John Sandford - Buried Prey

“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 asshole left here. Let me see that stuff.”

The porn was more of the same: young-looking girls having sex 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 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 sex, 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 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 shirt, chinos, and blue blazer. He dropped the second pill into a shirt 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 embarrassed. 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.”

The waitress came over and said to Pirner, “I love your hair,” and Lucas leaned into the conversation, said, “Thanks, I cut it myself,” and she rolled her eyes, and Pirner grinned at her and said, “Gimme a Grain Belt. He’s paying for it.”

“I’m not paying for a Grain Belt,” Lucas said. “Give him a Leinie’s.”

They sat and drank beer, talked about Prince and Purple Rain, and Morris Day’s feud with Prince, and about Madonna getting hot.

Pirner said Prince had come into Seventh Street with his entourage, and, “There was a bodyguard about the size of a mountain; he went through the crowd like a ship going through the ocean”; and he said Prince was interesting but “it’s not really our kind of music, you know?” He said he was working on a rerelease of the first Soul Asylum album.

Lucas told him about the investigation of the missing girls.

“No suspects?”

“I’m trying to find a guy,” Lucas said. He told him about the schizophrenic with the basketball.

Pirner leaned across the table and pointed the end of his Leinie’s bottle at Lucas. “There’s this chick… what’s her name? She’s kind of a groupie.”