John Sandford - Buried Prey

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 washing 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 pornographic 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 penis 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.”

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 porn, 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 glass 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 bum, 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 crap 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 fuck up a crime scene,” Malone said.

“Get off his back,” Lester snapped at Malone. “You would have done the same goddamn 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 finishing 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 shit,” Malone said.

“It is shit,” 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 or Penthouse. That’s really rough. That’s a kid.”

“No tits,” 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 fuck kids.”

They all looked at it for a few more seconds, then Daniel asked Lester, “You got some gloves?”