Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  “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.”<
br />
  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 t
oo 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’ ? ”