Buried Prey p-21

by John Sandford

  Someday, he thought, it’d snap shut with him outside. Probably in the winter. The obvious solution would be to unlock the door, but then he’d forget to lock it, as would everybody else, and the door would be open all the time.

  Besides, he got a little thrill from beating the door in his underwear.

  The Star Tribune had the Jones story on the front page, front and center. The Pioneer Press had it on an inside page. They’d missed the story, Lucas decided, probably saw it on the ten o’clock news, and then tried to recover. They hadn’t, very well.

  Lucas dropped the Pioneer Press on the floor by the door and carried the Star Tribune into the den, kicked back in his work chair, read through the story. The Strib had gotten to the Jones girls’ parents-now divorced, the story said, both remarried, George Jones with more children, though his ex-wife was childless. A second tragic story there, Lucas thought, thinking of Weather, pregnant, up in the bed; of the children who would comfort him in his old age.

  He finished the story, read through comments by the Minneapolis chief-they’d throw everything they had at the case. Right. Still sleepy, Lucas went back upstairs, and found Weather getting ready to go in to work.

  “Where’re you working this morning?”

  She yawned: “Regions.”

  “Anything interesting?” he asked.

  “It’s all interesting… but no.”

  “I’m going back to bed,” Lucas said.

  He fell asleep immediately, woke up three hours later, feeling sharp, picked up his cell phone from the bedstand, turned it on, and dialed.

  Del came up, and Lucas asked, “You read the paper this morning?”

  “Yeah. I was wondering if you’d call.”

  “I want to get in on this,” Lucas said.

  “I wouldn’t mind, but the politics will be a little crude,” Del said. “It’s a Minneapolis case.”

  “They won’t do it as well as you and I would,” Lucas said.

  “That’s true,” Del said.

  “Besides, we wouldn’t have to tell them… right away.”

  They thought about that for a minute. An unstated rivalry existed between the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the cops in Minneapolis and St. Paul. If you asked a Minneapolis leadhomicide detective, he would say something like, “A guy at the BCA probably handles twenty murders in his career. I see twenty in a year.”

  The BCA guy would say, “Yeah-gangbangers. You catch the guy sitting on a couch with a beer and a gun. When we go in, we go in late, and they’re always the hard ones.”

  To which each side would say to the other, “Bullshit.”

  Lucas asked, “You remember John Fell?”

  “I remember the name. That’s the guy you were looking for,” Del said.

  “There’s a good chance that he’s the killer. Even at the time, I thought there was some chance, but now that Terry Scrape is pretty much ruled out, I think we need to find him,” Lucas said.

  “Long time ago,” Del said.

  “Yeah.”

  “We oughta get a cup of coffee, sit and think.”

  “Give me an hour-I’ll see you down at the cafe.”

  “Bring your notebook,” Del said. “We’re gonna need a list.”

  So they went down to the cafe on Snelling, sat in a booth with a coffee for Del and Diet Coke for Lucas, and Lucas opened a sketchbook that he used for planning, and they started making their list. 1. Fell was fairly young-in his twenties-in the mideighties. “That means he didn’t quit with the two girls,” Del said. “He might’ve quit by now-a lot of the psychos poop out in their forties. But he kept going for ten or fifteen years. We need to look at cold cases where young thin blondes vanished.” 2. He could have been arrested for a sex crime at some point-most sex criminals were. Lucas couldn’t remember everything about the description of the guy, but he was overweight, dark hair, told jokes instead of engaging in regular conversation. “I think he might be missing a finger,” Lucas said. “I think I remember that.” That combination might be enough to identify him either to investigators, or to serial offenders who had spent a lot of time in jail. 3. At the time the girls disappeared, he may have been fired as a high school teacher. “Since he wasn’t very old, he must’ve been fired fairly recently when I was looking for him,” Lucas said. “And if he was fired that quickly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a sex thing involved… or suspected, anyway. So we’re looking for a guy with a rap sheet involving sex, who was a local schoolteacher back in the early eighties.” 4. Del said, “If we can find old checks that he wrote to cover the John Fell Visa account, we might pick up some DNA-and if he’s in the sex database, we’d have him.” Lucas shook his head: “I don’t think they keep paper checks anymore. We can look.” 5. “We gotta check every utility record we can find on that house,” Lucas said. “His name should be somewhere.” Del nodded, but said, “Minneapolis will be all over that angle.” Lucas said, “Wonder if they’ll check on next-door neighbors?” Del: “They will if they really pull out all the stops, like they say. But, we oughta check.”

  “Think Marcy will let us look at the Jones case file?” Del asked.

  Lucas said, “I don’t know how she could turn us down, if we asked, but she might get pissed.”

  Del suggested that they might find a pressure point, and Lucas asked, “How about this… you know James Hayworth at St. Paul?”

  Del nodded.

  Lucas said, “He just came back from Quantico. He’s really big on the behavioral science stuff. He’ll know that guys like Fell don’t quit… so what if we feed him to the Star Tribune? He’s all fired up right now, all that new information in his head, he’ll tell them a story that’ll scare the shit out of everybody.”

  Del half smiled and shrank back into the booth: “Man, if Marcy found out, she’d shoot you.”

  Lucas said, “Yeah, but if she doesn’t, and we perform just the right amount of suck… I’ll bet we get invited in. You know, to spread the blame.”

  “Where do we start?” Del asked.

  “I can get Sandy to do the research on missing children,” Lucas said. “She’d get it a lot faster than we would. We don’t want to bump into any Minneapolis guys any sooner than necessary, so… I think maybe we start with the schools.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll get Rose Marie to yank you off the task force for a while, and we can start this afternoon. What I’m thinking is, it’ll be an employment record, which the bureaucrats hold pretty close, so we might need a subpoena. Maybe we just get a subpoena that applies to all school board employment records in this area… we need to know how many school districts there are, and where they’re at.”

  “You find that out, and get the paper,” Del said. “I’ve got some task force stuff I have to clean up. I’ll be ready to go tomorrow morning.”

  At the office, Lucas found Sandy, the researcher, told her his theories about Fell, about what may have been a fight in an alley between Fell and Smith, the crack dealer, and outlined what he needed to know about missing girls; she would start immediately.

  Then Lucas started working the schools by telephone-and found there were more than fifty school districts in the metro area, and he’d have to go after them individually. He began with the larger, close-in districts, was told that he would need a subpoena to look at the employment records.

  He asked the first record keeper, “Do I need a subpoena to find out if you fired anyone in that period of time? Or could you just tell me ‘yes’ or ‘no’?”

  “Sure, I could tell you that,” he said. “Let me look at my records, and I’ll get back in an hour or so.”

  So he sat for five hours, breaking for lunch, patiently dialing phone numbers, reciting the same set of facts to all the various record keepers, and by the end of it, he’d learned that twelve of fifty-five districts had fired male schoolteachers during the relevant period.

  “I can’t give you the name, but I can tell you that this guy’s record suggests that there ma
y have been a parental complaint without any follow-through… which could mean sex,” one man said.

  “Straight sex?”

  “Uh, can’t tell. Didn’t occur to me that it might be otherwise, but I can’t tell. The thing to do is, get your subpoena, and we’ll dig everything out and you can take a look at what we’ve got.”

  “See you tomorrow,” Lucas said.

  Two more of the twelve districts also had fired or released male teachers under unclear circumstances, which the record keepers thought might suggest a sexual basis for the dismissals. “That stuff doesn’t get talked about or written down, because there’s the possibility of legal action.”

  The other nine were fired for a variety of behavior, most often drunkenness or drug charges, which were clearly not sexual.

  At the end of the day, he called Marcy Sherrill at Minneapolis: “You get anything on the Jones girls?”

  “We’re working it-things are a little slow, so we had some folks we could throw at it,” she said.

  “Shit hit the fan with the media?”

  “Maybe not as much as I expected,” she said. “This whole thing happened before the Channel Three reporter was born, and anything that happened before she was born is obviously not important… so, yeah, people are calling up, but it’s been reasonable.”

  Lucas said, “So you’re saying you got the media under control, and you haven’t got jack shit on the Jones case.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Not yet. The ME thinks there’s a chance they might take some DNA off the girls.”

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Lucas said.

  “Well, if it’s there, we could be all over this guy in a couple of days. I mean, any strange DNA that we find on them would almost have to belong to him. They were gone for two days, probably getting raped multiple times, so… there should be some DNA somewhere.”

  “Good luck. Did you get any names off the houses in the neighborhood?”

  “A few. We’re looking at utilities, of course, but they seem to have all been paid by Mark Towne, the Towne House guy. Apparently they were all rented with utilities paid… though not telephone. But, we’ve got no telephone for that address at that time. So, we’re looking. Trying to find old neighbors and so on.”

  “All right. Well, keep me up on it.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Lucas,” Sherrill said. “I know damn well you’re looking at something over there. What is it?”

  “Doing some research, is all. I’ve got a woman looking for other missing children of the same appearance from the same time. We’re doing the metro area, then I’ll have her do the state, then surrounding states. I don’t know if it’ll be of any use.”

  “That’s fine,” Marcy said. “That’s the kind of support we appreciate. If she finds anybody, let me know.”

  “It’s not a matter of finding anybody,” Lucas said. “She’s already got about twenty possibilities. Probably have fifty by the time she’s done. The problem is, figuring out who ran away, who snuck off to the other parent, and who got murdered. It’s pretty murky.”

  “Well, keep pluggin’,” she said.

  Lucas hung up a minute later and thought, She’s really gonna be pissed when she finds out.

  However dark the killer might have been, Lucas thought, the case lacked the urgency of a crime that happened yesterday: it was interesting in an archaeological way. Solving it would be a feather in Marcy’s cap, but she didn’t have the visceral drive she would if she’d been chasing a guy who was operating right now.

  Lucas did-a little, anyway, because he’d been there when the mistake had been made. After talking to Marcy, he leaned back in his office chair and closed his eyes, trying to remember those faroff days. Where had the time gone? Parts of it seemed so close he should be able to go outside and see it; but, on the other hand, it simultaneously seemed like ancient history.

  He remembered that during that summer, when the Jones girls disappeared, he’d had a brief and satisfactory relationship with a divorce attorney in her late thirties, and not long ago, he’d heard that she’d retired to Florida.

  Retired…

  Sandy poked her head in the office: “Got a minute?”

  “Sure.” He pointed at his visitor’s chair.

  “Something interesting,” she said. She had sandy hair that was neither really blond nor really brown; so she was well-named, Lucas thought. She was a self-described hippie, who showed up in shapeless, ankle-length paisley dresses and sandals, under which she had a figure that Lucas found interesting. She was pretty, in a bland way, with brown eyes that were touched with amber, behind old-fashioned round hippie glasses. Beneath it all was an intelligence like a cold, sharp knife.

  Lucas’s agent Virgil Flowers had once dallied with her, Lucas thought, and had gotten cut…

  She fussed with a yellow legal pad, then said, “I’ve got one very interesting case, so interesting I pulled it out for a special look. A stranger molestation, or attempted kidnapping, 1991 in Anoka County. The girl’s name was Kelly Bell, and from the photos we have, she looks like a sister to the Joneses. She was twelve, thin, blond, she got jumped while she was crossing a park on her way home from school. A man wielding a knife. Dark-haired, overweight. He tried to force her into a van, but she started screaming and fought back. He slashed her, cut her hands and forearms, but she ran away from him. She thinks the vehicle was a red cargo van, and you mentioned black cargo van when you briefed me. The colors are different, but if you’re right about how the kidnapping happened, and the murder… technique’s the same, and the description of the guy is perfect for this Fell person.”

  Lucas said. “They ever ID the guy?”

  “No. Which I thought was another interesting aspect. It was like the Jones thing-where nobody saw anything. Same here. He picked out a place where he knew she’d be, and jumped her,” Sandy said. “It was too well-planned to be a mistake. The sheriff’s deputies got some tire tracks, which they identified as Firestones, replacement tires, and fairly worn. The van was old enough that it needed an alignment-there was some cupping on one of the tires.”

  “This woman’s name was…?”

  “Kelly Bell.”

  “I need to know where Kelly Bell lives, and the cops who did the investigation. I take it we weren’t involved?”

  “No. Anoka PD,” she said. “Vital records shows Kelly Bell got married in oh-five, changed her name to Barker. Husband’s name is Todd Barker. They live down in Bloomington.”

  “You got the address?”

  “Of course. And their phone number,” Sandy said.

  “You ever think about getting your ass certified, and becoming a cop?” Lucas asked. “You’d get paid more, and we’d find a place for you here.”

  She was shaking her head. “I’m going to law school. When I finish there, maybe the feds.”

  “Like Clarice Starling… Silence of the Lambs.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” she said, with her shy, hippie smile.

  Because it was late in the day, and the pressure was not that intense, Lucas went home for dinner-his daughter Letty was experimenting with vegetarianism, so they ate wheat-based fakechicken cutlets, which Lucas secretly thought weren’t too bad-got the latest news on the pregnancy, and the gossip from the hospital, and then, when the housekeeper was hauling the dishes away to the dishwasher, he slipped into his den and called Kelly Barker.

  She picked up on the third ring, and when he explained who he was, and that he’d like to talk to her about the attack in ’91, she asked, “Does this have anything to do with those girls they dug up?”

  “It might have,” Lucas said. “The man I suspect of killing the Jones girls would have been fairly young at that time, and these kinds of predators don’t usually give up when they’re young. If they don’t get caught, they keep doing it, and the attack on you is pretty similar to what I think might have happened to the Jones girls. And the guy sounds the same. We don’t know who he is, but we may have a desc
ription. So if I could sit and talk for a bit…”

  “Would we be talking to any TV stations?” Barker asked.

  Lucas leaned back, surprised a bit. “Well, I wouldn’t. That’s not really part of an investigation track.”

  “I ask because I have an ongoing relationship with Channel Three. They did my biography after the stabbing, and I was on several times, few years ago, when Michael McCannlin got arrested for those child murders.”

  Lucas remembered McCannlin, who’d killed three children and wounded two adults in a shooting spree that involved property lines and a kids’ soccer game.

  “I don’t…” Lucas began, then, “McCannlin didn’t have anything to do with your case, did he?”

  “No, it’s just because of my attack, I’ve been asked to comment on other ones,” she said.

  “I’m not looking for television, although Jennifer Carey is an old friend, if you know her,” Lucas said.

  “Oh my God, I love her,” Barker said. “So, sure-come on over. When do you want to do it?”

  Right now, he’d said. She lived about twenty minutes from Lucas’s house in St. Paul, so he checked out with Weather, climbed into his Porsche 911, and headed across the Mississippi to Bloomington.

  Another warm night, a night like those when the Jones girls were taken, stars drifting through a hazy ski, humidity so thick you could almost drink the air. Lucas flashed back to the night he’d gone dumpster diving, and had come up with the box of clothing that would kill Scrape; the same kind of night.

  He took I-494 west past the airport and the Mall of America, through Bloomington, then south, and more west, into a neighborhood of sixties ranch-style houses, many of them still lived in by the original owners: not so many kids around, few bikes or trikes, a single Big Wheel over by a lamppost, looking discarded.