John Sandford - Buried Prey

When the neighbor had calmed down, Del had let him up, and the two men were shaking grass off their clothes. The two women were standing with arms crossed twenty feet away from the circle of men, on opposite sides, throwing in an occasional word of encouragement.

Lucas finally said, “Look-no harm done at this point. Okay? You want to sue each other, that’s your problem. But I don’t want to take you downtown, and you don’t want to go. It’s really unpleasant. Okay..”

And they were nodding and muttering around, and Lucas suggested that they shake hands. Sherman stepped forward, and so did the neighbor, and when Sherman stuck out a hand, the neighbor hit Sherman flat in the nose, and the big man staggered and one second later they were at it again and the women were screaming, and Lucas ripped the neighbor off Sherman and threw him at Del again and said, “Cuff him, he’s under arrest.”

Two more neighbors from down the street came running in, and Lucas held up his hands and said, “Police… we’re police… stay off the lawn, stay off.”

One of the new guys said, “This is about the garage, isn’t it?”

Sherman was bleeding from his nose, but not too bad. He was trying to pinch it off, and Lucas said, “Go inside, lie down, put some ice on it. If it doesn’t stop, get your wife to take you down to the emergency room, okay? Got that?”

Sherman said, “Ah, I’b hab a bloody nose before,” and asked, “Wha’ ’bout Berg?”

“He’s going downtown,” Lucas said.

They had the neighbor, whose name was Eric Berg, in the backseat of the Lexus when Lucas took a cell phone call from an agent named Jenkins, who shouted into his phone, over what sounded like a screaming car engine, “Where are you?”

“Up on Iowa Avenue, off Rice Street.”

“We’ll meet you at the corner of Rice and Maryland, in that tire company lot, lights and sirens, man… Get down here.”

“What’s going on?”

“Just… just get your ass down here. We’ll be there in two minutes… Fuckin’ get down here. Go.”

Marcy Sherrill missed Kelly Barker’s performance on the noon news, but heard about it, and then caught her on KARE at six o’clock. She’d known the Jones case was going to be a headache, and the headache had only gotten worse with Davenport working it.

She appreciated the fact that he had a personal stake in the investigation, and when that happened, it was usually like Sherman’s March on Atlanta: nothing stood in his way. Among other things, she believed, he was manipulating the media to put pressure on the Minneapolis PD to dig up every scrap of information they could find on the mystery man, John Fell.

Davenport really didn’t care about their other problems-though, to be fair, their problems weren’t all that bad. The murder rate was continuing to drop, rape and armed robbery were down, the gangs were continuing to fade. Part of that, she thought, was that coke and meth sales were down, while the quality of marijuana continued to increase.

In her humble opinion, a guy lying on his living room floor with a B.C. blunt, a bag of nachos, and Wheel of Fortune on the TV was less likely to do serious civic damage than some freaked-out tweaker looking for another hit.

And, to be doubly fair, Davenport had generally played the media as much when he was a Minneapolis cop, as when he’d left for the BCA. In fact, Marcy thought, she’d helped him do it often enough…

But, annoying. The chief was going to call her up and ask, in his sideways, we’re-all-pals voice, “Have you had a chance to talk to that Barker woman? I’ve seen her on all the channels.”

The chief spent a lot of time watching all the channels.

She was sitting in her office, feet up on her desk, looking at a small flat-panel TV when Barker came on. When Barker was done, she called out to Buster Hill, in the next room, “Hey, Buster. Get me an address and phone number for this Kelly Barker. She’s someplace down in Bloomington.”

Buster, a man who claimed to be an endomorph, rather than simply fat, came and leaned in her doorway and asked, “We gonna talk to her?”

“Got to,” Marcy said. “She’s been all over the TV, she’s got that BCA face… we gotta talk to her.”

“For real, or for PR?”

Marcy yawned. Her boyfriend was in Dallas, and she was restless and a little lonely: “PR, mostly… she’s told that story so often I got it memorized.”

“You want me to do it?”

“I want you to come along when I do it-follow me over there. I can go home from there. You can take notes. Somebody’s got to take notes.”

Buster got the address from the DMV, and a cell phone number from someplace else. Kelly Barker would be pleased to talk to Sherrill; she’d be at home all evening.

So Marcy and Buster headed out in two cars, down I-35W through south Minneapolis, past the airport and then west on I-494 and south again, a half-hour of easy driving, the sun slanting down toward the northwestern horizon.

Marcy thought about Davenport-he really was an arrogant bastard in a lot of ways, good-looking, rich, flaunting it with the car and the outrageously gorgeous Italian suits. But they’d once been involved in a case that led more or less directly to bed… forty days and forty nights, as Davenport referred to their affair. It had been short but sweet, and she still had a soft spot for him.

If he ever left Weather, would Marcy go back? Well, he was never going to leave Weather, for one thing. He was so loyal that once you were his friend, you stayed his friend, even if you didn’t want to.. and he was married to Weather and that would last right up to the grave, no doubt about it. But, speaking of the grave, if Weather got hit by a train, and Davenport, after a suitable interval, expressed a need for some female companionship…

Maybe. But what about Rick? Well, Rick was interesting, but he made his money by calling people up on the telephone, and talking to them about investments. He liked having a cop on his arm, and insisted that she carry a gun when they went out at night. She would have anyway; she’d always liked guns.

Still, she wasn’t much interested in being somebody’s trophy. She’d gone out with an artist for a while, a guy who reminded her of a crazier version of Davenport-in fact, he’d been a wrestler at the U at the same time Davenport had been playing hockey, and they knew each other, part of the band of jock-o brothers.

Huh. The artist had been… hot. Crazy, maybe, but hot. After they’d split up, he’d gone and married some chick he’d known forever, and Davenport had told her that he and the chick even went and had a kid.

Had a kid.

She’d like a kid… but, it’d have to be soon. Rick wasn’t the best daddy material in the world. He had the attention span of a banana slug, and didn’t seem like the kind who’d be interested in the poop-and-midnight-bottle routine.

There was another guy, too, an orthopedic surgeon who wore cowboy boots and rode cutting horses on the weekends, out of a ranch north of the Cities. He was divorced but getting ripe, looking at her, from time to time, and she felt a little buzz in his presence. And she liked horses.

Possibilities.

She smiled to herself and turned on the satellite radio. Lucinda Williams came up with “Joy,” quite the apposite little tune, given her contemplation of the boys in her life…

While she was heading south, the killer was roaming around Bloomington, going back again and again to Kelly Barker’s house, not knowing exactly what he planned to do; whatever it was, he had to wait until she got home, and she’d already kept him waiting so long that he felt the rage starting to burn under his belt buckle.

He was one morose and angry motherfucker, he admitted to himself, and things weren’t getting any better. He had no life, had never had one. He had a crappy house, a crappy van, a crappy income, and no prospects. He collected and resold junk. He was a junk dealer. He had a bald spot at the top of his head, growing like a forest fire at Yellowstone. He was so overweight he could barely see his own dick. He had recurrent outbreaks of acne, despite his age, and the cardiologist said that if he didn’t lose seventyfive pounds, he was going to die. And he had dandruff. Bad.