Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  She and Del left together, and Jenkins came in with a piece of paper in his hand. “I happened to look in the garage, and there was a dirt bike parked in there. I wrote the tag number on this piece of scrap paper.”

  “That was lucky,” Lucas said. “Be sure you put the scrap paper in the file. Did you run it?”

  “I did. The bike is registered to Brian Hanson.”

  Shrake said, “We got him.”

  “I think so,” Lucas said. “Listen, Sandy’ll have those photos in a minute. I’ve talked to three different women about them, and I want you guys to run them down, have them look at Roger’s face.”

  He gave them phone numbers and addresses for Dorcas Ryan, Lucy Landry, and Kelly Barker. They took the information, and as they left, Lucas said, “Make it as fast as you can. Get the IDs, and get back here.”

  WITH EVERYBODY OCCUPIED, Lucas walked up to the DNA lab and talked to the head of the unit, Gerald Taski, who was still excited about the hit on Darrell Hanson’s DNA. “This is the first time it’s happened with us,” Taski said. “But it opens up lots of possibilities. Say you get some DNA, and you think you know who the bad guy is, but you’re not sure, and you don’t want him to know that you’re looking at him. So you go to some other family member for DNA—you know, as a volunteer or you compel it with some other arrest—and use that DNA to nail down the first guy.”

  “That makes me a little uncomfortable,” Lucas said. “Sounds like something the Nazis would think of.”

  “But think of the efficiency,” Taski said.

  “That’s what the Nazis would have thought of,” Lucas said.

  “There’s a thing on the Net known as a corollary to Godwin’s Law, which says that the first guy to mention Nazis in a discussion, loses,” Taski said.

  “I don’t want to know about Nazis,” Lucas said. “What I want from you is a piece of paper I can put in a warrant application that says the DNA from Bloomington is X number of degrees away from the killer. Like three or four degrees, whatever it is.”

  “You think it’ll help identify him?” Taski asked.

  “It already has. We got him, we just need a warrant,” Lucas said. “So . . . the piece of paper?”

  SANDY CAME IN and said, “Moorhead wants a subpoena. The universities are pretty tight.”

  “Isn’t Virgil over there somewhere? I think he just told me he was over there.” He stuck his head out of his office and called to his secretary, “Hey—where’s Virgil?”

  “Pope County,” she said.

  “Isn’t that close to Moorhead?”

  She said, “Let me look at the map,” and she went off to a wall map, then called back, “It’s a ways, but right up I-94. Probably a hundred miles or so.”

  Lucas went to his cell phone, and got Virgil: “You still in Pope County?”

  “Until I finish eating breakfast,” Virgil said. “Then I’m heading home.”

  “You’re not far from Moorhead, right?”

  “Ah, shit,” Virgil said.

  “You’re gonna need a subpoena,” Lucas said. “It’ll be waiting for you when you get there.”

  LUCAS GOT EVERYBODY steppin’ and fetchin’, then retreated to his office and thought about it. He had enough for a warrant, but he really needed to find out where Roger Hanson was hiding out. He called Del: “What are we getting from Verizon?”

  “I think we’re okay, but their lawyers are talking to our lawyers, and I think we’re gonna be prohibited from listening in . . . but we’ll be able to get where his phone calls are coming from.”

  “That’s all we need. How long?”

  “Well, we gotta wade through all this legal bullshit, and then it should be quick. It’s the legal bullshit that’s holding us up.”

  “Stay on it. Push hard,” Lucas said.

  AN HOUR AFTER he and Jenkins left, Shrake came back from St. Paul Park, having spoken to Dorcas Ryan, and said, “She says he looks more like Fell than the first guy you showed her. Said she’s still not a hundred percent, but she’s ninety-five percent.”

  Jenkins called on his way in: he’d spoken to both Lucy Landry and Kelly Barker, and Landry agreed that the photo looked more like Fell than the first one—and Barker said she was a hundred percent that he was the attacker. “She says she’s absolutely sure.”

  “All right. Get in here. We’re going for the guy, as soon as we get his location.”

  “Something else,” Jenkins said. “Todd Barker’s having big problems. One of the shots sprayed bone particles all through his lungs, and they can’t control the infection. They won’t say it, but I think they’re gonna lose him. We’re gonna have a double murder.”

  Del walked in. “Hanson hasn’t made a phone call this morning, but late yesterday afternoon he made a call from Waconia to a clinic in St. Paul. We don’t know where it went at the clinic—it went into a main number—but if he’s shot, he might be looking for pain pills or antibiotics.”

  Lucas said, “Have we got somebody who could make a credible call to him? See what we can see?”

  “Let me talk to somebody,” Del said, and he went away.

  Jenkins came in, and Lucas told him and Shrake to get an early lunch: “I think we’ll be rolling out of here in a couple of hours, as soon as we nail him down. We’ve got some running around to do, but it won’t be long.”

  Del came back and said, “I’ve got a Chevy dealer making a robocall to him, offering complete service on his Chevrolet product. If he answers, we’ll know where he is.”

  “How long?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “I’m going to start putting together a warrant application. I’ll talk to Carsonet as soon as it’s ready.”

  “You’re not going back to Paulson?”

  Lucas shook his head: “We’ve got enough that Carsonet will give it to us. And I’d just as soon not ask Paulson again. He might wonder what happened the first time. . . . I mean, I pretty much swore that Darrell Hanson was the one.”

  “Gotcha,” Del said. He looked at his watch. “I’ll go call my guy at Verizon.”

  LUCAS STARTED PUTTING TOGETHER a search warrant for Roger Hanson’s house. He was halfway through when Virgil Flowers called from Moorhead. “There’s not a lot, but it’s suggestive. He majored in education with a minor in English, and dropped out halfway through the first semester of his senior year. He was practice teaching that semester, up in Red Lake Falls.”

  “Go home,” Lucas said.

  He looked up Red Lake Falls on the Net, called the superintendent, whose name was Lawrence Olafson, explained the situation, and was told that three or four teachers might possibly remember what happened when Hanson was teaching. He offered to have the teachers called out of their classrooms, and Lucas took him up on it, and asked him to keep the conversation confidential.

  The first teacher, Steve Little, called fifteen minutes later: “I talked to George Anderson, he was also supposed to call you; he says he doesn’t remember anything about that, so he won’t be calling.”

  “Okay, but you’re calling . . . do you remember the guy?” Lucas asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Larry thought you might be wondering if there was sex involved, and there was. I’d forgotten his name, Hanson, I’d forgotten that, but he got tangled up with a young girl here. Pretty voluntary on her part, I remember, but she was like way too young for that to mean anything. They could have got him on rape, but her parents didn’t want anything to do with that. As I remember. I could be wrong.”

  “So what happened?”

  “They threw his ass out,” Little said. “As they should have. And Moorhead threw his ass out, and that was the end of it. As I remember. Look, I’m not swearing to any of this, this was a long time ago.”

  “So they didn’t do anything legal. No prosecution?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Except throw him out,” Little said. “If you did the same thing now, of course, it wouldn’t make any difference what the girl wanted or the parents wanted. They’d a
rrest him and put him in jail. Back then, things were different.”

  “Do you remember how old the girl was?” Lucas asked.

  “Let me think . . . I mean, I still know her, that was almost thirty years ago, and I’d guess she must be in her early forties . . . So I guess she was thirteen. Maybe fourteen.”

  “Thin, blond?” Lucas asked.

  “Yes. Is that important?”

  “It could be,” Lucas said. “Listen, Steve, we may be getting back to you. If you were lining up somebody else to call, that won’t be necessary. This was just an informal check to confirm some information we had. If we need something more formal, we’ll send some people up to take depositions from you all. And thank you. You’ve been a help.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Read the Star Tribune. Or give me a call in a week or so, and I’ll tell you,” Lucas said.

  DEL CAME IN and said, “He’s still in Waconia. We made the call, he picked up there.”

  “So we’re set,” Lucas said. “We want to be out of here in half an hour. I’m going to talk to Carsonet—he knows I’m coming—so I’ll be back pretty quick. I want you to get an entry team together. I’ll give them the warrant, and I want them to hit Hanson’s house at two o’clock. That’ll just about get us into Waconia. Then Google Waconia, figure out what they have in the way of motels. And call Darrell Hanson, ask him if he’s got any relatives in Waconia. See if you can figure out where Roger is, exactly.”

  “How many of us are going?”

  “You, me, Jenkins, and Shrake. More than enough.”

  24

  Lucas got the warrant. Del called Darrell Hanson, and was told that as far as he knew, he had no relatives in Waconia. Del did a search of Waconia on the Internet and found two motels, an AmericInn and what appeared to be a mom-and-pop called Wadell’s Inn, on the far west side of town. He printed out satellite maps of the area.

  When Lucas got back from the Ramsey County Courthouse, he gave the warrant to the entry team, made sure they understood that they weren’t to serve it until two o’clock. “If he’s home, be careful. He’s shot one cop, and has nothing to lose by shooting another one. Call me when you’re in, and call me if you find anything significant.”

  The team leader, whose name was Johnston, said he would inform St. Paul of what they were doing, and Lucas suggested that he not make the call until they were moving. “I got nothing against St. Paul, but I really want to keep this close. If it leaks, and a TV station gets ahold of it, and if they ran a teaser on it . . . we don’t know for sure where Hanson is, and we don’t want him running. If we lose him at Waconia, he could be anyplace from Missouri to the Canadian border before it gets dark.”

  They went in two cars, Lucas and Del together in Lucas’s Lexus, with Del driving, and Shrake and Jenkins in Shrake’s Cadillac; they pulled out of the BCA parking lot at fifteen minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon.

  The day was hot and still, but there was nothing going on in the west: no sign of clouds. The air had the warm vibration that foretold of thunderstorms, but none were in the forecast for another couple of days.

  “Great day to make a bust,” Del said, as they headed south on I-35E.

  “What was it, four days ago? I was bullshitting Marcy.”

  “Ah, well.”

  THEIR FIRST TARGET was the AmericInn. On the way out of town, Lucas looked at the satellite maps that Del had printed. Waconia was a good-sized town—several thousand people, anyway—set on the south side of a five-square-mile lake. The town was about an hour from St. Paul on the far western edge of the metropolitan area; State Highway 5 hooked it to the metro area.

  Although it’d probably gotten started as a farm town, lying between Highway 5 to the south and the lake to the north, the satellite photos suggested Waconia had become another of the bedroom towns surrounding Minneapolis and St. Paul, with sprawling housing developments south of Highway 5. It wasn’t far—twenty minutes—from the richest residential real estate in Minnesota, the towns lying around Lake Minnetonka.

  They didn’t talk much on the way out: Lucas was preoccupied with thoughts of Marcy Sherrill, flashing again and again to the image of her face as she lay dead on the floor at Barker’s house. Del picked up his mood, and after making a couple of suggestions about how they might handle a room entry at the AmericInn—whether and when they should get in touch with the Carver County Sheriff ’s Office—he shut up and drove.

  They got off the metro’s interstate highway loop at the southwest corner of I-494, took Highway 212 west for a couple of miles, then split off again onto Highway 5, rolling through the heavily built exurban countryside south of Minnetonka. They came into Waconia on a four-lane highway, past a Kwik Trip convenience store and a strip mall on the north side of the highway, then past a bank and a hardware store and auto-parts places, past a Holiday station and a hospital; then the AmericInn, coming up on the right.

  Lucas got on his phone, called the leader of the entry team at Hanson’s house: “You in?”

  “We’re there, we’re knocking, but we’re not in. Be another two minutes.”

  “Call me.”

  JENKINS AND SHRAKE trailed them into the parking lot. Del said, “Got a white van.”

  “I see it,” Lucas said. The van was halfway down the parking lot, among a scattering of other cars and trucks. They drove past it, and Lucas found a printout given him by Sandy, and as Del said, “Looks too new,” Lucas read out Hanson’s license plate number against the van in the parking lot: “Wrong number,” he said.

  “He may have taken off,” Del said.

  “We got another motel to look at.”

  “You want to check here, see if he’s got a room?”

  “Might as well.”

  They parked, with Shrake and Jenkins a couple of spaces closer to the entrance. They got out, and Shrake walked around the nose of his car, with Jenkins, and blocked the sidewalk between Lucas’s truck and the motel entrance.

  Shrake said, “We gotta talk before we go in.”

  Lucas, frowning: “What?”

  Jenkins said, “Shrake and Del and I are afraid you’re gonna pop this guy. You’re gonna do it in a way that drags us all down. We gotta know that you’re not going to drag three good friends through the shit, just so you can get even with somebody.”

  Lucas felt a surge of anger, turned to Del. “You’re in this, too?”

  “Yeah, and we’re not the only ones. Everybody who knows you is worried. Your family.”

  “You’ve been talking behind my back,” Lucas said, even angrier.

  Shrake nodded: “Yeah. We have. We didn’t want to insult you, if it wasn’t a problem. But it looks to us like you’ve got a problem. The way you’ve been setting up this bust. You’ve got something fancy going on with the entry team, we could smell it.”

  “So what’re you gonna do: try to take my gun?”

  “Maybe,” Shrake said. “If we’ve got to.”

  “You think you could do it?” Lucas asked, taking a step back. Both Jenkins and Shrake were big and hard, and specialized in physical confrontation.

  Jenkins said, “The three of us could, yeah.”

  Lucas half turned to glance at Del, whose mouth was set in a solid line. Del said, “We don’t want your fuckin’ gun. What we want is a promise: you don’t drag your three friends through the shit just to bring down Hanson. You’re not an executioner. And we don’t want to witness an execution.”

  Lucas looked at the three of them, shook his head, his voice cold: “You got no idea what this is doing.”

  “I think we do,” Del said. “We’ve been worried about it for days. Talking about it. We couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

  “All we want you to do is give us your word: no executions, no kind of fuckin’ phony setups,” Jenkins said. “We go in, we take him, the chips fall where they may. We do it straight up.”

  Lucas was breathing hard, as torn as he’d ever been in his life: the
three men were among his half-dozen best friends. What they were doing felt like betrayal, but the little man at the back of his head told him that they were sincere enough.

  He said, “Fuck you.”

  Shrake said, “You can’t even do that, huh?”

  “What’re you going to do about it? I’ll go alone if I have to.”

  “We’ll fuck with you,” Jenkins said. “We’ve got the Carver County Sheriff ’s Office on speed-dial. I’ll call them, I’ll get them over here. You go in and ask the desk clerk for the room number, and I’ll embarrass you by telling him not to give it to you.”

  “You motherfuckers,” Lucas said, suddenly uncertain; he felt cornered—and maybe wrong.

  Del said, very quietly, “We’ll believe whatever you say. You give us your word that we’re not going to an execution, we’ll take it.”

  They were all grouped up in a bunch, and Lucas felt as though he were about to start shaking with frustration, but the man in the back of his head was persistent: the three of them were serious, and sincere, and were his friends.

  Finally, he nodded: “All right. Straight up.”

  “That’s good enough for us,” Shrake said, and he and Jenkins backed away, and let Lucas through, to lead them into the motel lobby.

  THE MOTEL CLERK was a soft-spoken woman with carefully coiffed gold-tinted hair and a Fargo accent; her blue eyes got wide when Lucas showed her his ID. “We’re looking for a man named Roger Hanson who would have checked in probably yesterday. Heavyset, black hair, maybe a thick black beard. He’s driving a Chevrolet van.”

  She said, “That doesn’t sound like anybody I’ve seen, but let me check.”

  As she went to her computer, Lucas’s phone rang. He stepped away from the desk, and the entry team leader at Hanson’s house said, “Man, you’re not going to believe this. We’ve got a male body in the guy’s freezer. We’re gonna leave him until crime scene can go over the place, so we’ve got no ID.”