Buried Prey

statements, showing a balance of $4,560. Hanson was broke. He found a drawer full of bills, thumbed them, pulled out a cell phone bill from Verizon and shoved it in his pocket.
    He found a fat file stuffed with homemade brochures from Thailand, printed on color laser printers, advertising sex tours; and offering teenage girls. He put it back in place.
    Listened. Nothing. No call from Del, yet. Risk was building. Looked at his watch: he’d been inside for eight minutes; the max he’d wanted to risk was five, and he was already three over.
    But two more minutes . . .
    He hurried through the kitchen to the back door. He pulled it closed, locked it as it had been. Checked a closet, saw nothing of interest. Opened another door, saw a steep stairs going into the basement. Flipped on a light, took the stairs, quickly as he could: two rooms: one a utility room with a washer, drier, washtub, furnace, water heater, a top-opening freezer.
    The other side was filled with more junk—old, but not antiques. Weather bought antiques, and the antiquing trips had given Lucas the rudiments of an eye. His eye told him that this stuff was junk.
    Glance at his watch: ten minutes. Time to run. His phone rang: Del.
    “Yeah?”
    “Get out of there, man,” Del said. “You been in there ten minutes.”
    “Somebody coming?”
    “Not yet,” Del said.
    “I’m coming.”
    He started up the stairs, caught the flash of the freezer. He stepped back, pulled it open, saw a pile of white meat packages, like the kind butchers use to package venison, and some boxes of sweet corn, and a shoe.
    His brain said, What?
    He brushed several boxes aside, and saw Brian Hanson’s frosted face and hair.
    He thought, Holy shit . After a few seconds, he pushed the boxes of sweet corn back across the dead man’s face, closed the freezer top, and ran up the stairs. Remembered to turn off the basement light and shut the door. Walked to the front door, touched the speed-dial button on his cell phone, and Del said, “What?”
    “I’m coming out.”
    “Fifteen seconds.”
    Lucas turned off the light, stepped out on the porch, pulled the door shut, walked as casually as he could down to the public sidewalk. Del pulled into the curb, and Lucas climbed into the Lexus.
     
     
    “NO SIGN OF HIM,” Del said, as they pulled away. “No sign of anything. We’re clean. But Jesus, you were in there a long time.”
    Lucas said, “Yeah.”
    In his mind’s eye, Lucas could see Brian Hanson’s frozen face. He’d never particularly liked Hanson—too old-style for Lucas—but he hadn’t been a bad investigator.
    They turned the corner and Del was saying something, and Lucas backtracked: he’d asked, “What’d you get?” and now was looking at Lucas a little oddly. He said, “You in there?”
    “I found Brian Hanson dead in the freezer.”
    Del laughed, and then stopped laughing. “You shit me. I mean, you were joking, you said something about finding him in the freezer.”
    “I shit you not. The guy is down in the freezer in the basement, frozen stiff. He’s got frost all over his face. Freaked me out. And there’s a pile of kiddie porn, and a computer that’s gotta have more stuff—I didn’t look at it—and there’s a file full of stuff from Thailand advertising young girls for sale. Del, you can’t believe the shit in there. He’s some kind of antique dealer, the place is full of junk. . . .”
    He went on for a while, and Del finally said, “That’s . . . insane.”
    “It’s insane. That’s exactly right. It’s insane.”
    They pulled up behind Del’s car, and Lucas stripped off the garden gloves and shoved them in his pocket, and put the rake back in the bag behind the seat, and Del said, “If he’s really insane, he’s gonna wind up spending life at St. Peter.”
    St. Peter was the Minnesota hospital for the criminally insane.
    Lucas shrugged.
    Del said, “Man, if you kill him—”
    “I’ve already had that lecture,” Lucas said. “Let it go.”
    They sat for a couple of minutes, and then Del said, “If we can get a warrant from anyone, we can go in there tomorrow, clean the place out. We’ll have him in a few hours.”
    “Gotta think about it,” Lucas said. “But what we’ve got to do for sure is get Shrake or Jenkins over here, to sit on the place overnight. If Hanson comes in, we’ve got to know about it—we don’t want him hauling his uncle out of there and getting away with it.”
    “What else?”
    “I got a