Buried Prey (17 page)

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 may 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 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.”