Buried Prey (4 page)

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.