Buried Prey

23

Lucas crawled into bed and lay awake for an hour, trying to work out how they would take Roger Hanson. He thought they might have two days, before word got around that his team was working on something solid. After that, the law enforcement bureaucrats would get into it, trying to slice off a piece of the credit for breaking the case-and capturing the killer of a well-liked cop. When they got involved, it’d turn into a snake hunt, with cops all over the state beating the bushes, trying to drive Hanson into the open.

Lucas had a couple of huge advantages: he knew who the killer was, and he knew how to find him, through the cell phone. But to avoid curiosity about how he knew-about the black bag job-he needed to lay down a logical trail of deduction. He had some help on that from Darrell Hanson and his wife, who’d pointed the finger at Roger. A pointing finger wasn’t enough to get a warrant, then go on to an arrest, but it was a start.

What he needed to do was to ostensibly take Darrell Hanson’s suggestion, as any cop would, and build a case against Roger. He could get some way down that trail simply by redoing everything he’d done to build the case against Darrell.

Was Roger’s white van really white, and not covered with roses or something? Did he teach school? Darrell didn’t think he ever had, but he could be wrong.

And Lucas wondered where Hanson had gone. What if he’d taken off for Mexico, or Thailand? What if he were sitting in the airport at Seattle or Los Angeles, waiting for a plane that would take him into some foreign obscurity?

But he hadn’t done that, Lucas thought. The house was not torn up in the way it would be if somebody were fleeing the country. It looked like a house that somebody was coming back to: all the underwear still in place in the bedroom bureau, a pile of dirty clothes sat in front of the washing machine, a stack of computer equipment was blinking into the dark, still running, a jar of coins was sitting on the kitchen counter. And with as little money as Hanson had, he would have cashed the coins.

So he was out there, somewhere close by.

He thought about that, then snuck out of the bedroom in his underwear, went down to the den, and called Shrake, who was babysitting the house. Shrake came up and Lucas asked, “Anything at all?”

“Nothing. I’ve been sitting here thinking. Buster Hill hit him with at least one shot. If that’s right, and Hanson knows he can’t go to a hospital, I suspect he’s holed up somewhere, taking care of the wound. Maybe didn’t want to come back home, where people could see him and know that he was hurt. I don’t think he’ll come wandering in-but if he does, I think he’ll stay.”

“I was hoping that he wasn’t in an airport somewhere.”

“I thought about that, too,” Shrake said. “If I was a wounded guy, I’m not sure I’d want to take a chance with airport security, having a bullet hole in me. If they felt a bandage, and wanted to look at it.. they find a bullet wound. It’d be taking a big chance.”

“Hmm.” Lucas thought about it, looked at the clock: a little after one A.M. “Tell you what: we’re gonna need people around tomorrow, I think, and I’m buying what you’re saying. Why don’t you sit until two, then go on home. We’ll see you at work tomorrow morning.”

“Jenkins was coming on at eight.”

“I’ll call him in the morning,” Lucas said. “I’ll have him check, and if Hanson isn’t there yet, I’ll pull him in, too.”

“You think we’ll find him tomorrow?”

“I’m gonna get Sandy checking the big cell phone companies tomorrow,” Lucas said. “If we can find a cell, we’ll get him.”

He rang off, went to bed, and slept soundly until nine o’clock, which he hadn’t expected. He woke, realized that he felt too good to be up early, looked at the clock, said, “Aw, man,” picked up his cell phone and turned it on, called Jenkins.

“Just sitting here. Nothing moving.”

“Give it another hour,” Lucas said. “We’re gonna look at it from a different angle.”

“Want me to knock on the door, try to sell him a magazine subscription?”

“No.” Lucas didn’t want to tell him that he knew the house was empty. Then he said, “But let me think about it. I may call you back.”

He thought about it as he shaved and showered, then called Jenkins and said, “Go up to the door, and if he’s there, tell him you’re investigating the disappearance of his uncle, Brian Hanson. Ask him the usual: last time he saw him, if he seemed depressed. Tell him you’re asking on behalf of the St. Louis County Sheriff ’s Office. I don’t think he’ll be there, but knock on the front door, and then go around and knock on the back door.”

“The back door…?”

“Just to make sure you’re not missing him. But that’ll get you right back by the garage. The garage has four windows in the overhead door, and I think there’s a side door-it looks like there should be. If you should glance inside the garage, just as a matter of walking around the house… and if you should see a dirt bike inside… I’d be really interested if there’s a dirt bike. And if you could see the license tag…”

“I can do that,” Jenkins said. “Call you back in ten.”

“I’ll be on my way into work,” Lucas said. “I’ll just see you there.”

He preferred to have the team around when Jenkins reported back.

More trail, that way.

Lucas ate a fast nonfat vegetarian breakfast-Trader Joe’s corn flakes with rice milk-and headed into the BCA; made a quick, impulsive stop at a diner, ordered scrambled eggs with link sausage, and a cup of coffee, and it all tasted and smelled so good he thought he might faint. He ate fast, didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty, and knew he’d never tell a soul. And on to the BCA.

Sandy was waiting, and he gave her the name and the list: cell phone first, motor vehicles, photos, background.

She went away, and Shrake came in, followed by Del. “What’re we doing?”

“Hanging out until I can give you stuff to do-errands, nailing it down,” Lucas said. “When we get enough, we’ll go for a warrant. But before we do anything official, I want to know where he is, and be headed in that direction. The word’s gonna start leaking that we’re up to something.”

Sandy came back: “You were right. That’s his phone number, and he is with Verizon. We need a warrant to find out where his phone is coming from.”

“A warrant? Or just a subpoena? We don’t want to listen to him, we just want to know where he is.”

She said, “I didn’t split that hair. I’ve got the name of the guy we need to talk to at Verizon.”

Lucas said to Del, “Call the guy, try to whittle him down to a subpoena, then talk to the lawyers.”

Del nodded. Lucas said to Sandy, “Photos, next. Everything you can get in the next five minutes. Start with his driver’s license.”

She and Del left together, and Jenkins came in with a piece of paper in his hand. “I happened to look in the garage, and there was a dirt bike parked in there. I wrote the tag number on this piece of scrap paper.”

“That was lucky,” Lucas said. “Be sure you put the scrap paper in the file. Did you run it?”

“I did. The bike is registered to Brian Hanson.”

Shrake said, “We got him.”

“I think so,” Lucas said. “Listen, Sandy’ll have those photos in a minute. I’ve talked to three different women about them, and I want you guys to run them down, have them look at Roger’s face.”

He gave them phone numbers and addresses for Dorcas Ryan, Lucy Landry, and Kelly Barker. They took the information, and as they left, Lucas said, “Make it as fast as you can. Get the IDs, and get back here.”

With everybody occupied, Lucas walked up to the DNA lab and talked to the head of the unit, Gerald Taski, who was still excited about the hit on Darrell Hanson’s DNA. “This is the first time it’s happened with us,” Taski said. “But it opens up lots of possibilities. Say you get some DNA, and you think you know who the bad guy is, but you’re not sure, and you don’t want him to know that you’re looking at him. So you go to some other family member for DNA-you know, as a volunteer or you compel it with some other arrest-and use that DNA to nail down the first guy.”

“That makes me a little uncomfortable,” Lucas said. “Sounds like something the Nazis would think of.”

“But think of the efficiency,” Taski said.

“That’s what the Nazis would have thought of,” Lucas said.

“There’s a thing on the Net known as a corollary to Godwin’s Law, which says that the first guy to mention Nazis in a discussion, loses,” Taski said.

“I don’t want to know about Nazis,” Lucas said. “What I want from you is a piece of paper I can put in a warrant application that says the DNA from Bloomington is X number of degrees away from the killer. Like three or four degrees, whatever it is.”

“You think it’ll help identify him?” Taski asked.

“It already has. We got him, we just need a warrant,” Lucas said. “So… the piece of paper?”

Sandy came in and said, “Moorhead wants a subpoena. The universities are pretty tight.”

“Isn’t Virgil over there somewhere? I think he just told me he was over there.” He stuck his head out of his office and called to his secretary, “Hey-where’s Virgil?”

“Pope County,” she said.

“Isn’t that close to Moorhead?”

She said, “Let me look at the map,” and she went off to a wall map, then called back, “It’s a ways, but right up I-94. Probably a hundred miles or so.”

Lucas went to his cell phone, and got Virgil: “You still in Pope County?”

“Until I finish eating breakfast,” Virgil said. “Then I’m heading home.”

“You’re not far from Moorhead, right?”

“Ah, shit,” Virgil said.

“You’re gonna need a subpoena,” Lucas said. “It’ll be waiting for you when you get there.”

Lucas got everybody steppin’ and fetchin’, then retreated to his office and thought about it. He had enough for a warrant, but he really needed to find out where Roger Hanson was hiding out. He called Del: “What are we getting from Verizon?”

“I think we’re okay, but their lawyers are talking to our lawyers, and I think we’re gonna be prohibited from listening in… but we’ll be able to get where his phone calls are coming from.”

“That’s all we need. How long?”

“Well, we gotta wade through all this legal bullshit, and then it should be quick. It’s the legal bullshit that’s holding us up.”

“Stay on it. Push hard,” Lucas said.

An hour after he and Jenkins left, Shrake came back from St. Paul Park, having spoken to Dorcas Ryan, and said, “She says he looks more like Fell than the first guy you showed her. Said she’s still not a hundred percent, but she’s ninety-five percent.”

Jenkins called on his way in: he’d spoken to both Lucy Landry and Kelly Barker, and Landry agreed that the photo looked more like Fell than the first one-and Barker said she was a hundred percent that he was the attacker. “She says she’s absolutely sure.”

“All right. Get in here. We’re going for the guy, as soon as we get his location.”

“Something else,” Jenkins said. “Todd Barker’s having big problems. One of the shots sprayed bone particles all through his lungs, and they can’t control the infection. They won’t say it, but I think they’re gonna lose him. We’re gonna have a double murder.”

Del walked in. “Hanson hasn’t made a phone call this morning, but late yesterday afternoon he made a call from Waconia to a clinic in St. Paul. We don’t know where it went at the clinic-it went into a main number-but if he’s shot, he might be looking for pain pills or antibiotics.”

Lucas said, “Have we got somebody who could make a credible call to him? See what we can see?”

“Let me talk to somebody,” Del said, and he went away.

Jenkins came in, and Lucas told him and Shrake to get an early lunch: “I think we’ll be rolling out of here in a couple of hours, as soon as we nail him down. We’ve got some running around to do, but it won’t be long.”

Del came back and said, “I’ve got a Chevy dealer making a robocall to him, offering complete service on his Chevrolet product. If he answers, we’ll know where he is.”

“How long?”

“Ten minutes.”

“I’m going to start putting together a warrant application. I’ll talk to Carsonet as soon as it’s ready.”

“You’re not going back to Paulson?”

Lucas shook his head: “We’ve got enough that Carsonet will give it to us. And I’d just as soon not ask Paulson again. He might wonder what happened the first time… I mean, I pretty much swore that Darrell Hanson was the one.”

“Gotcha,” Del said. He looked at his watch. “I’ll go call my guy at Verizon.”

Lucas started putting together a search warrant for Roger Hanson’s house. He was halfway through when Virgil Flowers called from Moorhead. “There’s not a lot, but it’s suggestive. He majored in education with a minor in English, and dropped out halfway through the first semester of his senior year. He was practice teaching that semester, up in Red Lake Falls.”

“Go home,” Lucas said.

He looked up Red Lake Falls on the Net, called the superintendent, whose name was Lawrence Olafson, explained the situation, and was told that three or four teachers might possibly remember what happened when Hanson was teaching. He offered to have the teachers called out of their classrooms, and Lucas took him up on it, and asked him to keep the conversation confidential.

The first teacher, Steve Little, called fifteen minutes later: “I talked to George Anderson, he was also supposed to call you; he says he doesn’t remember anything about that, so he won’t be calling.”

“Okay, but you’re calling… do you remember the guy?” Lucas asked.

“Oh, yeah. Larry thought you might be wondering if there was sex involved, and there was. I’d forgotten his name, Hanson, I’d forgotten that, but he got tangled up with a young girl here. Pretty voluntary on her part, I remember, but she was like way too young for that to mean anything. They could have got him on rape, but her parents didn’t want anything to do with that. As I remember. I could be wrong.”

“So what happened?”

“They threw his ass out,” Little said. “As they should have. And Moorhead threw his ass out, and that was the end of it. As I remember. Look, I’m not swearing to any of this, this was a long time ago.”

“So they didn’t do anything legal. No prosecution?”

“No, I don’t think so. Except throw him out,” Little said. “If you did the same thing now, of course, it wouldn’t make any difference what the girl wanted or the parents wanted. They’d arrest him and put him in jail. Back then, things were different.”

“Do you remember how old the girl was?” Lucas asked.

“Let me think… I mean, I still know her, that was almost thirty years ago, and I’d guess she must be in her early forties… So I guess she was thirteen. Maybe fourteen.”

“Thin, blond?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. Is that important?”

“It could be,” Lucas said. “Listen, Steve, we may be getting back to you. If you were lining up somebody else to call, that won’t be necessary. This was just an informal check to confirm some information we had. If we need something more formal, we’ll send some people up to take depositions from you all. And thank you. You’ve been a help.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Read the Star Tribune. Or give me a call in a week or so, and I’ll tell you,” Lucas said.

Del came in and said, “He’s still in Waconia. We made the call, he picked up there.”

“So we’re set,” Lucas said. “We want to be out of here in half an hour. I’m going to talk to Carsonet-he knows I’m coming-so I’ll be back pretty quick. I want you to get an entry team together. I’ll give them the warrant, and I want them to hit Hanson’s house at two o’clock. That’ll just about get us into Waconia. Then Google Waconia, figure out what they have in the way of motels. And call Darrell Hanson, ask him if he’s got any relatives in Waconia. See if you can figure out where Roger is, exactly.”

“How many of us are going?”

“You, me, Jenkins, and Shrake. More than enough.”