Buried Prey

anything against them.” Del looked at his watch. “Let’s talk to the commo guys. Get up to Stacy.”
     
     
    STACY DIDN’T HAVE COPS: the city was patrolled by the Chicago County sheriff’s office. The comm center got in touch with the night duty officer at the sheriff’s department, and between them they arranged to have a patrol officer meet Del and Lucas at County Highway 19, just off the I-35 exit.
    They took a city car, and left Del’s truck parked: the tranny needed work, he said, and he didn’t trust it for the ninety-mile round-trip. The drive north took forty-five minutes, and just before they got there, the comm center radioed to say that the cop they were supposed to meet had to take a call, and he’d be a few minutes late. They turned off the highway and drove around town, looking for the Letter Man office; Stacy was a small place, a few blocks of houses this way and that, mostly new, ten or fifteen years old.
    “People getting out of the Cities,” Del said.
    “Long commute.”
    “But pretty fast . . .”
    They saw a guy walking a dog, stopped, and he told them that the Letter Man was a small storefront back on County 19. They drove back, found it. Dark, nobody around.
    “This isn’t that much like the movies,” Lucas said, as they leaned back against the trunk of the car. “I’m thinking, ‘law school.’”
    “Man . . .”
    The sheriff’s deputy showed up five minutes later, introduced himself as Ron Howard, said he had no idea of who ran Letter Man, but knew who would: a local city councilman who knew everybody. They followed him to an older house, with a porch light on, where he knocked; a gray-haired man came to the door, saw Howard, smiled, and said, “Hey, Ron, what’s up?”
    “Dave . . . these guys are with the Minneapolis PD. They need to talk to whoever runs Letter Man.”
    “Rob Packard . . . what’d he do?” Small moths were batting around the porch light, and the older man moved his hand inside the door and turned the light off.
    Del said, “Nothing, as far as we know. We’re looking for somebody who he might know, either as a customer or an employee.”
    “He’s only got three or four employees, far as I know,” the man said. “His wife and daughter and a couple of girls.”
    “Does Packard live around here?”
    “Yeah, he lives up north of here. Let me get the phone book.”
    They got an address and the deputy led the way north, eight blocks, into a circle of the newer, suburban, ranch-style homes. There were lights in the window, and they got out and knocked on the door.
    Rob Packard wasn’t John Fell: Packard was a short, thin man, maybe fifty, wearing jeans and a University of Minnesota sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves, and he didn’t know a John Fell. Neither did his wife, but his daughter, whose name was Kate, said that judging from Fell’s description, she might.
    “There was a guy who came around three or four times. He bought some shirts, asked me about getting some made,” she said.
    Her father said, “Katie runs the front counter and does the design.”
    Kate said, “I think he works around here. He sort of hit on me, but you know—I wasn’t interested.”
    “Why not?” Lucas asked. He was checking her as she spoke: in her mid-twenties, he thought, but slender, and white-blond with small breasts: and he thought of the young Jones girls.
    “He just was . . . I don’t know. Not my style,” she said.
    “Creep you out?” Del asked.
    “Oh, he never did anything. But, yeah, you know . . .”
    Lucas: “Did he tell you jokes?”
    “Every time,” she said. “Really stupid ones.”
    Lucas said to Del, “That’s him.” And to Katie: “A fat man?”
    “Yeah, that too . . . sort of like a young Alfred Hitchcock.”
    Del asked, “Do you have any idea where he works?”
    “No, really, I don’t. I can tell you that he drives a black van, like a plumber or a contractor . . . but I don’t think he’s a plumber. Or a contractor. He sorta doesn’t talk like one.”
    “How about a teacher?” Lucas asked.
    She thought for a moment, then said, “Maybe. Yeah, maybe.”
    “What kind of shirts did he want?”
    “The first time, he said he was checking prices for a rock band, some stupid name, I forget.” She paused, her eyes floating up, then dropping back to Lucas: “No, wait: it was ‘Baby Blue.’ Or ‘Baby Blues.’”
    “Never heard of them,” Lucas said.
    “Neither have I, and I still haven’t,” she said. “He came