Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas said, “Older, maybe middle seventies, white hair, stocky—”

  “That’s him,” the team leader said. “Who is it?”

  “Probably his uncle, Brian Hanson. Former detective over in Minneapolis. There are a couple of older guys in Minneapolis Homicide who could ID him for you. Also, the former Minneapolis chief, Quentin Daniel, worked with him. Daniel’s retired, and he could probably run over. I’ve got a phone number for him if you need it. Jesus: listen, anything else?”

  “Lotsa porn, kiddie porn. This is the guy, Lucas. You got something going, right?”

  “We’re right behind him, we think. Maybe.” He looked at Jenkins, who was standing by the motel counter. Jenkins shook his head. “Maybe not. I’ll stay in touch as things develop. Call me if you get anything that might tell you where he is. Do not let TV close to the place. Nobody talks. We still got a chance to sneak up on this guy.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Lucas rang off and Jenkins said, nodding to the clerk behind the desk, “They’ve got no Hanson. She doesn’t remember anybody who looks like him. There’s no van—but there’s that mom-and-pop place out at the end of town, and it’s cheaper.”

  “Let’s go,” Lucas said. And to the clerk: “Please don’t tell anybody about this. We’re hunting the guy down, and if word gets out, he could be warned.”

  She said, “I won’t tell anybody.”

  “You’re welcome to talk all about it later,” Shrake told her. “But not until we’ve got him. He’s a dangerous man.”

  BACK OUT in the parking lot, Shrake asked, “Was that the entry team calling?”

  Lucas nodded. “Yeah. They found a body in Hanson’s freezer. From the description, it’s almost certainly Brian Hanson. He’s killed two cops now, and Todd Barker may go yet.”

  “And God knows how many kids,” Del said.

  “So let’s find him,” Jenkins said.

  On the way to the other motel, Lucas said to Del, “We’re gonna have to sit down and talk about this. It’s like you don’t trust me. We been through a lot of shit, man—”

  “Ah, for Christ’s sakes, I’d trust you with my life,” Del said. “I have trusted you with my life. We’re just not sure whether we can trust you with your life. That’s what we’re all worried about.”

  “I’m pretty fuckin’ pissed.”

  “Ah, stick a sock in it,” Del said.

  WADELL’S INN WAS an older place at the far western edge of town, a single-story, L-shaped affair, gray with dirty white trim, fifteen or twenty small rooms stretching east from the entrance at the far end, all facing a gravel parking lot. Each room had a door facing the parking lot, and a window next to the door. The entrance lobby, the other arm of the L, was built as a ranch-style house, and might have doubled as the owner’s residence. There was nothing behind the motel but farm fields; another mom-and-pop convenience store, called the Pit Stop, sat across the highway.

  As they came up, Del said, “There’s the van.”

  An older white van was parked halfway down the line of rooms. As they went past, Lucas looked at the numbers of the tag and said, “That’s him.”

  Del rolled past the motel at full speed, followed by Shrake; they did a U-turn a quarter mile down the road and came back, sliding into the residence side of the L, where they couldn’t be seen from the van.

  They hopped out, and Lucas and Del went into the lobby, while Jenkins and Shrake stood at the corner of the L, where they could keep an eye on the van.

  A THIN, OLD, sun-blasted woman sat in a closet-sized office behind the lobby desk, smoking a cigarette and looking at a computer screen. She stood up when Lucas came in, followed by the others, all of them blinking in the dim light.

  Lucas showed his ID and said, “We’re police officers with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We are looking for a man named Roger Hanson, who owns that white van parked halfway down your lot. Black hair, heavyset guy. We need to know what room he’s in, and we need a key.”

  “I don’t know what his name is, but he’s in Fifteen,” the woman said. Her voice was a crow-like croak, rough from a lifetime of cigarettes. “I got a key here.”

  She went through a drawer and came up with a key on a plastic tag. Lucas took it and said, “Please stay inside. Lock the door when we leave. We’ll let you know when it’s safe to come out.”

  “He’s dangerous?” she asked.

  “He’s a killer,” Del said.

  THEY WENT BACK OUT, heard the old woman lock the door. Lucas said, “All right. How’re we gonna do this?”

  Shrake said, “I went down and peeked at the first door. They’re metal fire doors. We won’t be able to kick it.”

  “I’ve got a key, but that’ll be slower,” Lucas said.

  Jenkins said, “You turn it, get it open. I’ll kick it, in case it’s chained, and hop back. Shrake and Del can have their guns ready, and pop right through.”

  Lucas nodded. “That works. Let’s do it.”

  They went down the walkway under the eaves of the motel, Del and Shrake pulling their guns. Halfway down to Fifteen, Jenkins whispered, “There’s an eighteen-wheeler coming. If you get the key in then . . .”

  Lucas spotted the truck and moved quickly to the door and knelt beside it, watched the truck. A few cars went by, and then the truck came up, and as the engine noise started to build, he slipped the key into the door lock, turned the key, pushed just a bit, felt the door come loose, and as the truck went by, said to Jenkins, “Now.”

  Jenkins kicked the door, nearly knocking it off its frame; no chain. Del and Shrake surged into the hotel room, straight through to the bath, and Shrake said, “It’s clear. Goddamn it.”

  The television was playing, a suitcase sat on the floor next to the bed, and a ring of keys sat under a bedside lamp, along with a pair of sunglasses. Del kicked the suitcase and said, “Got a gun, here.”

  Lucas glanced at it: a Glock.

  “He’s close . . .”

  “He’s across the highway at that store, I bet,” Shrake said.

  They all looked out the door, at the store across the way. It was tiny. Lucas said, “If he’s in there, there’s a good chance that he’s looking at us through the front window.”

  “Doesn’t have a gun,” Del said. “At least, not this gun.”

  Lucas said to Shrake, “I’m sticking by my word: there won’t be any execution. But somebody’s got to stay here, in case he’s in one of the other rooms. Del and I were friends of Marcy’s, and want to be there for the bust. Jenkins is faster than you, in case he runs.”

  Shrake said, “Go.”

  Lucas said, “Keep your gun out; he might be down in one of these other rooms. He might have met somebody, or something.”

  “I got it,” Shrake said. “Go.”

  HANSON HAD HIS FACE in the soda cooler when the BCA agents went into his room. He was walking toward the cash register when they came back out, and he saw them at once, and knew who they were: some brand of cops.

  He had no car, no keys, not much money, and no clothes but the ones he was standing in. His side, which seemed to be healing okay, nevertheless burned like fire. He saw them come out of the motel, and he turned and walked back through the store, past the restrooms, and out the back entrance, through a door marked “Not an Exit” and heard the counterman call, “Hey,” as he went out.

  He went through the back door only because he couldn’t go through the front, but he had no idea where he was going. When he got out the back, he saw two things: the counterman’s parked truck, and a small house, probably fifty yards away across the parking lot, with another car, an old Corolla, parked next to it. He ran that way. If he could get some keys . . .

  Then what?

  How far could he get?

  He didn’t think about it: he ran, and he thought, Keys.

  He just ran.

  LUCAS SAW A FLASH of what looked like daylight through the store window and it crossed his mind that somebody had just run out the b
ack. He, Del, and Jenkins were lined up at the edge of the highway, waiting to run across, when he saw the flash, and Lucas took the chance and ran straight through the traffic, causing one car to swerve and another to hit the brakes so hard that they screamed, and Del shouted, “Hey,” but Lucas was across the highway and running hard.

  Del and Jenkins were slowed by more cars, but got across, now fifty yards behind Lucas, and instead of going into the front of the store Lucas went left, around the far end of it, saw the little shabby house out back and the fat black-haired man running toward it, and he half turned and windmilled an arm at Jenkins and Del, and shouted, “This way,” and kept running.

  Ahead of him, Hanson kicked through a half-closed gate on a hurricane fence, ran across a concrete-block porch and half turned and saw Lucas coming, only twenty-five or thirty yards back, yanked open the screen door and crashed through the inner door into the house’s living room.

  A woman was standing in the kitchen and she screamed at him and he saw a butcher knife on the kitchen counter and she back-pedaled away from him, and then threw a towel at him, and he dodged the towel and grabbed the knife with one hand, and the woman by the hair with the other, and she twisted and screamed and then Lucas crashed through the door behind them.

  Hanson tried to shout something—“I’ll kill her,” or “I’vE got a knifE”—but Lucas never gave him time, simply vaulting across a couch, reaching for Hanson’s throat. His body smashed into Hanson’s left side, the impact pushing the fat man back against the kitchen sink. He slashed at Lucas’s face with the knife and the woman came free and fell on the floor, and Lucas tried to catch Hanson’s knife hand but missed, snagged a shirtsleeve, but he felt the knife slash across his shoulder and the back of his neck, and he twisted away from the knife and the woman’s body hit him behind the ankles and he went down, losing his grip on Hanson and then,

  BOOM.

  The gunshot, the sound not the slug, was like a bolt of lightning, and then another BOOM and Lucas, confused and half blinded by blood, scrambled across the supine woman, tried to pull her away from Hanson, and then realized Hanson was going down.

  Jenkins said, “Stay down, stay down . . .” and he pushed Lucas down with his hand. The woman was squealing, and Del was saying, “. . . ambulance down at a place called Pit Stop right now. We’ve got a seriously injured police officer. . . .”

  Jenkins looked down at him and Lucas said, “I’m not seriously injured.”

  Jenkins said, “Maybe not, but you’re bleeding like you’re seriously injured. So just stay down.”

  Del loomed over him: “Dumb shit.”

  “What about Hanson?” Lucas asked.

  Jenkins looked behind himself, at the form on the floor, and Lucas realized he still had his gun in his hand, a big .357 revolver that he’d bought from a highway patrolman.

  “You got what you wanted,” Jenkins said. “He’s stonecold dead.”

  25

  Del pushed Lucas flat and said, “Let me look at it.”

  Lucas let him look: Del used a paper towel to wipe the blood off Lucas’s forehead, and then looked at his shoulder through a slash in Lucas’s jacket, and said, finally, “It’s not that bad. You’ve got a nasty cut right along your hairline, but I don’t see any bone. It’s bleeding like crazy, though. There’s another cut on your shoulder, but your coat took most of the damage. You need to get sewn up.”

  They pressed more paper towels to his head, trying to stop the flow of blood, and he stayed on the floor, waiting for the ambulance. Carver County sheriff ’s deputies showed up two minutes after the shooting, and were handled by Jenkins. Then the ambulance came, and Lucas walked out to it on his own, stepping over Hanson’s facedown body as he left the house. The woman who owned the house was unhurt, but in shock, and was taken out to the ambulance with Lucas.

  At the hospital, they compressed the wounds to control the bleeding, and waited for a doc, and after Lucas had been waiting for fifteen minutes or so, a plastic surgeon showed up, took a long look at the cuts, and said, “Not too bad, but the recovery is going to be uncomfortable. Let’s get them closed up.”

  They closed the wounds with a local anesthetic, plus some kind of intravenous relaxer. Before they started, Lucas made a quick call to Weather, caught her just as she was leaving the hospital, told her that he’d been dinged up in a fight and was getting some stitches. She wanted details, and he passed the phone to the surgeon, who, after a minute, said, “Oh, yeah, I know you,” and told her that Lucas was worse than dinged up, but would nevertheless be home that afternoon.

  When he got off, he said, “Weather Karkinnen, huh? I better do my best work.”

  THEN LUCAS WENT AWAY for a while, came back sewn up and bandaged, and found Del sitting next to the hospital bed.

  “The doc said that when you’re steady on your feet, we can drive you home. He’s going to come by and talk to you, though.”

  “How’s everybody?” Lucas mumbled. He was still feeling fuzzy.

  “Jenkins shot Hanson twice, in the middle of the chest. He’s over there, working through the shooting with the sheriff ’s department. The woman there, her name’s Betty Ludwig, she’s okay, she’s maybe got some bruises; they brought her in with you and gave her some pills. . . . Shrake’s with Jenkins, filling in the sheriff ’s guys on the investigation. They might be a little pissed that we didn’t give them a call—and they want a statement from you, but it doesn’t have to be today.”

  “Not a big problem,” Lucas said. He was clearing up: Del’s voice was giving him something to focus on. “Have you heard from Johnston?” Johnston was the entry team leader at Hanson’s house.

  “They got trophies. Locks of hair, underwear, a kid’s necklace. And home movies,” Del said. “They’ve got VHS movies of the Jones girls.”

  “Don’t want to see that,” Lucas said.

  “I don’t think anybody will—we know he took them, and now he’s dead. No point.”

  THE DOC CAME IN a while later, looked at the bandages, asked Lucas a couple of questions, gave him a prescription for painkillers and antibiotics, and told him he could go. “Have your wife redo the dressing tomorrow, and every couple of days after that,” he said. “You’re welcome to come back to me, but you don’t have to.”

  Lucas thanked him, and they walked out to the car.

  “What I want to know,” Del said, as they pulled out of the hospital parking lot, “is what the fuck you were doing?”

  Lucas said, “I wanted to get my hands on him. I was right behind him when he went in the house, he didn’t have a gun, so I went straight in and then he had the woman and a knife and I was moving so fast I just kept going. It seemed like the best way to keep her from getting cut. I wanted to get her away from him, to get between them. The guy was nuts. I was thinking he might kill her, just to do it. And I knew you guys were right behind me.”

  “You didn’t get cut so Jenkins would have to shoot him?”

  Lucas said, “I’m not that fuckin’ crazy. From the time I went through the door to the time I got to him, was maybe half a second. All I was thinking of, was to knock him down and get him away from her.”

  THE SURGEON WAS RIGHT about the recovery being uncomfortable: the discomfort started when he got home, and Weather cornered Del and demanded details on how, exactly, Lucas had gotten hurt. When she found out, she chewed Lucas down to a stump, and then ordered him to bed. With cuts on both his face and back, he found that there was almost no comfortable way to lie in bed, and wound up half sitting, propped up by a pillow in the small of his back.

  Jenkins and Shrake came by later in the day, to report on the crime-scene process. There’d be no problem with the shooting, they said, with the woman having been attacked, and Lucas having been slashed—and Hanson being a multiple child-killer.

  Further, they said, Rose Marie Roux, the Public Safety commissioner and Lucas’s real boss, had gone to Hanson’s home, had viewed some trophies—underwear taken from victims, and
VHS home movies from the eighties and nineties, including some that included the Jones sisters—and had then held a press conference. Hanson, she said, probably had murdered at least six or seven children, in addition to his uncle and Marcy Sherrill.

  Weeks of investigation would be needed to figure out what he’d done, and who all the victims were.

  ROSE MARIE SHOWED UP just as Jenkins and Shrake were leaving, ganged up with Weather to chew on Lucas some more. Weather said, “Shrake and Jenkins are worried that you’re down on them, because they pushed you around a little. Lucas, they are your best friends in the world. You’re not so dumb you can’t see that.”

  Rose Marie nodded. “What she said.”

  “They’re good with me,” Lucas said. “I think they know that.”

  “Well, tell them,” Weather said.

  MARCY SHERRILL WAS CREMATED, and her ashes spread on her family’s farm. Brian Hanson was buried in a veterans’ cemetery. The two Jones girls were buried in a plot next to their grandparents, in St. Paul. Lucas went to all of the funerals. He had no idea what happened to Roger Hanson’s body, and didn’t care.

  TODD BARKER ALMOST DIED from lung infections, but in the end, didn’t. Kelly Barker made several more appearances on Channel Three, talking about the experience of being shot at, and then helping her husband with his recovery; she never made Oprah. Jennifer Carey, who did most of the interviews, told Lucas later that Todd Barker thought his main mistake was, he hadn’t gone to the door with a gun in his hand. “He says he’s never going to make that mistake again,” Carey told Lucas. “He’s even bought a couple of new ones. He’s got a garage gun now, for when he takes the garbage out.”