Buried Prey

know your father’s cabin?” Del asked.
    “Sure. But, most of the cousins did. It was like a family place.”
    “And he knew your father pretty well,” Lucas said.
    “Yes. But it’s the same thing—everybody knows everybody. All the cousins. We all get together on the Fourth of July, and at Christmas.”
    “So why do you think it’s Roger?” Lucas asked.
    Hanson looked at his wife, and finally she said, “Because he’s strange. In a bad way. He’s angry and mean and he can be scary.”
    They talked for another twenty minutes: it became apparent that several cousins probably fit the description of John Fell, and were in the right age range. They said Roger Hanson had never taught school, as far as they knew. They didn’t know anything about Brian Hanson cleaning up a legal mess made by one of the cousins.
    “Does he have a white van?” Lucas asked.
    Hanson ticked a finger at him: “I haven’t seen him in a couple of years—but he’s an antique dealer, a junk dealer, really, and he’s always had a van.”
    Lucas told the other cops to pack up, and apologized to the Hansons for the mistake. “I’m sorry about it, but you have to understand, given what’s happened, that it was worth it from my point of view. At this point, all we have to do is figure out which cousin is a cold-blooded murderer.”
    He added that they should not talk to anyone about the night’s developments: “The last time somebody got under his skin, he went to her house and shot three people, and killed one of them. So, stay quiet, and we’ll clear this up. But stay quiet.”
     
     
    OUT IN THE CAR, Del said, “I been in a lot of clusterfucks, but nothing that ever ended like that.”
    “Not a clusterfuck,” Lucas said. “One way or another, we broke the case.” He got on his cell phone, caught the researcher, Sandy, as she was about to eat dinner. “Can you get back into the office pretty quick? It’s kind of an emergency.”
    She could, she said: “I’m having pancakes. I can be down there in twenty minutes. What do you need?”
    He gave her Roger Hanson’s name, address, and phone number, which he’d gotten from Darrell Hanson, and told her to get everything she could find on him. “Are you coming in?”
    “In a bit,” he said.
     
     
    “WHERE ARE WE GOING?” Del asked.
    “I want to take a look at Roger’s house. It’s up on the northeast.”
    Roger Hanson lived in the prewar Logan Park neighborhood in northeast Minneapolis, on a street lined with shade trees and parked cars and pickups. His house was a modified bungalow with a narrow front porch, up three steps. Hedges ran down both sides of the house, separating it from the adjacent houses; a narrow, much-cracked driveway ran down one side of the house, to a onecar garage in back.
    Nothing was moving around it: a car was parked out front, there was no other car in sight, no white vans on the street. There was that garage, and there could be a van inside.
    “I could go knock, see if he comes to the door,” Del said. “If he was hit, I might be able to tell.”
    “If he’s hit, he won’t come to the door,” Lucas said. “Why would he? To get his Girl Scout cookies?”
    “No lights,” Del said.
    They drove twice around the block, slowly, and then parked at the end of the block, in front of a house with a “Sold” sign on it. With any luck, Del said, the owners had moved out and wouldn’t see them sitting there.
    Nobody apparently did, or at least nobody was curious: they sat for an hour, talked in a rambling way about a few current investigations, none of great importance, a few personalities around the office, and about Marcy. In that hour, there was no visible activity around Hanson’s house—no moving drapes, nobody at a window.
    “It feels empty,” Del said.
    “Could be at work,” Lucas said. “Could have flown the coop. Could be down at the grocery store . . . we don’ t know shit.”
    “One thing we know,” Del said, “is that the picture-window drapes are open, and so are the drapes on that room in the back, and that’s probably a bedroom. If they’re closed later on, or tonight, we’ll know somebody is home.”
    “Let’s go,” Lucas said. “Take a few more turns around the neighborhood. Get the lay of the land.”
    “You’re not gonna bag it?”
    “I’m thinking about it,” Lucas said. “Time’s passing, and word is gonna get out. Maybe not exactly what we’ve got, but that we’ve got something