John Sandford - Buried Prey

“Why?”

“Because I think the two tips came from the same guy, which, if you listened to what he’s saying on the tapes, is unlikely, unless he’s the killer. So, if it’s okay with you… I’ll leave a receipt with Clark.”

“Why don’t you just sit tight for five minutes?” She crunched on something, a carrot or a stalk of celery. “We’re about done here, and I’ll be back there.”

“Really five minutes? Not twenty minutes?”

“Really five minutes.”

She was back in ten minutes, crunching on carrot slices from a Ziploc bag. They went in her office, and she listened to the 911 recordings, and said, “Same guy. Okay, take them.” She popped the second tape out of the recorder and pushed them across her desk.

“Thank you,” Lucas said.

“You’re really into this, huh?”

“Yeah. I wish you were, a little bit more.”

“I’m interested. I’ve got Hote working on it full-time, and if we see anything at all, I can pull another guy,” she said. “But I’ve got that Magnussen thing going, and we’re tracking Jim Harrison… you know.”

“So you’re busy,” Lucas said. “So don’t give me any shit about looking at the Jones girls. I’ll keep you up to date, and if I can, and if we identify someone, I’ll get you there for the kill… if I can.”

“Try hard,” she said, a little skeptically.

He grinned and spread his arms and said, “I always do.”

She laughed and asked about Weather, and about Letty, and the conversation rambled back to the good old days. They’d once gone off to the Minnesota countryside where Lucas had gotten in a fistfight with a local sheriff’s deputy. “If I hadn’t talked our way out of that, you’d probably still be on a road gang somewhere,” Marcy said.

“You talked our way out of it? What are you talking about, I negotiated,” Lucas said.

“Negotiated, my ass,” Sherrill said.

“I did negotiate your ass, if I remember correctly,” Lucas said. “I was so weak when I got back from that trip I could barely crawl…”

And they were laughing again, talking about taking down the LaChaise gang, and Sherrill said, “It was all pretty good, wasn’t it? I gotta tell you, by the way-just between you and me-the Democrats want me to run for the state senate. Rose Marie’s old seat, it’s coming up empty.”

“You gonna do it?” Lucas asked.

“Thinking about it,” she said. “I feel like where I am now-I mean, I kicked this job’s ass-I feel like I’m on a launchpad. I’m good on TV, I’ve got a rep. I could go someplace with politics.”

“You’d have to hang around with politicians,” Lucas pointed out.

“You say things like that, but you hang around with politicians yourself,” Sherrill said.

“So go for it,” Lucas said. “You want me to whisper in the governor’s ear? He’s always had an eye for hot-chick politicians.”

“Well, if you find your mouth pressed to his ear, someday, instead of that other area, and can’t think of what to say… you could mention my name.”

Before he left, she patted the envelope with the tapes and asked how long it would take to confirm that the caller was the same man on both.

“Maybe tomorrow, or the day after,” Lucas said.

“So call me tomorrow and tell me what you got,” she said.

“Yes, dear,” Lucas said.

On the way home, he thought, Good old days. Not always so good: Marcy had been shot twice over the years, both times seriously. She was lucky she was still alive… but so was Lucas, for that matter.

With that thought, he went home and had a vegetarian dinner and talked to his kids and spent some time in the bathroom with Sam, who was having a little trouble with toilet training-“He knows what to do, he’s just being stubborn,” Weather said. “He needs some encouragement from his father.”

Then he sat alone in the den and thought more about the Jones case. They had a number of entries into the case, and any one of them might produce Fell. The most promising, he thought, was the probability that one of the massage-parlor women would identify Fell as Kelly Barker’s attacker, through the Identi-Kit picture.

If that didn’t work, he’d give the picture to the media; that might well produce an ID, especially if Fell had stayed in the area.

And, he thought, if Barker talked Channel Three into putting her in front of a camera, and if Fell saw it, and believed that she was the only witness against him, and if he were genuinely mad… might he not be tempted to get permanently rid of the only witness who could identify him?

Something more to think about.

A trap?

But probably not: too much like TV.

The Jones girls’ killer sat in his living room staring blankly at the TV, a rerun of a Seinfeld show, which he’d seen twenty times, the one about the Soup Nazi. He was dead tired, sat drinking a Budweiser, eating corn chips with cream cheese, trying to blink away the weariness as he waited for the old man to show up.

The killer was a large man, dressed in oversized jeans and a gray T-shirt; rolls of fat folded over his belt, and trembled like Jell-O down his triceps. He had thick black hair, heavy eyebrows, dark eyes, a small, angular nose, and a petulant, turned-down mouth. A mouth that said that nothing had worked for him: nothing. Ever.

His living room was small and cluttered. Off to one side, in a den not much larger than a closet, a half-dozen rack-mounted servers pushed the temperature in the room up into the eighties. He could take eighty-three or eighty-four, but any higher than that, he couldn’t sleep. He was right at that level, he thought, and sure enough, the air conditioner kicked on.

And started eating his money.

Not that he could sleep anyway.

He’d never slept more than five or six hours a night, except when he was popping Xanax, and that might get him seven hours for a week or so. He suspected he needed eight or nine hours, long term, to stay alive. He wasn’t getting it. He’d get up tired, be tired all day, go to bed tired, and then lie there, staring at the dark.

He suffered from anxiety, and felt that he had a right to. He had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, was grossly overweight, and had a set of vicious, burning hemorrhoids that might someday put him on an operating table.

And now the Jones girls had come back to haunt him.

Then there was the old man.

The killer, back in the day, had been an almost-college-graduate; and then, after college, he’d worked at a half-dozen jobs in electronics. Computers, everybody had said, were the machines of the future, and people with a computer education were assured of success.

The reality, the killer found out, was that a half-dozen courses in electronics would get you the same status and income as a TV repairman-not even that, after people began to accept the idea that computers were disposable. Then, they simply threw them away, rather than fix them when they broke.

He trudged around the edge of the computer business for ten years, and finally, and almost inevitably, given his deepest interests, he wound up selling porn. He ran a half-dozen porn sites out of his den, collecting barely enough to pay for food, taxes, and the mortgage. Porn supposedly was a mainstay of the Internet, an easy way to get rich. Maybe it was, but if so, where was his money? Back at the beginning, when the Net was just starting up, he’d worked hard at it, gathering hundreds of thousands of porno shots from around the world, plus thousands of short videos.

Now, he let the servers do the work. He had a computer kid over at the U who kept the site going-turning over the daily offerings so they didn’t recur too quickly, and stealing videos and photos from other sites when he could-in return for free access to the porn for himself and his friends, and a hundred dollars a week. The Jones killer did the books, processing the credit card numbers as they trickled in, a few every day, but, it seemed, fewer every day.