John Sandford - Buried Prey

The fourth woman came out of the back and said, “Okay, that was mean. You scared the poor guy half to death.”

“He’s gone?” Ryan asked.

“Yeah, I let him out the back.” She was a thin woman, with an overtanned face already going to wrinkles, though she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and an out-of-style Farrah Fawcett hairdo. She looked at Lucas, then at Del: “So what’s up with the cops? You need a little shine?”

“We’re looking for John Fell,” Lucas said.

“I heard that,” she said. “I think he works at Letter Man.”

“What’s Letterman?” Del asked.

“A silkscreen place, up off I-35 by Stacy. I used to go by there, on my way to school. He came in wearing a Letter Man shirt, and I mentioned I used to live up there, and I like the shirt, and he said he could get as many as I wanted. He never did get me any, though.”

“When was this?” Lucas asked.

“A month ago, maybe… No wait, longer than that. Maybe… May. I remember thinking it was still a little cool for T-shirts. But he’s one of those stout guys, who doesn’t feel the cold.”

“Letterman is one word? Or two words?” Del asked.

“Two,” the woman said. “Letter Man. Like a man who has letters. You know, they do advertising T-shirts and hats and shit.”

“He ever get rough with you?” Lucas asked.

“No, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he did,” she said. “He seemed like he might… like to, but was holding back. I think he could be a mean bastard.”

They used the phone in the massage parlor to call Letter Man, but it was apparently closed for the evening, and the woman who knew about the place didn’t know who ran it.

When the conversation ran down, Del looked at Lucas and said, “So let’s go see if Anderson got anything.” He gave the women his business card: “Don’t mess with this guy. If he comes in, call me. I won’t give you away, I’ll catch him later, on the street. But call. We’re thinking, he could be dangerous.”

Outside, Lucas said, “Dangerous,” and, “I gotta get some business cards.”

“I am getting a bad vibe from the guy,” Del said. “I’d just like to see him. Have a few words. I think you might be on to something.”

“We ought to go up to Stacy right now,” Lucas said. “We could be there in a half-hour, forty minutes. If we knock on enough doors, we’ll find the guy who runs the Letter Man place. We’ll be talking to him in an hour.”

“Anderson-”

“Anderson’s stuff will be there when we get back,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”

“Checking Anderson will take five minutes, and we can have the comm center run down the Stacy cops for us-find out who we can talk to.”

“You think they got cops?”

“That’s why you check before you go,” Del said.

Anderson’s file showed seventy-two charges to the Visa account over its lifetime, the last a month before, at the massage parlor. They scanned down the list of charges; a dozen or so were local, at what Del said were three different massage parlors. The others were apparently mail-order places scattered around the country.

“A bunch of them in Van Nuys, California, different places… you know what? I bet it’s pornography,” Del said. “I bet he’s using the card for sex stuff that he doesn’t want attached to his name.”

“Because why? He drives around in a van, he’s not some big shot,” Lucas said.

“I don’t know why, maybe he’s just embarrassed,” Del said. “But if it is porn, it’s another thing to throw in the pot. Porn addiction, goes to hookers… and you said Scrape denied that the porn you found was his.”

Lucas nodded. “Fell doesn’t know we’re checking on him,” Lucas said. “We talk to the post office guys, watch the box when he picks up the next bill.”

“Two weeks away,” Del said.

“But we know he’s up to something crooked.”

“Not good enough. I know two hundred people who are up to something crooked, but I can’t prove it,” Del said.

“All right. But if we know who he is, then we got something to work with,” Lucas said.

“Good point. You always want to know the players. Even if you can’t prove anything against them.” Del looked at his watch. “Let’s talk to the commo guys. Get up to Stacy.”

Stacy didn’t have cops: the city was patrolled by the Chicago County sheriff’s office. The comm center got in touch with the night duty officer at the sheriff’s department, and between them they arranged to have a patrol officer meet Del and Lucas at County Highway 19, just off the I-35 exit.

They took a city car, and left Del’s truck parked: the tranny needed work, he said, and he didn’t trust it for the ninety-mile round-trip. The drive north took forty-five minutes, and just before they got there, the comm center radioed to say that the cop they were supposed to meet had to take a call, and he’d be a few minutes late. They turned off the highway and drove around town, looking for the Letter Man office; Stacy was a small place, a few blocks of houses this way and that, mostly new, ten or fifteen years old.

“People getting out of the Cities,” Del said.

“Long commute.”

“But pretty fast…”

They saw a guy walking a dog, stopped, and he told them that the Letter Man was a small storefront back on County 19. They drove back, found it. Dark, nobody around.

“This isn’t that much like the movies,” Lucas said, as they leaned back against the trunk of the car. “I’m thinking, ‘law school.’”

“Man…”

The sheriff’s deputy showed up five minutes later, introduced himself as Ron Howard, said he had no idea of who ran Letter Man, but knew who would: a local city councilman who knew everybody. They followed him to an older house, with a porch light on, where he knocked; a gray-haired man came to the door, saw Howard, smiled, and said, “Hey, Ron, what’s up?”

“Dave… these guys are with the Minneapolis PD. They need to talk to whoever runs Letter Man.”

“Rob Packard… what’d he do?” Small moths were batting around the porch light, and the older man moved his hand inside the door and turned the light off.

Del said, “Nothing, as far as we know. We’re looking for somebody who he might know, either as a customer or an employee.”

“He’s only got three or four employees, far as I know,” the man said. “His wife and daughter and a couple of girls.”

“Does Packard live around here?”

“Yeah, he lives up north of here. Let me get the phone book.”

They got an address and the deputy led the way north, eight blocks, into a circle of the newer, suburban, ranch-style homes. There were lights in the window, and they got out and knocked on the door.

Rob Packard wasn’t John Fell: Packard was a short, thin man, maybe fifty, wearing jeans and a University of Minnesota sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves, and he didn’t know a John Fell. Neither did his wife, but his daughter, whose name was Kate, said that judging from Fell’s description, she might.

“There was a guy who came around three or four times. He bought some shirts, asked me about getting some made,” she said.

Her father said, “Katie runs the front counter and does the design.”

Kate said, “I think he works around here. He sort of hit on me, but you know-I wasn’t interested.”

“Why not?” Lucas asked. He was checking her as she spoke: in her mid-twenties, he thought, but slender, and white-blond with small breasts: and he thought of the young Jones girls.

“He just was… I don’t know. Not my style,” she said.

“Creep you out?” Del asked.

“Oh, he never did anything. But, yeah, you know…”

Lucas: “Did he tell you jokes?”