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the dumber the athletes get,” Sloan said. “By the time you get to the Midwest, tennis players are dumber’n a box of rocks. Across the Rockies? Don’t even ask. The tennis players out there are not so much human, as dirt.”
    “Dirt?”
    “Dirt.”
    “Something else I didn’t know,” Lucas said.
    “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