John Sandford - Buried Prey

“You think that black guy getting killed had something to do with the girls?” the wife asked. She no longer looked sleepy, but she looked scared. “We’ve got girls.”

“We don’t know, but there have been some indications that we can’t talk about,” Del said. “You should keep those girls tight.”

Lucas took down their names and the details of the conversation in his notebook, and asked who had the sharpest eyes for the street. They were passed along to another couple, who they shook out of bed for another sleepy interrogation. Those two had also seen the girls, but not in the last few days. And they had definitely seen them in the alley.

“I think they were back there pretty often, walking through,” the wife said. “I’ve seen them more than once, and I don’t go out there that much.”

Lucas took down their details, and when they were back outside, said to Del, “Man, we’re onto something here.”

Del said, “Don’t get excited. We got nothing yet. Nobody saw them the afternoon they disappeared.”

“You think we got something or not?”

“Maybe we got something,” Del conceded. “I’m glad I insisted on calling Daniel. At least I’ll get the credit.”

Lucas said, “You can have it. Who’s next? Maybe we ought to do all the lights, then go back after the darks.”

So they worked their way around the block, and found an elderly single woman who’d also seen the girls. As they were leaving, she said, “You know, I was driving down to park in my garage and I slowed down to look at the place where that colored boy was killed. I think it was there… I think I saw a little zori in the street, like somebody had thrown it away. Like a girl’s zori.”

“A what?” Del asked.

“A zori. A flip-flop. Like plastic shower shoes. It looked like it had been run over a bunch of times, so I thought maybe it fell out of a garbage can. But kids wear them.”

Del looked at Lucas and asked, “Were the kids wearing flip-flops?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard anybody talking about flip-flops,” Lucas said. “Did you guys pick anything up when you were doing the crime scene?”

“No flip-flops…”

Lucas said to the woman, “Thank you, ma’am.” And when they got out in the street, to Del, “We need our flashlights.”

They spent fifteen minutes working through the alley, until a man shouted out of the back of a house, opposite the house where they’d started, “Get out of there. We called the cops.”

Lucas yelled, “We are the cops. We need to talk to you.”

Lights came on in the house next door, and Del pointed at the house and said, “I’ll go talk to these guys.”

The shouting man’s name was Mayer, and he and his roommate agreed that they’d seen the girls walking by the house, but knew nothing about a flip-flop. They had been in Eau Claire the day of the murder and the girls’ disappearance, they said, in answer to Lucas’s question, and hadn’t gotten back until that morning.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, we’re not really interested in girls,” Mayer said.

Del came pounding up the front steps and across the porch, and then he knocked and stuck his head through the door and said to Lucas, “C’mon. The guys next door said they got a flip-flop.”

Lucas thanked Mayer and followed Del out the door, where an older man was waiting with a flashlight. They followed him down the side of his house and through a gate into the backyard, into his garage, and looked in his trash can. Inside was a single, badly beaten-up flip-flop.

“Well, shit,” Del said.

“But this is good,” Lucas said. “Maybe.”

“This means we gotta call Daniel again.”

“Okay, that’s not good.” But then Lucas laughed and slapped Del on the shoulder. “I’m so hot,” he said. “I’m so hot.”

The old man said, “I don’t think you should be laughing about this. Those little girls, that boy being dead and all.”

Daniel said, “Okay, Davenport, listen carefully. You listening?”

“Yeah.”

“Call a patrol car, get some crime-scene tape, and tape it to that garage. Leave the flip-flop in the garbage can, seal the garage, and go home. Okay? Go get some sleep. I will see you at that garage at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. You think you got that? Or do you want me to repeat it?”

“I got it, Chief,” Lucas said.

“Davenport, I’m not the chief.”

“You will be,” Lucas said.

“Okay. And I actually like the ass-kissing, so I won’t order you to stop,” Daniel said. “But you: go home.”

On the way back to Lucas’s car, Del said, “I had a thought.”

“Is it complicated?” Lucas asked. “You want to stop driving while you tell me?”

“Stop wiseassing me for a minute,” Del said. “If the kids were really taken in that alley…”

“Then the kidnapper had to have a car or a truck of some kind, and Scrape the ragman doesn’t, and probably doesn’t even know how to drive. I thought of that.”

They drove for another block, then Del asked, “What else did you think of?”

“That we’ve been running on clues given to us by people we don’t know and can’t find. Everyone else we’ve talked to is happy to chip in whatever thoughts they have-not a single person has been unwilling to help. Even the hookers were out front about what they knew. But everything good that we’ve gotten, it’s all been anonymous, and perfectly timed, and it all points us at Scrape.”

“Does seem too easy,” Del said.

“And I’ve thought of the fact that Smith was killed by somebody who overpowered a muscular, violent young gang member without leaving a trace. Scrape has trouble dribbling a basketball.”

“What does that mean?”

“Probably that Smith was killed by some other violent young gang member who he thought was a friend, and it has nothing to do with the girls,” Lucas said.

“What else?”

“That it would be a big fuckin’ coincidence, a HUGE fuckin’ coincidence that Smith got killed at the same time the girls were being kidnapped, in an alley that the girls used, without the two things being connected. You know what I mean?”

“What else?”

“That the first thing we should do tomorrow is find out if the flip-flop belonged to one of the girls, and where the girls would go down that alley. They had to be going somewhere, maybe out to Lake Street to buy shit. Popsicles, or something. Ding Dongs.”

“Ho Hos.”

“Sno Balls.”

“Moon pies.”

“Eight balls?”

“Not eight balls,” Del said. Eight balls were one-eighth-ounce Saran-Wrapped cocaine favors.

After another moment, Del said, “Half of what you think is internally contradictory.”

“Does that bother you?” Lucas asked.

“No, but it does highlight the fact that half of what you think is, ipso facto, bullshit.”

“Quid pro quo.”

“Nolo contendere.”

“Post hoc Ergo propter hoc.”

“Bullshit,” Del said. “There’s no such thing as that.”

“Sure there is. Logic one-oh-one. After this therefore because of this. Look it up,” Lucas said.

“Fuck that. I’d rather get my balls busted than waste time looking it up.”

Del left Lucas on the street looking at his watch. One-thirty in the morning. He should be ready for bed, but the afternoon nap, and his normal night-shift life, had him awake. He could hit a couple clubs, or find a party at the university; on the other hand…

He went back to the XTC, found the phone, and dialed a number from memory. Catherine Brown answered: “Library.”

He asked, “So you clipping the papers?”

“That’s what I’m doing. And it’s very cold and lonely up here.”