Buried Prey (32 page)

Lucas spotted the truck and moved quickly to the door and knelt beside it, watched the truck. A few cars went by, and then the truck came up, and as the engine noise started to build, he slipped the key into the door lock, turned the key, pushed just a bit, felt the door come loose, and as the truck went by, said to Jenkins, “Now.”

Jenkins kicked the door, nearly knocking it off its frame; no chain. Del and Shrake surged into the hotel room, straight through to the bath, and Shrake said, “It’s clear. Goddamn it.”

The television was playing, a suitcase sat on the floor next to the bed, and a ring of keys sat under a bedside lamp, along with a pair of sunglasses. Del kicked the suitcase and said, “Got a gun, here.”

Lucas glanced at it: a Glock.

“He’s close . . .”

“He’s across the highway at that store, I bet,” Shrake said.

They all looked out the door, at the store across the way. It was tiny. Lucas said, “If he’s in there, there’s a good chance that he’s looking at us through the front window.”

“Doesn’t have a gun,” Del said. “At least, not this gun.”

Lucas said to Shrake, “I’m sticking by my word: there won’t be any execution. But somebody’s got to stay here, in case he’s in one of the other rooms. Del and I were friends of Marcy’s, and want to be there for the bust. Jenkins is faster than you, in case he runs.”

Shrake said, “Go.”

Lucas said, “Keep your gun out; he might be down in one of these other rooms. He might have met somebody, or something.”

“I got it,” Shrake said. “Go.”

HANSON HAD HIS FACE in the soda cooler when the BCA agents went into his room. He was walking toward the cash register when they came back out, and he saw them at once, and knew who they were: some brand of cops.

He had no car, no keys, not much money, and no clothes but the ones he was standing in. His side, which seemed to be healing okay, nevertheless burned like fire. He saw them come out of the motel, and he turned and walked back through the store, past the restrooms, and out the back entrance, through a door marked “Not an Exit” and heard the counterman call, “Hey,” as he went out.

He went through the back door only because he couldn’t go through the front, but he had no idea where he was going. When he got out the back, he saw two things: the counterman’s parked truck, and a small house, probably fifty yards away across the parking lot, with another car, an old Corolla, parked next to it. He ran that way. If he could get some keys . . .

Then what?

How far could he get?

He didn’t think about it: he ran, and he thought,
Keys
.

He just ran.

LUCAS SAW A FLASH of what looked like daylight through the store window and it crossed his mind that somebody had just run out the back. He, Del, and Jenkins were lined up at the edge of the highway, waiting to run across, when he saw the flash, and Lucas took the chance and ran straight through the traffic, causing one car to swerve and another to hit the brakes so hard that they screamed, and Del shouted, “Hey,” but Lucas was across the highway and running hard.

Del and Jenkins were slowed by more cars, but got across, now fifty yards behind Lucas, and instead of going into the front of the store Lucas went left, around the far end of it, saw the little shabby house out back and the fat black-haired man running toward it, and he half turned and windmilled an arm at Jenkins and Del, and shouted, “This way,” and kept running.

Ahead of him, Hanson kicked through a half-closed gate on a hurricane fence, ran across a concrete-block porch and half turned and saw Lucas coming, only twenty-five or thirty yards back, yanked open the screen door and crashed through the inner door into the house’s living room.

A woman was standing in the kitchen and she screamed at him and he saw a butcher knife on the kitchen counter and she back-pedaled away from him, and then threw a towel at him, and he dodged the towel and grabbed the knife with one hand, and the woman by the hair with the other, and she twisted and screamed and then Lucas crashed through the door behind them.

Hanson tried to shout something—“
I’ll kill her,”
or
“I’vE got a knifE”
—but Lucas never gave him time, simply vaulting across a couch, reaching for Hanson’s throat. His body smashed into Hanson’s left side, the impact pushing the fat man back against the kitchen sink. He slashed at Lucas’s face with the knife and the woman came free and fell on the floor, and Lucas tried to catch Hanson’s knife hand but missed, snagged a shirtsleeve, but he felt the knife slash across his shoulder and the back of his neck, and he twisted away from the knife and the woman’s body hit him behind the ankles and he went down, losing his grip on Hanson and then,

BOOM.

The gunshot, the sound not the slug, was like a bolt of lightning, and then another
BOOM
and Lucas, confused and half blinded by blood, scrambled across the supine woman, tried to pull her away from Hanson, and then realized Hanson was going down.

Jenkins said, “Stay down, stay down . . .” and he pushed Lucas down with his hand. The woman was squealing, and Del was saying, “. . . ambulance down at a place called Pit Stop right now. We’ve got a seriously injured police officer. . . .”

Jenkins looked down at him and Lucas said, “I’m not seriously injured.”

Jenkins said, “Maybe not, but you’re bleeding like you’re seriously injured. So just stay down.”

Del loomed over him: “Dumb shit.”

“What about Hanson?” Lucas asked.

Jenkins looked behind himself, at the form on the floor, and Lucas realized he still had his gun in his hand, a big .357 revolver that he’d bought from a highway patrolman.

“You got what you wanted,” Jenkins said. “He’s stonecold dead.”

25

Del pushed Lucas flat and said, “Let me look at it.”

Lucas let him look: Del used a paper towel to wipe the blood off Lucas’s forehead, and then looked at his shoulder through a slash in Lucas’s jacket, and said, finally, “It’s not that bad. You’ve got a nasty cut right along your hairline, but I don’t see any bone. It’s bleeding like crazy, though. There’s another cut on your shoulder, but your coat took most of the damage. You need to get sewn up.”

They pressed more paper towels to his head, trying to stop the flow of blood, and he stayed on the floor, waiting for the ambulance. Carver County sheriff ’s deputies showed up two minutes after the shooting, and were handled by Jenkins. Then the ambulance came, and Lucas walked out to it on his own, stepping over Hanson’s facedown body as he left the house. The woman who owned the house was unhurt, but in shock, and was taken out to the ambulance with Lucas.

At the hospital, they compressed the wounds to control the bleeding, and waited for a doc, and after Lucas had been waiting for fifteen minutes or so, a plastic surgeon showed up, took a long look at the cuts, and said, “Not too bad, but the recovery is going to be uncomfortable. Let’s get them closed up.”

They closed the wounds with a local anesthetic, plus some kind of intravenous relaxer. Before they started, Lucas made a quick call to Weather, caught her just as she was leaving the hospital, told her that he’d been dinged up in a fight and was getting some stitches. She wanted details, and he passed the phone to the surgeon, who, after a minute, said, “Oh, yeah, I know you,” and told her that Lucas was worse than dinged up, but would nevertheless be home that afternoon.

When he got off, he said, “Weather Karkinnen, huh? I better do my best work.”

THEN LUCAS WENT AWAY for a while, came back sewn up and bandaged, and found Del sitting next to the hospital bed.

“The doc said that when you’re steady on your feet, we can drive you home. He’s going to come by and talk to you, though.”

“How’s everybody?” Lucas mumbled. He was still feeling fuzzy.

“Jenkins shot Hanson twice, in the middle of the chest. He’s over there, working through the shooting with the sheriff ’s department. The woman there, her name’s Betty Ludwig, she’s okay, she’s maybe got some bruises; they brought her in with you and gave her some pills. . . . Shrake’s with Jenkins, filling in the sheriff ’s guys on the investigation. They might be a little pissed that we didn’t give them a call—and they want a statement from you, but it doesn’t have to be today.”

“Not a big problem,” Lucas said. He was clearing up: Del’s voice was giving him something to focus on. “Have you heard from Johnston?” Johnston was the entry team leader at Hanson’s house.

“They got trophies. Locks of hair, underwear, a kid’s necklace. And home movies,” Del said. “They’ve got VHS movies of the Jones girls.”

“Don’t want to see that,” Lucas said.

“I don’t think anybody will—we know he took them, and now he’s dead. No point.”

THE DOC CAME IN a while later, looked at the bandages, asked Lucas a couple of questions, gave him a prescription for painkillers and antibiotics, and told him he could go. “Have your wife redo the dressing tomorrow, and every couple of days after that,” he said. “You’re welcome to come back to me, but you don’t have to.”

Lucas thanked him, and they walked out to the car.

“What I want to know,” Del said, as they pulled out of the hospital parking lot, “is what the fuck you were doing?”

Lucas said, “I wanted to get my hands on him. I was right behind him when he went in the house, he didn’t have a gun, so I went straight in and then he had the woman and a knife and I was moving so fast I just kept going. It seemed like the best way to keep her from getting cut. I wanted to get her away from him, to get between them. The guy was nuts. I was thinking he might kill her, just to do it. And I knew you guys were right behind me.”

“You didn’t get cut so Jenkins would have to shoot him?”

Lucas said, “I’m not that fuckin’ crazy. From the time I went through the door to the time I got to him, was maybe half a second. All I was thinking of, was to knock him down and get him away from her.”

THE SURGEON WAS RIGHT about the recovery being uncomfortable: the discomfort started when he got home, and Weather cornered Del and demanded details on how, exactly, Lucas had gotten hurt. When she found out, she chewed Lucas down to a stump, and then ordered him to bed. With cuts on both his face and back, he found that there was almost no comfortable way to lie in bed, and wound up half sitting, propped up by a pillow in the small of his back.

Jenkins and Shrake came by later in the day, to report on the crime-scene process. There’d be no problem with the shooting, they said, with the woman having been attacked, and Lucas having been slashed—and Hanson being a multiple child-killer.

Further, they said, Rose Marie Roux, the Public Safety commissioner and Lucas’s real boss, had gone to Hanson’s home, had viewed some trophies—underwear taken from victims, and VHS home movies from the eighties and nineties, including some that included the Jones sisters—and had then held a press conference. Hanson, she said, probably had murdered at least six or seven children, in addition to his uncle and Marcy Sherrill.

Weeks of investigation would be needed to figure out what he’d done, and who all the victims were.

ROSE MARIE SHOWED UP just as Jenkins and Shrake were leaving, ganged up with Weather to chew on Lucas some more. Weather said, “Shrake and Jenkins are worried that you’re down on them, because they pushed you around a little. Lucas, they are your best friends in the world. You’re not so dumb you can’t see that.”

Rose Marie nodded. “What she said.”

“They’re good with me,” Lucas said. “I think they know that.”

“Well, tell them,” Weather said.

MARCY SHERRILL WAS CREMATED, and her ashes spread on her family’s farm. Brian Hanson was buried in a veterans’ cemetery. The two Jones girls were buried in a plot next to their grandparents, in St. Paul. Lucas went to all of the funerals. He had no idea what happened to Roger Hanson’s body, and didn’t care.

TODD BARKER ALMOST DIED from lung infections, but in the end, didn’t. Kelly Barker made several more appearances on Channel Three, talking about the experience of being shot at, and then helping her husband with his recovery; she never made
Oprah
. Jennifer Carey, who did most of the interviews, told Lucas later that Todd Barker thought his main mistake was, he hadn’t gone to the door with a gun in his hand. “He says he’s never going to make that mistake again,” Carey told Lucas. “He’s even bought a couple of new ones. He’s got a garage gun now, for when he takes the garbage out.”

DARRELL HANSON and his wife went through some preliminary motions to sue the state for damage to their house caused by the search, but settled out of court for a minor payment. One of the state lawyers, whom Lucas knew, said that the prospect of being publicly tied to Roger Hanson had changed their minds, especially since the search had produced the DNA test of Darrell Hanson, and had pointed the finger at Roger.

THE BCA’S LAB BOSS did a number of interviews about the use of DNA to spot a killer through tests done on a relative. He suggested that it opened whole new doors to a time when, effectively, everybody in the country would be traceable through DNA. He had T-shirts printed that said “DNA,” and, beneath that, “World Tour.” Everybody thought they looked cheap and ugly, but Lucas’s housekeeper found that they made excellent dust rags.

LUCAS WAS LARGELY HEALED in two weeks. Weather took the stitches out, humming as she did it. It hurt a little, but that didn’t seem to bother her.

LUCAS FINALLY SAT ALONE in his den, when the house was momentarily empty, and thought about it all. He hadn’t been responsible for the Jones girls’ kidnapping—that’d been all Hanson. The VHS tapes suggested that Hanson hadn’t had the girls very long before he killed them, so even if Lucas had pushed, and had been successful, he couldn’t have saved them.

All those others, though . . . he might have saved them if he’d persisted in his hunt for John Fell. Weather kept telling him that it wasn’t a perfect world, and anyway, he wasn’t perfect. Things would happen. Good, hardworking, innocent people died of cancer all the time—and Hanson had simply been a cancer in the social system.

Lucas knew all that was true, but it was not something he could emotionally buy into. He didn’t
believe
he could fix the world, but he
felt
like he could.

He just had to try harder.