John Sandford - Buried Prey

“Every time,” she said. “Really stupid ones.”

Lucas said to Del, “That’s him.” And to Katie: “A fat man?”

“Yeah, that too… sort of like a young Alfred Hitchcock.”

Del asked, “Do you have any idea where he works?”

“No, really, I don’t. I can tell you that he drives a black van, like a plumber or a contractor… but I don’t think he’s a plumber. Or a contractor. He sorta doesn’t talk like one.”

“How about a teacher?” Lucas asked.

She thought for a moment, then said, “Maybe. Yeah, maybe.”

“What kind of shirts did he want?”

“The first time, he said he was checking prices for a rock band, some stupid name, I forget.” She paused, her eyes floating up, then dropping back to Lucas: “No, wait: it was ‘Baby Blue.’ Or ‘Baby Blues.’”

“Never heard of them,” Lucas said.

“Neither have I, and I still haven’t,” she said. “He came in again, about that, about the band, then the next time he came in, he was asking about buying seconds. We’ve always got some seconds, that we sell cheap. The last time, I don’t know. I think he was just looking me over. He took some seconds. They were for Wyman Archery. Says ‘Wyman Archery’ in a target, with a hunting arrow under the words.”

“He’s an archer? A bow hunter?”

She shook her head, “No, it was kind of a wicked-looking shirt. He just pulled them out of the seconds basket.”

Lucas asked her about the Letter Man shirt he’d been wearing. “We have samples, we sell them at cost-four dollars. I don’t remember selling him one, but maybe I did. He did buy some shirts.”

She hadn’t seen him around town, didn’t know whether he was going east or west when he arrived. “What time did he come in?” Lucas asked. “Same time?”

“Middle of the afternoon,” she said. “Yeah. Every time, around two or three. Between two and three. It’s our slowest time of day.”

Lucas said to Del, “He might be doing factory work, going in to the second shift.”

Del asked Kate, “You get any feeling that he was watching you? You know…”

She was shaking her head: “I never saw him outside the store. He’d come in, he’d go away. I thought he was interested in talking to me, you know, but… he got the idea.”

“You never saw a black van around when you were out walking?”

“Now you’re scaring me,” her father said.

“I don’t remember any, especially, but… there are vans all over the place. I guess you see them all the time. You don’t even look at them.”

There wasn’t anything more-a bit of a description, but nothing significant. The Packards knew of three or four assembly plants in the area, mostly smaller places putting together electronics, the kinds of places that came and went every few months. And she hadn’t seen Fell for at least four or five months, Kate said.

On the way back to the Cities, Lucas said, “I’m coming back up here tomorrow. I’m going to hit every one of those factories. If we get a time card, there’ll be eight ways to track him, even if he’s not working there anymore.”

But he didn’t do that.

They spent the drive back to the Twin Cities speculating about John Fell. Lucas said, “He’s at least as good a suspect as Scrape. Look, think about this: Somebody needs a fall guy. Who’s better than a guy like Scrape, who can’t even defend himself, because he’s crazy? And he looks crazier’n hell, who’d believe him? So this guy tracks both Scrape and the girls, steals stuff that Scrape has used, like that box in the pizza dumpster, and then he calls nine-one-one to feed us the clues.”

“Sounds too much like a movie,” Del said.

“It does,” Lucas admitted.

“I’ve never known one of those movie plots to work out,” Del said.

Lucas looked out the window at the rural darkness, just a scattering of lights off to the west. “Neither have I.”

Del had a list of eight more people he wanted to interview about Smith, with addresses. Though it was late, they found four of them with the lights on, but got no help. After the last one, Lucas followed Del back down the street to the car, and Del asked, “You know what the perfect crime is?”

“You’re gonna tell me, right?”

“It’s when you walk up to a guy you don’t know that well, because you want the crack in his pocket. You look around, there’s nobody watching. You pull your gun and Bam! you kill him. You take the crack and you walk away,” Del said. “Nobody gives two shits about a crack dealer, so there’s not gonna be a big deal investigation. There’re gonna be two guys walking around with notebooks, for maybe a week. There’s a million potential suspects, and no real connection between the killer and the killee, and an hour after the killing, the evidence has already gone up somebody’s pipe.”

“But somebody could see you-”

“Eh-no. Or they turn away. Smith wouldn’t be standing out in the middle of the street, handing it off. That’s why dope dealers get killed. Get killed all the time. Because they’re vulnerable and they’re worth killing. The guys doing it are desperate for a hit, they don’t have a hell of a lot to lose, and they don’t have two brain cells to rub together. So, they don’t worry about it, they don’t talk about it, they don’t plan it. It’s just walk up, look around, pull out the piece, pop him, and go.”

“All right-but when was the last time you picked up a dead black crack dealer in the alley behind a bunch of houses where all the people are white?” Lucas asked.

Del held up an index finger. “That’s another reason I like your whole spontaneous, semi-accidental murder theory. It’s possible that our crack-freak killer doesn’t exist. At least, not this one. So we’re looking for the wrong dude. He doesn’t exist. Maybe your dude does.”

“My dude exists-he snatched the girls,” Lucas said.

“Unless Scratch did it,” Del said.

“Scrape.”

“Yeah, Scrape. The point remains: we are wasting our time, right now,” Del said. “We aren’t gonna hang the Smith murder on a neighborhood guy unless an eyewitness turns up, and even then, we’d probably need to kick a confession out of the guy. Because (a) there’s no link to follow, and (b) nobody gives a shit. There’s no logic to a crack killing. No puzzle you can figure out. Only hunger.”

“You got me convinced,” Lucas said. “But you gotta keep your eye on the other ball, too.”

“What ball?”

“The political ball,” Lucas said. “The ball that requires two white guys to be out roaming around the black community so it looks like somebody cares, when nobody does.”

“I don’t like that ball,” Del said.

After a while, when the lights started going out around the neighborhood, they went home. Lucas thought about the case while waiting for sleep to catch up with him. It was confusing, but in a pleasant way: it was intricate, like a puzzle, like a really magnificent game. You could make a million moves, and prove yourself a complete fool.

He was still sleeping soundly at eight o’clock the next morning when his phone rang. The comm center was calling to say that some woman was trying to get in touch, and she’d said it might be an emergency. Lucas dialed the number she left, not recognizing it, and the blue-haired Karen Frazier picked up.

“All right, Scrape’s name is all over the place and the whole street is all freaked out, and I was talking to a guy named Millard and he told me that he saw Scrape last night sneaking along the riverbank across from the falls. On the east side.”

“Where are you?” Lucas asked.

“Right there, on Main. I was looking around for him.”