Buried Prey

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.”

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?”
    “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.
    Thought about Marcy all the way up: couldn’t get her out of his head. He’d be driving along, looking at cars or the landscape, and he’d get a flash of Marcy, something they’d lived through. The flashes were as clear and present as if he were still living them. He said a short prayer that he didn’t outlive Weather, or any of his children.
    Like most smart people, Lucas was able to stand back from himself, at least at times, to examine thoughts, motives, feelings. He knew that he was running out of control. He felt pointed toward Fell’s death, however that had to happen: he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to perfectly control himself when he came into Fell’s presence. When he imagined a confrontation with Fell, he could feel his blood pressure rising, could feel the adrenaline kicking into his bloodstream, could feel the anger surging up to his throat.
    He realized he was having a hard time recognizing that Marcy was gone, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, and that killing Fell would not answer the problem he was having with her death, would not bring her back, and could have devastating consequences for himself and his family.
    The little man at the back of his mind could whisper all of that to him: and yet, that realization had little effect on the urge for revenge.
     
     
    HIGHWAY 77 WAS a two-lane blacktop through scrubby tamaracks around the edge of Vermilion, one of the major lakes of northern Minnesota. He called the deputy, whose name was Clark Childress, when he was fifteen minutes south of the crossroads, and Childress said, “Jeez, you made good time, then. See you out there. . . . I’m in Tower, I’ll leave right now.”
    Childress either stopped to do something, or was a slow driver, because Lucas caught him right at the crossroads, saw the patrol car make the turn, and fell in behind him. They took 77 through several twists and turns, then onto a narrower blacktopped road, and finally onto a lane barely wider than the patrol car. Childress pulled into a yard beside an older garage, with a green clapboard cabin closer to the lake. A floating dock stuck into