Buried Prey

scare the shit out of everybody.”
    Del half smiled and shrank back into the booth: “Man, if Marcy found out, she’d shoot you.”
    Lucas said, “Yeah, but if she doesn’t, and we perform just the right amount of suck . . . I’ll bet we get invited in. You know, to spread the blame.”
    “Where do we start?” Del asked.
    “I can get Sandy to do the research on missing children,” Lucas said. “She’d get it a lot faster than we would. We don’t want to bump into any Minneapolis guys any sooner than necessary, so . . . I think maybe we start with the schools.”
    “When?”
    “I’ll get Rose Marie to yank you off the task force for a while, and we can start this afternoon. What I’m thinking is, it’ll be an employment record, which the bureaucrats hold pretty close, so we might need a subpoena. Maybe we just get a subpoena that applies to all school board employment records in this area . . . we need to know how many school districts there are, and where they’re at.”
    “You find that out, and get the paper,” Del said. “I’ve got some task force stuff I have to clean up. I’ll be ready to go tomorrow morning.”
     
     
    AT THE OFFICE, Lucas found Sandy, the researcher, told her his theories about Fell, about what may have been a fight in an alley between Fell and Smith, the crack dealer, and outlined what he needed to know about missing girls; she would start immediately.
    Then Lucas started working the schools by telephone—and found there were more than fifty school districts in the metro area, and he’d have to go after them individually. He began with the larger, close-in districts, was told that he would need a subpoena to look at the employment records.
    He asked the first record keeper, “Do I need a subpoena to find out if you fired anyone in that period of time? Or could you just tell me ‘yes’ or ‘no’?”
    “Sure, I could tell you that,” he said. “Let me look at my records, and I’ll get back in an hour or so.”
    So he sat for five hours, breaking for lunch, patiently dialing phone numbers, reciting the same set of facts to all the various record keepers, and by the end of it, he’d learned that twelve of fifty-five districts had fired male schoolteachers during the relevant period.
    “I can’t give you the name, but I can tell you that this guy’s record suggests that there may have been a parental complaint without any follow-through . . . which could mean sex,” one man said.
    “Straight sex?”
    “Uh, can’t tell. Didn’t occur to me that it might be otherwise, but I can’t tell. The thing to do is, get your subpoena, and we’ll dig everything out and you can take a look at what we’ve got.”
    “See you tomorrow,” Lucas said.
    Two more of the twelve districts also had fired or released male teachers under unclear circumstances, which the record keepers thought might suggest a sexual basis for the dismissals. “That stuff doesn’t get talked about or written down, because there’s the possibility of legal action.”
    The other nine were fired for a variety of behavior, most often drunkenness or drug charges, which were clearly not sexual.

    AT THE END of the day, he called Marcy Sherrill at Minneapolis: “You get anything on the Jones girls?”
    “We’re working it—things are a little slow, so we had some folks we could throw at it,” she said.
    “Shit hit the fan with the media?”
    “Maybe not as much as I expected,” she said. “This whole thing happened before the Channel Three reporter was born, and anything that happened before she was born is obviously not important . . . so, yeah, people are calling up, but it’s been reasonable.”
    Lucas said, “So you’re saying you got the media under control, and you haven’t got jack shit on the Jones case.”
    “I wouldn’t say that. Not yet. The ME thinks there’s a chance they might take some DNA off the girls.”
    “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Lucas said.
    “Well, if it’s there, we could be all over this guy in a couple of days. I mean, any strange DNA that we find on them would almost have to belong to him. They were gone for two days, probably getting raped multiple times, so . . . there should be some DNA somewhere.”
    “Good luck. Did you get any names off the houses in the neighborhood?”
    “A few. We’re looking at utilities, of course, but they seem to have all been paid by Mark Towne, the Towne House guy. Apparently they were all rented with utilities