John Sandford - Buried Prey

“All right,” he said. “Gotta think.” He put his arms around the shoulders of both women, and they walked into the house.

Time passed; it always does, and the dead don’t come back, and their death becomes more real.

Lucas sat in his darkened den while Letty and Weather bustled around the kitchen with the housekeeper. He could hear them banging around, like the distant sad/cheery sounds of Christmas to a bum on the street. And he could hear them snarling at each other from time to time.

Letty and Weather were close, but had radically different worldviews. Weather, as a surgeon, was imbued with the medical profession’s “care” mentality. Letty, their adopted daughter, had grown up in a harsh rural countryside without a father, and with a half-crazed, alcoholic mother: her attitude was, Hit first, and if necessary, hit again. If you made a mistake, you could apologize later. Her mentality was stark: take care of yourself, and your family and friends.

Weather would argue that the system would take care of Marcy’s killer. That Lucas would only get in trouble if he made it personal. Letty’s attitude was that Lucas would never sleep right if he didn’t hunt the killer down, and finish him.

Lucas had never loved another woman as he loved Weather-but his attitude was closer to Letty’s. He could feel the murder of Marcy Sherrill sitting like a cold chunk of iron in his heart and gut. It wouldn’t go away; it’d only grow harder and colder.

The anguish and regret never faded, but the anger came on, and it grew.

Marcy had meant a lot to him: he’d known her from her first days on the police force, just out of the academy, a dewy young thing working as a decoy in both prostitution and drug investigations. She’d been hot: terrific in a short skirt and high heels, with a soft clinging blouse: Weather habitually referred to her as Titsy.

She and Lucas ran into each other when Marcy made detective. They hadn’t worked out as sexual partners because, in some ways, they were simply too much alike: competitive, argumentative, manipulative, cynical. Both of them wanted to be on top; so they needed a little distance between them.

And while they were alike in their attitudes, they didn’t always-or even often-see eye to eye on investigations. Marcy had always been a leader: on an important case, she would put together an investigative crew, as big as she could get, and methodically grind through it until the perpetrator was turned up. With Marcy, an investigation was almost a social event.

Lucas, on the other hand, was a poor leader. He simply wasn’t interested in what he considered the time-wasting elements of operating in a bureaucracy. He was intuitive, harshly judgmental, and would occasionally wander into illegalities in the pursuit of what he saw as justice. In doing that, he preferred to work with one or two close friends who knew how to keep their mouths shut, didn’t mind the occasional perjury in a good cause, and knew when to blow him off, if he got too manic and started shouting; and would shout back. Lucas’s cops were outsiders, for the most part. The strange cops.

He didn’t think about all that, sitting in the den: he mostly just saw Marcy’s face on the floor in Bloomington, the postmortem lividity already showing as reddish streaks in her pale skin, and the eyes. He had to see that to know in his heart that she was dead, but now wished he hadn’t.

Weather came in, and they talked quietly, some about Marcy, and the times they’d been together; and about Letty at school and Sam at preschool. Then the housekeeper came and said Sam was ready for bed, and Weather went to put him down. Letty came in and pulled a chair around to face him.

“You’re responsible for a lot of people,” she said. “You gotta take care of this, but whatever you do, it can’t be crazy. You’ve got to plan it out.”

“I don’t know if I’m going to do anything,” Lucas said.

Letty said, “Please,” like they do in New York, meaning, “Don’t bullshit me,” and then, “What I’m saying is, you can’t go to jail and you can’t lose your job. You’ve got to think. So think. Don’t just start smashing people.”

He showed a little smile: “Thanks for the advice. Maybe you should go do your homework.”

“It’s summer vacation,” she said, and he said, “Great Expectations? All read?” and she said, “Fuck a bunch of homework. I’m serious here. I think you gotta do it, but you gotta think about it.”

“I will,” he promised.

“So where are you going to start?”

He closed his eyes and thought: “I’ve got to talk to Kelly Barker. Like right away. Tonight.”

“What else?”

“We know the guy lives here. He’s been here the whole time. He watches TV here. People know him, and we’ll have processed the DNA in a couple of days… All we have to do is identify him, and we’ve got him. The Bloomington cops have called all the ERs, so we’ll know if any gunshot wounds come in. The guy’s hurt… he’s gotta make a move. It’ll all be done pretty quick.”

“Can you live with it if somebody else takes him down?”

Lucas thought for a few more seconds, then said, “Yes. I can. I’d rather do it myself, I’ll kill him if I can, but if the Bloomington cops get him… I can live with it.”

Letty leaned forward out of her chair and said, “Get with Del. If you wind up putting him down, Del’s the guy you want with you.”

Lucas nodded. “Of course.” And, a few seconds later, “I don’t think you need to review this conversation with your mom.”

Letty said, “She’s so smart-she knows what we’re talking about. That’s why she’s upstairs with Sam, to get out of the way.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“So stop sitting there like a robot,” Letty said. “Call people on the phone. Get Del over here. Get it going.”

Lucas stared at her for a moment, unblinking; she didn’t flinch. And he thought, She’s way too young to think like this. But then, given her history, she really hadn’t been young since she was nine; that had been the last year of her childhood.

Del called ahead, and showed up in the truck a little after ten o’clock. Lucas was waiting in the driveway and said, “Let’s go over to Fairview. Kelly Barker’s still over there.”

“What’s she got for us?”

“I want to see what she says. And I want to get her with Retrief, working up another head shot. Then we paper the TV stations with it overnight.”

“Bloomington probably has that under way.”

“I want to make sure-and I need to hear her talk. Want her to talk about John Fell.”

“If it is John Fell-”

“It is… You take care of Berg?”

“Yeah. He’ll be out tonight. I don’t want to fuck with it.”

Lucas took the wheel, and they headed across town to Fairview Southdale, a trauma center four or five miles north of the Barker house. They parked outside the emergency exit, threw the “Police” card on the dashboard, and went inside. Two Bloomington uniformed cops saw them coming and pushed off a counter they’d been leaning against. Lucas held up his ID and asked, “Is Kelly Barker still here?”

“Up in surgical waiting,” one of them said, and pointed the way.

Barker, when they found her, was sitting upright in an overstuffed chair, but was sound asleep. A Minneapolis cop sat on the couch across from her, reading a copy of Modern Hospital. Lucas introduced himself and Del, and the cop said, “She’s been trying to get some sleep.”

Lucas said, “Kelly,” and touched her shoulder, and she started, her eyes popping open. She looked at Lucas for a minute, as though she didn’t recognize him, then shook her head and said, “Is he all right?”