John Sandford - Wicked Prey

Across the street, whoever was in the TV van opened the door and the young girl got in.

Frank and Lois were in the back of the van, eating pizza, and Frank said, "If you leave the bike like that, somebody's gonna run up and steal it."

"You think?" Letty asked.

"I think," he said. "Look at the crowd."

So Letty got back out and unwrapped the cable lock from around the seat tube, cinched it around the parking meter, got back in. Lois, a tall thin woman with spiky, close-cut black hair, said, "Mushroom and pepperoni."

Letty took a slice, realized that she was starving to death, took a bite, and turned to Frank. Frank had short curly hair and a round face and rimless glasses, a short fleshy nose, and thin, delicate pink lips in a rust-colored beard now going gray. Aside from being an excellent cameraman, he was somewhat famous for having gotten a blow job from a low-rent hooker on University Avenue. In his Sebring convertible. With the top down. At noon. He not only got caught, he got videotaped.

But that was water over the dam, at least until Letty, talking around the slice, asked, "If I wanted to find a low-rent hooker right now, on the street, where'd be the best place? Here in St. Paul."

Lois didn't move her face but her eyeballs clicked left, toward Frank, like a couple of marbles in a water glass. Frank carefully peeled a mushroom off his slice, dangled it for a moment over his upturned lips, sucked it in, chewed once, and then asked, "How old are you?"

"Never mind that. Where would I find her?" Letty asked. "I read that the St. Paul cops have cleared off University, but with this convention in town'"

"Why do you want to know?" Frank asked.

"A story," Letty said, and she half-believed it. An idea had been forming in the back of her head.

"You're too young to do a story about hookers," Lois said. "Forget it."

Letty looked at Frank. "Where?"

He whined, "If your dad even heard you asking the question…"

"Listen. I got a tip from a friend," Letty lied. "I'm the only one who could pull it off, and it'd be spectacular. One of my classmates is working the street-somewhere, and I'm sure it's got to be in St. Paul. Her boyfriend put her up to it, so they could get money for cocaine. If I can spot her ' I mean, she's fourteen. All I want to do is find her, and talk to her. I mean, what a great story"

She was right about the story, if she'd been telling the truth. She went to one of the snottiest private schools in the Twin Cities, and if one of her classmates was out doing knobjobs on the Republicans, and fourteen… That would be a story.

Frank said, "If you can get Jennifer…" Jennifer Carey was Letty's mentor at the station.

Letty broke in: "I don't have time. I'll talk to her as soon as I can, but I think my friend, Betsy, I think Betsy is out here right now. I need to know…"

Lois said, "I have nothing to do with this."

Frank sighed and said, "I suppose she'd be up on Wabasha, Fourth Street, Market' working that area between the Radisson and Rice Park ' down St. Peter. That's where most of the convention people are, up there…"

"I owe you one," Letty said. "Thanks for the slice-and I'll talk to Jennifer the first minute I see her."

She locked up her bike a second time, now behind City Hall. The place was crawling with cops, wearing insignia that she'd never seen; cops from Illinois, the Dakotas, Virginia, Wisconsin. Cops from Cedar Rapids. Cops on horses-the horses had face shields-and cops in black armor carrying long wooden riot batons. They paid no attention to her as she walked over to the Radisson, wandered through the lobby, and then continued down Wabasha Street, looking for a wheelchair, for the heavy girl, not finding them. She walked around the block, through the St. Paul Hotel, in the back door, out the front, the doorman giving her the eye. As she went by, he asked, "Aren't you on Channel Three?"

"Yes, I am," she said. "Maybe you can help me. I'm looking for a woman, probably eighteen, a little heavy, dark clothes, kind of ' sad-looking."

The doorman shrugged, and nodded at the sidewalk: "Look at this. There's ten thousand people an hour walking past here."

"Okay; well, thanks," she said. Across the street, in the park, a stage had been set up, red-white-and-blue bunting hung overhead, with the lights; cameras on three sides, and she could see people working in front of cameras: MSNBC. A crowd was watching, and she threaded through it, past the fountain with the bronze girl, and a guy, thirty-something, geeky wearing a McCain button, looked her over and said, "Hi there," and she kept going, around the park and down Fourth Street, against the stream of people walking toward the Xcel Center, where the convention was being held, and back to the Radisson.

And around again, and then off the loop, down St. Peter, to an open-air mall that ran between St. Peter and Wabasha, with people sitting outside, eating lunch, and watching the passersby; and she saw the wheelchair, at a bar called Juicy's.

Whitcomb was in it, talking to a man on a bench, and they were drinking beer. She watched for five minutes, staying back in the crowd, and never saw the girl.

She was out there, somewhere.

Would Letty be more likely to find her by walking the street, or by watching Whitcomb? Since the woman seemed to drive the car, she had to come back-but then she and Whitcomb might go somewhere else, and she had no way to stay with them. She thought it over, one eye on Whitcomb as she scanned the crowd, and decided that the best bet was to work along St. Peter Street, between the park at one end and the mall at the other, with occasional checks a block over on Wabasha.

She began working the loop. How long would it take, anyway, an appointment with a guy? When she was a kid, her mom would come home with men sometimes, and if they didn't stay over, they usually weren't more than a couple of hours ' and sometimes only an hour or so. But her mom wasn't getting paid, so the guys probably felt like they ought to hang around for a while, and talk. Or whatever.

Not with Whitcomb's girl'

She worked the crowded streets for an hour before she saw her, and when she did, she was a hundred yards away and not more than a hundred feet from the corner of the mall, where Whitcomb was drinking. Letty hurried after her, moving fast, but there was no chance: the woman turned the corner. Whitcomb was farther down the mall, and she took the corner carefully, so she didn't blunder into them, if he'd moved-and threading through the crowd, saw him in the same place, saw the woman sit down next to him.

She was there fifteen minutes, Letty watching from fifty or sixty yards away, back in the doorway of a sandwich place. She thought they might be arguing, that the woman might be crying. Then the woman stood, heavily, as though she were old, and she started walking back toward Letty. Letty thought the sadness came off her like a morning fog, a sadness that you could almost touch.

Letty caught her two hundred yards down the sidewalk. She called, "Hey! Girl!"

Briar turned, her eyes uncertain. "Are you ' Me?"

"Yes." Letty gave her a TV smile. "You're Randy's friend. We talked in a McDonald's. I was with a couple of friends."

"Oh ' I didn't recognize you ' here. What are you?"

"I'm with a TV crew. I report on young people. So what's up with you?"

Briar's eyes seemed to recede in her face: she was thinking about Randy, Letty thought, and what he might do about this conversation. She said quickly, "I won't tell Randy."

The woman's tongue flicked out: "Please."

"What's your name?" Letty asked.

"I shouldn't talk to you. Do you want to get Randy? He's right around the corner," Briar said.