John Sandford - Buried Prey

“Everybody knows that,” Scrape said, taking on a slightly superior aspect. “The Toonerville Rifa. Bad dudes, man. I got the heck out of there.”

They figured out that he was talking about a street gang in Los Angeles, and that he had never been around a woman on the Mississippi.

“So you backed down on a gang guy,” Hanson sneered. “You yellow? You a chickenshit?”

“I’m just not a big-boned man,” Scrape pleaded. “He was a big-boned guy. The only reason I’d ever back down, is if they’re bigger-boned than me, then I disengage.”

“They used to hear you yelling and screaming down there, by that box you had,” Hanson said. “Were you yelling at the girls? Is that where you had them?”

“I never had any girls; I never did. When I’m having a bad day, I might do some yelling. They come crowding in on me, and I try to keep it to myself, but sometimes I can’t. I have to yell it somewhere-”

“When who crowds in?” Hanson asked. “When the girls crowd in?”

“I don’t know any girls,” Scrape said, a miserable, yellowtoothed grimace pulling on his face.

The questioning was made more difficult by Scrape’s illness: he spoke his thoughts-“These cops are gonna kill me”-as a kind of oral parenthesis in the middle of answering a question. He claimed to have been in places where he couldn’t have been-Los Angeles, that morning-and to have spoken to people that he hadn’t spoken to-Michael J. Fox and Harrison Ford. When Sloan made the point that the conversations were fantasies, Scrape became further confused.

“But I just talked to Harrison this morning. Or maybe… maybe yesterday. He was going to…” He paused, then said, “He was coming over with some friends. He was going to bring beer.”

“Harrison Ford, the movie star,” Sloan said.

“Yeah, he’s a good friend. He loans me money sometimes.”

He became confused by logical inconsistencies in what he was saying; became confused by the fact that he was in Minneapolis, and not Los Angeles, though at other times he knew for sure that he was in Minneapolis.

They brought out the porn they’d taken from his boxes above the river. He could barely look at them. “Not mine. Not mine. Somebody else’s,” he said, turning his eyes away, in what seemed like embarrassment.

“We found them in your place,” Sloan said. “Your boxes, down by the river.”

“You did not,” Scrape said.

“We did,” Sloan insisted.

“Where am I gonna get that?” he asked. “I’m gonna mail away for it, so they could bring it to my mailbox? I’m gonna spend good money on it when I got no food? Where am I gonna get that shit?”

Then he said something that did make sense: “Hey, if I had those in my box, wouldn’t my fingerprints be on them?”

“Maybe,” Sloan said.

“Sure they would,” Scrape said. “I ain’t got no gloves. You look at them pictures, they won’t have no prints on them. Not my prints. You look.”

“We will,” Sloan said. “We’ll look.”

“That’s the proof, right there,” Scrape said. “No prints.”

Sloan was thoughtful and forgiving and mild-mannered, offered cigarettes and Cokes and coffee. Hanson was rude and demanding and skeptical. Between them, they tore everything Scrape said to shreds, except for three things: he’d never seen the porn, he’d never seen the girls, and he was a friend of Harrison Ford’s.

He didn’t know the girls, had never seen them, had never touched them.

So angry that he was shaking, his face red as a bullfighter’s cape, he kept his hands down and his story straight: “No: I never seen them.”

The ring of keys, he said, he collected: “I find keys, I put them on the ring. I like to listen to them at night. They’re like bells. And who knows when I might need one? Maybe I could sell one, or something.”

They gave it two hours, more or less, then Daniel brought in another cop to sit with Scrape, and he, Sloan, Hanson, and Lucas went into Daniel’s office and shut the door.

“I don’t think he did it,” Sloan said. “But I’d be more sure if he wasn’t nuts. Do you think it’s possible that he could have done it, and then forgot he did it?”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” Hanson said. “He gets stuff confused, but he remembers it all.”

Daniel looked at Lucas, who shrugged. “He looked like he was really confused when Sloan first asked him about them-it looked to me like he had no idea who we were talking about. I don’t think he’s smart enough to fake it. Or sane enough. Then, I’ve got to wonder about the prints on the porn. Are we looking at that?”

“We will,” Daniel said. “So, we got a problem. I mean, we got nothing. We picked him up on a rumor started by a guy we can’t find, and Davenport, here, thinks that guy’s a crook of some kind, with fake addresses and phony credit cards. We can’t even arrest Scrape on the knife, since he was in his own room, and he never had a chance to threaten anyone.”

“They find anything else out at his camp?” Lucas asked.

Daniel shook his head: “I talked to Lester twenty minutes ago. They combed the riverbank for a half-mile, both directions, and didn’t find anything. Not a thing.”

“We gonna cut him loose?”

Daniel said, “If Sloan doesn’t squeeze anything out of him.” He looked at Sloan and said, “I want you to keep him going for another hour. Run through it, all over again, and if nothing comes up, cut him loose. I’m going to get a couple guys to track him. If he took the kids, he’ll fuck up, and pretty quick.”

“What if he just runs?” Hanson asked.

“We don’t let him. He tries to get on a bus or hitch a ride out of town, we bust him again,” Daniel said. “We don’t let him get anywhere.”

“If he gets to LA, he’s pretty much gone,” Sloan said.

Hanson picked up Daniel’s phone and punched in a couple of numbers, listened, identified himself, then asked, “You got any inquiries about busts in the missing girls thing? Uh-huh. No, there’s nothing here. Keep me up, though.”

He hung up and said, “The papers don’t know we picked him up. Not yet, anyway.”

“So we cut him loose, in an hour or so, and tag him,” Daniel said. “Put somebody on the house, front and back. We wanna be inside his sweatshirt.”

Lucas asked, “What about me? You want me to follow him?”

Daniel said, “Nah. Go on home, get some sleep. We’re done. I expect we’ll be seeing you around.”

LUCAS, DISMISSED, left Daniel’s office a little down. He thought he’d done something with Scrape, and instead, they had, as Daniel said, “nothing.” He went out to the Jeep, sat for a moment, thinking about the guy who started the rumor about Scrape. He’d like to find Fell, just to see if he could. To see what was going on there.

The Dexedrine was beginning to fade, but Lucas was still too jacked to sleep. Instead of going home, he drove down to Kenny’s bar and introduced himself to the manager, Kenny Katz, who was sitting in a back office working over an old-fashioned mechanical adding machine. He looked at Lucas’s badge and pointed him at a chair, and Lucas told him the story about John Fell and the panhandler named Scrape.

“John usually comes in about six or seven, stays for an hour or so,” Katz said. “He showed up here three weeks or a month ago, and maybe every other night since. Usually around six or seven. He’s not exactly what I’d call a regular, though… he doesn’t exactly fit in.”

“Why not?”

Katz hesitated, then said, “I don’t know. There’s something off-center about him. He comes in, has a couple of drinks, talks with people. But it’s like it’s not natural to him. The bullshit. It’s like he went to a class. He tells a lot of jokes, and it’s like he’s got a joke book that he reads. It’s not like he’s got pals who tell him the jokes.”