Buried Prey

it’s important, but I thought I should call.”
    “Thank you. If we could get your name—”
    “I don’t want to get involved. Okay? Check the box.”
    Two seconds later, a different voice gave a time and date for the call, and said that it had been traced to a phone booth near the University of Minnesota—not the same place as the first, but close: walking distance.
    Lucas listened to the two calls, twice each, and made a few notes. He checked his notebooks, and found that the first call had come in about the time he and some other detectives—Sloan? Hanson or Malone? And Daniel?—had been looking across the street at Scrape’s apartment. The 911 call had been irrelevant at that point, not that the caller would know it. The second call had come in that night, while Lucas had been asleep. Sloan had gotten him out of bed to do the dumpster-diving. . . .
     
     
    RICHARDS CAME and leaned in the door frame as Lucas was taking off the headphones, and Lucas asked, “What’d you get?”
    “They all still live here—around here. One’s out in Stillwater,” Richards said. “I took them right from the ID numbers you have, up to the present. Names, addresses, phone numbers.”
    “Terrific,” Lucas said. “Now, I need something else. I need you to listen to these two tapes. Take you two minutes.”
    Richards sat down, put the headphones on, listened. When he was done, he frowned and asked, “A little strange—that was the same guy both times, right?”
    “I was hoping you’d say that,” Lucas said. He looked at his notes. “In both calls, the operator asks if the call is an emergency, and he says, ‘Maybe’ in the first one, and ‘Yes,’ in the second, but then, in both of them, he says exactly, ‘I think so.’ Then at the end of the tape, he refuses to give up his name, with almost the same words: ‘I don’t want to get involved.’”
    Richards said, “I was listening more to his voice. He’s got a kind of prissy way of talking, you know what I’m saying?”
    “English teacher,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, like that.”
    Lucas put the two tapes back in their envelopes, took out his cell phone, and called Marcy. She picked up and said, “I’m in a meeting.”
    “I know, but I needed to ask you something. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take the two tapes of the nine-one-one calls and have a voice guy look at them,” he said.
    “Why?”
    “Because I think the two tips came from the same guy, which, if you listened to what he’s saying on the tapes, is unlikely, unless he’s the killer. So, if it’s okay with you . . . I’ll leave a receipt with Clark.”
    “Why don’t you just sit tight for five minutes?” She crunched on something, a carrot or a stalk of celery. “We’re about done here, and I’ll be back there.”
    “Really five minutes? Not twenty minutes?”
    “Really five minutes.”
     
     
    SHE WAS BACK in ten minutes, crunching on carrot slices from a Ziploc bag. They went in her office, and she listened to the 911 recordings, and said, “Same guy. Okay, take them.” She popped the second tape out of the recorder and pushed them across her desk.
    “Thank you,” Lucas said.
    “You’re really into this, huh?”
    “Yeah. I wish you were, a little bit more.”
    “I’m interested. I’ve got Hote working on it full-time, and if we see anything at all, I can pull another guy,” she said. “But I’ve got that Magnussen thing going, and we’re tracking Jim Harrison . . . you know.”
    “So you’re busy,” Lucas said. “So don’t give me any shit about looking at the Jones girls. I’ll keep you up to date, and if I can, and if we identify someone, I’ll get you there for the kill . . . if I can.”
    “Try hard,” she said, a little skeptically.
    He grinned and spread his arms and said, “I always do.”
    She laughed and asked about Weather, and about Letty, and the conversation rambled back to the good old days. They’d once gone off to the Minnesota countryside where Lucas had gotten in a fistfight with a local sheriff’s deputy. “If I hadn’t talked our way out of that, you’d probably still be on a road gang somewhere,” Marcy said.
    “ You talked our way out of it? What are you talking about, I negotiated,” Lucas said.
    “Negotiated, my ass,” Sherrill said.
    “I did negotiate your ass, if I remember correctly,” Lucas said. “I was so weak when I got back from that trip I could barely crawl. . . .”
    And they were laughing again,