Buried Prey

TV.” A woman standing behind him said, “Tell them about John.”
    “Who’s John?” Lucas asked.
    “Dude down at Kenny’s,” the man said, with reluctance. “Don’t know his last name.”
    “He’s got a suspect,” the woman said.
    The man scowled at her, and Lucas pressed: “So what about John?”
    “Dude said that there was a crazy guy probably did it,” the man said. “Crazy guy’s been running around the neighborhood.”
    “You know the crazy guy?” Sloan asked.
    “No. We heard John talking about him.”
    “We’ve seen him, walking around, though. The crazy guy,” the woman said.
    “Did John say why he thought the crazy guy did it?” Lucas asked.
    “He said the guy was always lookin’, and never gettin’ any. Said the guy had a record, you know, for sex stuff.”
    “He call the cops?” Sloan asked.
    “I dunno. I don’t know the guy. I don’t know the crazy guy, either, except that I see him on the street sometimes.”
    “Gotta call it in,” Sloan said.
    He had a handset with him, and walked back down the sidewalk while Lucas talked to the man, and especially past him, to the woman. He asked, “What do you know about John? We really need to find him. If he knows anything . . . I mean, these two girls might not have much time. . . .”
    He got a description—John was an overweight man of average height, with an olive complexion and dark hair that curled over his forehead. “Italian-looking,” the woman said.
    Lucas said, “You mean good-looking?”
    “No. He’s too fat. But he’s dark, and he wears those skimpy T-shirts—the kind Italians wear, with the straps over the shoulders?—under regular shirts that he wears open. He’s got this gold chain.”
    The last time they’d seen him, he was wearing jeans and a blue long-sleeved shirt, open over the wife-beater. She added that he liked some of the girls who came in, and she put a little spin on the word “girls.”
    “You mean, working girls,” Lucas said. “I didn’t know they hung at Kenny’s.”
    “They don’t, but there’s that massage place across the street,” she said. “They come over, sometimes, when they don’t have clients. I don’t like to see them in there, myself. I mean, what if somebody thought I was one of them.”
    The guy said, “I wouldn’t mind a massage,” and the woman punched him on the arm, and he said, “Ouch.”
     
     
    THEY DIDN’T HAVE much else. A moment later, Sloan came back up the walk. “Cherry and McGuire are coming over,” he said.
    “What for? We got what there is,” Lucas said.
    “Because they don’t think we got what there is,” Sloan said. “We’re supposed to wait until they get here, then knock on some more doors.”
    “Fuck that,” Lucas said. “We need to get over to Kenny’s.”
    “Closed two hours ago,” the man said.
    “Might still be somebody there,” Lucas said.
    Everybody shrugged, and Sloan said, “They want us to finish knockin’ on the doors.”
     
     
    CHERRY AND MCGUIRE showed up, two fortyish veterans, and took over. Lucas and Sloan moved on down the block, and got nowhere, Lucas fuming about being knocked off the only positive hint they’d gotten.
    “We did the work, man, they oughta let us take it.”
    “Get used to it,” Sloan said. “Takes about four years before you’re a pro. That’s what they’re telling me. I got three to go.”
    “Fuck a bunch of four years,” Lucas said. He hadn’t told the older detectives about the massage parlor girls who might know John. Let them find it out themselves.
    They worked for two more hours, and Sloan finally quit at the end of his shift and went home to his wife. “I don’t even know what we’re doing,” he said. “We think the kidnapper’ll come to the door and confess?”
    “Somebody must have seen something,” Lucas said. “Seen the kids getting in a car. Seen them going through a door. They can’t just go away.”
    “Somebody would have called, if they were gonna talk,” Sloan said. “When we found that blouse . . . we should have looked around at the baddest guy on the block, and squeezed his pimple head until he coughed them up.”
    Lucas shook his head. “That blouse wasn’t right.”
    “What?”
    “Wasn’t right. Why in the hell would you throw a blouse out a car window? I can see throwing the girl out, if nobody was looking. But why would you throw a blouse out? Tell me one reason.”
    Sloan thought for a moment and said, “The guy killed her,