Buried Prey

8

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

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

“It does,” Lucas admitted.

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

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

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

“You’re gonna tell me, right?”

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

“But somebody could see you-”

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

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

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

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

“Unless Scratch did it,” Del said.

“Scrape.”

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

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

“What ball?”

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

“I don’t like that ball,” Del said.

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

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

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

“Where are you?” Lucas asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She turned away and looked off down the river.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like Madonna.”

She didn’t smile.

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

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

“Hey, Millard,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You were seen,” Lucas said.

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

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

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

“Could I see some ID?”

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

“Maybe I should call a lawyer.”

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

The hippie said, “I’ll be back.”

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

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

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

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

“Put on your shoes,” Lucas said.

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

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

“You ever see him with a basketball?”

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

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

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

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You sure you got it?”

“Yeah, I’ll sit here on the Jeep.”

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

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

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

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

Nothing but dark.

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

“Mission,” he said.

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

“Yeah… Was he in there?”

“Somebody is,” Lucas said.

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

“How deep is it?”

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

“All right. You sit tight.”

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

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

Lucas walked back down the riverbank, looked in the entrance to the drain, shouted, “Scrape? Don’t make me come in there…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somebody said, “Don’t get hurt.”