Buried Prey

The old man said, “I don’t think you should be laughing about this. Those little girls, that boy being dead and all.”

DANIEL SAID, “Okay, Davenport, listen carefully. You listening?”

“Yeah.”

“Call a patrol car, get some crime-scene tape, and tape it to that garage. Leave the flip-flop in the garbage can, seal the garage, and go home. Okay? Go get some sleep. I will see you at that garage at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. You think you got that? Or do you want me to repeat it?”

“I got it, Chief,” Lucas said.

“Davenport, I’m not the chief.”

“You will be,” Lucas said.

“Okay. And I actually like the ass-kissing, so I won’t order you to stop,” Daniel said. “But you: go home.”

ON THE WAY BACK to Lucas’s car, Del said, “I had a thought.”

“Is it complicated?” Lucas asked. “You want to stop driving while you tell me?”

“Stop wiseassing me for a minute,” Del said. “If the kids were really taken in that alley . . .”

“Then the kidnapper had to have a car or a truck of some kind, and Scrape the ragman doesn’t, and probably doesn’t even know how to drive. I thought of that.”

They drove for another block, then Del asked, “What else did you think of?”

“That we’ve been running on clues given to us by people we don’t know and can’t find. Everyone else we’ve talked to is happy to chip in whatever thoughts they have—not a single person has been unwilling to help. Even the hookers were out front about what they knew. But everything good that we’ve gotten, it’s all been anonymous, and perfectly timed, and it all points us at Scrape.”

“Does seem too easy,” Del said.

“And I’ve thought of the fact that Smith was killed by somebody who overpowered a muscular, violent young gang member without leaving a trace. Scrape has trouble dribbling a basketball.”

“What does that mean?”

“Probably that Smith was killed by some other violent young gang member who he thought was a friend, and it has nothing to do with the girls,” Lucas said.

“What else?”

“That it would be a big fuckin’ coincidence, a HUGE fuckin’ coincidence that Smith got killed at the same time the girls were being kidnapped, in an alley that the girls used, without the two things being connected. You know what I mean?”

“What else?”

“That the first thing we should do tomorrow is find out if the flip-flop belonged to one of the girls, and where the girls would go down that alley. They had to be going somewhere, maybe out to Lake Street to buy shit. Popsicles, or something. Ding Dongs.”

“Ho Hos.”

“Sno Balls.”

“Moon pies.”

“Eight balls?”

“Not eight balls,” Del said. Eight balls were one-eighth-ounce Saran-Wrapped cocaine favors.

After another moment, Del said, “Half of what you think is internally contradictory.”

“Does that bother you?” Lucas asked.

“No, but it does highlight the fact that half of what you think is, ipso facto, bullshit.”

“Quid pro quo.”

“Nolo contendere.”

“Post hoc Ergo propter hoc.”

“Bullshit,” Del said. “There’s no such thing as that.”

“Sure there is. Logic one-oh-one. After this therefore because of this. Look it up,” Lucas said.

“Fuck that. I’d rather get my balls busted than waste time looking it up.”

DEL LEFT LUCAS on the street looking at his watch. One-thirty in the morning. He should be ready for bed, but the afternoon nap, and his normal night-shift life, had him awake. He could hit a couple clubs, or find a party at the university; on the other hand . . .

He went back to the XTC, found the phone, and dialed a number from memory. Catherine Brown answered: “Library.”

He asked, “So you clipping the papers?”

“That’s what I’m doing. And it’s very cold and lonely up here.”

“Bet it’s boring, too,” he said.

“But they depend on me,” she said. “What would happen if the reporters actually had to file their own stories, instead of having me clip them for them?”

“I can’t begin to contemplate the awfulness of it,” Lucas said. “You like mushrooms?”

“Love mushrooms—and pepperoni. I’m starving. But I don’t get off for another hour and a half.”

“I can get four slices and be there in an hour,” Lucas said.

“I’ll be down by the door at exactly three o’clock.”

He had an hour to kill, not much to do: he could pick up the pizza anytime, at Red’s, an all-night pizza place on Hennepin Avenue. He looked at his watch, then pulled the notebook from his pocket. Red house, corner of Cornwall and Eighteenth. He headed back across town, farther south and a bit west of where he and Del had been working. Traffic was light, and he was cruising Cornwall in fifteen minutes: the big red house showed a light. Just one, but that, he thought, was enough for a knock on the door.

He parked at the curb in front of the house, looked up and down the street, then crossed the lawn, climbed the porch steps and knocked on the door; he could hear a radio or a stereo playing inside, and then he heard somebody say something, and he knocked again, louder.