Buried Prey

by John Sandford

The killer was tired. Really tired. While he’d waited for the old man to show, he’d worked out his next steps, and those had made him even more tired. Nevertheless, they had to be taken.

  He went back up the stairs, picked up the old man’s hat, put it on his head, turned off his porch light, and when he was sure there was nobody out in the street, walked out to the Caddy, got inside, and backed it down the drive.

  Really tired.

  FOUR HOURS LATER, at ten minutes before one in the morning, with the lights of Tower, Minnesota, in the distance, he took a hard left out to Lake Vermilion. The old man had a cabin there, one of a line of small cabins on the south shore of a peninsula. He pulled up the drive next to the cabin, went inside, turned on a light, waited a bit, and turned it off. Realized he was about to fall asleep: set an alarm clock for three o’clock in the morning, and two hours later, was knocked out of a sound sleep.

  Getting off the couch was painful, but he did it. Moving as quietly as he could in the dark, he went down to the dock, lifted the kayak that sat on the dock into the sixteen-foot Lund that was tied next to it, then untied the Lund and, using the kayak paddle, began to paddle out into the lake.

  The night sky was clear, with twenty million stars twinkling down at him. The lake was flat, and quiet, other than the odd plonks and plunks you always heard around lakes. He saw one other boat, a long way north, running at some speed from left to right, and then out of sight. Vermilion was a big place, and it was easy to get lost. . . .

  He paddled for ten minutes, a few hundred yards offshore, then fired up the four-stroke engine, which was relatively quiet, and motored another half-mile out. Somewhere out here was a reef, he thought, where the old man often went walleye fishing. Didn’t matter too much . . .

  Black as pitch; only a few lights on shore to guide him. He dropped the old man’s hat in the boat, lifted the kayak over the side, and eased into it. When he was settled, he horsed the boat around until it pointed back out into the lake, pushed the tiller more or less to center, and shifted the engine back into forward. The boat puttered off. He watched it for a minute, then turned the kayak back to shore. A half-hour later, he lifted the kayak back onto the dock and walked in the dark back up to the cabin.

  He’d been out an hour. Couldn’t risk any more sleep. He locked the cabin, went to the garage, opened the side access door, and wheeled the dirt bike out onto the gravel. Closed the door, and started pushing the bike up the drive toward the road.

  Heavier work than it looked, and he was sweating heavily by the time he got to the blacktop. Once there, he fired it up, and took off.

  It’d be a long trip back to the Cities.

  And he was so tired . . . so dead tired.

  13

  Lucas got up early the next morning, shaking out of bed as the Jones killer hit the northern suburbs on his bike; neither would ever know about that. But the killer was hurting. To ride a dirt bike from Vermilion to the Twin Cities was absurd, even for a regular rider. The killer wasn’t a regular rider, and on top of that, he was fat. He felt at times like the bike’s seat was about three feet up his butt.

  When he finally got back to his house, he pushed the bike into the garage at the back and staggered inside, left his clothes in a heap and lurched into a shower. He had saddle sores, he thought; he couldn’t see them, but he could feel them, flat burns on the inside of his legs. As to the hemorrhoids . . .

  LUCAS, ON THE OTHER HAND, was completely comfortable, and perhaps even self-satisfied, especially after he went out to recover the Star Tribune. As Ignace had suggested, his story was on the front page: “Cop Says Jones Killer Probably Murdered More Girls.” Excellent. Marcy would have a spontaneous hysterectomy when she read that, and the Minneapolis cops might actually start working the case.

  He left the house an hour later with three names and addresses written in his notebook—the three former massage-parlor women, Lucy Landry, Dorcas Ryan, and Mary Ann Ang, whose last name was now Morgan. He’d interviewed the first two on his own, back in the eighties, and the third one with Del. He hadn’t remembered any of their names or what they looked like, but recognized Dorcas Ryan when she opened the screen door of her St. Paul Park home and he introduced himself. She said, “Man, it’s been a while.”

  “Yes, it has,” Lucas said.

  Ryan’s house was a little run-down, and not the neatest of places, but no less tidy than his would have been if he’d been living alone, Lucas thought. Like most people, he carried certain models in his head for old acquaintances. He’d often seen hookers go from fresh-faced high school girls to broken-down, sorrylooking creatures of twenty-two or twenty-three, with coke or meth habits, who seemed destined to slide into a grave before they were thirty.

  Ryan, on the other hand, looked pretty much like a schoolteacher or bookkeeper in her late forties or early fifties, one who took care of herself. She was dressed in jeans, a neat collar blouse, and loafers. She invited him inside, offered him a Coke. He declined, sat in her one easy chair while she took the couch.

  “You remember why I came to talk to you back then?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes. The Jones kids. I was amazed when they were dug up—I guess you were, too.”

  “I was,” Lucas said. “You remember the guy I was looking for? John Fell.”

  “Sure. We were talking about him for weeks. He never came back.”

  Lucas took a bundle of papers out of the briefcase he’d brought with him, and handed them to her. “I want you to look at a bunch of faces, and see if Fell is one of them.”

  “All right . . . Huh. Not real photographs . . .” She began shuffling through the Identi-Kit pictures, taking them one at a time, slowly. “They’re all pretty much alike. . .”

  Lucas had chosen a dozen faces, all with dark hair and round, heavy faces. She went through them, pulled a couple, compared them, and handed one to Lucas. “There’s something about this face. It’s got something. I think it might be him.”

  She’d chosen the face that Barker had put together, and Lucas felt the hunter’s pleasure uncoil in his stomach. Most cases had a moment or two when a fact or an idea snapped into focus, when you knew you’d just taken a large step, and this was one of those times.

  He nodded at her: “Thank you,” he said.

  “Are you looking up the rest of the girls?”

  “Lucy Landry and Mary Ann Ang,” Lucas said. “Those were the ones I could find, along with you.”

  “Lucy’s had a hard time,” Ryan said. “First she got Jesus, probably fifteen years ago, and that didn’t work out, so she tried Scientology, and that didn’t help, but it cost a lot of money, so she tried Buddhism and yoga, and those didn’t work, so she started drinking. I think that helped, because she’s still drinking.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Lucas said. “What about Mary Ann Ang?”

  She shook her head. “Haven’t thought about her in years. I can barely remember her face. I do remember that she married a rich guy—like maybe a doctor. Had some kids. I’m not sure that anybody knows that she ever worked with us. She was only there a couple of months.”

  “Think it would mess her up if I interviewed her?”

  Ryan tipped her head: “That was not a good time, back then, you know . . . for any of us. We’re lucky we lived through it. If she’s doing good, jeez, it’d be an awful shame to mess her up.”

  LUCY LANDRY LIVED in an apartment on the edge of St. Paul’s Lowertown, one of those districts of old brick warehouses that the planners thought they could make artsy. He called her from the street, got lucky. She was home and buzzed him into the lobby. She was on the eighth floor, and he went up in an old freight elevator that groaned and stank of onions and took its own sweet time.

  Landry came to the door in a dressing gown, looked at him through half-drunk morning eyes, and said, “Yep, it’s you. You look tougher than you used to.”

  “You okay?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, pulling the gown tight around
herself. “Come on in. I work late, I should be sleeping for another couple of hours.”

  She had one bedroom, a small living room with a kitchen to one side, a round wooden table to eat at, a corduroy-covered couch to sit on, and a TV peering across the couch. Lucas sat on one end of the couch and took out his pictures.

  She went through them, pulled out the same picture that Ryan had. “That’s the closest,” she said.

  “Just close, or do you think that’s him?”

  “If I were putting a face on him, with this computer or whatever it is, that’s what I’d draw. There’s something not quite right around the mouth, but it’s pretty good.” She stood up, absently scratched her crotch while looking around the living room, then tottered off to the kitchen area and came back with a pencil and a book. She put the paper on the book and then used the pencil to touch up the mouth. After one try and an erasure, she said, “There. That’s better.”

  She handed it back to Lucas: she’d made only a small change, but one of significance—she’d changed the line of his lips, from squared-off, to a descending curve. She asked, “Do you think he killed the Jones girls?”

  Lucas said, “I think maybe he did. I think this time I’m going to get a chance to ask him.”

  “I saw on a Channel Three promo that some woman was attacked by him and got away. She’s on at noon.”

  Kelly Barker had gotten her wish, Lucas thought. “She’s the one who gave us this picture,” he said.

  “So he was still trying to snatch girls like years later,” Landry said. “You think he got some that nobody knows about?”

  Lucas stood up, stuffed the pictures of Fell back in his briefcase. “I hate to think about that,” he said.

  He took the stairs down instead of the elevator and was slowed by two men, artists, he supposed, carrying a four-by-eight sheet of plywood down the stairs. When they turned it around the corner, he saw that it was painted with a picture of a dancing man, like Lucas had seen on tarot cards.

  Back at his car, he decided not to go after Mary Ann Ang/ Morgan. He might have screwed up a few lives through simple inexperience, way back when, but he didn’t need to screw up another, by showing up on her doorstep with questions about a massage parlor.

  He would locate and identify Fell—he probably had enough now, he thought—and doubted that Ang/Morgan would be able to speed that up much. Now, it was all research.

  WHILE LUCAS WAS TALKING to Landry, the killer was lying facedown on his couch. Just as he had gotten out of the shower, he’d suffered a series of muscle spasms in his back and legs, and he was afraid the ride might have done something to his spine. He found a bottle of oxycodone, left over from an oral surgery, popped three of them.

  After an hour on the couch, he felt good enough to eat. He turned on the TV and headed into the kitchen. He was putting together three fried-egg-and-onion sandwiches on Wonder bread when he heard a promo for a woman who might be able to identify the killer of the Jones girls.

  He went into the living room to watch, eating the sandwiches, swilling Diet Pepsi. He had to wait ten minutes, through the last part of a gardening show, before the noon news came up. Kelly Barker was the first story.

  He remembered the bitch with perfect clarity. He’d cut her up, but she got away—one of only two women to get away from him. The other had been in Kansas, under similar circumstances. But he’d made his move too soon then, and never got close enough to touch.

  With Barker, he’d gotten close enough, but she’d fought him and then she’d gotten a couple of steps on him, and she’d run like the wind. He’d made the executive decision to get the fuck out of there.

  Now she was on TV—and she had a picture that looked something like him.

  He unconsciously licked egg and grease off his fingers, shook his head, and when she’d finished, went off to lie down and think about it.

  LUCAS GOT BACK to his office at five minutes to twelve. He turned on the TV, to Channel Three, for the Midday Report. Del wandered in as he was waiting for the show to come on: “I talked to a security guy at Wells Fargo,” he said. “They have a file of three cards they issued at different times, and they think they might all be linked to the same guy. John Fell was the first one. The others were a Ronald James Hubbard and a Tom Piper.”

  “Nursery rhyme names,” Lucas said. “Mother Hubbard and Tom the piper’s son.”

  “Yeah, the Wells Fargo guy picked that up, too. He wasn’t working with them, then, Norwest Bank issued the cards before it took over Wells Fargo, but the old Norwest file had all three guys already pulled out. No idea who he was, but he did the same thing with all three of them: had an address to start it, had it linked to a checking account he’d opened a couple of years earlier, changed the address to a post office box, emptied out the account, and skipped on the last credit-card bill. The first two final bills were small change, but the last one, he skipped on four thousand dollars. He worked it as a con, that last time.”

  “Checks?” Lucas asked.

  Del shook his head: “It’s all electronic. We can get facsimiles, but not the originals. They’ve all been recycled.”

  “But we know what he was paying for . . .”

  “Yeah, we got that. But it’s all pretty obscure. Small amounts, scattered all over the place. Maybe porn, like we were thinking. Could be books or records. That kind of money. Except that last one, toward the end, he bought a lot of stereo and TV stuff—stuff he could sell, I think.”

  “But why would he hide books or money on a fake account?”

  “That’s why I’m thinking porn, or something like it. Sex toys or something. I can’t find any of the account names at their address, so they were small-time, whatever they were. I’ll keep looking.”

  The news came up on Channel Three, and Lucas used his remote to push the volume. After a story about a woman who cleaned out the accounts of a local charity to support her Vegas habit, Barker came up, sitting on a couch, talking to Jennifer Carey, the woman with whom Lucas shared a daughter.

  “She’s on some kind of anti-aging sauce,” Del said. “She looks terrific.”

  “Got the cheekbones,” Lucas agreed.

  Barker said, “. . . came as a complete surprise. I agreed to cooperate, of course, so I went to the BCA office in St. Paul, and talked to an imaging expert named John Retrief, who helped me put together the image of the man who attacked me.”

  The image of Fell flashed up full-screen, stuck for a moment, then pulled back, and down, to reveal the two women again.

  “And this man they’re looking for, this John Fell—he matches that image?” Carey asked.

  “He matches exactly, according to Agent Davenport,” Barker said, with a solemn turn of her lips and eyes.

  “Jesus, I didn’t say that,” Lucas said.

  Del said, “You did now.”

  She continued, “And if you read the Star Tribune this morning, there’s a story on the case, where a serial-murder expert says he almost certainly killed more girls.” The camera shot changed to catch her square in the face: “I’m probably the only survivor. . . .” She began to shake, and tears appeared on her cheeks, and she said, “And I’m permanently scarred . . .” and held up her hands.

  “She can do it,” Del said. “She’s only about an inch away from Oprah.”

  “She might get Oprah, if we find Fell and pin the Jones murders on him,” Lucas said.

  “Hope her alligator mouth don’t get her hummingbird ass in trouble,” Del said. “If Fell sees her . . .”

  “I thought about that,” Lucas said. “I didn’t do anything about it.”

  Jennifer Carey said, “If any of our viewers have any idea who this John Fell might possibly be, his real name, or his current name, notify the Minneapolis Police Department or BCA agent Lucas Davenport immediately, at the numbers on your screen. Do not attempt to apprehend . . .”

  After the Channel Three broadcast, the other four stations jumped on the Identi-Kit picture, and Barker did tape
for both KSTP and KARE for the evening news, variations on Channel Three; KARE also ran tape of James Hayworth, the St. Paul cop interviewed by the Star Tribune. Hayworth repeated his contention that there were almost certainly more dead girls.

  During the afternoon, Del found four successor companies to the ones who took charges from Fell. “We were right—they were porn and sex toys,” he told Lucas. “None of them have records from back then. Just too long ago.”

  During the afternoon, too, seven calls came in for Lucas, based on the Channel Three broadcast, with tips on people who resembled John Fell. Minneapolis got twelve more.

  Lucas worked biographies on all of them during the afternoon, pulling criminal records, driver’s licenses, credit reports, personal histories. Four had minor criminal records, none for sex. Judging from driver’s license photos and data, two of the seven didn’t have dark hair, and four, including one of the brown-haired candidates, were too young. He was left with two possibilities, and he didn’t have much faith in either.

  He talked to Marcy Sherrill, who said of the twelve tips they got, three were still considered possibilities. “We’ll have more calls coming in overnight,” she said. “I figure the chances we’ll get him are like four to one, against.”

  “That’s about right,” Lucas said. “But if he’s still around, we’re gonna scare the shit out of him. That might get us somewhere.”

  He took another tip, shifted up by the BCA operator. A man who said, “I don’t want to say my name, but the guy you want is named Robert Sherman. He’s a sex freak and he’s the spitting image of the guy on TV, and he’s the right age—early fifties.”

  Lucas checked the number: the guy was calling from a bar.

  The guy said, “He lives on Iowa Avenue. In St. Paul.”

  And was gone.

  Lucas looked at his watch: he could hit Iowa on the way home, check the guy out. Or maybe after dinner . . .