Free Buried Prey by John Sandford Page B

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 the store: he waggled his fingers at Frazier, who frowned and asked, “Me?”
    “I’m a police officer. I gotta talk to you right now—it’s urgent,” he told her.
    “Me? About what?”
    “About a transient over in Minneapolis. I was told you could help me,” Lucas said.
    “By who?”
    “Dave Pirner. He’s a friend of mine.”
    “Dave’s a friend?” Now she was interested. She excused herself from the Hmong ladies, and they moved into an aisle of canned goods.
    “I’m looking for a street guy who goes around bouncing a basketball,” Lucas said. “We think he might know something about the two girls who disappeared last night. We really need to talk to him.”
    “You think he took them?”
    “We heard some things in that direction,” Lucas said. “And we found an old camp of his, under a tree . . .”
    “. . . off West Mississippi. I’ve been there,” she said.
    “So you know him?”
    “Yeah, but why do you think he’s involved?” she asked.
    “Something a guy said, a guy we think knows him. Then, we were digging around under that tree, and we found a bunch of porn, with really young girls.”
    “Ah, boy,” she said. She turned away from him and scratched her nose, working through the equities, decided, and said, “Okay . . . okay. His name’s Terry Scrape. S-c-r-a-p-e. He was born around here, and he comes back in the summer. Most of the year he’s out in California. Los Angeles. He’s schizophrenic, he thinks he’s in the movie business, he thinks he’s an actor, he sees movie stars everywhere. The last time I saw him, he was into Harrison Ford and Michael J. Fox.”
    Lucas was making notes: “Any history of violence?”
    “Not as far as I know—but you guys have busted him a bunch of times on marijuana charges,” Frazier said. “Using, not dealing. Self-medicating. He does carry a knife, but most of them do, somewhere.”
    “He never threatened you, or anything?”
    She shook her head: “No. He’ll freak out sometimes. It’s like . . . he has nightmares when he’s awake. He might hurt somebody inadvertently, but he’s not a bad guy. He’s suspicious, he’s paranoid at times. He won’t take his meds, they mess him up too bad.”
    “Where is he now?” Lucas asked.
    “He’s got a room. He had a room—I haven’t seen him for a few weeks, so he’s probably still there, or he’s gone back to LA. Anyway, the big corporations—Target, Norwest—got their employees to kick in money to house the homeless, and he got one of the spaces. A Target employee handles the money and finds the rooms.”
    She fumbled in her purse, took out a worn black address book, paged through it and said, “The Target guy’s name is Mark Chakkour. . . .” She spelled the name and gave Lucas a phone number.
    She had a few more details, and Lucas thanked her, got a phone number, used the phone in the back of the store to call Chakkour. He caught him on his way to a late lunch: “Yeah, we’ve got a Terry Scrape. What’d he do?”
    “We don’t know if he did anything, but we need to locate him,” Lucas said. After a little more evasion, he got an address, and headed that way, and thought about his next step.
    He was tempted to go in himself, just as he had been in the morning; no guts, no glory. On the other hand, Daniel already suspected that Lucas had held back information so he could work it himself. Maybe it was time to show some team spirit.
     
     
    SCRAPE’S APARTMENT WAS in south Minneapolis, a mile west of the river, not far from Lucas’s apartment in Uptown—a neighborhood mostly inhabited by people recently out of school, and working downtown. Lucas spotted the house, counted the mailboxes on the front porch, then went out to a shopping