John Sandford - Buried Prey

A short dark-haired woman came out of the back, behind the counter, looked at Lucas and said, “I’m all done.”

“He’s a cop,” the blonde said. “He’s looking for this guy John.. you know, John, the joker.”

Sally shook her head: “Why would I know where he is?”

The blonde said, “You’d know better than me. They’re looking for him about those two girls.”

Sally’s right hand went to her throat: “He took them?”

“He’s been talking about who might have,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to him.”

“I really don’t know him,” Sally said. “He’s come in a few times, I got him, you know, gave him a massage. He’s kinda funny, tells jokes and shit.”

“He ever say where he lives? Ask you to come over? Give you any hint…?”

She shook her head: “No, but I’ll tell you what. He charged the massage last time. I bet we got the slip.”

Lucas ticked a finger at her: “Thank you. Who do I see about the slip?”

“Me,” the blonde said. “But since we don’t know his last name, I don’t know how we figure out…”

Sally pressed her palms to her eyes and said, “Let me think,” and a minute later said, “Fourth of July. He was joking about fireworks, you know, when… never mind. Anyway, the night of the fourth. Don had a baseball game on the radio, so it couldn’t have been too late.”

The blonde went around the counter, took out a metal box, and began running through charge slips. Lucas said to Sally, “You said he’s okay. That means, what? He didn’t want anything peculiar?”

“Hey, it was a therapeutic massage.”

“I’m sure it was,” Lucas said. “Look, I don’t care what he wants, or what you do. I’m trying to figure out these girls and whether he might be weird. Can you tell me that? Is he weird?”

Sally shrugged: “He wants the Three-start with a hand job, end with a blow job. Is that weird? I dunno. A hundred and twenty bucks, plus tip. I don’t remember the tip, but it wasn’t…” She dug for a word, and came up with one: “Memorable.”

“So he’s got some money.”

“He’s got some, anyway,” the woman said. “But I ain’t going to Vegas on a tip I can’t remember.”

The blonde said, “I got a one-forty at eight forty-five Friday.. that’s it, probably. Says his name is John…”

“That’s gotta be him,” Sally said.

Lucas took the slip and walked it to the table lamp. The ink imprint was shaky-the name was John Fell, Lucas thought, but the number was clear. Lucas took down the information, then asked, “You got a Xerox machine?”

“No…”

“I’m gonna take this,” he said, waggling the paper slip. “You need the information to make the charge?”

“We already made it,” the blonde said. “We send it in while you’re still in the room.”

“Okay.” Lucas flipped a page in his notebook: “I need both your names. I want to see driver’s licenses. I need to know how often he comes in.”

The blonde began, “You said…”

Lucas shook his head: “I’m not arresting anybody. If he turns out to be somebody, I need to know who I talked to.”

The blonde’s name was Lucy Landry, and Sally’s name was Dorcas Ryan. John Fell had come in at least once in the past ten days, had been cheerful, funny, even, had been satisfied with the service and paid cash. Ryan had seen him at Kenny’s afterward, and he’d bought her a drink.

“He bought you a drink, but he didn’t chat? Didn’t tell you about himself?”

Ryan frowned: “You know what? Almost all he does is tell jokes. Like, ‘You heard the one about the priest who caught the sonofabitch?’ That’s what he does. He’s got a million of them.”

Lucas used their telephone to call Daniel at home, who answered and, when Lucas identified himself, said, “This better be good.”

“The guy’s name is John Fell and I’ve got a credit card slip on him. How do I get an address off the credit card?”

There was a moment of silence, then Daniel said, “What I usually do is call Harmon Anderson, and he does something on the computer.”

“So we gotta wait until he comes in?”

“No, no, I’ll bust him out of bed,” Daniel said. “Where’re you?”

“Down at the massage place,” Lucas said.

“Go on downtown. I’ll have Anderson meet you there.”

He hung up, and Ryan was telling Landry, “… so the Pope takes off his hat, puts his feet up on the table, and says, ‘You know what? You fuckers are all right.’”

Landry only half smiled: “It’s not that funny.”

“I didn’t say it was great,” Ryan said. She looked at Lucas. “I told her John’s sonofabitch joke.”

Lucas shrugged: “I missed it. Can you break a dollar? I need a gumball.”

Bottom line, Lucas thought, on his way downtown: he didn’t know how to get an address for a credit card. He needed to fix that. He chewed through the gumball in two minutes, threw the wad of gum out the window and drove faster.

He got there before Anderson, and had to wait. Anderson showed up twenty-five minutes later, sleepy and annoyed, sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. Lucas was looking over his shoulder and asked, “What’re you doing here?”

“A credit check,” Anderson said. “All the credit information is in computers. I can get in and look at some of the information for credit card holders. Including addresses and so on.”

“Neat,” Lucas said. “I’m thinking of getting a Macintosh.”

“Wait awhile-there’re rumors that they’re going to 512K this fall. The 128K just isn’t enough.”

“Can’t afford it for a while, anyway,” Lucas said.

“You patrol guys know all the crack freaks,” Anderson said. “You oughta be able to get one wholesale.”

“Pretty fuckin’ funny,” Lucas said.

“No offense,” Anderson said.

He sounded insincere, Lucas thought. He shut up and watched Anderson work. Five minutes after he started, Anderson had a name and address: “It’s a post office box.”

“That’s not good.” He wasn’t a detective yet, but he knew that much.

“The post office will have a name and address for the renter,” Anderson said. “But the thing is, credit card companies don’t usually take post office boxes. Did the hookers get paid?”

“They said so,” Lucas said.

“Huh. Well, something’s not right.”

The post office worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The front end was closed, but Lucas found his way in through the loading dock in the back and showed his ID to a couple of guys throwing canvas mail bags off a truck. One of them went inside and came back with a bureaucrat.

“I can’t tell you that,” he said. He was a fat little man, fish-pale with what must have been a permanent night shift. “It’s privileged information.”

“We got two girls missing-”

“I’m sorry, but it’s against the law for me to give you that information,” the bureaucrat said. “Come back with a search warrant and give it to the postmaster.”

“This guy could be killing them,” Lucas said.

“The law says-”

“Then give me the number for the postmaster,” Lucas said.

“I can’t do that. It’s the middle of the night.”

At some level, Lucas realized, the man was enjoying himself, sticking it to the cops. It was possible and even likely that there was a law or regulation about releasing the names of post office box renters; but, he thought, there sure as hell wasn’t a law about calling up the postmaster, even in the middle of the night.

Lucas got his face close to the bureaucrat’s. “I’ll tell you what. One way or another, I’m gonna get the name off the box. And if these girls are killed, I’m gonna take this conversation to the newspapers and I’m gonna hang it around your neck like a dead skunk. When they find these girls’ bodies, you’ll have reporters standing in your front yard yelling at you.”