John Sandford - Buried Prey

“I’m not wrong. I’m pissed, and frustrated.”

They drove back to the BCA, mostly in silence, and finally Lucas said, “I’ll call Cruz this afternoon, and kiss and make up.”

And a few minutes later, he added, “Fell knows Brett. Somehow he knows him. Maybe if we talked to Brett a little more-”

“He isn’t the brightest bulb on the pole lamp,” Del said. “He started out stupid and then started sniffing glue, so I wouldn’t expect too much.”

BACK AT THE BCA, he walked down to the office where Sandy, the researcher, worked. She was poking at a computer, looked up when Lucas loomed, and said, “It’s impossible. I can’t even give you a probability, because too many records are gone, and too many people took teacher training.”

“How many names you got?”

“I haven’t counted them-must be a couple of hundred. But the problem is, this is all before everything got computerized. Personal computers were brand-new, and a lot of stuff was still kept on paper. I can keep trying-”

“Ah, give it up,” Lucas said. He turned away, then turned back. “Hey, a guy from Minneapolis, a former cop named Brian Hanson, apparently fell out of his boat up on Vermilion. Could you see if there are any news feeds?”

“Sure.” She rattled some keys, and a news story popped up. “TV station out of Duluth,” she said.

Lucas read over her shoulder: neighbors heard him arrive, heard the boat go out, very early in the morning. The boat, a Lund, was found turning circles in the lake just after dawn, the motor running. Another fisherman had hopped into the boat, found Hanson’s hat, fishing rod, and open tackle box. No body had been found yet.

“Not uncommon,” Sandy said. “He was peeing over the side, like all men do, and he fell in, and the boat motored away. The water’s cold enough all year round, he dies of hypothermia, and sinks. Happens all the time.”

“Yeah, but… He worked on the Jones case, and died the day after they found the bodies. It worries me that they haven’t found his body.”

“You think he might have faked his own death?”

Lucas scratched his head: “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

Back in his office, working more from simple momentum than anything like intelligence, he called the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office, got hooked up with the deputy who’d covered the accident, and got the names of the two fishermen who’d chased down the empty boat. The cop said there was nothing especially suspicious in the disappearance: “It happens. And when it does, there’s nothing really to work with. A guy falls over the side, the boat drifts away, he sinks, and that’s it. No signs of violence, no disturbance… nothing. He’s just gone-but he’ll be back. Give him about ten days, he’ll come bobbing up.”

Lucas called around until he found one of the fishermen, an assistant manager at a Target store in Virginia. The boat, he said, “had been chugging right along.”

“How fast?” Lucas asked. “I mean, fast as you could walk?”

“Fast as you could jog,” the guy said.

“Big boat? Nineteen, twenty?”

“Uh-uh. Sixteen. The cops towed it back in, no problem.”

“How big was the engine?” Lucas asked.

“A forty.”

“Life jacket in the boat?”

“Can’t really… you know, I don’t think there was.”

Lucas thanked him and hung up. Thought about it for a second, said, “Ah,” to nobody, picked up the phone again, and called Virgil Flowers, a BCA agent who worked mostly outstate. “Where are you?” he asked, when Virgil came up.

“Sitting in the Pope County Courthouse. That Doug Spencer deposition.”

“Got a question for you,” Lucas said. “You used to have a little Lund, right?”

“Yeah. It’s all I could afford on my inadequate salary.”

“We got a guy who apparently fell overboard while he was fishing out of a sixteen-footer,” Lucas said. “His hat was found in the boat, two fishing rods and tackle box, so he wasn’t taking a fish off. The boat was found running, about as fast as you could jog. No body. So why did he fall overboard?”

After a moment of silence, Virgil said, “He was moving around, for some reason, stepped on something like a net handle or the rod handle, and he slipped and the gunwale caught him in the back of the legs, below the knees and he fell over backwards.”

“There was a theory that he was peeing off the boat.”

“Not that boat, not with the motor running like that,” Virgil said. “You couldn’t pee over the motor, so you’d have to stand off to one side, and with the motor running, and all that weight in the back corner, it’d start turning doughnuts. If he was peeing off the side, he’d have peed all over himself. You’re gonna pee, you kill the motor.”

“But still, you could think of a way that he’d fall over.”

“Sure. Boat bouncing around in the waves, you lose your balance-”

“No wind, flat lake.”

Another pause. “Step on a net handle.”

“That’s all you got?”

“It’s not all that easy to fall out of a boat,” Virgil said. “For one thing, in a boat that size, if you’re alone, you don’t really walk around. Not if the motor’s running. What would you be doing? You sit. Walleye fisherman?”

“That’s what I’m told.”

“So, there’s just not much reason to move around,” Virgil said. “I don’t know, Lucas. It’s sure not impossible, but it’s not too likely, either. On the other hand, he could have had three fishing rods, was playing a fish, reached too far over to lift it out of the water, had a spell of vertigo, and went in. It’s not that easy to fall out of a boat, but people do, all the time. For no good reason. How old was he? Could he have had a heart attack?”

“Thank you. Are you pulling your boat today?”

“Of course not. I’m on government business,” Virgil said.

Lucas hung up and thought about it-whatever anybody might say about it, it was a peculiar death, and it came at a peculiar time. He called Del and said, “I’m going up to look at Hanson’s cabin. Talk to his neighbors and so on.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s what I got,” Lucas said. “It’s all I got. I’m scratching around.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Think about it,” Lucas said. “What we need is ideas… maybe you could go back and talk to Don Brett again. Figure out how Fell knows him. If you could figure that out…”

“We’d have him.”

“Yeah. Exactly.” Lucas looked at his watch. “I’m gonna run home and get a bag, and take off. See you tomorrow.”

Lucas got directions to Hanson’s cabin from a deputy sheriff, who told him that the cabin was temporarily sealed “until we figure out for sure what happened to him. If he doesn’t show up in the next week or so, we’ll let the relatives in.”

“I need to get in,” Lucas said. “Can you guys fix it?”

“When are you coming up?”

“I’m on my way,” Lucas said into his cell phone. “I’m just clearing the Cities… so probably three and a half hours.”

“More like four. How you coming? You been here before?”

“Yeah. I’ll take 35 to 33 to 53 and then up 169 into Tower,” Lucas said.

“You want to stop at Peyla, that’s a crossroads just short of Tower, where 169 hits Highway 1 and County Road 77. You want to turn left on 77…”

Hanson, the deputy said, lived on a peninsula that stuck out into Lake Vermilion fifteen or twenty road miles north of Tower. Lucas took down the directions and said, “See you in three hours and a bit.”

“More like four,” the deputy said.

More like four; Lucas went a little deeper into the Porsche.