John Sandford - Buried Prey

Probably. But then you really couldn’t tell how a cop would behave in a shooting situation, until you’d seen him in one. You hoped the training worked, but there was no guarantee.

He sat thinking about that for a moment, groped for something else, realized he was treading water. He picked up the phone and called Bob Hillestad, a friend in Minneapolis Homicide, on his cell phone. Hillestad said, without preamble, “It’s a bitch, huh?”

“Yeah, it is,” Lucas said. “Where’re you hosers at? You got anything at all?”

“No. We got nothin’. Wait: we got that DNA, and we’ll run it through the database. It’s like everybody’s got both hands wrapped around their dicks, saying, ‘He’ll be in the database.’ Maybe he will be, but I don’t believe it, yet.”

“Heard anything from Bloomington?”

“A couple of people saw a white van leaving the neighborhood, pretty fast, at the right time. So Bloomington’s getting a list of white van owners. You know how many that’ll be? Someplace up in the five-digit area, is what they’re telling me. They’re saying it could go to six digits.”

“Good luck on that,” Lucas said.

“We’re all scratching around like a bunch of hens,” Hillestad said. “You guys got anything?”

“I decided to look at one guy based on nothing, and he’s not gonna work out. You know who’s getting that list for Bloomington?”

“No, but they’re going through the DMV. You could check over there.”

Lucas rang off, called the DMV, got routed around, and finally came up with a database guy who was doing the list for Bloomington. “I’m not a cop, but it’s absurd. What’re they going to do with it? On the other hand, it takes ten minutes and I don’t have to print it out-I’m just sending an electronic file, so, no skin off my butt.”

“Once you get the file, can you alphabetize it by the owners’ names?” Lucas asked.

“Sure.” There was a slurp at the other end; the guy had a cup of coffee. “You want me to shoot it to you?”

“Not yet-but put the list somewhere you can get at it. Hey, wait, could you do something to scan it, see if you’ve got a guy named Willard Packard on it?”

“Hang on. Give me a couple of minutes.”

The guy went away, and Del came in and Lucas pointed him at a chair, covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said, “Just a minute. Talking to the DMV.”

The DMV guy came back and said, “No Willard Packard on the white van list, but I looked up Willard Packard out in Woodbury, and he’s got a champagne Toyota minivan and a blue Ford Explorer. Champagne, white, not that close, but they’re both light.”

“Thanks. Keep the list active,” Lucas said. He hung up and said to Del, “Our guy owns a champagne minivan, but not a white one.”

“Eyewitnesses suck,” Del said. “Let’s go jack him up.”

They jacked up Packard about one-millionth of an inch, and then he unjacked himself. He lived in an apartment complex behind a shopping center, and came to the door in cargo shorts and a gray Army T-shirt with a sweat spot on the chest.

His hair, what was left of it, was cropped right down to the skin, giving him what looked like a cranial five-o’clock shadow. That didn’t fit with what Barker had seen.

A golf bag was leaning against the wall of the entry, and over his shoulder, in the living room, Lucas could see six-foot-tall stereo speakers: the place reeked of a post-divorce crib. Lucas and Del, standing in the hall, told him why they were calling.

“Jesus-you guys are hassling me on something I was found innocent on, more’n twenty years ago? What’s up with that?”

“We’re running down everything,” Lucas said. “Since Marcy Sherrill was killed-”

“All right. But man, you gotta get ahold of Dan Ball at Woodbury PD. You can get him through the station-he’ll be in at three o’clock, or you can call him at home. Or call Bill Garvey, he was supervising yesterday: I was in a squad starting at three o’clock, until eleven. We were sitting outside Cub eating lunch when we heard on the radio about the shooting.”

Lucas nodded. “So we’re cool. If we come by and ask for a DNA sample, you wouldn’t have a problem with it? Wouldn’t need to mention it to anybody.”

“I got no problem with that,” Packard said. “So you got nothin’?”

“We got nothin’,” Lucas said, turning away.

“I worked that Jones thing, in a squad,” Packard said. “I kinda remember you. You were on patrol. You were a couple-three years younger than me, and I mostly worked west. Wasn’t Brian Hanson big on that case?”

“Yeah. He was one of the lead guys,” Lucas said.

“Reason I mention it, see, is he died a couple days ago. Kinda weird way,” Packard said.

Lucas stopped. “Why weird?”

“Well, they know he’s dead, but they can’t find the body. They found his boat driving around in the middle of Lake Vermilion, up north, with his hat in it, but no sign of him. There’s a thing in the Star Tribune this morning, inside. His daughter says he used to pee off the back of the boat; everybody tried to stop him doing it.”

“Huh. Couple days ago?”

“Yeah. Same day the Jones girls were found. Or maybe the next day. Weird, huh?”

“Yeah, weird,” Lucas said. “Huh.”

Out in the car, Lucas said, “You know, Hanson… Wouldn’t have to be a cop-it could be a cop’s friend, just asking about the case.”

“I haven’t had any breakfast,” Del said. “Why don’t we stop over at Cub and get something? And figure this out.”

They sat in the parking lot eating deli sandwiches, and talked about Hanson, then started back to the BCA. They were a mile out when Shrake called on Lucas’s cell: “Minneapolis SWAT’s outside a place off Portland about Forty-second, not on Portland but over a block, it’s like Fifth Avenue or something, no details but the word is, the guy inside is the one who shot Marcy.”

“What?”

“That’s what we’re hearing, man,” Shrake said. “Some biker guy. Supposedly some kind of grudge thing, Marcy had been bustin’ his balls. Jenkins and I are on the way over. We’ll keep you in touch-”

“That makes no goddamn sense,” Lucas said. “That’s crazy. This doesn’t have anything to do with Marcy, it’s Barker who’s the one. That’s who the shooter was after.”

“I’m just telling you what I hear,” Shrake said. “The guy’s a doper.”

“We’re coming. We’re on 494 coming up to 94; get us some better directions. I think we’ll turn around and come up from the south.”

“Might be quicker,” Shrake said. “And you better hurry.”

“I bet they got a nine-one-one tip on the guy,” Lucas said.

“Why? We got DNA on the shooter; giving up the wrong guy won’t help him.”

Lucas said, “Yeah… maybe the guy doesn’t know about DNA. Or maybe he’s just fuckin’ with us. Or maybe he’s playing for time, maybe he’s getting his shit together and trying to get out of town.”

Minneapolis had barricaded a two-block radius from the target home on Fifth Avenue, an older white-stuccoed place on an embankment with a two-car detached garage in back. They parked outside the perimeter, walked past Jenkins’s Crown Vic and through the perimeter, flashing their BCA identification at the uniformed cops barricading the streets.

They found Jenkins and Shrake loitering outside the SWAT team’s command post. Lucas asked, “What’s happening?”

“Still in there,” Jenkins said. “They got a negotiator on the phone; he says the guy sounds pretty high.”

“Probably flushing all their junk down the toilet, what they can’t get up their noses,” Del said. “How many are in there?”

“A guy named Donald Brett and his old lady, Roxanne. Maybe a kid. Probably a kid.”