John Sandford - Buried Prey

“So his lights were on… and he wound up here.”

“That seems to be the case. You get anything?”

“Maybe,” Lucas said.

There was still enough light that he could go back to Hanson’s cabin, so he did that. There were close-in cabins on both sides of Hanson’s place, and he walked across the side yard and up the steps to the place on the south, and knocked on the porch door. A woman came to the door, saw him standing there. A worried look crossed her face, and he got the impression that she was alone.

“Yes?”

He held up his ID and said, “I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I was just here a while ago with a Deputy Childress?”

“Oh, okay, I guess I saw you over there.” She came to the screen door. “What’s up?”

“Did you see or hear Mr. Hanson the night he disappeared?”

“I talked to my husband, and we both thought we heard a car come in, late in the night. We were both asleep. The next morning, we saw his car parked there, and then, a while later, the police came in. But that’s about it. We never saw him or anything. We were really shocked when we heard.”

The neighbors on the other side were named Jansen, she said, and she’d seen them come in a half-hour before. “They’ll probably be going out fishing, so if you want to talk to them, you should get over there.”

Mark and Debbie Jansen were eating dinner when he knocked, and Mark Jansen invited him in and offered him a cup of coffee and a chair at the kitchen table, both of which Lucas took. They hadn’t heard Hanson come in, nor had they heard the boat go out. They found out he was missing when the police came around.

“Guess they traced him from the bow number on the boat,” Mark Jansen said.

They chatted for another few minutes, Lucas finished his coffee, took their recommendation that he spend the night at the casino, and left. He was getting in the car when Mark hustled across the lawn and called to him, “Hey-Lucas.”

Lucas waited until he came up, and Jansen said, “Did you go in his garage?”

“Yeah. Looked at the boat,” Lucas said.

“Is his dirt bike in there?”

“No, I don’t remember seeing one.”

“This might be nothing, but later that night… it wasn’t three o’clock, it was more like five o’clock… just getting light, probably… I heard a bike start up,” Jansen said. “Like, up on the road. And it took off. I didn’t think of it until just now, and there are a lot of trail bikes and four-wheelers around here, but I don’ t know why you’d be starting one right there… If that’s something.”

Lucas said, “Huh,” and, “Thanks. Something to think about.”

The reason to think about it, he thought to himself as he drove away, was that if somebody drove Hanson’s car up to the lake, whether or not it was Hanson faking his own death, or a killer faking an accident, he’d have to have a way to get out, once he got in. If he didn’t have an accomplice, and he couldn’t use the car…

“Then he’d have to know about the bike before he got here,” Lucas said aloud.

He passed the casino turnoff a few minutes later and kept going. Called Weather and said, “I’ll be home tonight, late. Don’t wait up, but don’t shoot me, either.”

“I wouldn’t shoot you anyway,” she said. “But I’ll warn Letty.”

Del walked up the sidewalk to Lucas’s house, saw Shrake’s Cadillac pull to the curb. He waited, hands thrust in the pockets of his jean jacket, until Shrake and Jenkins had caught up with him.

“What’s going on?” Shrake asked, as he came up.

“I don’t know,” Del said. “Weather called, but I just talked to Lucas, and he’s still three hours out.”

“Let’s find out,” Jenkins said, leading the way to the door.

Weather let them in and said, “We need to talk in a hurry, before Letty gets back. I don’t want her to see you.”

“What’s up?” Del asked.

“You want a beer? We’ve got Leinie’s and Negra Modelo.”

They took two Leinie’s and a Negra Modelo, and she went and got them, and brought them back to the living room, where the three cops were still standing, looking uneasy. Weather wasn’t exactly a friend, except that she was married to Lucas: she was a little too smart, a little too commanding, a little too tight.

In other words, a surgeon. She said, “Sit down, everyone. You look like you’re getting ready to stampede.”

When they were sitting, she said, “The thing is, Lucas is going to kill whoever it was that killed Marcy. About five minutes later, people will start talking about how he and Marcy had a relationship back when they were both working for Minneapolis. Some people will say that Lucas murdered this man, whoever he is-”

“I already sorta mentioned it to him,” Del said. “He didn’t want to talk about it.”

“And you might be a little early on getting concerned,” Jenkins said. “Nobody has any idea of who the killer is.”

“You have any doubt that Lucas will find him?” Weather asked.

Shrake, Jenkins, and Del exchanged quick glances, and then Del said, “I wouldn’t bet against him. And when I talked to him, I got the feeling he’s got a sniff of the guy. Something’s going on, I could hear it in his voice.”

“I could, too,” Weather said.

They all looked around, and took nervous hits on their beers, and Shrake finally said, “So what?”

“He’s going to find the guy, and then he’s going to kill him. Even if what he does is legitimate, he’ll be in a lot of trouble,” Weather said. “Somebody will come up with the fact that they had this relationship, and it’ll get in the papers and on television, and then the politicians will get involved, and the prosecutors will be talking

… And Lucas is so angry, I don’t think he’ll be careful enough. I’m afraid he’s so angry that he’ll simply walk up and plug him. That’s what I’m saying.”

Jenkins shook his head. “He’s too smart to do that out in public.”

Weather interrupted: “But you see, it’d almost be better if he did it in public. But he can’t. But if he does it where there are no witnesses but you cops, that’s when all the speculation will begin. People will imagine what he did…”

Shrake said, “Ah, shit… sorry.”

Weather: “He feels terrible about the Jones girls, like he could have done more back then. And he thinks that letting this man go then probably got more girls killed. And now Marcy, and he sees it all going back to the beginning: he thinks it’s his fault.”

“That’s nuts,” Del said. “I worked with him on that case, and he was the only guy who did anything. Quentin Daniel was running the show, and Lucas freaked him out. He couldn’t get Lucas into plainclothes fast enough. Lucas was the only guy who did anything.”

“That’s not the way Lucas thinks, though,” Weather said. “And you know it. He blames himself when things go bad and he’s involved-he thinks he should be able to control everything.”

Del said, “Okay.”

“What I wanted to talk about,” Weather said, “is the possibility that you guys could kind of push him around. Make sure he’s not there when this man is caught. Get him out of the way, somehow, so he never has a chance to kill the guy.”

“So the guy can while away his old age playing checkers in Stillwater?” Jenkins asked.

“Oh, no. I don’t particularly care if somebody kills him,” Weather said. “I’ve got no problem with that at all. As long as it’s not Lucas who does it. If somebody has to shoot the guy, I think one of you should do it. Or some other cop. If one of you shot him, especially Jenkins or Shrake, because you never worked with Marcy… I don’t think anybody would question it, especially if the guy was carrying a gun.”