Buried Prey

him, I don’t want to say because Larry Plant told me so.”
    Lucas pushed through, squeezed past the bars, saw Daniel at the top of the bank, and shouted, “We need an ambulance. Right now.”
    Daniel shouted back, “Who’s hurt?”
    “Scrape. He came out with an iron bar in his hands. He’s dead, but Sloan is asking for a doc.”
    Daniel nodded and hurried off, and Lucas went back into the cave.
    A cop was saying, “The only bad thing about it is, we can’t ask him where he stashed the girls.”
    Somebody said in a hushed voice, “Christ, remember that thing down in Florida where that girl was buried alive?”
    They all thought about that and looked at the body, and then the cop who did the shooting said, “I saw him coming with the bar and I didn’t know if it was a rifle or something and he lifted it up . . .”
    “Like a baseball bat,” said another cop. “If he’d hit you with that, that’d be you laying there. . . .”
     
     
    DANIEL CAME DOWN and moved them all out of the cave, except for one guy to keep an eye on the body, although there would be nobody to interfere with it, except the bats. A few minutes later, an ambulance arrived. Two medics were taken down the riverbank, and a minute later were back: Scrape was dead.
    The crime-scene specialists showed up next, went down to the cave. Daniel, who’d been talking to the shooter, took Lucas aside. “How’d you find him?”
    Lucas told the story about Karen Frazier calling him at home, about his interview with Millard, about hearing somebody moving in the entrance.
    “You think this Millard guy is still down at the Lunch Box?”
    “Yeah. I had him pretty scared,” Lucas said. “If he’s not, he’ll be easy enough to find. He’s staying at the Mission.”
    Daniel slapped him on the back. “You did good on this, Lucas. I’m gonna talk to the chief. Del tells me you’re pretty hot to get out of uniform.”
    “I am,” Lucas said. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure Scrape took the girls. There are too many questions.”
    “There are a few,” Daniel said. “What I need for you to do is, I need you to give a complete statement, with everything you think. I got some of it from Del, and it worries me. Don’t leave anything out.”
    “If we could just put hands on this Fell dude. That’s all I want—just to talk to him.”
    “What I need to do is find those girls,” Daniel said. “I’m not gonna rest right until we do it. We need to turn this cave inside out, we need to search every goddamn cave on these bluffs. . . .
    “He couldn’t get them down here without a vehicle,” Lucas said. “I keep stumbling over that. Where’s his vehicle? He couldn’t have just marched them down here.”
    Daniel said, “Yeah, yeah. I need to get you back to the office. Goddamnit, too much to do. Tell you what: you go down and get this Willard guy. Is that right, Willard?”
    “Millard,” Lucas said.
    “Get him, and bring him back here. We’re gonna need to squeeze him. Ah, Christ, look at this . . .”
    And here came the media: the Channel Three truck. They were quick and close, but the other stations would be right behind them.
    Daniel took Lucas by the arm and steered him up the slope. “You get Millard, get him back to my office. Just sit him there. I’ll be back as quick as I can. And we’re gonna need statements. Lots of statements . . .”
     
     
    LUCAS FOUND MILLARD sitting outside the Lunch Box. “They never let me sit inside, even when I got money.”
    “I gotta take you downtown to make a statement,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”
    “You’re not gonna put me in jail?”
    “No, no—just need a statement. No jail, as long as you keep your shit together.”
    “What happened to Scrape?” he asked, as Lucas pushed him toward the Jeep. There were eight or ten squad cars around the shooting scene, two TV trucks, thirty or forty spectators.
    “Got himself shot,” Lucas said. “Went after a cop with an iron bar.”
    “Don’t sound like Scrape. He was afraid of everybody,” Millard said.
    “Well, that’s what happened.”
    “How bad was he shot? Is he gonna be okay?”
    “No, I don’t think, uh . . . it’s gonna work out that well.”

    A DOZEN COPS were standing around outside the Homicide office, not knowing what to do, now that a suspect was down. Lucas turned Millard over to another cop, got an empty desk and started typing up a statement. Daniel came back, and he and another cop talked to Millard