John Sandford - Buried Prey

“Yeah, we checked at the time, but he didn’t have one,” Lucas said. “I suppose we could look again. But take a close look at how he paid those bills. If he had a checking account, we could probably find out quite a bit just by who he was paying.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Maybe talk to Marcy again,” Lucas said, “And then I’m going home for a nice vegetarian dinner with my wife and kids.”

“Kill yourself now.”

“No, no, it’s fine, a nice tofu steak with quince sauce, maybe, some corn,” Lucas said. “Organic applesauce for dessert.”

“I’m having some pig,” Del said. “I’ll call you and tell you about it.”

“God bless you,” Lucas said, and Del left.

Had to do something. Right now.

On the phone to Marcy: “I’d like to come over and look at the file on the Joneses, if that’s okay with you,” Lucas said.

“What are you looking for?”

“My notes. I wrote a couple of reports; I want to see if I can get some names.”

“You’re really getting into this,” she said.

“It’s interesting,” Lucas said. “I’m not working on anything hot right now, so I thought I’d hang around this for a while. If it doesn’t bother you.”

“No, not really. As long as you don’t overreach, and keep us up to date. Come on over, the file’s on Buster’s desk.”

Lucas made it over to Minneapolis in twenty minutes, and left his car in a police-only slot outside City Hall. He’d gone in and out of the Minneapolis City Hall probably ten thousand times during his career, and always marveled at how the original architects had managed to contrive a building that was at once ugly, inefficient, cold, sterile, charmless, and purple; and yet they had. Much of it was given over to the police department, and the long hallways of locked doors didn’t make the place any more cheerful.

He walked back to Homicide through the empty corridors, peeked into Marcy’s office. Nobody home. A lone Homicide guy was reading a New York Times at his desk, had looked up to grunt when Lucas came in, and said, “She’s gone to talk budget,” when Lucas looked into Marcy’s office.

“Where’s Buster’s desk?” Lucas asked.

“The one with the big-ass files sitting on it,” the guy said. His name was Roberts or Williams or Richards or Johns or something like that; Lucas knew him, but couldn’t put his finger on the name. “Marcy said I should watch to make sure you didn’t steal too much.”

“Just a few names,” Lucas said. A name popped into his head: Clark Richards. “How you been, Clark?”

“I been fine. You need help?”

Lucas looked at the five bankers’ boxes sitting on Buster’s desk: “If you got the time. I’m actually looking for my own written reports on the Jones kidnapping.”

They started going through the boxes, which were pleasantly musty, and halfway through the first one, Lucas found two brown office-mail envelopes, fastened with strings, that said “911 Tapes” on them. He opened them and found two cassette tapes.

“You have a cassette player around?” he asked.

“Yeah. Rodriguez has one in his bottom drawer.”

Lucas set the two tapes aside and continued looking. Richards found the reports in his second box, a big wad of cheap typing paper fastened with clasps. “Probably in here,” he said, thumbing through it.

Lucas took the paper, sat down, began flipping, and found his own contributions two-thirds of the way to the end. The hookers’ names, he found, were Lucy Landry, Dorcas Ryan, and Mary Ann Ang, and he’d taken down their driver’s license numbers along with their names.

“Just a child, but I was already so good,” he muttered, as he wrote them in a new notebook.

“Got what you needed?” Richards asked.

“Yes, I do,” Lucas said. “I wonder if you could get on your computer and look up some names for me, from the DMV. I want to listen to the nine-one-one tapes…”

He sat in Marcy’s office with the tape recorder and a pair of earphones, made sure he was pushing the right buttons, and listened. Neither tape was longer than thirty seconds:

The first one:

“Nine-one-one. Is this an emergency?”

“Maybe. I think so. I heard about those two girls who are missing, and I don’t want to get involved, but there’s a transient guy who walks around here dribbling a basketball, and the rumor is, he’s got a record for sex crimes.”

“Do you know his name?”

“No, I don’t talk to him, I only see him. You guys need to pick him up.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“Not exactly. I know he used to live in some boxes down the river bluff off West River Road.”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“No, no, I don’t want to get involved. Find the guy with the basketball.”

At that point the conversation ended, and two seconds later a different voice from the first two gave a time and date for the call, and added that it came from a number traced to a phone booth on southeast Fourth Street on the east bank of the Mississippi, a half-mile or so from the place where the girls had been buried.

The second call:

“Nine-one-one. Is this an emergency?”

“Yes. I think so. You’re looking for Terry Scrape, that transient who kidnapped the Jones girls. I know who he is, because he dribbles a basketball all the time, and I saw him walking down an alley behind Tom’s Pizza last night, and he was carrying a box and he threw the box in a dumpster behind Tom’s Pizza. I don’t know if it’s important, but I thought I should call.”

“Thank you. If we could get your name-”

“I don’t want to get involved. Okay? Check the box.”

Two seconds later, a different voice gave a time and date for the call, and said that it had been traced to a phone booth near the University of Minnesota-not the same place as the first, but close: walking distance.

Lucas listened to the two calls, twice each, and made a few notes. He checked his notebooks, and found that the first call had come in about the time he and some other detectives-Sloan? Hanson or Malone? And Daniel? — had been looking across the street at Scrape’s apartment. The 911 call had been irrelevant at that point, not that the caller would know it. The second call had come in that night, while Lucas had been asleep. Sloan had gotten him out of bed to do the dumpster-diving…

Richards came and leaned in the door frame as Lucas was taking off the headphones, and Lucas asked, “What’d you get?”

“They all still live here-around here. One’s out in Stillwater,” Richards said. “I took them right from the ID numbers you have, up to the present. Names, addresses, phone numbers.”

“Terrific,” Lucas said. “Now, I need something else. I need you to listen to these two tapes. Take you two minutes.”

Richards sat down, put the headphones on, listened. When he was done, he frowned and asked, “A little strange-that was the same guy both times, right?”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Lucas said. He looked at his notes. “In both calls, the operator asks if the call is an emergency, and he says, ‘Maybe’ in the first one, and ‘Yes,’ in the second, but then, in both of them, he says exactly, ‘I think so.’ Then at the end of the tape, he refuses to give up his name, with almost the same words: ‘I don’t want to get involved.’”

Richards said, “I was listening more to his voice. He’s got a kind of prissy way of talking, you know what I’m saying?”

“English teacher,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, like that.”

Lucas put the two tapes back in their envelopes, took out his cell phone, and called Marcy. She picked up and said, “I’m in a meeting.”

“I know, but I needed to ask you something. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take the two tapes of the nine-one-one calls and have a voice guy look at them,” he said.