Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  “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 lon
g 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.”