Buried Prey

the cuffs on; and thought that Scrape smelled like some weird combination of smoke, rancid butter, and dirt.
    Lucas patted him down, found an empty plastic baggie that might once have held some grass. Hanson spotted a butcher knife in a leather sheath on a rickety table next to the bed. He said, “Knife, over there.”
    They were all breathing hard, Scrape facedown on the floor, squealing now, and Daniel did a quick circuit of the spare room, looking for anything connected to the girls. Nothing. Daniel shook his head and said, “Let’s get him downtown.”
    Sloan and Hanson helped Scrape get up, and Sloan brushed off his shirt and said in a soft voice, “If you’ve still got them, you could give them up. It’d be a big help to everyone.”
    Scrape asked, “Who? Who?”
    Lucas would remember the tone of his voice: the utter confusion in it.
     
     
    SLOAN KEPT TALKING to Scrape like a man talking to a nervous horse, and he and Hanson took him out the door. Daniel’s eyes cut to Lucas and he said, “We had no time for a search warrant, I figured we were sort of in hot pursuit. We’ve got to have a warrant before we tear the place up.”
    Lucas thought that sounded a little shaky, but took a look around: one room, with a bed, a chest of drawers, a nightstand, and a wooden table and chair that might have been rescued from Goodwill. A key ring, with a bunch of keys, sat on the nightstand. A backpack, open at the top, and stuffed full of clothes, lay in the middle of the floor, with a basketball. There were two doors other than the one that went into the hallway: one stood half open, to reveal an empty closet. The other led to a compact three-quarters bath.
    He asked Daniel, “Think it’d be okay if I took a leak?”
    “If you don’t see any blood, and if you really have to go . . .”
    Lucas went in the bathroom, closed the door, checked the medicine cabinet—it was empty—and the shower booth, which showed only a sliver of soap, a miniature bar like those from hotels. No shaving cream or even toothpaste. There was a roll of unwaxed floss on the ledge behind the sink.
    He flushed the toilet and stepped back out. Daniel, with no witness, had had time to check the closet, under the bed, the chest of drawers, and the nightstand. The clothes in the pack had been pulled out and stuffed back in. Daniel said, “Get the knife and let’s go. We’ll get some guys back to check his pack.”
    So he’d found nothing.
    Lucas nodded. He picked up the knife, and the keys from the bedstand. They went out, and Lucas selected the newest-looking key, found that it worked, and locked the door behind them.
    Daniel said, “Be nice to know what those other keys do.”
    Lucas jangled them—a lot of them were old-fashioned skeleton keys, but some were modern. “We gotta ask him. And not nice.”

5
    They took Scrape, frightened, panicked, back to police headquarters, took his picture, printed him, tagged his knife, sat him at Sloan’s desk, and Sloan went to work on him, with Hanson crowding in at Scrape’s side, the bad guy. Lucas, Daniel, and a couple of other cops sat back and watched.
    Scrape started out scared, but when Sloan asked him about the girls, he said he didn’t know what they were talking about: and his confusion seemed real. He didn’t read newspapers, watch television, or listen to radio. When Sloan gave him the news about the girls, he got angry, twisting in his chair to look each of them in the face, one after another, as if searching for an ally—or simply for understanding.
    “I never would touch no girls like that,” he said. “I never touch no good girls. You can ask anybody.”
    “You do like girls, though, right? You’re not queer,” Sloan said, leaning toward him.
    “Heck no, I’m not queer. I got problems.” He made a circling motion with his index finger, by his temple. “My meds don’t help. But I’m not queer. I just . . . don’t do much of that.”
    “Much of what?”
    “You know. Girls,” Scrape said.
    “When was the last time you did?”
    Scrape eased down in his chair, his eyes scanning the cops, calculating an answer. Finally, he said, “There was this woman down in the river . . .”
    He stopped, and Sloan asked, quietly, “Where on the river? Down by your tree place?”
    Scrape was puzzled again for a second, then snorted, as if at a joke, and he said, “Not this river. The LA river. I got run out of there by TVR, but that was the river.”
    “What’s TVR?”