Buried Prey Part 32

"Think there's a chance of that?" Cruz asked. "If there is-"

"Nah, he's not gonna shoot me," Del said.

"But take the vest," Lucas said.

"You want to come with me?" Del asked Lucas.

"f.u.c.k no," Lucas said. "He might shoot both of us."

"I was planning to stand behind you," Del said.

"You guys slay me," Cruz said, no sign of a smile. "A laugh a minute."

SO DEL WENT DOWN to the white house, walked up the bank to the front steps, and up the steps and peered in the window, then pulled open an outer screen door, and they saw him talking, and then talking some more, and then he opened the front door and they saw Brett in the doorway. He was a large man with a black beard.

"He looks right," Cruz said.

"Yeah, he does," Lucas admitted. "But it's not him."

"I think it might be," Cruz said.

"He wouldn't be coming out if he had a bullet hole," Lucas said.

"We'll see," Cruz said.

Brett stepped out on the porch, Del said something, and he put his hands on top of his head, POW style, and Del backed away and Brett followed him. A SWAT guy came off the corner of the house, then another one, and a minute later, Brett was sitting on the lawn, his hands cuffed, and SWAT was inside the house.

Lucas asked Cruz, as they walked toward the house, "Can I ask him one question?"

"Okay with me, if it's okay with him."

Del was standing over Brett, and Lucas came up and asked, "You give him his rights?" He could hear a girl child crying from up in the house.

"Yeah, the SWAT guy did."

Lucas squatted next to the doper: "I got one question for you, about who might've told the cops that you were the shooter. The guy who ratted you out. It's gotta be somebody about fifty years old. Fat. Black hair, big black beard. Know anybody like that?"

Brett shook his head in exasperation: "Man, I'm a biker. Everybody's heavy and fat and got a black beard."

Lucas stood up and shook his head at Del. "He's . . . ah, f.u.c.k it."

Del asked Brett, "You got any kind of bullet hole in you?"

"No, man, I never been shot."

"They're gonna look at you downtown."

"Man, I keep telling you, I haven't been shot," Brett said. "They can take all the DNA they want, I'll jack off in a bottle, whatever they need."

A SWAT guy came out carrying the girl. She was maybe five, and still crying, and her mother came out behind her, and she was crying.

Brett said to the SWAT guy, "Look what you did."

Lucas said to Del, "Come on, let's go. This is bulls.h.i.+t."

"It's not bulls.h.i.+t," Cruz said. "We had a credible tip."

"It's bulls.h.i.+t," Lucas said.

ON THE WAY BACK to the car, Del said, "Made more friends in the MPD."

"f.u.c.k 'em," Lucas said. "We got led around by the nose when the Jones girls were killed, and they're being led around by the nose now."

"What if you're wrong?"

"I'm not wrong. I'm p.i.s.sed, 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, fis.h.i.+ng 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 his body." body."

"You think he might have faked his own death?"

Lucas scratched his head: "That hadn't occurred to me." 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 a.s.sistant 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 n.o.body, 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 fis.h.i.+ng out of a sixteen-footer," Lucas said. "His hat was found in the boat, two fis.h.i.+ng 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 three fis.h.i.+ng 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?" fis.h.i.+ng 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."

20.

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?"