Free Buried Prey by John Sandford Page A

talented.”
    Dave Pirner was the lead singer in the band Soul Asylum. He was a couple years younger than Lucas. They’d met in the rock clubs along Minneapolis’s Hennepin Avenue when Lucas was at the university. Pirner slid into the booth: “So what’re you up to?”
    “I’m working on that thing with the missing girls,” Lucas said. “Plainclothes, for a while, anyway.”
    “Read about the kids,” Pirner said. He waved at a waitress. “They just take off? Or they get kidnapped?”
    “Kidnapped, I think,” Lucas said. “Some people say they fell in the river.” Pirner made a rude noise, and Lucas nodded: “That’s what I think.”
    The waitress came over and said to Pirner, “I love your hair,” and Lucas leaned into the conversation, said, “Thanks, I cut it myself,” and she rolled her eyes, and Pirner grinned at her and said, “Gimme a Grain Belt. He’s paying for it.”
    “I’m not paying for a Grain Belt,” Lucas said. “Give him a Leinie’s.”
    They sat and drank beer, talked about Prince and Purple Rain, and Morris Day’s feud with Prince, and about Madonna getting hot.
    Pirner said Prince had come into Seventh Street with his entourage, and, “There was a bodyguard about the size of a mountain; he went through the crowd like a ship going through the ocean”; and he said Prince was interesting but “it’s not really our kind of music, you know?” He said he was working on a rerelease of the first Soul Asylum album.
    Lucas told him about the investigation of the missing girls.
    “No suspects?”
    “I’m trying to find a guy,” Lucas said. He told him about the schizophrenic with the basketball.
    Pirner leaned across the table and pointed the end of his Leinie’s bottle at Lucas. “There’s this chick . . . what’s her name? She’s kind of a groupie.”
    “Groupie for who?”
    “For us, wickdick.”
    “Now I know you’re lying. . . .”
    “Karen . . . Blue hair. I’ll think of it. She’s a social worker for somebody. Some foundation or something. She knows every goddamn street guy in Minneapolis. She practically lives with them. There’s a guy, she. . .” He straightened and snapped his fingers. “Karen, uh, Foster . Or Frazier . Something like that. Frazier, I’m pretty sure. Works for some foundation, but she went to the U for a long time. Like, years. Blue hair. She’s at every show.”
    Lucas scrawled the name on a piece of paper. “I’ll talk to her. We got nothin’ else.”
    “She’ll know the guy,” Pirner said. “I swear to Jesus.”
    They finished a second beer, Pirner said they had another gig coming up, and Lucas said he’d be there. Pirner was meeting a couple of friends at Rifle Sport to do some shooting and invited Lucas to come along.
    “I can’t, man, I got this thing going, I can’t stop,” Lucas said, standing up.
    He dropped some money on the table and Pirner headed out. Lucas went to the back of the bar to find a phone. He checked through a couple of supervisors in the welfare department and found a guy who told him that Karen Frazier worked for Lutheran Social Services.
    Lucas got an address and headed that way.

    A WOMAN at Lutheran Social Services told him that Karen Frazier was on the street somewhere, and when Lucas became persistent, went through the offices until she found somebody who said that Frazier planned to talk to a group of Hmong women about cultural violence, at an Asian grocery store in St. Paul.
    Xiong’s was on University Avenue, a near-slum of aging stores and small mechanical shops, now in the process of becoming a Hmong shopping district. Xiong’s had once been a drugstore, then a secondhand shop, then abandoned, and now was back as a supermarket that smelled funny to Lucas’s Western nose; an earth smell, like unfamiliar root vegetables. He found Frazier, with her blue hair, at the center of a group of Hmong women.
    Lucas was a foot taller than any of them, and attracted some attention as he worked through