Buried Prey

didn’t know what I was doing.”
    “You did all right,” Del said.
    “Yeah, yeah . . . I fucked it up, is what I did. But, tonight, what I want to do is, I want you to look at the reports, read through them, then we talk about them. I don’t think I’m missing anything, but you never know. . . .”
    So Lucas sat and drank his beer, and Del drank his and read through the slender pile of paper. He said once, “You didn’t type so bad.”
    “Yeah, I taught myself to touch type. Got a book.”
    “Huh . . . didn’t know that.”
    Weather came to say that she was going to bed, and then Letty asked if there was anything she could do, and Lucas sent her off to bed, and finally Del looked up and said, “Nothing jumps out at me.”
    “Listen to the tapes,” Lucas said. “These are copies of the nine-one-one calls.”
    Del listened to the tapes and said, “Boy—sounds like the same guy, doesn’t it?”
    “It’s him. The calls came from two different pay phones, but in the same area, and not in Scrape’s neighborhood.”
    They sat around and speculated some more, talked about the possibility that Fell had been a schoolteacher, and how he’d probably worked in some assembly plant up north, then Del sat up and snapped his fingers. “Hey, here’s an idea. How old do you think he was?”
    “Middle twenties, maybe a little older,” Lucas said. “That’s what people in the bar said.”
    “So—if most people go off to college when they’re eighteen, and don’t usually graduate in four years anymore . . . now it’s more like five or six, must’ve been like that when you graduated.”
    “Yeah?”
    “So what if he wasn’t actually a teacher?” Del asked. “What if he was like a practice teacher or something? I bet the schools wouldn’t even have a record of that. ’Cause they never would have actually fired him—he’d just be sent off. We’d have to go somewhere else to get his name. Like, you know, teachers’ college or something.”
    Lucas wagged a finger at him: “That’s decent. Not great, but it’s decent. I’ll get Sandy on that first thing in the morning.”
     
     
    AT ONE O’CLOCK, they hadn’t thought of much else, and Del finally went home. “You gonna be okay?” he asked, in the doorway.
    “Hell no,” Lucas said. “I’m gonna be screwed up for a while.”
    “You got some people worried about you,” Del said. “We don’t want you doing anything goofy.”
    “Jeez, have a little faith,” Lucas said. “I’m screwed up, but I’m not nuts.”
     
     
    WHEN DEL WAS GONE, Lucas went back to the den and gathered up all the papers, scanned them, sighed, and thought that the information was too thin. They had his voice . . . but it told them nothing, until they could find him. Once they had him, it might mean something.
    Same thing with his face—maybe Barker could identify him, and Todd Barker had stood within inches of him, and might be able to identify him, but they had to find him first. And once they found him, the DNA from the blood was really all they’d need.
    The problem was finding him.
    Lucas was stuffing the two tapes back in his briefcase when a thought struck him. There was nothing in the voice, but what about the timing of the calls? He checked the times, then went back to his notes, and the summarized notes from other investigators. The summaries weren’t enough to be sure, but the tips on Scrape and his whereabouts seemed to come precisely when the investigation was slowing because of a lack of information.
    That is, when they were looking for Scrape, they got a tip on where he lived. It hadn’t been used, because by the time they got it, Lucas had already located him.
    But then Scrape was released, and they promptly got a tip on the box of clothing that had been thrown in the dumpster, and the tip had paid off with what looked like the definitive case against the street guy.
    Both tips from the killer himself.
    As though the killer himself had been inside the investigation.
     
     
    LUCAS REACHED UP and turned off his over-the-shoulder reading lamp, and closed his eyes in the now darkened den.
    Once, years before, he’d been a Minneapolis police lieutenant loosely assigned to special investigations and intelligence work. At the time, a serial killer simply known in the newspapers as the “Maddog” had been killing women around the Twin Cities, in particularly brutal ways. The case turned on a pistol that had been stolen from an evidence box in the