Buried Prey p-21

by John Sandford

  “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 he
re 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 i
n 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.”