Buried Prey

20

Lucas got directions to Hanson’s cabin from a deputy sheriff, who told him that the cabin was temporarily sealed “until we figure out for sure what happened to him. If he doesn’t show up in the next week or so, we’ll let the relatives in.”

“I need to get in,” Lucas said. “Can you guys fix it?”

“When are you coming up?”

“I’m on my way,” Lucas said into his cell phone. “I’m just clearing the Cities… so probably three and a half hours.”

“More like four. How you coming? You been here before?”

“Yeah. I’ll take 35 to 33 to 53 and then up 169 into Tower,” Lucas said.

“You want to stop at Peyla, that’s a crossroads just short of Tower, where 169 hits Highway 1 and County Road 77. You want to turn left on 77…”

Hanson, the deputy said, lived on a peninsula that stuck out into Lake Vermilion fifteen or twenty road miles north of Tower. Lucas took down the directions and said, “See you in three hours and a bit.”

“More like four,” the deputy said.

More like four; Lucas went a little deeper into the Porsche.

Thought about Marcy all the way up: couldn’t get her out of his head. He’d be driving along, looking at cars or the landscape, and he’d get a flash of Marcy, something they’d lived through. The flashes were as clear and present as if he were still living them. He said a short prayer that he didn’t outlive Weather, or any of his children.

Like most smart people, Lucas was able to stand back from himself, at least at times, to examine thoughts, motives, feelings. He knew that he was running out of control. He felt pointed toward Fell’s death, however that had to happen: he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to perfectly control himself when he came into Fell’s presence. When he imagined a confrontation with Fell, he could feel his blood pressure rising, could feel the adrenaline kicking into his bloodstream, could feel the anger surging up to his throat.

He realized he was having a hard time recognizing that Marcy was gone, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, and that killing Fell would not answer the problem he was having with her death, would not bring her back, and could have devastating consequences for himself and his family.

The little man at the back of his mind could whisper all of that to him: and yet, that realization had little effect on the urge for revenge.

Highway 77 was a two-lane blacktop through scrubby tamaracks around the edge of Vermilion, one of the major lakes of northern Minnesota. He called the deputy, whose name was Clark Childress, when he was fifteen minutes south of the crossroads, and Childress said, “Jeez, you made good time, then. See you out there… I’m in Tower, I’ll leave right now.”

Childress either stopped to do something, or was a slow driver, because Lucas caught him right at the crossroads, saw the patrol car make the turn, and fell in behind him. They took 77 through several twists and turns, then onto a narrower blacktopped road, and finally onto a lane barely wider than the patrol car. Childress pulled into a yard beside an older garage, with a green clapboard cabin closer to the lake. A floating dock stuck into the lake, and a kayak was overturned and tied on top of the dock.

Lucas got out of the car at the same time Childress did, and the deputy said, “I thought, God almighty, that can’t be a cop driving a Porsche. That explains the fast trip.” Childress checked out the car, then said, “You got lights.”

“Don’t use them much, but they’ve been handy a time or two,” Lucas said. “Took a little heat from the highway patrol a couple of years ago.”

“Yup, those guys are your eager beavers when it comes to spirited driving,” Childress said. Then he laughed, a short little bark, and said, “I heard that ‘spirited driving’ thing on that British car show.”

“No sign of Hanson’s body?” Lucas asked.

“Not yet. His daughter is at a motel down in Tower. I told her you were stopping by; she’s gonna come over, too. She’s interested in why you’re interested.”

Lucas nodded. “Okay. The fact is, I’m running down a thin thread on the killing of an old friend of mine in Minneapolis, a detective named Marcy Sherrill.”

“Read about that,” Childress said. “That’s… pretty awful. You think it’s connected here?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, I’m running down a thread. Where’s Hanson’s boat?”

“Here, in the garage. I got the key.” He jangled a ring of keys, and led the way to the garage door.

The garage was no more than an old weathered shed, just big enough to keep snow off the boat and a collection of lawn care equipment, including a riding mower and a rototiller. There were axes and hoes and weed whips, a big block of wood, a chain saw sitting on a shelf; and it all smelled pleasantly of gasoline, oil, and grass.

The boat was an ordinary, ten-or fifteen-year-old aluminum fishing boat, a Lund with a red stripe down the side, scratched up like most fishing boats, from banging into docks. It was small for the lake, but perfectly usable, especially for walleye fishing, which is mostly done sitting down. As Virgil had said, the motor was nothing you’d want to pee over, and the boat-bottom was curved enough that peeing over the side would also be fairly unsteady, especially with the motor running.

As he was looking at the boat, Lucas gave Childress a brief explanation of Hanson’s connection to the Jones case. He concluded with, “We know that the Jones killer is still active, and that he killed Marcy. We know that Hanson died the day after the Jones girls’ bodies were found.”

“That’s a pretty heavy coincidence,” Childress said.

“Yes, it is. But it could be nothing but that,” Lucas said.

The boat had nothing for Lucas, except the feeling that falling out of that particular boat, on a quiet lake, would be stupid.

“He got any fishing buddies around here?” Lucas asked.

“Two guys…” Childress took a little paper notebook out of his pocket, thumbed it, and said, “A guy name Tony Cole and another guy named Bill Kushner. They’re golfing buddies of his, and they fish together. Couple of older guys, like him. They live out here… down the way.”

“Ex-cops?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know about Kushner, except that he’s retired. Cole used to work at UPS out of Duluth. He’s retired, too.”

“They think he fell out of the boat?”

“They think it’s possible, but they don’t know,” Childress said.

“You know if they’re up here?”

“Yeah, they are. I can take you around after we get done here,” the deputy said.

“I appreciate that,” Lucas said.

As he spoke, they heard the crunch of a car’s tires on gravel, and Childress said, “That’s probably Miz Sedakis, that’s Hanson’s daughter.”

“He got any other kids?”

“Got a son. He was up here, I guess, I didn’t meet him.”

They walked outside, and found a fortyish woman getting out of a gunmetal-gray Lexus RX350; she was tall, and fleshy, with blond-tinted hair and oversized sunglasses.

“Clark,” she said. And to Lucas, “You’re Agent Davenport?”

“Yes.” They shook hands, and she asked, “Why are you up here?”

He told her, succinctly, about Hanson’s work on the Jones case, and then his disappearance the day after they were found. “It’s probably a coincidence, but it’s an odd coincidence. When we were doing the investigation, we had guys running all over the place, on the smallest pieces of information. On rumors. Anything. I wondered if maybe he talked to somebody, who might have remembered.”

Sedakis’s hand went to her throat: “You mean… you think somebody might have killed him?”

“I’ve got no reason to think that, except for the coincidence,” Lucas said. “I thought I’d come up here, talk to some of his friends, see if he said anything to anyone.”

“I certainly remember the Jones thing, even though I was young. I must’ve been in tenth grade,” Sedakis said. “I remember he was working day and night. We used to talk about it. He never was sure that the street person did it. He said there was some other detective down there who thought the street person might have been framed, and I think he half believed that.”

Lucas said, “That was me,” and then thought, I never saw that in Hanson: never saw any skepticism about Scrape. And he asked, “Did he say anything about it after the bodies were found?”

“I hadn’t talked to him for a couple of weeks before this accident. We live down in Farmington, and he was up in Golden Valley. Most of the time in the summer, he was up here. So… no. I guess ‘no’ is the answer.”

“When did he go back to the Cities?” Lucas asked.

“He didn’t actually keep us up to date on his travels. He was up here most of the summer.”

“He went back the night before he disappeared,” Childress said. “We got that from his golf buddies.”

“So… he went down the night the Jones girls were found.”

Childress nodded. “And turned around the next day.”

Lucas asked to see the house. Childress took them in, asked them not to touch anything. Hanson had inherited the place from his father, who’d bought four acres on the lakeshore when the buying was good, back in the fifties. They’d had a trailer on the spot for twenty years, with the lakeshore prices rising all the time, and finally sold three of the acres for enough to put up the two-bedroom log cabin.

The cabin was well-kept, with two upstairs loft bedrooms, for kids or guests, reached by a nearly vertical stairway, with another small bedroom tucked in the back of the first floor. There were two small bathrooms, both with showers, neither with a tub. The kitchen was separated from the living area by a breakfast bar; the living room featured leather furniture facing an oversized television, fishing photos, a desk in a corner with a computer, hooked to a satellite antenna.

“Nice place; he kept it well,” Lucas said. He pointed at three bright red Stearns life jackets hung on pegs by the door. “Life jackets,” he said.

Childress said, “Yeah.”

“We had some happy times up here,” Sedakis said. And added, “I guess,” as if she weren’t quite sure. Then, hastily, “I’m more of a city girl.”

A row of family photos sat on the fireplace mantel, including a woman who looked like an older, heavier version of Sedakis, and a dark-haired boy holding a thirty-five-inch northern pike on an old-fashioned through-the-gills rope stringer. “That’s Mom,” Sedakis said, “and my brother, Darrell.”

Darrell, Lucas thought, with a thump of his heart, looked like Fell.

“I think I met Darrell once, maybe ten years back. I bumped into your father and him, coming out of Cecil’s, over in St. Paul… Big guy, black beard?”

“No, no… Darrell’s never had a beard, as far as I know. We’re not close; he’s ten years older than I am, but I see him a couple of times a year. He’s… I don’t think he can grow a beard, actually. He’s one of those guys who’s never done so good with a mustache, even. It comes out kind of scrawny.”

Lucas nodded. “Probably not him, then.”

They went back outside, Sedakis talking about her father’s career and retirement. Lucas learned that he was in reasonably good physical condition, though he was still too heavy. “A friend of mine wondered whether he might have had a heart attack.”

Sedakis shook her head: “My family doesn’t have heart problems. It’s usually kidneys that get us, or cancer.”

They talked a bit longer, and when Lucas ran out of questions, she left, waving as she pulled out into the lane.

“Interesting,” Childress said. “I never worked a murder… You think it could be a murder?”

“I’ll find out, sooner or later. Or his body will come bobbing up, with his fly down.”

“They mostly do that,” Childress said. “But sometimes, they don’t. They just stay down there. Too cold to rot, no bacteria, so they bob around like corks, still wearing their glasses… like a Stephen King story.”

“Jesus,” Lucas said. “You writing a screenplay?”

Hanson’s fishing pals, Cole and Kushner, lived three or four miles away, on another peninsula, and only a few hundred yards from each other. Both of them were in, and Cole volunteered to walk down to Kushner’s place and meet them there.

The two older men looked like the kind of plaid-shirted guys who’d be waved back and forth across the Canadian border without so much as a glance: white, balding, too heavy, too much sun, soft canvas shirts from Orvis, fishing-boat hats, and jeans.

Cole was the taller of the two, and said, “I understand why you’re looking into it-I already told the police that Brian was supposed to be down in the Cities. He coulda come back at the last minute, I suppose, but we play golf in the morning, and he’d usually want to make sure he had a spot.”

“A spot?”

“We play a sixteen-man scramble with a regular crew,” Cole said. “If you want to play, you have to let us know the night before. Otherwise, one of the extras will get put in your place.”

“It’s four hours from the Cities,” Lucas said. “The neighbors saw him pull in around three o’clock, which means he left there late. Maybe he didn’t want to take a chance of waking you up.”

“Maybe not,” Kushner said. “But there’s another problem. He hardly ever went out fishing early in the morning. He’d get up late, have about six cups of coffee and some oatmeal, and then head out to the golf course. We tee off at eleven, five days a week. Then, we’d have a few beers, and head home, and then two or three days a week, down toward dark, we’d head out on the lake, do some walleye fishing. But he hardly ever fished in the morning.”

Childress jumped in: “But if he got up here too late to play golf, he might’ve just decided to hop in the boat. He’d know he wasn’t playing the next day.”

The two men looked at each other, then back at Childress and simultaneously shrugged. “It’s possible,” Cole said.

“Ever see him pee off the back of the boat?” Lucas asked.

“Does a bear shit in the woods?” Kushner replied.

“Over the motor.”

Cole frowned. “Really can’t do that. Have to pee off a corner. You trying to figure out why he fell out… if he did fall out?”

“The boat doesn’t look like one where you’d want to pee over the sides, because of the slanted bottom,” Lucas said. “And the motor was running, and that doesn’t seem likely-”

“My theory is, he hooked up with something big, a big muskie or something, while he was trolling. Maybe he hooked a walleye and the muskie took it, and he stood up and was trying to land him, and the fish came off and he sorta staggered backwards and went over,” Kushner said. “If he fell over.”

“Wouldn’t he kill the motor when he got the hit?” Lucas asked.

“I guess he normally would,” Kushner admitted.

“HE wasn’t trolling,” Cole said suddenly. He looked at his friend. “The boat was going forward.”

“Oh… shoot. That’s right.” Kushner scratched his forehead. “Brian was a back troller. He worked it slow. If the boat was going forward…” He shook his head.

“Interesting,” Lucas said. “There are three red life jackets hanging by the front door. Did he usually wear one?”

Cole said, “If it wasn’t too hot, he would. Law says you gotta have one in the boat, and there are crick dicks all over the place. No offense.”

“Thing is, there wasn’t one in the boat, and if he was wearing one, you think we might’ve found him,” Lucas said.

Kushner said, “Maybe. It’s a big lake. And the way that boat was driving around by itself, we don’t really know where he went over.”

Cole added: “He wasn’t wearing one. He only had three life jackets-couldn’t hardly get more than three people in the boat, so that was what he had. Enough for me’n Kush, if we came over in the evening, to go out.”

There wasn’t much more; on the way out to the cars, Childress asked, “You got what you wanted?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Is there a good motel in town?”

“The casino’s just down the road, that might be best,” he said. “Give me a call if you need anything.”

Childress took off, and Lucas called Del: “You think of anything?”

“I went over to Hanson’s house and asked around. One of his neighbors thinks he saw Hanson leave his house around eight o’clock,” Del said. “He left his lights on, and they were still on when the news got out that he’d fallen out of the boat. One guy, named Arriss, said he was about to go over and look in the windows and make sure he hadn’t had a heart attack or something.”

“So his lights were on… and he wound up here.”

“That seems to be the case. You get anything?”

“Maybe,” Lucas said.

There was still enough light that he could go back to Hanson’s cabin, so he did that. There were close-in cabins on both sides of Hanson’s place, and he walked across the side yard and up the steps to the place on the south, and knocked on the porch door. A woman came to the door, saw him standing there. A worried look crossed her face, and he got the impression that she was alone.

“Yes?”

He held up his ID and said, “I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I was just here a while ago with a Deputy Childress?”

“Oh, okay, I guess I saw you over there.” She came to the screen door. “What’s up?”

“Did you see or hear Mr. Hanson the night he disappeared?”

“I talked to my husband, and we both thought we heard a car come in, late in the night. We were both asleep. The next morning, we saw his car parked there, and then, a while later, the police came in. But that’s about it. We never saw him or anything. We were really shocked when we heard.”

The neighbors on the other side were named Jansen, she said, and she’d seen them come in a half-hour before. “They’ll probably be going out fishing, so if you want to talk to them, you should get over there.”

Mark and Debbie Jansen were eating dinner when he knocked, and Mark Jansen invited him in and offered him a cup of coffee and a chair at the kitchen table, both of which Lucas took. They hadn’t heard Hanson come in, nor had they heard the boat go out. They found out he was missing when the police came around.

“Guess they traced him from the bow number on the boat,” Mark Jansen said.

They chatted for another few minutes, Lucas finished his coffee, took their recommendation that he spend the night at the casino, and left. He was getting in the car when Mark hustled across the lawn and called to him, “Hey-Lucas.”

Lucas waited until he came up, and Jansen said, “Did you go in his garage?”

“Yeah. Looked at the boat,” Lucas said.

“Is his dirt bike in there?”

“No, I don’t remember seeing one.”

“This might be nothing, but later that night… it wasn’t three o’clock, it was more like five o’clock… just getting light, probably… I heard a bike start up,” Jansen said. “Like, up on the road. And it took off. I didn’t think of it until just now, and there are a lot of trail bikes and four-wheelers around here, but I don’ t know why you’d be starting one right there… If that’s something.”

Lucas said, “Huh,” and, “Thanks. Something to think about.”

The reason to think about it, he thought to himself as he drove away, was that if somebody drove Hanson’s car up to the lake, whether or not it was Hanson faking his own death, or a killer faking an accident, he’d have to have a way to get out, once he got in. If he didn’t have an accomplice, and he couldn’t use the car…

“Then he’d have to know about the bike before he got here,” Lucas said aloud.

He passed the casino turnoff a few minutes later and kept going. Called Weather and said, “I’ll be home tonight, late. Don’t wait up, but don’t shoot me, either.”

“I wouldn’t shoot you anyway,” she said. “But I’ll warn Letty.”