Buried Prey

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.”