John Sandford - Buried Prey

“Bet it’s boring, too,” he said.

“But they depend on me,” she said. “What would happen if the reporters actually had to file their own stories, instead of having me clip them for them?”

“I can’t begin to contemplate the awfulness of it,” Lucas said. “You like mushrooms?”

“Love mushrooms-and pepperoni. I’m starving. But I don’t get off for another hour and a half.”

“I can get four slices and be there in an hour,” Lucas said.

“I’ll be down by the door at exactly three o’clock.”

He had an hour to kill, not much to do: he could pick up the pizza anytime, at Red’s, an all-night pizza place on Hennepin Avenue. He looked at his watch, then pulled the notebook from his pocket. Red house, corner of Cornwall and Eighteenth. He headed back across town, farther south and a bit west of where he and Del had been working. Traffic was light, and he was cruising Cornwall in fifteen minutes: the big red house showed a light. Just one, but that, he thought, was enough for a knock on the door.

He parked at the curb in front of the house, looked up and down the street, then crossed the lawn, climbed the porch steps and knocked on the door; he could hear a radio or a stereo playing inside, and then he heard somebody say something, and he knocked again, louder.

A pretty woman came to the door, pulled back the curtain that covered the glass inserts, looked at him, turned on the yellow bug light, looked at him again, obviously puzzled that a guy who looked like Lucas would be knocking on her door at two in the morning, and she asked, through the glass, “What?”

Lucas held up his badge and said, “I need to talk to Delia White. That you?”

“What do you want to talk to Delia for?”

“She might be able to help me with an investigation,” Lucas said.

“It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

Lucas looked at his watch, frowned, and said, “Jeez, I must have lost track of time.”

A smile flicked across her face and she turned and called back into the house, “Mom!”

Another woman came out, the first one turned away and met her a few steps from the door. Lucas couldn’t see them anymore because of the curtain, but he could hear them talking, and then the second woman pulled the curtain back, looked at him, and snapped, “What do you want?”

“I’m a police officer. I need to talk to Delia.”

“About what?”

Lucas wanted to get inside, but didn’t really know how, so he just said it: “I understand Delia saw L. Ron Parker stab Ronald Rice. I need to talk to her about it.”

The curtain slid back across the glass, and he could hear the women talking, but couldn’t make out the words. Then the curtain slid back again, and the older woman, Mom, gave him a long look, then unlatched the door.

Once inside, sitting on the front room couch, Lucas reapologized for running so late, but told them about the Jones investigation, and said, “So I was talking to a guy and he said that Miz White might be able to help me with this L. Ron Parker thing.”

“If El-Ron thought I was talking to the police, he’d stick me,” the pretty woman said, and Lucas understood that she was Delia.

“That doesn’t happen much,” Lucas assured her. “You gotta make up your own mind-I won’t say it never happens-but we can usually take the guy off in the corner, and whisper into his ear, and he’ll leave you alone. Unless he’s nuts.”

“El-Ron is nuts,” the older woman said. She looked at her daughter. “But I don’t know if he’s crazy enough to go after you.”

“Especially after what he did to your sister,” Lucas offered.

The two women turned back to him, faces gone hard, and Mom asked, “What’d you know about that?”

“I heard about it,” Lucas said. Nobody said anything for a long time, and Lucas took out his notebook and said, “So… to start, what does the L. stand for?”

“What L?” Delia White asked.

“In L. Ron Parker?”

“It’s not L, like the letter,” Delia said. “It’s El. E-L. His name is El-Ron Parker. E-L-dash-R-O-N. That’s his name.”

“Did he kill your sister?” he asked Delia.

She said, “Can’t prove it, but he did it.”

“What was her name?”

“CeeCee.”

“Did he stab Mr. Rice?” Lucas asked.

The story came out slowly. Delia and a man named George Danner had gone out to get some tacos and were eating in a parking lot by the Taco Bell when El-Ron Parker went by in a hurry, and they could tell he was looking for trouble, right there. They stepped around the Taco Bell, and they saw Parker approach Rice between two cars. They started arguing even before they got close, and then Parker went after the other man. They thought he was hitting him, but when Parker came running out from between the cars, they saw the knife in his hand.

“Does he know you saw him?”

“He does. He came over the next day and tried to make friends with me again.”

“What about your friend, this Danner guy?” Lucas asked. “Wouldn’t he testify against him?”

“George went back to St. Paul, and I haven’t seen him since. He’s a pretty peaceful man.”

“But he knows El-Ron.”

“Yeah, he does.”

Lucas said, “Huh. What about Mr. Rice? Has he identified Parker as the one who stabbed him?”

“Stop calling him mister,” the older woman said. “Ronald Rice is just another fool. But, he ain’t woke up yet. He might not wake up, is what the newspaper says.”

Lucas looked at his watch: time to go get pizza. He said, “This whole deal wasn’t my reason for being here. But I’m gonna look into it. We’ll protect you. He probably won’t even remember you by the time he gets out of prison. Has El-Ron got any prior arrests?”

“About a hundred,” said the older woman.

“There you go. He’ll be going on vacation for a long time, if you’re willing to testify,” Lucas said. “Think about your sister… and I’ll come back and talk to you some more. Think about CeeCee.”

He was ten minutes late to the Star Tribune’s loading dock. Brown said, “I thought you’d forgotten. I was about to go back upstairs,” and they climbed the back stairs with the pizza box. She was a moderately overweight blonde wearing a thin blue cottonpaisley dress, almost but not quite a hippie dress, which let the roundness of her figure shine through. He watched her hips as they went up the stairs and began breathing a little harder than the climb warranted.

There was hardly anyone in the building, and they walked down a couple of dark hallways toward the light coming out of a single office; Lucas could hear the police radios as they came up.

The radios were in a small room down the hall, and the blind man who monitored them said, as they went by, “Hello again, Catherine,” and she said, “Yup, it’s me,” and they went on into the library. She closed and locked the door behind her, though if there were any reporters left in the building, the guy in the monitoring room could buzz them through.

They got the pizza inside and they messed around for a couple minutes, squeezing and petting, then she buttoned her bra and they settled behind the counter to eat the pizza. Catherine asked, “What have you been up to?”

“This has gotta come from an anonymous source,” Lucas said, around a pepperoni and mushroom.

“I’ve already gotten you in the paper about six times…”

“No, no. This time, I don’t want to be in the paper,” Lucas said. “In fact, you can’t mention my name. Maybe you could feed it through the radio guy?”

“What is it?”

He told her how he’d been put in plainclothes to look for the girls, how he’d been switched to the Smith investigation, and how the two investigations might become one-how there was at least a possibility that Smith had been killed by the same person who took the girls.