John Sandford: Buried Prey

Lucas was largely healed in two weeks. Weather took the stitches out, humming as she did it. It hurt a little, but that didn’t seem to bother her.

Lucas finally sat alone in his den, when the house was momentarily empty, and thought about it all. He hadn’t been responsible for the Jones girls’ kidnapping-that’d been all Hanson. The VHS tapes suggested that Hanson hadn’t had the girls very long before he killed them, so even if Lucas had pushed, and had been successful, he couldn’t have saved them.

All those others, though… he might have saved them if he’d persisted in his hunt for John Fell. Weather kept telling him that it wasn’t a perfect world, and anyway, he wasn’t perfect. Things would happen. Good, hardworking, innocent people died of cancer all the time-and Hanson had simply been a cancer in the social system.

Lucas knew all that was true, but it was not something he could emotionally buy into. He didn’t believe he could fix the world, but he felt like he could.

He just had to try harder.