John Sandford - Buried Prey

“He went back the night before he disappeared,” Childress said. “We got that from his golf buddies.”

“So… he went down the night the Jones girls were found.”

Childress nodded. “And turned around the next day.”

Lucas asked to see the house. Childress took them in, asked them not to touch anything. Hanson had inherited the place from his father, who’d bought four acres on the lakeshore when the buying was good, back in the fifties. They’d had a trailer on the spot for twenty years, with the lakeshore prices rising all the time, and finally sold three of the acres for enough to put up the two-bedroom log cabin.

The cabin was well-kept, with two upstairs loft bedrooms, for kids or guests, reached by a nearly vertical stairway, with another small bedroom tucked in the back of the first floor. There were two small bathrooms, both with showers, neither with a tub. The kitchen was separated from the living area by a breakfast bar; the living room featured leather furniture facing an oversized television, fishing photos, a desk in a corner with a computer, hooked to a satellite antenna.

“Nice place; he kept it well,” Lucas said. He pointed at three bright red Stearns life jackets hung on pegs by the door. “Life jackets,” he said.

Childress said, “Yeah.”

“We had some happy times up here,” Sedakis said. And added, “I guess,” as if she weren’t quite sure. Then, hastily, “I’m more of a city girl.”

A row of family photos sat on the fireplace mantel, including a woman who looked like an older, heavier version of Sedakis, and a dark-haired boy holding a thirty-five-inch northern pike on an old-fashioned through-the-gills rope stringer. “That’s Mom,” Sedakis said, “and my brother, Darrell.”

Darrell, Lucas thought, with a thump of his heart, looked like Fell.

“I think I met Darrell once, maybe ten years back. I bumped into your father and him, coming out of Cecil’s, over in St. Paul… Big guy, black beard?”

“No, no… Darrell’s never had a beard, as far as I know. We’re not close; he’s ten years older than I am, but I see him a couple of times a year. He’s… I don’t think he can grow a beard, actually. He’s one of those guys who’s never done so good with a mustache, even. It comes out kind of scrawny.”

Lucas nodded. “Probably not him, then.”

They went back outside, Sedakis talking about her father’s career and retirement. Lucas learned that he was in reasonably good physical condition, though he was still too heavy. “A friend of mine wondered whether he might have had a heart attack.”

Sedakis shook her head: “My family doesn’t have heart problems. It’s usually kidneys that get us, or cancer.”

They talked a bit longer, and when Lucas ran out of questions, she left, waving as she pulled out into the lane.

“Interesting,” Childress said. “I never worked a murder… You think it could be a murder?”

“I’ll find out, sooner or later. Or his body will come bobbing up, with his fly down.”

“They mostly do that,” Childress said. “But sometimes, they don’t. They just stay down there. Too cold to rot, no bacteria, so they bob around like corks, still wearing their glasses… like a Stephen King story.”

“Jesus,” Lucas said. “You writing a screenplay?”

Hanson’s fishing pals, Cole and Kushner, lived three or four miles away, on another peninsula, and only a few hundred yards from each other. Both of them were in, and Cole volunteered to walk down to Kushner’s place and meet them there.

The two older men looked like the kind of plaid-shirted guys who’d be waved back and forth across the Canadian border without so much as a glance: white, balding, too heavy, too much sun, soft canvas shirts from Orvis, fishing-boat hats, and jeans.

Cole was the taller of the two, and said, “I understand why you’re looking into it-I already told the police that Brian was supposed to be down in the Cities. He coulda come back at the last minute, I suppose, but we play golf in the morning, and he’d usually want to make sure he had a spot.”

“A spot?”

“We play a sixteen-man scramble with a regular crew,” Cole said. “If you want to play, you have to let us know the night before. Otherwise, one of the extras will get put in your place.”

“It’s four hours from the Cities,” Lucas said. “The neighbors saw him pull in around three o’clock, which means he left there late. Maybe he didn’t want to take a chance of waking you up.”

“Maybe not,” Kushner said. “But there’s another problem. He hardly ever went out fishing early in the morning. He’d get up late, have about six cups of coffee and some oatmeal, and then head out to the golf course. We tee off at eleven, five days a week. Then, we’d have a few beers, and head home, and then two or three days a week, down toward dark, we’d head out on the lake, do some walleye fishing. But he hardly ever fished in the morning.”

Childress jumped in: “But if he got up here too late to play golf, he might’ve just decided to hop in the boat. He’d know he wasn’t playing the next day.”

The two men looked at each other, then back at Childress and simultaneously shrugged. “It’s possible,” Cole said.

“Ever see him pee off the back of the boat?” Lucas asked.

“Does a bear shit in the woods?” Kushner replied.

“Over the motor.”

Cole frowned. “Really can’t do that. Have to pee off a corner. You trying to figure out why he fell out… if he did fall out?”

“The boat doesn’t look like one where you’d want to pee over the sides, because of the slanted bottom,” Lucas said. “And the motor was running, and that doesn’t seem likely-”

“My theory is, he hooked up with something big, a big muskie or something, while he was trolling. Maybe he hooked a walleye and the muskie took it, and he stood up and was trying to land him, and the fish came off and he sorta staggered backwards and went over,” Kushner said. “If he fell over.”

“Wouldn’t he kill the motor when he got the hit?” Lucas asked.

“I guess he normally would,” Kushner admitted.

“HE wasn’t trolling,” Cole said suddenly. He looked at his friend. “The boat was going forward.”

“Oh… shoot. That’s right.” Kushner scratched his forehead. “Brian was a back troller. He worked it slow. If the boat was going forward…” He shook his head.

“Interesting,” Lucas said. “There are three red life jackets hanging by the front door. Did he usually wear one?”

Cole said, “If it wasn’t too hot, he would. Law says you gotta have one in the boat, and there are crick dicks all over the place. No offense.”

“Thing is, there wasn’t one in the boat, and if he was wearing one, you think we might’ve found him,” Lucas said.

Kushner said, “Maybe. It’s a big lake. And the way that boat was driving around by itself, we don’t really know where he went over.”

Cole added: “He wasn’t wearing one. He only had three life jackets-couldn’t hardly get more than three people in the boat, so that was what he had. Enough for me’n Kush, if we came over in the evening, to go out.”

There wasn’t much more; on the way out to the cars, Childress asked, “You got what you wanted?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Is there a good motel in town?”

“The casino’s just down the road, that might be best,” he said. “Give me a call if you need anything.”

Childress took off, and Lucas called Del: “You think of anything?”

“I went over to Hanson’s house and asked around. One of his neighbors thinks he saw Hanson leave his house around eight o’clock,” Del said. “He left his lights on, and they were still on when the news got out that he’d fallen out of the boat. One guy, named Arriss, said he was about to go over and look in the windows and make sure he hadn’t had a heart attack or something.”