Buried Prey

asked him to try to get Fell’s Visa bills. Anderson said he’d go back to the office and see what he could do, and leave the results on his desk, in a file marked for Del.
    Then they headed over to Kenny’s, and found Katz, the manager: “Haven’t seen him—it’s been a while now.”
    “Since the night the kids were kidnapped,” Lucas said.
    “That’s right,” Katz agreed.
    Lucas said to Del, “See. That’s part of the pattern. We can’t find the tipsters. Or tipster—maybe there’s only one.”
    “Who else ever met him?” Del asked Katz. “Any other people here?”
    Fifteen or twenty people were sitting around the bar: Katz checked the faces, then said, “Yeah, there are a few people here who knew him. I’d rather not point them out, you know . . .”
    “Be all right if I made an announcement?” Del asked.
    Katz shrugged. “Be my guest.”
    Del dragged a chair from a side table into the middle of the bar and stood on it: conversation stopped, and he looked around and said, “I’m a Minneapolis police detective, my name’s Capslock, and my partner and I are looking into the disappearance of the two Jones sisters. We need to get in touch with John Fell, who has been a semi-regular here. He provided some very useful information about the key suspect, but now we can’t find Mr. Fell. We’re asking that anybody who knew him, come chat with me and Detective Davenport, in the back booth. No big deal, just a chat. We pretty desperately need the help. . . . If you’ve been watching TV, you know what I’m talking about. Anyway—in the back.”
    He hopped down off the chair and walked with Lucas to the back of the bar. In a minute, four people had pulled up next to their booth, and a fifth had moved down to the end of the bar, from where he could watch and listen.
    “Anything will help: nothing’s too small,” Del repeated.
    Two of the people said they’d seen Fell getting into a black commercial van; one thought it was a Chevy, with cargo doors. One of those two said he thought Fell worked in electronics, that he’d said something about that. But a third, a woman, said she thought he might have been a teacher—now an ex-teacher.
    “He said something about having tried teaching when he got out of school, but found out he couldn’t stand high school kids. He said they never thought about anything but themselves, that they were a bunch of little assholes, and that teaching them was impossible.”
    “So he’s a college grad,” Lucas suggested.
    “I think so.”
    “You know where he taught?” Lucas asked.
    “No, I don’t,” she said. “He never said much about it.”
    “He’s got a Minnesota accent,” said one of the men. “He says ‘a-boat,’ like a Canadian.”
    “But you don’t think he’s a Canadian?” Lucas asked.
    “No, I got the same feeling that Linda did—that he’s from here.”
    “He didn’t really talk about himself that much. He mostly told jokes,” the fourth man said.
    The fifth man slid down from the bar stool and came over with a beer in his hand. “I think he might’ve got fired from the school.”
    “Why’s that?” Lucas asked.
    “One time he went on a rant about school administrators. It sounded like stuff you say when you get fired. You know, they didn’t know what they were doing, they were incompetent, they were jealous, all of that. Like when you get fired.”
    Del bobbed his head: “Okay. That’s good. Anybody ever see him on the street? Outside the bar?”
    “I might’ve,” the woman said. “I think I saw him down by the university, walking down the street.”
    “Just walking?” Lucas asked.
    “Yes, like he was going to lunch or coming back from lunch. Didn’t have anything in his hands, he was just walking along. But—I’m not completely sure it was him. It just seemed to me that it was. I didn’t think about it.”
    “Has he been in with women?”
    “Girls from across the street,” one of the men said. “The hookers.”
    “They hang out here?”
    “They’ll come in for a drink. You know. Kenny doesn’t allow any hustling, or anything. But, they knew him,” the man said.
    “I get the feeling that he’s from right around here,” Lucas said. “Sees the girls across the street, hangs out here.”
    “Doesn’t hang here much,” a man said. “He only came in, the first time, maybe a month ago.” The others nodded in agreement. “Then he was here pretty often. I haven’t seen him for a few days,