Broken Prey

does a beat-up car cost?”
    “You might get something for a grand, but he didn’t have it.”
    “Relatives?”
    “His mother’s still alive, but she’s poor as a church mouse herself,” Fox said.
    “He just walked off the job.”
    “Yeah. That’s the story. I went down to see his boss—he worked with a garbage hauler—and he said Pope finished up one day, said, ‘See ya,’ and never came back.”
    “They owe him money?” Lucas asked.
    “Three days,” Fox said, nodding.
    “Huh.” They took their time poking around the trailer. Some clothes must be missing, they agreed, because there was almost nothing left. They did find an open three-pack of black Jockey shorts under the pull-out bed, with one pair left inside, along with a dozen DVDs. Lucas flipped through them: “Strokemaster Finals, Fantasic Facials, Best of Anal Adventures 24 . . .”
    “There’s a violation for you,” Fox said.
    “Strokemaster could be golf instruction,” Sloan said.
     
    LUCAS TAPPED A CHEAP color TV and an even cheaper DVD player that sat on a cardboard box across from the bed. “He didn’t take his movies, his new shorts, or his TV. Maybe he was thinking of going out for a run, but coming back.”
    “Maybe he fucked something up and figured he couldn’t come back,” Sloan said.
    “What’d he fuck up?” Lucas asked. “He was absolutely clean on the Larson killing, if he did it.”
    “Maybe something we don’t know,” Sloan said. He looked at Fox: “Was he smart? Good-looking? Controlled-crazy?”
    Fox snorted. “Charlie? Charlie was a pervert. He looked like a pervert. If you saw him walking down the street, you’d say, ‘There goes a pervert.’ Didn’t you get that file from St. John’s? There’re pictures . . .”
    “We just got it; haven’t had time to think about it,” Lucas said. “How about smart? Is he smart?”
    “He got arrested a block from the Target Center trying to anally rape a screaming woman, two feet from the sidewalk that ten thousand basketball fans were about to walk down. He just grabbed her and started whaling away. Charlie is a dumb motherfucker. He just blew off the best job he ever had.”
    “As a garbageman,” Lucas said.
    “An apprentice garbageman.”
    Lucas and Sloan looked at each other for a moment, then Sloan wagged his head and said, “That ain’t the picture Elle was painting.”
     
    THEY EXPLAINED ELLE to Fox and the image she’d constructed of the killer. “That’s not Charlie. If she’s right, we’re looking for the wrong guy,” Fox said.
    “Maybe something snapped when he was in St. John’s,” Sloan suggested.
    “I didn’t know him before he was in St. John’s,” Fox said. “I know him now. He’s stupid and ugly now.”
     
    MOST OF THE TIME , thoroughly shaking down a house or an apartment would take hours. With Charlie Pope’s trailer, they were done in half an hour—not only was there not much to look at, there was hardly any paper. They could find no checkbook, no credit cards, no computer, not even a notepad. The state paper he had, involving his imprisonment and parole, was in a state file folder under a six-year-old phone book.
    “Nothing here but a bad smell,” Sloan said.
     
    WHEN THEY LEFT , Fox locked the door, and Lucas shook his head: “I had my hopes, but I don’t think so. I can’t get around the car thing.”
    “You can steal cars,” Fox said.
    “But would you steal a car to transport a bloody body, and then keep it?” Lucas asked. “I haven’t heard about anybody finding a stolen car full of blood. I suppose he could have abandoned it, but it’s been weeks since Larson was killed. Somebody should have seen it by now, if it was stolen.”
    “Could be parked out at the airport for a month,” Fox suggested.
    “Not with the new security,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “Their surveillance system takes your tag number when your car comes in, runs it right there. And if you’re out there for more than a week, they’ll take a look at your car.”
    “Could be at one of those twenty-four-hour Sam’s Club places,” Sloan suggested. “Might go unnoticed for a while.”
    They all thought about it for a minute, then Fox said, “I don’t know. There are some possibilities, but Charlie isn’t a master criminal.”
     
    THEY WERE STILL STANDING in the parking lot, scuffing gravel, talking about possibilities, when Elle called.
    “Lucas, I’ve been reading about this man Charles Pope,” she said.