Buried Prey

interesting?” he asked.
    “It’s all interesting . . . but no.”
    “I’m going back to bed,” Lucas said.
     
     
    HE FELL ASLEEP immediately, woke up three hours later, feeling sharp, picked up his cell phone from the bedstand, turned it on, and dialed.
    Del came up, and Lucas asked, “You read the paper this morning?”
    “Yeah. I was wondering if you’d call.”
    “I want to get in on this,” Lucas said.
    “I wouldn’t mind, but the politics will be a little crude,” Del said. “It’s a Minneapolis case.”
    “They won’t do it as well as you and I would,” Lucas said.
    “That’s true,” Del said.
    “Besides, we wouldn’t have to tell them . . . right away.”
    They thought about that for a minute. An unstated rivalry existed between the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the cops in Minneapolis and St. Paul. If you asked a Minneapolis leadhomicide detective, he would say something like, “A guy at the BCA probably handles twenty murders in his career. I see twenty in a year.”
    The BCA guy would say, “Yeah—gangbangers. You catch the guy sitting on a couch with a beer and a gun. When we go in, we go in late, and they’re always the hard ones.”
    To which each side would say to the other, “Bullshit.”
    Lucas asked, “You remember John Fell?”
    “I remember the name. That’s the guy you were looking for,” Del said.
    “There’s a good chance that he’s the killer. Even at the time, I thought there was some chance, but now that Terry Scrape is pretty much ruled out, I think we need to find him,” Lucas said.
    “Long time ago,” Del said.
    “Yeah.”
    “We oughta get a cup of coffee, sit and think.”
    “Give me an hour—I’ll see you down at the café.”
    “Bring your notebook,” Del said. “We’re gonna need a list.”
     
     
    SO THEY went down to the café on Snelling, sat in a booth with a coffee for Del and Diet Coke for Lucas, and Lucas opened a sketchbook that he used for planning, and they started making their list.
    1. Fell was fairly young—in his twenties—in the mideighties. “That means he didn’t quit with the two girls,” Del said. “He might’ve quit by now—a lot of the psychos poop out in their forties. But he kept going for ten or fifteen years. We need to look at cold cases where young thin blondes vanished.”
    2. He could have been arrested for a sex crime at some point—most sex criminals were. Lucas couldn’t remember everything about the description of the guy, but he was overweight, dark hair, told jokes instead of engaging in regular conversation. “I think he might be missing a finger,” Lucas said. “I think I remember that.” That combination might be enough to identify him either to investigators, or to serial offenders who had spent a lot of time in jail.
    3. At the time the girls disappeared, he may have been fired as a high school teacher. “Since he wasn’t very old, he must’ve been fired fairly recently when I was looking for him,” Lucas said. “And if he was fired that quickly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a sex thing involved . . . or suspected, anyway. So we’re looking for a guy with a rap sheet involving sex, who was a local schoolteacher back in the early eighties.”
    4. Del said, “If we can find old checks that he wrote to cover the John Fell Visa account, we might pick up some DNA—and if he’s in the sex database, we’d have him.” Lucas shook his head: “I don’t think they keep paper checks anymore. We can look.”
    5. “We gotta check every utility record we can find on that house,” Lucas said. “His name should be somewhere.” Del nodded, but said, “Minneapolis will be all over that angle.” Lucas said, “Wonder if they’ll check on next-door neighbors?” Del: “They will if they really pull out all the stops, like they say. But, we oughta check.”
    “Think Marcy will let us look at the Jones case file?” Del asked.
    Lucas said, “I don’t know how she could turn us down, if we asked, but she might get pissed.”
    Del suggested that they might find a pressure point, and Lucas asked, “How about this . . . you know James Hayworth at St. Paul?”
    Del nodded.
    Lucas said, “He just came back from Quantico. He’s really big on the behavioral science stuff. He’ll know that guys like Fell don’t quit . . . so what if we feed him to the Star Tribune? He’s all fired up right now, all that new information in his head, he’ll tell them a story that’ll