Buried Prey

away.
    “One of those coffee-serving things,” Carter said. “You know, that go around in circles.”
    Lucas studied him for a moment, then said, “You got no idea what a chiffonier is.”
    “That’s true.”
    “But I liked the way you handled it. That strip-search line,” Lucas said. “Took it right out of them.”
    “Like I said: keep the peace,” Carter said.
    “Really. You shoulda been a cop or something.”
     
     
    AT FIVE O’CLOCK, Lucas spotted a man named Justice Johnson, who’d beaten up his old lady once too often; a warrant had been issued. They corralled him in the recessed entry of a locksmith’s shop. He’d been eating a raw onion, as though it were an apple, and it bounced away into the gutter as they cuffed him. He didn’t bother to fight, and bitched and moaned about his woman, who, he said, did nothing but pick at him.
    “Bitch said I’m a dumbass,” Johnson said from the backseat of the squad. He was breathing out onion fumes, which were not diminished in any way by his overindulgence in Drakkar Noir.
    “You are a dumbass, Justice,” Carter said.
    “Hey, she ain’t supposed to say it,” Johnson said. “She’s supposed to take my side, but she never does. All she does is bitch, you ain’t done this, you ain’t done that. . . .”
    “So you beat her up,” Lucas said.
    “I slapped her.”
    “Broke her nose,” said Carter.
    “Didn’t mean to do that.”
    “Shut up, dumbass,” Lucas said. “And quit breathing on me.”
    He didn’t. He sat looking out the window for a minute, then said, “I think I’m peeing my pants.”
    “Ah, Jesus, don’t do that,” Lucas said.
    “Gotcha, cop,” Johnson said. He laughed for a minute, going huh-huh-huh, then said, “And my name ain’t Jesus. You think I look like a fuckin’ Puerto Rican?”
    “You shoulda made the cuffs tighter,” Carter said.
    “I shoulda put them around his fuckin’ windpipe,” Lucas said.
    They booked him into the Hennepin County jail.
     
     
    AT TWENTY MINUTES after six o’clock, they took a call on two missing girls. It was still full daylight, and the dispatchers sent them down to the Mississippi, below the I-94 bridge. The two girls had been known to play along the river, although they’d been warned against it by their parents.
    In the three years Lucas had been a cop, he’d seen most of what he’d ever see from a patrol car: murders, actual and attempted, the aftermath of robberies and burglaries, and even a couple of those in progress, as well as suicides, fights, mini-riots, car and foot chases, even an emergency pregnancy run, the woman screaming for help from the backseat. The baby arrived one minute after Lucas put the car at the emergency room door, delivered by a doc and a couple of nurses right on the gurney. The baby, rumor had it, had been named Otto, after the car ride.
    Carter said, “That’s always the rumor. That they called him Otto.”
    “It’s a pretty good rumor,” Lucas said. “I’ve been telling it to everybody.”
    There’d been a couple of lost kids over the years, but they’d been quickly found. These two had vanished between four and five o’clock, when kids were walking home for dinner, not heading down to the river.
    They parked the car and headed over to the slope down to the Mississippi. The river at that point was a few hundred yards across, a sullen dark green, with streaks of foam from the falls just up the river. The bank down to the water was steep and overgrown with brush, cut by slippery dirt paths down the slope worn by walkers, marked with thrown-away food wrappers, and here and there, a wad of toilet paper back in the bushes.
    A concrete walk ran along the river’s edge, leading both north and south, with an informal beach area where Lucas and Carter came down to the river. A fat woman in shorts was wading in the water up to her knees, and a kid in cutoff jeans was farther out, with a spin-fishing rod, casting out into deeper water. A few more people were scattered along the edge of the water, sitting, wading, or swimming.
    None of them had seen the girls.
    They’d finished talking with people at the beach when they were joined by cops from another squad, and the four of them split up, two north and two south, up and down the Mississippi, from the access path that the girls would have taken to the water. Three hundred yards downstream Lucas and Carter came upon a group of gays, at the gay beach. One of the men said that they hadn’t