Buried Prey p-21

by John Sandford

  Sherman, behind the screen, said, “You don’t look like Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

  Del said, “No, we’re with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” and held out his ID. “We’d like to have a word with you, if we could.”

  Sherman peered at Del’s ID, then opened the screen and stepped out on the porch. “What’s up?”

  “We got a call from a source who said you might be able to help us with our investigation of the murder of the two Jones girls-”

  “Ah, man, you think I look like that guy, don’t you?” Sherman said. “My wife said that. She saw the picture on TV and said, ‘You look like that guy.’”

  He had a wife; Lucas didn’t think John Fell would be married. “Our source said that you may have had some problems with sexual issues,” Lucas said.

  Sherman started getting hot: “Sexual issues? What does that mean? You mean, somebody said I was a pervert? Is that what?”

  “Well, somebody suggested-” Lucas began.

  Del said, “Take it easy-”

  Sherman said, his voice rising, “That’s bullshit. I never… I’ve never been arrested, I mean, I got some speeding tickets back a few years ago, but I never…” And then he swiveled his head to the left, looking over Del’s head, and shouted, “You motherfucker.”

  Lucas looked that way and saw another man, looking out from the open door of his garage. On his face was an expression compounded of rage and glee, and he shouted back, “Now you’re gonna get it, dickhead. Now you’re gonna get it.”

  Del said, “Ah, man…”

  Sherman took three quick running steps down the porch and Lucas tried to grab his arm, but Sherman was heavy and moving fast, and Lucas fumbled it, and Sherman was loose and heading across the lawn. The other man, who was much smaller but just as angry, came out to meet him, and when they were ten feet apart Sherman threw his beer can at the other man’s head, and a half-second later they were wrapped up on the ground, ineffectively punching at each other, and tearing at each other’s hair.

  As Lucas and Del ran across the lawn to separate them, a woman came out behind them and shouted, “No, no, Bob, don’t…”

  And then a thin woman with fly-away hair popped out of the neighboring garage and shouted, “You shut up, you whore,” and she started for the property line.

  The neighbor was shorter and lighter than Sherman, so Lucas grabbed him by the collar and yanked him away from Sherman and threw him at Del, who grabbed one of the neighbor’s flailing arms and levered him onto the grass, facedown, his arm locked straight up behind him.

  Sherman was trying to get up, and Lucas shouted, “Stay down, stay down,” and then the women started, circling each other like a couple of Mexican fighting cocks, yelling at each other. Lucas pushed Sherman down and got between the two women, who were getting the nails out. He shouted, “Everybody shut up, or you’re all going to jail. Everybody shut up.”

  The neighbor, still pinned, was shouting, “You’re killing me, you’re killing me,” and Sherman, now on his feet, wild-eyed, said to Lucas, “It’s the fucking garage. It’s the fucking garage.”

  Lucas had the two women separated, and he looked at Sherman and said, “You think you could hang on to your wife here?” Sherman hustled over and got his wife around the waist and walked her back to the porch, and then came back and shouted at the neighbor, still on the ground, “It’s the fucking garage, isn’t it? You called them because of the fuckin’ garage.”

  They took five minutes to get the story. The two couples had never liked each other, and Sherman’s kid had been a high school football star, and the neighbor’s kid had been cut in tenth grade, and then Sherman built the Taj Ma-Garage in his backyard, looming over the neighbor’s backyard, throwing half of it into shadow.

  “Where’m I supposed to grow my tomatoes?” the neighbor bleated at Lucas. “You can’t grow tomatoes in full shade. And he goes back there with that saw all the time and it used to be all peaceful back here and now he runs that saw at all times of day and night.”

  And, he thought, Sherman was a dead ringer for the guy who killed the Jones girls and attacked Barker.

  When the neighbor had calmed down, Del had let him up, and the two men were shaking grass off their clothes. The two women were standing with arms crossed twenty feet away from the circle of men, on opposite sides, throwing in an occasional word of encouragement.

  Lucas finally said, “Look-no harm done at this point. Okay? You want to sue each other, that’s your problem. But I don’t want to take you downtown, and you don’t want to go. It’s really unpleasant. Okay..”

  And they were nodding and muttering around, and Lucas suggested that they shake hands. Sherman stepped forward, and so did the neighbor, and when Sherman stuck out a hand, the neighbor hit Sherman flat in the nose, and the big man staggered and one second later they were at it again and the women were screaming, and Lucas ripped the neighbor off Sherman and threw him at Del again and said, “Cuff him, he’s under arrest.”

  Two more neighbors from down the street came running in, and Lucas held up his hands and said, “Police… we’re police… stay off the lawn, stay off.”

  One of the new guys said, “This is about the garage, isn’t it?”

  Sherman was bleeding from his nose, but not too bad. He was trying to pinch it off, and Lucas said, “Go inside, lie down, put some ice on it. If it doesn’t stop, get your wife to take you down to the emergency room, okay? Got that?”

  Sherman said, “Ah, I’b hab a bloody nose before,” and asked, “Wha’ ’bout Berg?”

  “He’s going downtown,” Lucas said.

  They had the neighbor, whose name was Eric Berg, in the backseat of the Lexus when Lucas took a cell phone call from an agent named Jenkins, who shouted into his phone, over what sounded like a screaming car engine, “Where are you?”

  “Up on Iowa Avenue, off Rice Street.”

  “We’ll meet you at the corner of Rice and Maryland, in that tire company lot, lights and sirens, man… Get down here.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just… just get your ass down here. We’ll be there in two minutes… Fuckin’ get down here. Go.”

  15

  Marcy Sherrill missed Kelly Barker’s performance on the noon news, but heard about it, and then caught her on KARE at six o’clock. She’d known the Jones case was going to be a headache, and the headache had only gotten worse with Davenport working it.

  She appreciated the fact that he had a personal stake in the investigation, and when that happened, it was usually like Sherman’s March on Atlanta: nothing stood in his way. Among other things, she believed, he was manipulating the media to put pressure on the Minneapolis PD to dig up every scrap of information they could find on the mystery man, John Fell.

  Davenport really didn’t care about their other problems-though, to be fair, their problems weren’t all that bad. The murder rate was continuing to drop, rape and armed robbery were down, the gangs were continuing to fade. Part of that, she thought, was that coke and meth sales were down, while the quality of marijuana continued to increase.

  In her humble opinion, a guy lying on his living room floor with a B.C. blunt, a bag of nachos, and Wheel of Fortune on the TV was less likely to do serious civic damage than some freaked-out tweaker looking for another hit.

  And, to be doubly fair, Davenport had generally played the media as much when he was a Minneapolis cop, as when he’d left for the BCA. In fact, Marcy thought, she’d helped him do it often enough…

  But, annoying. The chief was going to call her up and ask, in his sideways, we’re-all-pals voice, “Have you had a chance to talk to that Barker woman? I’ve seen her on all the channels.”

  The chief spent a lot of time watching all the channels.

  She was sitting in her office, feet up on her desk, looking at a small flat-panel TV when Barker came on. When Barker was done, she called out to Buster Hill, in the next room, “Hey, Buster. Get me an address and phone
number for this Kelly Barker. She’s someplace down in Bloomington.”

  Buster, a man who claimed to be an endomorph, rather than simply fat, came and leaned in her doorway and asked, “We gonna talk to her?”

  “Got to,” Marcy said. “She’s been all over the TV, she’s got that BCA face… we gotta talk to her.”

  “For real, or for PR?”

  Marcy yawned. Her boyfriend was in Dallas, and she was restless and a little lonely: “PR, mostly… she’s told that story so often I got it memorized.”

  “You want me to do it?”

  “I want you to come along when I do it-follow me over there. I can go home from there. You can take notes. Somebody’s got to take notes.”

  Buster got the address from the DMV, and a cell phone number from someplace else. Kelly Barker would be pleased to talk to Sherrill; she’d be at home all evening.

  So Marcy and Buster headed out in two cars, down I-35W through south Minneapolis, past the airport and then west on I-494 and south again, a half-hour of easy driving, the sun slanting down toward the northwestern horizon.

  Marcy thought about Davenport-he really was an arrogant bastard in a lot of ways, good-looking, rich, flaunting it with the car and the outrageously gorgeous Italian suits. But they’d once been involved in a case that led more or less directly to bed… forty days and forty nights, as Davenport referred to their affair. It had been short but sweet, and she still had a soft spot for him.

  If he ever left Weather, would Marcy go back? Well, he was never going to leave Weather, for one thing. He was so loyal that once you were his friend, you stayed his friend, even if you didn’t want to.. and he was married to Weather and that would last right up to the grave, no doubt about it. But, speaking of the grave, if Weather got hit by a train, and Davenport, after a suitable interval, expressed a need for some female companionship…

  Maybe. But what about Rick? Well, Rick was interesting, but he made his money by calling people up on the telephone, and talking to them about investments. He liked having a cop on his arm, and insisted that she carry a gun when they went out at night. She would have anyway; she’d always liked guns.

  Still, she wasn’t much interested in being somebody’s trophy. She’d gone out with an artist for a while, a guy who reminded her of a crazier version of Davenport-in fact, he’d been a wrestler at the U at the same time Davenport had been playing hockey, and they knew each other, part of the band of jock-o brothers.

  Huh. The artist had been… hot. Crazy, maybe, but hot. After they’d split up, he’d gone and married some chick he’d known forever, and Davenport had told her that he and the chick even went and had a kid.

  Had a kid.

  She’d like a kid… but, it’d have to be soon. Rick wasn’t the best daddy material in the world. He had the attention span of a banana slug, and didn’t seem like the kind who’d be interested in the poop-and-midnight-bottle routine.

  There was another guy, too, an orthopedic surgeon who wore cowboy boots and rode cutting horses on the weekends, out of a ranch north of the Cities. He was divorced but getting ripe, looking at her, from time to time, and she felt a little buzz in his presence. And she liked horses.

  Possibilities.

  She smiled to herself and turned on the satellite radio. Lucinda Williams came up with “Joy,” quite the apposite little tune, given her contemplation of the boys in her life…

  While she was heading south, the killer was roaming around Bloomington, going back again and again to Kelly Barker’s house, not knowing exactly what he planned to do; whatever it was, he had to wait until she got home, and she’d already kept him waiting so long that he felt the rage starting to burn under his belt buckle.

  He was one morose and angry motherfucker, he admitted to himself, and things weren’t getting any better. He had no life, had never had one. He had a crappy house, a crappy van, a crappy income, and no prospects. He collected and resold junk. He was a junk dealer. He had a bald spot at the top of his head, growing like a forest fire at Yellowstone. He was so overweight he could barely see his own dick. He had recurrent outbreaks of acne, despite his age, and the cardiologist said that if he didn’t lose seventyfive pounds, he was going to die. And he had dandruff. Bad.

  Dumb and doomed: even in Thailand, he could see the disregard, the contempt, in the eyes of the little girls he used. They weren’t even frightened of him.

  Might just want to stick a gun in his mouth… some other time.

  Some other time, because right now he was in an ugly mood, and the mood was feeding on itself, and he had that gun, and he had the address of the only woman who could identify him for sure.

  He went around the block and this time, there were lights on in the window, and he saw a shadow cross a drape. They were home.

  All right, he thought; time for tactics.

  He did a few more laps, took a long look at the neighbors. The Barkers’ street was quiet enough, but there were lights in almost every house. On the street behind the Barkers’, though, two dark houses sat side by side. If he parked on that street, he could cut between the two houses, walk down the side of the Barkers’ place, and around to the front door.

  Ring the bell, kill the bitch, and wheel. If her husband answered, knock him down with a couple of shots, go in after the woman, put her down, and go out the back.

  He pulled into a parking lot and parked, getting his guts up; sat and thought and then reached out to the glove box, opened it, and lifted out the fake black beard. Wouldn’t fool anyone from two feet, but it’d be good enough from eight or ten or fifty. It had little pull-off tabs that uncovered sticky tape. He pulled them off, threw them on the floor of the car, and stuck the beard on his face using the rearview mirror to get the position right. When he was satisfied, he pressed the tapes hard, ten seconds each, then smacked his lips to make sure it was on tight.

  Ready to go.

  Careful not to leave any DNA, not to touch anything. Let the bullets do the talking.

  Speaking of which…

  He checked around again to make sure he wasn’t being observed, took the shells out of the pistol’s magazine, and polished each one with a Kleenex, taking care not to touch them again as he pushed them back into the magazine, one by one.

  Thirteen rounds.

  Barker’s unlucky number.

  Buster Hill said, as they crossed the street, after parking, “When you see her on TV, you gotta think she’s having a good time. I mean, she’s been doing this for what, almost twenty years?”

  “She likes it,” Marcy agreed. “If you’re a victim, at least you’re something. You’re not just another nonentity.”

  “Got some drama in your life,” Hill said.

  “Exactly,” Marcy said. They got to the door and Marcy rang, and Kelly Barker answered, a puppy-like eagerness on her face.

  “Officer Sherrill? Come on in-you have to excuse the house, we’ve been running around like mad dogs since this started.”

  Her husband was smiling in the background, as eager as his wife. Marcy could smell coffee and coffee cake, and smiled, and led Buster inside.

  She could use some coffee cake.

  The killer couldn’t believe that he was going to do it, but he was. He just… did it. He parked on the street behind the Barkers’ house, got out, looked up and down the street-lots of lights, no people, all inside eating dinner, or watching TV, though it was a beautiful evening.

  Started walking. When he got around the block, there was a new car parked on the street across from the Barkers’ but nobody in sight. That was the last moment that he might have turned around.

  Instead, he put his hand on the Glock, in his jacket pocket, made sure the safety was off, and walked quickly across the yard and down between the two dark houses, pushed through a sickly hedge, and continued through the Barkers’ backyard, down the side of their house, and around to the front.

  Looked up and down the street, saw nobody watching, rang the doorbell. Heard the faint cadences
of people talking, and footfalls on the floor inside. The knob turned, and he was looking at a thirty-something guy, a guy with an eager white face over a JCPenney suit…

  The killer shot the guy three times, bap-bap-bap, and he went down, and the killer took a step forward, following the muzzle of his gun, saw three people frozen on the living room couch and then a dark-haired woman was moving and a big fat guy, and they seemed to have guns and the killer ripped out ten shots without stopping, just pointed the gun and let it rip, fast as he could move his finger, and saw people falling and then something tore at his side and he was running…

  Didn’t think, didn’t hear, didn’t do anything but run.

  Marcy had a sweet roll in one hand-tasted good, she hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch-when the doorbell rang. Todd Barker got up and said, “I’ll get it, it’s probably Jim,” and went to the door. Kelly Barker said, “Jim’s from just down the street. He was going to record all the TV-”

  And Todd Barker opened the door and there were three shots and he went down, and a black-bearded fat man was there with a gun and Marcy made a move for her pistol and could feel Buster making a move…

  Then it all went away for Marcy Sherrill, as swiftly and surely as the light fleeing a shattered bulb; gone into darkness.

  No more Davenport and his suits, no more Rick or the hot artist, no more lunches with pals at the police force, no more fistfights, no more surgeons on cutting horses, no more politics, no more anything.

  The killer’s fifth wild shot, sprayed across the room, caught Marcy Sherrill under the chin, blew through her throat and spinal cord, and she died without even knowing it, without being able to say goodbye or feel any regret, with the taste of a sweet roll on her tongue…

  Nothing, again, forever.

  16

  Lucas dropped the hammer on the Lexus, burning down Rice Street, blowing through a red light at Arlington, with barely a hesitation. Berg, cuffed in the backseat, called, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” and Del, holding on to an overhead hand grip, said, “I wonder what those crazy fucks have done this time?”