“Well, you were a hockey player.”
They pushed through the gate on a chain-link fence, toward a clapboard house with a narrow front porch with a broken-down couch sitting on it, and a light in one window. Sloan pointed his flashlight into the side yard, at a circle of dirt around an iron stake, and said, “Bad dog.”
“Could be a horseshoes pit,” Lucas said.
Sloan laughed. “So you go first.”
Lucas moved up to the door and knocked, and a dog went crazy behind the door.
“Bad dog,” Sloan said behind him. “Sounds like one of those bull terriers.”
Nobody answered for a minute, then two. Lucas pounded again, and a light came on at the back of the house. Another minute, and a man appeared, opening the door just an inch, looked at them over a heavy chain lock. “Who’re you?”
Sloan explained, and the man started shaking his head halfway through the explanation. “I didn’t see no white girls doin’ nothin’,” he said. The dog was snuffling at the man’s pant leg, its toenails scratching anxiously on the linoleum. “I gotta go to bed. I gotta get up at five o’clock.”
Walking back down the sidewalk, Sloan asked, “You hear what happened to Park Brubaker?” Brubaker was a Korean-American detective, now suspended and looking at time on federal drug charges.
“Yeah. Dumb shit.”
“He had problems,” Sloan said.
“I got problems,” Lucas said. “I don’t go robbing people for their Apple Jacks.”
They came to a door on Thirty-fifth Avenue, answered by a heavyset white man with a Hemingway beard and a sweaty forehead and an oversized nose. A fat nose. He said, “We didn’t see nothin’ at all. Except what was on TV.” A woman standing behind him said, “Tell them about John.”
“Who’s John?” Lucas asked.
“Dude down at Kenny’s,” the man said, with reluctance. “Don’t know his last name.”
“He’s got a suspect,” the woman said.
The man scowled at her, and Lucas pressed: “So what about John?”
“Dude said that there was a crazy guy probably did it,” the man said. “Crazy guy’s been running around the neighborhood.”
“You know the crazy guy?” Sloan asked.
“No. We heard John talking about him.”
“We’ve seen him, walking around, though. The crazy guy,” the woman said.
“Did John say why he thought the crazy guy did it?” Lucas asked.
“He said the guy was always lookin’, and never gettin’ any. Said the guy had a record, you know, for sex stuff.”
“He call the cops?” Sloan asked.
“I dunno. I don’t know the guy. I don’t know the crazy guy, either, except that I see him on the street sometimes.”
“Gotta call it in,” Sloan said.
He had a handset with him, and walked back down the sidewalk while Lucas talked to the man, and especially past him, to the woman. He asked, “What do you know about John? We really need to find him. If he knows anything… I mean, these two girls might not have much time…”
He got a description-John was an overweight man of average height, with an olive complexion and dark hair that curled over his forehead. “Italian-looking,” the woman said.
Lucas said, “You mean good-looking?”
“No. He’s too fat. But he’s dark, and he wears those skimpy T-shirts-the kind Italians wear, with the straps over the shoulders? — under regular shirts that he wears open. He’s got this gold chain.”
The last time they’d seen him, he was wearing jeans and a blue long-sleeved shirt, open over the wife- beater. She added that he liked some of the girls who came in, and she put a little spin on the word “girls.”
“You mean, working girls,” Lucas said. “I didn’t know they hung at Kenny’s.”
“They don’t, but there’s that massage place across the street,” she said. “They come over, sometimes, when they don’t have clients. I don’t like to see them in there, myself. I mean, what if somebody thought I was one of them.”
The guy said, “I wouldn’t mind a massage,” and the woman punched him on the arm, and he said, “Ouch.”
They didn’t have much else. A moment later, Sloan came back up the walk. “Cherry and McGuire are coming over,” he said.
“What for? We got what there is,” Lucas said.
“Because they don’t think we got what there is,” Sloan said. “We’re supposed to wait until they get here, then knock on some more doors.”
“Fuck that,” Lucas said. “We need to get over to Kenny’s.”
“Closed two hours ago,” the man said.
“Might still be somebody there,” Lucas said.
Everybody shrugged, and Sloan said, “They want us to finish knockin’ on the doors.”
Cherry and McGuire showed up, two fortyish veterans, and took over. Lucas and Sloan moved on down the block, and got nowhere, Lucas fuming about being knocked off the only positive hint they’d gotten.
“We did the work, man, they oughta let us take it.”
“Get used to it,” Sloan said. “Takes about four years before you’re a pro. That’s what they’re telling me. I got three to go.”
“Fuck a bunch of four years,” Lucas said. He hadn’t told the older detectives about the massage parlor girls who might know John. Let them find it out themselves.
They worked for two more hours, and Sloan finally quit at the end of his shift and went home to his wife. “I don’t even know what we’re doing,” he said. “We think the kidnapper’ll come to the door and confess?”
“Somebody must have seen something,” Lucas said. “Seen the kids getting in a car. Seen them going through a door. They can’t just go away.”
“Somebody would have called, if they were gonna talk,” Sloan said. “When we found that blouse… we should have looked around at the baddest guy on the block, and squeezed his pimple head until he coughed them up.”
Lucas shook his head. “That blouse wasn’t right.”
“What?”
“Wasn’t right. Why in the hell would you throw a blouse out a car window? I can see throwing the girl out, if nobody was looking. But why would you throw a blouse out? Tell me one reason.”
Sloan thought for a moment and said, “The guy killed her, took her blouse as a trophy. The bodies are already in a dumpster somewhere, and he was driving around with the blouse over his face, smelling the chick, getting off on it. At some point, he gets tired of it, or can’t smell her anymore, so he throws it out the window.”
Lucas grinned at him and said, “That’s perverted. I kinda like it.”
The night was still warm, for August, with a hint of rain in the still air. They drove back to Lucas’s place in Sloan’s Dodge, arms out the side windows, Lucas thinking how quiet the city was, and for all they knew, somewhere in its quiet heart, two little girls were being tortured by a monster.
Sloan dropped him, and went on his way. Lucas went inside, got a beer, sat at the kitchen table and looked at a blue three-ring binder stuffed with paper. In school, he’d lived in an apartment inhabited mostly by nerds from the computer center. Despite his jock status, he had been pulled into some of their role-playing games. Then he wrote a module, which had impressed the nerds, who said it was as good as the commercial modules.
Talking around with the computer guys, he developed an idea for a football-based strategy game, similar to the war games popular in the seventies, but that would be played on a computer. A computer guy promised to program it, if Lucas could write the scenarios. The work had been harder than he’d expected, and had been delayed when he’d had to take a course in statistics: he wanted the game to be real.
He sat and looked at paper, which, after the day hunting for the girls, looked like silly paper. Games. Something awful was happening outside, and he was sitting at the kitchen table looking at silly paper.
