Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  “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 the
y’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.”