Buried Prey

remembered.”
    Sedakis’s hand went to her throat: “You mean . . . you think somebody might have killed him?”
    “I’ve got no reason to think that, except for the coincidence,” Lucas said. “I thought I’d come up here, talk to some of his friends, see if he said anything to anyone.”
    “I certainly remember the Jones thing, even though I was young. I must’ve been in tenth grade,” Sedakis said. “I remember he was working day and night. We used to talk about it. He never was sure that the street person did it. He said there was some other detective down there who thought the street person might have been framed, and I think he half believed that.”
    Lucas said, “That was me,” and then thought, I never saw that in Hanson: never saw any skepticism about Scrape. And he asked, “Did he say anything about it after the bodies were found?”
    “I hadn’t talked to him for a couple of weeks before this accident. We live down in Farmington, and he was up in Golden Valley. Most of the time in the summer, he was up here. So . . . no. I guess ‘no’ is the answer.”
    “When did he go back to the Cities?” Lucas asked.
    “He didn’t actually keep us up to date on his travels. He was up here most of the summer.”
    “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