Buried Prey (18 page)

“That sounds like him, and he used a knife on me, that’s for sure,” Kelly Barker said. She stretched her arms toward Lucas, and traced a finger down thin white scars on her forearms. “He really cut me up. He stuck my hand, too, right through my palm.” She held up her left hand so Lucas could see a wedge-shape scar in the palm. “I kept screaming, and trying to run backwards, and he stumbled and that gave me room and I ran. He ran after me for a little way, but then, he was too fat, he couldn’t catch me, and he ran back to his van. I ran out of the park and waved at people on the street and this man stopped and took me to the hospital.”

“Weird that you got in a car with somebody after that,” Todd said. “You know, a strange man.”

“He was a really nice guy, actually. His name was Nathan Dunn, he was a salesman, an older guy,” she said. “Anyway, he took me right to the hospital. I got blood all over his car. I was afraid I was going to bleed to death.”

Hospital officials had called the Anoka police, and the cops had quickly started a search for a red van driven by a dark-haired fat man. “They never found him.”

“Do you remember him well enough that if I put you with a police artist, you could put together a picture of him?”

“The Anoka police already did that,” she said. “Way back when it happened. Wait just one minute . . .”

She hopped off the couch, went into a side room; Lucas heard a file drawer open, and a minute later she came back, digging through a manila folder. “Here.”

She passed Lucas a sheet of paper, with a man’s face done with an old-fashioned Identi-Kit. He took it in, blinked: the face fit the description of Fell, though the Identi-Kit made it thinner. That wasn’t uncommon with eyewitness photo-sketches—police artists tended to go to averages, and if somebody was fat, they tended to lose weight in the sketches.

“We’ve got a little better computer tech now,” Lucas said, passing the sketch back to her. “If you have any time at all to come up to St. Paul . . .”

She did, and she would.

He dug for more details, and she had a few. Her attacker had parked the van off the park road, backing it into the bushes so it was right up against the walking path. “I saw it really close—it looked like some kind of . . . prisoner thing. There was a screen behind the driver, so you couldn’t get at him from the inside,” Kelly said. “I remember the screen. And there was more screen on the back windows, hung off bars, so you couldn’t break the glass. There were no side windows. That’s what I remember . . . the inside of the van. It was like a prison van.”

“What’d he say when he tried to grab you?” Lucas asked.

“I don’t really remember that. Even right afterwards. I was walking down this sidewalk in the park, and there was this place where bushes closed in—lilacs, I think—and he came out of them and grabbed me and waved the knife at me, and I saw the van and he was pulling at me and I was fighting him, and I broke out of his hand, and started backing up and he was trying to talk to me but he was slashing, too, and then he tried to grab me again and I yanked away and I ran. . . . He came after me a little but I ran faster and faster, and I looked back and I saw him going into the bushes and then I heard the van, and I got off the sidewalk because I was afraid he’d chase me, and I could see the street up ahead and I ran as hard as I could . . . but he never came after me.”

“But you were right there: face-to-face.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “He was talking and . . .” She put a hand to her face. “. . . spitting. He got some spit on me, he was so close.”

“Do you remember what kind of knife?”

She shuddered: “Do I ever. It was this long curved meat knife, like you use for cutting roasts or something. Not like a big heavy butcher knife, but a long curved knife.”

“A kitchen knife, not a hunting knife or a jackknife.”

“Definitely a kitchen knife. Like one of those Chicago Cutlery things, with the wooden handle.”

“Then you ran and the Dunn guy came along. Did he get a look at the attacker?”

“Oh, no—I had to run down this path, through the bushes. Mr. Dunn didn’t even see me until the last minute. He almost ran over me. And I went to the hospital,” Kelly said. “But I can tell you, when I was fighting the guy, I scratched him, and I had blood and skin under my fingernails, and the police took it away. And there was a hair—I remember the guy at the hospital took it out from under my fingernail and he said, ‘Got a black hair.’”

“Ah—that could be important. Thank you,” Lucas said.

“Can you still get, you know, DNA from stuff that old?” Todd asked.

“If they’ve still got it, we can,” Lucas said. “The good thing is, people who do this kind of thing usually get caught, sooner or later, and we’ve got a DNA bank for sex criminals. So does the FBI. If he’s been arrested and convicted, he could be in the bank.”

“That is so exceptionally excellent,” Kelly said.

They talked for a few more minutes, but she had nothing more that really contributed to the case. Didn’t remember anything about a missing finger.

The DNA possibility was interesting. DNA had been used to clear quite a few men improperly convicted of rape or murder, but had been used to nail just as many who thought they’d gotten away with it, only to have a long-ago crime snatch them right off the street.

Barker also convinced Lucas that Fell, whatever his real name, was the killer, and that he’d continued operating after the Jones murders. If the Jones girls’ kidnapping was his first killing—and it might or might not have been—and Barker was another attempt, there’d be more.

As he was leaving, Kelly Barker asked, “Listen, do you mind if my agent gets in touch with Channel Three, and they give you a call? I’m pretty sure they’d be interested.” She said it earnestly, one showbiz personality to another.

“I can’t talk to them on the record, at least at this point,” Lucas said. “If you do talk to them, and they want to do some film, be sure you let me know. I mean, this guy might be watching. And there’s a woman at the Minneapolis Police Department, Marcy Sherrill, the head of Homicide—you should call her. She might have some ideas for you. Remember—you might be the only living person who could identify him.”

“I think we can take care of ourselves,” Todd Barker said, with a square-chinned grin. “Look around—there are four guns in this room. I can get to one of them in two seconds, from the threatalert to trigger.”

Lucas nodded: “Hope you have the two seconds.”

“Two seconds is nothing,” Barker said.

“Average high school kid, on a track, can run a hundred yards in twelve seconds or so,” Lucas said. “That’s about fifty feet in two seconds . . . from your front door to your backyard.”

“You think I should get a shotgun?” Barker asked.

“I think you should get good locks,” Lucas said.

LUCAS WALKED BACK down the dark sidewalk to the Porsche, stood there for a minute, looking up at the sky, thinking. Gun nuts made him a little nervous. He always had the feeling that they were looking for something to shoot. They had a kind of tight-jawed routine—“Better to have a gun and not need it, than need one and not have it”—but behind that, he thought, was an urge.

And the idea that they could take care of themselves was an illusion: put an asshole behind a bush, in the night, with a shotgun, and you were gonna get shot.

Lucas had shot a number of people in his life, and found shootings always involved a bureaucratic nightmare and sometimes a few lawsuits; all in all, with a couple of exceptions, he’d prefer not to shoot. For Lucas, shooting wasn’t important; what was important was the hunt.

Now he felt a quickening at the heart.

Because he’d gotten a sniff of the quarry, he thought. John Fell was eighty percent the man who’d attacked Barker. The hunt was under way.

11

Del was playing with a new camera when Lucas came in the next morning. “That fuckin’ Flowers got me interested,” Del said. “I’m taking a photography class at night.”

“Weather gave me one,” Lucas said. “Kinda interesting. Wish I had more time for it. . . . So did you get free?”

“I’m cool,” Del said. “What’d you find out yesterday?”

Lucas told him about talking to Marcy Sherrill, about calling the schools, about Sandy finding Kelly Barker, and his conversation with Kelly and Todd Barker.

“I may be wrong, but I’ve got the feeling that if we go to a full-court press, we’ll track him down pretty quickly,” Lucas said. “I’m at least eighty percent that it’s Fell who went after Barker, and ninety-five percent that Fell killed the Jones girls. If we get a name, all we need to do is get a DNA sample and run it against the Anoka sample.”

“Won’t necessarily get him for the Jones killings that way,” Del said.

“You told me back the first time I met you, that knowing was pretty important. Once we know . . .”

“Sure—but it’s a bigger deal with drug dealers and burglars and people like that,” Del said. “People who are committing crimes five times a week. If you know, you’ll get them, sooner or later. But if they’re committing a crime once a year, and if they quit doing it ten years ago, that’s a whole different problem.”

“It is,” Lucas agreed. “But not an insoluble one.”

THEY SAT in Lucas’s office for an hour, plotting and making phone calls. The first went out to Anoka County, where, after some runarounds, Lucas talked to a detective named Dave Carson. He gave Carson a quick explanation of the Jones case, and then got the bad news: “There was apparently some tissue collected at the time, but the DNA analysis got screwed up . . . by, uh, you guys,” Carson said. “It was right after the lab opened, and there wasn’t much tissue, and the test failed. I don’t know why.”

“Was any tissue saved?” Lucas asked.

“No. It’s gone. We’ve been told since then that if we’d stored it for a few months, or a year or so, until techniques got better, we’d have been okay,” Carson said. “As it is . . . we got nothing.”

“Who knows about it?”

“Well, a couple of us guys here,” Carson said. “And maybe a couple guys at the BCA, if they’re still at the lab. I mean, it was twenty years ago, pretty near.”

“Okay. Listen, if the question comes up, don’t mention this,” Lucas said. “We might want to put a little pressure on the suspect—let him think that we’ve got the DNA.”

“Fine by us,” Carson said.

“That didn’t sound good,” Del said, when Lucas got off the phone.

“It wasn’t.” He explained what Carson had told him. “Goddamnit, if we had the DNA, all we’d have to do is identify the guy, and we’d have him.” He turned and looked out his window, where a police van was just pulling up to evidence intake.

Another nice day. Hot, but not too hot.

They sat and thought about it.

“Are you going to talk to Ruffe? See if you can light a fire under Minneapolis?” Del asked after a while. Ruffe Ignace was a moderately trustworthy reporter at the
Star Tribune
. Trustworthy because he had an acute sense of where, how, and by whom his bread got buttered; but only moderately trustworthy because he was intensely ambitious.

Lucas said, “Yeah. If we do it now . . .” He looked at the clock, found Ignace’s number on his computer, picked up the phone, and punched in the number.

Ignace came up on his cell: “What?”

“This is Davenport, over at the BCA.”

“Tall guy, dark hair, constantly relives his glory days as an amateur hockey player,” Ignace said, “while overestimating his abilities on a basketball court.”

“That’s me,” Lucas said. “I got something you may be interested in, or maybe not.”

“I got nothing today—if you got a cat in a tree, I’m interested,” Ignace said. “In fact, I’d encourage you to
put
a cat in a tree.”

“What about the Jones case?”

“Day before yesterday’s news. Nobody’s got anything,” Ignace said. “We got one guy, called up Scrape’s relatives, and asked them if they were going to sue. They said no, they weren’t the suin’ kind. Our guy said they didn’t remember him very well.”

“Won’t sue? My God, where do they live?”

“I don’t know, but it must be someplace so primitive they haven’t even developed trial lawyers.”

“Pretty fuckin’ primitive,” Lucas said.

Ignace said, “Okay, I’m starting to yawn, here. Always happy to talk to a source, of course, but I gotta polish my shoes. . . .”

“This can’t come from me,” Lucas said. “There’s a guy over at St. Paul who just got back from the FBI school at Quantico.”

“James Hayworth. ‘Call me James.’ Yeah, but I’d cut my wrists before I wrote about some guy doing an FBI school,” Ignace said.

“The thing is, he got really freaked out by the behavioral science thing. He now sees serial killers in his garbage can,” Lucas said. “So: I think if you called him about the Jones case, he’d probably tell you that the killer didn’t stop with the Jones girls. That he’s probably been killing right along. That there are God-onlyknows how many victims, buried in lonely old basements.”

“Huh. But it’s a Minneapolis case, and he’s St. Paul,” Ignace said, not uninterested. “You think he’d say something anyway?”

“He’d talk to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer if Rudolph asked him about sex killers,” Lucas said. “I’m thinking you could talk to him, take what he has to say, and then blow it all out of proportion.”

“That’s true, and a worthy goal in itself,” Ignace said. “But an equally interesting question is, what does Davenport get out of it?”

“Just trying to help out an old newspaper friend,” Lucas said.

“You too often lie by reflex,” Ignace said. “You should consider your lies more carefully.”

“Well, hell, I’m dealing with the press,” Lucas said. “So, what do you think?”

“If I go with this, will I wind up looking like a fool? Or will it turn out that he actually has killed more people?”

“Off the record?”

“For now,” Ignace agreed.

“We think we have at least one more attack,” Lucas said. “So we think he kept doing it. And you won’t wind up looking like a fool anyway, because if it doesn’t pan out, nobody’ll remember it: just another piece of paper for the bottom of the birdcage.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. So what do you think?”

“I think it’ll be on the front page tomorrow,” Ignace said.

“There you go,” said Lucas.

DEL SAID, “If Marcy finds out . . .”

“Ah, Ruffe can keep his mouth shut,” Lucas said. “But, I oughta call Marcy and tell her about Barker.” He got back on the phone, was told that Marcy Sherrill was in a budget meeting. He left a call-back.

“Want to do schools?” he asked Del.

“No, but what else have we got?”

Armed with a batch of subpoenas set up by Sandy, the researcher, they started with the schools the farthest out, in south Washington County, then drove north to Mounds View schools, then over to Minneapolis.

The first firing, of a forty-four-year-old male teacher named Hosfedder, in south Washington County, was actually a double firing. Hosfedder and a female teacher named Dubois, who had also been fired, had been involved in an extramarital affair, according to an assistant superintendent. The affair had been consummated, at least once, on a table in the chemistry lab on a dim Saturday afternoon in the late fall. Unfortunately for them, the coupling had been witnessed by a group of students who’d been in the school for a music program, and who’d gone quietly down to the lab for reasons not disclosed and presumably not relevant.

“Probably to neck,” Del suggested to the assistant superintendent.

“At least,” the guy said.

“No kids involved, I mean, no kids approached by Hosfedder,” Lucas said.

“Nothing recorded here,” the assistant superintendent said, thumbing through the file.

The second case
had
involved teacher-student sexual contact, a teacher named Lewis and a seventeen-year-old girl named Pelletson, but Del said, “Uh, we’ve got a problem, Houston.”

He tapped a line in the personnel file: Lewis was fifty-three at the time of the contact.

Lucas said, “Dirty old man,” and, to the school principal, “Thank you for your cooperation.”

MARCY CALLED as they were heading to Minneapolis. Lucas told her about Sandy finding the case involving Kelly Barker. “So I ran over there last night and talked to her, and I’ll tell you what—I think she was attacked by the same guy.”

“By the guy you say set up Scrape.”

“That’s right,” Lucas said.

“Okay. Thanks for the call,” Marcy said. “I’ll have somebody run down and check.” She sounded bored.

“Anything more on who lived in the house?”

“Not at the moment,” she said. “We’ve got a name for somebody who lived next door, but we haven’t gotten to her yet. She moved out to Fargo.”

“Let me know,” Lucas said.

“What’s happening with them?” Del asked, when Lucas rang off.

“Ah, they’re dead in the water,” Lucas said. “Marcy’s just not much interested yet.”

“She’s usually a go-getter.”

“She’s not a believer—doesn’t believe this is going to turn into anything except another pain in the ass. What she really likes is a nice run-and-shoot murder where she can put on a vest and smoke somebody out of a basement.”

After a minute, Del said, “Well, that
is
pretty fun.”

“Well, yeah.”

THE THIRD SCHOOL CASE, in Minneapolis, involved teacher-student, male-female contact again, but the teacher was black.

“That doesn’t help,” Lucas said.

They stopped at a McDonald’s for a quick lunch, got back to the office in the middle of the afternoon, just as Todd and Kelly Barker walked out the front door. “You do the Identi-Kit?” Lucas asked.

“Just got done—it’s a lot better than it used to be,” she said. She handed Lucas a printout of the reconstruction. He looked at it, passed it to Del, and said, “We need to dig up the people who met Fell, way back when, and show them this—I hope somebody’s still alive.”

“Well, we are,” Del said, handing the picture back to Kelly. “Must be some more. Maybe those hookers. They were pretty young. You still got their names?”

“Gotta be in my reports from back then,” Lucas said.

“You comfortable asking Minneapolis for that?”

“Man’s gotta do . . .” Lucas said. He turned back to the Barkers. “Whatever happened to the TV thing? You talk to your agent?”

“We’re waiting to hear back,” Kelly said. “I think it’s gonna fly, especially with this.” She flapped the computer likeness at them. “And especially now because of the Joneses.”

“We’re not sure of that connection yet,” Lucas said.

“All possibilities should be examined,” Kelly Barker said.

UP IN LUCAS’S OFFICE, Del asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“Check the Visa stuff under the John Fell name. We need to find out how he paid the account. If it’s postal money orders, we’re screwed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what it is. But if he had a checking account under the same name, then it gets more interesting. More complicated . . .”

“He’d have to have an ID for that,” Del said. “Did anyone ever check to see if he went for a driver’s license under that name?”

“Yeah, we checked at the time, but he didn’t have one,” Lucas said. “I suppose we could look again. But take a close look at how he paid those bills. If he had a checking account, we could probably find out quite a bit just by who he was paying.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Maybe talk to Marcy again,” Lucas said, “And then I’m going home for a nice vegetarian dinner with my wife and kids.”

“Kill yourself now.”

“No, no, it’s fine, a nice tofu steak with quince sauce, maybe, some corn,” Lucas said. “Organic applesauce for dessert.”

“I’m having some pig,” Del said. “I’ll call you and tell you about it.”

“God bless you,” Lucas said, and Del left.

HAD TO DO SOMETHING. Right now.

On the phone to Marcy: “I’d like to come over and look at the file on the Joneses, if that’s okay with you,” Lucas said.

“What are you looking for?”

“My notes. I wrote a couple of reports; I want to see if I can get some names.”

“You’re really getting into this,” she said.

“It’s interesting,” Lucas said. “I’m not working on anything hot right now, so I thought I’d hang around this for a while. If it doesn’t bother you.”

“No, not really. As long as you don’t overreach, and keep us up to date. Come on over, the file’s on Buster’s desk.”

Lucas made it over to Minneapolis in twenty minutes, and left his car in a police-only slot outside City Hall. He’d gone in and out of the Minneapolis City Hall probably ten thousand times during his career, and always marveled at how the original architects had managed to contrive a building that was at once ugly, inefficient, cold, sterile, charmless, and purple; and yet they had. Much of it was given over to the police department, and the long hallways of locked doors didn’t make the place any more cheerful.

He walked back to Homicide through the empty corridors, peeked into Marcy’s office. Nobody home. A lone Homicide guy was reading a
New York Times
at his desk, had looked up to grunt when Lucas came in, and said, “She’s gone to talk budget,” when Lucas looked into Marcy’s office.

“Where’s Buster’s desk?” Lucas asked.

“The one with the big-ass files sitting on it,” the guy said. His name was Roberts or Williams or Richards or Johns or something like that; Lucas knew him, but couldn’t put his finger on the name. “Marcy said I should watch to make sure you didn’t steal too much.”

“Just a few names,” Lucas said. A name popped into his head: Clark Richards. “How you been, Clark?”

“I been fine. You need help?”

Lucas looked at the five bankers’ boxes sitting on Buster’s desk: “If you got the time. I’m actually looking for my own written reports on the Jones kidnapping.”

They started going through the boxes, which were pleasantly musty, and halfway through the first one, Lucas found two brown office-mail envelopes, fastened with strings, that said “911 Tapes” on them. He opened them and found two cassette tapes.