Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  “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 description. 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.

  The Barkers lived in a gray-and-white rambler with a cracked driveway and a narrow two-car garage. A sidewalk curled from the driveway up to the front door.

  Lucas got out, rang the bell, and Todd Barker opened the door. “Don’t want to be impolite, but have you got some kind of ID?” he asked.

  “Sure.” Lucas fished out his ID and handed it over. Barker glanced at it, and said, “Okay. Come on in. . . . Uh, I have a pistol here that I’m going to put away. We didn’t know for sure who you might be.”

  “Okay.”

  A woman was sitting on a couch facing a television, which had been muted. She said, “Todd was a little upset that you were coming over.”

  Todd said, “Not exactly upset . . .” He put a Smith & Wesson Airweight in a drawer that popped out of the side of a six-foot-tall grandfather clock, and
pushed the door shut. “More like careful. We try to stay in Condition One at all times. Cocked and locked . . . Can I ask what you carry?”

  “Uh, sure,” Lucas said. He pulled back his jacket to show his pistol in its shoulder rig. “Colt Gold Cup.”

  “Terrific,” Todd said, enthusiasm showing in his face. “Cocked and locked, or . . .”

  “No, I don’t keep a shell in the chamber; I keep the—”

  “Israeli draw,” he said. “Not quite as quick that way.”

  “I’ve never really needed a quick draw,” Lucas said. “If I think something is coming, I take the gun out and jack a shell into the chamber.”

  “Yeah, yup, yup,” Todd said. “I got a carry permit, myself, but my employer doesn’t allow guns on the premises; a mistake I hope he never lives to regret.”

  BOTH THE BARKERS appeared to be in their early thirties. The house had a starter-home feel to it, with mass-market furniture and inexpensive carpeting, an unpainted-furniture-style hutch in one corner, full of old dishes. An antique buffet, carefully polished, had pride-of-place in the living room, under a wall-mounted flat-screen television.

  Todd Barker dropped onto the couch beside his wife, and gestured at an easy chair for Lucas. Lucas took it, gave them a quick summary of the Jones case, including the recovery of the girls’ bodies, and recited the details, as he remembered them, of the descriptions he’d accumulated on the man who’d called himself John Fell.

  “Fairly big guy, but chunky to fat,” Lucas said. “Dark hair, black or dark brown, and curly. Broad face. If he’s the one who took the Joneses, he might also have killed a drug dealer who witnessed the kidnapping. The drug dealer was stabbed several times—many times—and that murder was never solved, either. But, if it’s him, he used a knife.”

  “That sounds like him, and he used a knife on me, that’s for sure,” Kelly Barker said. She stretched her arms toward Lucas, and traced a finger down thin white scars on her forearms. “He really cut me up. He stuck my hand, too, right through my palm.” She held up her left hand so Lucas could see a wedge-shape scar in the palm. “I kept screaming, and trying to run backwards, and he stumbled and that gave me room and I ran. He ran after me for a little way, but then, he was too fat, he couldn’t catch me, and he ran back to his van. I ran out of the park and waved at people on the street and this man stopped and took me to the hospital.”

  “Weird that you got in a car with somebody after that,” Todd said. “You know, a strange man.”

  “He was a really nice guy, actually. His name was Nathan Dunn, he was a salesman, an older guy,” she said. “Anyway, he took me right to the hospital. I got blood all over his car. I was afraid I was going to bleed to death.”

  Hospital officials had called the Anoka police, and the cops had quickly started a search for a red van driven by a dark-haired fat man. “They never found him.”

  “Do you remember him well enough that if I put you with a police artist, you could put together a picture of him?”

  “The Anoka police already did that,” she said. “Way back when it happened. Wait just one minute . . .”

  She hopped off the couch, went into a side room; Lucas heard a file drawer open, and a minute later she came back, digging through a manila folder. “Here.”

  She passed Lucas a sheet of paper, with a man’s face done with an old-fashioned Identi-Kit. He took it in, blinked: the face fit the description of Fell, though the Identi-Kit made it thinner. That wasn’t uncommon with eyewitness photo-sketches—police artists tended to go to averages, and if somebody was fat, they tended to lose weight in the sketches.

  “We’ve got a little better computer tech now,” Lucas said, passing the sketch back to her. “If you have any time at all to come up to St. Paul . . .”

  She did, and she would.

  He dug for more details, and she had a few. Her attacker had parked the van off the park road, backing it into the bushes so it was right up against the walking path. “I saw it really close—it looked like some kind of . . . prisoner thing. There was a screen behind the driver, so you couldn’t get at him from the inside,” Kelly said. “I remember the screen. And there was more screen on the back windows, hung off bars, so you couldn’t break the glass. There were no side windows. That’s what I remember . . . the inside of the van. It was like a prison van.”

  “What’d he say when he tried to grab you?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t really remember that. Even right afterwards. I was walking down this sidewalk in the park, and there was this place where bushes closed in—lilacs, I think—and he came out of them and grabbed me and waved the knife at me, and I saw the van and he was pulling at me and I was fighting him, and I broke out of his hand, and started backing up and he was trying to talk to me but he was slashing, too, and then he tried to grab me again and I yanked away and I ran. . . . He came after me a little but I ran faster and faster, and I looked back and I saw him going into the bushes and then I heard the van, and I got off the sidewalk because I was afraid he’d chase me, and I could see the street up ahead and I ran as hard as I could . . . but he never came after me.”

  “But you were right there: face-to-face.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “He was talking and . . .” She put a hand to her face. “. . . spitting. He got some spit on me, he was so close.”

  “Do you remember what kind of knife?”

  She shuddered: “Do I ever. It was this long curved meat knife, like you use for cutting roasts or something. Not like a big heavy butcher knife, but a long curved knife.”

  “A kitchen knife, not a hunting knife or a jackknife.”

  “Definitely a kitchen knife. Like one of those Chicago Cutlery things, with the wooden handle.”

  “Then you ran and the Dunn guy came along. Did he get a look at the attacker?”

  “Oh, no—I had to run down this path, through the bushes. Mr. Dunn didn’t even see me until the last minute. He almost ran over me. And I went to the hospital,” Kelly said. “But I can tell you, when I was fighting the guy, I scratched him, and I had blood and skin under my fingernails, and the police took it away. And there was a hair—I remember the guy at the hospital took it out from under my fingernail and he said, ‘Got a black hair.’”

  “Ah—that could be important. Thank you,” Lucas said.

  “Can you still get, you know, DNA from stuff that old?” Todd asked.

  “If they’ve still got it, we can,” Lucas said. “The good thing is, people who do this kind of thing usually get caught, sooner or later, and we’ve got a DNA bank for sex criminals. So does the FBI. If he’s been arrested and convicted, he could be in the bank.”

  “That is so exceptionally excellent,” Kelly said.

  They talked for a few more minutes, but she had nothing more that really contributed to the case. Didn’t remember anything about a missing finger.

  The DNA possibility was interesting. DNA had been used to clear quite a few men improperly convicted of rape or murder, but had been used to nail just as many who thought they’d gotten away with it, only to have a long-ago crime snatch them right off the street.

  Barker also convinced Lucas that Fell, whatever his real name, was the killer, and that he’d continued operating after the Jones murders. If the Jones girls’ kidnapping was his first killing—and it might or might not have been—and Barker was another attempt, there’d be more.

  As he was leaving, Kelly Barker asked, “Listen, do you mind if my agent gets in touch with Channel Three, and they give you a call? I’m pretty sure they’d be interested.” She said it earnestly, one showbiz personality to another.

  “I can’t talk to them on the record, at least at this point,” Lucas said. “If you do talk to them, and they want to do some film, be sure you let me know. I mean, this guy might be watching. And there’s a woman at the Minneapolis Police Department, Marcy Sherrill, the head of Homicide—you should call her. She might have some ideas for you. Remember—you might be the only living pe
rson who could identify him.”

  “I think we can take care of ourselves,” Todd Barker said, with a square-chinned grin. “Look around—there are four guns in this room. I can get to one of them in two seconds, from the threatalert to trigger.”

  Lucas nodded: “Hope you have the two seconds.”

  “Two seconds is nothing,” Barker said.

  “Average high school kid, on a track, can run a hundred yards in twelve seconds or so,” Lucas said. “That’s about fifty feet in two seconds . . . from your front door to your backyard.”

  “You think I should get a shotgun?” Barker asked.

  “I think you should get good locks,” Lucas said.

  LUCAS WALKED BACK down the dark sidewalk to the Porsche, stood there for a minute, looking up at the sky, thinking. Gun nuts made him a little nervous. He always had the feeling that they were looking for something to shoot. They had a kind of tight-jawed routine—“Better to have a gun and not need it, than need one and not have it”—but behind that, he thought, was an urge.

  And the idea that they could take care of themselves was an illusion: put an asshole behind a bush, in the night, with a shotgun, and you were gonna get shot.

  Lucas had shot a number of people in his life, and found shootings always involved a bureaucratic nightmare and sometimes a few lawsuits; all in all, with a couple of exceptions, he’d prefer not to shoot. For Lucas, shooting wasn’t important; what was important was the hunt.

  Now he felt a quickening at the heart.

  Because he’d gotten a sniff of the quarry, he thought. John Fell was eighty percent the man who’d attacked Barker. The hunt was under way.

  11

  Del was playing with a new camera when Lucas came in the next morning. “That fuckin’ Flowers got me interested,” Del said. “I’m taking a photography class at night.”

  “Weather gave me one,” Lucas said. “Kinda interesting. Wish I had more time for it. . . . So did you get free?”