John Sandford - Buried Prey

“Did he?”

“How in the fuck would I know? And who cares?”

Lucas looked at Randy for a minute, then said, “How do you know this?”

“Because I sell a little medicine to Delia and her friends.”

“Crack?” Lucas asked. A crackhead wouldn’t be the best witness.

“Not crack, just a little weed.”

“If you’re punkin’ me…”

“I’m not, I swear to God.”

Lucas looked at him another moment, then said, “You get off the south side. I don’t care where you go. You go up north, you go over to St. Paul. I don’t want to see you on my turf.”

“I’m outa here,” Randy said. He held his cuffed hands out to the side. Lucas looked at him for another long moment, moved him over into the light from a streetlight, and popped the cuffs. Randy rubbed his wrists, moving away, then turned and ran. Lucas moved more under the light, wrote “Delia White” and “L. Ron Parker” in his notebook, circled them, and drew a line to “Ronald Rice.”

A block down the street, Randy turned again and began screaming: “You cocksucker… you cocksucker…”

Lucas saw Del’s truck coming down the street, and stepped out and flagged it down. When he looked back after Randy, Randy was gone.

Lucas got in the truck and Del asked, “What the hell was that all about?”

“Little asshole I’ve been trying to get rid of,” Lucas said.

“You get rid of him?”

“Probably not,” Lucas said. “You get anything?”

“I got a rash. I think my underwear’s too tight.”

At eleven o’clock, they were ready to quit, and headed back toward the river to drop Lucas; they were talking about cars.

Del confessed that his heart beat a little harder every time he saw a Camaro IROC-Z. “Zero to sixty in seven seconds, thirteen grand to put it in my driveway.”

“We called them dork-mobiles, over at the U,” Lucas said.

“What?”

“Yeah. Dork-mobiles. You get one, you’d have to grow a mullet.”

“Now you ruined it for me,” Del said.

“I’m thinking Porsche,” Lucas said. “They’d, like, Eat a fuckin’ IROC-Z.”

“Along with your paycheck for the next ten years,” Del said. He pointed off to his right and said, “Smith was killed about three blocks over there.”

Lucas frowned. “Over there?”

“Yeah, right over there.”

“Let’s go see it,” Lucas said.

“It’s dark, man,” Del said. “There’s nothing to see. There wasn’t much to see in the first place.”

“I wanna see it,” Lucas said. “It’ll take you what, two minutes?”

Del shrugged and took the next right, and they went back around the block, took a left, went four more blocks down and took another right, and another right into a narrow alley, and rolled a few car lengths into it. Del did a little jog so his headlights played across the side of a garage and an adjoining hedge. “That’s it. He was stabbed right by the garage door, we think, and thrown into the hedge beside the garage.”

“And the garbage guys found him at six this morning, and the ME said he’d been dead for quite a while, but they weren’t sure how long because it was so hot.”

“Yeah.”

“And he was stabbed by a long knife with a heavy blade,” Lucas said.

“Where’re we going with this?”

“We’re about a five-minute walk from the Jones girls’ house. We got a tip that the killer was this guy-”

“The bum with the basketball. Crank, or whatever his name is.”

“Scrape. We took a long knife off him. Butcher knife.”

Del looked at him in the thin ambient light and said, “Ah… fuck me.”

They considered that statement for a while, then Del added, “This asshole, Smith, was killed by some other asshole for six dollars’ worth of crack cocaine.”

Lucas said, “Probably. But, you gotta consider the possibilities. A guy gets stabbed with a long butcher knife, and a crazy dude, who is a suspect in a kidnapping-murder in the same place at Exactly the same time, is picked up with a long butcher knife. Probably a coincidence, but you gotta look at it. Am I right?”

Del said, “You’re gonna cause a lot of trouble in this goddamn department. We gotta talk to somebody.”

Lucas took out his notebook. “I got Daniel’s home phone number. If we can find a phone, I’ll give him a ring.”

“You’re a braver man than I am,” Del said. “But if you’ll talk to him, I know the location of every single fuckin’ pay phone in Minneapolis, and there’s one on the back wall of the Ugly Stick. We can be there in two minutes.”

“Got a quarter?” Lucas asked.

Daniel took the phone from his wife and said, “Davenport… goddamnit. It’s almost midnight. Why’d I give you this number? I really need the sleep.”

Lucas and Del were in the back room of the Ugly Stick, a pool parlor on Lake Street, thick with smoke and wiseasses. Del leaned against the wall and dug around his teeth with a toothpick, and listened as Lucas made the call. Lucas asked, “What’d we do with that knife we took off Scrape?”

“It’s in an evidence locker. Did you hook up with Del or what?”

“Del’s right here-he’s the one who insisted we call,” Lucas said. Behind him, Del clapped a hand to his forehead. “Listen: Scrape’s in jail, right?”

There was a moment of dead silence, then Daniel said, “No. He took off. Snuck out. We don’t know how-probably out a side window-but we can’t put our hands on him. We checked his cave, he’s not there. We’re looking for him… but I don’t want to talk about this in the middle of the night. What the hell are you doing?”

Lucas was dumbfounded. “He got away? Weren’t we watching him? What was that thing about being inside his sweatshirt?”

“Davenport…”

“Smith got killed at the same time the girls disappeared, and he was stabbed to death with a butcher knife with a long heavy blade,” Lucas said. “That was four blocks from the Jones house. You can’t see it unless you’re down here, how close they are. The girls could have been walking out to the stores on Lake, there’s all kinds of stuff down there that kids might go for. And they would have gone right by this alley. Or through it. We need to look for Smith’s blood on the knife.”

Daniel said, “Aw, for Christ’s sakes… Del’s there? Let me talk to Del.”

Lucas pushed the phone at Del: “He wants to talk to you.”

Del took the phone and listened for a minute, then said. “Right. Talk to you tomorrow.” He hung up and said to Lucas, “Thanks a lot for that ‘Del insisted’ bullshit.”

“No problem,” Lucas said. “What’d he say?”

“He said to go back and knock on every single door where the house shows lights,” Del said.

“All right,” Lucas said. “Now we’re cooking with gas.”

“I was cooking before,” Del said. “Now, we’re gonna be out here until two in the morning.”

“I say we knock on every door, lights or not,” Lucas said.

“Anybody ever tell you to go fuck yourself?”

“All the time,” Lucas said. “Just about every fuckin’ day.”

They started with the house closest to the murder site, Lucas always in front, looking more like a detective than Del, Del sidling around the edges with follow-up questions. At the second house, they woke up a couple who, after listening to Lucas’s explanation, told them two things: they knew the two girls by sight, they believed. “If it was the same two girls, we were talking about it at the dinner table,” the wife said. But they hadn’t seen them for several days. The girls sometimes walked past the house, and, the husband said, he thought he’d seen them cutting through the alley.