Buried Prey

was always bouncing a basketball, but he didn’t seem especially good at it. He was always losing it, and chasing it around.”
    “He’s not just a bum, though,” Lucas said. “People say he’s crazy.”
    “Schizophrenic, I think,” Alice said. “You could hear him yelling some nights. It sounded like an argument, like a violent argument, but he was all by himself, yelling and jumping up and down, like he was fighting somebody. Like fighting an invisible man. If you just heard it, and didn’t see it . . . it was pretty convincing. It sounded like a fight. He’d be cursing and screaming. . . .”
    “You never saw him with any girls, or women?”
    “I never saw him with anybody. Ever.”
    “Did he ever show up in a car? Or a truck?”
    “Never. Not that I saw.”
     
     
    LUCAS WROTE IT all down in his notebook, and fifteen minutes after he’d spoken to Daniel, walked down to wait in the street.
    Daniel took nearly a half-hour to arrive; before he got there, an unmarked car pulled up, and a couple of homicide detectives got out, John Malone and Frank Lester. Lester asked, “Where’s this stuff?”
    Lucas pointed through the fence at the tree. “Right there. Under the washed-out roots.”
    Malone said to Lester, “We’re gonna need better access,” and to Lucas, “You get your prints all over everything?”
    “On some of it,” Lucas admitted. “The boxes were mostly empty, just a bunch of crap lying around. He hasn’t been here for a couple of weeks, according to the neighbors. They had the park cops run him off. There’s like a . . . cupboard . . . thing cut into the back. I needed to go inside and see if there was anything in it.”
    “Hope you didn’t fuck up a crime scene,” Malone said.
    “Get off his back,” Lester snapped at Malone. “You would have done the same goddamn thing.” To Lucas: “You did good, rook.”
    “I hope,” Lucas said.
    “Still need access,” Malone said, tacitly conceding the point. “I’m gonna get some snappers.”
    He made a call from his car, and a squad showed up five minutes later. A uniformed cop named Willis climbed out, said, “Hey,” to Lucas, and got a commercial bolt-cutter from the trunk. The cutter had steel handles almost as long as a baseball bat, and was mostly used for cutting the shackles off padlocks. Willis started cutting a man-shaped hole in the fence, and was finishing the job when Daniel arrived, driving a yellow, ten-year-old Corvette. Daniel nodded at Lucas and asked Lester, “Whaddya got, Frank?”
    “Haven’t been down yet,” he said. “We’re just going now.”
    Willis dragged the arc of cut wire out of the hole, and Lucas led the way down the slope to the base of the oak tree. “Smells like shit,” Malone said.
    “It is shit,” Lucas said. “His toilet’s right down the slope.”
    When they got to the mouth of the two boxes, they all squatted and Lucas pointed toward the niche in the back. “It’s like a little cupboard cut into the dirt. That’s where the paper is—I only pulled one out. That’s it right there.”
    Daniel got down on his knees, crawled a couple feet into the sleeping box, picked up the paper, and backed out. They all looked at it, and Lester said, “That’s not Playboy or Penthouse . That’s really rough. That’s a kid.”
    “No tits,” Malone said. “But she could be older than she looks.”
    Daniel said, “That doesn’t make any difference. The point is, she looks like a kid, and she’s aimed at people who want to fuck kids.”
    They all looked at it for a few more seconds, then Daniel asked Lester, “You got some gloves?”
    “Yeah.” He took a pair of white latex gloves from his pocket, the kind surgeons used.
    “Give them to Davenport,” Daniel said. And to Lucas: “Crawl back in there and get the rest of the paper.”
    Lucas took the gloves, pulled them on, crawled to the back of the box, pulled the flap down, and retrieved the sheaf of paper. As he was backing out of the box, Daniel asked, “We got your prints, right?”
    “Yeah,” Lucas said.
    “We’ll need them to separate them from the prints this asshole left here. Let me see that stuff.”
    The porn was more of the same: young-looking girls having sex with older men.
    Daniel said to Lucas, “He’s our guy. We need to get all over this. I want you to find him.”
    “I go on at three o’clock. . . .”
    “I fixed that. You’re working for me for a while,” Daniel said. “I want you to find this