Buried Prey p-21 Page 5

  Now, investigating, the feeling was back: getting credit card numbers off computers-cool. Manipulating hookers. Threatening bureaucrats. He was crude, and he knew it, but it was interesting and he’d get better at it.

  He’d learn about disappointment, too, he found out a few minutes later.

  The address on Sixth Street was a shabby old three-story Victorian house that smelled of rot and microwave food, with six mailboxes nailed to the gray clapboard on the porch. All but one of the mailboxes had names, none of which was Fell. None of them had a John or a J.

  The one unlabeled mailbox was for Apartment Five. He curled up a long zigzag stairway, half blocked at one landing by a bicycle chained to the banister, and pounded on the door to Apartment Five until a woman shouted from Six, “Nobody lives there. Go away.”

  He stepped across the hall and rapped on her door: “Police. Could you open the door, please?”

  “No. I’m not crazy,” the woman shouted back. “What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for a John Fell,” Lucas said.

  “There’s nobody here named John Fell. Or anything Fell,” she shouted.

  “You mean, in your apartment, or in the house?”

  “In the house. There’s nobody named John Fell. Go away or I’ll call nine-one-one.”

  “Call nine-one-one. Tell them there’s a cop at your door named Lucas Davenport. I’ll call them on my handset…”

  She did that, and opened the door three minutes later, a woman in her early twenties with bad sleep hair. “It is you. You played hockey with a friend of mine. Jared Michael? I’d see you on the ice.”

  “Oh, hell, yes,” Lucas said. “I haven’t seen him lately, maybe a couple years…”

  “He’s in marketing at General Mills,” she said. “He works twenty-two hours a day. You’re looking for those girls? I didn’t even know you were a cop now.”

  “Yeah, I am, and we’re looking for a guy named John Fell,” Lucas said. He described Fell, and she was shaking her head.

  “Everybody in this house is a student. Three apartments are Asians, I’m by myself, Five is empty and has been empty all year-it’s got a bad smell they can’t get out. The previous tenants put rat poison inside their walls because they could hear rats running, and I guess all the rats died and now they’re in the walls rotting and there’s no way to get them out.”

  “Nice story,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, well.” She took a moment to sweep her hair back from her face. “The last apartment, One, is Bobby and Vicki Arens, and Bobby’s got red hair and he’s about six-six.”

  “Who’s been here the longest?”

  “Well, me… and the Lees, in Four. We both got here two years ago. The Lees, you know, are Chinese, they’re studying medicine. They’re really nice.”

  “Okay. Shoot. I’m sorry I woke you up,” Lucas said.

  “Listen, come on in for some Rice Krispies,” she said. “We can think about it. I won’t be able to get back to sleep anyway.”

  “Huh,” he said. He looked at his watch. A little after five-thirty, and he could use a bite, and she was a pretty woman. “All right.”

  In addition to a bowl of Rice Krispies, he advanced another inch in his education. The woman’s name was Katie Darin, and she suggested that a student house would be the perfect place to set up a fake credit card, or a mail drop.

  “Nobody knows who’s coming and going-people move in and out all the time,” she said. “The post office still delivers mail to my box for people who haven’t lived here for years. So, you know, you want a fake ID, you have it delivered here. The post office doesn’t know. Everybody’s in class when the mailman comes. He comes at ten o’clock, and this place is empty.”

  “The guy I’m looking for set up his Visa account two years ago,” Lucas said.

  “When did he set up the post office box?” she asked.

  “Six months ago.”

  “So he was picking up his mail here, for a year and a half?”

  “I guess,” Lucas said. “He didn’t charge much, but he did from time to time.”

  “So the mail gets sent to Apartment Five, or wherever, and the mailman doesn’t care, he just sticks it in the Apartment Five box,” Darin said. “There’s probably mail in it right now. This guy probably knows what day his Visa bill would get here, and he’d just come by and pick it up. No problem.”

  “The question is, why would he set up a fake ID?” Lucas asked.

  “Because he’s a criminal of some kind,” she answered. “Or maybe, political.”

  “Political?”

  “Yeah, you know, somebody who’s underground,” she said. “Somebody left over from the seventies.”

  Lucas scratched his nose: “I gotta think about it.”

  “How long have you been a detective?” she asked.

  Lucas looked at his watch: “About eight hours.”

  She smiled and said, “So you got thrown in the deep end.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” he said. “You don’t remember anybody like Fell? Do you think the Lees might? They overlapped by a year and a half.”

  “We could ask them.” She looked at the stove clock. Six o’clock. “They’ll be up.”

  The lees looked like twins, same height, same haircuts, same dress; except that one of them had breasts. The one with breasts remembered Fell. “He was not supposed to take mail. He didn’t live here. I ask him once, why do you take mail? He say, the post office still brings it by mistake. But after I ask him, I don’t see him again.”

  That was, she guessed, about six months earlier. She added two details:

  — Fell was missing the little finger on his left hand. “I see it when he opened the mailbox.”

  — He drove a black panel van.

  Lucas took a few minutes to establish that the van wasn’t a minivan, but Mrs. Lee was clear. He drove a panel van, with no windows in the sides. Lucas didn’t say so, but it occurred to him that whoever took the girls must have had a vehicle, and a panel van would be perfect. More than perfect-almost necessary. It’d be tough to kidnap a couple of kids with a convertible.

  When they left, Darin suggested that if Lucas became obsessed with finding Fell, he’d taken his eye off the ball. “You’re looking for him because he said something about a crazy guy, and other people know the crazy guy. Maybe the other people would be easier to find.”

  “Good thought,” Lucas said. She was not only pretty, she was smart. He looked at his watch again. Ten after six. He was due back in uniform in eight hours. “I gotta roll. Thanks for everything… maybe you oughta give me your phone number, in case I need more advice.”

  She smiled, then said, “All right.”

  He went back to City Hall, to the licensing department, prepared to wait until somebody showed up. But when he got there and looked through the glass panel on the door, he saw a light coming out of an office. He banged on the door for a moment, until a man in a flannel shirt came out of the office and shook his head and waved him off. Lucas held up his badge, and the guy came over. Through the glass, he asked, “What?”

  “I need a name.”

  The guy wasn’t the right guy, but he knew how to work the computer, and he pulled up the owners of Kenny’s, the bar where Fell had been hanging out, as a Steve and Margery Gardner from Eagan. A half-hour later, Lucas pulled into their driveway and pounded on the door until an irritated Steve Gardner came out from the back of the house in a bathrobe.

  “What the hell?” he asked.

  Lucas held up his badge: “We’re looking for the two lost girls. You’ve got a customer named Fell, who was talking about a crazy guy…”

  They talked in the house’s entry, and Margery came out after a minute. Neither one had any idea who Fell was. “You gotta talk to the manager, Kenny Katz,” Steve Gardner said. “We own six bars, we’re in Kenny’s about three times a week for an hour a time. Talk to Kenny.”

  They had seen the crazy man. “He’s been around all summer. He’
s tall, thin, he’s been dribbling a basketball around. I’ve seen him down by the river a couple times, and he used to stand by the ramp onto I-94 with a sign asking for money. Said he was a homeless vet, but he doesn’t look like a vet. I don’t know how you’d find him-just drive around, I guess.”

  Lucas went back to his Jeep. Just drive around, I guess. Patrol cops-guys like him-could do that, of course, and probably would be doing that, if he couldn’t come up with anything better.

  He looked back at the Gardner house and filed away another fact: just because you figured out a possible source of information, and then figured out how to find them, and then rousted them out of bed.. didn’t mean they’d know a single fuckin’ thing. He’d used up an hour learning that.

  A thought popped in: the post office. There’s probably a guy who systematically walks around the neighborhood every day…

  He headed back downtown, around to the back of the post office again. The old bureaucrat had gone at seven o’clock. The new bureaucrat decided that he wouldn’t be breaking any regulation by letting Lucas talk to the mail carriers, who were sorting mail into the address racks. The new bureaucrat took him down to one wing of the post office and introduced him to four mail carriers who carried the near south side.

  Two of them had seen the crazy man.

  One of them knew where he lived.

  4

  A dilemma: Lucas could call the information to the overnight guy in Homicide, or continue to push it on his own. If he’d already been a detective, he would have called it in, and gotten some help. As a patrolman, temporarily in plainclothes-not even temporarily, as much as momentarily-he’d probably have the whole thing taken away from him, and given to people with more experience in investigation.

  That had already happened once, and he didn’t want it to happen again. He mulled it over only as long as it took him to get back to his Jeep. There was no way that Daniel would be back in his office yet, and since Daniel was his sole contact on the case, Lucas felt justified in running along on his own, until Daniel pulled him off.

  Or until he turned back into a pumpkin, at three o’clock, and had to put his uniform back on.

  He’d been up for twenty hours, but still felt fairly clean. He climbed in the Jeep and headed over to the Mississippi, well downstream from the spot where, the day before, he’d been sent to look for the kids.

  The crazy guy with the basketball, the mailman said, lived in a couple of plastic-covered Amana refrigerator boxes that he’d jammed in a washed-out space under an oak tree. The thick gnarled tree roots held, covered, and concealed the boxes, and the plastic sheets kept the water off when it rained.

  The site should be easy enough to find, the carrier said, because it was right across a chain-link fence a few hundred yards north of Lake Street. “There’s a big yellow house, the only one up there, and there’s a hole under the fence about forty or fifty yards south of it, where you can scrape under. He’s the only guy I’ve seen down there. The only bum.”

  The sun was getting hot, promising another warm day. Lucas drove down West River Parkway, into a neighborhood of older, affluent homes, carefully kept, spotted with flower gardens and tall overhanging trees. He parked his Jeep in a no-parking zone just south of the yellow house, put a cop card on the dashboard. When he got out, a man on the sidewalk, who was retrieving a Star Tribune, called, “You can’t park there.”

  “I’m a cop,” Lucas said, walking down toward him. He nodded toward the bluff. “There used to be a homeless man, living under a tree around here. The other side of the fence.”

  “He’s gone,” the man said. “We had the park cops out here, and they ran him off. Three or four weeks ago.”

  Damn it. “Where was he?” Lucas asked. “I need to take a look.”

  “You can take a look, but he’s gone,” the man said. He was a little too heavy, with a successful lawyer’s carefully tanned face. He came down the sidewalk, his sandals flapping on the concrete; he was wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts, his black hair slicked back. He reminded Lucas a little of Jack Nicholson. “This way.”

  Lucas followed him up the street, and the man asked, “What’s this all about?”

  “We want to talk to him about some missing kids,” Lucas said.

  “The girls? He’s the one?”

  “Don’t know that,” Lucas said. “You ever see the guy around any kids?”

  “No, I never did. But I never saw him much,” the man said. “I’m usually outa here by eight o’clock or so, and I don’t get home until six. My wife says he’d come out in the middle of the morning, go under the fence, but we never saw him come back. We figured he came back after dark.”

  The man pointed across the street to an aged, heavily branched oak: “He lived under that tree. There’s a place just down the road where you can slide under the fence. Might tear your clothes up.”

  Lucas wrote the man’s name and his phone number in his notebook: Art Prose. “I’d need to talk to your wife-I need to get a good description of the guy,” Lucas said. “Will she be around?”

  “Oh, sure. I’ll tell her you’re coming. Name’s Alice. And I’ll be here for another half-hour or so.”

  Lucas walked down the street to the tree. Looking through the chain-link fence, he could see what looked like toilet paper down the slope behind it, and plastic wrappers from food cartons, and a white plastic fork. He could see corners of the cardboard boxes, but not much.

  A little farther down, he found the slide-under place, where water coming off the sidewalk had been flowing over the bluff toward the river. He’d get dirty going under, he thought, but what the hell. He took off his jacket, hung it on a tree branch that poked through the fence, and slid as carefully as he could under the wire.

  A narrow dirt trail, no more than a foot wide, led from the slide-under place to the tree. The bluff going down to the river was steep, and he had to hang on to the brush to keep his balance.

  The tree was huge, and canted slightly toward the river; the riverside roots were out in the air, and two empty boxes were wedged beneath them to make a cardboard cave. They were covered by a sheet of translucent plastic, like the kind painters used, but heavier. One edge of the plastic had been curled into a pipe that would collect water from the top of the boxes and empty a bit down the slope.

  One of the boxes was pushed in horizontally, and was long enough to sleep in. The other was shorter, and upright, but high enough to sit in. The area around the boxes was littered with plastic and paper trash, the remains of magazines and newspapers. A green plastic Bic lighter was tangled in a bush down the slope, apparently discarded. Near the bottom of the slope, he could see tufts of rotting toilet paper around a clump of brush that was probably the man’s toilet.

  The water washing under the tree would collect in a shallow gully, and clean up the toilet from time to time, Lucas thought.

  So: the boxes.

  Not much to see, but he’d have to call it in-maybe there’d be fingerprints or something. He got down on his knees for a better look into the boxes, and noticed a slit in the back of the bed box, and a fold. Like a cupboard, he thought. He wondered briefly if he might get some disease by crawling into the box, then got down, and crawled in.

  He could smell the man, even after a month. He tried breathing through his mouth, but it didn’t help much. Well into the box, on his hands and knees, he reached back and pulled open the flap. It had been a cupboard, or something, he thought, a hole carved into the dirt, but it was empty now.

  He crawled a bit deeper in and yanked the cardboard flap farther open… and saw the edge of several sheets of paper that had slipped down between the box and the dirt wall behind it. He pulled one of the sheets out, and for a moment, with the sheet upside down, didn’t quite understand what he’d found.

  He turned it around and said, “Jesus Christ.”

  He was holding a pornographic photograph, torn from a badly printed magazine. The woman-girl-in the photo was either very young,
or looked very young. She was sitting astride a man, her head thrown back, the man’s penis visibly penetrating her.

  Lucas put the paper on the floor of the box and carefully backed out.

  He dusted off his hands, noticed that they were shaking a little: adrenaline.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said again. And: he’d found something. He’d investigated, and he’d come up with something important, on his own. The rush was like kicking Wisconsin in hockey.

  He hurried back to the hole in the fence, slipped under, got his jacket off the bush, and half ran back to the Proses’ house. He knocked and Prose came to the door, now wearing a bathrobe, and Lucas said, “I need to use your phone. And talk to your wife. Like right now.”

  He called Daniel at home. Daniel came up and said, “Davenport? It can’t wait for breakfast?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “I found where that street guy was staying. He had a stash of porn, with some really young women in it. Like, girls. Young girls.”

  “Where are you?” Daniel asked.

  Lucas gave him the address, and Daniel said, “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. You sit on that site, don’t let anybody get close to it. You got that? You sit on it.”

  “I’ll sit on it,” Lucas said.

  He actually sat on the Proses’ front porch, talking to Alice Prose, a tall sandy-haired woman who looked like she should have been an English school mistress, and he drank a glass of the Proses’ orange juice. Alice gave him a thorough description of the street guy: tall, not old but with a burned, weather-wrinkled face, brown and gray hair down to the back of his neck, a full beard. He wore a baseball hat, with a logo above the bill, but she’d never been close enough to see what the logo was. He carried a nylon backpack, stuffed with clothes or bedding. There was the occasional odor of cooking food around the tree, and sometimes a fecal odor, “which is one reason that people thought it was best if he’d find someplace else to stay. Someplace with a bathroom,” she said.