Buried Prey

said.
    “I don’t think anybody will—we know he took them, and now he’s dead. No point.”
     
     
    THE DOC CAME IN a while later, looked at the bandages, asked Lucas a couple of questions, gave him a prescription for painkillers and antibiotics, and told him he could go. “Have your wife redo the dressing tomorrow, and every couple of days after that,” he said. “You’re welcome to come back to me, but you don’t have to.”
    Lucas thanked him, and they walked out to the car.
    “What I want to know,” Del said, as they pulled out of the hospital parking lot, “is what the fuck you were doing?”
    Lucas said, “I wanted to get my hands on him. I was right behind him when he went in the house, he didn’t have a gun, so I went straight in and then he had the woman and a knife and I was moving so fast I just kept going. It seemed like the best way to keep her from getting cut. I wanted to get her away from him, to get between them. The guy was nuts. I was thinking he might kill her, just to do it. And I knew you guys were right behind me.”
    “You didn’t get cut so Jenkins would have to shoot him?”
    Lucas said, “I’m not that fuckin’ crazy. From the time I went through the door to the time I got to him, was maybe half a second. All I was thinking of, was to knock him down and get him away from her.”
     
     
    THE SURGEON WAS RIGHT about the recovery being uncomfortable: the discomfort started when he got home, and Weather cornered Del and demanded details on how, exactly, Lucas had gotten hurt. When she found out, she chewed Lucas down to a stump, and then ordered him to bed. With cuts on both his face and back, he found that there was almost no comfortable way to lie in bed, and wound up half sitting, propped up by a pillow in the small of his back.
    Jenkins and Shrake came by later in the day, to report on the crime-scene process. There’d be no problem with the shooting, they said, with the woman having been attacked, and Lucas having been slashed—and Hanson being a multiple child-killer.
    Further, they said, Rose Marie Roux, the Public Safety commissioner and Lucas’s real boss, had gone to Hanson’s home, had viewed some trophies—underwear taken from victims, and VHS home movies from the eighties and nineties, including some that included the Jones sisters—and had then held a press conference. Hanson, she said, probably had murdered at least six or seven children, in addition to his uncle and Marcy Sherrill.
    Weeks of investigation would be needed to figure out what he’d done, and who all the victims were.
     
     
    ROSE MARIE SHOWED UP just as Jenkins and Shrake were leaving, ganged up with Weather to chew on Lucas some more. Weather said, “Shrake and Jenkins are worried that you’re down on them, because they pushed you around a little. Lucas, they are your best friends in the world. You’re not so dumb you can’t see that.”
    Rose Marie nodded. “What she said.”
    “They’re good with me,” Lucas said. “I think they know that.”
    “Well, tell them,” Weather said.
     
     
    MARCY SHERRILL WAS CREMATED, and her ashes spread on her family’s farm. Brian Hanson was buried in a veterans’ cemetery. The two Jones girls were buried in a plot next to their grandparents, in St. Paul. Lucas went to all of the funerals. He had no idea what happened to Roger Hanson’s body, and didn’t care.
     
     
    TODD BARKER ALMOST DIED from lung infections, but in the end, didn’t. Kelly Barker made several more appearances on Channel Three, talking about the experience of being shot at, and then helping her husband with his recovery; she never made Oprah . Jennifer Carey, who did most of the interviews, told Lucas later that Todd Barker thought his main mistake was, he hadn’t gone to the door with a gun in his hand. “He says he’s never going to make that mistake again,” Carey told Lucas. “He’s even bought a couple of new ones. He’s got a garage gun now, for when he takes the garbage out.”
     
     
    DARRELL HANSON and his wife went through some preliminary motions to sue the state for damage to their house caused by the search, but settled out of court for a minor payment. One of the state lawyers, whom Lucas knew, said that the prospect of being publicly tied to Roger Hanson had changed their minds, especially since the search had produced the DNA test of Darrell Hanson, and had pointed the finger at Roger.
     
     
    THE BCA’S LAB BOSS did a number of