Buried Prey Part 24

12.

The Jones girls' killer sat in his living room staring blankly at the TV, a rerun of a Seinfeld Seinfeld show, which he'd seen twenty times, the one about the Soup n.a.z.i. He was dead tired, sat drinking a Budweiser, eating corn chips with cream cheese, trying to blink away the weariness as he waited for the old man to show up. show, which he'd seen twenty times, the one about the Soup n.a.z.i. He was dead tired, sat drinking a Budweiser, eating corn chips with cream cheese, trying to blink away the weariness as he waited for the old man to show up.

The killer was a large man, dressed in oversized jeans and a gray T-s.h.i.+rt; rolls of fat folded over his belt, and trembled like Jell-O down his triceps. He had thick black hair, heavy eyebrows, dark eyes, a small, angular nose, and a petulant, turned-down mouth. A mouth that said that nothing had worked for him: nothing. Ever.

His living room was small and cluttered. Off to one side, in a den not much larger than a closet, a half-dozen rack-mounted servers pushed the temperature in the room up into the eighties. He could take eighty-three or eighty-four, but any higher than that, he couldn't sleep. He was right at that level, he thought, and sure enough, the air conditioner kicked on.

And started eating his money.

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NOT THAT he could sleep anyway.

He'd never slept more than five or six hours a night, except when he was popping Xanax, and that might get him seven hours for a week or so. He suspected he needed eight or nine hours, long term, to stay alive. He wasn't getting it. He'd get up tired, be tired all day, go to bed tired, and then lie there, staring at the dark.

He suffered from anxiety, and felt that he had a right to. He had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, was grossly overweight, and had a set of vicious, burning hemorrhoids that might someday put him on an operating table.

And now the Jones girls had come back to haunt him.

Then there was the old man.

THE KILLER, back in the day, had been an almost-college-graduate; and then, after college, he'd worked at a half-dozen jobs in electronics. Computers, everybody had said, were the machines of the future, and people with a computer education were a.s.sured of success.

The reality, the killer found out, was that a half-dozen courses in electronics would get you the same status and income as a TV repairman-not even that, after people began to accept the idea that computers were disposable. Then, they simply threw them away, rather than fix them when they broke.

He trudged around the edge of the computer business for ten years, and finally, and almost inevitably, given his deepest interests, he wound up selling p.o.r.n. He ran a half-dozen p.o.r.n sites out of his den, collecting barely enough to pay for food, taxes, and the mortgage. p.o.r.n supposedly was a mainstay of the Internet, an easy way to get rich. Maybe it was, but if so, where was his his money? Back at the beginning, when the Net was just starting up, he'd worked hard at it, gathering hundreds of thousands of p.o.r.no shots from around the world, plus thousands of short videos. money? Back at the beginning, when the Net was just starting up, he'd worked hard at it, gathering hundreds of thousands of p.o.r.no shots from around the world, plus thousands of short videos.

Now, he let the servers do the work. He had a computer kid over at the U who kept the site going-turning over the daily offerings so they didn't recur too quickly, and stealing videos and photos from other sites when he could-in return for free access to the p.o.r.n for himself and his friends, and a hundred dollars a week. The Jones killer did the books, processing the credit card numbers as they trickled in, a few every day, but, it seemed, fewer every day.

He had money worries.

The p.o.r.n brought in two grand a month, after expenses. Nothing, really.

He made the rest of his money on eBay, reselling almost anything he could turn up that might be of value to somebody, somewhere. Over the years, he'd developed an eye for moneymakers collecting dust in the back of junk stores; knew the back rooms of every junk store between the Ozarks and the Canadian line, from the Mississippi to the Big Horns. His latest score had been a bunch of silk kimonos that turned up in a bundle of rags from j.a.pan. He bought sixty of them for twelve dollars each, sold them for an average of fifty to a hundred, depending on color and condition.

Enough to keep going for another couple of months.

But he needed money for his travel, and he needed to travel. The need was growing. He really would like to go first cla.s.s, because he'd become large enough that tourist cla.s.s was starting to hurt, especially on the long flights.

THE KILLER WAS a borderline manic-depressive, currently sliding down the slope into depression. That hadn't been helped when the cops turned over the bas.e.m.e.nt of his old house by the university, and found the bodies of the Jones girls.

He was mostly worried about the neighbors from back then. He'd never been a social b.u.t.terfly, but still, some might remember him, if the cops could find them. He didn't worry too much about the landlord, who was dead, and had been for years; and he'd always paid the rent in cash, for a ten percent discount, which the landlord had recouped by not paying taxes on the cash.

In his manic phases, the killer had spent twenty years running his p.o.r.n sites and collecting both junk for resale, and incautious young girls. He'd taken seven of them between the middle eighties and the middle nineties, and once kept one for almost a month before she died. Three, including the Jones girls, had come from Minnesota. The others had come from Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois. The Illinois girl had been an experiment, a bone-thin black girl from East St. Louis, taken to see if black girls were s.e.xually different, like he'd heard. They weren't, and he decided he didn't like black. He cut her throat the same night he took her, and threw her body in a ditch off the Mississippi up in Granite City.

Then, in the middle nineties, he'd discovered the s.e.x tours to Thailand.

You could get whatever you wanted in Thailand, if you had the right contacts. No fuss, no muss, no risk . . . and he liked the little yellow ones.

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HEADACHE.

He stood up, went into the bathroom, pulled off six feet of toilet paper, folded it into a pad, and used it to pat sweat off his forehead and the top of his chest. The house smelled, he thought. Pizza and beer and black beans and beer-and-black-bean farts. He'd open the window, but it was just too d.a.m.n hot.

He went into the second bedroom, where he kept the junk, and retrieved a pair of antique wooden Indian clubs. He'd had them up on eBay for $99, but hadn't gotten any bids; he'd wait for a week or two, and put them back up, under a different name, for $69 OBO.

The clubs, originally used in exercise routines imported from India to Europe, and then from Europe to the U.S. at the end of the nineteenth century, were nineteen inches long and weighed almost exactly two pounds each-about the weight of a baseball bat, but less than two-thirds the length of a bat.

Shaped vaguely like bowling pins, they were made to swing, and to juggle, and to build flexibility and muscle.

He put them on the carpet under the couch table.

A LIGHT FLASHED across his window, and he went to the front window and peeked out between the drape and the wall. The old man was getting out of his Cadillac. The killer watched as he stood in the driveway for a minute, scratching his a.s.s-the hemorrhoids were another genetic gift pa.s.sed down through the family-and then plodded up toward the door.

Plodding, yet another gift. They all plodded.

The killer went to the door and pulled it open. The old man came in, sniffed, looked around, then looked at the killer and almost shook his head. "What you up to?" he asked.

"Nothing much," the killer said. "Sit down. You want a beer? I got Budweiser and Budweiser."

"Yeah, I'll take a Budweiser." The old man dropped on the couch, looked at the TV. "What's this s.h.i.+t?"

"Seinfeld," the killer said from the kitchen. He twisted the top off a Budweiser, brought it in, handed the bottle to the old man, who took a hit and said, "Hot outside."

"So what's up?" the killer asked. He sat on a beanbag chair opposite the couch. "You sounded a little cranked up on the phone."

"You remember way back, twenty, twenty-five years ago, there were these two girls kidnapped in Minneapolis? Disappeared? The Jones girls? A tramp got shot, a b.u.m, a couple days later, found his fingerprints on a box full of the kids' clothes."

The killer shook his head. "I don't remember it."

"You oughta read the papers," the old man said. "You were pretty interested in it, at the time. We were talking about it every night."

"Okay, I'm thinking I remember that," the killer said. "The tramp was shot in a cave?"

The old man tipped a bottle toward him. "That's it. The thing is, they found the girls' bodies yesterday. They were putting some condos up, over off University, digging up some old houses, and they found them under the bas.e.m.e.nt. Apparently, whoever did it buried them under the house, and poured concrete back on top of them."

Well, not Exactly, but pretty close, the killer thought. "I don't know," he said. "I don't read the papers, much."

The old man looked at him, his eyes a watery, fading blue. "The thing is, the house is right near that place you used to live. I thought . . . you had that problem back when you were teaching school, you know, and if they start doing some research, there could be some questions coming at you."

"Well, Jesus, I didn't have anything to do with that," the killer said, letting the impatience ride up in his voice. "They had fingerprints on the b.u.m, right? It's all settled."

"Not all settled," the old man said. "A couple of the old guys on the force say Marcy Sherrill, she runs Homicide . . . they're saying she doesn't think the b.u.m could've done it. He didn't have a car, so the question is, how'd he get them all the way across town from wherever he picked them up? Anyway, there's a guy named Davenport, works with the BCA. He was on it back then, and I hear he's all over it again. Between, they're gonna push it to the wall. They'll be talking to every swinging d.i.c.k who lived within a mile of that house."

"Ah, man," the killer said. He stood up, brushed his hand through his long hair, said, "This is just what I needed." He wandered around behind the couch and picked up one of the Indian clubs.

The old man said, "I don't think you have-"

AND THE KILLER HIT him in the temple with the club, a long flat snapping swing that crushed the old man's skull and killed him before his body hit the floor.

The killer took another hit on the bottle of Budweiser, looked at the body folded on the floor. He'd never much liked the old man, not even as a kid. As to this discussion, he'd seen it coming; he'd heard it in the whining tone of the old man's voice, when he'd called earlier in the evening. And once the old man knew for sure, he'd be downtown talking to his pals on the force.

No way that could happen.

THE KILLER SIGHED, went over to the body, and dug the car keys out of the old man's pocket. Took his wallet, his change, grabbed the body by the s.h.i.+rt collar, and dragged it down the stairs. No blood to speak of. Have to find a permanent place to put him . . .

He felt not a single spark of regret. He'd noticed that when he killed the girls-he regretted not having the s.e.x, of course, but the killing, that wasn't a problem. Once they were dead, he rarely thought of them again.

Now he hoisted the old man's body into the freezer, dropped him on top of a dwindling pile of white-wrapped deer burger, and packages of frozen corn. When the old man was inside, he reached beneath him and swept the food packages out from under, folding and refolding the limp body until he'd gotten it as compact as he could. That done, he pushed the packages of venison and corn over the body. Didn't really hide it, but maybe if somebody just glanced inside, they wouldn't see it. Maybe. Have to get rid of it, but no rush. If the cops showed up and looked in his freezer, he was already finished.

And as for the final disposal, he'd had some experience with that.

The killer was tired. Really tired. While he'd waited for the old man to show, he'd worked out his next steps, and those had made him even more tired. Nevertheless, they had to be taken.

He went back up the stairs, picked up the old man's hat, put it on his head, turned off his porch light, and when he was sure there was n.o.body out in the street, walked out to the Caddy, got inside, and backed it down the drive.

Really tired.

FOUR HOURS LATER, at ten minutes before one in the morning, with the lights of Tower, Minnesota, in the distance, he took a hard left out to Lake Vermilion. The old man had a cabin there, one of a line of small cabins on the south sh.o.r.e of a peninsula. He pulled up the drive next to the cabin, went inside, turned on a light, waited a bit, and turned it off. Realized he was about to fall asleep: set an alarm clock for three o'clock in the morning, and two hours later, was knocked out of a sound sleep.

Getting off the couch was painful, but he did it. Moving as quietly as he could in the dark, he went down to the dock, lifted the kayak that sat on the dock into the sixteen-foot Lund that was tied next to it, then untied the Lund and, using the kayak paddle, began to paddle out into the lake.

The night sky was clear, with twenty million stars twinkling down at him. The lake was flat, and quiet, other than the odd plonks plonks and and plunks plunks you always heard around lakes. He saw one other boat, a long way north, running at some speed from left to right, and then out of sight. Vermilion was a big place, and it was easy to get lost. . . . you always heard around lakes. He saw one other boat, a long way north, running at some speed from left to right, and then out of sight. Vermilion was a big place, and it was easy to get lost. . . .

He paddled for ten minutes, a few hundred yards offsh.o.r.e, then fired up the four-stroke engine, which was relatively quiet, and motored another half-mile out. Somewhere out here was a reef, he thought, where the old man often went walleye fis.h.i.+ng. Didn't matter too much . . .

Black as pitch; only a few lights on sh.o.r.e to guide him. He dropped the old man's hat in the boat, lifted the kayak over the side, and eased into it. When he was settled, he horsed the boat around until it pointed back out into the lake, pushed the tiller more or less to center, and s.h.i.+fted the engine back into forward. The boat puttered off. He watched it for a minute, then turned the kayak back to sh.o.r.e. A half-hour later, he lifted the kayak back onto the dock and walked in the dark back up to the cabin.

He'd been out an hour. Couldn't risk any more sleep. He locked the cabin, went to the garage, opened the side access door, and wheeled the dirt bike out onto the gravel. Closed the door, and started pus.h.i.+ng the bike up the drive toward the road.

Heavier work than it looked, and he was sweating heavily by the time he got to the blacktop. Once there, he fired it up, and took off.

It'd be a long trip back to the Cities.

And he was so tired . . . so dead tired.

13.

Lucas got up early the next morning, shaking out of bed as the Jones killer hit the northern suburbs on his bike; neither would ever know about that. But the killer was hurting. To ride a dirt bike from Vermilion to the Twin Cities was absurd, even for a regular rider. The killer wasn't a regular rider, and on top of that, he was fat. He felt at times like the bike's seat was about three feet up his b.u.t.t.

When he finally got back to his house, he pushed the bike into the garage at the back and staggered inside, left his clothes in a heap and lurched into a shower. He had saddle sores, he thought; he couldn't see them, but he could feel them, flat burns on the inside of his legs. As to the hemorrhoids . . .

LUCAS, ON THE OTHER HAND, was completely comfortable, and perhaps even self-satisfied, especially after he went out to recover the Star Tribune Star Tribune. As Ignace had suggested, his story was on the front page: "Cop Says Jones Killer Probably Murdered More Girls." Excellent. Marcy would have a spontaneous hysterectomy when she read that, and the Minneapolis cops might actually start working the case.

He left the house an hour later with three names and addresses written in his notebook-the three former ma.s.sage-parlor women, Lucy Landry, Dorcas Ryan, and Mary Ann Ang, whose last name was now Morgan. He'd interviewed the first two on his own, back in the eighties, and the third one with Del. He hadn't remembered any of their names or what they looked like, but recognized Dorcas Ryan when she opened the screen door of her St. Paul Park home and he introduced himself. She said, "Man, it's been a while."