Buried Prey

enough.”
    “Can’t afford it for a while, anyway,” Lucas said.
    “You patrol guys know all the crack freaks,” Anderson said. “You oughta be able to get one wholesale.”
    “Pretty fuckin’ funny,” Lucas said.
    “No offense,” Anderson said.
    He sounded insincere, Lucas thought. He shut up and watched Anderson work. Five minutes after he started, Anderson had a name and address: “It’s a post office box.”
    “That’s not good.” He wasn’t a detective yet, but he knew that much.
    “The post office will have a name and address for the renter,” Anderson said. “But the thing is, credit card companies don’t usually take post office boxes. Did the hookers get paid?”
    “They said so,” Lucas said.
    “Huh. Well, something’s not right.”
     
     
    THE POST OFFICE worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The front end was closed, but Lucas found his way in through the loading dock in the back and showed his ID to a couple of guys throwing canvas mail bags off a truck. One of them went inside and came back with a bureaucrat.
    “I can’t tell you that,” he said. He was a fat little man, fish-pale with what must have been a permanent night shift. “It’s privileged information.”
    “We got two girls missing—”
    “I’m sorry, but it’s against the law for me to give you that information,” the bureaucrat said. “Come back with a search warrant and give it to the postmaster.”
    “This guy could be killing them,” Lucas said.
    “The law says—”
    “Then give me the number for the postmaster,” Lucas said.
    “I can’t do that. It’s the middle of the night.”
    At some level, Lucas realized, the man was enjoying himself, sticking it to the cops. It was possible and even likely that there was a law or regulation about releasing the names of post office box renters; but, he thought, there sure as hell wasn’t a law about calling up the postmaster, even in the middle of the night.
    Lucas got his face close to the bureaucrat’s. “I’ll tell you what. One way or another, I’m gonna get the name off the box. And if these girls are killed, I’m gonna take this conversation to the newspapers and I’m gonna hang it around your neck like a dead skunk. When they find these girls’ bodies, you’ll have reporters standing in your front yard yelling at you.”
    The man flushed: “You can’t threaten me. The law—”
    Lucas crowded closer: “The law doesn’t say you can’t wake up the postmaster. Does it? Does the law say that?”
    The man was furious, and said, “On your head.”
    “On yours,” Lucas said. “You’re now gonna come out looking like an asshole no matter what you do.”
    The bureaucrat said, “Wait here,” and disappeared into the post office.
    One of the truck loaders said, “He is an asshole. That’s his job.”
    “Yeah, well, I got no time for it,” Lucas said.
     
     
    THE BUREAUCRAT CAME BACK a minute later, and said, “I got the superintendent of mails on the phone.”
    Lucas talked to the superintendent of mails, who said, “I’m waiving the confidentiality reg in this case because of the emergency, but I’m going to need a letter from your chief outlining the problem. I need to file it.”
    “You’ll get it,” Lucas said.
    “Put Gene back on the line.”
    Lucas left the post office ten minutes later with the paper in his hand: John Fell at an address on Sixth Street SE, Minneapolis. Five minutes away, the sun coming up over St. Paul.
    In his first year as a cop, working patrol and then, briefly, as a dope guy, he’d felt that he was learning things at a ferocious rate: about the street, life, death, sex, love, hate, fear, stupidity, jealousy, and accident, and all the other things that brought citizens in contact with the cops.
    Then the learning rate tailed off. He’d continued to accumulate detail, to see faces, to interpret moves, but at nothing like the rate of his first ten or twelve months.
    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