John Sandford - Buried Prey

He was breathing through his mouth, but with a nose full of Vicks, couldn’t smell much of the crap anyway. He said, “Get out of the way,” and bent and started throwing cardboard over the side, watching carefully where he put his fingers, looking for needles. In two minutes, his gloves and lower legs were covered with rotting cheese and tomato sauce, and another rat made a break for it, running up the corner, and again the guys outside yelled at it, and Lucas threw more crap over the side.

He’d been digging for five or six minutes when a patrol car turned into the alley and the light bar flared, and Lester walked around and yelled, “Turn the goddamn light off,” and the light died. A patrol cop shouted back, “We got a call on you guys… What’s going on?”

“Had to check the dumpster,” Lester said.

Lucas peered over the edge of the dumpster at the car, and one of the cops inside said, “Hey, it’s Davenport.”

The other guy started laughing, and then called, “Hey, plainclothes.”

“Fuck you,” Lucas shouted back, and started throwing more crap out.

The car left, and Sloan asked, “How’s it going?”

“Fuck you.”

They all laughed.

Halfway down, Lucas found the box.

It was sitting flat on its bottom, as though it had been carefully placed inside the dumpster, a box that you might use to move books, its top flaps carefully interleaved. “Got something,” he reported.

“Get it out,” Lester said.

“Sort of stuck in here…” He threw more crap over the side, excavating around it. The box had been soaked in sludge on one side-mostly grease, with a little tomato sauce-and had weakened. He cleared a space all the way around it, then slipped a hand beneath it, and lifted it out.

He put the box on the top of the stepladder, boosted himself onto the edge of the dumpster, swung his legs over, and carried the box down. He put it on the ground under the door light, moth shadows flicking crazily across it, and as the other four crowded around, pulled the flaps apart.

Inside were two small pairs of jeans, carefully folded, a small brassiere, and a white blouse.

“Motherfucker,” Lester said.

“They’re dead. I told you they were dead,” Hanson said.

Sloan’s hands were in his hair, holding on, as though he couldn’t stand his thoughts. Lacey had been smoking a cigarette, and turned away, dropped it in the alley and stomped it out, as though he were angry at the butt.

Lucas carried the soggy box around to Hanson’s car and put it in the trunk, and asked, “When are you gonna get Mr. Jones down there?”

“I’ll call him from the office after I talk to Daniel,” Lester said.

“I want to be there,” Lucas said. “But I gotta get cleaned up. Wait for me.”

“You’re not important enough to wait for,” Hanson said. “So you better hurry.”

Lucas headed for his Jeep, and Lacey called after him, “Who’s going to throw this shit back in the dumpster?”

“I investigate, I don’t clean up,” Lucas yelled back, and then he was in his Jeep and rolling.

At his apartment, he stripped naked, put all the clothes except his boots and the newer canvas shirt in a garbage bag and threw it at the door. He put the shirt in another garbage bag, and left it on the kitchen table; he’d take it to a laundromat and wash it for an hour or so. The boots he carried back to the shower, and washed them with soap and hot water, until they looked clean, then left them on the floor to dry out. He scrubbed himself down, washed his hair, dried, dressed, picked up the garbage bag by the door, threw it in the trash on the way out, and headed downtown.

The box was on Daniel’s desk, sitting on top of a pile of newspaper. Daniel was sitting behind his desk, while Sloan and Lester took the two guest chairs. Hanson wasn’t around. An amused look flitted across Daniel’s face when Lucas walked in, and he said, “They tell me you smelled worse than the box.”

“They were right,” Lucas said. “I ruined about fifty bucks’ worth of clothes, if I manage to save the boots. You’ll be getting the bill.”

“Go ahead and put in for the boots,” Daniel said. “A little bonus.”

“Is Jones on the way?” Lucas asked.

“Talked to him five minutes ago,” Sloan said. “He’s coming.”

“But it’s theirs,” Daniel said. “The girls’.” There was no doubt in his voice.

They all sat there, for a moment, in silence, and then Lucas said, “I’d like to know a little more about that nine-one-one tip.”

The tip, Daniel said, had come from somebody who identified himself as a neighbor who didn’t want to get involved. He said he’d gone into the alley to move his car, and saw the guy with a basketball and a box, and saw him stop and loft the box into the dumpster, and then walk around the corner at Tom’s. He said he knew about the basketball from neighborhood rumor-that the cops were looking for the guy with the basketball.

“So everybody in the world knows Scrape,” Lucas said.

“Not the whole world,” Sloan said. “But the neighborhood around Matthews Park is pretty contained-and when you’re talking about a pedophile, the word gets around fast.”

Lester: “The thing about Scrape is, all he does is walk. He walks up and down every street down there, every day. They all know who he is.”

“I still don’t like it,” Lucas said. “We get an anonymous tip that Scrape threw the clothes in the dumpster, and we’re only chasing him in the first place because of a tip from a guy we can’t find, who might be some kind of an asshole operating under a phony name.” He remembered, then, and looked at his watch: eight o’clock. “Shit.”

“What?”

“I had an appointment at seven tonight. Gotta make a call.”

“What you’re gonna find as you get into investigations,” Lester said, “is that all kinds of weird shit happens.”

“I already learned that,” Lucas said. “Weird shit happens on the street, too-but there’s weird shit and then there’s weird shit. When it’s too weird, you gotta think about it some more. I need a phone.”

He went into the outer office, to an empty desk, got Kenny’s number from the operator, and called. He asked for Katz, got him, identified himself. “Has John Fell been in? John Fell?”

“Not tonight. Not so far.”

He’d just hung up when George Jones, followed by a frightened-looking woman who Lucas recognized from the papers as his wife, Gloria, stepped into the office, trailed by Hanson, who’d apparently gone to meet them at the door. Hanson said, “This is Detective Davenport, who recovered the box for us.”

The two nodded vaguely at Lucas, and they all went into Daniel’s office. Daniel, Lester, and Sloan were all on their feet, and Daniel said a few words about how hard it all was, and then opened the top of the box.

Gloria Jones, a slightly too-heavy woman with red-tinted hair, began to tremble and her husband took her arm. Together, they peered into the box, and then Gloria reached into it and picked up the brassiere and said, “The kitty bra,” and fainted.

She would have fallen if Lucas hadn’t caught her, under the arms, and he eased her into a chair, but she was unconscious, and Daniel was shouting about an ambulance, and everybody but Lucas and George Jones went running.

Daniel was back in a few seconds and said, “We’ve got an ambulance on the way; it’ll be here in a minute.”

“I think she fainted,” Lucas said. “She’s coming back.”

“Can’t take a chance,” Daniel snapped. “It could be her heart.”

She came back, but then the medics were there to take care of her, and the cops all moved to the outer office. George Jones said, “The kitty bra-it was Nancy’s first bra. It has a kitty face in the front.”