Prey: Night Prey Part 15

Lucas held up a hand, got close to the kid. "This is a farm girl, Dex. Just came up to the city, somebody let the air out of her."

"Ain't got nothin' to do with me," Dex said, looking at the crowd again.

"Come over here," Lucas said, his voice friendly. He took the kid's arm. "Look at the body."

"What?"

"Come on. . . ." He waved the kid over, then said to the patrolman, "Loan me your flashlight, will you, pal?"

Lucas took Dex around the bush, then duckwalked with him toward the woman on the wound side. He went willingly enough; h.e.l.l, he'd seen six thousand bodies on TV, and once had walked by a place where some ambulance guys were taking a body out of a house. This'd be cool.

A foot from the body, Lucas turned the light on the stomach wound.

"f.u.c.k," said Dex. He stood up, straight through the bush, and started thrashing his way out.

Lucas caught his web pocket, hauled him back down, rough. "Come on, man, you can tell people about this. How the cops let you check her out." He put the flashlight on the girl's face. "Look at her eyes, man, they're still open, they look like eggs. You can smell her guts if you get closer, kind of soapy smelling."

Dex's eyes moved toward the corpse's, and he shuddered and stood and tried to run. Lucas let him go: Carrigan was waiting when the kid fought free of the bush.

"Never saw nothin' like that before," Dex said. A line of saliva dribbled from one edge of his mouth, and he wiped it with his hand.

"So who was it?" Carrigan asked.

"White dude. Driving a pickup."

"What kind of pickup?"

"White with dark on it, maybe red, I don't know; I know the white part for sure," Dex said. He kept moving away from the body, around the bushes back toward the curb. Carrigan held one arm and Dex babbled on. "There was a camper on the back. People come up here to throw garbage sometimes. I thought that's what he was doin', throwing garbage."

"How close were you?" Connell asked.

"Down to the corner," Dex said, pointing. A hundred yards.

"What'd he look like, far as you could tell?" Connell pressed. "Big guy? Small guy? Skinny?"

"Pretty big. Big as me. And I think maybe he plays basketball, the way he got in the truck. He like hopped up there, you know. Just real quick, like he's got some speed. Quick."

Connell fumbled in her purse and took out a folded square of paper. She started to unfold it when Lucas realized what it was, reached out and caught her hand, shook his head. "Don't do that," he said. He looked at Dex and asked, "How long ago?"

"Hour? I don't know. 'Bout an hour." That meant nothing. For most witnesses, an hour was more than fifteen minutes and less than three hours.

"What else?"

"Man, I don't think there's anything else. I mean, let me think about it. . . ." He looked past Lucas. "Here comes my mom."

A woman rolled right through the police line, and when a cop reached out toward her, she turned around and snapped something that stopped him short, and she came on.

"What're you doing here?" she demanded.

"Talking to your son," Carrigan said, facing her. "He's a witness to a crime."

"He's never been in no trouble," the woman said.

"He's not in any trouble now," Connell said. "He might've seen a killer-a white man. He's just trying to remember what else he might've seen."

"He's not in no trouble?" She was suspicious.

Connell shook her head. "He's helping out."

"Momma, you oughta see that girl," Dex said, swallowing. He looked back toward the bush. The girl's hip was just visible from where they were standing. He looked back at Carrigan. "The truck had those steps on the sides, you know, what do they call them?"

"Running boards?" Lucas suggested.

Dex nodded. "That's it. Silver running boards."

"Chevy, Ford?"

"Shoot, man, they all look the same to me. Wouldn't have one, myself. . . ."

"What color was the camper?"

The kid had to think about it. "Dark," he said finally.

"What else?"

He scratched behind one ear, looked at his mother, then shook his head. "Just some white dude dumping garbage, is what I thought."

"Were you alone when you saw him?" Lucas asked.

He swallowed again and glanced at his mother. His mother saw it and slapped his back, hard. "You tell."

"I saw a guy named Lawrence was up here," he said.

His mother put her hands on her hips. "You with Lawrence?"

"I wasn't with Lawrence, Momma. I just saw him up here, is all. I wasn't with him."

"You G.o.dd.a.m.n better not be with him or I throw your b.u.t.t outa the house. You know what I told you," his mother said, angry. She looked at Carrigan and said, "Lawrence a pusher."

"Lawrence his first name or his last name?" Carrigan asked.

"Lawrence Wright."

"Lawrence Wright? I know him," Carrigan said. " 'Bout twenty-two or -three, tall skinny guy, used to wear a sailor hat all the time?"

"That's him," the woman said. "Trash. He comes from a long line of trash. Got a trashy mother and all his brothers are trash," she said. She smacked the kid on the back again. "You hanging around with that trash?"

"Where'd he go?" Lucas asked. "Lawrence?"

"He was around here until they found the body," Dex said, looking around as if he might see the missing man. "Then he left."

"Did he see the white guy?" Connell asked.

Dex shrugged. "I wasn't with him. But he was closer than me. He was walking up this way when the white dude went out of the park. I saw the white dude lookin' at him."

Lucas looked at Carrigan. "We need to get to this Lawrence right now."

"Does he smoke?" Carrigan asked Dex.

Dex shrugged, but his mother said, "He smokes. He's all the time walking around with his head up in the sky with that crack s.h.i.t."

"We gotta get him," Lucas said again.

"I don't know where he hangs out, I just knew him from the neighborhood when I was working dope five years ago," Carrigan said uncertainly. "I could call a guy, Alex Drucker, works dope up here."

"Get him," Lucas said.

Carrigan glanced at his watch and chuckled. "Four-thirty. Drucker's been in bed about two hours now. He'll like this."

As Carrigan went back to his car, one of the crime-scene crew came over and said, "No cigarettes from tonight, just old bits and pieces."

"Forget it," Lucas said. "We're told she was dumped an hour ago. Might check the street from here back to . . . Nah, f.u.c.k it. We know who did it."

"We'll check," the crime-scene guy said. "Camels. . . ."

"Unfiltered," Lucas said. He turned to the mother. "We need to send Dex downtown with an officer to make a statement, and maybe get him to describe this guy for an artist. We'll bring him back. Or, if you want, you can ride along."

"Ride along?"

"If you want."

"I better do that," she said. "He's not in trouble?"

"He's not in trouble."

CARRIGAN CAME BACK. "n.o.body at Drucker's place. No answer."

"The guy's known around here-why don't we walk down to the corner and ask?"

Carrigan looked down to the corner, then back to Lucas and Connell. "You two are pretty white to be askin' favors from them."

Lucas shrugged. "I'm not going to sweat them; I'm just gonna ask. Come on."

They walked down toward the corner, and Connell asked, "Why can't I show him the picture? He could give us a confirmation."

"I don't want to contaminate his memory. If we get a sketch out of him, I'd rather have it be what he remembers, not what he saw when you showed him a picture."

"Oh." She thought about it for a minute, then nodded.

As they reached the corner, the crowd went quiet, and Carrigan pushed right up to it. "Some white dude just cut open a little girl and dumped her body in the bushes back there," Carrigan said conversationally, without preamble. "A guy named Lawrence Wright saw him. We don't want to ha.s.sle Lawrence, we just want a statement: if anybody's seen him, or if he's here?"

"That girl, black or white?" a woman asked.

"White," Lucas said.

"Why you need to talk to Lawrence? Maybe he didn't see nothin'."

"He saw something," Carrigan said. "He was right next to this white dude."

"The guy is nuts," Lucas said. "He's like that guy over in Milwaukee, killed all those boys. This has got nothing to do with nothing, he's just killing people."

A ripple of talk ran through the crowd, and then a woman's voice said, "Lawrence went to Porter's." Somebody else said, "Shush," and the woman's voice said, "Shush, your a.s.s, he's killing little girls, somebody is."

"White girls . . . that don't make no difference . . . still white . . . What'd Lawrence do . . . ?"

"We better get going," Carrigan said quietly. "Before somebody runs down to Porter's and tells Lawrence we're coming."

LUCAS AND CONNELL rode with Carrigan. "Porter's is an after-hours place down on Twenty-ninth," Carrigan said. "We oughta get a squad to do some blocking for us."

"Wouldn't hurt," Lucas said. "The place'd still be open?"

"Another fifteen minutes or so. He usually closes about five in the summertime."

They met the squad four minutes later at a Perkins restaurant parking lot. One patrolman was black, the other white, and Lucas talked to them through the car windows, told them who they were looking for. "Just hold anybody coming out . . . You guys know where it is?"

"Yeah. We'll slide right down the alley. As soon as you see us going in, though, you better get in the front."

"Let's do it," Carrigan said.

"How bad might this get?" Connell asked.

Carrigan glanced at her. "Shouldn't be bad at all. Porter's is an okay place; Porter goes along. But you know . . ."

"Yeah. Lucas and I are white."

"Better let me go first. Don't yell at anybody."

THEY HESITATED AT the corner, just long enough for the squad to cut behind them, go halfway down the block, then duck into the mouth of the alley. Carrigan rolled up to the front of a 1920s-style four-square house with a wide porch. The porch was empty, but when they climbed out of the car, Lucas could hear a Charles Brown tune floating out through an open window.

Carrigan led the way up the walk, across the porch. When he went through the door, Lucas and Connell paused a moment, making just a little s.p.a.ce, then followed him through.

The living room of the old house had been turned into a bar; the old parlor had a half-dozen chairs in it, three of them filled. Two men and two women sat around a table in the living room to the left. Everything stopped when Lucas and Connell walked in. The air was layered with tobacco smoke and the smell of whiskey.

"Mr. Porter," Carrigan was saying to a bald man behind the bar.

"What can I do for you gentlemen?" Porter asked, both hands poised on the bar. Porter didn't have a license, but it wasn't usually a problem. One of the men at the table moved his chair back an inch, and Lucas looked at him. He stopped moving.

"One of your patrons saw a suspect in a murder-a white man who killed a white girl and dumped her body up in the park," Carrigan said, his voice formal, polite. "Guy's a maniac, and we need to talk to Lawrence Wright about it. Have you seen Lawrence?"