Buried Prey (24 page)

Early in the investigation, Lucas had been put under surveillance by Internal Affairs, with the thought that he might have been the killer. That had been quickly cleared up, when one of the murders took place while he was actively being watched.

But he’d been roundly pissed off, until the chief explained the circumstances—about the missing gun, about a profiler who said that the killer would be attractive to women, and charming, and probably a nice dresser, whose dress would bring women to trust him . . . a description that fit Lucas.

Could this killer be a cop? Buster Hill said that the shooter at the Barkers’ house had been using a Glock, a fairly nondescript piece of weaponry that was also a common police sidearm in the Twin Cities area.

He’d known cops who were killers, but they were not common.

He hated to think that a Minneapolis cop might have been one. Given the age of Fell, he’d almost have to be a patrolman, and Lucas knew all the young patrolmen at the time. He couldn’t think of any who’d really fit both the personality and the appearance of Fell. . . .

Well: maybe one or two.

He’d think about it overnight.

Try to sleep on it.

TRY TO SLEEP ON IT—he hardly slept at all. Kept flashing back to Marcy. Weather always got up first, and did this morning. As soon as she got out of the bathroom, he rolled out of bed.

“Can’t sleep?” she asked.

“Can’t stop thinking about possibilities,” he said. “I might as well get going. I want to check and make sure that poster got out to the TV stations. And I got a couple of things I want to look at over at Minneapolis.”

“Good luck,” she said. “Be careful.”

18

When the killer had turned from the Barkers’ doorway, he’d been confused by the crowd in the house, by the noise, and even by the gunfire itself, though he was doing the shooting, then by the sight of the cop coming out with the gun. Nothing rational was working through his brain: he was down on the lizard level, banging away as fast as he could, both scared and furious and righteous.

He saw one or two people going down and the muzzle flash from a pistol and then, as he turned, felt an impact under his armpit. He was confused about what it was, felt like somebody had hit him with a thrown rock, a sharp rock—and then he was around the house and running between houses, stuffing the pistol in his pants pocket, and across the neighbor’s backyard, between more houses out to the street and into the van.

His heart pounding, he’d cleared the neighborhood in little more than a minute, turning corners, heading out to I-494. His arm didn’t hurt that much, but when he scratched at it, his other hand came away covered with blood and he realized he’d been shot or had cut himself, or something.

He freaked. One thing he didn’t like was the sight of his own blood. He was weaving around the highway, trying to see where it was coming from, then thought about the highway patrol—it’d be ridiculous, at this point, if he were pulled over by the highway patrol for drunk driving.

He swerved onto an exit, across the highway into a shopping center, parked in front of a Best Buy, and looked at his arm. Lots of blood. He probed at it, realized there was nothing there. He hadn’t been hit in the arm at all, but in the side, near the pit of his arm.

He checked the parking lot, then carefully peeled up his shirt and found the wound. To his eye, it looked almost like a knife cut, straight, but deep and ragged. Not a hole, but a slice.

Not too bad, he thought; not too bad, but still bleeding.

He saw a newspaper stand outside a bagel place, dug some change out of his parking-meter stash, looked around again, hopped out of the van, walked over to the box, and bought a
Star Tribune
.

He’d once read that the inside pages of newspapers were fairly sterile. The pages were made with acidic wood pulp, with lots of heat in the process, and were untouched by human hands. He hoped it was true. He carried the paper back to the van, got inside, pulled out the sports pages, and used them to pad his armpit.

Needed to get home . . .

The beard was bothering him—and he wondered if the cops had put out a thing about a white van and a black beard. He pulled it off, the adhesive stretching the skin around his mouth and nose, pushed it down between the seats of the van. He looked in the mirror: still had adhesive on his face. He peeled it for a moment, then put the van in gear and headed out.

IF ONLY . . .

Most of his life seemed built on the phrase. If only . . .

If only the apartment building had been put somewhere else, if only the Jones girls hadn’t been found. If only those things had happened, the old man would still be alive, and he’d still be peacefully pursuing his junk, building his stash for another trip to Thailand.

If only the Barker woman had been there alone, if only he hadn’t been hit by the bullet. Who were those people, anyway? Must have been cops. Maybe bodyguards? Had it been a trap? He wondered if he’d hit them, thought he might have. He’d emptied the pistol at them. . . .

If they were cops, they’d never stop looking for him, especially if he’d hit one. He turned on the radio, looking for news, but none of the radio stations did news anymore. He turned it back off, tried to concentrate on his driving. His side hurt worse, the pain growing, and he started to sweat.

He could handle the pain, he thought. He could even handle the wound. He had that half-tube of oxycodone, left over from the root canal, along with some antiseptics of some kind.

But he needed to get home. Once he was home . . .

Sweat was running freely down his face by the time he turned into his driveway and pulled into the garage. He didn’t know why he was sweating—he wasn’t hurt that bad. There was some pain, but it was a dull ache, rather than agonizing.

He clambered out of the van and went inside, straight to the bathroom, pulled his shirt off, peeled the newspaper off his skin, and looked at the wound. Still bleeding, but not that much. All right. He dug through his medicine cabinet—got the tube of oxycodone, found another tube, from an ear infection, with some amoxicillin, two tabs. Not much else, besides some Band-Aids and a tube of Band-Aid antiseptic cream.

Then he remembered the first-aid kit that came with the van. He’d never bothered to open it, but wouldn’t that have some gauze in it? He went back out to the garage, found the kit, found four gauze pads inside it, and a roll of medical tape. He carried it back to the bathroom, wiped some antiseptic cream over the wound, then covered the wound with the gauze pads. He tried the tape, and managed to stick the pads on, but they wouldn’t hold, he thought. The tape was not long or strong enough, meant to go around fingers or toes. He got a bread bag, ripped off a piece of plastic large enough to cover the gauze pads, then taped it to his body with long strips of duct tape.

Not bad, he thought, looking in the mirror. He hurt, but he wasn’t going to die, unless he got infected. He popped an oxycodone and one of the antibiotic pills, then, on reflection, popped another one of each.

Still hurt, but there was nothing more he could do about it. He went into his living room and lay down on the couch, moved around until he was as comfortable as he could get, and turned on the TV, flipped around the channels.

Nothing. The news wasn’t up yet. Nobody was breaking in with a news flash—maybe nobody had been hit.

If he’d been really unlucky, somebody might have gotten his license tag numbers, but there was nothing he could do about that. And if they had, the cops would already be at his door . . . and they weren’t.

With that thought, he dozed; tired from the action, knocked down by the dope.

WHEN HE WOKE, he was disoriented for a moment, looked at the time. After nine-thirty. The news would be coming up.

He was anxious, waiting for it. Anxious to see what he’d done, where the coverage was. Anxious to see how he’d been described. To see what they knew . . .

He went out to the kitchen, got three wieners out of the refrigerator, and a jar of sauerkraut; slathered the wieners in the sauerkraut, stuck them in the microwave, got out three hot dog buns, got a bottle of horseradish-mustard out of the refrigerator, squirted the buns full of the mustard.

The microwave beeped and the meal was ready: he sat on the couch watching the end of a complicated cop drama, and the news came on.

A woman standing outside the Barker house: “A bearded gunman who may be the killer of the two Jones sisters struck again this evening, murdering a Minneapolis police office, wounding another police officer, and also wounding Todd Barker, the wife of Kelly Barker, who is believed to have been attacked by the same gunman in 1991 in Anoka. Officer Buster Hill is in guarded condition tonight, and Todd Barker is in critical condition at Fairview-Southdale Hospital in Edina. . . .”

The killer watched with dulled interest as the reporter recounted the shooting, and then interviewed a police spokesman, who said, “We believe Officer Hill wounded the gunman in the exchange of gunfire. We found traces of blood along what we presume to be the route the gunman took away from the house. The blood has been picked up by our crime-scene crews and will be taken to the BCA where we will . . .”

And then the police spokesman said the word that the killer hadn’t thought about, but knew quite well. The thing that had, really, pushed him to Thailand.

The officer said, “. . . process it for DNA. When we find him, we’ll then know that we have him for sure, and we think that finding him is now only a matter of time.”

The killer knew all about DNA. DNA seemed like a cloud, something that contaminated everything you touched. He’d been afraid that if he simply continued taking girls, that someday he’d be tagged by DNA. Now he sat up, staring at the TV, felt like screaming at it. Felt like throwing one of the Indian clubs through it, to shatter the screen, but didn’t.

Just stared, the chant going through his head: DNA, DNA, DNA . . .

Had to get out of here, he thought, looking around the house. Had to get away from the smell, the blinking lights on the porn servers, the junk that was scattered all over the place. Had to get away from this piece-of-shit life, had to find a den, had to get well. Had to heal.

Had to put a pillow over his head, shut out the world.

Hide.

19

Minneapolis police headquarters was full of pissed-off people the next morning, buzzing like a nest of killer bees. Lucas slipped through the swarm around Homicide, found the room he was looking for, used for training—and on the walls, photos of every academy graduating class.

At the time of the Jones killings, everybody he’d interviewed about Fell agreed that he was in his mid to late twenties. If he were a young-looking thirty, just to pad the age range a bit, he could hardly have gotten out of the academy before the mid to late seventies—couldn’t have been a cop for more than ten years, at the most.

Lucas went through ten years of classes, noting the names of the prospective cops who looked more or less like the Barkers’ description. There weren’t many. The killer was heavily built, almost square, she’d said. She emphasized the darkness of his hair, almost Mediterranean in tone, but said that his complexion was fair.

In ten years of photographs, there were nine possibilities. After noting down the names, he walked down to the office of Deputy Chief Marilyn Barin. Barin ran the Professional Standards Bureau, which included Internal Affairs. She was Lucas’s age, but had come up through patrol. They’d been friendly enough over the years, but not good friends; she’d been a casual friend of Marcy’s.

She looked up when Lucas knocked on her door frame. “Lucas. Thought you might come around today. This is brutal.”

Lucas took a chair and said, “A long time ago, I worked the Jones girls’ killing, and thought I had a lead on the killer. That was wiped out when we pinned it on a street guy. Turns out we were wrong about that—the guy who shot Marcy is the same guy who killed the Jones girls, and probably a few more over the years.”

Barin nodded. “I heard a couple people talking about your theory . . . and you’re a smart guy.”

He said, “I
am
a smart guy, and it’s way more than a theory, now. I wouldn’t bullshit you on something like this. The thing is . . .”

He explained the sequence of the original investigation, and the 911 calls that had led them down the path to Scrape. “It looks like—this is a leap—like the shooter might have had a contact inside the department, or might even have been a cop. The shooter yesterday used a Glock, according to Buster Hill. Bottom line is, I have a list of names of cops and probably ex-cops or never-were cops, and I’d like somebody to pull some personnel folders and some IA files and tell me if I’m barking up the wrong tree. Or the right one.”

Barin contemplated him for a moment, then swiveled in her chair and looked at a bulletin board above a bookcase, then swiveled back and said, “I gotta talk to the chief. I’ll tell him that we’ve got to go with the request. But I’ve got to clear it with him.”

“How long will that take?”

“Sit here,” she said. She got up and left the office. Five minutes later she came back and said, “You’re good to go. The chief called Cody Ryan down in IA. He’s waiting for you.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep you guys up-to-date. It’s sort of a reach. . . .”

“Do stay in touch,” she said. “We’re putting everything we’ve got on this thing. But if it should turn out to be a cop, or an ex-cop . . .” She rubbed her face. “Ah, God, I hate to think about that. I mean, at this point, I gotta tell you, I don’t believe it’ll be that way.”

CODY RYAN WAS another cop who’d moved into his job after Lucas left the Minneapolis force; Lucas knew him not at all. Which was good, since Lucas had been pushed off the force by IA, after he’d finally beaten up Randy Whitcomb for church-keying the face of one of his street contacts.

Ryan was a bluff, square man with gold-wire-rimmed glasses and a red face, a white shirt, and a red tie and blue slacks. Lucas introduced himself and Ryan said, “I just looked up your file. You were a bad boy.”

“I shouldn’t have hit him the last thirty times,” Lucas said. “The first thirty were pure self-defense.”

Ryan gestured at a chair: “Yeah, well . . . saw the pictures of the chick who got church-keyed. That might tend to piss you off. So: who’re we looking up?”

Lucas gave him the list of names, and Ryan started punching up computer files. He had records on six of the nine, nothing at all on the other three. “Makes me think they didn’t work here,” he said. “Might have gotten turned down for one reason or another. You’d have to go to the general personnel records for that. I don’t know if they’d have them that far back.”

“What do we have on the six?”

Ryan hit a
Print
button, and started passing the files over to Lucas. Four of the six were clean in IA’s eyes—minor citizen complaints that didn’t amount to much. Only one of the four was still on the force, a patrol sergeant working out of the second precinct. Lucas checked his dates: he’d come out of the last class that Lucas had looked at, which meant that he’d be close to the prime age for the killer. The file included an ID photograph; the guy wore glasses and really didn’t look much like Barker’s reconstruction. He was square, but not fat.

The other three had come out of earlier classes; two had quit the force relatively early on, one had retired. Nothing in the IA reports suggested that any of them had ever had problems with women.

Of the two with more serious IA reports, one was for excessive use of force on three separate occasions, but with nothing involving sex. The final one involved a complaint by a dancer that the officer, a Willard Packard, had pressured her for sex, suggesting that there might be some benefits in sleeping with a police officer.

Packard had replied that he suspected the woman of prostitution, and had moved her along when he found her loitering outside the club, talking with customers. He said she was clearly soliciting, and had filed the complaint as a way of getting back at him.

An IA investigator named John Seat had concluded that both might be telling the truth—that she had been soliciting, and that Packard might have pressured her for freebies. Seat had been unable to come up with any hard evidence, and when the complainant told IA that she was tired of the whole thing and wanted to drop the complaint, the investigation ended and Packard walked.

Packard continued with the force for another three years, then resigned, with a note that he’d gone to work with a suburban department east of St. Paul.

“Sounds to me like Seat was pretty sure he was pushing her, but what are you gonna do? It’s all talk, no action, and no witnesses,” Ryan said.

Lucas looked at a photograph: There was a resemblance to the Identi-Kit portrait, though Packard had a bulbous nose, and Barker had shown the killer’s nose as harsh and angled. But eyewitnesses, like Barker, were notoriously unreliable. That she could assemble a coherent image at all, that was picked out by other witnesses, was unusual. Getting a nose wrong—making it more “evil”—was a small enough thing. “Think I’ll look him up,” Lucas said. “Our guy used to go to a massage parlor. He liked his hookers.”

“Long time ago, though,” Ryan said. “He could be dead.”

ON HIS WAY OUT, three different detectives hooked Lucas into quick conversations about Marcy Sherrill; by the time he went out the door, he was hurrying to get away from it. Twenty minutes later, he was back at the BCA headquarters in St. Paul. He called in Sandy, the researcher, and outlined Del’s idea about possible practice teachers. Her eyes narrowed as he talked, and she said, “I’ll try, but I’d be willing to bet that the schools don’t track that stuff. I’d probably have to go out to the teachers’ colleges, teachertraining courses. I don’t know—”

“Give it a try,” Lucas said.

When Sandy was gone, he looked up Willard Packard, and learned that he was still on the job. His driver’s license ID showed a square-built balding man with dark hair and glasses—he had a corrective lens restriction on his license—weighing 230 pounds. He was clean-shaven.

DEL CALLED and asked what Lucas wanted to do: “I’m going out to Woodbury to talk to a cop. You could ride along.”

“See you in ten minutes,” Del said. “Want me to pick you up a Diet Coke?”

“Yeah, that’d be good.”

Lucas needed to check off Packard, just to get the name out of his hair, but had lost faith in the prospect of Packard being the killer—too many things were a bit off. He didn’t look quite right, and the man who shot Marcy, now that he thought about it, hadn’t used the gun like a trained police officer. The
gun
itself might be a common police weapon, but the shooter apparently hadn’t behaved like a cop.

Probably. But then you really couldn’t tell how a cop would behave in a shooting situation, until you’d seen him in one. You hoped the training worked, but there was no guarantee.

He sat thinking about that for a moment, groped for something else, realized he was treading water. He picked up the phone and called Bob Hillestad, a friend in Minneapolis Homicide, on his cell phone. Hillestad said, without preamble, “It’s a bitch, huh?”

“Yeah, it is,” Lucas said. “Where’re you hosers at? You got anything at all?”

“No. We got nothin’. Wait: we got that DNA, and we’ll run it through the database. It’s like everybody’s got both hands wrapped around their dicks, saying, ‘He’ll be in the database.’ Maybe he will be, but I don’t believe it, yet.”

“Heard anything from Bloomington?”

“A couple of people saw a white van leaving the neighborhood, pretty fast, at the right time. So Bloomington’s getting a list of white van owners. You know how many that’ll be? Someplace up in the five-digit area, is what they’re telling me. They’re saying it could go to six digits.”

“Good luck on that,” Lucas said.

“We’re all scratching around like a bunch of hens,” Hillestad said. “You guys got anything?”

“I decided to look at one guy based on nothing, and he’s not gonna work out. You know who’s getting that list for Bloomington?”

“No, but they’re going through the DMV. You could check over there.”

Lucas rang off, called the DMV, got routed around, and finally came up with a database guy who was doing the list for Bloomington. “I’m not a cop, but it’s absurd. What’re they going to do with it? On the other hand, it takes ten minutes and I don’t have to print it out—I’m just sending an electronic file, so, no skin off my butt.”

“Once you get the file, can you alphabetize it by the owners’ names?” Lucas asked.

“Sure.” There was a slurp at the other end; the guy had a cup of coffee. “You want me to shoot it to you?”

“Not yet—but put the list somewhere you can get at it. Hey, wait, could you do something to scan it, see if you’ve got a guy named Willard Packard on it?”

“Hang on. Give me a couple of minutes.”

The guy went away, and Del came in and Lucas pointed him at a chair, covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said, “Just a minute. Talking to the DMV.”

The DMV guy came back and said, “No Willard Packard on the white van list, but I looked up Willard Packard out in Woodbury, and he’s got a champagne Toyota minivan and a blue Ford Explorer. Champagne, white, not that close, but they’re both light.”

“Thanks. Keep the list active,” Lucas said. He hung up and said to Del, “Our guy owns a champagne minivan, but not a white one.”

“Eyewitnesses suck,” Del said. “Let’s go jack him up.”

THEY JACKED UP Packard about one-millionth of an inch, and then he unjacked himself. He lived in an apartment complex behind a shopping center, and came to the door in cargo shorts and a gray Army T-shirt with a sweat spot on the chest.

His hair, what was left of it, was cropped right down to the skin, giving him what looked like a cranial five-o’clock shadow. That didn’t fit with what Barker had seen.

A golf bag was leaning against the wall of the entry, and over his shoulder, in the living room, Lucas could see six-foot-tall stereo speakers: the place reeked of a post-divorce crib. Lucas and Del, standing in the hall, told him why they were calling.

“Jesus—you guys are hassling me on something I was found innocent on, more’n twenty years ago? What’s up with that?”

“We’re running down everything,” Lucas said. “Since Marcy Sherrill was killed—”

“All right. But man, you gotta get ahold of Dan Ball at Woodbury PD. You can get him through the station—he’ll be in at three o’clock, or you can call him at home. Or call Bill Garvey, he was supervising yesterday: I was in a squad starting at three o’clock, until eleven. We were sitting outside Cub eating lunch when we heard on the radio about the shooting.”

Lucas nodded. “So we’re cool. If we come by and ask for a DNA sample, you wouldn’t have a problem with it? Wouldn’t need to mention it to anybody.”

“I got no problem with that,” Packard said. “So you got nothin’?”

“We got nothin’,” Lucas said, turning away.

“I worked that Jones thing, in a squad,” Packard said. “I kinda remember you. You were on patrol. You were a couple-three years younger than me, and I mostly worked west. Wasn’t Brian Hanson big on that case?”

“Yeah. He was one of the lead guys,” Lucas said.

“Reason I mention it, see, is he died a couple days ago. Kinda weird way,” Packard said.

Lucas stopped. “Why weird?”

“Well, they know he’s dead, but they can’t find the body. They found his boat driving around in the middle of Lake Vermilion, up north, with his hat in it, but no sign of him. There’s a thing in the
Star Tribune
this morning, inside. His daughter says he used to pee off the back of the boat; everybody tried to stop him doing it.”

“Huh. Couple days ago?”

“Yeah. Same day the Jones girls were found. Or maybe the next day. Weird, huh?”

“Yeah, weird,” Lucas said. “Huh.”