John Sandford - Buried Prey

“Chemical genius out there somewhere,” Sloan said.

“Sales genius,” Lucas said. “Toot for the common people.”

Sloan was a few years older than Lucas, a narrow-slatted man who dressed in earth colors from JCPenney. When he wore something flashy, it was usually a necktie, probably chosen by his wife; and it was usually a glittery, gecko green. He’d been developing a reputation as an interrogator, because of a peculiar, caring, softtalking approach he took to suspects. He was as conservative in lifestyle as in dress, having gotten married at eighteen to his highschool sweetheart. He had two daughters before he was twenty-one, and worried about insurance. As different as they were, Lucas liked him. Sloan had a sense of humor, and a good idea of who he was. He was quiet and cool and smart.

“The word is, you’re moving to plainclothes right away,” Sloan said, as they moved across the dark end of a block, ready to start on another circle of houses. “Compared to patrol, it’s a different world. Patrol is like football; plainclothes is like chess.”

“Or like hockey,” Lucas said.

Sloan looked at him suspiciously. “I’ll have to assume that’s your sense of humor talking,” he said.

“Why’s that?” Lucas asked.

“It’s well known that hockey guys are almost as dumb as baseball players.”

“I didn’t know that,” Lucas said.

“It’s true,” Sloan said. “In the major college sports, football’s at the top of the intelligence ratings, then wrestling, then basketball, then golf, swimming, hockey, baseball, and tennis, in that order.”

“Tennis is at the bottom?”

“Yup. Not only that, the further west you go, the dumber the athletes get,” Sloan said. “By the time you get to the Midwest, tennis players are dumber’n a box of rocks. Across the Rockies? Don’t even ask. The tennis players out there are not so much human, as dirt.”

“Dirt?”

“Dirt.”

“Something else I didn’t know,” Lucas said.

“Well, you were a hockey player.”

They pushed through the gate on a chain-link fence, toward a clapboard house with a narrow front porch with a broken-down couch sitting on it, and a light in one window. Sloan pointed his flashlight into the side yard, at a circle of dirt around an iron stake, and said, “Bad dog.”

“Could be a horseshoes pit,” Lucas said.

Sloan laughed. “So you go first.”

Lucas moved up to the door and knocked, and a dog went crazy behind the door.

“Bad dog,” Sloan said behind him. “Sounds like one of those bull terriers.”

Nobody answered for a minute, then two. Lucas pounded again, and a light came on at the back of the house. Another minute, and a man appeared, opening the door just an inch, looked at them over a heavy chain lock. “Who’re you?”

Sloan explained, and the man started shaking his head halfway through the explanation. “I didn’t see no white girls doin’ nothin’,” he said. The dog was snuffling at the man’s pant leg, its toenails scratching anxiously on the linoleum. “I gotta go to bed. I gotta get up at five o’clock.”

Walking back down the sidewalk, Sloan asked, “You hear what happened to Park Brubaker?” Brubaker was a Korean-American detective, now suspended and looking at time on federal drug charges.

“Yeah. Dumb shit.”

“He had problems,” Sloan said.

“I got problems,” Lucas said. “I don’t go robbing people for their Apple Jacks.”

They came to a door on Thirty-fifth Avenue, answered by a heavyset white man with a Hemingway beard and a sweaty forehead and an oversized nose. A fat nose. He said, “We didn’t see nothin’ at all. Except what was on TV.” A woman standing behind him said, “Tell them about John.”

“Who’s John?” Lucas asked.

“Dude down at Kenny’s,” the man said, with reluctance. “Don’t know his last name.”

“He’s got a suspect,” the woman said.

The man scowled at her, and Lucas pressed: “So what about John?”

“Dude said that there was a crazy guy probably did it,” the man said. “Crazy guy’s been running around the neighborhood.”

“You know the crazy guy?” Sloan asked.

“No. We heard John talking about him.”

“We’ve seen him, walking around, though. The crazy guy,” the woman said.

“Did John say why he thought the crazy guy did it?” Lucas asked.

“He said the guy was always lookin’, and never gettin’ any. Said the guy had a record, you know, for sex stuff.”

“He call the cops?” Sloan asked.

“I dunno. I don’t know the guy. I don’t know the crazy guy, either, except that I see him on the street sometimes.”

“Gotta call it in,” Sloan said.

He had a handset with him, and walked back down the sidewalk while Lucas talked to the man, and especially past him, to the woman. He asked, “What do you know about John? We really need to find him. If he knows anything… I mean, these two girls might not have much time…”

He got a description-John was an overweight man of average height, with an olive complexion and dark hair that curled over his forehead. “Italian-looking,” the woman said.

Lucas said, “You mean good-looking?”

“No. He’s too fat. But he’s dark, and he wears those skimpy T-shirts-the kind Italians wear, with the straps over the shoulders? — under regular shirts that he wears open. He’s got this gold chain.”

The last time they’d seen him, he was wearing jeans and a blue long-sleeved shirt, open over the wife-beater. She added that he liked some of the girls who came in, and she put a little spin on the word “girls.”

“You mean, working girls,” Lucas said. “I didn’t know they hung at Kenny’s.”

“They don’t, but there’s that massage place across the street,” she said. “They come over, sometimes, when they don’t have clients. I don’t like to see them in there, myself. I mean, what if somebody thought I was one of them.”

The guy said, “I wouldn’t mind a massage,” and the woman punched him on the arm, and he said, “Ouch.”

They didn’t have much else. A moment later, Sloan came back up the walk. “Cherry and McGuire are coming over,” he said.

“What for? We got what there is,” Lucas said.

“Because they don’t think we got what there is,” Sloan said. “We’re supposed to wait until they get here, then knock on some more doors.”

“Fuck that,” Lucas said. “We need to get over to Kenny’s.”

“Closed two hours ago,” the man said.

“Might still be somebody there,” Lucas said.

Everybody shrugged, and Sloan said, “They want us to finish knockin’ on the doors.”

Cherry and McGuire showed up, two fortyish veterans, and took over. Lucas and Sloan moved on down the block, and got nowhere, Lucas fuming about being knocked off the only positive hint they’d gotten.

“We did the work, man, they oughta let us take it.”

“Get used to it,” Sloan said. “Takes about four years before you’re a pro. That’s what they’re telling me. I got three to go.”

“Fuck a bunch of four years,” Lucas said. He hadn’t told the older detectives about the massage parlor girls who might know John. Let them find it out themselves.

They worked for two more hours, and Sloan finally quit at the end of his shift and went home to his wife. “I don’t even know what we’re doing,” he said. “We think the kidnapper’ll come to the door and confess?”

“Somebody must have seen something,” Lucas said. “Seen the kids getting in a car. Seen them going through a door. They can’t just go away.”

“Somebody would have called, if they were gonna talk,” Sloan said. “When we found that blouse… we should have looked around at the baddest guy on the block, and squeezed his pimple head until he coughed them up.”