Buried Prey

paid . . . though not telephone. But, we’ve got no telephone for that address at that time. So, we’re looking. Trying to find old neighbors and so on.”
    “All right. Well, keep me up on it.”
    “Don’t bullshit me, Lucas,” Sherrill said. “I know damn well you’re looking at something over there. What is it?”
    “Doing some research, is all. I’ve got a woman looking for other missing children of the same appearance from the same time. We’re doing the metro area, then I’ll have her do the state, then surrounding states. I don’t know if it’ll be of any use.”
    “That’s fine,” Marcy said. “That’s the kind of support we appreciate. If she finds anybody, let me know.”
    “It’s not a matter of finding anybody,” Lucas said. “She’s already got about twenty possibilities. Probably have fifty by the time she’s done. The problem is, figuring out who ran away, who snuck off to the other parent, and who got murdered. It’s pretty murky.”
    “Well, keep pluggin’,” she said.
    Lucas hung up a minute later and thought, She’s really gonna be pissed when she finds out.
    However dark the killer might have been, Lucas thought, the case lacked the urgency of a crime that happened yesterday: it was interesting in an archaeological way. Solving it would be a feather in Marcy’s cap, but she didn’t have the visceral drive she would if she’d been chasing a guy who was operating right now .
    Lucas did—a little, anyway, because he’d been there when the mistake had been made. After talking to Marcy, he leaned back in his office chair and closed his eyes, trying to remember those faroff days. Where had the time gone? Parts of it seemed so close he should be able to go outside and see it; but, on the other hand, it simultaneously seemed like ancient history.
    He remembered that during that summer, when the Jones girls disappeared, he’d had a brief and satisfactory relationship with a divorce attorney in her late thirties, and not long ago, he’d heard that she’d retired to Florida.
    Retired . . .
     
     
    SANDY POKED HER HEAD in the office: “Got a minute?”
    “Sure.” He pointed at his visitor’s chair.
    “Something interesting,” she said. She had sandy hair that was neither really blond nor really brown; so she was well-named, Lucas thought. She was a self-described hippie, who showed up in shapeless, ankle-length paisley dresses and sandals, under which she had a figure that Lucas found interesting. She was pretty, in a bland way, with brown eyes that were touched with amber, behind old-fashioned round hippie glasses. Beneath it all was an intelligence like a cold, sharp knife.
    Lucas’s agent Virgil Flowers had once dallied with her, Lucas thought, and had gotten cut . . .
    She fussed with a yellow legal pad, then said, “I’ve got one very interesting case, so interesting I pulled it out for a special look. A stranger molestation, or attempted kidnapping, 1991 in Anoka County. The girl’s name was Kelly Bell, and from the photos we have, she looks like a sister to the Joneses. She was twelve, thin, blond, she got jumped while she was crossing a park on her way home from school. A man wielding a knife. Dark-haired, overweight. He tried to force her into a van, but she started screaming and fought back. He slashed her, cut her hands and forearms, but she ran away from him. She thinks the vehicle was a red cargo van, and you mentioned black cargo van when you briefed me. The colors are different, but if you’re right about how the kidnapping happened, and the murder . . . technique’s the same, and the description of the guy is perfect for this Fell person.”
    Lucas said. “They ever ID the guy?”
    “No. Which I thought was another interesting aspect. It was like the Jones thing—where nobody saw anything. Same here. He picked out a place where he knew she’d be, and jumped her,” Sandy said. “It was too well-planned to be a mistake. The sheriff’s deputies got some tire tracks, which they identified as Firestones, replacement tires, and fairly worn. The van was old enough that it needed an alignment—there was some cupping on one of the tires.”
    “This woman’s name was . . . ?”
    “Kelly Bell.”
    “I need to know where Kelly Bell lives, and the cops who did the investigation. I take it we weren’t involved?”
    “No. Anoka PD,” she said. “Vital records shows Kelly Bell got married in oh-five, changed her name to Barker. Husband’s