Buried Prey

Hanson asked. “That some kind of TV station?”
    Scrape cocked his head. “What TV station?”
    Hanson said, “You said, ‘I got run off by TVR.’ What’s TVR?”
    “Everybody knows that,” Scrape said, taking on a slightly superior aspect. “The Toonerville Rifa. Bad dudes, man. I got the heck out of there.”
    They figured out that he was talking about a street gang in Los Angeles, and that he had never been around a woman on the Mississippi.
    “So you backed down on a gang guy,” Hanson sneered. “You yellow? You a chickenshit?”
    “I’m just not a big-boned man,” Scrape pleaded. “He was a big-boned guy. The only reason I’d ever back down, is if they’re bigger-boned than me, then I disengage.”
    “They used to hear you yelling and screaming down there, by that box you had,” Hanson said. “Were you yelling at the girls? Is that where you had them?”
    “I never had any girls; I never did. When I’m having a bad day, I might do some yelling. They come crowding in on me, and I try to keep it to myself, but sometimes I can’t. I have to yell it somewhere—”
    “When who crowds in?” Hanson asked. “When the girls crowd in?”
    “I don’t know any girls,” Scrape said, a miserable, yellowtoothed grimace pulling on his face.
     
     
    THE QUESTIONING WAS MADE more difficult by Scrape’s illness: he spoke his thoughts—“These cops are gonna kill me”—as a kind of oral parenthesis in the middle of answering a question. He claimed to have been in places where he couldn’t have been—Los Angeles, that morning—and to have spoken to people that he hadn’t spoken to—Michael J. Fox and Harrison Ford. When Sloan made the point that the conversations were fantasies, Scrape became further confused.
    “But I just talked to Harrison this morning. Or maybe . . . maybe yesterday. He was going to . . .” He paused, then said, “He was coming over with some friends. He was going to bring beer.”
    “Harrison Ford, the movie star,” Sloan said.
    “Yeah, he’s a good friend. He loans me money sometimes.”
    He became confused by logical inconsistencies in what he was saying; became confused by the fact that he was in Minneapolis, and not Los Angeles, though at other times he knew for sure that he was in Minneapolis.
    They brought out the porn they’d taken from his boxes above the river. He could barely look at them. “Not mine. Not mine. Somebody else’s,” he said, turning his eyes away, in what seemed like embarrassment.
    “We found them in your place,” Sloan said. “Your boxes, down by the river.”
    “You did not,” Scrape said.
    “We did,” Sloan insisted.
    “Where am I gonna get that?” he asked. “I’m gonna mail away for it, so they could bring it to my mailbox? I’m gonna spend good money on it when I got no food? Where am I gonna get that shit?”
    Then he said something that did make sense: “Hey, if I had those in my box, wouldn’t my fingerprints be on them?”
    “Maybe,” Sloan said.
    “Sure they would,” Scrape said. “I ain’t got no gloves. You look at them pictures, they won’t have no prints on them. Not my prints. You look.”
    “We will,” Sloan said. “We’ll look.”
    “That’s the proof, right there,” Scrape said. “No prints.”
     
     
    SLOAN WAS THOUGHTFUL and forgiving and mild-mannered, offered cigarettes and Cokes and coffee. Hanson was rude and demanding and skeptical. Between them, they tore everything Scrape said to shreds, except for three things: he’d never seen the porn, he’d never seen the girls, and he was a friend of Harrison Ford’s.
    He didn’t know the girls, had never seen them, had never touched them.
    So angry that he was shaking, his face red as a bullfighter’s cape, he kept his hands down and his story straight: “NO: I NEVER SEEN THEM.”
    The ring of keys, he said, he collected: “I find keys, I put them on the ring. I like to listen to them at night. They’re like bells. And who knows when I might need one? Maybe I could sell one, or something.”
    They gave it two hours, more or less, then Daniel brought in another cop to sit with Scrape, and he, Sloan, Hanson, and Lucas went into Daniel’s office and shut the door.
    “I don’t think he did it,” Sloan said. “But I’d be more sure if he wasn’t nuts. Do you think it’s possible that he could have done it, and then forgot he did it?”
    “Doesn’t seem like it,” Hanson said. “He gets stuff confused, but he remembers it