Buried Prey

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.”