John Sandford - Buried Prey

“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?”