John Sandford - Buried Prey

The man flushed: “You can’t threaten me. The law-”

Lucas crowded closer: “The law doesn’t say you can’t wake up the postmaster. Does it? Does the law say that?”

The man was furious, and said, “On your head.”

“On yours,” Lucas said. “You’re now gonna come out looking like an asshole no matter what you do.”

The bureaucrat said, “Wait here,” and disappeared into the post office.

One of the truck loaders said, “He is an asshole. That’s his job.”

“Yeah, well, I got no time for it,” Lucas said.

The bureaucrat came back a minute later, and said, “I got the superintendent of mails on the phone.”

Lucas talked to the superintendent of mails, who said, “I’m waiving the confidentiality reg in this case because of the emergency, but I’m going to need a letter from your chief outlining the problem. I need to file it.”

“You’ll get it,” Lucas said.

“Put Gene back on the line.”

Lucas left the post office ten minutes later with the paper in his hand: John Fell at an address on Sixth Street SE, Minneapolis. Five minutes away, the sun coming up over St. Paul.

In his first year as a cop, working patrol and then, briefly, as a dope guy, he’d felt that he was learning things at a ferocious rate: about the street, life, death, sex, love, hate, fear, stupidity, jealousy, and accident, and all the other things that brought citizens in contact with the cops.

Then the learning rate tailed off. He’d continued to accumulate detail, to see faces, to interpret moves, but at nothing like the rate of his first ten or twelve months.

Now, investigating, the feeling was back: getting credit card numbers off computers-cool. Manipulating hookers. Threatening bureaucrats. He was crude, and he knew it, but it was interesting and he’d get better at it.

He’d learn about disappointment, too, he found out a few minutes later.

The address on Sixth Street was a shabby old three-story Victorian house that smelled of rot and microwave food, with six mailboxes nailed to the gray clapboard on the porch. All but one of the mailboxes had names, none of which was Fell. None of them had a John or a J.

The one unlabeled mailbox was for Apartment Five. He curled up a long zigzag stairway, half blocked at one landing by a bicycle chained to the banister, and pounded on the door to Apartment Five until a woman shouted from Six, “Nobody lives there. Go away.”

He stepped across the hall and rapped on her door: “Police. Could you open the door, please?”

“No. I’m not crazy,” the woman shouted back. “What do you want?”

“I’m looking for a John Fell,” Lucas said.

“There’s nobody here named John Fell. Or anything Fell,” she shouted.

“You mean, in your apartment, or in the house?”

“In the house. There’s nobody named John Fell. Go away or I’ll call nine-one-one.”

“Call nine-one-one. Tell them there’s a cop at your door named Lucas Davenport. I’ll call them on my handset…”

She did that, and opened the door three minutes later, a woman in her early twenties with bad sleep hair. “It is you. You played hockey with a friend of mine. Jared Michael? I’d see you on the ice.”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Lucas said. “I haven’t seen him lately, maybe a couple years…”

“He’s in marketing at General Mills,” she said. “He works twenty-two hours a day. You’re looking for those girls? I didn’t even know you were a cop now.”

“Yeah, I am, and we’re looking for a guy named John Fell,” Lucas said. He described Fell, and she was shaking her head.

“Everybody in this house is a student. Three apartments are Asians, I’m by myself, Five is empty and has been empty all year-it’s got a bad smell they can’t get out. The previous tenants put rat poison inside their walls because they could hear rats running, and I guess all the rats died and now they’re in the walls rotting and there’s no way to get them out.”

“Nice story,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, well.” She took a moment to sweep her hair back from her face. “The last apartment, One, is Bobby and Vicki Arens, and Bobby’s got red hair and he’s about six-six.”

“Who’s been here the longest?”

“Well, me… and the Lees, in Four. We both got here two years ago. The Lees, you know, are Chinese, they’re studying medicine. They’re really nice.”

“Okay. Shoot. I’m sorry I woke you up,” Lucas said.

“Listen, come on in for some Rice Krispies,” she said. “We can think about it. I won’t be able to get back to sleep anyway.”

“Huh,” he said. He looked at his watch. A little after five-thirty, and he could use a bite, and she was a pretty woman. “All right.”

In addition to a bowl of Rice Krispies, he advanced another inch in his education. The woman’s name was Katie Darin, and she suggested that a student house would be the perfect place to set up a fake credit card, or a mail drop.

“Nobody knows who’s coming and going-people move in and out all the time,” she said. “The post office still delivers mail to my box for people who haven’t lived here for years. So, you know, you want a fake ID, you have it delivered here. The post office doesn’t know. Everybody’s in class when the mailman comes. He comes at ten o’clock, and this place is empty.”

“The guy I’m looking for set up his Visa account two years ago,” Lucas said.

“When did he set up the post office box?” she asked.

“Six months ago.”

“So he was picking up his mail here, for a year and a half?”

“I guess,” Lucas said. “He didn’t charge much, but he did from time to time.”

“So the mail gets sent to Apartment Five, or wherever, and the mailman doesn’t care, he just sticks it in the Apartment Five box,” Darin said. “There’s probably mail in it right now. This guy probably knows what day his Visa bill would get here, and he’d just come by and pick it up. No problem.”

“The question is, why would he set up a fake ID?” Lucas asked.

“Because he’s a criminal of some kind,” she answered. “Or maybe, political.”

“Political?”

“Yeah, you know, somebody who’s underground,” she said. “Somebody left over from the seventies.”

Lucas scratched his nose: “I gotta think about it.”

“How long have you been a detective?” she asked.

Lucas looked at his watch: “About eight hours.”

She smiled and said, “So you got thrown in the deep end.”

“I’ll figure it out,” he said. “You don’t remember anybody like Fell? Do you think the Lees might? They overlapped by a year and a half.”

“We could ask them.” She looked at the stove clock. Six o’clock. “They’ll be up.”

The lees looked like twins, same height, same haircuts, same dress; except that one of them had breasts. The one with breasts remembered Fell. “He was not supposed to take mail. He didn’t live here. I ask him once, why do you take mail? He say, the post office still brings it by mistake. But after I ask him, I don’t see him again.”

That was, she guessed, about six months earlier. She added two details:

— Fell was missing the little finger on his left hand. “I see it when he opened the mailbox.”

— He drove a black panel van.

Lucas took a few minutes to establish that the van wasn’t a minivan, but Mrs. Lee was clear. He drove a panel van, with no windows in the sides. Lucas didn’t say so, but it occurred to him that whoever took the girls must have had a vehicle, and a panel van would be perfect. More than perfect-almost necessary. It’d be tough to kidnap a couple of kids with a convertible.

When they left, Darin suggested that if Lucas became obsessed with finding Fell, he’d taken his eye off the ball. “You’re looking for him because he said something about a crazy guy, and other people know the crazy guy. Maybe the other people would be easier to find.”