Buried Prey Part 6

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 h.e.l.l. 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 p.o.r.nographic 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 p.e.n.i.s 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."

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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 p.o.r.n, 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 gla.s.s 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 b.u.m, 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 c.r.a.p 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 f.u.c.k up a crime scene," Malone said.

"Get off his back," Lester snapped at Malone. "You would have done the same G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+t," Malone said.

"It is is s.h.i.+t," Lucas said. "His toilet's right down the slope." s.h.i.+t," 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 Playboy or or Penthouse Penthouse. That's really rough. That's a kid."

"No t.i.ts," 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 f.u.c.k 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 a.s.shole left here. Let me see that stuff."

The p.o.r.n was more of the same: young-looking girls having s.e.x 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 think about it," Daniel said. " 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 s.e.x, 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 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. 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 s.h.i.+rt, chinos, and blue blazer. He dropped the second pill into a s.h.i.+rt 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 embarra.s.sed. 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."