Buried Prey

in again, about that, about the band, then the next time he came in, he was asking about buying seconds. We’ve always got some seconds, that we sell cheap. The last time, I don’t know. I think he was just looking me over. He took some seconds. They were for Wyman Archery. Says ‘Wyman Archery’ in a target, with a hunting arrow under the words.”
    “He’s an archer? A bow hunter?”
    She shook her head, “No, it was kind of a wicked-looking shirt. He just pulled them out of the seconds basket.”
    Lucas asked her about the Letter Man shirt he’d been wearing. “We have samples, we sell them at cost—four dollars. I don’t remember selling him one, but maybe I did. He did buy some shirts.”
    She hadn’t seen him around town, didn’t know whether he was going east or west when he arrived. “What time did he come in?” Lucas asked. “Same time?”
    “Middle of the afternoon,” she said. “Yeah. Every time, around two or three. Between two and three. It’s our slowest time of day.”
    Lucas said to Del, “He might be doing factory work, going in to the second shift.”
    Del asked Kate, “You get any feeling that he was watching you? You know . . .”
    She was shaking her head: “I never saw him outside the store. He’d come in, he’d go away. I thought he was interested in talking to me, you know, but . . . he got the idea.”
    “You never saw a black van around when you were out walking?”
    “Now you’re scaring me,” her father said.
    “I don’t remember any, especially, but . . . there are vans all over the place. I guess you see them all the time. You don’t even look at them.”
     
     
    THERE WASN’T ANYTHING MORE—a bit of a description, but nothing significant. The Packards knew of three or four assembly plants in the area, mostly smaller places putting together electronics, the kinds of places that came and went every few months. And she hadn’t seen Fell for at least four or five months, Kate said.
    On the way back to the Cities, Lucas said, “I’m coming back up here tomorrow. I’m going to hit every one of those factories. If we get a time card, there’ll be eight ways to track him, even if he’s not working there anymore.”
     
     
    BUT HE DIDN’T DO THAT.

8
    They spent the drive back to the Twin Cities speculating about John Fell. Lucas said, “He’s at least as good a suspect as Scrape. Look, think about this: Somebody needs a fall guy. Who’s better than a guy like Scrape, who can’t even defend himself, because he’s crazy? And he looks crazier’n hell, who’d believe him? So this guy tracks both Scrape and the girls, steals stuff that Scrape has used, like that box in the pizza dumpster, and then he calls nine-one-one to feed us the clues.”
    “Sounds too much like a movie,” Del said.
    “It does,” Lucas admitted.
    “I’ve never known one of those movie plots to work out,” Del said.
    Lucas looked out the window at the rural darkness, just a scattering of lights off to the west. “Neither have I.”
     
     
    DEL HAD A LIST of eight more people he wanted to interview about Smith, with addresses. Though it was late, they found four of them with the lights on, but got no help. After the last one, Lucas followed Del back down the street to the car, and Del asked, “You know what the perfect crime is?”
    “You’re gonna tell me, right?”
    “It’s when you walk up to a guy you don’t know that well, because you want the crack in his pocket. You look around, there’s nobody watching. You pull your gun and Bam! , you kill him. You take the crack and you walk away,” Del said. “Nobody gives two shits about a crack dealer, so there’s not gonna be a big deal investigation. There’re gonna be two guys walking around with notebooks, for maybe a week. There’s a million potential suspects, and no real connection between the killer and the killee, and an hour after the killing, the evidence has already gone up somebody’s pipe.”
    “But somebody could see you—”
    “Eh—no. Or they turn away. Smith wouldn’t be standing out in the middle of the street, handing it off. That’s why dope dealers get killed. Get killed all the time. Because they’re vulnerable and they’re worth killing. The guys doing it are desperate for a hit, they don’t have a hell of a lot to lose, and they don’t have two brain cells to rub together. So, they don’t worry about it, they don’t talk about it, they don’t plan it. It’s just walk up,