Buried Prey

corner, and the car followed. He turned the corner and the car followed again, and flicked its high beams a couple of times.
    Lucas pulled over, the car followed, and in his rearview mirror, he saw Del get out and walk up to his driver-side window. He rolled it down and Del said, “Letty says you’re way too obvious.”
    “Ah, shit.”
    “So you gonna do it?” Del asked.
    “I am,” Lucas said. “I think you ought to stay away.”
    “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’m too young to go to prison for burglary, but I’ve got you on speed dial. If I see him coming, I’ll ring you, and you get the fuck out the back. If you go out the back, you’ll see that you can jump a hurricane fence in the backyard, and I’ll pick you up around the block.”
    “What about this car?”
    “I’ll take it. We’ll drop my car somewhere, I’ll let you out in front of the house, then go around the block and park where I can see his driveway.”
    Lucas nodded. “Thanks.”
    They did that, and when Del took the wheel of the Lexus, he said, “Not that I’m happy about it.”
    “You don’t have to do it.”
    “Yes, I do,” Del said. “I got this vague memory of talking you out of chasing John Fell, way back when. Saying it was pointless. I wonder how many girls are dead because of it?”
    “I’ve been sick about it,” Lucas said, staring stolidly through the windshield. “But even if we’d identified him, what were we going to do with it? We had no bodies, we had no witnesses, we had a dead guy whose fingerprints were on that fuckin’ box. . . .”
    “Still . . .”
    “Yeah. Still.”
     
     
    THEY CIRCLED the block one more time, checking houses with lights: the house across the street from Hanson’s had lights, as did the one on the left. “If we’re gonna do it, best not to circle again,” Del said.
    “Drop me off,” Lucas said, and pulled on the gloves.
    Lucas climbed out in front of the lights-out house, walked quickly down the sidewalk and then up the walk to Hanson’s place, and rang the doorbell. Rang it again, did a quick check around, pulled out the rake, rang the doorbell again, and slipped the rake into the lock. The rake sounded like somebody shaking a tray of dinner forks: not hard, just shaking it a little. Lucas kept the turning pressure on the lock, and felt it go.
    He took the knob, turned it, called, “Hey, Roger. You home?”
    No answer. He stepped inside, pushed the door shut, and turned on the light. Burglary notes: if you’re burglarizing a house, don’t go through the door and leave the house dark, and look around with the flashlight. The neighbors will call the cops. On the other hand, turning on the light is absolutely normal.
    Lucas called out again: “Hey, Hanson? Hey . . .”
    Silence.
    He started moving, going swiftly through the living room, through the kitchen to the back door. He unlocked it, cracked it open. Then back through the house, checking the three bedrooms. One had been turned into an office, one was filled with what looked like junk, the other held a bed. The bed was covered with twisted blankets, as though the sleeper had been struggling with them.
    He spent three minutes in the bedroom, quickly pulling out drawers, checking through them, finding nothing interesting but a switchblade and, in another drawer, two ball bearings in a sock, the ball bearings the diameter of a fifty-cent piece. He’d seen similar things used as saps, but the ball bearings were so heavy that if you hit someone on the head with them, you’d kill them. Must be some other use he was unaware of . . . or maybe Hanson collected ball bearings.
    In the bedroom closet, he found a stash of what looked like old printed pornography, in a stack four feet high. The magazines were cheaply printed, apparently in Asia, and featured girls who were too young.
    Lucas thought, Yes.
    And he flashed back to the porn he’d found in Scrape’s box. This was similar, but a decade or two newer. The same genre.
    They had him, and it was time to go, he thought.
     
     
    HE DIDN’T GO. His appetite whetted by the discovery in the bedroom, he checked out the office, and found a jumbled mass of income tax returns. He flipped through the recent ones, found declared incomes of $30,000 to $40,000, and business cards identifying Roger Hanson as an antique dealer, which explained the junk in the bedroom.
    He found a file full of bank statements: the most recent one showed a balance of $789; and a file of Visa