Buried Prey

by John Sandford

  Brett said to the SWAT guy, “Look what you did.”

  Lucas said to Del, “Come on, let’s go. This is bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit,” Cruz said. “We had a credible tip.”

  “It’s bullshit,” Lucas said.

  ON THE WAY BACK to the car, Del said, “Made more friends in the MPD.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Lucas said. “We got led around by the nose when the Jones girls were killed, and they’re being led around by the nose now.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “I’m not wrong. I’m pissed, and frustrated.”

  They drove back to the BCA, mostly in silence, and finally Lucas said, “I’ll call Cruz this afternoon, and kiss and make up.”

  And a few minutes later, he added, “Fell knows Brett. Somehow he knows him. Maybe if we talked to Brett a little more—”

  “He isn’t the brightest bulb on the pole lamp,” Del said. “He started out stupid and then started sniffing glue, so I wouldn’t expect too much.”

  BACK AT THE BCA, he walked down to the office where Sandy, the researcher, worked. She was poking at a computer, looked up when Lucas loomed, and said, “It’s impossible. I can’t even give you a probability, because too many records are gone, and too many people took teacher training.”

  “How many names you got?”

  “I haven’t counted them—must be a couple of hundred. But the problem is, this is all before everything got computerized. Personal computers were brand-new, and a lot of stuff was still kept on paper. I can keep trying—”

  “Ah, give it up,” Lucas said. He turned away, then turned back. “Hey, a guy from Minneapolis, a former cop named Brian Hanson, apparently fell out of his boat up on Vermilion. Could you see if there are any news feeds?”

  “Sure.” She rattled some keys, and a news story popped up. “TV station out of Duluth,” she said.

  Lucas read over her shoulder: neighbors heard him arrive, heard the boat go out, very early in the morning. The boat, a Lund, was found turning circles in the lake just after dawn, the motor running. Another fisherman had hopped into the boat, found Hanson’s hat, fishing rod, and open tackle box. No body had been found yet.

  “Not uncommon,” Sandy said. “He was peeing over the side, like all men do, and he fell in, and the boat motored away. The water’s cold enough all year round, he dies of hypothermia, and sinks. Happens all the time.”

  “Yeah, but . . . He worked on the Jones case, and died the day after they found the bodies. It worries me that they haven’t found his body.”

  “You think he might have faked his own death?”

  Lucas scratched his head: “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

  BACK IN HIS OFFICE, working more from simple momentum than anything like intelligence, he called the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office, got hooked up with the deputy who’d covered the accident, and got the names of the two fishermen who’d chased down the empty boat. The cop said there was nothing especially suspicious in the disappearance: “It happens. And when it does, there’s nothing really to work with. A guy falls over the side, the boat drifts away, he sinks, and that’s it. No signs of violence, no disturbance . . . nothing. He’s just gone—but he’ll be back. Give him about ten days, he’ll come bobbing up.”

  Lucas called around until he found one of the fishermen, an assistant manager at a Target store in Virginia. The boat, he said, “had been chugging right along.”

  “How fast?” Lucas asked. “I mean, fast as you could walk?”

  “Fast as you could jog,” the guy said.

  “Big boat? Nineteen, twenty?”

  “Uh-uh. Sixteen. The cops towed it back in, no problem.”

  “How big was the engine?” Lucas asked.

  “A forty.”

  “Life jacket in the boat?”

  “Can’t really . . . you know, I don’t think there was.”

  Lucas thanked him and hung up. Thought about it for a second, said, “Ah,” to nobody, picked up the phone again, and called Virgil Flowers, a BCA agent who worked mostly outstate. “Where are you?” he asked, when Virgil came up.

  “Sitting in the Pope County Courthouse. That Doug Spencer deposition.”

  “Got a question for you,” Lucas said. “You used to have a little Lund, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s all I could afford on my inadequate salary.”

  “We got a guy who apparently fell overboard while he was fishing out of a sixteen-footer,” Lucas said. “His hat was found in the boat, two fishing rods and tackle box, so he wasn’t taking a fish off. The boat was found running, about as fast as you could jog. No body. So why did he fall overboard?”

  After a moment of silence, Virgil said, “He was moving around, for some reason, stepped on something like a net handle or the rod handle, and he slipped and the gunwale caught him in the back of the legs, below the knees and he fell over backwards.”

  “There was a theory that he was peeing off the boat.”

  “Not that boat, not with the motor running like that,” Virgil said. “You couldn’t pee over the motor, so you’d have to stand off to one side, and with the motor running, and all that weight in the back corner, it’d start turning doughnuts. If he was peeing off the side, he’d have peed all over himself. You’re gonna pee, you kill the motor.”

  “But still, you could think of a way that he’d fall over.”

  “Sure. Boat bouncing around in the waves, you lose your balance—”

  “No wind, flat lake.”

  Another pause. “Step on a net handle.”

  “That’s all you got?”

  “It’s not all that easy to fall out of a boat,” Virgil said. “For one thing, in a boat that size, if you’re alone, you don’t really walk around. Not if the motor’s running. What would you be doing? You sit. Walleye fisherman?”

  “That’s what I’m told.”

  “So, there’s just not much reason to move around,” Virgil said. “I don’t know, Lucas. It’s sure not impossible, but it’s not too likely, either. On the other hand, he could have had three fishing rods, was playing a fish, reached too far over to lift it out of the water, had a spell of vertigo, and went in. It’s not that easy to fall out of a boat, but people do, all the time. For no good reason. How old was he? Could he have had a heart attack?”

  “Thank you. Are you pulling your boat today?”

  “Of course not. I’m on government business,” Virgil said.

  LUCAS HUNG UP and thought about it—whatever anybody might say about it, it was a peculiar death, and it came at a peculiar time. He called Del and said, “I’m going up to look at Hanson’s cabin. Talk to his neighbors and so on.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s what I got,” Lucas said. “It’s all I got. I’m scratching around.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Think about it,” Lucas said. “What we need is ideas . . . maybe you could go back and talk to Don Brett again. Figure out how Fell knows him. If you could figure that out . . .”

  “We’d have him.”

  “Yeah. Exactly.” Lucas looked at his watch. “I’m gonna run home and get a bag, and take off. See you tomorrow.”

  20

  Lucas got directions to Hanson’s cabin from a deputy sheriff, who told him that the cabin was temporarily sealed “until we figure out for sure what happened to him. If he doesn’t show up in the next week or so, we’ll let the relatives in.”

  “I need to get in,” Lucas said. “Can you guys fix it?”

  “When are you coming up?”

  “I’m on my way,” Lucas said into his cell phone. “I’m just clearing the Cities . . . so probably three and a half hours.”

  “More like four. How you coming? You been here before?”

  “Yeah. I’ll take 35 to 33 to 53 and then up 169 into Tower,” Lucas said.

  “You want to stop at Peyla, that’s a crossroads just short of Tower, where 169 hits Highway 1 and County Road 77.
You want to turn left on 77 . . .”

  Hanson, the deputy said, lived on a peninsula that stuck out into Lake Vermilion fifteen or twenty road miles north of Tower. Lucas took down the directions and said, “See you in three hours and a bit.”

  “More like four,” the deputy said.

  MORE LIKE FOUR; Lucas went a little deeper into the Porsche.

  Thought about Marcy all the way up: couldn’t get her out of his head. He’d be driving along, looking at cars or the landscape, and he’d get a flash of Marcy, something they’d lived through. The flashes were as clear and present as if he were still living them. He said a short prayer that he didn’t outlive Weather, or any of his children.

  Like most smart people, Lucas was able to stand back from himself, at least at times, to examine thoughts, motives, feelings. He knew that he was running out of control. He felt pointed toward Fell’s death, however that had to happen: he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to perfectly control himself when he came into Fell’s presence. When he imagined a confrontation with Fell, he could feel his blood pressure rising, could feel the adrenaline kicking into his bloodstream, could feel the anger surging up to his throat.

  He realized he was having a hard time recognizing that Marcy was gone, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, and that killing Fell would not answer the problem he was having with her death, would not bring her back, and could have devastating consequences for himself and his family.

  The little man at the back of his mind could whisper all of that to him: and yet, that realization had little effect on the urge for revenge.

  HIGHWAY 77 WAS a two-lane blacktop through scrubby tamaracks around the edge of Vermilion, one of the major lakes of northern Minnesota. He called the deputy, whose name was Clark Childress, when he was fifteen minutes south of the crossroads, and Childress said, “Jeez, you made good time, then. See you out there. . . . I’m in Tower, I’ll leave right now.”

  Childress either stopped to do something, or was a slow driver, because Lucas caught him right at the crossroads, saw the patrol car make the turn, and fell in behind him. They took 77 through several twists and turns, then onto a narrower blacktopped road, and finally onto a lane barely wider than the patrol car. Childress pulled into a yard beside an older garage, with a green clapboard cabin closer to the lake. A floating dock stuck into the lake, and a kayak was overturned and tied on top of the dock.

  Lucas got out of the car at the same time Childress did, and the deputy said, “I thought, God almighty, that can’t be a cop driving a Porsche. That explains the fast trip.” Childress checked out the car, then said, “You got lights.”

  “Don’t use them much, but they’ve been handy a time or two,” Lucas said. “Took a little heat from the highway patrol a couple of years ago.”

  “Yup, those guys are your eager beavers when it comes to spirited driving,” Childress said. Then he laughed, a short little bark, and said, “I heard that ‘spirited driving’ thing on that British car show.”

  “No sign of Hanson’s body?” Lucas asked.

  “Not yet. His daughter is at a motel down in Tower. I told her you were stopping by; she’s gonna come over, too. She’s interested in why you’re interested.”

  Lucas nodded. “Okay. The fact is, I’m running down a thin thread on the killing of an old friend of mine in Minneapolis, a detective named Marcy Sherrill.”

  “Read about that,” Childress said. “That’s . . . pretty awful. You think it’s connected here?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, I’m running down a thread. Where’s Hanson’s boat?”

  “Here, in the garage. I got the key.” He jangled a ring of keys, and led the way to the garage door.

  The garage was no more than an old weathered shed, just big enough to keep snow off the boat and a collection of lawn care equipment, including a riding mower and a rototiller. There were axes and hoes and weed whips, a big block of wood, a chain saw sitting on a shelf; and it all smelled pleasantly of gasoline, oil, and grass.

  The boat was an ordinary, ten–or fifteen-year-old aluminum fishing boat, a Lund with a red stripe down the side, scratched up like most fishing boats, from banging into docks. It was small for the lake, but perfectly usable, especially for walleye fishing, which is mostly done sitting down. As Virgil had said, the motor was nothing you’d want to pee over, and the boat-bottom was curved enough that peeing over the side would also be fairly unsteady, especially with the motor running.

  As he was looking at the boat, Lucas gave Childress a brief explanation of Hanson’s connection to the Jones case. He concluded with, “We know that the Jones killer is still active, and that he killed Marcy. We know that Hanson died the day after the Jones girls’ bodies were found.”

  “That’s a pretty heavy coincidence,” Childress said.

  “Yes, it is. But it could be nothing but that,” Lucas said.

  THE BOAT HAD NOTHING for Lucas, except the feeling that falling out of that particular boat, on a quiet lake, would be stupid.

  “He got any fishing buddies around here?” Lucas asked.

  “Two guys . . .” Childress took a little paper notebook out of his pocket, thumbed it, and said, “A guy name Tony Cole and another guy named Bill Kushner. They’re golfing buddies of his, and they fish together. Couple of older guys, like him. They live out here . . . down the way.”

  “Ex-cops?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know about Kushner, except that he’s retired. Cole used to work at UPS out of Duluth. He’s retired, too.”

  “They think he fell out of the boat?”

  “They think it’s possible, but they don’t know,” Childress said.

  “You know if they’re up here?”

  “Yeah, they are. I can take you around after we get done here,” the deputy said.

  “I appreciate that,” Lucas said.

  As he spoke, they heard the crunch of a car’s tires on gravel, and Childress said, “That’s probably Miz Sedakis, that’s Hanson’s daughter.”

  “He got any other kids?”

  “Got a son. He was up here, I guess, I didn’t meet him.”

  They walked outside, and found a fortyish woman getting out of a gunmetal-gray Lexus RX350; she was tall, and fleshy, with blond-tinted hair and oversized sunglasses.

  “Clark,” she said. And to Lucas, “You’re Agent Davenport?”

  “Yes.” They shook hands, and she asked, “Why are you up here?”

  He told her, succinctly, about Hanson’s work on the Jones case, and then his disappearance the day after they were found. “It’s probably a coincidence, but it’s an odd coincidence. When we were doing the investigation, we had guys running all over the place, on the smallest pieces of information. On rumors. Anything. I wondered if maybe he talked to somebody, who might have remembered.”

  Sedakis’s hand went to her throat: “You mean . . . you think somebody might have killed him?”

  “I’ve got no reason to think that, except for the coincidence,” Lucas said. “I thought I’d come up here, talk to some of his friends, see if he said anything to anyone.”

  “I certainly remember the Jones thing, even though I was young. I must’ve been in tenth grade,” Sedakis said. “I remember he was working day and night. We used to talk about it. He never was sure that the street person did it. He said there was some other detective down there who thought the street person might have been framed, and I think he half believed that.”

  Lucas said, “That was me,” and then thought, I never saw that in Hanson: never saw any skepticism about Scrape. And he asked, “Did he say anything about it after the bodies were found?”

  “I hadn’t talked to him for a couple of weeks before this accident. We live down in Farmington, and he was up in Golden Valley. Most of the time in the summer, he was up here. So . . . no. I guess ‘no’ is the answer.”

  “When did he go back to the Cities?” Lucas asked.

  “He didn’t actually keep us up t
o date on his travels. He was up here most of the summer.”

  “He went back the night before he disappeared,” Childress said. “We got that from his golf buddies.”

  “So . . . he went down the night the Jones girls were found.”

  Childress nodded. “And turned around the next day.”

  LUCAS ASKED to see the house. Childress took them in, asked them not to touch anything. Hanson had inherited the place from his father, who’d bought four acres on the lakeshore when the buying was good, back in the fifties. They’d had a trailer on the spot for twenty years, with the lakeshore prices rising all the time, and finally sold three of the acres for enough to put up the two-bedroom log cabin.

  The cabin was well-kept, with two upstairs loft bedrooms, for kids or guests, reached by a nearly vertical stairway, with another small bedroom tucked in the back of the first floor. There were two small bathrooms, both with showers, neither with a tub. The kitchen was separated from the living area by a breakfast bar; the living room featured leather furniture facing an oversized television, fishing photos, a desk in a corner with a computer, hooked to a satellite antenna.

  “Nice place; he kept it well,” Lucas said. He pointed at three bright red Stearns life jackets hung on pegs by the door. “Life jackets,” he said.

  Childress said, “Yeah.”

  “We had some happy times up here,” Sedakis said. And added, “I guess,” as if she weren’t quite sure. Then, hastily, “I’m more of a city girl.”

  A row of family photos sat on the fireplace mantel, including a woman who looked like an older, heavier version of Sedakis, and a dark-haired boy holding a thirty-five-inch northern pike on an old-fashioned through-the-gills rope stringer. “That’s Mom,” Sedakis said, “and my brother, Darrell.”

  Darrell, Lucas thought, with a thump of his heart, looked like Fell.

  “I think I met Darrell once, maybe ten years back. I bumped into your father and him, coming out of Cecil’s, over in St. Paul. . . . Big guy, black beard?”