Buried Prey

7

Five hours of sleep wasn’t enough-he would have killed for seven-but the alarm blew him out of bed at five-thirty. Lucas cleaned up, put on khaki slacks, a black golf shirt and a sport coat, regulation black steeltoed uniform shoes, with the Model 40 in a shoulder rig.

When he got downtown, he found Daniel in his office, cleaning off his desk, ready to go home. “What happened?” Lucas asked.

“The chief had his press conference, we’re still looking for Scrape,” Daniel said. “We got fifteen guys on the street, and we’re getting jack shit. Don’t know where he could’ve gone. His face is all over the TV.”

“We get a hard time about turning him loose?” Lucas asked.

“Not yet, but we will, sooner or later,” Daniel said. He kicked back in his chair, put his feet on his desk. “But the chief can tap-dance. He made it sound like brilliant police work, picking him up the first time. Then, we’re civil liberties heroes, letting him go. Now we’re all working together, the people and the police, hand in hand, getting him back.”

“Wish I’d seen it,” Lucas said.

“Taught me one thing: I gotta learn how to tap-dance,” Daniel said. “What’re you doing here?”

“Waiting for Del. We’re going out on the Smith thing again. Different angle this time. Was Smith a hero? Maybe loosen some people up. And we’re gonna see what we can find out about Fell.”

“Good luck. I don’t think there’s anything there, but-good luck.”

Del showed up at six-thirty, yawning, rubbing his unshaved face with the back of his hand. “You look like a cocker spaniel, your tongue is hangin’ out,” he said to Lucas. “Let’s get some coffee, somewhere. Something to eat. Fries. Figure out what we’re doing. Maybe you could do some push-ups, or something.”

“I could attract some women for us,” Lucas offered. “Just as a personal favor to you.”

“Coffee. Fries. You can fantasize on your own time.”

“Jealousy is hard to live with,” Lucas said. “But there are government programs for the handicapped. Maybe I could find one for you…”

They walked over to the Little Wagon, ordered coffee, two twenty-one shrimp baskets with fries, and Lucas sat for a few minutes beside a uniformed cop named Sally, working through her latest romantic trauma, before moving back to Del when the food arrived.

“You are a goddamned hound,” Del said.

“Just trying to help her out,” Lucas said. “Her boyfriend smokes a little dope, but now she thinks he might be moving into retail. She’s wondering if she should bust him, and if she does, if that would adversely affect their relationship.”

“I’d get one last terrific piece of ass before I did it,” Del said, pouring a quarter bottle of ketchup on a mound of fries. “Of course, that’s the male viewpoint. And that assumes that the guy’s terrific in bed. ’Course, most dope dealers are. That’s what I hear.”

“And that’s why you don’t get laid. You see everything from the male point of view,” Lucas said, around a mouthful of shrimp breading, and not much shrimp. “I try to see these things from the woman’s point of view. That’s why I got women crawling all over me. That and my good looks and charisma.”

“One: I get laid all the time, and, two, that sounds pretty fuckin’ cynical for a fifteen-year-old, or however old you are.”

“Not cynical. I’m sincere,” Lucas said. “I really do try to see it from their point of view.”

Del looked skeptical.

“Really,” Lucas said. “I’m serious. I try.”

They sat and talked, getting acquainted. Del had been on the force for nine years, after two years of college, and had worked patrol for only six months.

“I went on in October, got off in April. Coldest winter in twenty years,” he said. “Honest to God, there were nights so cold that the car wouldn’t heat up. I’d walk down the street, and my nuts would be banging together like ball bearings. I was directing traffic around a big fire downtown one night, it was nineteen below zero with a thirty-mile-an-hour wind. The fire guys were spraying the building, and we had icicles blowing back on us.”

Like Lucas, he’d done drug decoy work out of the academy, but unlike Lucas, he’d liked it, and stayed on, started working with intelligence and the sex unit, off and on, before his short stint on patrol. “They had a nasty long-term intelligence thing come up. I took it, and the payoff was, I got to stay on with Intel,” he said.

Lucas told him about his time on patrol, and how he’d like to get off, the sooner the better: “If I’m not off in the next couple of months, I’m gonna apply for law school for next year. I already took the LSATs and I did good.”

“You really want to be a fuckin’ lawyer?” Del asked. “Look in the yellow pages. There are thousands of them. They’re like rats.”

“Yeah, I know. I don’t know what to do. I used to think I could be a defense lawyer, but now, you know, after looking at four years of dirtbags, maybe not,” Lucas said. “So then I’m thinking about being a prosecutor, but then I see the prosecutors we work with, and the political bullshit they put up with, and I’m thinking…”

“Maybe not,” Del finished.

“But there’s gotta be something in there,” Lucas said. “Maybe get a law degree, I could go to the FBI.”

“Ah, you don’t want the FBI. Maybe ATF or the DEA, and you don’t need a law degree for that,” Del said. “The FBI… there’s not much there. They mostly call each other up on the telephone. If you want to hunt, you need to be a big-city cop.”

“I wrote a role-playing game when I was in college,” Lucas said. “I was in this nerd class, introduction to computer science, and these guys were playing Dungeons and Dragons. I got interested and wrote a module for them, and they played it, and they liked it. There’s some money in that… I’m writing another one, on football. I don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff out there that I could do. I think I could be an investigator, but if I’ve got to spend much more time on patrol, I’m not gonna do it.”

“Daniel likes you and he’s got clout,” Del said. “Have a serious talk with him. Something’ll get done.”

Sally, the uniformed cop, stopped on her way out, patted Lucas on the shoulder and said, “Thanks for all that. I gotta think. Maybe we could get a cup of coffee.”

“Anytime,” Lucas said. “But hey: stay loose. And if you need help, call.”

She patted his shoulder again and when she left, Del said, “I can barely stand it.”

Lucas grinned and said, “Sincerity. That’s all it is. So-let me tell you about John Fell, and you can tell me how to find him.”

When Lucas finished explaining his ideas about Fell, Del said: “Interesting. So we’ve got a bunch of people who know him, who’ve seen him. Let’s go talk to them.”

“I talked to them-”

“But from what you tell me, you haven’t conversed with them,” Del said. “You interviewed them, you got a bunch of facts. What we want is all the ratshit they’ve seen and know about. Have they seen him in the neighborhood? What kind of a car does he drive? Does he smoke dope? Snort cocaine? If he does, I might get something on him, with my people out on the town. Oh-and we get Anderson in again, and instead of a credit check, we get his Visa bills. We want to know where he spends his money.”

Lucas said, “That’s good.”

Del said, “No, it’s not-it’s just a bunch of words. We’re just sitting here bullshitting.”

They called Anderson, the computer guy, and asked him to try to get Fell’s Visa bills. Anderson said he’d go back to the office and see what he could do, and leave the results on his desk, in a file marked for Del.

Then they headed over to Kenny’s, and found Katz, the manager: “Haven’t seen him-it’s been a while now.”

“Since the night the kids were kidnapped,” Lucas said.

“That’s right,” Katz agreed.

Lucas said to Del, “See. That’s part of the pattern. We can’t find the tipsters. Or tipster-maybe there’s only one.”

“Who else ever met him?” Del asked Katz. “Any other people here?”

Fifteen or twenty people were sitting around the bar: Katz checked the faces, then said, “Yeah, there are a few people here who knew him. I’d rather not point them out, you know…”

“Be all right if I made an announcement?” Del asked.

Katz shrugged. “Be my guest.”

Del dragged a chair from a side table into the middle of the bar and stood on it: conversation stopped, and he looked around and said, “I’m a Minneapolis police detective, my name’s Capslock, and my partner and I are looking into the disappearance of the two Jones sisters. We need to get in touch with John Fell, who has been a semi-regular here. He provided some very useful information about the key suspect, but now we can’t find Mr. Fell. We’re asking that anybody who knew him, come chat with me and Detective Davenport, in the back booth. No big deal, just a chat. We pretty desperately need the help.

… If you’ve been watching TV, you know what I’m talking about. Anyway-in the back.”

He hopped down off the chair and walked with Lucas to the back of the bar. In a minute, four people had pulled up next to their booth, and a fifth had moved down to the end of the bar, from where he could watch and listen.

“Anything will help: nothing’s too small,” Del repeated.

Two of the people said they’d seen Fell getting into a black commercial van; one thought it was a Chevy, with cargo doors. One of those two said he thought Fell worked in electronics, that he’d said something about that. But a third, a woman, said she thought he might have been a teacher-now an ex-teacher.

“He said something about having tried teaching when he got out of school, but found out he couldn’t stand high school kids. He said they never thought about anything but themselves, that they were a bunch of little assholes, and that teaching them was impossible.”

“So he’s a college grad,” Lucas suggested.

“I think so.”

“You know where he taught?” Lucas asked.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “He never said much about it.”

“He’s got a Minnesota accent,” said one of the men. “He says ‘a-boat,’ like a Canadian.”

“But you don’t think he’s a Canadian?” Lucas asked.

“No, I got the same feeling that Linda did-that he’s from here.”

“He didn’t really talk about himself that much. He mostly told jokes,” the fourth man said.

The fifth man slid down from the bar stool and came over with a beer in his hand. “I think he might’ve got fired from the school.”

“Why’s that?” Lucas asked.

“One time he went on a rant about school administrators. It sounded like stuff you say when you get fired. You know, they didn’t know what they were doing, they were incompetent, they were jealous, all of that. Like when you get fired.”

Del bobbed his head: “Okay. That’s good. Anybody ever see him on the street? Outside the bar?”

“I might’ve,” the woman said. “I think I saw him down by the university, walking down the street.”

“Just walking?” Lucas asked.

“Yes, like he was going to lunch or coming back from lunch. Didn’t have anything in his hands, he was just walking along. But-I’m not completely sure it was him. It just seemed to me that it was. I didn’t think about it.”

“Has he been in with women?”

“Girls from across the street,” one of the men said. “The hookers.”

“They hang out here?”

“They’ll come in for a drink. You know. Kenny doesn’t allow any hustling, or anything. But, they knew him,” the man said.

“I get the feeling that he’s from right around here,” Lucas said. “Sees the girls across the street, hangs out here.”

“Doesn’t hang here much,” a man said. “He only came in, the first time, maybe a month ago.” The others nodded in agreement. “Then he was here pretty often. I haven’t seen him for a few days, though.”

“He was talking about seeing this transient-” Lucas began.

“The Scrape guy,” the woman said.

“Yeah. What’d he say about Scrape? Any of you guys hear about that?”

“He said Scrape had some sort of sex record,” one of the men said. “Is that true? You guys oughta know…”

“He’s been arrested about a hundred times, but we haven’t found anything about sex so far,” Lucas said. “It’s mostly just, you know, loitering, or sleeping outside, pot, that sort of thing.”

“He’s one weird-lookin’ dude,” one of the men said. “And weird-actin’.”

“So’s John Fell,” the woman said.

Del pounced on it: “Why?” he asked her. “Why do you say that?”

“He just makes me… nervous,” she said. “I don’t like to sit around with him. You have the feeling he’s always sneaking looks at you. And then, he goes across the street. And that, you know… that’s kinda freaky.”

There was a little more, but nothing that would nail Fell down. Del said to Lucas, “So let’s go talk to the girls again.”

On the way out the door, a guy with a waxed mustache and muttonchops held up a finger and said, “Hey, you know about Dr. Fell?”

Del: “What?”

The guy said, “It’s a nursery rhyme: ‘I do not like thee, Dr. Fell / The reason why I cannot tell / but this I know, and know full well / I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.’”

Lucas said, “Uh, thanks.”

The guy shrugged. “I thought you should know about it. It was written about a guy named John Fell.”

Dell frowned. “But it was like a… nursery rhyme?”

“Yeah. About a professor. Way back, hundreds of years ago. In England. Dr. Fell.”

Lucas said, “Huh,” and, “How’d you know about it?”

“I’m an English teacher.”

“Okay. You ever talk to John Fell? This John Fell?”

The teacher shook his head. “No, I never did.”

“All right.” He nodded at the guy, and they went out. He asked Del, “What do you think?”

“You say there is no John Fell-that it’s a phony name. A guy who sets up a phony name is a criminal. So he picked a name for himself.. and who’d know about a Dr. Fell?”

“Maybe he likes nursery rhymes… or maybe he was a teacher.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Del said. They jaywalked across the street to the massage parlor, and he added, “Maybe… I don’t know. There wasn’t much in that nursery rhyme, the way the guy said it. So maybe it’s a coincidence.”

“Hate coincidences,” Lucas said.

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

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

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

“I’m still growing,” he said.

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

“You sound like an asshole,” Del said.

“Ask me about cigarettes sometime,” Lucas said.

“Mmm, Marlboros,” Del said.

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

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

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

“Never said what he does, though.”

“Not that I remember,” Ryan said.

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s gone?” Ryan asked.

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

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

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

“What’s Letterman?” Del asked.

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

“When was this?” Lucas asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anderson-”

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

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

“You think they got cops?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Two weeks away,” Del said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Long commute.”

“But pretty fast…”

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

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

“Man…”

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

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

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

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

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

“Does Packard live around here?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Creep you out?” Del asked.

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

Lucas: “Did he tell you jokes?”

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

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

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

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

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

“How about a teacher?” Lucas asked.

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

“What kind of shirts did he want?”

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

“Never heard of them,” Lucas said.

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

“He’s an archer? A bow hunter?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he didn’t do that.