Buried Prey

.”
    They watched the house for an hour, and then Sandy called, and Lucas put it on the car speakerphone. She said, “All right. He’s got a white van, number one. Two, he went to school in Moorhead, which has a big teachers’ college, and he was there for four years. I couldn’t get at any personal records, but I did find out that he didn’t graduate. I could get at the graduation records.”
    Del said, “He didn’t graduate because he diddled an eighthgrader in his last year.”
    “I could find no reports of diddling,” Sandy said. “Maybe there’d be something, if I could crack the individual records, but they’re very well-protected. I’d need a subpoena for that.”
    Nothing had moved in Hanson’s house, and they gave it up after Sandy’s phone call. On the way back to the BCA, Lucas said, “Another reason for bagging it: say we get a warrant, go in there, and find some trophies—the Jones girls’ panties, or whatever. Or his old man is stuffed in the freezer. Then what? If we didn’t put out a general alert, we’d take an ocean of shit. If we find anything, that’d be the end of our hunt.”
    “So what? Then we got him.”
    Lucas patted his chest, and his voice was grim. “ I want to get him. Me. Me.”
     
     
    THEY CAME to no conclusion about bagging Hanson’s house, agreed to talk it over the next day, and headed home. Lucas was too late for dinner, but had a sandwich, and called Bob Hillestad from Minneapolis homicide at home. Minneapolis, Hillestad said, had gotten nowhere, and everybody was waiting for the BCA to finish running the DNA file against the data bank.
    Later in the evening, Lucas read a couple of online financial blogs, killing time, and as Weather was getting ready for bed, he went out to the garage, lifted a step in the back stairs going up to the housekeeper’s apartment, and took out his burglary tools—an electric lock rake, a ring of bump keys, a small crowbar, a pair of white cotton garden gloves, an LED headlamp. He checked the batteries in the rake, thought they might be a little weak, and replaced them with two new C cells from the workbench.
    He put them in a black nylon briefcase and dropped them behind the front seat of his Lexus SUV. That done, he went back in the house, got a beer, stepped in the bedroom to say good night to Weather, then leaned in Letty’s doorway and watched her working through Facebook.
    “I know women need to build social networks because it’s wired into their brains to do that, but what a fuckin’ waste of time,” he said. “You oughta learn to play guitar or something.”
    “I’m working,” she said, without looking up.
    “Working?” The skepticism was right there in his voice.
    Now she looked up. “Yeah. Some big newspaper, like maybe the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington one—”
    “The Post .”
    “Yeah, one of those, they did a big story about online bullies on Facebook and how some girl, like, hung herself, and they’ve got me going out to all my Facebook friends looking for people who got bullied, so we can do a story on it.”
    “They” were her mentors at Channel Three.
    “Hanged,” Lucas said. “Not hung. People get hanged, other things get hung.”
    “You mean like, ‘He hanged up on me,’ or ‘She was really hanged up on that guy’? Or ‘Jeez, he is really well hanged’ ? ”
    “I mean by the neck. People get hanged by the neck until dead. Everything else is ‘hung.’”
    “So what are you doing hassling me?” Letty asked. “While I’m working?”
    “Not hassling. Just came by to see if you needed anything at the store. I’m gonna go buy some of that Greek yogurt.”
    “You could get me some Coke. Maybe some Hostess Sno Balls.”
    “I think Sno Balls are made out of pork liver,” Lucas said.
    “That’s really funny. I’m laughing myself sick,” she said. “Get me the Coke. And the Greek yogurt with peaches.”
    “Talk to you tomorrow.”
     
     
    LUCAS FINISHED THE BEER, ostentatiously banged around in the kitchen, then went out and climbed in the Lexus and headed over to Hanson’s place. He could feel the stress building as he rolled along, and the excitement. The fact was, he liked it, always had.
    He cruised Hanson’s place once, saw no lights, was able to see that the position of the drapes was the same. Screwed up his guts, cruised it again. On his second pass, headlights flicked on from a car parked at the end of the block. He turned the