Buried Prey Part 19

"Millard," Lucas said.

"Get him, and bring him back here. We're gonna need to squeeze him. Ah, Christ, look at this . . ."

And here came the media: the Channel Three truck. They were quick and close, but the other stations would be right behind them.

Daniel took Lucas by the arm and steered him up the slope. "You get Millard, get him back to my office. Just sit him there. I'll be back as quick as I can. And we're gonna need statements. Lots of statements . . ."

LUCAS FOUND MILLARD sitting outside the Lunch Box. "They never let me sit inside, even when I got money."

"I gotta take you downtown to make a statement," Lucas said. "Let's go."

"You're not gonna put me in jail?"

"No, no-just need a statement. No jail, as long as you keep your s.h.i.t together."

"What happened to Sc.r.a.pe?" he asked, as Lucas pushed him toward the Jeep. There were eight or ten squad cars around the shooting scene, two TV trucks, thirty or forty spectators.

"Got himself shot," Lucas said. "Went after a cop with an iron bar."

"Don't sound like Sc.r.a.pe. He was afraid of everybody," Millard said.

"Well, that's what happened."

"How bad was he shot? Is he gonna be okay?"

"No, I don't think, uh . . . it's gonna work out that well."

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A DOZEN COPS were standing around outside the Homicide office, not knowing what to do, now that a suspect was down. Lucas turned Millard over to another cop, got an empty desk and started typing up a statement. Daniel came back, and he and another cop talked to Millard for ten minutes, then sent him on his way. Lucas gave Daniel his statement, and Daniel read it, came back with a half-dozen questions, and told him to rewrite it.

Lucas was working on the rewrite when he heard one of the cops talking to Daniel about Ronald Rice. He turned and looked at them, and the other detective was flipping through a stack of paper, explaining something, and Lucas said, "Hey."

Daniel looked over and Lucas asked, "What about Ronald Rice?"

"He got stabbed," Daniel said, and he started to turn back to the other cop.

"I know that," Lucas said. "Did he wake up?"

Daniel: "No."

The other guy said, "He croaked."

Lucas: "He died?"

"Lucas, write the statement," Daniel said.

"But I got a guy who told me who stabbed Rice, and who the witnesses were, but I sorta let it go-he wasn't dead," Lucas said. He held his hands out in a "What the h.e.l.l?" gesture: "I was gonna bring it up," he said.

The other cop said, "What?"

Lucas gave them a quick summary, and Daniel shook his head. "Okay. Give it all to d.i.c.k." He turned to the first cop. "d.i.c.k, you go talk to this Delia. I mean . . ." He turned back, and sputtered: "Jesus Christ, Davenport, you were gonna bring it up bring it up?"

BY THE TIME Lucas finished, Daniel had gone off to talk to the chief and the mayor.

Del came in. "I hear you bagged him," he said to Lucas.

"Not me. It was Ted Hughes," Lucas said. "I don't think he meant to, he sort of jerked off a shot."

"I meant, you were the guy who tracked him." Del sat down in a chair across from Lucas's desk.

Lucas said, "You know what? Daniel was telling me about the evidence they got-that box from the pizza place. I kinda don't believe it. I want to find this Fell guy."

"Maybe you can work it some other time," Del suggested.

"I was thinking, tonight . . ."

Del was shaking his head. "Look, Lucas . . . They've got a dead suspect, and they've got all kinds of evidence against him. If there was a little less evidence, or if he was a little less dead, then maybe they'd let you look for Fell. But now that Sc.r.a.pe is dead, they need need him to be the bad guy." him to be the bad guy."

"The girls-"

"The girls are gone," Del said. "Everybody knows it. That was blood on the blouse . . . man, they can't afford to have Sc.r.a.pe be innocent. That'd open a huge can of worms. They'd have shot an innocent guy, and screwed up the investigation. What I'm telling you is, I guess, it's done."

"Doesn't seem right," Lucas said.

"I'm just sayin'. Not sayin' it's right." Del shook his head. "It happens, and I can smell it coming."

"What do you think think?" Lucas asked.

"I'd like to find Fell," Del said. "I'd really like to find him. But there's a lot of evidence against Sc.r.a.pe. So, I don't know. I just don't."

Lucas ran his hands through his hair. "I'll tell you what. I'm gonna find the guy. I don't give a s.h.i.t what anybody says. I'm tracking his a.s.s down."

Del shrugged. "Good. Nice to have a hobby. C'mon. Let's go get a c.o.ke. You gotta tell me about this whole Ronald Rice thing. I just got the story from Roy Patterson. You were gonna bring it up?" Del started laughing. "You broke a murder case in your spare time, and you were gonna bring it up gonna bring it up?"

Lucas got the feeling that he'd done something unusual.

THERE WAS a press conference later that day, Lucas standing in the back of the crowd, in which a mournful chief of police said, "We know we got the killer, and there's every sign that the little girls are gone. Have been killed. We haven't found them yet, and will press on with every available man. We will will find them. . . ." find them. . . ."

BUT THEY NEVER DID.

THAT NIGHT, Daniel took Lucas aside and said, "I talked to the chief. You'll be temporarily a.s.signed to Intelligence, but you'll be working with me. Can't promote you yet, we don't have the slot, but you're the next guy up-you'll have it in six months, max, and you'll be working in plainclothes until then. You're gonna be a G.o.dd.a.m.ned fantastic detective, Lucas. You broke this case, and you took the Rice case and stuffed it. Un-f.u.c.kin'-believable. I've never seen anybody do it better, and you're a rook."

"I never found my guy," Lucas said, with some bitterness riding on his voice. "I never found Fell."

"You need to evaluate," Daniel said. "Fell is a person of interest, all right? But we have that cardboard box with Sc.r.a.pe's fingerprints on it, and we're looking for the witness who saw Sc.r.a.pe throw the box in the dumpster. We're really looking."

"Yeah . . ."

"Listen: in every case you have, for the rest of your career, there'll be loose ends. Things you can't explain," Daniel said. "This isn't the kind of job where everything ties up in a knot. We're walking in a fog, man. Every once in a while, it clears up enough that you can see something, but then it comes right back down. You'll have to learn to live with that. But I'll tell you what, it's more interesting than any other job you could ever find. More complicated. Sherlock Holmes was a f.u.c.kin' piker compared to us, compared to what we do."

Sherlock Holmes, Lucas thought. He was the guy that Randy Whitcomb had been talking about. The cop with the backward hat.

LUCAS TOOK WHAT DANIEL told him, and moved into plainclothes the very next day. In his off-hours, for a while, he looked for Fell. With Anderson working the computer, he found that Fell never again used the Visa card.

Nor did he go back to Kenny's, or the ma.s.sage parlor. Lucas wondered, at the time, why he hadn't. Did he know that Lucas was checking for him? Had somebody tipped him?

Lucas kept checking for nearly a year, but he got hot as an investigator, buried in cases that piled up with the crack craze.

After a year, he let it go.

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NOW.

10.

Lucas shook himself out of his Jones girl reverie-was that the right word?-and called his researcher, and told her to find the girls' parents. He gave her what he had about them, then spent ten minutes reviewing a series of proposed statements from the governor, concerning crime, and generally taking credit for its decline. He initialed them as he read, and dropped them with his secretary.

The researcher came back with names and addresses for the Jones girls' parents, whose names were George and Gloria-he'd forgotten them-and he called Marcy Sherrill at Minneapolis.

He gave her the names and asked, "Are you going to call them, or have somebody else do it?"

"I'll have a chaplain do it," she said. "John Kling. He's got a really nice manner and he was around back when the girls were killed. I already talked to him."

"It's gonna be on TV pretty quick," Lucas said.

"He's standing by-I'll have him call right now. You still pretty b.u.mmed?"

"Ah, you know. Another day in the life."

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HE COULDN'T GET AWAY from the Jones girls all afternoon. He went to a long meeting, filled with lawyers, about the prospect of taking DNA samples from every person arrested in Minnesota, for crimes other than routine traffic offenses. Civil libertarians argued that it was a further intrusion into the privacy of the citizenry; those in favor argued that it was no different from taking a mug shot and fingerprints, which were routinely done on arrest.

Lucas's position was supine: that is, whenever he heard people arguing about it, he wanted to lie down and take a nap.

Still mulling over the discovery of the bodies, he told the story during dinner, which started a long, tangled discussion of forensics. In the evening, a banker named Bone stopped over with his wife, and they ate cookies and talked about portfolios and the stock market, and about fishing.

Lucas's wife, Weather, a surgeon, was working the next morning, and went to bed shortly after the Bones left.

Lucas went for a walk around his neighborhood, chatted with a couple of dog walkers, spent some time at the computer when he got back, and finally went to bed and dreamed about the Jones girls.

Weather was sound asleep when he woke up at four o'clock, the dream popping like a bubble, gone forever. He tried to get it back for a moment, then gave up, opened his eyes, and rolled toward Weather. She'd thrown off the sheet and lay with her legs wrapped around a long, soft pillow, which propped up her distended abdomen. She was pregnant again, six months down the road, and the ultrasounds suggested they'd be getting a sister, rather than a brother, for their three-year-old Sam and fifteen-year-old Letty.

A Gabrielle rather than a Gabriel.

Lucas was as excited by the prospect as Weather: the idea of another daughter. Girls are always good. More girls are even better. Lucas already had one natural daughter, whom he saw only once or twice a month, for a few hours at a time, as she was settled in with her mother and a terrific second family; and he loved her to death.

And there was Letty, whom he and Weather had adopted. Letty was a handful, but Lucas loved her as much as he would any natural daughter; and was confident that she loved him back, despite her tendency to terrorize him.

Lucas turned toward Weather, watched her for a moment, her hip high on the pillow, her small body twisted toward the corner of the bed. She hadn't been sleeping well, but she'd had a similar sleepless stretch in her first pregnancy, from about five and a half months, to about seven. Stress, anxiety, whatever . . . he hadn't been able to help much, and he was pleased to see her sleeping so soundly this morning. He worried about her: neither one of them was a kid, with Weather edging into her forties, Lucas looking at fifty.