Buried Prey

If he ever left Weather, would Marcy go back? Well, he was never going to leave Weather, for one thing. He was so loyal that once you were his friend, you stayed his friend, even if you didn’t want to . . . and he was married to Weather and that would last right up to the grave, no doubt about it. But, speaking of the grave, if Weather got hit by a train, and Davenport, after a suitable interval, expressed a need for some female companionship . . .

Maybe. But what about Rick? Well, Rick was interesting, but he made his money by calling people up on the telephone, and talking to them about investments. He liked having a cop on his arm, and insisted that she carry a gun when they went out at night. She would have anyway; she’d always liked guns.

Still, she wasn’t much interested in being somebody’s trophy. She’d gone out with an artist for a while, a guy who reminded her of a crazier version of Davenport—in fact, he’d been a wrestler at the U at the same time Davenport had been playing hockey, and they knew each other, part of the band of jock-o brothers.

Huh. The artist had been . . . hot. Crazy, maybe, but hot. After they’d split up, he’d gone and married some chick he’d known forever, and Davenport had told her that he and the chick even went and had a kid.

Had a kid.

She’d like a kid . . . but, it’d have to be soon. Rick wasn’t the best daddy material in the world. He had the attention span of a banana slug, and didn’t seem like the kind who’d be interested in the poop-and-midnight-bottle routine.

There was another guy, too, an orthopedic surgeon who wore cowboy boots and rode cutting horses on the weekends, out of a ranch north of the Cities. He was divorced but getting ripe, looking at her, from time to time, and she felt a little buzz in his presence. And she liked horses.

Possibilities.

She smiled to herself and turned on the satellite radio. Lucinda Williams came up with “Joy,” quite the apposite little tune, given her contemplation of the boys in her life. . . .

WHILE SHE WAS HEADING SOUTH, the killer was roaming around Bloomington, going back again and again to Kelly Barker’s house, not knowing exactly what he planned to do; whatever it was, he had to wait until she got home, and she’d already kept him waiting so long that he felt the rage starting to burn under his belt buckle.

He was one morose and angry motherfucker, he admitted to himself, and things weren’t getting any better. He had no life, had never had one. He had a crappy house, a crappy van, a crappy income, and no prospects. He collected and resold junk. He was a junk dealer. He had a bald spot at the top of his head, growing like a forest fire at Yellowstone. He was so overweight he could barely see his own dick. He had recurrent outbreaks of acne, despite his age, and the cardiologist said that if he didn’t lose seventyfive pounds, he was going to die. And he had dandruff. Bad.

Dumb and doomed: even in Thailand, he could see the disregard, the contempt, in the eyes of the little girls he used. They weren’t even frightened of him.

Might just want to stick a gun in his mouth . . . some other time.

Some other time, because right now he was in an ugly mood, and the mood was feeding on itself, and he had that gun, and he had the address of the only woman who could identify him for sure.

He went around the block and this time, there were lights on in the window, and he saw a shadow cross a drape. They were home.

All right, he thought; time for tactics.

He did a few more laps, took a long look at the neighbors. The Barkers’ street was quiet enough, but there were lights in almost every house. On the street behind the Barkers’, though, two dark houses sat side by side. If he parked on that street, he could cut between the two houses, walk down the side of the Barkers’ place, and around to the front door.

Ring the bell, kill the bitch, and wheel. If her husband answered, knock him down with a couple of shots, go in after the woman, put her down, and go out the back.

He pulled into a parking lot and parked, getting his guts up; sat and thought and then reached out to the glove box, opened it, and lifted out the fake black beard. Wouldn’t fool anyone from two feet, but it’d be good enough from eight or ten or fifty. It had little pull-off tabs that uncovered sticky tape. He pulled them off, threw them on the floor of the car, and stuck the beard on his face using the rearview mirror to get the position right. When he was satisfied, he pressed the tapes hard, ten seconds each, then smacked his lips to make sure it was on tight.

Ready to go.

Careful not to leave any DNA, not to touch anything. Let the bullets do the talking.

Speaking of which . . .

He checked around again to make sure he wasn’t being observed, took the shells out of the pistol’s magazine, and polished each one with a Kleenex, taking care not to touch them again as he pushed them back into the magazine, one by one.

Thirteen rounds.

Barker’s unlucky number.

BUSTER HILL SAID, as they crossed the street, after parking, “When you see her on TV, you gotta think she’s having a good time. I mean, she’s been doing this for what, almost twenty years?”

“She likes it,” Marcy agreed. “If you’re a victim, at least you’re something. You’re not just another nonentity.”

“Got some drama in your life,” Hill said.

“Exactly,” Marcy said. They got to the door and Marcy rang, and Kelly Barker answered, a puppy-like eagerness on her face.

“Officer Sherrill? Come on in—you have to excuse the house, we’ve been running around like mad dogs since this started.”

Her husband was smiling in the background, as eager as his wife. Marcy could smell coffee and coffee cake, and smiled, and led Buster inside.

She could use some coffee cake.

THE KILLER COULDN’T BELIEVE that he was going to do it, but he was. He just . . . did it. He parked on the street behind the Barkers’ house, got out, looked up and down the street—lots of lights, no people, all inside eating dinner, or watching TV, though it was a beautiful evening.

Started walking. When he got around the block, there was a new car parked on the street across from the Barkers’ but nobody in sight. That was the last moment that he might have turned around.

Instead, he put his hand on the Glock, in his jacket pocket, made sure the safety was off, and walked quickly across the yard and down between the two dark houses, pushed through a sickly hedge, and continued through the Barkers’ backyard, down the side of their house, and around to the front.

Looked up and down the street, saw nobody watching, rang the doorbell. Heard the faint cadences of people talking, and footfalls on the floor inside. The knob turned, and he was looking at a thirty-something guy, a guy with an eager white face over a JCPenney suit. . . .

The killer shot the guy three times, bap-bap-bap, and he went down, and the killer took a step forward, following the muzzle of his gun, saw three people frozen on the living room couch and then a dark-haired woman was moving and a big fat guy, and they seemed to have guns and the killer ripped out ten shots without stopping, just pointed the gun and let it rip, fast as he could move his finger, and saw people falling and then something tore at his side and he was running . . .

Didn’t think, didn’t hear, didn’t do anything but run.

MARCY HAD A SWEET ROLL in one hand—tasted good, she hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch—when the doorbell rang. Todd Barker got up and said, “I’ll get it, it’s probably Jim,” and went to the door. Kelly Barker said, “Jim’s from just down the street. He was going to record all the TV—”

And Todd Barker opened the door and there were three shots and he went down, and a black-bearded fat man was there with a gun and Marcy made a move for her pistol and could feel Buster making a move . . .

Then it all went away for Marcy Sherrill, as swiftly and surely as the light fleeing a shattered bulb; gone into darkness.

No more Davenport and his suits, no more Rick or the hot artist, no more lunches with pals at the police force, no more fistfights, no more surgeons on cutting horses, no more politics, no more anything.

The killer’s fifth wild shot, sprayed across the room, caught Marcy Sherrill under the chin, blew through her throat and spinal cord, and she died without even knowing it, without being able to say goodbye or feel any regret, with the taste of a sweet roll on her tongue. . . .

Nothing, again, forever.

16

Lucas dropped the hammer on the Lexus, burning down Rice Street, blowing through a red light at Arlington, with barely a hesitation. Berg, cuffed in the backseat, called, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” and Del, holding on to an overhead hand grip, said, “I wonder what those crazy fucks have done this time?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why they wouldn’t tell me,” Lucas said. “Why wouldn’t they tell me?”

Maryland wasn’t far. “Maryland? What’s at Maryland?” Del asked. “Was there something going on there?”

“Not as far as I know,” Lucas said. “They were working those home invasions down in South St. Paul. . . .”

Shrake and Jenkins had many sterling qualities, but discretion wasn’t one of them: to hear them freaked and screaming for lights and sirens meant something bad was happening or about to happen. “Something bad, man, something really bad,” Lucas said.

Del put his feet on the dash and dug his pistol out and checked it. From the back, Berg cried, “What’s happening? What’s happening?” and Del said, “Shut up, asshole.”

Three blocks ahead, they saw Jenkins’s personal Crown Vic slew across the intersection and then disappear into what must be the parking lot.

They were there in ten seconds, saw Jenkins and Shrake standing outside the Crown Vic looking up the street at them, and Del said, “They’re just standing there,” and he reholstered his pistol, and then Lucas put the truck into the parking lot, bouncing to a stop next to the two big agents.

He and Del were out, and Jenkins pointed at Berg through the back window of the Lexus and asked, “Who’s he?”

Lucas asked, “Jesus, what’s going on? What’s going on?”

“Who’s the guy?” Jenkins asked again.

His voice carried a peculiar intensity that made Lucas stop, and answer: “We’re transporting him down to Ramsey on assault.”

Jenkins said to Shrake, “Get him out of there,” and to Lucas: “We’ll take him.”

Shrake went around and jerked open the back door. Lucas said, “Jenkins, goddamnit—”

“Marcy Sherrill’s been shot,” Jenkins said. “She was over at that Barker chick’s house, and somebody came crashing in and shot the place up. Three people hit, the shooter’s maybe hit, it’s all confused, it’s all fucked up.”

Lucas grabbed Jenkins’s arm: “How bad? Where’re they taking her? Where’re they taking her?”

Jenkins shook his head: “They’re not transporting her.”

Lucas’s mind froze for a minute, then: “What?”

“They’re not transporting, man.” Jenkins moved up and threw an arm around Lucas’s shoulder. “She’s gone, man. That’s what they’re telling us.”

LUCAS STARED AT HIM for a moment, and then Del said, his voice shaking, “We’re going. Get that fucker out of there . . .” gesturing at Berg. Shrake yanked the thin man out of the back of the truck and slammed the door.

Del ran around to the driver’s side, and Lucas said, “No, I got it,” and Del said, “Bullshit, I’m driving. Get in. Get the fuck in the car.”

Del drove fast, but not crazy, as Lucas would have, all the way across town, with Lucas yelling suggestions at him, onto I-94, off I-94 at Cretin Avenue, south down Cretin at sixty miles an hour, then across the bridge and past the airport and the Mall of America and down into Bloomington’s suburban maze.

And all the way, with the sick feeling of doom in his gut, Lucas was yelling out reasons why it couldn’t be right: one of the best hospitals in the metro area was five minutes from the Barkers’ house; they would have transported her no matter what, there was a lot of confusion, that fuckin’ Jenkins had it wrong.

Del just drove and once in a while, shook his head. Jenkins, he believed, wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. He was a thug, but a smart one, and not insensitive. He didn’t say it, kept his foot down and shook his head as Lucas shouted out possibilities.

THERE WERE BLOOMINGTON COPS all over the place, and the street down to Barker’s house was blocked off. Del rolled the Lexus past the blocking black-and-white, hanging his BCA credentials out the window, and put the truck in a vacant spot a halfblock from the Barker house.

They climbed down and jogged past a half-dozen uniformed Bloomington cops coming and going, cutting across a couple of yards, swerving around a loop of crime-scene tape to a detective standing out in the yard. He looked up as Lucas and Del came up and said, “I know you—”

“Davenport and Capslock, with the BCA,” Lucas said. “We heard that Marcy Sherrill was down. Is she . . . ?”

The cop shook his head: “You were with Minneapolis, right?”

“Yeah, we both were. We’re close friends of hers.”

“I’m John Rimes, I’m running the scene right now. I’ll let you go in,” he said. “But you might not want to . . . have to go around to the side door.”

“Man, she’s . . .” Lucas held his hands out, palms up, pleading.

Rimes nodded. “She’s gone. We got two more down, another cop named Buster Hill, and Todd Barker, the husband here—”

“Aw, man.” Lucas stopped, put his hand to his forehead. Del put a hand on his shoulder. “Aw . . . can’t be right.”

“I’m sorry,” Rimes said.

“I interviewed them a couple days ago; this is part of the Jones investigation,” Lucas said, as they walked around to the side of the house. A kind of black dread was enveloping his brain. “I talked to Marcy a couple times today.”

Del said, “Easy . . .”

Lucas shook him off. “I’m okay.”

Rimes said, “Hill got off a couple of shots and it looks like he hit the guy—we’ve got a blood trail going around the side of the house over to the next street. Not much, but it’s a trail.”

Del asked, as they went through the side door, “Anybody get the tags?”

“No, but a guy down the street said it was a white cargo van. . . . Of course, there are only about thirty thousand of those.”

Lucas said to Del, “It’s him. It’s the van. It’s the guy.”

Rimes asked, “Who?” but Lucas shook his head.

Then they were crossing a kitchen toward a crowd of people in the living room, and Rimes said, “Make a hole,” and people stepped back and Lucas looked down and suddenly, shockingly, saw Marcy, eyes still open, faceup on the living room rug, only a small hole under her chin, but a big puddle of blood under her neck. She was wearing a white silky blouse with bloody handprints down the front, where somebody had tried to tend to her. Her eyes were blank as the sky.

“Aw, Christ,” he said, and he began to shake.

Around her, the house was a shambles, overturned chairs and blood tracks on the carpet, telling the story.

“This Hill guy was hit in the leg. He started screaming for an ambulance, but she was gone,” Rimes said. “He said he knew she was gone the minute he looked at the wound. Hill’s gonna be okay, the husband’s hurt bad, but he’ll make it. He took two in the chest and one in the shoulder. . . . Sherrill was hit right under the chin.”

“Took out her spinal cord,” said a crime-scene guy. “Instantaneous. Like she was decapitated.”

Rimes shook his head at the guy and said, “Thank you,” and the guy looked at Lucas’s face and went away.

Rimes said, “The woman, this Kelly Barker, she wasn’t hurt. She said the shooter was a big fat guy with a black beard. We’re gonna get DNA on him, so he’s toast if we can put our hands on him.”

Rimes’s voice was quiet, but intense, a recitation of what he’d learned since he took over the scene. He asked Lucas, “You need to sit down?”

Lucas turned toward Del but he couldn’t find his voice, couldn’t even find any spit in his mouth, not enough moisture to force out a word, and he shook his head and went back through the kitchen and out to the backyard and sat down on the grass.

Del was on his cell phone when he came out a minute later. He clicked off, squatted next to Lucas, and said, “Come on, these guys are pros. They’ll get it done. Let’s get you home.”

“Got to tell her folks,” Lucas said, finding a few words. Tears started streaming down his face. “Somebody’s—”

“Somebody does, but not you,” Del said. “Come on. I’m taking you home.”

LUCAS DIDN’T FIGHT HIM. He sat in the passenger seat, couldn’t stop the tears. Del said, “This is the worst goddamn thing. It’s the worst goddamn thing.”

WEATHER CALLED on Lucas’s cell and asked, “Where are you?”

“Coming home. I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said.

“Are you driving?”

“No. Del is.”

“Ten minutes,” she said.

WEATHER AND LETTY were in the driveway when they got to Lucas’s home. Del pulled in, and said, “I’ll go downtown and take care of the paper on Berg—I wish we’d never talked to that fool.”

Lucas nodded and climbed out of the truck, and Weather came and took him around the waist and said, “Shrake called, and Del. Lucas, I’m so sorry.”

Lucas nodded and Letty asked, “What’re you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got to think about it. I’m so freaked out I can’t think right now. This was like a freak shot, the guy was spraying the house. He shot the husband three times from four feet and didn’t kill him, but he hits Marcy once from forty feet and she’s gone. Ah, Jesus . . .”

Letty said, “You’ve got to find the guy who did it and take care of him. Personally.”

Weather said, “Letty, let it go.”

Letty said to Weather, “I’m not letting it go.” And to Lucas: “If you don’t settle this, get a hand in it, you’re going to be screwed up for a long time. First the Jones girls and now Marcy. Dad—”

Weather said, “Letty, shut up. Look: just shut up for now. We can talk about it later. Lucas, let’s go sit down.”

“I need to talk to the guys at Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “I need to talk to her partner, find out what happened. I’ve got enough to find this guy, and now we’ve got DNA on him.”

“You’re not going to do any of that tonight,” Weather said. “Come on. I’ve got some hot dogs hidden away. We’ll get something to eat . . . you need to think.”

“All right,” he said. “Gotta think.” He put his arms around the shoulders of both women, and they walked into the house.

TIME PASSED; it always does, and the dead don’t come back, and their death becomes more real.

Lucas sat in his darkened den while Letty and Weather bustled around the kitchen with the housekeeper. He could hear them banging around, like the distant sad/cheery sounds of Christmas to a bum on the street. And he could hear them snarling at each other from time to time.

Letty and Weather were close, but had radically different worldviews. Weather, as a surgeon, was imbued with the medical profession’s “care” mentality. Letty, their adopted daughter, had grown up in a harsh rural countryside without a father, and with a half-crazed, alcoholic mother: her attitude was, Hit first, and if necessary, hit again. If you made a mistake, you could apologize later. Her mentality was stark: take care of yourself, and your family and friends.

Weather would argue that the system would take care of Marcy’s killer. That Lucas would only get in trouble if he made it personal. Letty’s attitude was that Lucas would never sleep right if he didn’t hunt the killer down, and finish him.

Lucas had never loved another woman as he loved Weather—but his attitude was closer to Letty’s. He could feel the murder of Marcy Sherrill sitting like a cold chunk of iron in his heart and gut. It wouldn’t go away; it’d only grow harder and colder.

The anguish and regret never faded, but the anger came on, and it grew.

Marcy had meant a lot to him: he’d known her from her first days on the police force, just out of the academy, a dewy young thing working as a decoy in both prostitution and drug investigations. She’d been hot: terrific in a short skirt and high heels, with a soft clinging blouse: Weather habitually referred to her as Titsy.

She and Lucas ran into each other when Marcy made detective. They hadn’t worked out as sexual partners because, in some ways, they were simply too much alike: competitive, argumentative, manipulative, cynical. Both of them wanted to be on top; so they needed a little distance between them.

And while they were alike in their attitudes, they didn’t always—or even often—see eye to eye on investigations. Marcy had always been a leader: on an important case, she would put together an investigative crew, as big as she could get, and methodically grind through it until the perpetrator was turned up. With Marcy, an investigation was almost a social event.

Lucas, on the other hand, was a poor leader. He simply wasn’t interested in what he considered the time-wasting elements of operating in a bureaucracy. He was intuitive, harshly judgmental, and would occasionally wander into illegalities in the pursuit of what he saw as justice. In doing that, he preferred to work with one or two close friends who knew how to keep their mouths shut, didn’t mind the occasional perjury in a good cause, and knew when to blow him off, if he got too manic and started shouting; and would shout back. Lucas’s cops were outsiders, for the most part. The strange cops.

HE DIDN’T THINK about all that, sitting in the den: he mostly just saw Marcy’s face on the floor in Bloomington, the postmortem lividity already showing as reddish streaks in her pale skin, and the eyes. He had to see that to know in his heart that she was dead, but now wished he hadn’t.

WEATHER CAME IN, and they talked quietly, some about Marcy, and the times they’d been together; and about Letty at school and Sam at preschool. Then the housekeeper came and said Sam was ready for bed, and Weather went to put him down. Letty came in and pulled a chair around to face him.

“You’re responsible for a lot of people,” she said. “You gotta take care of this, but whatever you do, it can’t be crazy. You’ve got to plan it out.”

“I don’t know if I’m going to do anything,” Lucas said.

Letty said, “Please,” like they do in New York, meaning, “Don’t bullshit me,” and then, “What I’m saying is, you can’t go to jail and you can’t lose your job. You’ve got to think. So think. Don’t just start smashing people.”

He showed a little smile: “Thanks for the advice. Maybe you should go do your homework.”

“It’s summer vacation,” she said, and he said, “Great Expectations ? All read?” and she said, “Fuck a bunch of homework. I’m serious here. I think you gotta do it, but you gotta think about it.”

“I will,” he promised.

“So where are you going to start?”

He closed his eyes and thought: “I’ve got to talk to Kelly Barker. Like right away. Tonight.”

“What else?”

“We know the guy lives here. He’s been here the whole time. He watches TV here. People know him, and we’ll have processed the DNA in a couple of days. . . . All we have to do is identify him, and we’ve got him. The Bloomington cops have called all the ERs, so we’ll know if any gunshot wounds come in. The guy’s hurt . . . he’s gotta make a move. It’ll all be done pretty quick.”

“Can you live with it if somebody else takes him down?”

Lucas thought for a few more seconds, then said, “Yes. I can. I’d rather do it myself, I’ll kill him if I can, but if the Bloomington cops get him . . . I can live with it.”

Letty leaned forward out of her chair and said, “Get with Del. If you wind up putting him down, Del’s the guy you want with you.”

Lucas nodded. “Of course.” And, a few seconds later, “I don’t think you need to review this conversation with your mom.”

Letty said, “She’s so smart—she knows what we’re talking about. That’s why she’s upstairs with Sam, to get out of the way.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“So stop sitting there like a robot,” Letty said. “Call people on the phone. Get Del over here. Get it going.”

Lucas stared at her for a moment, unblinking; she didn’t flinch. And he thought, She’s way too young to think like this. But then, given her history, she really hadn’t been young since she was nine; that had been the last year of her childhood.

17

Del called ahead, and showed up in the truck a little after ten o’clock. Lucas was waiting in the driveway and said, “Let’s go over to Fairview. Kelly Barker’s still over there.”

“What’s she got for us?”

“I want to see what she says. And I want to get her with Retrief, working up another head shot. Then we paper the TV stations with it overnight.”

“Bloomington probably has that under way.”

“I want to make sure—and I need to hear her talk. Want her to talk about John Fell.”

“If it is John Fell—”

“It is. . . . You take care of Berg?”

“Yeah. He’ll be out tonight. I don’t want to fuck with it.”

LUCAS TOOK THE WHEEL, and they headed across town to Fairview Southdale, a trauma center four or five miles north of the Barker house. They parked outside the emergency exit, threw the “Police” card on the dashboard, and went inside. Two Bloomington uniformed cops saw them coming and pushed off a counter they’d been leaning against. Lucas held up his ID and asked, “Is Kelly Barker still here?”

“Up in surgical waiting,” one of them said, and pointed the way.

Barker, when they found her, was sitting upright in an overstuffed chair, but was sound asleep. A Minneapolis cop sat on the couch across from her, reading a copy of Modern Hospital. Lucas introduced himself and Del, and the cop said, “She’s been trying to get some sleep.”

Lucas said, “Kelly,” and touched her shoulder, and she started, her eyes popping open. She looked at Lucas for a minute, as though she didn’t recognize him, then shook her head and said, “Is he all right?”

“We just got here,” Lucas said. “We don’t know the status on anyone.”

“That lady police officer died.”

“Yeah . . .”

“She seemed nice. It’s so awful,” Barker said. “Everything was going so well this morning and afternoon, and then this man . . .”

It all came out in a gush; what they’d been talking about, the man at the door, the explosion of gunfire, the screaming of the wounded, the rush to the hospital.

“They say the man was shot, but I don’t see how. The police officer, Buster, was upside down on the floor; he shot two times, I think, but they say he might have hit him.”

“There was a blood trail,” Lucas said. “It’s the only good thing to come out of this whole disaster. All we have to do now is identify him: we’ve got all the proof we need, if we can just lay our hands on him.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I’ve got John Retrief headed this way with a laptop. Since you’re waiting here on the operation, we were hoping you’d help revise the head shot.”

“Sure. I’m lined up to go on WCCO and KSTP tomorrow. Channel Three wants me but I told them I couldn’t do it until noon, and I told them all I needed like, heavy makeup, because I’m so distraught.”

Lucas thought: she didn’t look all that distraught, and he felt the anger burning away in his chest. He pushed it back and asked, “What about Todd? What’ve you heard?”

“Only that he’s shot pretty bad, there’re some holes in his lungs and they have to reconstruct his shoulder when he’s recovered enough to do it,” she said. “They brought Buster out a while ago; he’s in recovery—or maybe he’s out by now—there are some more police officers down there. If it wasn’t for Buster shooting that nut, we’d all be dead now.”

The shooter, she told him, had a heavy square-cut black beard like some Iranians she saw on television. “But it was him—it was my stalker, all right. I saw his eyes. I thought he was going to kill me.”

They talked awhile longer, then Lucas called Retrief and was told that he’d just passed the airport and was probably fifteen minutes away. “As soon as you’re done with Miz Barker, I want you to send copies to all the media outlets you’ve got,” Lucas said. “Everyone in the state. And down to Des Moines, out to Fargo, over to Milwaukee, with a response back to us. Tag it with something about a Midwestern serial killer of young girls, so it attracts some attention outside the state. Localize it for them.”

“I’ll do it—too late for the regular news tonight, but they’ll all have it at the crack of dawn tomorrow.”

THEY LEFT BARKER on the couch, and stopped by the intensive care ward, where Buster Hill was sitting slightly upright. Two Minneapolis detectives were sitting with him, nodded when Lucas and Del stepped in.

“Thought you might come by,” said the older of the two cops, a guy named Les MacBride. He turned to Hill: “Davenport and Capslock, BCA.” The younger of the two detectives was named Clarence.

“Heard of you from Marcy,” Hill said to Lucas and Del. “God, this is the most awful day of my life. She was such a great kid.”

“How’re you doing?” Lucas asked.

“Hurts,” Hill said. “But . . . the thing about Marcy is what’s got me really freaked out.”

“Sounds like you did okay,” Lucas said. “You tagged the guy.”

“Shoulda killed the sonofabitch. Maybe I will yet,” he said. “I will if I get the chance.”

His story was only slightly different from Barker’s, nothing more than a point-of-view variation. He hadn’t seen Marcy get hit. As soon as the shooting started at the door, he said, he went for his gun, but Marcy’s weapon was in her bag, and she went for the bag, but he didn’t know whether she’d ever cleared the gun. He’d been hit right away and didn’t see Marcy get hit—didn’t realize she had been until the shooter disappeared, and he’d called out to her for help.

“Didn’t come. I rolled over, and man, she was . . . gone.”

The shooter, he said, emptied his Glock into the room and then turned to run, which is when Hill hit him, he thought. “I was on my back with my gun over my head, shooting upside down. Bad shot, off center, but he stepped into it. Looked to me—this was a pretty fast impression—that he got it above the elbow, left arm, entry wound in the back, going out the front. Maybe, maybe hit him in the side, not the arm. But right there. I had this image when I fired. Don’t think it broke the bone, his arm didn’t move much. I think it was all soft tissue.”

MacBride said, “The blood trail was pretty thin. A splotch right at the beginning, but after that, it was mostly drips and drops.”

“It’s all good, they can get DNA out of nothing,” Lucas said. To Hill: “You said, ‘Glock.’ You sure about that?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Had that matte-gray look, not like metal as much as plastic. That plasticky finish. I picked up on it all the way.”

“Did he look like he knew what he was doing?”

Hill shook his head. “Naw. He was pumping with every shot. Squeezing as fast as he could, gun was jumping all over the place. I mean, he was trying to hit us, he just wasn’t much of a shooter. Except for . . . you know.”

They talked for a few more minutes, didn’t get much more: from Hill’s point of view, it’d been like getting hit by a car. He’d been chatting with Kelly Barker one second, and in the next second, he was upside down with a bullet wound.

“You did pretty goddamn good,” Del said, and Lucas nodded: “That’s right. We’re proud of you, man.”

Hill nodded. “Thanks . . . I only wish . . .”

IN THE CAR, driving back to St. Paul, Lucas said, “Fell is not much of a shooter. Except he was the only one who killed anyone.”

After a moment of silence, Del asked, “What’s next?”

“With Marcy, the Minneapolis cops will be working nothing but a million details. They’ll knock down everything. I would like to get to the guy before they do,” Lucas said.

“If you kill him, there’ll be a humongous stink, sooner or later,” Del said. “There are quite a few people around Minneapolis who don’t completely appreciate your act. And they know that you and Marcy had that relationship.”

“I’ll think of something,” Lucas said. “Forty days and forty nights, she used to say.”

Del snorted. “It wasn’t the most discreet romance. There was a rumor around that you nailed her on your desk downtown.”

“Ridiculous,” Lucas said.

“You’re saying it’s not true?”

“Of course it’s not true.” He looked out the window for a moment, then said, “We couldn’t keep it on the desk. It was on the floor.”

They both laughed, and then Del said, “Aw, Jesus. She did everything right. Ate right, exercised, never smoked, hardly drank. . . Why are we still here, and she’s gone?”

WHEN LUCAS HAD BUILT his house, he’d designed a combination den and office where he could sit and think, when he needed to do that. It wasn’t large, but it had a desk with a proper office chair, and two large leather chairs with tile-topped side tables. Everybody but Sam was still awake when they got back. Lucas got beers for himself and Del, and they went into the den and sat down, Lucas with his briefcase between his knees.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. He took out a sheaf of paper, his copies of his reports from the original investigation of the Jones girls’ disappearance. “Ninety-nine percent of what’s in the Minneapolis file is bullshit. That’s because they were specifically going after Scrape, most of the time. I was the only guy looking at John Fell, so the only reports worth a fuckin’ thing are mine, and I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“You did all right,” Del said.

“Yeah, yeah . . . I fucked it up, is what I did. But, tonight, what I want to do is, I want you to look at the reports, read through them, then we talk about them. I don’t think I’m missing anything, but you never know. . . .”

So Lucas sat and drank his beer, and Del drank his and read through the slender pile of paper. He said once, “You didn’t type so bad.”

“Yeah, I taught myself to touch type. Got a book.”

“Huh . . . didn’t know that.”

Weather came to say that she was going to bed, and then Letty asked if there was anything she could do, and Lucas sent her off to bed, and finally Del looked up and said, “Nothing jumps out at me.”

“Listen to the tapes,” Lucas said. “These are copies of the nine-one-one calls.”

Del listened to the tapes and said, “Boy—sounds like the same guy, doesn’t it?”

“It’s him. The calls came from two different pay phones, but in the same area, and not in Scrape’s neighborhood.”

They sat around and speculated some more, talked about the possibility that Fell had been a schoolteacher, and how he’d probably worked in some assembly plant up north, then Del sat up and snapped his fingers. “Hey, here’s an idea. How old do you think he was?”

“Middle twenties, maybe a little older,” Lucas said. “That’s what people in the bar said.”

“So—if most people go off to college when they’re eighteen, and don’t usually graduate in four years anymore . . . now it’s more like five or six, must’ve been like that when you graduated.”

“Yeah?”

“So what if he wasn’t actually a teacher?” Del asked. “What if he was like a practice teacher or something? I bet the schools wouldn’t even have a record of that. ’Cause they never would have actually fired him—he’d just be sent off. We’d have to go somewhere else to get his name. Like, you know, teachers’ college or something.”

Lucas wagged a finger at him: “That’s decent. Not great, but it’s decent. I’ll get Sandy on that first thing in the morning.”

AT ONE O’CLOCK, they hadn’t thought of much else, and Del finally went home. “You gonna be okay?” he asked, in the doorway.

“Hell no,” Lucas said. “I’m gonna be screwed up for a while.”

“You got some people worried about you,” Del said. “We don’t want you doing anything goofy.”

“Jeez, have a little faith,” Lucas said. “I’m screwed up, but I’m not nuts.”

WHEN DEL WAS GONE, Lucas went back to the den and gathered up all the papers, scanned them, sighed, and thought that the information was too thin. They had his voice . . . but it told them nothing, until they could find him. Once they had him, it might mean something.

Same thing with his face—maybe Barker could identify him, and Todd Barker had stood within inches of him, and might be able to identify him, but they had to find him first. And once they found him, the DNA from the blood was really all they’d need.

The problem was finding him.

Lucas was stuffing the two tapes back in his briefcase when a thought struck him. There was nothing in the voice, but what about the timing of the calls? He checked the times, then went back to his notes, and the summarized notes from other investigators. The summaries weren’t enough to be sure, but the tips on Scrape and his whereabouts seemed to come precisely when the investigation was slowing because of a lack of information.

That is, when they were looking for Scrape, they got a tip on where he lived. It hadn’t been used, because by the time they got it, Lucas had already located him.

But then Scrape was released, and they promptly got a tip on the box of clothing that had been thrown in the dumpster, and the tip had paid off with what looked like the definitive case against the street guy.

Both tips from the killer himself.

As though the killer himself had been inside the investigation.

LUCAS REACHED UP and turned off his over-the-shoulder reading lamp, and closed his eyes in the now darkened den.

Once, years before, he’d been a Minneapolis police lieutenant loosely assigned to special investigations and intelligence work. At the time, a serial killer simply known in the newspapers as the “Maddog” had been killing women around the Twin Cities, in particularly brutal ways. The case turned on a pistol that had been stolen from an evidence box in the police department—an evidence box to which Lucas had had access.

Early in the investigation, Lucas had been put under surveillance by Internal Affairs, with the thought that he might have been the killer. That had been quickly cleared up, when one of the murders took place while he was actively being watched.

But he’d been roundly pissed off, until the chief explained the circumstances—about the missing gun, about a profiler who said that the killer would be attractive to women, and charming, and probably a nice dresser, whose dress would bring women to trust him . . . a description that fit Lucas.

Could this killer be a cop? Buster Hill said that the shooter at the Barkers’ house had been using a Glock, a fairly nondescript piece of weaponry that was also a common police sidearm in the Twin Cities area.

He’d known cops who were killers, but they were not common.

He hated to think that a Minneapolis cop might have been one. Given the age of Fell, he’d almost have to be a patrolman, and Lucas knew all the young patrolmen at the time. He couldn’t think of any who’d really fit both the personality and the appearance of Fell. . . .

Well: maybe one or two.

He’d think about it overnight.

Try to sleep on it.

TRY TO SLEEP ON IT—he hardly slept at all. Kept flashing back to Marcy. Weather always got up first, and did this morning. As soon as she got out of the bathroom, he rolled out of bed.

“Can’t sleep?” she asked.

“Can’t stop thinking about possibilities,” he said. “I might as well get going. I want to check and make sure that poster got out to the TV stations. And I got a couple of things I want to look at over at Minneapolis.”

“Good luck,” she said. “Be careful.”

18

When the killer had turned from the Barkers’ doorway, he’d been confused by the crowd in the house, by the noise, and even by the gunfire itself, though he was doing the shooting, then by the sight of the cop coming out with the gun. Nothing rational was working through his brain: he was down on the lizard level, banging away as fast as he could, both scared and furious and righteous.

He saw one or two people going down and the muzzle flash from a pistol and then, as he turned, felt an impact under his armpit. He was confused about what it was, felt like somebody had hit him with a thrown rock, a sharp rock—and then he was around the house and running between houses, stuffing the pistol in his pants pocket, and across the neighbor’s backyard, between more houses out to the street and into the van.

His heart pounding, he’d cleared the neighborhood in little more than a minute, turning corners, heading out to I-494. His arm didn’t hurt that much, but when he scratched at it, his other hand came away covered with blood and he realized he’d been shot or had cut himself, or something.

He freaked. One thing he didn’t like was the sight of his own blood. He was weaving around the highway, trying to see where it was coming from, then thought about the highway patrol—it’d be ridiculous, at this point, if he were pulled over by the highway patrol for drunk driving.

He swerved onto an exit, across the highway into a shopping center, parked in front of a Best Buy, and looked at his arm. Lots of blood. He probed at it, realized there was nothing there. He hadn’t been hit in the arm at all, but in the side, near the pit of his arm.

He checked the parking lot, then carefully peeled up his shirt and found the wound. To his eye, it looked almost like a knife cut, straight, but deep and ragged. Not a hole, but a slice.

Not too bad, he thought; not too bad, but still bleeding.

He saw a newspaper stand outside a bagel place, dug some change out of his parking-meter stash, looked around again, hopped out of the van, walked over to the box, and bought a Star Tribune.

He’d once read that the inside pages of newspapers were fairly sterile. The pages were made with acidic wood pulp, with lots of heat in the process, and were untouched by human hands. He hoped it was true. He carried the paper back to the van, got inside, pulled out the sports pages, and used them to pad his armpit.

Needed to get home . . .

The beard was bothering him—and he wondered if the cops had put out a thing about a white van and a black beard. He pulled it off, the adhesive stretching the skin around his mouth and nose, pushed it down between the seats of the van. He looked in the mirror: still had adhesive on his face. He peeled it for a moment, then put the van in gear and headed out.

IF ONLY . . .

Most of his life seemed built on the phrase. If only . . .

If only the apartment building had been put somewhere else, if only the Jones girls hadn’t been found. If only those things had happened, the old man would still be alive, and he’d still be peacefully pursuing his junk, building his stash for another trip to Thailand.

If only the Barker woman had been there alone, if only he hadn’t been hit by the bullet. Who were those people, anyway? Must have been cops. Maybe bodyguards? Had it been a trap? He wondered if he’d hit them, thought he might have. He’d emptied the pistol at them. . . .

If they were cops, they’d never stop looking for him, especially if he’d hit one. He turned on the radio, looking for news, but none of the radio stations did news anymore. He turned it back off, tried to concentrate on his driving. His side hurt worse, the pain growing, and he started to sweat.

He could handle the pain, he thought. He could even handle the wound. He had that half-tube of oxycodone, left over from the root canal, along with some antiseptics of some kind.

But he needed to get home. Once he was home . . .

Sweat was running freely down his face by the time he turned into his driveway and pulled into the garage. He didn’t know why he was sweating—he wasn’t hurt that bad. There was some pain, but it was a dull ache, rather than agonizing.

He clambered out of the van and went inside, straight to the bathroom, pulled his shirt off, peeled the newspaper off his skin, and looked at the wound. Still bleeding, but not that much. All right. He dug through his medicine cabinet—got the tube of oxycodone, found another tube, from an ear infection, with some amoxicillin, two tabs. Not much else, besides some Band-Aids and a tube of Band-Aid antiseptic cream.

Then he remembered the first-aid kit that came with the van. He’d never bothered to open it, but wouldn’t that have some gauze in it? He went back out to the garage, found the kit, found four gauze pads inside it, and a roll of medical tape. He carried it back to the bathroom, wiped some antiseptic cream over the wound, then covered the wound with the gauze pads. He tried the tape, and managed to stick the pads on, but they wouldn’t hold, he thought. The tape was not long or strong enough, meant to go around fingers or toes. He got a bread bag, ripped off a piece of plastic large enough to cover the gauze pads, then taped it to his body with long strips of duct tape.

Not bad, he thought, looking in the mirror. He hurt, but he wasn’t going to die, unless he got infected. He popped an oxycodone and one of the antibiotic pills, then, on reflection, popped another one of each.

Still hurt, but there was nothing more he could do about it. He went into his living room and lay down on the couch, moved around until he was as comfortable as he could get, and turned on the TV, flipped around the channels.

Nothing. The news wasn’t up yet. Nobody was breaking in with a news flash—maybe nobody had been hit.

If he’d been really unlucky, somebody might have gotten his license tag numbers, but there was nothing he could do about that. And if they had, the cops would already be at his door . . . and they weren’t.

With that thought, he dozed; tired from the action, knocked down by the dope.

WHEN HE WOKE, he was disoriented for a moment, looked at the time. After nine-thirty. The news would be coming up.

He was anxious, waiting for it. Anxious to see what he’d done, where the coverage was. Anxious to see how he’d been described. To see what they knew . . .

He went out to the kitchen, got three wieners out of the refrigerator, and a jar of sauerkraut; slathered the wieners in the sauerkraut, stuck them in the microwave, got out three hot dog buns, got a bottle of horseradish-mustard out of the refrigerator, squirted the buns full of the mustard.

The microwave beeped and the meal was ready: he sat on the couch watching the end of a complicated cop drama, and the news came on.

A woman standing outside the Barker house: “A bearded gunman who may be the killer of the two Jones sisters struck again this evening, murdering a Minneapolis police office, wounding another police officer, and also wounding Todd Barker, the wife of Kelly Barker, who is believed to have been attacked by the same gunman in 1991 in Anoka. Officer Buster Hill is in guarded condition tonight, and Todd Barker is in critical condition at Fairview-Southdale Hospital in Edina. . . .”

The killer watched with dulled interest as the reporter recounted the shooting, and then interviewed a police spokesman, who said, “We believe Officer Hill wounded the gunman in the exchange of gunfire. We found traces of blood along what we presume to be the route the gunman took away from the house. The blood has been picked up by our crime-scene crews and will be taken to the BCA where we will . . .”

And then the police spokesman said the word that the killer hadn’t thought about, but knew quite well. The thing that had, really, pushed him to Thailand.

The officer said, “. . . process it for DNA. When we find him, we’ll then know that we have him for sure, and we think that finding him is now only a matter of time.”

The killer knew all about DNA. DNA seemed like a cloud, something that contaminated everything you touched. He’d been afraid that if he simply continued taking girls, that someday he’d be tagged by DNA. Now he sat up, staring at the TV, felt like screaming at it. Felt like throwing one of the Indian clubs through it, to shatter the screen, but didn’t.

Just stared, the chant going through his head: DNA, DNA, DNA . . .

Had to get out of here, he thought, looking around the house. Had to get away from the smell, the blinking lights on the porn servers, the junk that was scattered all over the place. Had to get away from this piece-of-shit life, had to find a den, had to get well. Had to heal.

Had to put a pillow over his head, shut out the world.

Hide.

19

Minneapolis police headquarters was full of pissed-off people the next morning, buzzing like a nest of killer bees. Lucas slipped through the swarm around Homicide, found the room he was looking for, used for training—and on the walls, photos of every academy graduating class.

At the time of the Jones killings, everybody he’d interviewed about Fell agreed that he was in his mid to late twenties. If he were a young-looking thirty, just to pad the age range a bit, he could hardly have gotten out of the academy before the mid to late seventies—couldn’t have been a cop for more than ten years, at the most.

Lucas went through ten years of classes, noting the names of the prospective cops who looked more or less like the Barkers’ description. There weren’t many. The killer was heavily built, almost square, she’d said. She emphasized the darkness of his hair, almost Mediterranean in tone, but said that his complexion was fair.

In ten years of photographs, there were nine possibilities. After noting down the names, he walked down to the office of Deputy Chief Marilyn Barin. Barin ran the Professional Standards Bureau, which included Internal Affairs. She was Lucas’s age, but had come up through patrol. They’d been friendly enough over the years, but not good friends; she’d been a casual friend of Marcy’s.

She looked up when Lucas knocked on her door frame. “Lucas. Thought you might come around today. This is brutal.”

Lucas took a chair and said, “A long time ago, I worked the Jones girls’ killing, and thought I had a lead on the killer. That was wiped out when we pinned it on a street guy. Turns out we were wrong about that—the guy who shot Marcy is the same guy who killed the Jones girls, and probably a few more over the years.”

Barin nodded. “I heard a couple people talking about your theory . . . and you’re a smart guy.”

He said, “I am a smart guy, and it’s way more than a theory, now. I wouldn’t bullshit you on something like this. The thing is . . .”

He explained the sequence of the original investigation, and the 911 calls that had led them down the path to Scrape. “It looks like—this is a leap—like the shooter might have had a contact inside the department, or might even have been a cop. The shooter yesterday used a Glock, according to Buster Hill. Bottom line is, I have a list of names of cops and probably ex-cops or never-were cops, and I’d like somebody to pull some personnel folders and some IA files and tell me if I’m barking up the wrong tree. Or the right one.”

Barin contemplated him for a moment, then swiveled in her chair and looked at a bulletin board above a bookcase, then swiveled back and said, “I gotta talk to the chief. I’ll tell him that we’ve got to go with the request. But I’ve got to clear it with him.”

“How long will that take?”

“Sit here,” she said. She got up and left the office. Five minutes later she came back and said, “You’re good to go. The chief called Cody Ryan down in IA. He’s waiting for you.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep you guys up-to-date. It’s sort of a reach. . . .”

“Do stay in touch,” she said. “We’re putting everything we’ve got on this thing. But if it should turn out to be a cop, or an ex-cop . . .” She rubbed her face. “Ah, God, I hate to think about that. I mean, at this point, I gotta tell you, I don’t believe it’ll be that way.”

CODY RYAN WAS another cop who’d moved into his job after Lucas left the Minneapolis force; Lucas knew him not at all. Which was good, since Lucas had been pushed off the force by IA, after he’d finally beaten up Randy Whitcomb for church-keying the face of one of his street contacts.

Ryan was a bluff, square man with gold-wire-rimmed glasses and a red face, a white shirt, and a red tie and blue slacks. Lucas introduced himself and Ryan said, “I just looked up your file. You were a bad boy.”

“I shouldn’t have hit him the last thirty times,” Lucas said. “The first thirty were pure self-defense.”

Ryan gestured at a chair: “Yeah, well . . . saw the pictures of the chick who got church-keyed. That might tend to piss you off. So: who’re we looking up?”

Lucas gave him the list of names, and Ryan started punching up computer files. He had records on six of the nine, nothing at all on the other three. “Makes me think they didn’t work here,” he said. “Might have gotten turned down for one reason or another. You’d have to go to the general personnel records for that. I don’t know if they’d have them that far back.”

“What do we have on the six?”

Ryan hit a Print button, and started passing the files over to Lucas. Four of the six were clean in IA’s eyes—minor citizen complaints that didn’t amount to much. Only one of the four was still on the force, a patrol sergeant working out of the second precinct. Lucas checked his dates: he’d come out of the last class that Lucas had looked at, which meant that he’d be close to the prime age for the killer. The file included an ID photograph; the guy wore glasses and really didn’t look much like Barker’s reconstruction. He was square, but not fat.

The other three had come out of earlier classes; two had quit the force relatively early on, one had retired. Nothing in the IA reports suggested that any of them had ever had problems with women.

Of the two with more serious IA reports, one was for excessive use of force on three separate occasions, but with nothing involving sex. The final one involved a complaint by a dancer that the officer, a Willard Packard, had pressured her for sex, suggesting that there might be some benefits in sleeping with a police officer.

Packard had replied that he suspected the woman of prostitution, and had moved her along when he found her loitering outside the club, talking with customers. He said she was clearly soliciting, and had filed the complaint as a way of getting back at him.

An IA investigator named John Seat had concluded that both might be telling the truth—that she had been soliciting, and that Packard might have pressured her for freebies. Seat had been unable to come up with any hard evidence, and when the complainant told IA that she was tired of the whole thing and wanted to drop the complaint, the investigation ended and Packard walked.

Packard continued with the force for another three years, then resigned, with a note that he’d gone to work with a suburban department east of St. Paul.

“Sounds to me like Seat was pretty sure he was pushing her, but what are you gonna do? It’s all talk, no action, and no witnesses,” Ryan said.

Lucas looked at a photograph: There was a resemblance to the Identi-Kit portrait, though Packard had a bulbous nose, and Barker had shown the killer’s nose as harsh and angled. But eyewitnesses, like Barker, were notoriously unreliable. That she could assemble a coherent image at all, that was picked out by other witnesses, was unusual. Getting a nose wrong—making it more “evil”—was a small enough thing. “Think I’ll look him up,” Lucas said. “Our guy used to go to a massage parlor. He liked his hookers.”

“Long time ago, though,” Ryan said. “He could be dead.”

ON HIS WAY OUT, three different detectives hooked Lucas into quick conversations about Marcy Sherrill; by the time he went out the door, he was hurrying to get away from it. Twenty minutes later, he was back at the BCA headquarters in St. Paul. He called in Sandy, the researcher, and outlined Del’s idea about possible practice teachers. Her eyes narrowed as he talked, and she said, “I’ll try, but I’d be willing to bet that the schools don’t track that stuff. I’d probably have to go out to the teachers’ colleges, teachertraining courses. I don’t know—”

“Give it a try,” Lucas said.

When Sandy was gone, he looked up Willard Packard, and learned that he was still on the job. His driver’s license ID showed a square-built balding man with dark hair and glasses—he had a corrective lens restriction on his license—weighing 230 pounds. He was clean-shaven.

DEL CALLED and asked what Lucas wanted to do: “I’m going out to Woodbury to talk to a cop. You could ride along.”

“See you in ten minutes,” Del said. “Want me to pick you up a Diet Coke?”

“Yeah, that’d be good.”

Lucas needed to check off Packard, just to get the name out of his hair, but had lost faith in the prospect of Packard being the killer—too many things were a bit off. He didn’t look quite right, and the man who shot Marcy, now that he thought about it, hadn’t used the gun like a trained police officer. The gun itself might be a common police weapon, but the shooter apparently hadn’t behaved like a cop.

Probably. But then you really couldn’t tell how a cop would behave in a shooting situation, until you’d seen him in one. You hoped the training worked, but there was no guarantee.

He sat thinking about that for a moment, groped for something else, realized he was treading water. He picked up the phone and called Bob Hillestad, a friend in Minneapolis Homicide, on his cell phone. Hillestad said, without preamble, “It’s a bitch, huh?”

“Yeah, it is,” Lucas said. “Where’re you hosers at? You got anything at all?”

“No. We got nothin’. Wait: we got that DNA, and we’ll run it through the database. It’s like everybody’s got both hands wrapped around their dicks, saying, ‘He’ll be in the database.’ Maybe he will be, but I don’t believe it, yet.”

“Heard anything from Bloomington?”

“A couple of people saw a white van leaving the neighborhood, pretty fast, at the right time. So Bloomington’s getting a list of white van owners. You know how many that’ll be? Someplace up in the five-digit area, is what they’re telling me. They’re saying it could go to six digits.”

“Good luck on that,” Lucas said.

“We’re all scratching around like a bunch of hens,” Hillestad said. “You guys got anything?”

“I decided to look at one guy based on nothing, and he’s not gonna work out. You know who’s getting that list for Bloomington?”

“No, but they’re going through the DMV. You could check over there.”

Lucas rang off, called the DMV, got routed around, and finally came up with a database guy who was doing the list for Bloomington. “I’m not a cop, but it’s absurd. What’re they going to do with it? On the other hand, it takes ten minutes and I don’t have to print it out—I’m just sending an electronic file, so, no skin off my butt.”

“Once you get the file, can you alphabetize it by the owners’ names?” Lucas asked.

“Sure.” There was a slurp at the other end; the guy had a cup of coffee. “You want me to shoot it to you?”

“Not yet—but put the list somewhere you can get at it. Hey, wait, could you do something to scan it, see if you’ve got a guy named Willard Packard on it?”

“Hang on. Give me a couple of minutes.”

The guy went away, and Del came in and Lucas pointed him at a chair, covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said, “Just a minute. Talking to the DMV.”

The DMV guy came back and said, “No Willard Packard on the white van list, but I looked up Willard Packard out in Woodbury, and he’s got a champagne Toyota minivan and a blue Ford Explorer. Champagne, white, not that close, but they’re both light.”

“Thanks. Keep the list active,” Lucas said. He hung up and said to Del, “Our guy owns a champagne minivan, but not a white one.”

“Eyewitnesses suck,” Del said. “Let’s go jack him up.”

THEY JACKED UP Packard about one-millionth of an inch, and then he unjacked himself. He lived in an apartment complex behind a shopping center, and came to the door in cargo shorts and a gray Army T-shirt with a sweat spot on the chest.

His hair, what was left of it, was cropped right down to the skin, giving him what looked like a cranial five-o’clock shadow. That didn’t fit with what Barker had seen.

A golf bag was leaning against the wall of the entry, and over his shoulder, in the living room, Lucas could see six-foot-tall stereo speakers: the place reeked of a post-divorce crib. Lucas and Del, standing in the hall, told him why they were calling.

“Jesus—you guys are hassling me on something I was found innocent on, more’n twenty years ago? What’s up with that?”

“We’re running down everything,” Lucas said. “Since Marcy Sherrill was killed—”

“All right. But man, you gotta get ahold of Dan Ball at Woodbury PD. You can get him through the station—he’ll be in at three o’clock, or you can call him at home. Or call Bill Garvey, he was supervising yesterday: I was in a squad starting at three o’clock, until eleven. We were sitting outside Cub eating lunch when we heard on the radio about the shooting.”

Lucas nodded. “So we’re cool. If we come by and ask for a DNA sample, you wouldn’t have a problem with it? Wouldn’t need to mention it to anybody.”

“I got no problem with that,” Packard said. “So you got nothin’?”

“We got nothin’,” Lucas said, turning away.

“I worked that Jones thing, in a squad,” Packard said. “I kinda remember you. You were on patrol. You were a couple-three years younger than me, and I mostly worked west. Wasn’t Brian Hanson big on that case?”

“Yeah. He was one of the lead guys,” Lucas said.

“Reason I mention it, see, is he died a couple days ago. Kinda weird way,” Packard said.

Lucas stopped. “Why weird?”

“Well, they know he’s dead, but they can’t find the body. They found his boat driving around in the middle of Lake Vermilion, up north, with his hat in it, but no sign of him. There’s a thing in the Star Tribune this morning, inside. His daughter says he used to pee off the back of the boat; everybody tried to stop him doing it.”

“Huh. Couple days ago?”

“Yeah. Same day the Jones girls were found. Or maybe the next day. Weird, huh?”

“Yeah, weird,” Lucas said. “Huh.”

OUT IN THE CAR, Lucas said, “You know, Hanson . . . Wouldn’t have to be a cop—it could be a cop’s friend, just asking about the case.”

“I haven’t had any breakfast,” Del said. “Why don’t we stop over at Cub and get something? And figure this out.”

They sat in the parking lot eating deli sandwiches, and talked about Hanson, then started back to the BCA. They were a mile out when Shrake called on Lucas’s cell: “Minneapolis SWAT’s outside a place off Portland about Forty-second, not on Portland but over a block, it’s like Fifth Avenue or something, no details but the word is, the guy inside is the one who shot Marcy.”

“What?”

“That’s what we’re hearing, man,” Shrake said. “Some biker guy. Supposedly some kind of grudge thing, Marcy had been bustin’ his balls. Jenkins and I are on the way over. We’ll keep you in touch—”

“That makes no goddamn sense,” Lucas said. “That’s crazy. This doesn’t have anything to do with Marcy, it’s Barker who’s the one. That’s who the shooter was after.”

“I’m just telling you what I hear,” Shrake said. “The guy’s a doper.”

“We’re coming. We’re on 494 coming up to 94; get us some better directions. I think we’ll turn around and come up from the south.”

“Might be quicker,” Shrake said. “And you better hurry.”

“I bet they got a nine-one-one tip on the guy,” Lucas said.

“Why? We got DNA on the shooter; giving up the wrong guy won’t help him.”

Lucas said, “Yeah . . . maybe the guy doesn’t know about DNA. Or maybe he’s just fuckin’ with us. Or maybe he’s playing for time, maybe he’s getting his shit together and trying to get out of town.”

MINNEAPOLIS HAD BARRICADED a two-block radius from the target home on Fifth Avenue, an older white-stuccoed place on an embankment with a two-car detached garage in back. They parked outside the perimeter, walked past Jenkins’s Crown Vic and through the perimeter, flashing their BCA identification at the uniformed cops barricading the streets.

They found Jenkins and Shrake loitering outside the SWAT team’s command post. Lucas asked, “What’s happening?”

“Still in there,” Jenkins said. “They got a negotiator on the phone; he says the guy sounds pretty high.”

“Probably flushing all their junk down the toilet, what they can’t get up their noses,” Del said. “How many are in there?”

“A guy named Donald Brett and his old lady, Roxanne. Maybe a kid. Probably a kid.”

“I know that guy,” Del said.

“Asshole?” Shrake asked.

“Oh yeah,” Del said.

Lucas: “Crazy enough to kill a cop?”

“Probably,” Del said. “He’s your basic hometown psycho who’s been self-medicating with crank and cocaine for years.”

“Can’t see anything from here,” Lucas said, peering down the street at the target house.

“Couple guys went up and were getting ready to take the door down, a pit bull came around the house and started tearing up their ass, and they shot it. Dog’s still there,” Jenkins said. “When they went back to the door, Brett had pushed a table in the entryway. They can’t get the door open now.”

“That’s a handy table,” Del said.

“Probably done it before,” Shrake said.

Lucas: “I’m gonna go find the guy in charge.”

THEY FOUND the guy in charge, a Xavier Cruz, sitting on a tripod stool behind a SWAT van. Inside, another guy was sitting on the floor of the van, talking into a telephone, a finger in his off-ear: the negotiator. Cruz saw them coming and said, “Davenport. Del.”

“How’d you figure the guy out?” Lucas asked.

“Got a nine-one-one tip,” Cruz said. “Guy said he was bragging to friends over at the White Nights.”

“You got the nine-one-one guy?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“He said he didn’t want to be involved,” Lucas suggested.

“Something like that,” Cruz said. “Why?”

Lucas said, “Because the guy on the phone was the killer. He did the same thing to us back on the Jones case. Did it twice; we still got the recordings.”

Cruz said, “Huh,” like, maybe yes, maybe no.

The negotiator was saying, “You gotta man up, Don. You gotta man up. You got responsibilities, you got a wife, you got kids. If you’re not involved, it won’t take long for us to figure it out.”

Del said to Cruz, “If you put me on the phone, I can probably get him out of there in a couple of minutes.”

Cruz studied him for a few seconds, then asked, “You pals?”

“Not exactly. But he knows me. I don’t bullshit him.”

Cruz shrugged: “Gotta ask the man,” and flipped a thumb at the negotiator.

WHEN THE MAN TOOK a short break, they asked him, and he said, “I’m working him around. I don’t need somebody setting me back.”

“If you think I’ll set you back, then let’s not do it,” Del said. “But I wouldn’t. I think I could get him to come out.”

The man looked at Cruz, who shrugged again and said, “Brett’s got us by the nuts—we can’t get in, we can’t shoot in, we can’t even gas in, without knowing who else is in there. We know there are at least two more. . . .”

They both looked at Del, and then the negotiator said, “I’ll give you a couple minutes with him, if he comes back on the phone.”

THEY GOT BRETT BACK on the line, and after a little back-andforth, the negotiator gave the phone to Del.

Del said, “Hey, Don, this is Del. Yeah, it’s Del. I saw you at Einstein’s a couple weeks ago, you were getting a bag of bagels, and we bullshitted for a while. Yeah, the Jewish chick. Yeah, yeah.” He listened for a minute, and then said, “Listen, Don, I know you didn’t do it. I know you didn’t. We’re looking for a guy, and it ain’t you. Not only are we looking for him, the guy was shot in the arm yesterday, and if you don’t have a bullet hole in your arm, you’re good. And we’re getting DNA from the blood from his bullet wound, and if it ain’t your DNA, then it wasn’t you. Yeah, yeah, hey, it was on TV. You been watching TV, haven’t you? Yeah, it’s been on TV.”

After a moment, Del took the phone away from his ear and said, “He’s talking to his old lady. She was watching TV.”

He listened on the phone for another minute, then said, “They’re not gonna shoot you. If you want, I’ll come up there, and you can come out behind me. We already told the SWAT boss that you didn’t do it. Yeah, yeah. We told him. He’s right here. Who’s that crying?”

Another few seconds, then, “Of course she’s scared. She’s probably scared shitless. No point in staying in there, nobody here’s going away. Yeah, they’ll take you downtown, look for bullet holes, probably make you give them a DNA sample. . . . You just take a little swab and swab the inside of your cheek. The cheek in your mouth. Yeah . . . well, yeah, they’re a little pissed about the dog, but you’d be a little pissed, too, if a goddamn pit bull was biting your ass. . . . Wasn’t all that funny, from our point of view. Huh? Okay. Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll come down and knock.”

CRUZ ASKED, “You want a vest?”

“Yeah, might as well,” Del said. “If he shoots me, I trust you to plug him.”

“Think there’s a chance of that?” Cruz asked. “If there is—”

“Nah, he’s not gonna shoot me,” Del said.

“But take the vest,” Lucas said.

“You want to come with me?” Del asked Lucas.

“Fuck no,” Lucas said. “He might shoot both of us.”

“I was planning to stand behind you,” Del said.

“You guys slay me,” Cruz said, no sign of a smile. “A laugh a minute.”

SO DEL WENT DOWN to the white house, walked up the bank to the front steps, and up the steps and peered in the window, then pulled open an outer screen door, and they saw him talking, and then talking some more, and then he opened the front door and they saw Brett in the doorway. He was a large man with a black beard.

“He looks right,” Cruz said.

“Yeah, he does,” Lucas admitted. “But it’s not him.”

“I think it might be,” Cruz said.

“He wouldn’t be coming out if he had a bullet hole,” Lucas said.

“We’ll see,” Cruz said.

Brett stepped out on the porch, Del said something, and he put his hands on top of his head, POW style, and Del backed away and Brett followed him. A SWAT guy came off the corner of the house, then another one, and a minute later, Brett was sitting on the lawn, his hands cuffed, and SWAT was inside the house.

Lucas asked Cruz, as they walked toward the house, “Can I ask him one question?”

“Okay with me, if it’s okay with him.”

Del was standing over Brett, and Lucas came up and asked, “You give him his rights?” He could hear a girl child crying from up in the house.

“Yeah, the SWAT guy did.”

Lucas squatted next to the doper: “I got one question for you, about who might’ve told the cops that you were the shooter. The guy who ratted you out. It’s gotta be somebody about fifty years old. Fat. Black hair, big black beard. Know anybody like that?”

Brett shook his head in exasperation: “Man, I’m a biker. Everybody’s heavy and fat and got a black beard.”

Lucas stood up and shook his head at Del. “He’s . . . ah, fuck it.”

Del asked Brett, “You got any kind of bullet hole in you?”

“No, man, I never been shot.”

“They’re gonna look at you downtown.”

“Man, I keep telling you, I haven’t been shot,” Brett said. “They can take all the DNA they want, I’ll jack off in a bottle, whatever they need.”

A SWAT guy came out carrying the girl. She was maybe five, and still crying, and her mother came out behind her, and she was crying.

Brett said to the SWAT guy, “Look what you did.”

Lucas said to Del, “Come on, let’s go. This is bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit,” Cruz said. “We had a credible tip.”

“It’s bullshit,” Lucas said.

ON THE WAY BACK to the car, Del said, “Made more friends in the MPD.”

“Fuck ’em,” Lucas said. “We got led around by the nose when the Jones girls were killed, and they’re being led around by the nose now.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not wrong. I’m pissed, and frustrated.”

They drove back to the BCA, mostly in silence, and finally Lucas said, “I’ll call Cruz this afternoon, and kiss and make up.”

And a few minutes later, he added, “Fell knows Brett. Somehow he knows him. Maybe if we talked to Brett a little more—”

“He isn’t the brightest bulb on the pole lamp,” Del said. “He started out stupid and then started sniffing glue, so I wouldn’t expect too much.”

BACK AT THE BCA, he walked down to the office where Sandy, the researcher, worked. She was poking at a computer, looked up when Lucas loomed, and said, “It’s impossible. I can’t even give you a probability, because too many records are gone, and too many people took teacher training.”

“How many names you got?”

“I haven’t counted them—must be a couple of hundred. But the problem is, this is all before everything got computerized. Personal computers were brand-new, and a lot of stuff was still kept on paper. I can keep trying—”

“Ah, give it up,” Lucas said. He turned away, then turned back. “Hey, a guy from Minneapolis, a former cop named Brian Hanson, apparently fell out of his boat up on Vermilion. Could you see if there are any news feeds?”

“Sure.” She rattled some keys, and a news story popped up. “TV station out of Duluth,” she said.

Lucas read over her shoulder: neighbors heard him arrive, heard the boat go out, very early in the morning. The boat, a Lund, was found turning circles in the lake just after dawn, the motor running. Another fisherman had hopped into the boat, found Hanson’s hat, fishing rod, and open tackle box. No body had been found yet.

“Not uncommon,” Sandy said. “He was peeing over the side, like all men do, and he fell in, and the boat motored away. The water’s cold enough all year round, he dies of hypothermia, and sinks. Happens all the time.”

“Yeah, but . . . He worked on the Jones case, and died the day after they found the bodies. It worries me that they haven’t found his body.”

“You think he might have faked his own death?”

Lucas scratched his head: “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

BACK IN HIS OFFICE, working more from simple momentum than anything like intelligence, he called the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office, got hooked up with the deputy who’d covered the accident, and got the names of the two fishermen who’d chased down the empty boat. The cop said there was nothing especially suspicious in the disappearance: “It happens. And when it does, there’s nothing really to work with. A guy falls over the side, the boat drifts away, he sinks, and that’s it. No signs of violence, no disturbance . . . nothing. He’s just gone—but he’ll be back. Give him about ten days, he’ll come bobbing up.”

Lucas called around until he found one of the fishermen, an assistant manager at a Target store in Virginia. The boat, he said, “had been chugging right along.”

“How fast?” Lucas asked. “I mean, fast as you could walk?”

“Fast as you could jog,” the guy said.

“Big boat? Nineteen, twenty?”

“Uh-uh. Sixteen. The cops towed it back in, no problem.”

“How big was the engine?” Lucas asked.

“A forty.”

“Life jacket in the boat?”

“Can’t really . . . you know, I don’t think there was.”

Lucas thanked him and hung up. Thought about it for a second, said, “Ah,” to nobody, picked up the phone again, and called Virgil Flowers, a BCA agent who worked mostly outstate. “Where are you?” he asked, when Virgil came up.

“Sitting in the Pope County Courthouse. That Doug Spencer deposition.”

“Got a question for you,” Lucas said. “You used to have a little Lund, right?”

“Yeah. It’s all I could afford on my inadequate salary.”

“We got a guy who apparently fell overboard while he was fishing out of a sixteen-footer,” Lucas said. “His hat was found in the boat, two fishing rods and tackle box, so he wasn’t taking a fish off. The boat was found running, about as fast as you could jog. No body. So why did he fall overboard?”

After a moment of silence, Virgil said, “He was moving around, for some reason, stepped on something like a net handle or the rod handle, and he slipped and the gunwale caught him in the back of the legs, below the knees and he fell over backwards.”

“There was a theory that he was peeing off the boat.”

“Not that boat, not with the motor running like that,” Virgil said. “You couldn’t pee over the motor, so you’d have to stand off to one side, and with the motor running, and all that weight in the back corner, it’d start turning doughnuts. If he was peeing off the side, he’d have peed all over himself. You’re gonna pee, you kill the motor.”

“But still, you could think of a way that he’d fall over.”

“Sure. Boat bouncing around in the waves, you lose your balance—”

“No wind, flat lake.”

Another pause. “Step on a net handle.”

“That’s all you got?”

“It’s not all that easy to fall out of a boat,” Virgil said. “For one thing, in a boat that size, if you’re alone, you don’t really walk around. Not if the motor’s running. What would you be doing? You sit. Walleye fisherman?”

“That’s what I’m told.”

“So, there’s just not much reason to move around,” Virgil said. “I don’t know, Lucas. It’s sure not impossible, but it’s not too likely, either. On the other hand, he could have had three fishing rods, was playing a fish, reached too far over to lift it out of the water, had a spell of vertigo, and went in. It’s not that easy to fall out of a boat, but people do, all the time. For no good reason. How old was he? Could he have had a heart attack?”

“Thank you. Are you pulling your boat today?”

“Of course not. I’m on government business,” Virgil said.

LUCAS HUNG UP and thought about it—whatever anybody might say about it, it was a peculiar death, and it came at a peculiar time. He called Del and said, “I’m going up to look at Hanson’s cabin. Talk to his neighbors and so on.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s what I got,” Lucas said. “It’s all I got. I’m scratching around.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Think about it,” Lucas said. “What we need is ideas . . . maybe you could go back and talk to Don Brett again. Figure out how Fell knows him. If you could figure that out . . .”

“We’d have him.”

“Yeah. Exactly.” Lucas looked at his watch. “I’m gonna run home and get a bag, and take off. See you tomorrow.”

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.”

21

Del walked up the sidewalk to Lucas’s house, saw Shrake’s Cadillac pull to the curb. He waited, hands thrust in the pockets of his jean jacket, until Shrake and Jenkins had caught up with him.

“What’s going on?” Shrake asked, as he came up.

“I don’t know,” Del said. “Weather called, but I just talked to Lucas, and he’s still three hours out.”

“Let’s find out,” Jenkins said, leading the way to the door.

Weather let them in and said, “We need to talk in a hurry, before Letty gets back. I don’t want her to see you.”

“What’s up?” Del asked.

“You want a beer? We’ve got Leinie’s and Negra Modelo.”

They took two Leinie’s and a Negra Modelo, and she went and got them, and brought them back to the living room, where the three cops were still standing, looking uneasy. Weather wasn’t exactly a friend, except that she was married to Lucas: she was a little too smart, a little too commanding, a little too tight.

In other words, a surgeon. She said, “Sit down, everyone. You look like you’re getting ready to stampede.”

When they were sitting, she said, “The thing is, Lucas is going to kill whoever it was that killed Marcy. About five minutes later, people will start talking about how he and Marcy had a relationship back when they were both working for Minneapolis. Some people will say that Lucas murdered this man, whoever he is—”

“I already sorta mentioned it to him,” Del said. “He didn’t want to talk about it.”

“And you might be a little early on getting concerned,” Jenkins said. “Nobody has any idea of who the killer is.”

“You have any doubt that Lucas will find him?” Weather asked.

Shrake, Jenkins, and Del exchanged quick glances, and then Del said, “I wouldn’t bet against him. And when I talked to him, I got the feeling he’s got a sniff of the guy. Something’s going on, I could hear it in his voice.”

“I could, too,” Weather said.

They all looked around, and took nervous hits on their beers, and Shrake finally said, “So what?”

“He’s going to find the guy, and then he’s going to kill him. Even if what he does is legitimate, he’ll be in a lot of trouble,” Weather said. “Somebody will come up with the fact that they had this relationship, and it’ll get in the papers and on television, and then the politicians will get involved, and the prosecutors will be talking . . . And Lucas is so angry, I don’t think he’ll be careful enough. I’m afraid he’s so angry that he’ll simply walk up and plug him. That’s what I’m saying.”

Jenkins shook his head. “He’s too smart to do that out in public.”

Weather interrupted: “But you see, it’d almost be better if he did it in public. But he can’t. But if he does it where there are no witnesses but you cops, that’s when all the speculation will begin. People will imagine what he did. . . .”

Shrake said, “Ah, shit . . . sorry.”

Weather: “He feels terrible about the Jones girls, like he could have done more back then. And he thinks that letting this man go then probably got more girls killed. And now Marcy, and he sees it all going back to the beginning: he thinks it’s his fault.”

“That’s nuts,” Del said. “I worked with him on that case, and he was the only guy who did anything. Quentin Daniel was running the show, and Lucas freaked him out. He couldn’t get Lucas into plainclothes fast enough. Lucas was the only guy who did anything.”

“That’s not the way Lucas thinks, though,” Weather said. “And you know it. He blames himself when things go bad and he’s involved—he thinks he should be able to control everything.”

Del said, “Okay.”

“What I wanted to talk about,” Weather said, “is the possibility that you guys could kind of push him around. Make sure he’s not there when this man is caught. Get him out of the way, somehow, so he never has a chance to kill the guy.”

“So the guy can while away his old age playing checkers in Stillwater?” Jenkins asked.

“Oh, no. I don’t particularly care if somebody kills him,” Weather said. “I’ve got no problem with that at all. As long as it’s not Lucas who does it. If somebody has to shoot the guy, I think one of you should do it. Or some other cop. If one of you shot him, especially Jenkins or Shrake, because you never worked with Marcy . . . I don’t think anybody would question it, especially if the guy was carrying a gun.”

“What if he isn’t?” Jenkins asked.

“Let’s not go there,” Weather said. “But it would be convenient if he were.”

Nobody said anything for a few seconds, taking it in, and then Shrake said, “We shouldn’t talk about this anymore. The word ‘conspiracy’ comes to mind.”

“Had to come out,” Weather said. “We don’t have to talk about what happens to this guy, because I’m just not worried about what happens to him. Thirty years in Stillwater would be okay with me. I’m concerned about Lucas.”

“Ah, Jesus,” Del said.

“You think I’m right, don’t you?” Weather asked.

Del nodded, looked at Shrake and Jenkins, and they both nodded. Shrake said, “I figured that Lucas would waste the guy. The rest of it never occurred to me—the way it would look. You’re right, there’s gonna be a hell of a stink . . . if we don’t do something.”

JENKINS, SHRAKE, AND DEL were long gone by the time Lucas pulled into the driveway, their beer bottles trashed with the recycling. The house was quiet when he came in through the garage—he turned on the kitchen light, looked in the refrigerator, found a chicken salad sandwich left by the housekeeper, and a bottle of Leinie’s. He sat down to eat in the breakfast nook, and heard bare feet coming down the stairs. A moment later, Letty stuck her head in the kitchen. “Hey.”

“You’re up late,” he said.

“Yeah. Mom’s cutting in the morning, so she went to bed at ten. Gotta be quiet when you go up.”

“Okay. You know what she’s doing?”

“Rhino, and then she’s covering some burns,” Letty said.

She watched him chew until he asked, “What?”

“Mom thinks you’re onto something. You know who killed her?”

Lucas shook his head: “You might blab to Jennifer.” Jennifer Carey worked for Channel Three, where Letty was an unofficial intern.

“Would not,” Letty said. “Not unless you told me I could.”

Lucas said, “All right. I’ve got a couple of ideas.” He told her about Hanson’s mysterious disappearance. “I’m thinking he knew the person who did it, and that person got worried and killed him.”

“When are you going to find out?”

“Pretty soon,” he said.

“So this is the time you gotta be really careful,” Letty said. “If you’re gonna take him out.”

“You worry too much.”

“You’re right. And you’re not worried enough.”

HE SNUCK INTO BED, quiet and silent as a cat burglar, and then Weather said in the dark, “I hope your daughter gave you a good talking-to.”

“Ah, yeah . . . she did.”

“Good. I’m going to sleep now, so I don’t cut off poor Mrs. Johnson’s nose.”

Rhino, Lucas thought, as he drifted away, for rhinoplasty. From the Greek rhino for nose, plus plassein, to shape. A nose job, in other words.

But he didn’t dream of rhinos; he dreamed of the mysterious Fell.

I do not like thee, Dr. Fell . . .

WEATHER GOT UP at five-thirty, and Lucas at eight, early for him. He hadn’t felt her go; he usually didn’t. He stretched, yawned, did some push-ups and crunches, got cleaned up, got his gun, sat down in his den, and made a call.

Quentin Daniel picked up and in an old man’s voice said, “What?”

“This is Davenport. I need to talk.”

“That was a bad day,” Daniel said. “That was about as bad a day as I’ve had since Carol died. On top of the Jones kids coming up—”

“That’s what I need to talk about.”

“When?”

“How about now?” Lucas suggested.

“You know where that Starbucks is, down the street from me?” Daniel asked.

“Sure.”

“Meet you there in thirty minutes,” Daniel said.

QUENTIN DANIEL HAD BEEN a ranking detective when Lucas first met him, and later, for eight years, the chief of police. He’d done some bad things in his time, and he knew it, as did Lucas, and they’d never been quite square since.

But Daniel was smart and had been a good investigator, and knew the Jones case and also knew his cops. That, in fact, had been his most serious strength: he knew his investigators so well that he’d match them to cases that he knew would catch their imaginations, and they’d work all the harder for it. He’d also had complete confidence in his own intelligence, and other smart cops didn’t intimidate him. He saw the intelligence of others as simply another weapon in his arsenal.

Lucas had been his finest weapon.

Lucas crossed the street to the Starbucks just as Daniel opened the door to go inside. He’d always been a bigger man, but now had thinned down; his hair was longer, and silvery gray, and he was dressed for golf in a red shirt and white slacks, with athletic shoes. He must be in his middle seventies, Lucas thought.

He held the door for Lucas, said, “You’re looking rich,” and Lucas asked, “What’s your handicap now?” Daniel said, “Same as always: my swing.”

Inside, Daniel ordered a skinny half-caff no-foam latte and Lucas got a bottle of orange juice from the cooler. “Get a table while I’m waiting,” Daniel said.

Lucas found a table in the corner, and when Daniel came over, asked, “How’ve you been?”

“I’ve lost twenty pounds and gotten my cholesterol lower than my IQ. Of course, I’m eating nothing but twigs.”

They chatted for a minute, and Daniel asked about Lucas’s kids, and Lucas filled him in, and then Lucas said, “You remember, way back when, on the Jones case, I was running after a guy named Fell?”

“I remember you were running after a guy,” Daniel said. “There was something unusual about him.”

Lucas filled him in and Daniel started nodding. “I got it now,” he said. Then Lucas told him about the weird death of Brian Hanson, and the timing, and his thoughts about the possibility that somebody on the force had been talking to the killer.

“So what I want to ask you—you knew these people better than anyone—do you know anyone that Hanson might have been talking to? Did you ever have any feeling that he was worried about it, that there was anything going on there?”

Daniel took a sip of his coffee, then leaned back and closed his eyes, silent for so long that Lucas thought he might be into a serious senior moment; then he opened his eyes and said, “Hanson had some kind of a family problem. Something criminal, and it involved sex. Not here, though—not in Minneapolis. I remember hearing that he was maneuvering around, trying to get something done, and I had somebody tell him to take it easy. You know, unofficially. Be careful about asking for favors.”

Lucas said, “Really.”

“You’re not surprised.”

“There are some indications, if you have a suspicious mind, that suggest the killer was close to Hanson. I saw a picture of his kid, when the kid was still young, a teenager, and he sort of looks like the description of Fell, except that he wasn’t fat. And the guy who shot Marcy had a black beard—and I’ve been told that Hanson’s son can’t grow a beard.”

“Maybe if you were planning to gun somebody down in a quiet neighborhood, where it’d get noticed, you’d want to invest two dollars in a disguise,” Daniel said.

“Could happen,” Lucas said. “Do you remember anything else at all?”

Daniel leaned back, looked out the window for a minute—a young mom pushing a stroller, looking satisfied with herself—and took a hit on his coffee. Turning back to Lucas, he said, “You know, I don’t. It was something serious, but not for us. Brian fixed it somehow—talked to some pals, got a lawyer. Never had any hint that his kid might have been involved in the Jones case. I think Brian would have told us, if he thought that. But if you think Hanson’s death might be involved, I’d take a look at the kid.”

“That’s the biggest hint we’ve gotten so far,” Lucas said.

“And that’s all I got for you,” Daniel said. “I wish I had more. Marcy being killed . . . goddamnit, I can’t get it off my back. I didn’t know her long, before I retired, but she was a comer. I keep thinking about her. I keep seeing her.”

Lucas nodded: “So do I. I keep wanting to call her up, tell her some stuff.”

LUCAS DROVE BACK to the BCA and found Sandy. She was wearing one of her long light hippie dresses, and a pair of round sunglasses that she thought made her look like Yoko Ono or somebody, but actually made her look like one of the three blind mice. He told her what he needed, and in one minute, she’d found Hanson’s kid’s driver’s license information, including his current address, in a nice neighborhood in St. Paul. In two minutes, they’d downloaded his driver’s license photo. They printed it; he told Sandy he needed everything they could get on him, and headed back to his car.

His cell phone rang as he was getting in: Sandy. “I dug through the records. He’s got a Chevy van, white in color.”

“Ah, jeez . . . Sandy!”

DORCAS RYAN, the onetime massage parlor hooker, worked the second shift, so she should be home, he thought. Twenty minutes later, he parked in front her house, and through the kitchen window, saw her looking out at him.

He walked up the sidewalk; she was opening the door as he came up. He didn’t go inside: he simply handed her the digital copy of Hanson’s driver’s license photo, without saying a word. She took it, peered at it, said, “Just a minute,” retreated back inside, returned with a pair of reading glasses, put them on her nose, and looked again at the picture.

She said, “Ah. It’s been a long time.”

“The kid . . . is that Fell?”

“It could be,” Ryan said. “If I were in a court, and they asked me to swear to it, I don’t think I could. I could say it could be. But it’s been a long time.”

“Don’t tell anybody about this. If he’s the killer, we want to snap him up.”

“Who would I tell?” Ryan asked.

“Anybody,” Lucas said. “You tell a friend, and she tells somebody else, and they call Channel Three . . . there you are.”

“Won’t tell a soul,” Ryan said. “Not until I hear he’s dead.”

“He might not be dead—”

She snorted. “A cop killer, is what I hear on TV. A lady-cop killer. What are his chances?”

Lucas walked away, thinking, Everybody thinks we’re gonna kill Fell. He remembered Letty’s warning: gotta be cool.

AFTER LEAVING RYAN, he headed back toward the BCA, got on his cell phone as he drove, and called Del. Del had just gotten up, was eating breakfast. “I got a break,” he said.

“I thought something was up,” Del said. “I told Shrake and Jenkins to hang loose.”

“See you at the office,” Lucas said.

He started by pulling all of Hanson’s DMV information. At the time of the Jones killings, he had been twenty-seven. Just right, Lucas thought. He ran the information through the NCIC and came up empty: Hanson had no criminal record.

Del showed up, and Lucas told him about Hanson. “If he’s the one . . . you think he killed his old man? I mean, Jesus.”

“If he’s the one, he’s a fruitcake. A psycho,” Lucas said. “His old man was a cop, and Daniel says, knowing Hanson, if he smelled it on his kid, he’d have let us know. And the kid might have known that. This was a guy who set up that whole Dr. Fell routine . . . he’s a planner.”

Sandy came in. “Hanson went to the University of Minnesota, here in the Cities. Got a degree in horticultural science. Last job I can find was at a place called Clean Genes, whatever that means.”

“Not quite right,” Del said.

Lucas said to Del, “Did I tell you he drives a white van?”

“That’s something,” Del said to Lucas.

“Nothing to say horticultural scientists can’t read nursery rhymes,” Lucas said.

LUCAS ASKED SANDY, “How’d you do this? Some kind of weird computer shit?”

“I looked him up on Facebook,” Sandy said. “His Facebook page says he graduated from the U, and I took a quick peek at his records—don’t tell anybody about that. He did pretty well.”

DEL ASKED, “What are we doing?”

“I want to look in Hanson’s house,” Lucas said. “Brian Hanson’s. See what I can see. See if there’s anything that would point us at the kid.”

“St. Louis Park’s been inside of it, when the deputies called from up north,” Del said. “We could give them a call.”

Lucas called St. Louis Park, talked to a Lieutenant Carl Wright. “I think we can get you in—I’d have to check with the chief,” Wright said. “Part of the investigation into his disappearance?”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Lucas said. “When you went in the first time, did you move stuff around, or just walk through?”

“Walked through—for all we knew, he’d be coming back, so we didn’t disturb anything.”

“Excellent,” Lucas said. “We’ll start your way. If there’s a problem, give me a call on my cell phone. Also, I don’t want the relatives to know about this, if they get in touch with you.”

“Why’s that?”

“Tell you when we get there,” Lucas said.

On the way out the door, Lucas said to Del, “Let’s take your car. It’s a little less conspicuous.”

“Why can’t we be conspicuous?”

“I might want to cruise Darrell Hanson’s house on the way back. See if he’s around.”

ST. LOUIS PARK was a few minutes west of Minneapolis, and a half-hour after they left the BCA, they pulled into the redbrick police station, found Wright, who said they’d been cleared to walk through Hanson’s house. “I’ll be coming with you, to keep everything kosher.”

“Fine,” Lucas said.

“So what’s this about the relatives?”

“There’s at least the outside possibility that one of the relatives could be a guy we’re interested in. . . .” He gave Wright a quick summary, without mentioning Marcy, and Wright said, “You know, if this is a criminal investigation, maybe we ought to get a warrant.”

“We’re not investigating Brian Hanson for anything, other than to find out how he died,” Lucas said. “We’re not searching for anything—we’re just looking for signs that he expected to come back to his house.”

“And it’s better not to ask if it’s okay,” Del said. “We can always apologize later.”

“That’s true,” Wright said. “All right. I can live with that. Let’s go.”

HANSON HAD LIVED in a fifties bungalow, on a tree-shaded side street not far from the station. The guy next door was trimming his hedge, and stopped when they got out of their cars—Wright was driving a patrol car—and asked, “No sign of him yet?”

“Not yet,” Wright said.

“You see anybody checking around?” Del asked.

“It’s been quiet,” the neighbor said. “And we been kinda keeping an eye out.”

Wright had a key. He explained that they used a locksmith to open the door the first time, and found the key on a hook in the kitchen. When Wright opened the door, they could smell the lack of activity: the house felt shut up, and still. And they could smell cigarette smoke.

“Guy’s still smoking. Must be nuts, his age,” Del said.

“Gonna kill him, for sure,” Lucas said.

They walked through the house, moving quickly. Del stopped once to pop open the washer and drier. Both were empty.

“He’d been home for a few days,” Lucas said.

In the bathroom, they found a dopp kit with a razor, shaving cream, toothbrush and toothpaste, and miscellaneous—antiseptic cream, SPF-30 face lotion, a tube of Preparation H, nose-hair scissors, Band-Aids. “There’s a clue for you,” Del said. “Did he have another kit up north?”

“No, he didn’t,” Lucas said. “The bathroom was empty. There was no suitcase, but that doesn’t mean much, if he kept clothes in both places.”

“Wonder why he didn’t keep a kit in both places?” Wright asked.

“Because then you’re never sure of what you’ve got,” Lucas said. “I do the same thing with my cabin—I keep clothes there, but I take the dopp kit back and forth. And shoes . . .”

They found a pair of athletic shoes at the end of the bed. They were scuffed and dirty. “There’s your fishing shoes,” Lucas said.

Del said, “Speaking as a defense attorney, I can say that you’re building a fairy tale.”

In the kitchen, they found a carton of Marlboros sitting on the counter, one pack missing. “There you go,” Lucas said. “He was coming back. At six bucks a pack, he wasn’t going to leave those behind.”

“I’ll buy that,” Del said.

“I gotta think about it,” Wright said. “But I’m moving your way.”

BACK IN THE CAR, Del said, “It looks almost too good.”

“Let’s take a look at Darrell’s place,” Lucas suggested.

Darrell Hanson lived in a well-preserved three-story Victorian across the street from Lake Como. A guy in a painter’s white shirt and trousers was standing on a stepladder, painting the eaves a teal green.

They were parked on a narrow one-way lane, two doors down from Hanson’s house, and Lucas looked around and said, “If you showed up at the right time of day . . . that side door.”

Del said, “You’re not thinking about bagging the place? Man, that’s a really bad idea. This whole neighborhood is gonna be full of security—we could be on a camera right now.”

“Come in from the back—”

“Aw, bullshit. That’d probably be worse.”

Lucas took a long breath and let it out: “I’d like to bag it. See what I could see. But I’m also thinking that Dwayne Paulson might give us a delayed report, if he thinks we got enough on Hanson.”

“Maybe we got enough. Maybe. A half-ass photo ID, the white van . . .”

“When I make application, the photo ID could be ‘probably.’ I could get a ‘probably’ out of Kelly Barker.”

“That’s sorta . . . borderline, dude.”

“Don’t get all lawyer on me,” Lucas said. “Look: we know Darrell’s father disappeared from his house, leaving the lights on, his cigarettes out, and all the rest. We know that Hanson’s death was faked, if it was faked, by somebody who knew about the cabin, how to get in and out, and about the motorbike. Had to know about the old man’s habits. Had to know about the dirt bike so they could count on stealing it. So if he was killed, it was probably by somebody who knows him.”

“And we thought we knew he was a schoolteacher, but it turns out he wasn’t.”

Lucas went on: “He was the right age—”

“I agree, he’s probably the one,” Del said. “I’m just saying, a lot of the stuff might not cut much ice with a judge. And why go to Paulson? We could just go to Carsonet.”

Lucas said, “Because Paulson got divorced about five years ago, and he and Marcy went out for a while.”

“Ah. That would help,” Del said. “Still don’t have any hard evidence.”

“And once we go for a warrant, we’re committed,” Lucas said.

They thought about that for a minute, then Del said, “If you bag it, you gotta talk to me. I don’t want you doing it alone.”

“Then, if I get caught, two of us go down,” Lucas said.

“So let’s go talk to Paulson.”

“I’m afraid he’ll say no.”

“So then we bag it,” Del said. “Can’t be in any more trouble, if we get caught.”

Lucas put his head down and thought about it. If he blackbagged the house, he could only be inside for a few minutes. If he got caught, his career was done: and he might be looking at jail time. A lot of security around . . .

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go see Paulson. We can tell him what we’ve got, ask him if he’ll give us a delayed report. We ask him before he makes application.”

“Be right up front with him.”

“He’s no dummy,” Lucas said. “If we try to bullshit him, we’ll only piss him off.”

THEY WENT BACK to the BCA to pick up some paperwork, and then Lucas talked to Paulson’s clerk to make sure the judge would be around. Told that he had a relaxed schedule that morning, Lucas signed up for an appointment and he and Del headed for Minneapolis.

Paulson’s chambers were on the eighteenth floor of the Hennepin County Courthouse. When his clerk ushered Lucas and Del into the office, they found Paulson with his feet up on his desk, picking on an electric guitar, listening to himself on earphones plugged into a tiny amp. He saw them, tipped his head toward two visitors’ chairs, continued picking for another ten seconds, then shut down the guitar.

“I coulda been a Rolling Stone,” he said. He was a tall man, with slicked-back hair, a long nose, and a thin white smile. He could have been a country singer, but probably not a Rolling Stone.

“And if you’d been a judge at the same time, you coulda sent yourself to prison for drug abuse,” Del said.

“How are you, Del?” Paulson asked. To Lucas: “It’s bad, ain’t it?”

“It is. I’ve got to tell you, we’re here to ask your advice about a search warrant, and it involves Marcy’s murder.”

“Uh-oh,” Paulson said, dropping his feet to the floor. “Let’s hear it.”

Lucas explained what they had, and what they’d be looking for if they got a search warrant, and why they weren’t yet applying: “We know it’s a little thin, but we think the totality of the evidence should get us in. But if you don’t think so, we don’t want the application made official.”

“And you came to me because you knew it was thin, and you also knew that Marcy and I dated for a while.”

“That was a factor,” Lucas said. “I won’t bullshit you, Dwayne: we do think we’ve got enough, but we know we’re on the edge.”

“Give me one minute to think,” Paulson said. He turned in his desk chair so that his back was to them, and tilted his head back. They looked at his small bald spot for a minute, then two, and finally he turned back and said, “This guy just walked into that house down in Bloomington and opened fire, with no warning.”

“That’s right.”

“It sounds like he’s an absolute danger to himself and others. He may be undergoing a psychotic break.”

“Absolutely,” Del said.

“I wouldn’t give it to you without that. Make a note of that in your app, and I’ll give it to you.”

Lucas took the paperwork from his pocket: “I left space for additional notes,” he said.

THEY LEFT with the warrant in their pockets, and Lucas said, “The more I’ve thought about it, the surer I am. No big thing pointing to him, but a lot of little ones. And he’s a planner. He’s not the kind of guy to leave big clues hanging around.”

Back at the BCA, Lucas called John Simon, the director, and told him what was happening. Simon had almost no control over Lucas’s unit, and resented it, but lived with it. “Just take it easy. I don’t want a bunch of dead people,” he said. “I don’t want any dead people.”

22

Lucas, Del, Jenkins, Shrake, and two crime-scene techs, Norman Johnson and Delores Schmidt, went into Hanson’s house a little after three o’clock in the afternoon.

The place was empty, but lived-in: it smelled like good cooking, there were two dozen plants on the ground floor alone, and more on the stairway and through the second floor, where the bedrooms were. They were well watered and healthy, and the refrigerator was full of fresh food. A two-car garage faced the alley in back, but was empty.

“I was hoping we’d find a dirt bike,” Lucas said.

They began pulling the place apart, starting in the bedrooms and the basement, where people tended to hide things. Schmidt, a computer specialist, went to work on a PC found in the den, and a laptop that was sitting in the kitchen. Using specialist software, she pulled up both passwords in a matter of minutes and began probing the files in the two machines.

“Look for porn,” Lucas told her. “Image files.”

The going was slow: two hours after they arrived, they hadn’t turned up anything decisive, although Lucas found two file boxes full of photographs, and Schmidt found more on the computers—dozens of them included Darrell Hanson. Some of the photos looked exactly like Kelly Barker’s Identi-Kit construction; others did not.

Then Hanson arrived home, driving the white van, a little after six o’clock. Shrake went out to meet him, and Lucas focused on him like a cat on a mouse, his breathing deepening, his eyes dilating. Wanted to smash him—

“He look like the guy?” Jenkins asked. Jenkins was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Lucas as they looked out the back.

“Yeah,” Lucas said. “He does.”

Hanson had a screaming fit, and Lucas watched him have it, stalking around the room, staying one layer of cops away from him, watching him talk to Del and Shrake, Jenkins always at Lucas’s elbow. Hanson was a short, dark-haired man, thick through the chest, with a sallow face and heavy black hair. Del slowed him down, but didn’t calm him down: Hanson called an attorney, who lived a few minutes away, and twenty minutes after he arrived home, the attorney, a fleshy, sandy-haired man in a light blue suit, walked in.

Hanson showed the attorney the warrant that Lucas had served on him, and the attorney told him to sit down and shut up, and told Lucas to direct all questions to him, not to Hanson.

Lucas said, “That’s fine. We may have some questions later.”

Hanson said, “I want to know what’s going on.”

The attorney put a finger across his lips, but Lucas said, “I could give a speech, which doesn’t include any questions.”

The attorney scratched his neck, said to Hanson, “If you want to hear the speech, that’s okay. Do not respond.”

At that moment, Del came in, crooked his finger at Lucas. Lucas followed him through to the kitchen, out of earshot of the attorney and Hanson, and Del said, quietly, “We may have a problem.”

“Yeah?”

“I just looked at the white van,” Del said. “It’s a white van, all right, but both sides and the back are covered with large red roses. He works with some kind of flower farm place, wholesaling flowers. The people who talked to Bloomington, who’d seen the van, didn’t say anything about any roses. It’d be the first thing you noticed.”

“Man . . . I think it’s him,” Lucas said. “He looks right.”

“I don’t know. I got a bad feeling,” Del said. “I think we screwed the pooch.”

“I’m gonna make a speech,” Lucas said.

LUCAS MADE A SPEECH. They had reason to believe that Hanson’s father had been murdered, had not fallen out of the boat and drowned. Evidence pointed to somebody who knew him well. The same person was believed to have killed a Minneapolis police officer and two other people, and the description fit Hanson. He said, “The whole issue can be solved with a DNA test. We have blood from the shooter, and the DNA processing is being finished this afternoon. Is probably done now. We do not have permission to take DNA from Mr. Hanson, at this point, but we will get it, unless he voluntarily wants to give it up.”

“No,” said the attorney, whose name was Jim.

“Wait, wait,” Hanson said. “It’d clear me?”

“Yes,” Lucas said.

“I’m telling you not to do it, Darrell,” the attorney said.

“Jim, I know about DNA,” Hanson said. “It’ll clear me. It’s not my blood. In fact, they don’t even have to take any from me.”

“Darrell, we need to spend a lot more time talking this through before we start volunteering anything,” the attorney said. “We need to get a criminal attorney in here. I’m not really that hot on criminal law.”

“You’re doing fine,” Hanson said. But he turned to Lucas and said, “Two years ago, I went to Iraq with a civilian contractor called Wetland Restorations from Caplan, Missouri. We were there to consult on some marshlands at the southern end of the country, that they were trying to restore. Anyway, before we went, they did DNA on all of us, you know, in case we got blown up. Wetland has a DNA file on me.”

A TINTED-BLOND WOMAN in her forties came through the door carrying a Macy’s shopping bag and wearing a look of shock: Carol Hanson, Darrell’s wife, who, like Darrell, exploded at the cops, then began weeping.

Lucas went out back, while Del and Shrake tried to calm things down, and called the head of the BCA’s DNA lab, told him about the file at Wetland. He agreed to go back downtown, make some calls, try to get the file. “We got the file on the blood from the Bloomington shooting. If we can get a legit file from this place, we could tell you pretty quickly if there’s a match.”

Lucas went back to the search: the woman, Mrs. Hanson, had gone into the family room and was lying on a couch, with Shrake sitting across from her, talking to her. Didn’t want anyone to have a heart attack.

An hour after Lucas had talked to the man at the DNA lab, Hanson took a call, listened for a minute, then said, “Yes. You have my permission. Give it to them.”

To Lucas, he said, “They’re sending the DNA file to your lab. They’ll have it in one minute.”

“Aw, Darrell, that’s . . . I can’t be responsible for that decision,” the attorney said. “We gotta get somebody else in here.”

Lucas said, “Hey, if he didn’t do it, we don’t want to try to pin it on him. He’s got me about sixty percent believing him now. We’re gonna need another DNA sample, to be sure there isn’t something tricky going on—”

“I’ll do it,” Hanson said.

His wife had moved into the front room with him, and cried, “They completely tore apart our bedroom. It’s torn apart.” She started weeping again.

Another hour passed. They’d almost finished with the house, and Lucas called the DNA lab, was told that the computer was still running the comparison: “Almost there,” he was told. “The other file was good, and has Hanson’s name and Social Security number right on the file. I don’t think anyone’s trying to pull a fast one, but we’ll need to double-check.”

“Call me,” Lucas said.

“Twenty minutes.”

Lucas sat on a living room chair, and Hanson started going through the “never been arrested routine” that Lucas had heard fifty times from people who’d just been arrested, some of them for murder. “Honest to God, I have never, ever . . .”

THE LAB DIRECTOR, whose name was Gerald Taski, called.

He said, “You’re not gonna believe it. You’re not going to believe it, that’s all I can say. This is so weird, I only ever heard of one other case like it, out in LA. . . .”

“Well, tell me,” Lucas said.

“It’s definitely not him,” Taski said. “You got the wrong guy.”

“That’s not good, but it’s not weird,” Lucas said. “What’s weird?”

“Your guy knows the killer.”

“What?” Lucas turned around and stared at Hanson, who flinched.

“He might not know he knows the killer, but the killer is very closely related to him,” Taski said. “Not more than a few generations removed. They probably shared a grandfather. Maybe a great-grandfather, but I don’t think it’s that far back. We need more analysis.”

Lucas listened for another minute, with Hanson, the attorney, and the other cops all watching him, then hung up and said, “Unless there’s some kind of really unusual bullshit going on, you’re clear.”

“I told you,” Hanson said, and his wife started weeping again, and half shouted, “You ruined our house.”

Lucas waved them down: “But—you’re closely related to the killer.”

Now it was Hanson’s turn: “What?”

“You probably share a grandfather,” Lucas said. “Who would it be?”

Hanson looked at his wife, then at the floor, and then his wife muttered something that Hanson didn’t catch, and he looked around and said, “Oh, good Lord.”

“Who is it?” Lucas asked.

“We’re a big family,” Hanson said. “I must have twenty cousins. That’s what we’re talking about, right? Cousins?”

“I guess so,” Lucas said. “Cousins, but it could be uncles, or second cousins, I guess.”

Hanson said, “I’ve got a cousin named Roger. Roger Hanson. If it’s somebody, I’d say it was him.”

“Did he know your father’s cabin?” Del asked.

“Sure. But, most of the cousins did. It was like a family place.”

“And he knew your father pretty well,” Lucas said.

“Yes. But it’s the same thing—everybody knows everybody. All the cousins. We all get together on the Fourth of July, and at Christmas.”

“So why do you think it’s Roger?” Lucas asked.

Hanson looked at his wife, and finally she said, “Because he’s strange. In a bad way. He’s angry and mean and he can be scary.”

They talked for another twenty minutes: it became apparent that several cousins probably fit the description of John Fell, and were in the right age range. They said Roger Hanson had never taught school, as far as they knew. They didn’t know anything about Brian Hanson cleaning up a legal mess made by one of the cousins.

“Does he have a white van?” Lucas asked.

Hanson ticked a finger at him: “I haven’t seen him in a couple of years—but he’s an antique dealer, a junk dealer, really, and he’s always had a van.”

Lucas told the other cops to pack up, and apologized to the Hansons for the mistake. “I’m sorry about it, but you have to understand, given what’s happened, that it was worth it from my point of view. At this point, all we have to do is figure out which cousin is a cold-blooded murderer.”

He added that they should not talk to anyone about the night’s developments: “The last time somebody got under his skin, he went to her house and shot three people, and killed one of them. So, stay quiet, and we’ll clear this up. But stay quiet.”

OUT IN THE CAR, Del said, “I been in a lot of clusterfucks, but nothing that ever ended like that.”

“Not a clusterfuck,” Lucas said. “One way or another, we broke the case.” He got on his cell phone, caught the researcher, Sandy, as she was about to eat dinner. “Can you get back into the office pretty quick? It’s kind of an emergency.”

She could, she said: “I’m having pancakes. I can be down there in twenty minutes. What do you need?”

He gave her Roger Hanson’s name, address, and phone number, which he’d gotten from Darrell Hanson, and told her to get everything she could find on him. “Are you coming in?”

“In a bit,” he said.

“WHERE ARE WE GOING?” Del asked.

“I want to take a look at Roger’s house. It’s up on the northeast.”

Roger Hanson lived in the prewar Logan Park neighborhood in northeast Minneapolis, on a street lined with shade trees and parked cars and pickups. His house was a modified bungalow with a narrow front porch, up three steps. Hedges ran down both sides of the house, separating it from the adjacent houses; a narrow, much-cracked driveway ran down one side of the house, to a onecar garage in back.

Nothing was moving around it: a car was parked out front, there was no other car in sight, no white vans on the street. There was that garage, and there could be a van inside.

“I could go knock, see if he comes to the door,” Del said. “If he was hit, I might be able to tell.”

“If he’s hit, he won’t come to the door,” Lucas said. “Why would he? To get his Girl Scout cookies?”

“No lights,” Del said.

They drove twice around the block, slowly, and then parked at the end of the block, in front of a house with a “Sold” sign on it. With any luck, Del said, the owners had moved out and wouldn’t see them sitting there.

Nobody apparently did, or at least nobody was curious: they sat for an hour, talked in a rambling way about a few current investigations, none of great importance, a few personalities around the office, and about Marcy. In that hour, there was no visible activity around Hanson’s house—no moving drapes, nobody at a window.

“It feels empty,” Del said.

“Could be at work,” Lucas said. “Could have flown the coop. Could be down at the grocery store . . . we don’ t know shit.”

“One thing we know,” Del said, “is that the picture-window drapes are open, and so are the drapes on that room in the back, and that’s probably a bedroom. If they’re closed later on, or tonight, we’ll know somebody is home.”

“Let’s go,” Lucas said. “Take a few more turns around the neighborhood. Get the lay of the land.”

“You’re not gonna bag it?”

“I’m thinking about it,” Lucas said. “Time’s passing, and word is gonna get out. Maybe not exactly what we’ve got, but that we’ve got something.”

They watched the house for an hour, and then Sandy called, and Lucas put it on the car speakerphone. She said, “All right. He’s got a white van, number one. Two, he went to school in Moorhead, which has a big teachers’ college, and he was there for four years. I couldn’t get at any personal records, but I did find out that he didn’t graduate. I could get at the graduation records.”

Del said, “He didn’t graduate because he diddled an eighthgrader in his last year.”

“I could find no reports of diddling,” Sandy said. “Maybe there’d be something, if I could crack the individual records, but they’re very well-protected. I’d need a subpoena for that.”

Nothing had moved in Hanson’s house, and they gave it up after Sandy’s phone call. On the way back to the BCA, Lucas said, “Another reason for bagging it: say we get a warrant, go in there, and find some trophies—the Jones girls’ panties, or whatever. Or his old man is stuffed in the freezer. Then what? If we didn’t put out a general alert, we’d take an ocean of shit. If we find anything, that’d be the end of our hunt.”

“So what? Then we got him.”

Lucas patted his chest, and his voice was grim. “I want to get him. Me. Me.”

THEY CAME to no conclusion about bagging Hanson’s house, agreed to talk it over the next day, and headed home. Lucas was too late for dinner, but had a sandwich, and called Bob Hillestad from Minneapolis homicide at home. Minneapolis, Hillestad said, had gotten nowhere, and everybody was waiting for the BCA to finish running the DNA file against the data bank.

Later in the evening, Lucas read a couple of online financial blogs, killing time, and as Weather was getting ready for bed, he went out to the garage, lifted a step in the back stairs going up to the housekeeper’s apartment, and took out his burglary tools—an electric lock rake, a ring of bump keys, a small crowbar, a pair of white cotton garden gloves, an LED headlamp. He checked the batteries in the rake, thought they might be a little weak, and replaced them with two new C cells from the workbench.

He put them in a black nylon briefcase and dropped them behind the front seat of his Lexus SUV. That done, he went back in the house, got a beer, stepped in the bedroom to say good night to Weather, then leaned in Letty’s doorway and watched her working through Facebook.

“I know women need to build social networks because it’s wired into their brains to do that, but what a fuckin’ waste of time,” he said. “You oughta learn to play guitar or something.”

“I’m working,” she said, without looking up.

“Working?” The skepticism was right there in his voice.

Now she looked up. “Yeah. Some big newspaper, like maybe the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington one—”

“The Post.”

“Yeah, one of those, they did a big story about online bullies on Facebook and how some girl, like, hung herself, and they’ve got me going out to all my Facebook friends looking for people who got bullied, so we can do a story on it.”

“They” were her mentors at Channel Three.

“Hanged,” Lucas said. “Not hung. People get hanged, other things get hung.”

“You mean like, ‘He hanged up on me,’ or ‘She was really hanged up on that guy’? Or ‘Jeez, he is really well hanged’ ? ”

“I mean by the neck. People get hanged by the neck until dead. Everything else is ‘hung.’”

“So what are you doing hassling me?” Letty asked. “While I’m working?”

“Not hassling. Just came by to see if you needed anything at the store. I’m gonna go buy some of that Greek yogurt.”

“You could get me some Coke. Maybe some Hostess Sno Balls.”

“I think Sno Balls are made out of pork liver,” Lucas said.

“That’s really funny. I’m laughing myself sick,” she said. “Get me the Coke. And the Greek yogurt with peaches.”

“Talk to you tomorrow.”

LUCAS FINISHED THE BEER, ostentatiously banged around in the kitchen, then went out and climbed in the Lexus and headed over to Hanson’s place. He could feel the stress building as he rolled along, and the excitement. The fact was, he liked it, always had.

He cruised Hanson’s place once, saw no lights, was able to see that the position of the drapes was the same. Screwed up his guts, cruised it again. On his second pass, headlights flicked on from a car parked at the end of the block. He turned the corner, and the car followed. He turned the corner and the car followed again, and flicked its high beams a couple of times.

Lucas pulled over, the car followed, and in his rearview mirror, he saw Del get out and walk up to his driver-side window. He rolled it down and Del said, “Letty says you’re way too obvious.”

“Ah, shit.”

“So you gonna do it?” Del asked.

“I am,” Lucas said. “I think you ought to stay away.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’m too young to go to prison for burglary, but I’ve got you on speed dial. If I see him coming, I’ll ring you, and you get the fuck out the back. If you go out the back, you’ll see that you can jump a hurricane fence in the backyard, and I’ll pick you up around the block.”

“What about this car?”

“I’ll take it. We’ll drop my car somewhere, I’ll let you out in front of the house, then go around the block and park where I can see his driveway.”

Lucas nodded. “Thanks.”

They did that, and when Del took the wheel of the Lexus, he said, “Not that I’m happy about it.”

“You don’t have to do it.”

“Yes, I do,” Del said. “I got this vague memory of talking you out of chasing John Fell, way back when. Saying it was pointless. I wonder how many girls are dead because of it?”

“I’ve been sick about it,” Lucas said, staring stolidly through the windshield. “But even if we’d identified him, what were we going to do with it? We had no bodies, we had no witnesses, we had a dead guy whose fingerprints were on that fuckin’ box. . . .”

“Still . . .”

“Yeah. Still.”

THEY CIRCLED the block one more time, checking houses with lights: the house across the street from Hanson’s had lights, as did the one on the left. “If we’re gonna do it, best not to circle again,” Del said.

“Drop me off,” Lucas said, and pulled on the gloves.

Lucas climbed out in front of the lights-out house, walked quickly down the sidewalk and then up the walk to Hanson’s place, and rang the doorbell. Rang it again, did a quick check around, pulled out the rake, rang the doorbell again, and slipped the rake into the lock. The rake sounded like somebody shaking a tray of dinner forks: not hard, just shaking it a little. Lucas kept the turning pressure on the lock, and felt it go.

He took the knob, turned it, called, “Hey, Roger. You home?”

No answer. He stepped inside, pushed the door shut, and turned on the light. Burglary notes: if you’re burglarizing a house, don’t go through the door and leave the house dark, and look around with the flashlight. The neighbors will call the cops. On the other hand, turning on the light is absolutely normal.

Lucas called out again: “Hey, Hanson? Hey . . .”

Silence.

He started moving, going swiftly through the living room, through the kitchen to the back door. He unlocked it, cracked it open. Then back through the house, checking the three bedrooms. One had been turned into an office, one was filled with what looked like junk, the other held a bed. The bed was covered with twisted blankets, as though the sleeper had been struggling with them.

He spent three minutes in the bedroom, quickly pulling out drawers, checking through them, finding nothing interesting but a switchblade and, in another drawer, two ball bearings in a sock, the ball bearings the diameter of a fifty-cent piece. He’d seen similar things used as saps, but the ball bearings were so heavy that if you hit someone on the head with them, you’d kill them. Must be some other use he was unaware of . . . or maybe Hanson collected ball bearings.

In the bedroom closet, he found a stash of what looked like old printed pornography, in a stack four feet high. The magazines were cheaply printed, apparently in Asia, and featured girls who were too young.

Lucas thought, Yes.

And he flashed back to the porn he’d found in Scrape’s box. This was similar, but a decade or two newer. The same genre.

They had him, and it was time to go, he thought.

HE DIDN’T GO. His appetite whetted by the discovery in the bedroom, he checked out the office, and found a jumbled mass of income tax returns. He flipped through the recent ones, found declared incomes of $30,000 to $40,000, and business cards identifying Roger Hanson as an antique dealer, which explained the junk in the bedroom.

He found a file full of bank statements: the most recent one showed a balance of $789; and a file of Visa statements, showing a balance of $4,560. Hanson was broke. He found a drawer full of bills, thumbed them, pulled out a cell phone bill from Verizon and shoved it in his pocket.

He found a fat file stuffed with homemade brochures from Thailand, printed on color laser printers, advertising sex tours; and offering teenage girls. He put it back in place.

Listened. Nothing. No call from Del, yet. Risk was building. Looked at his watch: he’d been inside for eight minutes; the max he’d wanted to risk was five, and he was already three over.

But two more minutes . . .

He hurried through the kitchen to the back door. He pulled it closed, locked it as it had been. Checked a closet, saw nothing of interest. Opened another door, saw a steep stairs going into the basement. Flipped on a light, took the stairs, quickly as he could: two rooms: one a utility room with a washer, drier, washtub, furnace, water heater, a top-opening freezer.

The other side was filled with more junk—old, but not antiques. Weather bought antiques, and the antiquing trips had given Lucas the rudiments of an eye. His eye told him that this stuff was junk.

Glance at his watch: ten minutes. Time to run. His phone rang: Del.

“Yeah?”

“Get out of there, man,” Del said. “You been in there ten minutes.”

“Somebody coming?”

“Not yet,” Del said.

“I’m coming.”

He started up the stairs, caught the flash of the freezer. He stepped back, pulled it open, saw a pile of white meat packages, like the kind butchers use to package venison, and some boxes of sweet corn, and a shoe.

His brain said, What?

He brushed several boxes aside, and saw Brian Hanson’s frosted face and hair.

He thought, Holy shit. After a few seconds, he pushed the boxes of sweet corn back across the dead man’s face, closed the freezer top, and ran up the stairs. Remembered to turn off the basement light and shut the door. Walked to the front door, touched the speed-dial button on his cell phone, and Del said, “What?”

“I’m coming out.”

“Fifteen seconds.”

Lucas turned off the light, stepped out on the porch, pulled the door shut, walked as casually as he could down to the public sidewalk. Del pulled into the curb, and Lucas climbed into the Lexus.

“NO SIGN OF HIM,” Del said, as they pulled away. “No sign of anything. We’re clean. But Jesus, you were in there a long time.”

Lucas said, “Yeah.”

In his mind’s eye, Lucas could see Brian Hanson’s frozen face. He’d never particularly liked Hanson—too old-style for Lucas—but he hadn’t been a bad investigator.

They turned the corner and Del was saying something, and Lucas backtracked: he’d asked, “What’d you get?” and now was looking at Lucas a little oddly. He said, “You in there?”

“I found Brian Hanson dead in the freezer.”

Del laughed, and then stopped laughing. “You shit me. I mean, you were joking, you said something about finding him in the freezer.”

“I shit you not. The guy is down in the freezer in the basement, frozen stiff. He’s got frost all over his face. Freaked me out. And there’s a pile of kiddie porn, and a computer that’s gotta have more stuff—I didn’t look at it—and there’s a file full of stuff from Thailand advertising young girls for sale. Del, you can’t believe the shit in there. He’s some kind of antique dealer, the place is full of junk. . . .”

He went on for a while, and Del finally said, “That’s . . . insane.”

“It’s insane. That’s exactly right. It’s insane.”

They pulled up behind Del’s car, and Lucas stripped off the garden gloves and shoved them in his pocket, and put the rake back in the bag behind the seat, and Del said, “If he’s really insane, he’s gonna wind up spending life at St. Peter.”

St. Peter was the Minnesota hospital for the criminally insane.

Lucas shrugged.

Del said, “Man, if you kill him—”

“I’ve already had that lecture,” Lucas said. “Let it go.”

They sat for a couple of minutes, and then Del said, “If we can get a warrant from anyone, we can go in there tomorrow, clean the place out. We’ll have him in a few hours.”

“Gotta think about it,” Lucas said. “But what we’ve got to do for sure is get Shrake or Jenkins over here, to sit on the place overnight. If Hanson comes in, we’ve got to know about it—we don’t want him hauling his uncle out of there and getting away with it.”

“What else?”

“I got a Verizon bill from him, with his cell phone number. We need to get in touch with Verizon, find out where he’s calling from. Probably need a subpoena.”

“All of this is tomorrow,” Del said. “Let’s get Jenkins over here to sit on the house. Then tomorrow, we drop on him.”

“Don’t want him to go to St. Peter,” Lucas said. “I want to settle this now.”

Del looked at him, then said, “Don’t bullshit me: you’re not doing any more tonight.”

Lucas shook his head: “No. I’m satisfied. We got him—now I’ve got to figure out a way to get him. I’m gonna stop at the store, then I’m heading home.”

“The store?”

“I’m gonna get some Greek yogurt and a six-pack of Coke, so I’ll have it in my hand when Letty jumps me,” Lucas said. He grinned in the dark. “She’s a piece of work. And turn off your cell, so she can’t call you. I want her up all night, worrying about what happened.”

“That’s mean,” Del said.

“That’s life,” Lucas said. “You mess with someone, you can’t bitch too much when they return the favor. Even when it’s your daughter.”

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.”

24

Lucas got the warrant. Del called Darrell Hanson, and was told that as far as he knew, he had no relatives in Waconia. Del did a search of Waconia on the Internet and found two motels, an AmericInn and what appeared to be a mom-and-pop called Wadell’s Inn, on the far west side of town. He printed out satellite maps of the area.

When Lucas got back from the Ramsey County Courthouse, he gave the warrant to the entry team, made sure they understood that they weren’t to serve it until two o’clock. “If he’s home, be careful. He’s shot one cop, and has nothing to lose by shooting another one. Call me when you’re in, and call me if you find anything significant.”

The team leader, whose name was Johnston, said he would inform St. Paul of what they were doing, and Lucas suggested that he not make the call until they were moving. “I got nothing against St. Paul, but I really want to keep this close. If it leaks, and a TV station gets ahold of it, and if they ran a teaser on it . . . we don’t know for sure where Hanson is, and we don’t want him running. If we lose him at Waconia, he could be anyplace from Missouri to the Canadian border before it gets dark.”

They went in two cars, Lucas and Del together in Lucas’s Lexus, with Del driving, and Shrake and Jenkins in Shrake’s Cadillac; they pulled out of the BCA parking lot at fifteen minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon.

The day was hot and still, but there was nothing going on in the west: no sign of clouds. The air had the warm vibration that foretold of thunderstorms, but none were in the forecast for another couple of days.

“Great day to make a bust,” Del said, as they headed south on I-35E.

“What was it, four days ago? I was bullshitting Marcy.”

“Ah, well.”

THEIR FIRST TARGET was the AmericInn. On the way out of town, Lucas looked at the satellite maps that Del had printed. Waconia was a good-sized town—several thousand people, anyway—set on the south side of a five-square-mile lake. The town was about an hour from St. Paul on the far western edge of the metropolitan area; State Highway 5 hooked it to the metro area.

Although it’d probably gotten started as a farm town, lying between Highway 5 to the south and the lake to the north, the satellite photos suggested Waconia had become another of the bedroom towns surrounding Minneapolis and St. Paul, with sprawling housing developments south of Highway 5. It wasn’t far—twenty minutes—from the richest residential real estate in Minnesota, the towns lying around Lake Minnetonka.

They didn’t talk much on the way out: Lucas was preoccupied with thoughts of Marcy Sherrill, flashing again and again to the image of her face as she lay dead on the floor at Barker’s house. Del picked up his mood, and after making a couple of suggestions about how they might handle a room entry at the AmericInn—whether and when they should get in touch with the Carver County Sheriff ’s Office—he shut up and drove.

They got off the metro’s interstate highway loop at the southwest corner of I-494, took Highway 212 west for a couple of miles, then split off again onto Highway 5, rolling through the heavily built exurban countryside south of Minnetonka. They came into Waconia on a four-lane highway, past a Kwik Trip convenience store and a strip mall on the north side of the highway, then past a bank and a hardware store and auto-parts places, past a Holiday station and a hospital; then the AmericInn, coming up on the right.

Lucas got on his phone, called the leader of the entry team at Hanson’s house: “You in?”

“We’re there, we’re knocking, but we’re not in. Be another two minutes.”

“Call me.”

JENKINS AND SHRAKE trailed them into the parking lot. Del said, “Got a white van.”

“I see it,” Lucas said. The van was halfway down the parking lot, among a scattering of other cars and trucks. They drove past it, and Lucas found a printout given him by Sandy, and as Del said, “Looks too new,” Lucas read out Hanson’s license plate number against the van in the parking lot: “Wrong number,” he said.

“He may have taken off,” Del said.

“We got another motel to look at.”

“You want to check here, see if he’s got a room?”

“Might as well.”

They parked, with Shrake and Jenkins a couple of spaces closer to the entrance. They got out, and Shrake walked around the nose of his car, with Jenkins, and blocked the sidewalk between Lucas’s truck and the motel entrance.

Shrake said, “We gotta talk before we go in.”

Lucas, frowning: “What?”

Jenkins said, “Shrake and Del and I are afraid you’re gonna pop this guy. You’re gonna do it in a way that drags us all down. We gotta know that you’re not going to drag three good friends through the shit, just so you can get even with somebody.”

Lucas felt a surge of anger, turned to Del. “You’re in this, too?”

“Yeah, and we’re not the only ones. Everybody who knows you is worried. Your family.”

“You’ve been talking behind my back,” Lucas said, even angrier.

Shrake nodded: “Yeah. We have. We didn’t want to insult you, if it wasn’t a problem. But it looks to us like you’ve got a problem. The way you’ve been setting up this bust. You’ve got something fancy going on with the entry team, we could smell it.”

“So what’re you gonna do: try to take my gun?”

“Maybe,” Shrake said. “If we’ve got to.”

“You think you could do it?” Lucas asked, taking a step back. Both Jenkins and Shrake were big and hard, and specialized in physical confrontation.

Jenkins said, “The three of us could, yeah.”

Lucas half turned to glance at Del, whose mouth was set in a solid line. Del said, “We don’t want your fuckin’ gun. What we want is a promise: you don’t drag your three friends through the shit just to bring down Hanson. You’re not an executioner. And we don’t want to witness an execution.”

Lucas looked at the three of them, shook his head, his voice cold: “You got no idea what this is doing.”

“I think we do,” Del said. “We’ve been worried about it for days. Talking about it. We couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

“All we want you to do is give us your word: no executions, no kind of fuckin’ phony setups,” Jenkins said. “We go in, we take him, the chips fall where they may. We do it straight up.”

Lucas was breathing hard, as torn as he’d ever been in his life: the three men were among his half-dozen best friends. What they were doing felt like betrayal, but the little man at the back of his head told him that they were sincere enough.

He said, “Fuck you.”

Shrake said, “You can’t even do that, huh?”

“What’re you going to do about it? I’ll go alone if I have to.”

“We’ll fuck with you,” Jenkins said. “We’ve got the Carver County Sheriff ’s Office on speed-dial. I’ll call them, I’ll get them over here. You go in and ask the desk clerk for the room number, and I’ll embarrass you by telling him not to give it to you.”

“You motherfuckers,” Lucas said, suddenly uncertain; he felt cornered—and maybe wrong.

Del said, very quietly, “We’ll believe whatever you say. You give us your word that we’re not going to an execution, we’ll take it.”

They were all grouped up in a bunch, and Lucas felt as though he were about to start shaking with frustration, but the man in the back of his head was persistent: the three of them were serious, and sincere, and were his friends.

Finally, he nodded: “All right. Straight up.”

“That’s good enough for us,” Shrake said, and he and Jenkins backed away, and let Lucas through, to lead them into the motel lobby.

THE MOTEL CLERK was a soft-spoken woman with carefully coiffed gold-tinted hair and a Fargo accent; her blue eyes got wide when Lucas showed her his ID. “We’re looking for a man named Roger Hanson who would have checked in probably yesterday. Heavyset, black hair, maybe a thick black beard. He’s driving a Chevrolet van.”

She said, “That doesn’t sound like anybody I’ve seen, but let me check.”

As she went to her computer, Lucas’s phone rang. He stepped away from the desk, and the entry team leader at Hanson’s house said, “Man, you’re not going to believe this. We’ve got a male body in the guy’s freezer. We’re gonna leave him until crime scene can go over the place, so we’ve got no ID.”

Lucas said, “Older, maybe middle seventies, white hair, stocky—”

“That’s him,” the team leader said. “Who is it?”

“Probably his uncle, Brian Hanson. Former detective over in Minneapolis. There are a couple of older guys in Minneapolis Homicide who could ID him for you. Also, the former Minneapolis chief, Quentin Daniel, worked with him. Daniel’s retired, and he could probably run over. I’ve got a phone number for him if you need it. Jesus: listen, anything else?”

“Lotsa porn, kiddie porn. This is the guy, Lucas. You got something going, right?”

“We’re right behind him, we think. Maybe.” He looked at Jenkins, who was standing by the motel counter. Jenkins shook his head. “Maybe not. I’ll stay in touch as things develop. Call me if you get anything that might tell you where he is. Do not let TV close to the place. Nobody talks. We still got a chance to sneak up on this guy.”

“Gotcha.”

Lucas rang off and Jenkins said, nodding to the clerk behind the desk, “They’ve got no Hanson. She doesn’t remember anybody who looks like him. There’s no van—but there’s that mom-and-pop place out at the end of town, and it’s cheaper.”

“Let’s go,” Lucas said. And to the clerk: “Please don’t tell anybody about this. We’re hunting the guy down, and if word gets out, he could be warned.”

She said, “I won’t tell anybody.”

“You’re welcome to talk all about it later,” Shrake told her. “But not until we’ve got him. He’s a dangerous man.”

BACK OUT in the parking lot, Shrake asked, “Was that the entry team calling?”

Lucas nodded. “Yeah. They found a body in Hanson’s freezer. From the description, it’s almost certainly Brian Hanson. He’s killed two cops now, and Todd Barker may go yet.”

“And God knows how many kids,” Del said.

“So let’s find him,” Jenkins said.

On the way to the other motel, Lucas said to Del, “We’re gonna have to sit down and talk about this. It’s like you don’t trust me. We been through a lot of shit, man—”

“Ah, for Christ’s sakes, I’d trust you with my life,” Del said. “I have trusted you with my life. We’re just not sure whether we can trust you with your life. That’s what we’re all worried about.”

“I’m pretty fuckin’ pissed.”

“Ah, stick a sock in it,” Del said.

WADELL’S INN WAS an older place at the far western edge of town, a single-story, L-shaped affair, gray with dirty white trim, fifteen or twenty small rooms stretching east from the entrance at the far end, all facing a gravel parking lot. Each room had a door facing the parking lot, and a window next to the door. The entrance lobby, the other arm of the L, was built as a ranch-style house, and might have doubled as the owner’s residence. There was nothing behind the motel but farm fields; another mom-and-pop convenience store, called the Pit Stop, sat across the highway.

As they came up, Del said, “There’s the van.”

An older white van was parked halfway down the line of rooms. As they went past, Lucas looked at the numbers of the tag and said, “That’s him.”

Del rolled past the motel at full speed, followed by Shrake; they did a U-turn a quarter mile down the road and came back, sliding into the residence side of the L, where they couldn’t be seen from the van.

They hopped out, and Lucas and Del went into the lobby, while Jenkins and Shrake stood at the corner of the L, where they could keep an eye on the van.

A THIN, OLD, sun-blasted woman sat in a closet-sized office behind the lobby desk, smoking a cigarette and looking at a computer screen. She stood up when Lucas came in, followed by the others, all of them blinking in the dim light.

Lucas showed his ID and said, “We’re police officers with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We are looking for a man named Roger Hanson, who owns that white van parked halfway down your lot. Black hair, heavyset guy. We need to know what room he’s in, and we need a key.”

“I don’t know what his name is, but he’s in Fifteen,” the woman said. Her voice was a crow-like croak, rough from a lifetime of cigarettes. “I got a key here.”

She went through a drawer and came up with a key on a plastic tag. Lucas took it and said, “Please stay inside. Lock the door when we leave. We’ll let you know when it’s safe to come out.”

“He’s dangerous?” she asked.

“He’s a killer,” Del said.

THEY WENT BACK OUT, heard the old woman lock the door. Lucas said, “All right. How’re we gonna do this?”

Shrake said, “I went down and peeked at the first door. They’re metal fire doors. We won’t be able to kick it.”

“I’ve got a key, but that’ll be slower,” Lucas said.

Jenkins said, “You turn it, get it open. I’ll kick it, in case it’s chained, and hop back. Shrake and Del can have their guns ready, and pop right through.”

Lucas nodded. “That works. Let’s do it.”

They went down the walkway under the eaves of the motel, Del and Shrake pulling their guns. Halfway down to Fifteen, Jenkins whispered, “There’s an eighteen-wheeler coming. If you get the key in then . . .”

Lucas spotted the truck and moved quickly to the door and knelt beside it, watched the truck. A few cars went by, and then the truck came up, and as the engine noise started to build, he slipped the key into the door lock, turned the key, pushed just a bit, felt the door come loose, and as the truck went by, said to Jenkins, “Now.”

Jenkins kicked the door, nearly knocking it off its frame; no chain. Del and Shrake surged into the hotel room, straight through to the bath, and Shrake said, “It’s clear. Goddamn it.”

The television was playing, a suitcase sat on the floor next to the bed, and a ring of keys sat under a bedside lamp, along with a pair of sunglasses. Del kicked the suitcase and said, “Got a gun, here.”

Lucas glanced at it: a Glock.

“He’s close . . .”

“He’s across the highway at that store, I bet,” Shrake said.

They all looked out the door, at the store across the way. It was tiny. Lucas said, “If he’s in there, there’s a good chance that he’s looking at us through the front window.”

“Doesn’t have a gun,” Del said. “At least, not this gun.”

Lucas said to Shrake, “I’m sticking by my word: there won’t be any execution. But somebody’s got to stay here, in case he’s in one of the other rooms. Del and I were friends of Marcy’s, and want to be there for the bust. Jenkins is faster than you, in case he runs.”

Shrake said, “Go.”

Lucas said, “Keep your gun out; he might be down in one of these other rooms. He might have met somebody, or something.”

“I got it,” Shrake said. “Go.”

HANSON HAD HIS FACE in the soda cooler when the BCA agents went into his room. He was walking toward the cash register when they came back out, and he saw them at once, and knew who they were: some brand of cops.

He had no car, no keys, not much money, and no clothes but the ones he was standing in. His side, which seemed to be healing okay, nevertheless burned like fire. He saw them come out of the motel, and he turned and walked back through the store, past the restrooms, and out the back entrance, through a door marked “Not an Exit” and heard the counterman call, “Hey,” as he went out.

He went through the back door only because he couldn’t go through the front, but he had no idea where he was going. When he got out the back, he saw two things: the counterman’s parked truck, and a small house, probably fifty yards away across the parking lot, with another car, an old Corolla, parked next to it. He ran that way. If he could get some keys . . .