John Sandford - Buried Prey

“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?”