas rolled out of bed and stretched, a lightning stroke of pain shot through his left side, from the cracked ribs he’d taken from those two quick Golden Gloves punches. He stretched again, more carefully, then looked down at the soft round ass of a blond-haired woman and said, “DeeDee. Rise and shine.”

“What?” She sounded drugged. She wasn’t getting much sleep, she said, between her law practice and keeping two guys happy.

Lucas said, “Get up. You got a bitter woman to talk to.”

DeeDee McAllister groaned and said, “Go away.”

He smacked her on the bottom and said, “C’mon. You told me not to let you sleep. Let’s go. You got a client. You got a three o’clock.”

She pushed up and looked at the clock on the bedstand: two o’clock. Dropped back and said, “Ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes,” Lucas agreed.

They’d rendezvoused in his first-floor apartment in an old brick house in Minneapolis’s Uptown. He had two rooms, and a three-quarters bath, with a compact kitchen at one end of his living room, and an oversized leather chair that faced an undersized television.

He headed for the bathroom—a shower, no tub—scrubbed his face, brushed his teeth, hopped in the shower, sudsed up, rinsed, and was out in five minutes.

He stopped to look at himself in a full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door: he was tall, dark-haired, broadshouldered, heavily muscled from twenty years of hockey, the last few as a first-line defenseman for the Minnesota Golden Gophers.

He’d lost some muscle since graduation, but that was okay. He’d stopped the obsessive muscle-building workouts, at the advice of the team trainers, and started spending more time on endurance workouts, with lighter weights and more reps. And he was running more.

“You think my dick is bigger than average?” he asked, looking at himself.

McAllister pushed herself up, saw him posing in the mirror, said, “Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” and fell flat again.

“Well, what do you think?”

“You’ve seen about a million times more penises than I have, since you spent your entire friggin’ life in locker rooms,” she said. “I’ve seen about four.”

“Four?” He sounded doubtful.

“Okay, six. Or eight. No more than eight. You’ve seen a million.”

“Yeah, but they weren’t, you know, erect,” Lucas said. He looked in the mirror again. “I think I’m fairly big.”

“I’d say you’re on the big side of average,” she said. “Now let me get my last minute.”

“You think I’m big,” he said.

“Big side of average. Maybe. Now gimme my goddamn one minute.”

He stood sideways: Big.

HE STEPPED around a pile of hockey gear next to the bed, got out a fresh pair of shorts and a T-shirt. As he was pulling on a T-shirt, McAllister sat up and said, “One thing is, your body gets me hot.”

“Gets me hot, too,” Lucas said. He rubbed his nipples with the palms of his hands.

“Ah, Jesus.” She rubbed her face. “He plays with his own tits.” She watched him dress, and smacked her lips and scratched her ass.

“C’mon,” he said. The apartment bedroom had a tiny closet, too small for his growing collection of clothes, so he’d bought an old oak clothing rack from a used furniture store. From it, he selected a clean pair of uniform pants and a shirt. DeeDee got out of bed and went into the bathroom, stared at her face in the mirror above the sink, and said, finally, “I almost look happy.”

“That’s good.”

“I wish Mark could see me this way,” she said.

“Would I have to be standing here?” Lucas asked. Mark was her husband; McAllister was a divorce attorney. She sometimes talked about Mark’s gun collection.

“I’d have to think about that,” she said. She stepped back into the bedroom and picked up her underpants. “He has a nasty temper and you could protect me. Make me kinda hot seeing two guys fighting over me. Like a princess.”

“Everything gets you hot. A domestic protection order gets you hot,” Lucas said. They both knew he was telling the truth.

“On the other hand,” she continued, “it’s considered somewhat déclassé for a prestigious divorce attorney like myself to be caught screwing a humble cop. Even one with an average dick.”

“Large.” Lucas checked himself in the mirror: Hair still damp, uniform shirt tight across the shoulders and loose around the waist, tightly pressed slacks. Chicks liked pressed slacks, even the hippies; or at least, he suspected they did. His study of women continued. “So you’d have to decide whether you’d rather get beaten up, or be considered déclassé.”

“Yeah. I hate to think which way I’d go,” she said. “Getting beat up only hurts for a while.” He turned and watched her get dressed: she’d draped her clothes neatly on wooden clothes hangers, and hung them on a curtain rod: a woman’s business suit, navy blue jacket and skirt over a white blouse, big pads in the jacket shoulders, a narrow red ribbon tie. She had fairly wide, feminine hips, and the combination of shoulder pads and hips made her look, from the back, like a duck.

Lucas didn’t say so. His study of women had gotten that far. Quack.

Instead, he picked up his duty belt and strapped it around his waist, pulled the Glock from its holster, did an automatic check. He didn’t much like the weapon—too white-bread, in his opinion—but that was what he’d been issued and was required to carry. When he made detective, he’d change to something classier. European or something.

McAllister was back in the bathroom, checked herself in the mirror, and came out, smiled, not shyly, but said, “Don’t kiss me, you’ll mess up my lipstick.”

“I’d like to throw you back on the bed and do you one more time,” Lucas lied. She was attractive, all right, and she wasn’t short on enthusiasm, but he was itching to get out in the car. He liked working nights, and this night was going to be interesting. Early August, people all over the street, and the heat had been building for a week. Rock-out. “Or maybe twice.”

“Save it,” she said. “I gotta go talk to the bitter woman.”

Lucas stuck a finger through the Venetian blind and peeked out: the sky was clear and blue and shimmering with humidity. No sign of her husband.

Party time.

LUCAS HAD BEEN A COP for three years. He’d graduated from the University of Minnesota after five years of study, and four years of hockey—he’d been a rare redshirt the first year, to pick up weight and muscle—with a major in American studies, which, he quickly discovered, qualified him to go back to school. He considered law, but after talking to a few law students, decided that life might be too short.

One of his AmStud professors suggested that he look at law enforcement. “My old man’s a cop,” the professor said. “You’ve got the attitude. I think you’d like it. Do it for a few years, then look at law school.”

His mother was against it: “You’ll get shot. Then there’ll be nobody left.”

She meant, nobody left in the family. His father had died of congenital heart disease when Lucas was in fifth grade. His mother had now been diagnosed with breast cancer, and had convinced herself that she wasn’t going to make it.

Lucas had looked into it, sitting up in the university’s medical library, and thought she was probably right. He tried not to dwell on that conclusion, because there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.

Stopping cancer, he thought, was like throwing your body in a river to stop the water. You could weep, scream, demand, research, and pray, and nothing seemed to help. The only help he’d found was in denial: he didn’t think about it, particularly when she seemed to be in remission.

He also didn’t worry about his own heart—his father’s mother had German measles during the pregnancy, he’d been told, and that accounted for the defect that eventually killed him. No genetics involved.

LUCAS WENT OFF to the police academy, scored at the top of his class—would have been at the top in any class anyone could remember—spent a few weeks on patrol, spent six months working dope, then went back on patrol.

Dope was interesting, but he didn’t get to do much investigation. He mostly hung out, a white guy in a letter jacket who always knew the spread on college sports, and tried to buy dope in commercial quantities by making friends with the dealers he met. The dealers were everywhere—meeting them wasn’t a problem. The problem was, some of them didn’t seem like bad guys. They were more like guys his age who couldn’t get real jobs. So they’d come up with a kilo, or a pound, and then the real narcs would move in, and bust the dealer. . . .

The whole thing smacked too much of betrayal. You made friends, you bought dope from them, you busted them. The accumulating bad taste moved him back to patrol, which was fun for an ex-jock, a hockey defenseman. There was some excitement, new sights—new insights—and the sense that he was doing something worthwhile.

But after three years, he’d decided he wouldn’t do it for too much longer. They’d make him a detective, and pretty quickly, or he’d find something else to do.

What, he didn’t know.

Law school. Something. The military? There were no decent wars in sight. . . .

LUCAS WAS OUT sitting on the hood of his assigned squad when Fred Carter, his partner, finally showed up. Carter had missed the second-shift briefing, said he’d been caught in traffic, but he smelled of an Italian meatball sandwich.

“What’re we doing?”

“Usual,” Lucas said. “Homer’s pissed at you.”

“I’ll talk to him. It was unavoidable,” Carter said.

Lucas said, “You got some tomato sauce under your lip. I’d wipe it off before you talk to him.”

Carter was a fleshy, bull-necked man who looked like a cabdriver, with blunt features and fingers, and a growing gut. He wasn’t stupid, but he was going nowhere in the police department. He knew it, and didn’t care. He was in for twenty, and then out. He’d gotten fourteen, and now his main concern was to avoid injury, and to plot out his move to state government, for a second dip in the pension stream.

That attitude was the main bone of contention between them: Lucas enjoyed the occasional fight and didn’t mind chasing a man through dark backyards. Carter said, “I don’t care if you get your ass kicked, but the problem is, you pull me into it. Stop doing that.”

“We’re cops,” Lucas said.

“We’re peace officers,” Carter snapped back. “Try to keep a little fuckin’ peace, okay?”

Yeah, keep a little peace. But what did it mean if a guy went through life thinking about nothing but football—Carter was a big Vikes fan—and a pension? What kind of life was that?

ON THIS AFTERNOON and evening, they checked out their squad and started rolling around in south Minneapolis, taking in the sights; it was one of those late afternoons in the city when everything smelled like melting Juicy Fruit, spilled Orange Crush, and hot tar. Then a drunk Ojibwa, down from Red Lake, climbed up on a fire hydrant, for reasons unknown, gave a speech, fell off, and gashed his head on the top nut. They thought for a moment that he’d been shot, until a witness explained. They called an ambulance and had him transported to Hennepin General, and rolled again.

Carter was short of his quota on traffic tickets that month, so they hid at the bottom of a hill and knocked off three speeders in forty-five minutes, which put him back square. It wasn’t a quota, it was a performance metric. The chief said so, with a straight face.

They hit a convenience store on Lyndale, scowled at the dope dealers, who moseyed off, and Carter got a fried cherry pie and a Pepsi. They rolled away, and the dope dealers moseyed back. A half-hour later, they checked out a report of a fight in the parking lot of a bar. There’d been one, all right, but everybody ran when the car pulled up, and there were no bodies and no blood, and nobody knew who was involved.

They got a couple more soft drinks, Diet Coke for Lucas, another Pepsi for Carter, and moved along, arguing Coke versus Pepsi, took a call about another fight, this one at an antique store.

When they got there, two women, one heavy and one thin, both with fashionable blond haircuts, were squared off on the sidewalk, the dealer between them, a clerk peering out from the gold-leafed doorway. The fight hadn’t actually taken place yet, and Lucas and Carter separated the two women, one of whom told the other, “You’re lucky the cops got here, or I would have stuffed that chiffonier right up your fat butt.”

“Oh, yeah, bitch-face, let me tell you . . .” What she told her couldn’t be reported in any of the better home furnishings magazines, Lucas thought, as it included four of the seven words George Carlin said you couldn’t use on television. The fat one was definitely ready to go, until Carter said, “If we have to take you in, they will discover any chiffoniers you got up there. It’s called a body-cavity search, and you won’t like it.”

That cooled them off, and they left in their respective Mercedeses.

“It’s the heat that does it,” Carter observed to the antique dealer.

“Maybe not,” the dealer said. “It’s a gorgeous chiffonier.”

“WHAT THE FUCK is a chiffonier?” Lucas asked, as they rolled away.

“One of those coffee-serving things,” Carter said. “You know, that go around in circles.”

Lucas studied him for a moment, then said, “You got no idea what a chiffonier is.”

“That’s true.”

“But I liked the way you handled it. That strip-search line,” Lucas said. “Took it right out of them.”

“Like I said: keep the peace,” Carter said.

“Really. You shoulda been a cop or something.”

AT FIVE O’CLOCK, Lucas spotted a man named Justice Johnson, who’d beaten up his old lady once too often; a warrant had been issued. They corralled him in the recessed entry of a locksmith’s shop. He’d been eating a raw onion, as though it were an apple, and it bounced away into the gutter as they cuffed him. He didn’t bother to fight, and bitched and moaned about his woman, who, he said, did nothing but pick at him.

“Bitch said I’m a dumbass,” Johnson said from the backseat of the squad. He was breathing out onion fumes, which were not diminished in any way by his overindulgence in Drakkar Noir.

“You are a dumbass, Justice,” Carter said.

“Hey, she ain’t supposed to say it,” Johnson said. “She’s supposed to take my side, but she never does. All she does is bitch, you ain’t done this, you ain’t done that. . . .”

“So you beat her up,” Lucas said.

“I slapped her.”

“Broke her nose,” said Carter.

“Didn’t mean to do that.”

“Shut up, dumbass,” Lucas said. “And quit breathing on me.”

He didn’t. He sat looking out the window for a minute, then said, “I think I’m peeing my pants.”

“Ah, Jesus, don’t do that,” Lucas said.

“Gotcha, cop,” Johnson said. He laughed for a minute, going huh-huh-huh, then said, “And my name ain’t Jesus. You think I look like a fuckin’ Puerto Rican?”

“You shoulda made the cuffs tighter,” Carter said.

“I shoulda put them around his fuckin’ windpipe,” Lucas said.

They booked him into the Hennepin County jail.

AT TWENTY MINUTES after six o’clock, they took a call on two missing girls. It was still full daylight, and the dispatchers sent them down to the Mississippi, below the I-94 bridge. The two girls had been known to play along the river, although they’d been warned against it by their parents.

In the three years Lucas had been a cop, he’d seen most of what he’d ever see from a patrol car: murders, actual and attempted, the aftermath of robberies and burglaries, and even a couple of those in progress, as well as suicides, fights, mini-riots, car and foot chases, even an emergency pregnancy run, the woman screaming for help from the backseat. The baby arrived one minute after Lucas put the car at the emergency room door, delivered by a doc and a couple of nurses right on the gurney. The baby, rumor had it, had been named Otto, after the car ride.

Carter said, “That’s always the rumor. That they called him Otto.”

“It’s a pretty good rumor,” Lucas said. “I’ve been telling it to everybody.”

There’d been a couple of lost kids over the years, but they’d been quickly found. These two had vanished between four and five o’clock, when kids were walking home for dinner, not heading down to the river.

They parked the car and headed over to the slope down to the Mississippi. The river at that point was a few hundred yards across, a sullen dark green, with streaks of foam from the falls just up the river. The bank down to the water was steep and overgrown with brush, cut by slippery dirt paths down the slope worn by walkers, marked with thrown-away food wrappers, and here and there, a wad of toilet paper back in the bushes.

A concrete walk ran along the river’s edge, leading both north and south, with an informal beach area where Lucas and Carter came down to the river. A fat woman in shorts was wading in the water up to her knees, and a kid in cutoff jeans was farther out, with a spin-fishing rod, casting out into deeper water. A few more people were scattered along the edge of the water, sitting, wading, or swimming.

None of them had seen the girls.

They’d finished talking with people at the beach when they were joined by cops from another squad, and the four of them split up, two north and two south, up and down the Mississippi, from the access path that the girls would have taken to the water. Three hundred yards downstream Lucas and Carter came upon a group of gays, at the gay beach. One of the men said that they hadn’t seen the girls, either on the bank or in the water, and they’d been there all afternoon.

Lucas and Carter walked back upstream, Carter fulminating about the gays: “Fuckin’ queer motherfuckers, buncha goddamn fudge-punchers walking around in jockstraps in the middle of the day. Did you see that guy? He didn’t give a shit. . . .”

“You sound kind of excited about it, Fred,” Lucas observed. “Kind of aroused.”

“Screw you, skate boy,” Carter said. “Where in the hell are the sex guys, is what I want to know.”

“They didn’t see the kids,” Lucas said. “If the kids’d gone in the water, you’d think they would have seen them. They say the kids could swim.”

“Yeah.” Carter hooked his thumbs over his belt and looked out at the water, which was low and flat and smelled of carp. “Not very deep here, either. I got a bad feeling about this, Lucas. I don’t think they’re in the river.”

“No?”

“I think somebody took them,” Carter said. “I think they’re getting raped, right now, while we’re standing here with our thumbs up our asses.”

“Gut feeling?”

“Yep.”

Carter wasn’t much of a cop, but his gut had a record of good calls. Fourteen years rolling around on the street seemed to have given him—or his gut, anyway—a sense of the rightness of particular behavior. If his gut said that he and Lucas were doing the wrong thing, they probably were, and Lucas had come to recognize that fact. “What do you think we oughta be doing?”

“Looking up there,” Carter said, pointing at the top of the bank, but meaning the south side in general. “The kids were walking past a lot of houses with a lot of weirdos in them. We oughta be shaking them out.”

“Somebody’s doing it,” Lucas said.

“Everybody ought to be doing it,” Carter said.

The other two cops, who’d walked upstream, came back with nothing to report. “You get down to the fruit market?” one of them asked Carter.

“Yeah, they saw nothin’,” Carter said. “Bunch of bare-assed perverts . . .”

THEY WERE TALKING to a bum who’d appeared from under the I-94 bridge when a thin, freckled, red-haired man came jogging down the bank and called, “You find them? Anybody see them?”

Lucas asked, “Who are you?”

“George Jones. I’m their father, I’m their dad. Did anybody see them?” He was in his middle to late thirties, panting, and his sweatshirt, sleeves ripped off at the shoulder, was soaked in sweat, which they could smell coming off him, in waves. He was wearing a green army baseball cap with a combat infantryman’s badge on it, and was breathing hard. One of the other cops stepped up and said, “You gotta take it easy—we’ll find them.”

“They’ve never done this,” Jones said, his eyes and voice pleading with them for help. “Never. They’re always on time. They’re three hours late, nobody’s seen them . . .”

Carter said, “I don’t believe they’re down here, Mr. Jones. We’ve talked to people all along here; they didn’t see them. Quite a few people down here on a hot Saturday, they would have been seen.”

Jones said, “All right. All right, thanks. They’re probably . . . goddamnit, I’m going to beat their butts when they get back; they’re probably at a friend’s house.” Still talking to himself, he jogged back up the bank and they heard him shout to someone out of sight, “They’re not down there . . . nobody’s seen them.”

One of the other cops said, looking out at the dark, drifting river, “Coulda stepped in a hole and got sucked under . . .”

Carter shook his head. “They ain’t down here,” he said. “We’re wasting our time.”

GEORGE JONES, the girls’ father, belonged to a lefty ex-military organization, and he’d put out a call for help. Members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War began showing up at seven o’clock, still not dark: a miscellaneous collection of hauntedlooking men wearing pieces of military uniform, mixed with antiwar buttons and patches. A few dozen strong, they began working their way through alleys and backyards, within a half-mile of Jones’s house, staying in touch by calling back and forth.

Just before it got seriously dark, Lucas and Carter were flagged by a vet off Thirty-fourth Street. When they stopped, the vet leaned into the car window and said, “We got a girl’s blouse. Nobody touched it, but somebody needs to take a look.”

They parked and called in, and Lucas walked down to an alley to where a bunch of vets had gathered around what looked like a rag, lying beside a hedge, as though somebody had thrown it out a car window. Lucas squatted next to it, and shined his flashlight on it. A girl’s blouse, all right, blue with little white speckles. He called in again, on his shoulder set. Then he stood up and said, “We got some detectives coming. I don’t know if it’s anything, but good work, guys.”

Carter said, “Good eyes.”

“I hope it’s not hers, I hope it’s not,” said a thin, crazy-looking man with a six-day beard. He was wearing an army OD uniform shirt with the sleeves cut off just below a buck sergeant’s blackon-green stripes. “I got girls of my own, I mean . . .”

A car turned in at the mouth of the alley, and a man got out: Harrison Sloan, a youngish detective not long off patrol. He ambled down the alley, and Lucas pointed. Sloan squatted, as Lucas had, and Lucas put his flashlight on the blouse. Sloan looked at it for a minute, then said, “Goddamnit.”

“Is it one of theirs?” asked one of the vets.

Sloan said, “Could be.” He stood and looked around, and then asked, “Who found it? Who exactly?”

One of the vets raised his hand.

Sloan worked the group, taking notes, and a couple more plainclothes guys showed up, then Quentin Daniel, the Homicide lieutenant, and Carter muttered to Lucas, “It’s her shirt. They know it. They’re gone.”

Daniel took his own long look at the shirt, shook his head, said a few words to the three detectives now talking to the vets, then turned and walked back to Lucas and Carter. “We need to go over this whole block, foot by foot. Carter, I already talked to Phil”—Phil Blessing was the head of the uniform section—“and he’s rounding up twenty guys to get down here and walk it off. You think you can organize that?”

“Sure, I guess,” Carter said.

Daniel turned to Lucas. “This is gonna be a mess. I’m borrowing you. Go home and put on a shirt and tie. You got a shirt and tie?”

“Sure.”

“All right. I’m hooking you up with Sloan. I want you guys door-to-door. We’re gonna interview every swinging dick for a half-mile around. Take the squad: I want you back here in twenty minutes.”

“You got it, Chief,” Lucas said.

Daniel had been his boss when he was working dope, just out of the academy. Daniel had taken an interest, enough that Lucas wondered briefly if he was queer. But he realized after a while that Daniel was interested in the way other people saw the world; other people including new cops. He also learned that Daniel expected to be chief, one day, and didn’t mind being called that.

And Lucas knew that he wasn’t being promoted. He was being used to pump up the apparent number of detectives working the case. There’d be four or five more patrolmen walking around in shirts and ties before the night was done.

He could think about that later. He climbed in the squad, drove it to the end of the block before he hit the lights and sirens, and took off, the traffic clearing out in front of him, pedestrians stopping with their toes on the curb, watching him go by. Wondering, maybe, about the smile on his face.

HE WAS BACK at his apartment in six minutes, and took another thoughtful six minutes to get into a pair of light khaki slacks, a short-sleeve white shirt, and a navy blue linen sport coat with a wine-colored tie. He hesitated over the short-sleeve shirt, because Esquire magazine despised them; but then, Esquire editors probably didn’t have to walk through slum neighborhoods in ninetydegree heat.

He accessorized with black loafers, over-the-calf navy socks, and, from behind his chest of drawers, a Smith & Wesson Model 40 revolver with a belt-clip holster. He checked himself in the mirror again.

Lucas liked clothes—always had. They were, he thought, the chosen symbols of a person’s individuality, or lack of it; not a trivial matter. They were also uniforms, and it paid a cop to understand the uniform of the person with whom he was dealing, to distinguish between, say, dope dealer, hippie, gangbanger, biker, skater, artist, and bum.

In addition to his intellectual interest, he liked to look good.

He did, he thought, and was out the door.

Still a little worried about the short sleeves.

3

Lucas worked with Sloan late into the night, slogging up and down the dark, declining residential streets, pounding on doors. Ordinarily, there might have been enough bad people around—crack cocaine had arrived that spring, and was spiraling out of control—to inject some extra stress into the work. On this night, there were so many cops on the street that the bad people moved over.

“Weird thing happened with crack,” Sloan observed, as they tramped between houses, and the dark shadows between streetlights and elm trees. “The pimps got fired. We used to think that the hookers were slaves. Turns out it was more complicated than that.”

“I gotta say, I haven’t seen some of the boys around,” Lucas said.

“They’re gone. They’ve been laid off. Had to sell their hats,” Sloan said.

Lucas said, “When I was working dope, nobody even heard of crack. You had a few guys freebasing, but other than that, it was right up the nose.”

“Chemical genius out there somewhere,” Sloan said.

“Sales genius,” Lucas said. “Toot for the common people.”

Sloan was a few years older than Lucas, a narrow-slatted man who dressed in earth colors from JCPenney. When he wore something flashy, it was usually a necktie, probably chosen by his wife; and it was usually a glittery, gecko green. He’d been developing a reputation as an interrogator, because of a peculiar, caring, softtalking approach he took to suspects. He was as conservative in lifestyle as in dress, having gotten married at eighteen to his highschool sweetheart. He had two daughters before he was twenty-one, and worried about insurance. As different as they were, Lucas liked him. Sloan had a sense of humor, and a good idea of who he was. He was quiet and cool and smart.

“The word is, you’re moving to plainclothes right away,” Sloan said, as they moved across the dark end of a block, ready to start on another circle of houses. “Compared to patrol, it’s a different world. Patrol is like football; plainclothes is like chess.”

“Or like hockey,” Lucas said.

Sloan looked at him suspiciously. “I’ll have to assume that’s your sense of humor talking,” he said.

“Why’s that?” Lucas asked.

“It’s well known that hockey guys are almost as dumb as baseball players.”

“I didn’t know that,” Lucas said.

“It’s true,” Sloan said. “In the major college sports, football’s at the top of the intelligence ratings, then wrestling, then basketball, then golf, swimming, hockey, baseball, and tennis, in that order.”

“Tennis is at the bottom?”

“Yup. Not only that, the further west you go, the dumber the athletes get,” Sloan said. “By the time you get to the Midwest, tennis players are dumber’n a box of rocks. Across the Rockies? Don’t even ask. The tennis players out there are not so much human, as dirt.”

“Dirt?”

“Dirt.”

“Something else I didn’t know,” Lucas said.

“Well, you were a hockey player.”

THEY PUSHED through the gate on a chain-link fence, toward a clapboard house with a narrow front porch with a broken-down couch sitting on it, and a light in one window. Sloan pointed his flashlight into the side yard, at a circle of dirt around an iron stake, and said, “Bad dog.”

“Could be a horseshoes pit,” Lucas said.

Sloan laughed. “So you go first.”

Lucas moved up to the door and knocked, and a dog went crazy behind the door.

“Bad dog,” Sloan said behind him. “Sounds like one of those bull terriers.”

Nobody answered for a minute, then two. Lucas pounded again, and a light came on at the back of the house. Another minute, and a man appeared, opening the door just an inch, looked at them over a heavy chain lock. “Who’re you?”

Sloan explained, and the man started shaking his head halfway through the explanation. “I didn’t see no white girls doin’ nothin’,” he said. The dog was snuffling at the man’s pant leg, its toenails scratching anxiously on the linoleum. “I gotta go to bed. I gotta get up at five o’clock.”

Walking back down the sidewalk, Sloan asked, “You hear what happened to Park Brubaker?” Brubaker was a Korean-American detective, now suspended and looking at time on federal drug charges.

“Yeah. Dumb shit.”

“He had problems,” Sloan said.

“I got problems,” Lucas said. “I don’t go robbing people for their Apple Jacks.”

They came to a door on Thirty-fifth Avenue, answered by a heavyset white man with a Hemingway beard and a sweaty forehead and an oversized nose. A fat nose. He said, “We didn’t see nothin’ at all. Except what was on TV.” A woman standing behind him said, “Tell them about John.”

“Who’s John?” Lucas asked.

“Dude down at Kenny’s,” the man said, with reluctance. “Don’t know his last name.”

“He’s got a suspect,” the woman said.

The man scowled at her, and Lucas pressed: “So what about John?”

“Dude said that there was a crazy guy probably did it,” the man said. “Crazy guy’s been running around the neighborhood.”

“You know the crazy guy?” Sloan asked.

“No. We heard John talking about him.”

“We’ve seen him, walking around, though. The crazy guy,” the woman said.

“Did John say why he thought the crazy guy did it?” Lucas asked.

“He said the guy was always lookin’, and never gettin’ any. Said the guy had a record, you know, for sex stuff.”

“He call the cops?” Sloan asked.

“I dunno. I don’t know the guy. I don’t know the crazy guy, either, except that I see him on the street sometimes.”

“Gotta call it in,” Sloan said.

He had a handset with him, and walked back down the sidewalk while Lucas talked to the man, and especially past him, to the woman. He asked, “What do you know about John? We really need to find him. If he knows anything . . . I mean, these two girls might not have much time. . . .”

He got a description—John was an overweight man of average height, with an olive complexion and dark hair that curled over his forehead. “Italian-looking,” the woman said.

Lucas said, “You mean good-looking?”

“No. He’s too fat. But he’s dark, and he wears those skimpy T-shirts—the kind Italians wear, with the straps over the shoulders?—under regular shirts that he wears open. He’s got this gold chain.”

The last time they’d seen him, he was wearing jeans and a blue long-sleeved shirt, open over the wife-beater. She added that he liked some of the girls who came in, and she put a little spin on the word “girls.”

“You mean, working girls,” Lucas said. “I didn’t know they hung at Kenny’s.”

“They don’t, but there’s that massage place across the street,” she said. “They come over, sometimes, when they don’t have clients. I don’t like to see them in there, myself. I mean, what if somebody thought I was one of them.”

The guy said, “I wouldn’t mind a massage,” and the woman punched him on the arm, and he said, “Ouch.”

THEY DIDN’T HAVE much else. A moment later, Sloan came back up the walk. “Cherry and McGuire are coming over,” he said.

“What for? We got what there is,” Lucas said.

“Because they don’t think we got what there is,” Sloan said. “We’re supposed to wait until they get here, then knock on some more doors.”

“Fuck that,” Lucas said. “We need to get over to Kenny’s.”

“Closed two hours ago,” the man said.

“Might still be somebody there,” Lucas said.

Everybody shrugged, and Sloan said, “They want us to finish knockin’ on the doors.”

CHERRY AND MCGUIRE showed up, two fortyish veterans, and took over. Lucas and Sloan moved on down the block, and got nowhere, Lucas fuming about being knocked off the only positive hint they’d gotten.

“We did the work, man, they oughta let us take it.”

“Get used to it,” Sloan said. “Takes about four years before you’re a pro. That’s what they’re telling me. I got three to go.”

“Fuck a bunch of four years,” Lucas said. He hadn’t told the older detectives about the massage parlor girls who might know John. Let them find it out themselves.

They worked for two more hours, and Sloan finally quit at the end of his shift and went home to his wife. “I don’t even know what we’re doing,” he said. “We think the kidnapper’ll come to the door and confess?”

“Somebody must have seen something,” Lucas said. “Seen the kids getting in a car. Seen them going through a door. They can’t just go away.”

“Somebody would have called, if they were gonna talk,” Sloan said. “When we found that blouse . . . we should have looked around at the baddest guy on the block, and squeezed his pimple head until he coughed them up.”

Lucas shook his head. “That blouse wasn’t right.”

“What?”

“Wasn’t right. Why in the hell would you throw a blouse out a car window? I can see throwing the girl out, if nobody was looking. But why would you throw a blouse out? Tell me one reason.”

Sloan thought for a moment and said, “The guy killed her, took her blouse as a trophy. The bodies are already in a dumpster somewhere, and he was driving around with the blouse over his face, smelling the chick, getting off on it. At some point, he gets tired of it, or can’t smell her anymore, so he throws it out the window.”

Lucas grinned at him and said, “That’s perverted. I kinda like it.”

THE NIGHT WAS still warm, for August, with a hint of rain in the still air. They drove back to Lucas’s place in Sloan’s Dodge, arms out the side windows, Lucas thinking how quiet the city was, and for all they knew, somewhere in its quiet heart, two little girls were being tortured by a monster.

Sloan dropped him, and went on his way. Lucas went inside, got a beer, sat at the kitchen table and looked at a blue three-ring binder stuffed with paper. In school, he’d lived in an apartment inhabited mostly by nerds from the computer center. Despite his jock status, he had been pulled into some of their role-playing games. Then he wrote a module, which had impressed the nerds, who said it was as good as the commercial modules.

Talking around with the computer guys, he developed an idea for a football-based strategy game, similar to the war games popular in the seventies, but that would be played on a computer. A computer guy promised to program it, if Lucas could write the scenarios. The work had been harder than he’d expected, and had been delayed when he’d had to take a course in statistics: he wanted the game to be real.

He sat and looked at paper, which, after the day hunting for the girls, looked like silly paper. Games. Something awful was happening outside, and he was sitting at the kitchen table looking at silly paper.

He fooled with the coaching modules for a while, then gave up and got a second beer, glanced at the clock. Two o’clock in the morning. He wondered if Cherry and McGuire had gone down to Kenny’s, and what they’d found.

Restless, he picked up his sport coat, climbed in his Jeep, and headed downtown, left the car at the curb, and walked into City Hall. The place was dark but busy, with cops all over the hallways. Lucas stopped a uniformed guy named Morgan and asked what had happened. “Nothing,” Morgan said. “No sign of them. People are talking about the river again.”

“I don’t think they’re in there,” Lucas said. “How many guys are working it?”

“Right now? A half-dozen. Daniel’s still here, but people are starting to freak—the TV people are driving around in their truck. It’s turning into a circus.”

“You seen Cherry or McGuire?” Lucas asked.

“Not for a while.”

Lucas went down to Homicide, stuck his head in the office, spotted Daniel with his feet up on a desk, talking to a couple of detectives. Lucas went in, idled off to the side for a minute, until Daniel said, “Davenport. What’s happening?”

“I wondered if Cherry and McGuire got anything at Kenny’s?”

Daniel shook his head and said, “Not much more than you got.” He looked at a piece of paper on his desk. “The place was closed, but they talked to the manager. He says it’s a guy named John. Nobody knows where he lives, or how to get in touch. Just a guy.”

“So they struck out,” Lucas said.

“Well, it’s something,” Daniel said.

“Right,” said one of the detectives. “We’ve got a suspect named ‘John.’ That narrows it down.”

Daniel ignored him: “How come you’re still running around?” he asked Lucas.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Lucas said. “I was thinking, you know, if it’s all right with you . . . I might go down and hit that massage place across from Kenny’s. Unless Cherry and McGuire already did.”

“No, they didn’t,” Daniel said. “Why would they?”

“Didn’t they get that? That John knows some of those chicks? Maybe that’s why they call him John. Maybe he is one,” Lucas said.

An annoyed look crept across Daniel’s face. “I guess they didn’t get that. You didn’t mention it?”

“They told us to take a hike,” Lucas said. “So . . . I’m not doing much.”

“Step outside with me,” Daniel said, standing up.

In the hall, he said, quietly, but showing some teeth, “You’re not fuckin’ with us, are you? Withholding information so you can get a shot at it? With these two girls, this wouldn’t be the time to make points.”

“Hell no,” Lucas lied. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“You should have told Cherry and McGuire what the woman said.”

“They didn’t want to hear it,” Lucas said. “They were like, ‘Uh-huh, go knock on doors, rook.’”

Daniel looked at him for a minute, then said, “I can’t pay you overtime. But if you go down there, I’ll back you up if anything comes out of it.”

Lucas nodded. “Okay. How long you gonna be here?”

“Not much longer. Don’t call me unless you get something serious—but call me if you do.” He gave Lucas his office and home phone numbers.

“Did we get anything tonight? Anything?”

Daniel shook his head. “We got that blouse, and it was Mary’s. Nobody knows how it got there. We think the kids might have walked past Andy’s Cleaners. One of the desk girls says she saw them. That’s only about a block from their house, so maybe she did. It was early, before they were missing.”

“But they were together?”

“That’s what the girl says,” Daniel said.

“Were they walking toward their house, or away?”

“Away.”

“Any blood on the blouse?” Lucas asked.

“Not sure. There’s a small discoloration, could be blood that somebody tried to wash out. We’ll know tomorrow morning.”

“You think they’re dead?” Lucas asked.

“Probably not yet. But they will be, soon.”

PAUL’S THERAPEUTIC MASSAGE occupied the end store in a fivebusiness strip that included a movie rental place, a coin laundry, a dog groomer, and a medical-oxygen service. Lucas parked in front of the massage parlor. A light shone from one window, but a red neon “Open” sign had been turned off.

When Lucas climbed out of the Jeep and slammed the door, a curtain moved in the window, and he caught the pale flash of a woman’s face. He walked up to the entrance, tried the handle: the heavy steel-cored door was locked. He pounded on it, got no answer. He pounded louder, still got no answer, so he kicked it a few times, shaking the door in its frame, and heard a woman shout, “We’re closed. Go away.”

Lucas pounded again and shouted, “Police. Open up.”

He waited for a minute, then kicked the door a few more times—carefully, with the heel, since he was still wearing the loafers—stopped when he heard a bolt rattling on the other side of the lock. The door opened a couple of inches, a chain across the gap, and a narrow blond woman asked, “Cop?”

Lucas held up his badge: “We’re looking for two missing girls. I need information about a guy you know.”

“What guy?”

“His name is John. You guys hang out with him sometimes at Kenny’s. That’s all I know,” Lucas said.

The door opened another couple of inches. “Did he do it?”

“He was telling people that he knows who did,” Lucas said. He pushed the door with his fingertips, and she let it swing open a bit more. “So who is he?”

She looked back over her shoulder and shouted, “Sally.”

Lucas pushed on the door again, and she let it open. He took that as an invitation, and stepped into a ten-foot-long room with a Formica counter and yellowing white-plaster walls, like in a drycleaning shop. A couple of chairs sat against the window wall, with a low wooden table between them, holding an ashtray and a table lamp with a shade that had a burned spot on one side. A gumball machine sat in a corner, half empty, or half full, depending. Not a place that people would linger for long, Lucas thought.

A short dark-haired woman came out of the back, behind the counter, looked at Lucas and said, “I’m all done.”

“He’s a cop,” the blonde said. “He’s looking for this guy John . . . you know, John, the joker.”

Sally shook her head: “Why would I know where he is?”

The blonde said, “You’d know better than me. They’re looking for him about those two girls.”

Sally’s right hand went to her throat: “He took them?”

“He’s been talking about who might have,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to him.”

“I really don’t know him,” Sally said. “He’s come in a few times, I got him, you know, gave him a massage. He’s kinda funny, tells jokes and shit.”

“He ever say where he lives? Ask you to come over? Give you any hint . . .?”

She shook her head: “No, but I’ll tell you what. He charged the massage last time. I bet we got the slip.”

Lucas ticked a finger at her: “Thank you. Who do I see about the slip?”

“Me,” the blonde said. “But since we don’t know his last name, I don’t know how we figure out . . .”

Sally pressed her palms to her eyes and said, “Let me think,” and a minute later said, “Fourth of July. He was joking about fireworks, you know, when . . . never mind. Anyway, the night of the fourth. Don had a baseball game on the radio, so it couldn’t have been too late.”

The blonde went around the counter, took out a metal box, and began running through charge slips. Lucas said to Sally, “You said he’s okay. That means, what? He didn’t want anything peculiar?”

“Hey, it was a therapeutic massage.”

“I’m sure it was,” Lucas said. “Look, I don’t care what he wants, or what you do. I’m trying to figure out these girls and whether he might be weird. Can you tell me that? Is he weird?”

Sally shrugged: “He wants the Three—start with a hand job, end with a blow job. Is that weird? I dunno. A hundred and twenty bucks, plus tip. I don’t remember the tip, but it wasn’t . . .” She dug for a word, and came up with one: “Memorable.”

“So he’s got some money.”

“He’s got some, anyway,” the woman said. “But I ain’t going to Vegas on a tip I can’t remember.”

The blonde said, “I got a one-forty at eight forty-five Friday . . . that’s it, probably. Says his name is John . . .”

“That’s gotta be him,” Sally said.

Lucas took the slip and walked it to the table lamp. The ink imprint was shaky—the name was John Fell, Lucas thought, but the number was clear. Lucas took down the information, then asked, “You got a Xerox machine?”

“No . . .”

“I’m gonna take this,” he said, waggling the paper slip. “You need the information to make the charge?”

“We already made it,” the blonde said. “We send it in while you’re still in the room.”

“Okay.” Lucas flipped a page in his notebook: “I need both your names. I want to see driver’s licenses. I need to know how often he comes in.”

The blonde began, “You said . . .”

Lucas shook his head: “I’m not arresting anybody. If he turns out to be somebody, I need to know who I talked to.”

The blonde’s name was Lucy Landry, and Sally’s name was Dorcas Ryan. John Fell had come in at least once in the past ten days, had been cheerful, funny, even, had been satisfied with the service and paid cash. Ryan had seen him at Kenny’s afterward, and he’d bought her a drink.

“He bought you a drink, but he didn’t chat? Didn’t tell you about himself?”

Ryan frowned: “You know what? Almost all he does is tell jokes. Like, ‘You heard the one about the priest who caught the sonofabitch?’ That’s what he does. He’s got a million of them.”

Lucas used their telephone to call Daniel at home, who answered and, when Lucas identified himself, said, “This better be good.”

“The guy’s name is John Fell and I’ve got a credit card slip on him. How do I get an address off the credit card?”

There was a moment of silence, then Daniel said, “What I usually do is call Harmon Anderson, and he does something on the computer.”

“So we gotta wait until he comes in?”

“No, no, I’ll bust him out of bed,” Daniel said. “Where’re you?”

“Down at the massage place,” Lucas said.

“Go on downtown. I’ll have Anderson meet you there.”

He hung up, and Ryan was telling Landry, “. . . so the Pope takes off his hat, puts his feet up on the table, and says, ‘You know what? You fuckers are all right.’”

Landry only half smiled: “It’s not that funny.”

“I didn’t say it was great,” Ryan said. She looked at Lucas. “I told her John’s sonofabitch joke.”

Lucas shrugged: “I missed it. Can you break a dollar? I need a gumball.”

BOTTOM LINE, Lucas thought, on his way downtown: he didn’t know how to get an address for a credit card. He needed to fix that. He chewed through the gumball in two minutes, threw the wad of gum out the window and drove faster.

He got there before Anderson, and had to wait. Anderson showed up twenty-five minutes later, sleepy and annoyed, sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. Lucas was looking over his shoulder and asked, “What’re you doing here?”

“A credit check,” Anderson said. “All the credit information is in computers. I can get in and look at some of the information for credit card holders. Including addresses and so on.”

“Neat,” Lucas said. “I’m thinking of getting a Macintosh.”

“Wait awhile—there’re rumors that they’re going to 512K this fall. The 128K just isn’t enough.”

“Can’t afford it for a while, anyway,” Lucas said.

“You patrol guys know all the crack freaks,” Anderson said. “You oughta be able to get one wholesale.”

“Pretty fuckin’ funny,” Lucas said.

“No offense,” Anderson said.

He sounded insincere, Lucas thought. He shut up and watched Anderson work. Five minutes after he started, Anderson had a name and address: “It’s a post office box.”

“That’s not good.” He wasn’t a detective yet, but he knew that much.

“The post office will have a name and address for the renter,” Anderson said. “But the thing is, credit card companies don’t usually take post office boxes. Did the hookers get paid?”

“They said so,” Lucas said.

“Huh. Well, something’s not right.”

THE POST OFFICE worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The front end was closed, but Lucas found his way in through the loading dock in the back and showed his ID to a couple of guys throwing canvas mail bags off a truck. One of them went inside and came back with a bureaucrat.

“I can’t tell you that,” he said. He was a fat little man, fish-pale with what must have been a permanent night shift. “It’s privileged information.”

“We got two girls missing—”

“I’m sorry, but it’s against the law for me to give you that information,” the bureaucrat said. “Come back with a search warrant and give it to the postmaster.”

“This guy could be killing them,” Lucas said.

“The law says—”

“Then give me the number for the postmaster,” Lucas said.

“I can’t do that. It’s the middle of the night.”

At some level, Lucas realized, the man was enjoying himself, sticking it to the cops. It was possible and even likely that there was a law or regulation about releasing the names of post office box renters; but, he thought, there sure as hell wasn’t a law about calling up the postmaster, even in the middle of the night.

Lucas got his face close to the bureaucrat’s. “I’ll tell you what. One way or another, I’m gonna get the name off the box. And if these girls are killed, I’m gonna take this conversation to the newspapers and I’m gonna hang it around your neck like a dead skunk. When they find these girls’ bodies, you’ll have reporters standing in your front yard yelling at you.”

The man flushed: “You can’t threaten me. The law—”

Lucas crowded closer: “The law doesn’t say you can’t wake up the postmaster. Does it? Does the law say that?”

The man was furious, and said, “On your head.”

“On yours,” Lucas said. “You’re now gonna come out looking like an asshole no matter what you do.”

The bureaucrat said, “Wait here,” and disappeared into the post office.

One of the truck loaders said, “He is an asshole. That’s his job.”

“Yeah, well, I got no time for it,” Lucas said.

THE BUREAUCRAT CAME BACK a minute later, and said, “I got the superintendent of mails on the phone.”

Lucas talked to the superintendent of mails, who said, “I’m waiving the confidentiality reg in this case because of the emergency, but I’m going to need a letter from your chief outlining the problem. I need to file it.”

“You’ll get it,” Lucas said.

“Put Gene back on the line.”

Lucas left the post office ten minutes later with the paper in his hand: John Fell at an address on Sixth Street SE, Minneapolis. Five minutes away, the sun coming up over St. Paul.

In his first year as a cop, working patrol and then, briefly, as a dope guy, he’d felt that he was learning things at a ferocious rate: about the street, life, death, sex, love, hate, fear, stupidity, jealousy, and accident, and all the other things that brought citizens in contact with the cops.

Then the learning rate tailed off. He’d continued to accumulate detail, to see faces, to interpret moves, but at nothing like the rate of his first ten or twelve months.

Now, investigating, the feeling was back: getting credit card numbers off computers—cool. Manipulating hookers. Threatening bureaucrats. He was crude, and he knew it, but it was interesting and he’d get better at it.

HE’D LEARN ABOUT DISAPPOINTMENT, too, he found out a few minutes later.

The address on Sixth Street was a shabby old three-story Victorian house that smelled of rot and microwave food, with six mailboxes nailed to the gray clapboard on the porch. All but one of the mailboxes had names, none of which was Fell. None of them had a John or a J.

The one unlabeled mailbox was for Apartment Five. He curled up a long zigzag stairway, half blocked at one landing by a bicycle chained to the banister, and pounded on the door to Apartment Five until a woman shouted from Six, “Nobody lives there. Go away.”

He stepped across the hall and rapped on her door: “Police. Could you open the door, please?”

“No. I’m not crazy,” the woman shouted back. “What do you want?”

“I’m looking for a John Fell,” Lucas said.

“There’s nobody here named John Fell. Or anything Fell,” she shouted.

“You mean, in your apartment, or in the house?”

“In the house. There’s nobody named John Fell. Go away or I’ll call nine-one-one.”

“Call nine-one-one. Tell them there’s a cop at your door named Lucas Davenport. I’ll call them on my handset. . . .”

She did that, and opened the door three minutes later, a woman in her early twenties with bad sleep hair. “It is you. You played hockey with a friend of mine. Jared Michael? I’d see you on the ice.”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Lucas said. “I haven’t seen him lately, maybe a couple years . . .”

“He’s in marketing at General Mills,” she said. “He works twenty-two hours a day. You’re looking for those girls? I didn’t even know you were a cop now.”

“Yeah, I am, and we’re looking for a guy named John Fell,” Lucas said. He described Fell, and she was shaking her head.

“Everybody in this house is a student. Three apartments are Asians, I’m by myself, Five is empty and has been empty all year—it’s got a bad smell they can’t get out. The previous tenants put rat poison inside their walls because they could hear rats running, and I guess all the rats died and now they’re in the walls rotting and there’s no way to get them out.”

“Nice story,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, well.” She took a moment to sweep her hair back from her face. “The last apartment, One, is Bobby and Vicki Arens, and Bobby’s got red hair and he’s about six-six.”

“Who’s been here the longest?”

“Well, me . . . and the Lees, in Four. We both got here two years ago. The Lees, you know, are Chinese, they’re studying medicine. They’re really nice.”

“Okay. Shoot. I’m sorry I woke you up,” Lucas said.

“Listen, come on in for some Rice Krispies,” she said. “We can think about it. I won’t be able to get back to sleep anyway.”

“Huh,” he said. He looked at his watch. A little after five-thirty, and he could use a bite, and she was a pretty woman. “All right.”

IN ADDITION TO a bowl of Rice Krispies, he advanced another inch in his education. The woman’s name was Katie Darin, and she suggested that a student house would be the perfect place to set up a fake credit card, or a mail drop.

“Nobody knows who’s coming and going—people move in and out all the time,” she said. “The post office still delivers mail to my box for people who haven’t lived here for years. So, you know, you want a fake ID, you have it delivered here. The post office doesn’t know. Everybody’s in class when the mailman comes. He comes at ten o’clock, and this place is empty.”

“The guy I’m looking for set up his Visa account two years ago,” Lucas said.

“When did he set up the post office box?” she asked.

“Six months ago.”

“So he was picking up his mail here, for a year and a half?”

“I guess,” Lucas said. “He didn’t charge much, but he did from time to time.”

“So the mail gets sent to Apartment Five, or wherever, and the mailman doesn’t care, he just sticks it in the Apartment Five box,” Darin said. “There’s probably mail in it right now. This guy probably knows what day his Visa bill would get here, and he’d just come by and pick it up. No problem.”

“The question is, why would he set up a fake ID?” Lucas asked.

“Because he’s a criminal of some kind,” she answered. “Or maybe, political.”

“Political?”

“Yeah, you know, somebody who’s underground,” she said. “Somebody left over from the seventies.”

Lucas scratched his nose: “I gotta think about it.”

“How long have you been a detective?” she asked.

Lucas looked at his watch: “About eight hours.”

She smiled and said, “So you got thrown in the deep end.”

“I’ll figure it out,” he said. “You don’t remember anybody like Fell? Do you think the Lees might? They overlapped by a year and a half.”

“We could ask them.” She looked at the stove clock. Six o’clock. “They’ll be up.”

THE LEES LOOKED like twins, same height, same haircuts, same dress; except that one of them had breasts. The one with breasts remembered Fell. “He was not supposed to take mail. He didn’t live here. I ask him once, why do you take mail? He say, the post office still brings it by mistake. But after I ask him, I don’t see him again.”

That was, she guessed, about six months earlier. She added two details:

—Fell was missing the little finger on his left hand. “I see it when he opened the mailbox.”

—He drove a black panel van.

Lucas took a few minutes to establish that the van wasn’t a minivan, but Mrs. Lee was clear. He drove a panel van, with no windows in the sides. Lucas didn’t say so, but it occurred to him that whoever took the girls must have had a vehicle, and a panel van would be perfect. More than perfect—almost necessary. It’d be tough to kidnap a couple of kids with a convertible.

When they left, Darin suggested that if Lucas became obsessed with finding Fell, he’d taken his eye off the ball. “You’re looking for him because he said something about a crazy guy, and other people know the crazy guy. Maybe the other people would be easier to find.”

“Good thought,” Lucas said. She was not only pretty, she was smart. He looked at his watch again. Ten after six. He was due back in uniform in eight hours. “I gotta roll. Thanks for everything . . . maybe you oughta give me your phone number, in case I need more advice.”

She smiled, then said, “All right.”

HE WENT BACK to City Hall, to the licensing department, prepared to wait until somebody showed up. But when he got there and looked through the glass panel on the door, he saw a light coming out of an office. He banged on the door for a moment, until a man in a flannel shirt came out of the office and shook his head and waved him off. Lucas held up his badge, and the guy came over. Through the glass, he asked, “What?”

“I need a name.”

The guy wasn’t the right guy, but he knew how to work the computer, and he pulled up the owners of Kenny’s, the bar where Fell had been hanging out, as a Steve and Margery Gardner from Eagan. A half-hour later, Lucas pulled into their driveway and pounded on the door until an irritated Steve Gardner came out from the back of the house in a bathrobe.

“What the hell?” he asked.

Lucas held up his badge: “We’re looking for the two lost girls. You’ve got a customer named Fell, who was talking about a crazy guy. . . .”

They talked in the house’s entry, and Margery came out after a minute. Neither one had any idea who Fell was. “You gotta talk to the manager, Kenny Katz,” Steve Gardner said. “We own six bars, we’re in Kenny’s about three times a week for an hour a time. Talk to Kenny.”

They had seen the crazy man. “He’s been around all summer. He’s tall, thin, he’s been dribbling a basketball around. I’ve seen him down by the river a couple times, and he used to stand by the ramp onto I-94 with a sign asking for money. Said he was a homeless vet, but he doesn’t look like a vet. I don’t know how you’d find him—just drive around, I guess.”

Lucas went back to his Jeep. Just drive around, I guess. Patrol cops—guys like him—could do that, of course, and probably would be doing that, if he couldn’t come up with anything better.

He looked back at the Gardner house and filed away another fact: just because you figured out a possible source of information, and then figured out how to find them, and then rousted them out of bed . . . didn’t mean they’d know a single fuckin’ thing. He’d used up an hour learning that.

A thought popped in: the post office. There’s probably a guy who systematically walks around the neighborhood every day. . . .

He headed back downtown, around to the back of the post office again. The old bureaucrat had gone at seven o’clock. The new bureaucrat decided that he wouldn’t be breaking any regulation by letting Lucas talk to the mail carriers, who were sorting mail into the address racks. The new bureaucrat took him down to one wing of the post office and introduced him to four mail carriers who carried the near south side.

Two of them had seen the crazy man.

One of them knew where he lived.

4

A dilemma: Lucas could call the information to the overnight guy in Homicide, or continue to push it on his own. If he’d already been a detective, he would have called it in, and gotten some help. As a patrolman, temporarily in plainclothes—not even temporarily, as much as momentarily—he’d probably have the whole thing taken away from him, and given to people with more experience in investigation.

That had already happened once, and he didn’t want it to happen again. He mulled it over only as long as it took him to get back to his Jeep. There was no way that Daniel would be back in his office yet, and since Daniel was his sole contact on the case, Lucas felt justified in running along on his own, until Daniel pulled him off.

Or until he turned back into a pumpkin, at three o’clock, and had to put his uniform back on.

HE’D BEEN UP for twenty hours, but still felt fairly clean. He climbed in the Jeep and headed over to the Mississippi, well downstream from the spot where, the day before, he’d been sent to look for the kids.

The crazy guy with the basketball, the mailman said, lived in a couple of plastic-covered Amana refrigerator boxes that he’d jammed in a washed-out space under an oak tree. The thick gnarled tree roots held, covered, and concealed the boxes, and the plastic sheets kept the water off when it rained.

The site should be easy enough to find, the carrier said, because it was right across a chain-link fence a few hundred yards north of Lake Street. “There’s a big yellow house, the only one up there, and there’s a hole under the fence about forty or fifty yards south of it, where you can scrape under. He’s the only guy I’ve seen down there. The only bum.”

The sun was getting hot, promising another warm day. Lucas drove down West River Parkway, into a neighborhood of older, affluent homes, carefully kept, spotted with flower gardens and tall overhanging trees. He parked his Jeep in a no-parking zone just south of the yellow house, put a cop card on the dashboard. When he got out, a man on the sidewalk, who was retrieving a Star Tribune, called, “You can’t park there.”

“I’m a cop,” Lucas said, walking down toward him. He nodded toward the bluff. “There used to be a homeless man, living under a tree around here. The other side of the fence.”

“He’s gone,” the man said. “We had the park cops out here, and they ran him off. Three or four weeks ago.”

Damn it. “Where was he?” Lucas asked. “I need to take a look.”

“You can take a look, but he’s gone,” the man said. He was a little too heavy, with a successful lawyer’s carefully tanned face. He came down the sidewalk, his sandals flapping on the concrete; he was wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts, his black hair slicked back. He reminded Lucas a little of Jack Nicholson. “This way.”

Lucas followed him up the street, and the man asked, “What’s this all about?”

“We want to talk to him about some missing kids,” Lucas said.

“The girls? He’s the one?”

“Don’t know that,” Lucas said. “You ever see the guy around any kids?”

“No, I never did. But I never saw him much,” the man said. “I’m usually outa here by eight o’clock or so, and I don’t get home until six. My wife says he’d come out in the middle of the morning, go under the fence, but we never saw him come back. We figured he came back after dark.”

The man pointed across the street to an aged, heavily branched oak: “He lived under that tree. There’s a place just down the road where you can slide under the fence. Might tear your clothes up.”

Lucas wrote the man’s name and his phone number in his notebook: Art Prose. “I’d need to talk to your wife—I need to get a good description of the guy,” Lucas said. “Will she be around?”

“Oh, sure. I’ll tell her you’re coming. Name’s Alice. And I’ll be here for another half-hour or so.”

LUCAS WALKED DOWN the street to the tree. Looking through the chain-link fence, he could see what looked like toilet paper down the slope behind it, and plastic wrappers from food cartons, and a white plastic fork. He could see corners of the cardboard boxes, but not much.

A little farther down, he found the slide-under place, where water coming off the sidewalk had been flowing over the bluff toward the river. He’d get dirty going under, he thought, but what the hell. He took off his jacket, hung it on a tree branch that poked through the fence, and slid as carefully as he could under the wire.

A narrow dirt trail, no more than a foot wide, led from the slide-under place to the tree. The bluff going down to the river was steep, and he had to hang on to the brush to keep his balance.

The tree was huge, and canted slightly toward the river; the riverside roots were out in the air, and two empty boxes were wedged beneath them to make a cardboard cave. They were covered by a sheet of translucent plastic, like the kind painters used, but heavier. One edge of the plastic had been curled into a pipe that would collect water from the top of the boxes and empty a bit down the slope.

One of the boxes was pushed in horizontally, and was long enough to sleep in. The other was shorter, and upright, but high enough to sit in. The area around the boxes was littered with plastic and paper trash, the remains of magazines and newspapers. A green plastic Bic lighter was tangled in a bush down the slope, apparently discarded. Near the bottom of the slope, he could see tufts of rotting toilet paper around a clump of brush that was probably the man’s toilet.

The water washing under the tree would collect in a shallow gully, and clean up the toilet from time to time, Lucas thought.

So: the boxes.

Not much to see, but he’d have to call it in—maybe there’d be fingerprints or something. He got down on his knees for a better look into the boxes, and noticed a slit in the back of the bed box, and a fold. Like a cupboard, he thought. He wondered briefly if he might get some disease by crawling into the box, then got down, and crawled in.

He could smell the man, even after a month. He tried breathing through his mouth, but it didn’t help much. Well into the box, on his hands and knees, he reached back and pulled open the flap. It had been a cupboard, or something, he thought, a hole carved into the dirt, but it was empty now.

He crawled a bit deeper in and yanked the cardboard flap farther open . . . and saw the edge of several sheets of paper that had slipped down between the box and the dirt wall behind it. He pulled one of the sheets out, and for a moment, with the sheet upside down, didn’t quite understand what he’d found.

He turned it around and said, “Jesus Christ.”

He was holding a pornographic photograph, torn from a badly printed magazine. The woman—girl—in the photo was either very young, or looked very young. She was sitting astride a man, her head thrown back, the man’s penis visibly penetrating her.

Lucas put the paper on the floor of the box and carefully backed out.

He dusted off his hands, noticed that they were shaking a little: adrenaline.

“Jesus Christ,” he said again. And: he’d found something. He’d investigated, and he’d come up with something important, on his own. The rush was like kicking Wisconsin in hockey.

He hurried back to the hole in the fence, slipped under, got his jacket off the bush, and half ran back to the Proses’ house. He knocked and Prose came to the door, now wearing a bathrobe, and Lucas said, “I need to use your phone. And talk to your wife. Like right now.”

HE CALLED DANIEL at home. Daniel came up and said, “Davenport? It can’t wait for breakfast?”

“I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “I found where that street guy was staying. He had a stash of porn, with some really young women in it. Like, girls. Young girls.”

“Where are you?” Daniel asked.

Lucas gave him the address, and Daniel said, “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. You sit on that site, don’t let anybody get close to it. You got that? You sit on it.”

“I’ll sit on it,” Lucas said.

He actually sat on the Proses’ front porch, talking to Alice Prose, a tall sandy-haired woman who looked like she should have been an English school mistress, and he drank a glass of the Proses’ orange juice. Alice gave him a thorough description of the street guy: tall, not old but with a burned, weather-wrinkled face, brown and gray hair down to the back of his neck, a full beard. He wore a baseball hat, with a logo above the bill, but she’d never been close enough to see what the logo was. He carried a nylon backpack, stuffed with clothes or bedding. There was the occasional odor of cooking food around the tree, and sometimes a fecal odor, “which is one reason that people thought it was best if he’d find someplace else to stay. Someplace with a bathroom,” she said.

She’d never seen him with anybody else, male or female. “He was always bouncing a basketball, but he didn’t seem especially good at it. He was always losing it, and chasing it around.”

“He’s not just a bum, though,” Lucas said. “People say he’s crazy.”

“Schizophrenic, I think,” Alice said. “You could hear him yelling some nights. It sounded like an argument, like a violent argument, but he was all by himself, yelling and jumping up and down, like he was fighting somebody. Like fighting an invisible man. If you just heard it, and didn’t see it . . . it was pretty convincing. It sounded like a fight. He’d be cursing and screaming. . . .”

“You never saw him with any girls, or women?”

“I never saw him with anybody. Ever.”

“Did he ever show up in a car? Or a truck?”

“Never. Not that I saw.”

LUCAS WROTE IT all down in his notebook, and fifteen minutes after he’d spoken to Daniel, walked down to wait in the street.

Daniel took nearly a half-hour to arrive; before he got there, an unmarked car pulled up, and a couple of homicide detectives got out, John Malone and Frank Lester. Lester asked, “Where’s this stuff?”

Lucas pointed through the fence at the tree. “Right there. Under the washed-out roots.”

Malone said to Lester, “We’re gonna need better access,” and to Lucas, “You get your prints all over everything?”

“On some of it,” Lucas admitted. “The boxes were mostly empty, just a bunch of crap lying around. He hasn’t been here for a couple of weeks, according to the neighbors. They had the park cops run him off. There’s like a . . . cupboard . . . thing cut into the back. I needed to go inside and see if there was anything in it.”

“Hope you didn’t fuck up a crime scene,” Malone said.

“Get off his back,” Lester snapped at Malone. “You would have done the same goddamn thing.” To Lucas: “You did good, rook.”

“I hope,” Lucas said.

“Still need access,” Malone said, tacitly conceding the point. “I’m gonna get some snappers.”

He made a call from his car, and a squad showed up five minutes later. A uniformed cop named Willis climbed out, said, “Hey,” to Lucas, and got a commercial bolt-cutter from the trunk. The cutter had steel handles almost as long as a baseball bat, and was mostly used for cutting the shackles off padlocks. Willis started cutting a man-shaped hole in the fence, and was finishing the job when Daniel arrived, driving a yellow, ten-year-old Corvette. Daniel nodded at Lucas and asked Lester, “Whaddya got, Frank?”

“Haven’t been down yet,” he said. “We’re just going now.”

Willis dragged the arc of cut wire out of the hole, and Lucas led the way down the slope to the base of the oak tree. “Smells like shit,” Malone said.

“It is shit,” Lucas said. “His toilet’s right down the slope.”

When they got to the mouth of the two boxes, they all squatted and Lucas pointed toward the niche in the back. “It’s like a little cupboard cut into the dirt. That’s where the paper is—I only pulled one out. That’s it right there.”

Daniel got down on his knees, crawled a couple feet into the sleeping box, picked up the paper, and backed out. They all looked at it, and Lester said, “That’s not Playboy or Penthouse. That’s really rough. That’s a kid.”

“No tits,” Malone said. “But she could be older than she looks.”

Daniel said, “That doesn’t make any difference. The point is, she looks like a kid, and she’s aimed at people who want to fuck kids.”

They all looked at it for a few more seconds, then Daniel asked Lester, “You got some gloves?”

“Yeah.” He took a pair of white latex gloves from his pocket, the kind surgeons used.

“Give them to Davenport,” Daniel said. And to Lucas: “Crawl back in there and get the rest of the paper.”

Lucas took the gloves, pulled them on, crawled to the back of the box, pulled the flap down, and retrieved the sheaf of paper. As he was backing out of the box, Daniel asked, “We got your prints, right?”

“Yeah,” Lucas said.

“We’ll need them to separate them from the prints this asshole left here. Let me see that stuff.”

The porn was more of the same: young-looking girls having sex with older men.

Daniel said to Lucas, “He’s our guy. We need to get all over this. I want you to find him.”

“I go on at three o’clock. . . .”

“I fixed that. You’re working for me for a while,” Daniel said. “I want you to find this guy.”

Lucas nodded, but said, “You know, I don’t, uh . . .”

“I want you to think about it,” Daniel said. “Think about it. And maybe go talk to the welfare guys or whatever. We need a description, we need everything you got. . . .”

“I got a description, but the main thing is, he’s a street guy. He goes around dribbling a basketball,” Lucas said. “The neighbor said that every time they saw him, he had the ball. That’s the only street guy I ever heard of doing that. If you get the patrol guys looking for him, that’d be our best chance.”

Daniel said, “We’ll do that.” To Lester, “We need to get some guys down here; we need to walk up and down this riverbank. If he killed them, he could have left them around here. He knows the area, he might have felt safe here. We need to look in the boxes and see if there’s blood. We need to check old culverts down by the water, look for caves, holes . . . we need the whole riverbank swept.”

“What about the kids’ father?” Lucas asked. “Just out of curiosity.”

“What about him?” Daniel asked.

“Is somebody taking a close look at him?”

“Yeah. Somebody is,” Daniel said. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Get downtown, find somebody who knows this guy, and where he is. We want him.”

“The girls are gone,” Lester said.

“Maybe not,” Daniel said. “There was that guy who kept the girl chained to the toilet. He didn’t kill her for a week.”

“One guy,” Malone said. Then he said to Lucas, “You better hurry and find him.”

Pressure. Lester grinned at him: “Life ain’t fair, is it?”

BY THE TIME he left the scene, Lucas was feeling a little tattered. His clothes felt dirty, and he needed some sleep—he’d started twenty-two hours earlier with some vigorous sex, followed by an evening on patrol, then an overnight banging on doors, and then into the new day . . . and now he had the feeling that he was being judged by Daniel.

But he liked it: liked the pressure.

He didn’t like the feeling of being slowed down. He’d spent most of his life playing hockey at a high level, and had grown to know the feeling of being not-quite-sharp. When you felt like that—not much off, but with a slightly blurred edge—you were looking at a bad game.

There were ways to take care of that. Instead of heading straight downtown, he detoured home, took a fast shower and washed his hair. As his hair dried, he went into the apartment’s compact kitchen, dug a flat-bladed screwdriver out of a drawer, went to the entryway, and carefully popped off a baseboard. From behind the board, he removed an amber prescription-pill bottle he’d picked up on the street, shook out two Dexedrine tabs, tossed one to the back of his throat and swallowed.

He put the baseboard back in place and took the other pill back to his bedroom, where he dressed in a blue oxford-cloth shirt, chinos, and blue blazer. He dropped the second pill into a shirt pocket: he disliked taking three, because they pushed him out too far. But one or two were fine: by the time he got back to the Jeep, he was already building a new edge.

WHICH WAS WASTED over the next couple of hours: he worked through four separate welfare-related agencies, and found no one that knew, or had seen, a street guy with a basketball. He got the impression that most of their work was done in the offices, and that the people he spoke to had little regular contact with the street.

Later, he went down to the 911 center and started calling patrol cars. They’d all been put on the alert, to look for the guy, and he found two patrolmen who remembered seeing him at one time or another.

They agreed that he was usually in the neighborhoods adjacent to the river, between the I-94 bridge and the Marshall Lake bridge to the south. “I think he might have been camping out along the railroad tracks behind Brackett Park, but we went down there, and there’s no sign of a camp. Maybe he split,” one of the cops said.

AT NOON, he walked over to Hennepin Avenue to get a sandwich, but mostly to get away from the bureaucrats in City Hall, and to think. That’s what Daniel had told him to do, and he hadn’t been doing enough of it.

He took with him a file of arrest reports involving street people: the guy was so completely gone that it occurred to Lucas that he might be in jail. If he were, and that was discovered at some later date, they would all be embarrassed. He needed to check that. . . .

He was sitting in Henry’s, a shabby bar-restaurant with a decent cheeseburger, flipping through the paper, finding nothing, when somebody said, “Jesus, they’re letting the cops in here.”

A thin man with wild blond hair and skinny paper-thin jeans stood in the dim light coming through the front door, fingertips in his jeans pockets, grinning down at him.

Lucas half stood and they slapped hands, and he said, “I caught you at Seventh Street. You guys are out of control.”

“I saw you in the crowd. . . .” The man laughed, and said, “I love watching you dance. It’s like watchin’ a bear gettin’ electrocuted.”

“Hey . . . I’m physically talented.”

Dave Pirner was the lead singer in the band Soul Asylum. He was a couple years younger than Lucas. They’d met in the rock clubs along Minneapolis’s Hennepin Avenue when Lucas was at the university. Pirner slid into the booth: “So what’re you up to?”

“I’m working on that thing with the missing girls,” Lucas said. “Plainclothes, for a while, anyway.”

“Read about the kids,” Pirner said. He waved at a waitress. “They just take off? Or they get kidnapped?”

“Kidnapped, I think,” Lucas said. “Some people say they fell in the river.” Pirner made a rude noise, and Lucas nodded: “That’s what I think.”

The waitress came over and said to Pirner, “I love your hair,” and Lucas leaned into the conversation, said, “Thanks, I cut it myself,” and she rolled her eyes, and Pirner grinned at her and said, “Gimme a Grain Belt. He’s paying for it.”

“I’m not paying for a Grain Belt,” Lucas said. “Give him a Leinie’s.”

They sat and drank beer, talked about Prince and Purple Rain, and Morris Day’s feud with Prince, and about Madonna getting hot.

Pirner said Prince had come into Seventh Street with his entourage, and, “There was a bodyguard about the size of a mountain; he went through the crowd like a ship going through the ocean”; and he said Prince was interesting but “it’s not really our kind of music, you know?” He said he was working on a rerelease of the first Soul Asylum album.

Lucas told him about the investigation of the missing girls.

“No suspects?”

“I’m trying to find a guy,” Lucas said. He told him about the schizophrenic with the basketball.

Pirner leaned across the table and pointed the end of his Leinie’s bottle at Lucas. “There’s this chick . . . what’s her name? She’s kind of a groupie.”

“Groupie for who?”

“For us, wickdick.”

“Now I know you’re lying. . . .”

“Karen . . . Blue hair. I’ll think of it. She’s a social worker for somebody. Some foundation or something. She knows every goddamn street guy in Minneapolis. She practically lives with them. There’s a guy, she. . .” He straightened and snapped his fingers. “Karen, uh, Foster. Or Frazier. Something like that. Frazier, I’m pretty sure. Works for some foundation, but she went to the U for a long time. Like, years. Blue hair. She’s at every show.”

Lucas scrawled the name on a piece of paper. “I’ll talk to her. We got nothin’ else.”

“She’ll know the guy,” Pirner said. “I swear to Jesus.”

They finished a second beer, Pirner said they had another gig coming up, and Lucas said he’d be there. Pirner was meeting a couple of friends at Rifle Sport to do some shooting and invited Lucas to come along.

“I can’t, man, I got this thing going, I can’t stop,” Lucas said, standing up.

He dropped some money on the table and Pirner headed out. Lucas went to the back of the bar to find a phone. He checked through a couple of supervisors in the welfare department and found a guy who told him that Karen Frazier worked for Lutheran Social Services.

Lucas got an address and headed that way.

A WOMAN at Lutheran Social Services told him that Karen Frazier was on the street somewhere, and when Lucas became persistent, went through the offices until she found somebody who said that Frazier planned to talk to a group of Hmong women about cultural violence, at an Asian grocery store in St. Paul.

Xiong’s was on University Avenue, a near-slum of aging stores and small mechanical shops, now in the process of becoming a Hmong shopping district. Xiong’s had once been a drugstore, then a secondhand shop, then abandoned, and now was back as a supermarket that smelled funny to Lucas’s Western nose; an earth smell, like unfamiliar root vegetables. He found Frazier, with her blue hair, at the center of a group of Hmong women.

Lucas was a foot taller than any of them, and attracted some attention as he worked through the store: he waggled his fingers at Frazier, who frowned and asked, “Me?”

“I’m a police officer. I gotta talk to you right now—it’s urgent,” he told her.

“Me? About what?”

“About a transient over in Minneapolis. I was told you could help me,” Lucas said.

“By who?”

“Dave Pirner. He’s a friend of mine.”

“Dave’s a friend?” Now she was interested. She excused herself from the Hmong ladies, and they moved into an aisle of canned goods.

“I’m looking for a street guy who goes around bouncing a basketball,” Lucas said. “We think he might know something about the two girls who disappeared last night. We really need to talk to him.”

“You think he took them?”

“We heard some things in that direction,” Lucas said. “And we found an old camp of his, under a tree . . .”

“. . . off West Mississippi. I’ve been there,” she said.

“So you know him?”

“Yeah, but why do you think he’s involved?” she asked.

“Something a guy said, a guy we think knows him. Then, we were digging around under that tree, and we found a bunch of porn, with really young girls.”

“Ah, boy,” she said. She turned away from him and scratched her nose, working through the equities, decided, and said, “Okay . . . okay. His name’s Terry Scrape. S-c-r-a-p-e. He was born around here, and he comes back in the summer. Most of the year he’s out in California. Los Angeles. He’s schizophrenic, he thinks he’s in the movie business, he thinks he’s an actor, he sees movie stars everywhere. The last time I saw him, he was into Harrison Ford and Michael J. Fox.”

Lucas was making notes: “Any history of violence?”

“Not as far as I know—but you guys have busted him a bunch of times on marijuana charges,” Frazier said. “Using, not dealing. Self-medicating. He does carry a knife, but most of them do, somewhere.”

“He never threatened you, or anything?”

She shook her head: “No. He’ll freak out sometimes. It’s like . . . he has nightmares when he’s awake. He might hurt somebody inadvertently, but he’s not a bad guy. He’s suspicious, he’s paranoid at times. He won’t take his meds, they mess him up too bad.”

“Where is he now?” Lucas asked.

“He’s got a room. He had a room—I haven’t seen him for a few weeks, so he’s probably still there, or he’s gone back to LA. Anyway, the big corporations—Target, Norwest—got their employees to kick in money to house the homeless, and he got one of the spaces. A Target employee handles the money and finds the rooms.”

She fumbled in her purse, took out a worn black address book, paged through it and said, “The Target guy’s name is Mark Chakkour. . . .” She spelled the name and gave Lucas a phone number.

She had a few more details, and Lucas thanked her, got a phone number, used the phone in the back of the store to call Chakkour. He caught him on his way to a late lunch: “Yeah, we’ve got a Terry Scrape. What’d he do?”

“We don’t know if he did anything, but we need to locate him,” Lucas said. After a little more evasion, he got an address, and headed that way, and thought about his next step.

He was tempted to go in himself, just as he had been in the morning; no guts, no glory. On the other hand, Daniel already suspected that Lucas had held back information so he could work it himself. Maybe it was time to show some team spirit.

SCRAPE’S APARTMENT WAS in south Minneapolis, a mile west of the river, not far from Lucas’s apartment in Uptown—a neighborhood mostly inhabited by people recently out of school, and working downtown. Lucas spotted the house, counted the mailboxes on the front porch, then went out to a shopping center and got on the phone to Daniel.

Another cop picked up, and yelled at Daniel that Lucas was on the line: “You find him yet?” Daniel asked without preamble, when he picked up.

“His name’s Terry Scrape,” Lucas said, straining to keep his voice nonchalant. “He’s got a charity place in Uptown, one of those old houses converted to apartments. I’m standing outside. I haven’t gone in yet.”

“Don’t go in. We’ll be there. You say Terry Scrape?”

“Yeah. S-c-r-a-p-e. We should have a sheet on him. My source says he’s been picked up a bunch of times. Possession of marijuana . . . carries a knife. Paranoid, schizophrenic, has waking nightmares. Not on his meds.”

Daniel took down the address and said, “Fifteen minutes.”

THIS TIME he was fifteen minutes. He and two other detectives came in two unmarked cars, Daniel alone, the second car driven by Sloan, the detective Lucas had worked with the night before. The third guy was a long-timer named Hanson, who wore a gray felt hat like men wore before John Kennedy changed the fashion; a hat with a brim.

Sloan asked Lucas, “You chicken out of going in by yourself?”

Lucas said, “I wanted to share the glory with you guys.”

“Smart move,” Daniel said.

They were parked a block from the apartment house, standing between the nose of Sloan’s car and the trunk of Daniel’s. “You seen anything moving over there?” Hanson asked.

“Nope. Not a single person, coming or going, since I got here. He’s in Apartment F. The guy who got it for him says he thinks it’s on the first floor, at the back.”

“Where’d you get the information?” Daniel asked.

“I got it all written down,” Lucas said. “I’ll give you a list when we get back. Social worker, was the main one.”

“There was a rumor that you were fucking a librarian at the Star Tribune,” Hanson said.

Lucas shook his head. “Jeez, I hate that word.”

“Then you’re in the wrong fucking job, fuckhead,” Sloan said.

“I meant ‘librarian,’” Lucas said.

They all laughed, a little nervously, getting cranked for an entry, maybe even finding the Jones girls, dead or alive. They looked down the street some more, until Daniel said, “Well, hell.” He looked at Lucas. “You wearin’ your steel toes?”

“No. Why?”

“Might want you to kick the door, and I’ve got plantar fasciitis. Let’s go on down there.”

THEY WALKED DOWN the street two-by-two, looking enough like cops that a passing bicyclist checked them over, the way people check cops. They stayed on the opposite side of the street until they were directly across from the house’s front door, then crossed and climbed the stairs to the porch. Lucas looked at the mailbox marked F, but there was no name on it. He opened it: no mail.

Daniel led the way inside, where they found a small foyer, with a stair going up, and a hall going back; smelling of boiled cabbage, or maybe broccoli. There were doors on either side of them, to front apartments, one marked A, the other B. Lucas held up a finger to the others, stopping them, and moved carefully down the hall, the wooden floor creaking underfoot. He found C and D opposite each other, halfway down the hall, and then saw E and F at the end.

He tiptoed back and said, “End of the hall, on the right.”

They tiptoed back down the hall, the floor creaking, until they were opposite F, and Lucas breathed, “Knock, or kick?”

“You think you could get it with one shot?”

Lucas looked at the door. Some doors could be opened with a cough, but others resisted even sledgehammers. This house was a rehab, and the door looked like it might be trouble, at least for a kick: the lock was modern. He shook his head and muttered, “I don’t know.”

Sloan moved up and said, “I’ll knock.”

Lucas noticed that he had a gun in his hand, as did Hanson. He’d forgotten about his gun, put his hand back on it, then left it. Two guns were enough. Sloan looked at the three of them, then knocked and called, “Mr. Scrape? You’ve got a package. Mr. Scrape?”

They heard nothing for a moment, then the sound of heels, somebody either barefoot, or in stocking feet, coming to the door. Lucas said, “Stand back.”

The others got behind him, and when Scrape opened the door—it was Scrape, the picture of the man described to him by Alice Prose—Lucas kicked it as hard as he could. The door smashed open, hitting Scrape in the face, and the man went down, screaming with pain, fear, and confusion, and Lucas and Hanson were on top of him. Hanson’s hat popped off and rolled in a half-circle across the bare floor.

Scrape was an average-sized man, maybe an inch under six feet, with a long prematurely gray beard and pale blue eyes; he was extremely thin, and as he struggled with the cops, the ligaments stood out in his arms. He was screaming and thrashing and Lucas pulled his cuffs, and they rolled him, ignoring his thrashing, and bent his arms and Lucas got the cuffs on; and thought that Scrape smelled like some weird combination of smoke, rancid butter, and dirt.

Lucas patted him down, found an empty plastic baggie that might once have held some grass. Hanson spotted a butcher knife in a leather sheath on a rickety table next to the bed. He said, “Knife, over there.”

They were all breathing hard, Scrape facedown on the floor, squealing now, and Daniel did a quick circuit of the spare room, looking for anything connected to the girls. Nothing. Daniel shook his head and said, “Let’s get him downtown.”

Sloan and Hanson helped Scrape get up, and Sloan brushed off his shirt and said in a soft voice, “If you’ve still got them, you could give them up. It’d be a big help to everyone.”

Scrape asked, “Who? Who?”

Lucas would remember the tone of his voice: the utter confusion in it.

SLOAN KEPT TALKING to Scrape like a man talking to a nervous horse, and he and Hanson took him out the door. Daniel’s eyes cut to Lucas and he said, “We had no time for a search warrant, I figured we were sort of in hot pursuit. We’ve got to have a warrant before we tear the place up.”

Lucas thought that sounded a little shaky, but took a look around: one room, with a bed, a chest of drawers, a nightstand, and a wooden table and chair that might have been rescued from Goodwill. A key ring, with a bunch of keys, sat on the nightstand. A backpack, open at the top, and stuffed full of clothes, lay in the middle of the floor, with a basketball. There were two doors other than the one that went into the hallway: one stood half open, to reveal an empty closet. The other led to a compact three-quarters bath.

He asked Daniel, “Think it’d be okay if I took a leak?”

“If you don’t see any blood, and if you really have to go . . .”

Lucas went in the bathroom, closed the door, checked the medicine cabinet—it was empty—and the shower booth, which showed only a sliver of soap, a miniature bar like those from hotels. No shaving cream or even toothpaste. There was a roll of unwaxed floss on the ledge behind the sink.

He flushed the toilet and stepped back out. Daniel, with no witness, had had time to check the closet, under the bed, the chest of drawers, and the nightstand. The clothes in the pack had been pulled out and stuffed back in. Daniel said, “Get the knife and let’s go. We’ll get some guys back to check his pack.”

So he’d found nothing.

Lucas nodded. He picked up the knife, and the keys from the bedstand. They went out, and Lucas selected the newest-looking key, found that it worked, and locked the door behind them.

Daniel said, “Be nice to know what those other keys do.”

Lucas jangled them—a lot of them were old-fashioned skeleton keys, but some were modern. “We gotta ask him. And not nice.”

5

They took Scrape, frightened, panicked, back to police headquarters, took his picture, printed him, tagged his knife, sat him at Sloan’s desk, and Sloan went to work on him, with Hanson crowding in at Scrape’s side, the bad guy. Lucas, Daniel, and a couple of other cops sat back and watched.

Scrape started out scared, but when Sloan asked him about the girls, he said he didn’t know what they were talking about: and his confusion seemed real. He didn’t read newspapers, watch television, or listen to radio. When Sloan gave him the news about the girls, he got angry, twisting in his chair to look each of them in the face, one after another, as if searching for an ally—or simply for understanding.

“I never would touch no girls like that,” he said. “I never touch no good girls. You can ask anybody.”

“You do like girls, though, right? You’re not queer,” Sloan said, leaning toward him.

“Heck no, I’m not queer. I got problems.” He made a circling motion with his index finger, by his temple. “My meds don’t help. But I’m not queer. I just . . . don’t do much of that.”

“Much of what?”

“You know. Girls,” Scrape said.

“When was the last time you did?”

Scrape eased down in his chair, his eyes scanning the cops, calculating an answer. Finally, he said, “There was this woman down in the river . . .”

He stopped, and Sloan asked, quietly, “Where on the river? Down by your tree place?”

Scrape was puzzled again for a second, then snorted, as if at a joke, and he said, “Not this river. The LA river. I got run out of there by TVR, but that was the river.”

“What’s TVR?” Hanson asked. “That some kind of TV station?”

Scrape cocked his head. “What TV station?”

Hanson said, “You said, ‘I got run off by TVR.’ What’s TVR?”

“Everybody knows that,” Scrape said, taking on a slightly superior aspect. “The Toonerville Rifa. Bad dudes, man. I got the heck out of there.”

They figured out that he was talking about a street gang in Los Angeles, and that he had never been around a woman on the Mississippi.

“So you backed down on a gang guy,” Hanson sneered. “You yellow? You a chickenshit?”

“I’m just not a big-boned man,” Scrape pleaded. “He was a big-boned guy. The only reason I’d ever back down, is if they’re bigger-boned than me, then I disengage.”

“They used to hear you yelling and screaming down there, by that box you had,” Hanson said. “Were you yelling at the girls? Is that where you had them?”

“I never had any girls; I never did. When I’m having a bad day, I might do some yelling. They come crowding in on me, and I try to keep it to myself, but sometimes I can’t. I have to yell it somewhere—”

“When who crowds in?” Hanson asked. “When the girls crowd in?”

“I don’t know any girls,” Scrape said, a miserable, yellowtoothed grimace pulling on his face.

THE QUESTIONING WAS MADE more difficult by Scrape’s illness: he spoke his thoughts—“These cops are gonna kill me”—as a kind of oral parenthesis in the middle of answering a question. He claimed to have been in places where he couldn’t have been—Los Angeles, that morning—and to have spoken to people that he hadn’t spoken to—Michael J. Fox and Harrison Ford. When Sloan made the point that the conversations were fantasies, Scrape became further confused.

“But I just talked to Harrison this morning. Or maybe . . . maybe yesterday. He was going to . . .” He paused, then said, “He was coming over with some friends. He was going to bring beer.”

“Harrison Ford, the movie star,” Sloan said.

“Yeah, he’s a good friend. He loans me money sometimes.”

He became confused by logical inconsistencies in what he was saying; became confused by the fact that he was in Minneapolis, and not Los Angeles, though at other times he knew for sure that he was in Minneapolis.

They brought out the porn they’d taken from his boxes above the river. He could barely look at them. “Not mine. Not mine. Somebody else’s,” he said, turning his eyes away, in what seemed like embarrassment.

“We found them in your place,” Sloan said. “Your boxes, down by the river.”

“You did not,” Scrape said.

“We did,” Sloan insisted.

“Where am I gonna get that?” he asked. “I’m gonna mail away for it, so they could bring it to my mailbox? I’m gonna spend good money on it when I got no food? Where am I gonna get that shit?”

Then he said something that did make sense: “Hey, if I had those in my box, wouldn’t my fingerprints be on them?”

“Maybe,” Sloan said.

“Sure they would,” Scrape said. “I ain’t got no gloves. You look at them pictures, they won’t have no prints on them. Not my prints. You look.”

“We will,” Sloan said. “We’ll look.”

“That’s the proof, right there,” Scrape said. “No prints.”

SLOAN WAS THOUGHTFUL and forgiving and mild-mannered, offered cigarettes and Cokes and coffee. Hanson was rude and demanding and skeptical. Between them, they tore everything Scrape said to shreds, except for three things: he’d never seen the porn, he’d never seen the girls, and he was a friend of Harrison Ford’s.

He didn’t know the girls, had never seen them, had never touched them.

So angry that he was shaking, his face red as a bullfighter’s cape, he kept his hands down and his story straight: “NO: I NEVER SEEN THEM.”

The ring of keys, he said, he collected: “I find keys, I put them on the ring. I like to listen to them at night. They’re like bells. And who knows when I might need one? Maybe I could sell one, or something.”

They gave it two hours, more or less, then Daniel brought in another cop to sit with Scrape, and he, Sloan, Hanson, and Lucas went into Daniel’s office and shut the door.

“I don’t think he did it,” Sloan said. “But I’d be more sure if he wasn’t nuts. Do you think it’s possible that he could have done it, and then forgot he did it?”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” Hanson said. “He gets stuff confused, but he remembers it all.”

Daniel looked at Lucas, who shrugged. “He looked like he was really confused when Sloan first asked him about them—it looked to me like he had no idea who we were talking about. I don’t think he’s smart enough to fake it. Or sane enough. Then, I’ve got to wonder about the prints on the porn. Are we looking at that?”

“We will,” Daniel said. “So, we got a problem. I mean, we got nothing. We picked him up on a rumor started by a guy we can’t find, and Davenport, here, thinks that guy’s a crook of some kind, with fake addresses and phony credit cards. We can’t even arrest Scrape on the knife, since he was in his own room, and he never had a chance to threaten anyone.”

“They find anything else out at his camp?” Lucas asked.

Daniel shook his head: “I talked to Lester twenty minutes ago. They combed the riverbank for a half-mile, both directions, and didn’t find anything. Not a thing.”

“We gonna cut him loose?”

Daniel said, “If Sloan doesn’t squeeze anything out of him.” He looked at Sloan and said, “I want you to keep him going for another hour. Run through it, all over again, and if nothing comes up, cut him loose. I’m going to get a couple guys to track him. If he took the kids, he’ll fuck up, and pretty quick.”

“What if he just runs?” Hanson asked.

“We don’t let him. He tries to get on a bus or hitch a ride out of town, we bust him again,” Daniel said. “We don’t let him get anywhere.”

“If he gets to LA, he’s pretty much gone,” Sloan said.

Hanson picked up Daniel’s phone and punched in a couple of numbers, listened, identified himself, then asked, “You got any inquiries about busts in the missing girls thing? Uh-huh. No, there’s nothing here. Keep me up, though.”

He hung up and said, “The papers don’t know we picked him up. Not yet, anyway.”

“So we cut him loose, in an hour or so, and tag him,” Daniel said. “Put somebody on the house, front and back. We wanna be inside his sweatshirt.”

Lucas asked, “What about me? You want me to follow him?”

Daniel said, “Nah. Go on home, get some sleep. We’re done. I expect we’ll be seeing you around.”

LUCAS, DISMISSED, left Daniel’s office a little down. He thought he’d done something with Scrape, and instead, they had, as Daniel said, “nothing.” He went out to the Jeep, sat for a moment, thinking about the guy who started the rumor about Scrape. He’d like to find Fell, just to see if he could. To see what was going on there.

The Dexedrine was beginning to fade, but Lucas was still too jacked to sleep. Instead of going home, he drove down to Kenny’s bar and introduced himself to the manager, Kenny Katz, who was sitting in a back office working over an old-fashioned mechanical adding machine. He looked at Lucas’s badge and pointed him at a chair, and Lucas told him the story about John Fell and the panhandler named Scrape.

“John usually comes in about six or seven, stays for an hour or so,” Katz said. “He showed up here three weeks or a month ago, and maybe every other night since. Usually around six or seven. He’s not exactly what I’d call a regular, though . . . he doesn’t exactly fit in.”

“Why not?”

Katz hesitated, then said, “I don’t know. There’s something off-center about him. He comes in, has a couple of drinks, talks with people. But it’s like it’s not natural to him. The bullshit. It’s like he went to a class. He tells a lot of jokes, and it’s like he’s got a joke book that he reads. It’s not like he’s got pals who tell him the jokes.”

“Huh.” They sat looking at each other for a moment, then Lucas asked, “You ever see this bum around? The guy with the basketball?”

“Oh, sure. He used to come in every once in a while, and ask to use the bathroom. I didn’t encourage him, but if it’s early in the day, and there aren’t many customers around . . . You know, what are you gonna say?”

“Haven’t seen him lately?”

“He stopped by maybe two weeks ago, said he got a room somewhere, wouldn’t need our bathroom anymore,” Katz said. “He said thanks. Kind of surprised me. I said, ‘You’re welcome,’ and that seemed to make him happy.”

“You think he took those girls?”

Katz said, “Hell, I don’t know. I mean, I just don’t know.”

“John Fell sort of put us on his trail.”

Katz shook his head, his jowls waggling: “That’s something else I don’t know about. Why he’d think that? He doesn’t seem like a guy who’d talk to bums.”

“Fell used to go to the massage place across the street . . . and the girls sometimes come in here . . .”

“They do not solicit in here,” Katz said. “This is a neighborhood place. They know better.”

“But they come in,” Lucas said. “Do they hang with Fell? Do they come in for him?”

“Not especially. But I’ll tell you what, a guy that goes to a hooker, on a regular basis, isn’t quite right,” Katz said. “You know what I mean?”

Lucas nodded. “I think so.”

“I mean, if you’re really ugly, or you’re handicapped, and can’t get a regular woman, then, maybe. You gotta let off steam,” Katz said. “But John, there’s nothing physically wrong with him, not that you can see, anyway. Okay, he’s a little fat, but a lot of guys are fat now. But if there’s something wrong with him, it’s up here.” Katz tapped his temple.

“You say he’s in around six or seven?”

“Most days,” Katz said. “You plan to come back?”

“I’d like to talk to him,” Lucas said. “We’re pushing every button we got, and he’s one of them.”

“You think you’ll get those kids back?” Katz asked.

Lucas said, “Most of the experienced guys don’t think so. I’m too new and dumb to give up.”

LUCAS WENT BACK out to the street and sat in his Jeep. The sun was still high, and it was hot, and he couldn’t think of what to do. He finally headed home, cranked up the air conditioner, and fell on his bed, certain that he wouldn’t be able to sleep.

He didn’t for half an hour: his mind kept moving, looking for any crack that he could get ahold of, anything he could do. There wasn’t much: as long as he was pulling on the Scrape thread, he had a line to work along. But that thread ran out, and he was deadended on Fell. There had to be some other way to get at Fell, but he could feel his own ignorance there. He knew that if he’d only been working longer, he would have thought of something.

Instead, he felt marinated in ignorance.

THE PHONE SURPRISED HIM: caught him asleep, and for quite a while, he thought. He popped up on his hands, in a half-push-up, disoriented, in the dark, his shirt twisted around his neck.

He found the phone, and Sloan was on the other end of the line: “Thought you might be interested. Nine-one-one got a tip that says ol’ Scrape was seen throwing a box of stuff in a dumpster behind Tom’s Pizza on Lyndale, yesterday about dark. You want to do some diving?”

“Aw, man, no,” Lucas said. He’d gone dumpster-diving a few times on patrol. “I mean, I’d like to be there. . . .”

“Daniel’s looking for one of us to go in,” Sloan said. “You know, one of his guys. Junior guy usually does it.”

“Who’s junior if I don’t do it?” Lucas asked.

“That’d be me,” Sloan said.

Lucas smiled into the phone. “What’s it worth to you?”

“C’mon, man. I’m in good clothes, I don’t have time to change,” Sloan said. “You’re at home, you could just throw on some old shit.”

“All right, all right,” Lucas said. “I hope it’s not for nothing.”

“Bring a flashlight,” Sloan said. “Listen, weren’t you there last night when that soldier guy found the blouse?”

“Yeah, that was us.”

“Well, Tom’s is about two blocks up that alley. I think this could be something.”

“Twenty minutes,” Lucas said. “I gotta stop at Walgreens and get some Vicks.”

He changed into an old pair of jeans and high-topped hiking boots, a T-shirt with terminally stained underarms, and a year-old canvas fishing shirt, still new enough to be stiff.

His biggest fear wasn’t the filth of a dumpster; it was AIDS. The disease was exploding in the Cities, and the papers said that a major component in its spread, besides gay sex, was blood-toblood contact with needles used by junkies.

And needles wound up in dumpsters.

Five minutes after Sloan’s call, he was back in his Jeep. He made a quick stop at a Walgreens, picked up the thickest pair of yellowplastic kitchen gloves they had, and a jar of Vicks VapoRub.

TOM’S PIZZA WAS a failing storefront pizza joint distinguished by its low prices and juicy bluebottle flies. The flies looked a little too much like Tom’s pizza ingredients for the high-priced trade, though some argued that they added a certain je ne sais quoi to the cheese-and-mushroom special.

Lucas parked on the street at the side of the building and walked around back, carrying the bag with the gloves and the Vicks, and the heavy shirt, and found Sloan, Hanson, Lester, and Jack Lacey, the owner of Tom’s, standing in the alley looking up at the dumpster. The bright motion-sensor light shone down from the roof, onto the space around the store’s back entrance, half illuminating the dumpster. A stepladder stood next to it.

Lucas said, “Hey,” as he walked up, and Sloan said, “I owe you,” and Lucas said, “You really do.” Lucas made the mistake of sniffing at the dumpster and gagged and turned away: “Holy shit; when was this thing dumped?”

“They get it once a week,” Lacey said. “It goes out tomorrow. It’s been hot.”

“Maybe they ought to get it twice a week,” Lucas said. “This is disgusting.”

“Only in the summer . . .”

“Listen, it’s been nice chatting,” Lester said. “So, let’s get your ass in there.”

Lucas looked at the dumpster, sighed, pulled on the heavy canvas shirt, unscrewed the jar of Vicks, put a daub in each nostril.

“He’s a goddamned pro,” Sloan said, with false heartiness.

“Gonna ruin everything I’m wearing,” Lucas said.

Lester said, “Put in for it. I’ll approve it.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Lucas climbed the ladder and looked into the dumpster—and looking was almost as bad as smelling. The basic component of the mess inside was rotten cheese, along with rotten meat, rotten crusts, rotten grease, rotten greasy cardboard, and flies. He’d always wondered where flies went at night, and now he knew. He could see a couple of cylindrical cartons that once contained tomato sauce; and a rat, with tiny black ball-bearing eyes, each with a highlight from the overhead alley spot.

The rat saw him coming and ran up the far corner and over the side. Lester cried, “Man, look at the size of that sonofabitch,” and Hanson said, “Don’t get bit. It might have rabies.”

Hanson had his pistol out, tracking the rat. Sloan shouted, “Don’t shoot it, don’t shoot it, the ricochet . . .”

Lester said, “Remind me to bring my old lady here for dinner.”

Lacey: “Hey. There aren’t any rats inside. . . .”

When the excitement died, and Hanson put his gun away, Lucas said, “Ah Jesus,” put his hips on the edge of the dumpster, swiveled, and let himself drop inside. The mass of cardboard—it was mostly cardboard—was saturated with various fluids, and was soft and slippery underfoot, almost like walking on moss.

He was breathing through his mouth, but with a nose full of Vicks, couldn’t smell much of the crap anyway. He said, “Get out of the way,” and bent and started throwing cardboard over the side, watching carefully where he put his fingers, looking for needles. In two minutes, his gloves and lower legs were covered with rotting cheese and tomato sauce, and another rat made a break for it, running up the corner, and again the guys outside yelled at it, and Lucas threw more crap over the side.

He’d been digging for five or six minutes when a patrol car turned into the alley and the light bar flared, and Lester walked around and yelled, “Turn the goddamn light off,” and the light died. A patrol cop shouted back, “We got a call on you guys. . . . What’s going on?”

“Had to check the dumpster,” Lester said.

Lucas peered over the edge of the dumpster at the car, and one of the cops inside said, “Hey, it’s Davenport.”

The other guy started laughing, and then called, “Hey, plainclothes.”

“Fuck you,” Lucas shouted back, and started throwing more crap out.

The car left, and Sloan asked, “How’s it going?”

“Fuck you.”

They all laughed.

HALFWAY DOWN, Lucas found the box.

It was sitting flat on its bottom, as though it had been carefully placed inside the dumpster, a box that you might use to move books, its top flaps carefully interleaved. “Got something,” he reported.

“Get it out,” Lester said.

“Sort of stuck in here . . .” He threw more crap over the side, excavating around it. The box had been soaked in sludge on one side—mostly grease, with a little tomato sauce—and had weakened. He cleared a space all the way around it, then slipped a hand beneath it, and lifted it out.

He put the box on the top of the stepladder, boosted himself onto the edge of the dumpster, swung his legs over, and carried the box down. He put it on the ground under the door light, moth shadows flicking crazily across it, and as the other four crowded around, pulled the flaps apart.

Inside were two small pairs of jeans, carefully folded, a small brassiere, and a white blouse.

“Motherfucker,” Lester said.

“They’re dead. I told you they were dead,” Hanson said.

Sloan’s hands were in his hair, holding on, as though he couldn’t stand his thoughts. Lacey had been smoking a cigarette, and turned away, dropped it in the alley and stomped it out, as though he were angry at the butt.

Lucas carried the soggy box around to Hanson’s car and put it in the trunk, and asked, “When are you gonna get Mr. Jones down there?”

“I’ll call him from the office after I talk to Daniel,” Lester said.

“I want to be there,” Lucas said. “But I gotta get cleaned up. Wait for me.”

“You’re not important enough to wait for,” Hanson said. “So you better hurry.”

Lucas headed for his Jeep, and Lacey called after him, “Who’s going to throw this shit back in the dumpster?”

“I investigate, I don’t clean up,” Lucas yelled back, and then he was in his Jeep and rolling.

AT HIS APARTMENT, he stripped naked, put all the clothes except his boots and the newer canvas shirt in a garbage bag and threw it at the door. He put the shirt in another garbage bag, and left it on the kitchen table; he’d take it to a laundromat and wash it for an hour or so. The boots he carried back to the shower, and washed them with soap and hot water, until they looked clean, then left them on the floor to dry out. He scrubbed himself down, washed his hair, dried, dressed, picked up the garbage bag by the door, threw it in the trash on the way out, and headed downtown.

The box was on Daniel’s desk, sitting on top of a pile of newspaper. Daniel was sitting behind his desk, while Sloan and Lester took the two guest chairs. Hanson wasn’t around. An amused look flitted across Daniel’s face when Lucas walked in, and he said, “They tell me you smelled worse than the box.”

“They were right,” Lucas said. “I ruined about fifty bucks’ worth of clothes, if I manage to save the boots. You’ll be getting the bill.”

“Go ahead and put in for the boots,” Daniel said. “A little bonus.”

“Is Jones on the way?” Lucas asked.

“Talked to him five minutes ago,” Sloan said. “He’s coming.”

“But it’s theirs,” Daniel said. “The girls’.” There was no doubt in his voice.

They all sat there, for a moment, in silence, and then Lucas said, “I’d like to know a little more about that nine-one-one tip.”

The tip, Daniel said, had come from somebody who identified himself as a neighbor who didn’t want to get involved. He said he’d gone into the alley to move his car, and saw the guy with a basketball and a box, and saw him stop and loft the box into the dumpster, and then walk around the corner at Tom’s. He said he knew about the basketball from neighborhood rumor—that the cops were looking for the guy with the basketball.

“So everybody in the world knows Scrape,” Lucas said.

“Not the whole world,” Sloan said. “But the neighborhood around Matthews Park is pretty contained—and when you’re talking about a pedophile, the word gets around fast.”

Lester: “The thing about Scrape is, all he does is walk. He walks up and down every street down there, every day. They all know who he is.”

“I still don’t like it,” Lucas said. “We get an anonymous tip that Scrape threw the clothes in the dumpster, and we’re only chasing him in the first place because of a tip from a guy we can’t find, who might be some kind of an asshole operating under a phony name.” He remembered, then, and looked at his watch: eight o’clock. “Shit.”

“What?”

“I had an appointment at seven tonight. Gotta make a call.”

“What you’re gonna find as you get into investigations,” Lester said, “is that all kinds of weird shit happens.”

“I already learned that,” Lucas said. “Weird shit happens on the street, too—but there’s weird shit and then there’s weird shit. When it’s too weird, you gotta think about it some more. I need a phone.”

He went into the outer office, to an empty desk, got Kenny’s number from the operator, and called. He asked for Katz, got him, identified himself. “Has John Fell been in? John Fell?”

“Not tonight. Not so far.”

HE’D JUST HUNG UP when George Jones, followed by a frightened-looking woman who Lucas recognized from the papers as his wife, Gloria, stepped into the office, trailed by Hanson, who’d apparently gone to meet them at the door. Hanson said, “This is Detective Davenport, who recovered the box for us.”

The two nodded vaguely at Lucas, and they all went into Daniel’s office. Daniel, Lester, and Sloan were all on their feet, and Daniel said a few words about how hard it all was, and then opened the top of the box.

Gloria Jones, a slightly too-heavy woman with red-tinted hair, began to tremble and her husband took her arm. Together, they peered into the box, and then Gloria reached into it and picked up the brassiere and said, “The kitty bra,” and fainted.

She would have fallen if Lucas hadn’t caught her, under the arms, and he eased her into a chair, but she was unconscious, and Daniel was shouting about an ambulance, and everybody but Lucas and George Jones went running.

Daniel was back in a few seconds and said, “We’ve got an ambulance on the way; it’ll be here in a minute.”

“I think she fainted,” Lucas said. “She’s coming back.”

“Can’t take a chance,” Daniel snapped. “It could be her heart.”

She came back, but then the medics were there to take care of her, and the cops all moved to the outer office. George Jones said, “The kitty bra—it was Nancy’s first bra. It has a kitty face in the front.”

And it did.

GLORIA JONES WAS WHEELED to the ambulance for the oneminute ride to the emergency room, and George went with her. The cops gathered back in Daniel’s office, and Daniel said, “We’re looking at a double murder, now. Anybody doubt that?”

They all shook their heads.

“There’s gonna be tremendous heat,” Daniel said. “We’ve gotta get Scrape back, right now. We need to know who called nine-one-one, even if we have to tear the neighborhood apart. I don’t give a shit if the guy doesn’t want to get involved, we find him.”

Hanson: “Best to do it right now, everybody home from work but still awake . . .”

Sloan: “Oughta get an entry team this time, gettin’ Scrape.”

Daniel began issuing orders, and the detectives started moving, and Hanson turned back to Daniel’s desk and looked into the box, and Lucas, who hadn’t been told anything, asked, “What am I doing?”

Daniel looked up at him and said, “Uhhh . . . Lucas, man, you did really good. And I’m keeping you around for a few more days. But we’ve got something else for you.”

Lucas didn’t understand. “Something else? What the hell? I’m all over this one,” he said.

“But this one, we’re just chasing the guy down. We . . . don’t need you to do that. So now, you’re gonna get all over the other one,” Daniel said. “And it’s important. The Smith murder. Capslock caught it this morning, but Sandola is on vacation, and we don’t want Capslock wandering around by himself interviewing gangbangers.”

“Smith murder? What’s the Smith murder? What’re you talking about?” Lucas was tired, and now was a little pissed.

Daniel spread his hands, as if explaining the real world to a moron: “Life goes on, even when kids get kidnapped. Billy Smith, a little dipshit gangbanger and crack salesman, got his ass stabbed to death. We found him this morning. He’s over at the ME’s office right now. We need to get a clean white face on it, and you’re the guy.”

“A clean white face?”

Hanson stepped in: “See, Billy had him some friends in the community, and if we don’t step up and take it seriously, they’ll call the mayor and their councilman, and they’ll call the chief, and the chief will call QD here . . .”

“And I hate that,” Daniel said. “I hate to get called. So even though we know we won’t catch the killer unless somebody calls us, we gotta look like we’re serious about it. That means sending white guys in good clothes down there, to talk to folks, and take notes on what they say. Capslock caught it, and he needs a partner.”

“Fuck me,” Lucas said, his hands on his hips.

“Yesterday, you were walking around with a flashlight picking up drunks. Today you’re investigating a murder. Just take it,” Daniel said. And: “Capslock’s getting dinner at the XTC. You need to get over there and introduce yourself.”

“Goddamnit,” Lucas said.

Daniel: “You taking it?”

Lucas ran his hands through his hair, walked a tight circle around the office, then said, “Yeah, I’ll take it—I’m taking it. Right in the ass. I oughta be on the girls, because I’m all over that. But I’ll take it.”

Sloan came back: “We’re pulling the team together. They’re coming in. Dick and Tim are down on his door, so there’ll be eight or ten of us; should be enough for one guy.”

“Let me just come for the entry,” Lucas said to Daniel.

Daniel said, “Lucas, just . . . help me out here. Get on over to XTC. There’s not a damn thing you could do when we pick him up. You’d just be another guy standing there with his thumb up his ass. Go see Del.”

HE DID, STILL PISSED.

The XTC was a gentleman’s club that used to be a strip joint on a side street where Minneapolis turned into St. Paul. During the day, it looked like a piece of shit, a purple-painted concrete-block single-story building with a cracked-blacktop parking lot that usually had a couple of used rubbers cooking on the tarmac. At night, it looked only slightly better. Lucas had been there a few times, called by the bouncer when a gentleman got too rowdy or was suspected of carrying a gun, or objected too strenuously to the champagne bill.

He’d never been there in civilian clothes, and felt a little sleazy as he went slinking down the street toward the entrance, hoping that no past, present, or future women friends saw him going in.

When the strip joint became a gentleman’s club, the owner took down the NUDE-NUDE-NUDE red-blinking neons and put up a green one that said, “Gentlemen.” Other than that, not much had changed; the first bar stool by the door still had a strip of duct tape covering a slash in the vinyl cover, and it still smelled of cheap disinfectant, layered over by even cheaper lilac perfume.

Del was in the back, playing shuffleboard bowling with a tall, heavyset man with a drunk-red face under a white Sparkle Drywall hat with the bill turned up. A dozen empty Bud bottles were sitting on a table behind them. Lucas marched past the three main poles, two with active dancers, one down to her G-string. The other peeled a pastie as Lucas went by, then cupped her breasts and pointed them at him.

“Stick ’em up,” she said.

He kept going, not amused.

Del was looking at a six-seven split on the shuffleboard machine, and Lucas came up, crossed his arms, and stared at the back of his head. He’d worked with Capslock a couple of times as a drug decoy, and he’d seemed a little out there.

After a couple of practice strokes, Del let the puck slide, took out the six and cleanly missed the seven, said, “Rat poop,” and without turning around, reached for his beer.

The drywall guy, peering through small drunk eyes at Lucas, asked, “What’re you looking at, college boy?”

Lucas, still pissed at being pulled off the Jones kidnapping case, snapped, “Not you, fat man. I got better taste.”

The drywall guy put down his beer and started around Del, as Del straightened, saw Lucas, put his arm across the other man’s chest, and said, “Whoa. Slow down, Earl. He’s a cop, he was third team all-Big Ten in hockey, he can press three twenty-five and he likes to fight.”

“And if you keep coming, I’ll beat your ass into one big bruise and then put it in jail,” Lucas said. “I am not in a good mood right now.”

Earl saw it in Lucas’s eyes, and slowed down. “I’d kick your ass if I wasn’t so drunk,” he said.

“Go away,” Lucas said. “I got business with this clown.”

Earl picked up his beer and went to stare at a pole dancer. Del said, “Clown?”

“Third team?”

Del smiled, his teeth still yellow in the subdued light: “So we’re even.”

“I didn’t know if the fat guy knew you were a cop,” Lucas said. “Or I woulda called you Ossifer Capslock.”

“Well, thank you.”

DEL WAS A THIN, middle-height man with salt-and-pepper hair that seemed premature, and a short, neatly trimmed beard. His face was weathered, and his arms were dark with the sun. He was dressed in jeans and an antique Bob Dylan T-shirt ripped at the neckline, with a silver Rolex on one wrist. He led the way out of the bar to his vehicle, a ’77 Scout pickup convertible that somebody had painted white with a brush. He settled in his seat and said, “We’ve got four interviews—friends and relatives.”

“Why in the middle of the night?”

“Because that’s when they’re home and we can find them,” he said, as he put the truck in gear. “They don’t have straight jobs.”

They found friends and relatives, but nobody knew anything about the killing, and Lucas tended to believe them. Smith, they said, was out doing his thing, which mostly involved wandering around, talking to his homeys. Everybody knew he’d been pounding the crack, and sometimes sold it, and was often holding. So the belief was, somebody needed some crack and they took it.

One guy angrily told them that “That shit is everywhere and it’s fuckin’ up everybody and you ain’t doing a damn thing about it. Not a damn thing.”

Del told him, “I don’t know what to do. You tell me what to do.”

“Do something,” the guy said. “Anything. Arrest them. Put them in jail. They’re a buncha animals, they’re fuckin’ up the whole neighborhood. If we were white, you’d be all over it.”

His wife was standing behind him, arms crossed, nodding.

MOVING AROUND with Del felt weird.

As a uniformed cop, Lucas generally assumed that the people with whom he came in contact were the enemy, until proven different. In the course of covering traffic accidents or making traffic stops, breaking up fights, chasing down robbers or burglars, calling ambulances, talking to victims, uniforms really didn’t need to project much empathy. They were like the army: not there to make friends. And sometimes, rolling through the dark across hostile neighborhoods, inside a car filled with weapons, radios, and lights, he felt like he was in an army, and in hostile territory.

Del, on the other hand, solicited help, listened carefully, displayed great patience, and when the guy went off about crack, he was nodding in agreement, and when the guy finished, he said, “Don’t tell the boss I said this, but I agree with you.”

And he got some cooperation, but no real information, probably, Lucas thought, because nobody had any.

AT TEN O’CLOCK, Del had gotten involved in a convoluted discussion with a minister who’d once run a church that Smith and his mother had gone to. Lucas had drifted off down the street, toward the corner where they’d parked, when he saw a thin young white man walking toward the same corner, from the right-angle street. The man was wearing what cops had called a pimp hat, a widebrimmed fuzzy thing that had gone out of fashion sometime in the seventies, when disco died. Long knotted Rasta braids flowed out from under the hat, and Lucas said, aloud, “Randy.”

The man stopped, saw Lucas, did a double take, turned, and started running. Lucas went after him, fifty yards behind.

The thing was, Randy Whitcomb could hoof it, like skinny people often can. He wasn’t in the same class athletically as Lucas, but he wasn’t carrying the weight, either. Lucas heard Del shout, “Hey! Hey!” as he went around the corner, and then the race was on. Lucas could close by ten yards or so every short block, but there was traffic. Sometimes he caught it wrong, going across the street, and Randy stretched his lead, and sometimes Randy caught it wrong, and lost ground. Five blocks and Lucas was getting close, fifteen yards back, and Randy swerved into an alley and as he turned, Lucas caught a flash of plastic going over a hedge; so Randy had off-loaded his crack, coke, or grass, hoping that Lucas hadn’t seen it.

Toward the end of the block, Lucas was four feet behind him, then two feet: Randy glanced back in desperation, hearing the footsteps, and lost another foot in looking, and Lucas hit him between the shoulder blades. Randy went down on his face and Lucas was on top of him, one hand on Randy’s neck, his weight on Randy’s upper back.

“You little cocksucker, I told you to get out of my part of town,” Lucas said. He banged Randy’s face on the alley’s concrete one time, then maneuvered to put the cuffs on. “What’d you throw in that bag, Randy? Yeah, I saw it. You got a little crack in there? You got five years in there?”

“I’m gonna kill you, you motherfucker,” Randy said. “I’m gonna cut your fuckin’ nuts off.”

Randy Whitcomb was a twenty-year-old refugee from suburban St. Paul. He gave every sign of believing that he was a black pimp, though he was so pale that he almost glowed in the darkness of the alley. Not only did he believe that he was black, but a stereotypical TV gangster black, with the fuzzy hat, the cocaine fingernails, the braids, and even a ghetto accent, picked up from MTV. It might have been laughable, if he hadn’t been such an evil little fuck, attempting to recruit runaway girls to hustle for him, beating them blue when they failed or didn’t work hard enough or held out on him.

Lucas got the cuffs on and jerked Randy to his feet, and started marching him back down the alley to the hedge where he’d thrown the bag. “You know what’s in the bag, dickhead? There’s one-half ounce of weed, which will get me about, uh, an hour in jail, you piece of shit,” Randy said. “Good going, Davenport, you’re a real fuckin’ . . . you know . . . that guy with the hat.”

“What?”

“The fuckin’ cop with the fuckin’ backwards hat.”

“Fuck you, Randy,” Lucas said, with no idea of what Randy was talking about. But if he was telling the truth, the weed hadn’t been worth the chase.

Then Lucas said, “You can take that weed and stick it up your ass, as far as I’m concerned. You’re going down for the Billy Smith murder, you little shit.”

“What? What the fuck?”

“We just got fuckin’ tired of you,” Lucas said. “We got the knife he was stabbed with, and guess whose fingerprints are gonna be on it? Man, I been waiting three years for this day. . . .”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Randy said, trying to twist around to see Lucas’s face.

“Bullshit, I wouldn’t,” Lucas said. “So would every other cop on the south side. We solve a murder, we put you away for eighteen fuckin’ years, get you outa our hair.”

“But I didn’t do it,” Randy said. “I didn’t do it.”

“But you’ve done all kinds of other shit. We’ll just call it even,” Lucas said. “You get away with that, we frame you for this. Everybody’s happy. Especially those three-hundred-pound weightlifting homos out at Stillwater. They’re gonna love your little red ass.”

They came to the point in the hedge where Randy had tossed the bag, and Lucas steered him through a hurricane fence gate, and found the bag sitting on the back lawn of a darkened house. Lucas picked it up between two fingers, not getting prints on it: weed, all right, and probably not much more than a half-ounce. He stuck it in Randy’s back pocket. “Oh, look—he’s still got the weed.”

“You fuck.”

“And you murdered that poor Billy Smith boy.”

Then Randy said, “Davenport, listen, goddamnit. I got something for you. You know when Rice got stabbed the other week? I know who done that.”

“Rice?” Lucas knew about a guy named Ronald Rice getting stabbed on the north side, out of his territory, but hadn’t heard much more about it.

“Yeah. I know who done that, and I know who’ll tell you about it. You let me go . . . you got nothing here with this little bit of weed . . . you let me go, I’ll give you the name. Just you and me.”

“Randy, you’re going to prison. Right now. You’re off—”

Randy smelled the interest. “No, no, no, man, I got these names. They’re good names, honest to God. I just don’t want to go to jail tonight, and I don’t like this asshole anyway, he gives me a lot of shit, so I’ll give the name to you. And the name of the chick who can back it up.”

Lucas thought about it, standing in the alley. Then he said, “If there’s one thing I hate more than you, it’d be you punkin’ me,” Lucas said. “You punkin’ me, Randy? If you are, I swear to God, I’ll find you and I’ll choke you to death and I’ll throw your body in the fuckin’ Mississippi River.”

Randy felt the deal coming: “Okay. Okay. Here’s the name: Delia White. She lives on the corner of Cornwall and Eighteenth, in a big red house. You know that big red house?”

Lucas did. “Delia White.”

“That’s right. The guy who stabbed Rice is her brother-in-law, which name is El-Ron Parker. And she’ll talk, because she thinks El-Ron killed her sister two years ago.”

“Did he?”

“How in the fuck would I know? And who cares?”

Lucas looked at Randy for a minute, then said, “How do you know this?”

“Because I sell a little medicine to Delia and her friends.”

“Crack?” Lucas asked. A crackhead wouldn’t be the best witness.

“Not crack, just a little weed.”

“If you’re punkin’ me . . .”

“I’m not, I swear to God.”

Lucas looked at him another moment, then said, “You get off the south side. I don’t care where you go. You go up north, you go over to St. Paul. I don’t want to see you on my turf.”

“I’m outa here,” Randy said. He held his cuffed hands out to the side. Lucas looked at him for another long moment, moved him over into the light from a streetlight, and popped the cuffs. Randy rubbed his wrists, moving away, then turned and ran. Lucas moved more under the light, wrote “Delia White” and “L. Ron Parker” in his notebook, circled them, and drew a line to “Ronald Rice.”

A block down the street, Randy turned again and began screaming: “You cocksucker . . . you cocksucker . . .”

Lucas saw Del’s truck coming down the street, and stepped out and flagged it down. When he looked back after Randy, Randy was gone.

Lucas got in the truck and Del asked, “What the hell was that all about?”

“Little asshole I’ve been trying to get rid of,” Lucas said.

“You get rid of him?”

“Probably not,” Lucas said. “You get anything?”

“I got a rash. I think my underwear’s too tight.”

AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK, they were ready to quit, and headed back toward the river to drop Lucas; they were talking about cars.

Del confessed that his heart beat a little harder every time he saw a Camaro IROC-Z. “Zero to sixty in seven seconds, thirteen grand to put it in my driveway.”

“We called them dork-mobiles, over at the U,” Lucas said.

“What?”

“Yeah. Dork-mobiles. You get one, you’d have to grow a mullet.”

“Now you ruined it for me,” Del said.

“I’m thinking Porsche,” Lucas said. “They’d, like, Eat a fuckin’ IROC-Z.”

“Along with your paycheck for the next ten years,” Del said. He pointed off to his right and said, “Smith was killed about three blocks over there.”

Lucas frowned. “Over there?”

“Yeah, right over there.”

“Let’s go see it,” Lucas said.

“It’s dark, man,” Del said. “There’s nothing to see. There wasn’t much to see in the first place.”

“I wanna see it,” Lucas said. “It’ll take you what, two minutes?”

Del shrugged and took the next right, and they went back around the block, took a left, went four more blocks down and took another right, and another right into a narrow alley, and rolled a few car lengths into it. Del did a little jog so his headlights played across the side of a garage and an adjoining hedge. “That’s it. He was stabbed right by the garage door, we think, and thrown into the hedge beside the garage.”

“And the garbage guys found him at six this morning, and the ME said he’d been dead for quite a while, but they weren’t sure how long because it was so hot.”

“Yeah.”

“And he was stabbed by a long knife with a heavy blade,” Lucas said.

“Where’re we going with this?”

“We’re about a five-minute walk from the Jones girls’ house. We got a tip that the killer was this guy—”

“The bum with the basketball. Crank, or whatever his name is.”

“Scrape. We took a long knife off him. Butcher knife.”

Del looked at him in the thin ambient light and said, “Ah . . . fuck me.”

They considered that statement for a while, then Del added, “This asshole, Smith, was killed by some other asshole for six dollars’ worth of crack cocaine.”

Lucas said, “Probably. But, you gotta consider the possibilities. A guy gets stabbed with a long butcher knife, and a crazy dude, who is a suspect in a kidnapping-murder in the same place at Exactly the same time, is picked up with a long butcher knife. Probably a coincidence, but you gotta look at it. Am I right?”

Del said, “You’re gonna cause a lot of trouble in this goddamn department. We gotta talk to somebody.”

Lucas took out his notebook. “I got Daniel’s home phone number. If we can find a phone, I’ll give him a ring.”

“You’re a braver man than I am,” Del said. “But if you’ll talk to him, I know the location of every single fuckin’ pay phone in Minneapolis, and there’s one on the back wall of the Ugly Stick. We can be there in two minutes.”

“Got a quarter?” Lucas asked.

DANIEL TOOK THE PHONE from his wife and said, “Davenport . . . goddamnit. It’s almost midnight. Why’d I give you this number? I really need the sleep.”

Lucas and Del were in the back room of the Ugly Stick, a pool parlor on Lake Street, thick with smoke and wiseasses. Del leaned against the wall and dug around his teeth with a toothpick, and listened as Lucas made the call. Lucas asked, “What’d we do with that knife we took off Scrape?”

“It’s in an evidence locker. Did you hook up with Del or what?”

“Del’s right here—he’s the one who insisted we call,” Lucas said. Behind him, Del clapped a hand to his forehead. “Listen: Scrape’s in jail, right?”

There was a moment of dead silence, then Daniel said, “No. He took off. Snuck out. We don’t know how—probably out a side window—but we can’t put our hands on him. We checked his cave, he’s not there. We’re looking for him . . . but I don’t want to talk about this in the middle of the night. What the hell are you doing?”

Lucas was dumbfounded. “He got away? Weren’t we watching him? What was that thing about being inside his sweatshirt?”

“Davenport . . .”

“Smith got killed at the same time the girls disappeared, and he was stabbed to death with a butcher knife with a long heavy blade,” Lucas said. “That was four blocks from the Jones house. You can’t see it unless you’re down here, how close they are. The girls could have been walking out to the stores on Lake, there’s all kinds of stuff down there that kids might go for. And they would have gone right by this alley. Or through it. We need to look for Smith’s blood on the knife.”

Daniel said, “Aw, for Christ’s sakes . . . Del’s there? Let me talk to Del.”

Lucas pushed the phone at Del: “He wants to talk to you.”

Del took the phone and listened for a minute, then said. “Right. Talk to you tomorrow.” He hung up and said to Lucas, “Thanks a lot for that ‘Del insisted’ bullshit.”

“No problem,” Lucas said. “What’d he say?”

“He said to go back and knock on every single door where the house shows lights,” Del said.

“All right,” Lucas said. “Now we’re cooking with gas.”

“I was cooking before,” Del said. “Now, we’re gonna be out here until two in the morning.”

“I say we knock on every door, lights or not,” Lucas said.

“Anybody ever tell you to go fuck yourself?”

“All the time,” Lucas said. “Just about every fuckin’ day.”

6

They started with the house closest to the murder site, Lucas always in front, looking more like a detective than Del, Del sidling around the edges with follow-up questions. At the second house, they woke up a couple who, after listening to Lucas’s explanation, told them two things: they knew the two girls by sight, they believed. “If it was the same two girls, we were talking about it at the dinner table,” the wife said. But they hadn’t seen them for several days. The girls sometimes walked past the house, and, the husband said, he thought he’d seen them cutting through the alley.

“You think that black guy getting killed had something to do with the girls?” the wife asked. She no longer looked sleepy, but she looked scared. “We’ve got girls.”

“We don’t know, but there have been some indications that we can’t talk about,” Del said. “You should keep those girls tight.”

Lucas took down their names and the details of the conversation in his notebook, and asked who had the sharpest eyes for the street. They were passed along to another couple, who they shook out of bed for another sleepy interrogation. Those two had also seen the girls, but not in the last few days. And they had definitely seen them in the alley.

“I think they were back there pretty often, walking through,” the wife said. “I’ve seen them more than once, and I don’t go out there that much.”

Lucas took down their details, and when they were back outside, said to Del, “Man, we’re onto something here.”

Del said, “Don’t get excited. We got nothing yet. Nobody saw them the afternoon they disappeared.”

“You think we got something or not?”

“Maybe we got something,” Del conceded. “I’m glad I insisted on calling Daniel. At least I’ll get the credit.”

Lucas said, “You can have it. Who’s next? Maybe we ought to do all the lights, then go back after the darks.”

SO THEY WORKED their way around the block, and found an elderly single woman who’d also seen the girls. As they were leaving, she said, “You know, I was driving down to park in my garage and I slowed down to look at the place where that colored boy was killed. I think it was there . . . I think I saw a little zori in the street, like somebody had thrown it away. Like a girl’s zori.”

“A what?” Del asked.

“A zori. A flip-flop. Like plastic shower shoes. It looked like it had been run over a bunch of times, so I thought maybe it fell out of a garbage can. But kids wear them.”

Del looked at Lucas and asked, “Were the kids wearing flip-flops?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard anybody talking about flip-flops,” Lucas said. “Did you guys pick anything up when you were doing the crime scene?”

“No flip-flops . . .”

Lucas said to the woman, “Thank you, ma’am.” And when they got out in the street, to Del, “We need our flashlights.”

They spent fifteen minutes working through the alley, until a man shouted out of the back of a house, opposite the house where they’d started, “Get out of there. We called the cops.”

Lucas yelled, “We are the cops. We need to talk to you.”

Lights came on in the house next door, and Del pointed at the house and said, “I’ll go talk to these guys.”

The shouting man’s name was Mayer, and he and his roommate agreed that they’d seen the girls walking by the house, but knew nothing about a flip-flop. They had been in Eau Claire the day of the murder and the girls’ disappearance, they said, in answer to Lucas’s question, and hadn’t gotten back until that morning.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, we’re not really interested in girls,” Mayer said.

Del came pounding up the front steps and across the porch, and then he knocked and stuck his head through the door and said to Lucas, “C’mon. The guys next door said they got a flip-flop.”

Lucas thanked Mayer and followed Del out the door, where an older man was waiting with a flashlight. They followed him down the side of his house and through a gate into the backyard, into his garage, and looked in his trash can. Inside was a single, badly beaten-up flip-flop.

“Well, shit,” Del said.

“But this is good,” Lucas said. “Maybe.”

“This means we gotta call Daniel again.”

“Okay, that’s not good.” But then Lucas laughed and slapped Del on the shoulder. “I’m so hot,” he said. “I’m so hot.”

The old man said, “I don’t think you should be laughing about this. Those little girls, that boy being dead and all.”

DANIEL SAID, “Okay, Davenport, listen carefully. You listening?”

“Yeah.”

“Call a patrol car, get some crime-scene tape, and tape it to that garage. Leave the flip-flop in the garbage can, seal the garage, and go home. Okay? Go get some sleep. I will see you at that garage at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. You think you got that? Or do you want me to repeat it?”

“I got it, Chief,” Lucas said.

“Davenport, I’m not the chief.”

“You will be,” Lucas said.

“Okay. And I actually like the ass-kissing, so I won’t order you to stop,” Daniel said. “But you: go home.”

ON THE WAY BACK to Lucas’s car, Del said, “I had a thought.”

“Is it complicated?” Lucas asked. “You want to stop driving while you tell me?”

“Stop wiseassing me for a minute,” Del said. “If the kids were really taken in that alley . . .”

“Then the kidnapper had to have a car or a truck of some kind, and Scrape the ragman doesn’t, and probably doesn’t even know how to drive. I thought of that.”

They drove for another block, then Del asked, “What else did you think of?”

“That we’ve been running on clues given to us by people we don’t know and can’t find. Everyone else we’ve talked to is happy to chip in whatever thoughts they have—not a single person has been unwilling to help. Even the hookers were out front about what they knew. But everything good that we’ve gotten, it’s all been anonymous, and perfectly timed, and it all points us at Scrape.”

“Does seem too easy,” Del said.

“And I’ve thought of the fact that Smith was killed by somebody who overpowered a muscular, violent young gang member without leaving a trace. Scrape has trouble dribbling a basketball.”

“What does that mean?”

“Probably that Smith was killed by some other violent young gang member who he thought was a friend, and it has nothing to do with the girls,” Lucas said.

“What else?”

“That it would be a big fuckin’ coincidence, a HUGE fuckin’ coincidence that Smith got killed at the same time the girls were being kidnapped, in an alley that the girls used, without the two things being connected. You know what I mean?”

“What else?”

“That the first thing we should do tomorrow is find out if the flip-flop belonged to one of the girls, and where the girls would go down that alley. They had to be going somewhere, maybe out to Lake Street to buy shit. Popsicles, or something. Ding Dongs.”

“Ho Hos.”

“Sno Balls.”

“Moon pies.”

“Eight balls?”

“Not eight balls,” Del said. Eight balls were one-eighth-ounce Saran-Wrapped cocaine favors.

After another moment, Del said, “Half of what you think is internally contradictory.”

“Does that bother you?” Lucas asked.

“No, but it does highlight the fact that half of what you think is, ipso facto, bullshit.”

“Quid pro quo.”

“Nolo contendere.”

“Post hoc Ergo propter hoc.”

“Bullshit,” Del said. “There’s no such thing as that.”

“Sure there is. Logic one-oh-one. After this therefore because of this. Look it up,” Lucas said.

“Fuck that. I’d rather get my balls busted than waste time looking it up.”

DEL LEFT LUCAS on the street looking at his watch. One-thirty in the morning. He should be ready for bed, but the afternoon nap, and his normal night-shift life, had him awake. He could hit a couple clubs, or find a party at the university; on the other hand . . .

He went back to the XTC, found the phone, and dialed a number from memory. Catherine Brown answered: “Library.”

He asked, “So you clipping the papers?”

“That’s what I’m doing. And it’s very cold and lonely up here.”

“Bet it’s boring, too,” he said.

“But they depend on me,” she said. “What would happen if the reporters actually had to file their own stories, instead of having me clip them for them?”

“I can’t begin to contemplate the awfulness of it,” Lucas said. “You like mushrooms?”

“Love mushrooms—and pepperoni. I’m starving. But I don’t get off for another hour and a half.”

“I can get four slices and be there in an hour,” Lucas said.

“I’ll be down by the door at exactly three o’clock.”

He had an hour to kill, not much to do: he could pick up the pizza anytime, at Red’s, an all-night pizza place on Hennepin Avenue. He looked at his watch, then pulled the notebook from his pocket. Red house, corner of Cornwall and Eighteenth. He headed back across town, farther south and a bit west of where he and Del had been working. Traffic was light, and he was cruising Cornwall in fifteen minutes: the big red house showed a light. Just one, but that, he thought, was enough for a knock on the door.

He parked at the curb in front of the house, looked up and down the street, then crossed the lawn, climbed the porch steps and knocked on the door; he could hear a radio or a stereo playing inside, and then he heard somebody say something, and he knocked again, louder.

A pretty woman came to the door, pulled back the curtain that covered the glass inserts, looked at him, turned on the yellow bug light, looked at him again, obviously puzzled that a guy who looked like Lucas would be knocking on her door at two in the morning, and she asked, through the glass, “What?”

Lucas held up his badge and said, “I need to talk to Delia White. That you?”

“What do you want to talk to Delia for?”

“She might be able to help me with an investigation,” Lucas said.

“It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

Lucas looked at his watch, frowned, and said, “Jeez, I must have lost track of time.”

A smile flicked across her face and she turned and called back into the house, “Mom!”

Another woman came out, the first one turned away and met her a few steps from the door. Lucas couldn’t see them anymore because of the curtain, but he could hear them talking, and then the second woman pulled the curtain back, looked at him, and snapped, “What do you want?”

“I’m a police officer. I need to talk to Delia.”

“About what?”

Lucas wanted to get inside, but didn’t really know how, so he just said it: “I understand Delia saw L. Ron Parker stab Ronald Rice. I need to talk to her about it.”

The curtain slid back across the glass, and he could hear the women talking, but couldn’t make out the words. Then the curtain slid back again, and the older woman, Mom, gave him a long look, then unlatched the door.

Once inside, sitting on the front room couch, Lucas reapologized for running so late, but told them about the Jones investigation, and said, “So I was talking to a guy and he said that Miz White might be able to help me with this L. Ron Parker thing.”

“If El-Ron thought I was talking to the police, he’d stick me,” the pretty woman said, and Lucas understood that she was Delia.

“That doesn’t happen much,” Lucas assured her. “You gotta make up your own mind—I won’t say it never happens—but we can usually take the guy off in the corner, and whisper into his ear, and he’ll leave you alone. Unless he’s nuts.”

“El-Ron is nuts,” the older woman said. She looked at her daughter. “But I don’t know if he’s crazy enough to go after you.”

“Especially after what he did to your sister,” Lucas offered.

The two women turned back to him, faces gone hard, and Mom asked, “What’d you know about that?”

“I heard about it,” Lucas said. Nobody said anything for a long time, and Lucas took out his notebook and said, “So . . . to start, what does the L. stand for?”

“What L?” Delia White asked.

“In L. Ron Parker?”

“It’s not L, like the letter,” Delia said. “It’s El. E-L. His name is El-Ron Parker. E-L-dash-R-O-N. That’s his name.”

“Did he kill your sister?” he asked Delia.

She said, “Can’t prove it, but he did it.”

“What was her name?”

“CeeCee.”

“Did he stab Mr. Rice?” Lucas asked.

The story came out slowly. Delia and a man named George Danner had gone out to get some tacos and were eating in a parking lot by the Taco Bell when El-Ron Parker went by in a hurry, and they could tell he was looking for trouble, right there. They stepped around the Taco Bell, and they saw Parker approach Rice between two cars. They started arguing even before they got close, and then Parker went after the other man. They thought he was hitting him, but when Parker came running out from between the cars, they saw the knife in his hand.

“Does he know you saw him?”

“He does. He came over the next day and tried to make friends with me again.”

“What about your friend, this Danner guy?” Lucas asked. “Wouldn’t he testify against him?”

“George went back to St. Paul, and I haven’t seen him since. He’s a pretty peaceful man.”

“But he knows El-Ron.”

“Yeah, he does.”

Lucas said, “Huh. What about Mr. Rice? Has he identified Parker as the one who stabbed him?”

“Stop calling him mister,” the older woman said. “Ronald Rice is just another fool. But, he ain’t woke up yet. He might not wake up, is what the newspaper says.”

Lucas looked at his watch: time to go get pizza. He said, “This whole deal wasn’t my reason for being here. But I’m gonna look into it. We’ll protect you. He probably won’t even remember you by the time he gets out of prison. Has El-Ron got any prior arrests?”

“About a hundred,” said the older woman.

“There you go. He’ll be going on vacation for a long time, if you’re willing to testify,” Lucas said. “Think about your sister . . . and I’ll come back and talk to you some more. Think about CeeCee.”

HE WAS TEN MINUTES late to the Star Tribune’s loading dock. Brown said, “I thought you’d forgotten. I was about to go back upstairs,” and they climbed the back stairs with the pizza box. She was a moderately overweight blonde wearing a thin blue cottonpaisley dress, almost but not quite a hippie dress, which let the roundness of her figure shine through. He watched her hips as they went up the stairs and began breathing a little harder than the climb warranted.

There was hardly anyone in the building, and they walked down a couple of dark hallways toward the light coming out of a single office; Lucas could hear the police radios as they came up.

The radios were in a small room down the hall, and the blind man who monitored them said, as they went by, “Hello again, Catherine,” and she said, “Yup, it’s me,” and they went on into the library. She closed and locked the door behind her, though if there were any reporters left in the building, the guy in the monitoring room could buzz them through.

They got the pizza inside and they messed around for a couple minutes, squeezing and petting, then she buttoned her bra and they settled behind the counter to eat the pizza. Catherine asked, “What have you been up to?”

“This has gotta come from an anonymous source,” Lucas said, around a pepperoni and mushroom.

“I’ve already gotten you in the paper about six times. . . .”

“No, no. This time, I don’t want to be in the paper,” Lucas said. “In fact, you can’t mention my name. Maybe you could feed it through the radio guy?”

“What is it?”

He told her how he’d been put in plainclothes to look for the girls, how he’d been switched to the Smith investigation, and how the two investigations might become one—how there was at least a possibility that Smith had been killed by the same person who took the girls.

“You figured this out? Wow,” she said. Her eyes were large. “Wait a minute, I just clipped the story. . . .”

She went through a file of stories clipped from the next day’s paper, and said, “Here . . .” She scanned it, and then looked up: “There’s not a single word about a suspect. About this street guy.”

“We’ve been holding it tight. But here’s the thing: instead of giving it all to the reporter, have them ask the question: Did you arrest a bum, a transient, and then let him go? Are you looking for him? Do you have a photo? And ask if the Smith murder was involved.”

“What do you get out of this?”

Lucas grinned at her: “Friendship?”

She blushed and said, “I could use a little friendship. But I’ve got to finish clipping.”

LUCAS WATCHED her clip the rest of the papers, stuffing the day’s stories in little green envelopes, and thought about the stuff he’d given her, and smiled to himself. A few questions about Scrape would crank up the pressure, might bring in some tips about where he was and how he got loose after his arrest, and keep Lucas on the job.

He really didn’t want to go back to the patrol car. Not after the taste he’d had; and he wanted to stay in front of Daniel as long as he could.

As Catherine finished the clipping, Lucas went into the vault, an inner room of the newspaper library, and pulled a tied bundle of papers off a shelf. Some historic issue about Hubert Humphrey, judging from the headlines. Well, fuck a bunch of Hubert Humphrey. He spread the papers out on the floor, an inch or so thick.

When he came back out, she said, “What were you doing?”

“Hubert Humphrey’s suffered a tragedy,” he said. “Only a trained librarian could put it right.”

She came to look in the vault, turned to him and said, “This is a disgrace.”

AN HOUR LATER, on their way out of the building, Catherine leaned in the door of the radio room and said, “Roy . . . listen, I was talking to a guy—”

“The guy with you?”

“No, no. This is just a friend,” she said.

The radio guy said, “Hi, friend.”

Lucas: “Hi.”

Catherine said, “Anyway, this guy says there was a ruckus down in his neighborhood tonight, right around midnight. There were some cops there—”

“Got that. The fight down at the Mill?”

“No. Listen, here’s the thing. My guy says somebody should ask the cops if it’s true that they arrested a transient in the case of the Jones girls, and then let him go, and now are trying to get him back. And they should ask if it’s true that the killing of the black kid the other day, Bobby’s story, if that guy was killed by the same transient who took the girls, at the same time.”

“The cops think a transient killed Smith, and kidnapped the girls?” The blind guy was skeptical.

“That’s what my guy heard. They were searching that alley where Smith got killed, at midnight, and they weren’t looking for evidence about Smith—they were looking for evidence about the girls. And he says they found some. They say Smith might have tried to interfere in the kidnapping. He might be a hero, not some dead dope dealer.”

“Pretty heavy-duty if it’s true,” the blind guy said.

“Thought you might get some cred if you pass it along,” Catherine said.

“I’ll do that. Thanks, Kate.”

They went down the back stairs, and Lucas walked her to her car in the parking lot across from the front of the building. She said, “You never come to my place. I think you’re afraid it might turn into a relationship.”

“That’s completely wrong,” he said. “With my hours . . .”

“You’re not going anywhere now,” she said. “So follow me.”

“Kate . . .”

But she was already rolling.

THE THING ABOUT BIG GIRLS, Lucas thought, the next morning, as he parked his Jeep outside the entrance to the alley, is that sometimes they can take more punishment than you’re prepared to hand out. He half limped around the corner and found Daniel, Sloan, Hanson, and Del staring through the open garage door at the trash can.