Buried Prey

a while.”
    “Ah. That would help,” Del said. “Still don’t have any hard evidence.”
    “And once we go for a warrant, we’re committed,” Lucas said.
    They thought about that for a minute, then Del said, “If you bag it, you gotta talk to me. I don’t want you doing it alone.”
    “Then, if I get caught, two of us go down,” Lucas said.
    “So let’s go talk to Paulson.”
    “I’m afraid he’ll say no.”
    “So then we bag it,” Del said. “Can’t be in any more trouble, if we get caught.”
    Lucas put his head down and thought about it. If he blackbagged the house, he could only be inside for a few minutes. If he got caught, his career was done: and he might be looking at jail time. A lot of security around . . .
    “All right,” he said. “Let’s go see Paulson. We can tell him what we’ve got, ask him if he’ll give us a delayed report. We ask him before he makes application.”
    “Be right up front with him.”
    “He’s no dummy,” Lucas said. “If we try to bullshit him, we’ll only piss him off.”
     
     
    THEY WENT BACK to the BCA to pick up some paperwork, and then Lucas talked to Paulson’s clerk to make sure the judge would be around. Told that he had a relaxed schedule that morning, Lucas signed up for an appointment and he and Del headed for Minneapolis.
    Paulson’s chambers were on the eighteenth floor of the Hennepin County Courthouse. When his clerk ushered Lucas and Del into the office, they found Paulson with his feet up on his desk, picking on an electric guitar, listening to himself on earphones plugged into a tiny amp. He saw them, tipped his head toward two visitors’ chairs, continued picking for another ten seconds, then shut down the guitar.
    “I coulda been a Rolling Stone,” he said. He was a tall man, with slicked-back hair, a long nose, and a thin white smile. He could have been a country singer, but probably not a Rolling Stone.
    “And if you’d been a judge at the same time, you coulda sent yourself to prison for drug abuse,” Del said.
    “How are you, Del?” Paulson asked. To Lucas: “It’s bad, ain’t it?”
    “It is. I’ve got to tell you, we’re here to ask your advice about a search warrant, and it involves Marcy’s murder.”
    “Uh-oh,” Paulson said, dropping his feet to the floor. “Let’s hear it.”
    Lucas explained what they had, and what they’d be looking for if they got a search warrant, and why they weren’t yet applying: “We know it’s a little thin, but we think the totality of the evidence should get us in. But if you don’t think so, we don’t want the application made official.”
    “And you came to me because you knew it was thin, and you also knew that Marcy and I dated for a while.”
    “That was a factor,” Lucas said. “I won’t bullshit you, Dwayne: we do think we’ve got enough, but we know we’re on the edge.”
    “Give me one minute to think,” Paulson said. He turned in his desk chair so that his back was to them, and tilted his head back. They looked at his small bald spot for a minute, then two, and finally he turned back and said, “This guy just walked into that house down in Bloomington and opened fire, with no warning.”
    “That’s right.”
    “It sounds like he’s an absolute danger to himself and others. He may be undergoing a psychotic break.”
    “Absolutely,” Del said.
    “I wouldn’t give it to you without that. Make a note of that in your app, and I’ll give it to you.”
    Lucas took the paperwork from his pocket: “I left space for additional notes,” he said.
     
     
    THEY LEFT with the warrant in their pockets, and Lucas said, “The more I’ve thought about it, the surer I am. No big thing pointing to him, but a lot of little ones. And he’s a planner. He’s not the kind of guy to leave big clues hanging around.”
    Back at the BCA, Lucas called John Simon, the director, and told him what was happening. Simon had almost no control over Lucas’s unit, and resented it, but lived with it. “Just take it easy. I don’t want a bunch of dead people,” he said. “I don’t want any dead people.”

22
    Lucas, Del, Jenkins, Shrake, and two crime-scene techs, Norman Johnson and Delores Schmidt, went into Hanson’s house a little after three o’clock in the afternoon.
    The place was empty, but lived-in: it smelled like good cooking, there were two dozen plants on the ground floor alone, and more on the stairway and through the second floor, where the