Buried Prey

Daniel said, “Aw, for Christ’s sakes . . . Del’s there? Let me talk to Del.”

Lucas pushed the phone at Del: “He wants to talk to you.”

Del took the phone and listened for a minute, then said. “Right. Talk to you tomorrow.” He hung up and said to Lucas, “Thanks a lot for that ‘Del insisted’ bullshit.”

“No problem,” Lucas said. “What’d he say?”

“He said to go back and knock on every single door where the house shows lights,” Del said.

“All right,” Lucas said. “Now we’re cooking with gas.”

“I was cooking before,” Del said. “Now, we’re gonna be out here until two in the morning.”

“I say we knock on every door, lights or not,” Lucas said.

“Anybody ever tell you to go fuck yourself?”

“All the time,” Lucas said. “Just about every fuckin’ day.”

6

They started with the house closest to the murder site, Lucas always in front, looking more like a detective than Del, Del sidling around the edges with follow-up questions. At the second house, they woke up a couple who, after listening to Lucas’s explanation, told them two things: they knew the two girls by sight, they believed. “If it was the same two girls, we were talking about it at the dinner table,” the wife said. But they hadn’t seen them for several days. The girls sometimes walked past the house, and, the husband said, he thought he’d seen them cutting through the alley.

“You think that black guy getting killed had something to do with the girls?” the wife asked. She no longer looked sleepy, but she looked scared. “We’ve got girls.”

“We don’t know, but there have been some indications that we can’t talk about,” Del said. “You should keep those girls tight.”

Lucas took down their names and the details of the conversation in his notebook, and asked who had the sharpest eyes for the street. They were passed along to another couple, who they shook out of bed for another sleepy interrogation. Those two had also seen the girls, but not in the last few days. And they had definitely seen them in the alley.

“I think they were back there pretty often, walking through,” the wife said. “I’ve seen them more than once, and I don’t go out there that much.”

Lucas took down their details, and when they were back outside, said to Del, “Man, we’re onto something here.”

Del said, “Don’t get excited. We got nothing yet. Nobody saw them the afternoon they disappeared.”

“You think we got something or not?”

“Maybe we got something,” Del conceded. “I’m glad I insisted on calling Daniel. At least I’ll get the credit.”

Lucas said, “You can have it. Who’s next? Maybe we ought to do all the lights, then go back after the darks.”

SO THEY WORKED their way around the block, and found an elderly single woman who’d also seen the girls. As they were leaving, she said, “You know, I was driving down to park in my garage and I slowed down to look at the place where that colored boy was killed. I think it was there . . . I think I saw a little zori in the street, like somebody had thrown it away. Like a girl’s zori.”

“A what?” Del asked.

“A zori. A flip-flop. Like plastic shower shoes. It looked like it had been run over a bunch of times, so I thought maybe it fell out of a garbage can. But kids wear them.”

Del looked at Lucas and asked, “Were the kids wearing flip-flops?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard anybody talking about flip-flops,” Lucas said. “Did you guys pick anything up when you were doing the crime scene?”

“No flip-flops . . .”

Lucas said to the woman, “Thank you, ma’am.” And when they got out in the street, to Del, “We need our flashlights.”

They spent fifteen minutes working through the alley, until a man shouted out of the back of a house, opposite the house where they’d started, “Get out of there. We called the cops.”

Lucas yelled, “We are the cops. We need to talk to you.”

Lights came on in the house next door, and Del pointed at the house and said, “I’ll go talk to these guys.”

The shouting man’s name was Mayer, and he and his roommate agreed that they’d seen the girls walking by the house, but knew nothing about a flip-flop. They had been in Eau Claire the day of the murder and the girls’ disappearance, they said, in answer to Lucas’s question, and hadn’t gotten back until that morning.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, we’re not really interested in girls,” Mayer said.

Del came pounding up the front steps and across the porch, and then he knocked and stuck his head through the door and said to Lucas, “C’mon. The guys next door said they got a flip-flop.”

Lucas thanked Mayer and followed Del out the door, where an older man was waiting with a flashlight. They followed him down the side of his house and through a gate into the backyard, into his garage, and looked in his trash can. Inside was a single, badly beaten-up flip-flop.

“Well, shit,” Del said.

“But this is good,” Lucas said. “Maybe.”

“This means we gotta call Daniel again.”

“Okay, that’s not good.” But then Lucas laughed and slapped Del on the shoulder. “I’m so hot,” he said. “I’m so hot.”