Buried Prey

Lucas and asked, “Were the kids wearing flip-flops?”
    “I don’t know. I haven’t heard anybody talking about flip-flops,” Lucas said. “Did you guys pick anything up when you were doing the crime scene?”
    “No flip-flops . . .”
    Lucas said to the woman, “Thank you, ma’am.” And when they got out in the street, to Del, “We need our flashlights.”
    They spent fifteen minutes working through the alley, until a man shouted out of the back of a house, opposite the house where they’d started, “Get out of there. We called the cops.”
    Lucas yelled, “We are the cops. We need to talk to you.”
    Lights came on in the house next door, and Del pointed at the house and said, “I’ll go talk to these guys.”
    The shouting man’s name was Mayer, and he and his roommate agreed that they’d seen the girls walking by the house, but knew nothing about a flip-flop. They had been in Eau Claire the day of the murder and the girls’ disappearance, they said, in answer to Lucas’s question, and hadn’t gotten back until that morning.
    “Not to put too fine a point on it, we’re not really interested in girls,” Mayer said.
    Del came pounding up the front steps and across the porch, and then he knocked and stuck his head through the door and said to Lucas, “C’mon. The guys next door said they got a flip-flop.”
    Lucas thanked Mayer and followed Del out the door, where an older man was waiting with a flashlight. They followed him down the side of his house and through a gate into the backyard, into his garage, and looked in his trash can. Inside was a single, badly beaten-up flip-flop.
    “Well, shit,” Del said.
    “But this is good,” Lucas said. “Maybe.”
    “This means we gotta call Daniel again.”
    “Okay, that’s not good.” But then Lucas laughed and slapped Del on the shoulder. “I’m so hot,” he said. “I’m so hot.”
    The old man said, “I don’t think you should be laughing about this. Those little girls, that boy being dead and all.”
     
     
    DANIEL SAID, “Okay, Davenport, listen carefully. You listening?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Call a patrol car, get some crime-scene tape, and tape it to that garage. Leave the flip-flop in the garbage can, seal the garage, and go home. Okay? Go get some sleep. I will see you at that garage at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. You think you got that? Or do you want me to repeat it?”
    “I got it, Chief,” Lucas said.
    “Davenport, I’m not the chief.”
    “You will be,” Lucas said.
    “Okay. And I actually like the ass-kissing, so I won’t order you to stop,” Daniel said. “But you: go home.”
     
     
    ON THE WAY BACK to Lucas’s car, Del said, “I had a thought.”
    “Is it complicated?” Lucas asked. “You want to stop driving while you tell me?”
    “Stop wiseassing me for a minute,” Del said. “If the kids were really taken in that alley . . .”
    “Then the kidnapper had to have a car or a truck of some kind, and Scrape the ragman doesn’t, and probably doesn’t even know how to drive. I thought of that.”
    They drove for another block, then Del asked, “What else did you think of?”
    “That we’ve been running on clues given to us by people we don’t know and can’t find. Everyone else we’ve talked to is happy to chip in whatever thoughts they have—not a single person has been unwilling to help. Even the hookers were out front about what they knew. But everything good that we’ve gotten, it’s all been anonymous, and perfectly timed, and it all points us at Scrape.”
    “Does seem too easy,” Del said.
    “And I’ve thought of the fact that Smith was killed by somebody who overpowered a muscular, violent young gang member without leaving a trace. Scrape has trouble dribbling a basketball.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Probably that Smith was killed by some other violent young gang member who he thought was a friend, and it has nothing to do with the girls,” Lucas said.
    “What else?”
    “That it would be a big fuckin’ coincidence, a HUGE fuckin’ coincidence that Smith got killed at the same time the girls were being kidnapped, in an alley that the girls used, without the two things being connected. You know what I mean?”
    “What else?”
    “That the first thing we should do tomorrow is find out if the flip-flop belonged to one of the girls, and where the girls would go down that alley. They had to be going somewhere, maybe out to Lake Street to buy shit. Popsicles, or