John Sandford - Buried Prey

“We just got here,” Lucas said. “We don’t know the status on anyone.”

“That lady police officer died.”

“Yeah…”

“She seemed nice. It’s so awful,” Barker said. “Everything was going so well this morning and afternoon, and then this man…”

It all came out in a gush; what they’d been talking about, the man at the door, the explosion of gunfire, the screaming of the wounded, the rush to the hospital.

“They say the man was shot, but I don’t see how. The police officer, Buster, was upside down on the floor; he shot two times, I think, but they say he might have hit him.”

“There was a blood trail,” Lucas said. “It’s the only good thing to come out of this whole disaster. All we have to do now is identify him: we’ve got all the proof we need, if we can just lay our hands on him.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I’ve got John Retrief headed this way with a laptop. Since you’re waiting here on the operation, we were hoping you’d help revise the head shot.”

“Sure. I’m lined up to go on WCCO and KSTP tomorrow. Channel Three wants me but I told them I couldn’t do it until noon, and I told them all I needed like, heavy makeup, because I’m so distraught.”

Lucas thought: she didn’t look all that distraught, and he felt the anger burning away in his chest. He pushed it back and asked, “What about Todd? What’ve you heard?”

“Only that he’s shot pretty bad, there’re some holes in his lungs and they have to reconstruct his shoulder when he’s recovered enough to do it,” she said. “They brought Buster out a while ago; he’s in recovery-or maybe he’s out by now-there are some more police officers down there. If it wasn’t for Buster shooting that nut, we’d all be dead now.”

The shooter, she told him, had a heavy square-cut black beard like some Iranians she saw on television. “But it was him-it was my stalker, all right. I saw his eyes. I thought he was going to kill me.”

They talked awhile longer, then Lucas called Retrief and was told that he’d just passed the airport and was probably fifteen minutes away. “As soon as you’re done with Miz Barker, I want you to send copies to all the media outlets you’ve got,” Lucas said. “Everyone in the state. And down to Des Moines, out to Fargo, over to Milwaukee, with a response back to us. Tag it with something about a Midwestern serial killer of young girls, so it attracts some attention outside the state. Localize it for them.”

“I’ll do it-too late for the regular news tonight, but they’ll all have it at the crack of dawn tomorrow.”

They left Barker on the couch, and stopped by the intensive care ward, where Buster Hill was sitting slightly upright. Two Minneapolis detectives were sitting with him, nodded when Lucas and Del stepped in.

“Thought you might come by,” said the older of the two cops, a guy named Les MacBride. He turned to Hill: “Davenport and Capslock, BCA.” The younger of the two detectives was named Clarence.

“Heard of you from Marcy,” Hill said to Lucas and Del. “God, this is the most awful day of my life. She was such a great kid.”

“How’re you doing?” Lucas asked.

“Hurts,” Hill said. “But… the thing about Marcy is what’s got me really freaked out.”

“Sounds like you did okay,” Lucas said. “You tagged the guy.”

“Shoulda killed the sonofabitch. Maybe I will yet,” he said. “I will if I get the chance.”

His story was only slightly different from Barker’s, nothing more than a point-of-view variation. He hadn’t seen Marcy get hit. As soon as the shooting started at the door, he said, he went for his gun, but Marcy’s weapon was in her bag, and she went for the bag, but he didn’t know whether she’d ever cleared the gun. He’d been hit right away and didn’t see Marcy get hit-didn’t realize she had been until the shooter disappeared, and he’d called out to her for help.

“Didn’t come. I rolled over, and man, she was… gone.”

The shooter, he said, emptied his Glock into the room and then turned to run, which is when Hill hit him, he thought. “I was on my back with my gun over my head, shooting upside down. Bad shot, off center, but he stepped into it. Looked to me-this was a pretty fast impression-that he got it above the elbow, left arm, entry wound in the back, going out the front. Maybe, maybe hit him in the side, not the arm. But right there. I had this image when I fired. Don’t think it broke the bone, his arm didn’t move much. I think it was all soft tissue.”

MacBride said, “The blood trail was pretty thin. A splotch right at the beginning, but after that, it was mostly drips and drops.”

“It’s all good, they can get DNA out of nothing,” Lucas said. To Hill: “You said, ‘Glock.’ You sure about that?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Had that matte-gray look, not like metal as much as plastic. That plasticky finish. I picked up on it all the way.”

“Did he look like he knew what he was doing?”

Hill shook his head. “Naw. He was pumping with every shot. Squeezing as fast as he could, gun was jumping all over the place. I mean, he was trying to hit us, he just wasn’t much of a shooter. Except for… you know.”

They talked for a few more minutes, didn’t get much more: from Hill’s point of view, it’d been like getting hit by a car. He’d been chatting with Kelly Barker one second, and in the next second, he was upside down with a bullet wound.

“You did pretty goddamn good,” Del said, and Lucas nodded: “That’s right. We’re proud of you, man.”

Hill nodded. “Thanks… I only wish…”

In the car, driving back to St. Paul, Lucas said, “Fell is not much of a shooter. Except he was the only one who killed anyone.”

After a moment of silence, Del asked, “What’s next?”

“With Marcy, the Minneapolis cops will be working nothing but a million details. They’ll knock down everything. I would like to get to the guy before they do,” Lucas said.

“If you kill him, there’ll be a humongous stink, sooner or later,” Del said. “There are quite a few people around Minneapolis who don’t completely appreciate your act. And they know that you and Marcy had that relationship.”

“I’ll think of something,” Lucas said. “Forty days and forty nights, she used to say.”

Del snorted. “It wasn’t the most discreet romance. There was a rumor around that you nailed her on your desk downtown.”

“Ridiculous,” Lucas said.

“You’re saying it’s not true?”

“Of course it’s not true.” He looked out the window for a moment, then said, “We couldn’t keep it on the desk. It was on the floor.”

They both laughed, and then Del said, “Aw, Jesus. She did everything right. Ate right, exercised, never smoked, hardly drank.. Why are we still here, and she’s gone?”

When Lucas had built his house, he’d designed a combination den and office where he could sit and think, when he needed to do that. It wasn’t large, but it had a desk with a proper office chair, and two large leather chairs with tile-topped side tables. Everybody but Sam was still awake when they got back. Lucas got beers for himself and Del, and they went into the den and sat down, Lucas with his briefcase between his knees.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. He took out a sheaf of paper, his copies of his reports from the original investigation of the Jones girls’ disappearance. “Ninety-nine percent of what’s in the Minneapolis file is bullshit. That’s because they were specifically going after Scrape, most of the time. I was the only guy looking at John Fell, so the only reports worth a fuckin’ thing are mine, and I didn’t know what I was doing.”