Buried Prey

name is Todd Barker. They live down in Bloomington.”
    “You got the address?”
    “Of course. And their phone number,” Sandy said.
    “You ever think about getting your ass certified, and becoming a cop?” Lucas asked. “You’d get paid more, and we’d find a place for you here.”
    She was shaking her head. “I’m going to law school. When I finish there, maybe the feds.”
    “Like Clarice Starling . . . Silence of the Lambs .”
    “That’s what I’m thinking,” she said, with her shy, hippie smile.
     
     
    BECAUSE IT WAS LATE in the day, and the pressure was not that intense, Lucas went home for dinner—his daughter Letty was experimenting with vegetarianism, so they ate wheat-based fakechicken cutlets, which Lucas secretly thought weren’t too bad—got the latest news on the pregnancy, and the gossip from the hospital, and then, when the housekeeper was hauling the dishes away to the dishwasher, he slipped into his den and called Kelly Barker.
    She picked up on the third ring, and when he explained who he was, and that he’d like to talk to her about the attack in ’91, she asked, “Does this have anything to do with those girls they dug up?”
    “It might have,” Lucas said. “The man I suspect of killing the Jones girls would have been fairly young at that time, and these kinds of predators don’t usually give up when they’re young. If they don’t get caught, they keep doing it, and the attack on you is pretty similar to what I think might have happened to the Jones girls. And the guy sounds the same. We don’t know who he is, but we may have a description. So if I could sit and talk for a bit . . .”
    “Would we be talking to any TV stations?” Barker asked.
    Lucas leaned back, surprised a bit. “Well, I wouldn’t. That’s not really part of an investigation track.”
    “I ask because I have an ongoing relationship with Channel Three. They did my biography after the stabbing, and I was on several times, few years ago, when Michael McCannlin got arrested for those child murders.”
    Lucas remembered McCannlin, who’d killed three children and wounded two adults in a shooting spree that involved property lines and a kids’ soccer game.
    “I don’t . . .” Lucas began, then, “McCannlin didn’t have anything to do with your case, did he?”
    “No, it’s just because of my attack, I’ve been asked to comment on other ones,” she said.
    “I’m not looking for television, although Jennifer Carey is an old friend, if you know her,” Lucas said.
    “Oh my God, I love her,” Barker said. “So, sure—come on over. When do you want to do it?”
     
     
    RIGHT NOW, he’d said. She lived about twenty minutes from Lucas’s house in St. Paul, so he checked out with Weather, climbed into his Porsche 911, and headed across the Mississippi to Bloomington.
    Another warm night, a night like those when the Jones girls were taken, stars drifting through a hazy ski, humidity so thick you could almost drink the air. Lucas flashed back to the night he’d gone dumpster diving, and had come up with the box of clothing that would kill Scrape; the same kind of night.
    He took I-494 west past the airport and the Mall of America, through Bloomington, then south, and more west, into a neighborhood of sixties ranch-style houses, many of them still lived in by the original owners: not so many kids around, few bikes or trikes, a single Big Wheel over by a lamppost, looking discarded.
    The Barkers lived in a gray-and-white rambler with a cracked driveway and a narrow two-car garage. A sidewalk curled from the driveway up to the front door.
    Lucas got out, rang the bell, and Todd Barker opened the door. “Don’t want to be impolite, but have you got some kind of ID?” he asked.
    “Sure.” Lucas fished out his ID and handed it over. Barker glanced at it, and said, “Okay. Come on in. . . . Uh, I have a pistol here that I’m going to put away. We didn’t know for sure who you might be.”
    “Okay.”
    A woman was sitting on a couch facing a television, which had been muted. She said, “Todd was a little upset that you were coming over.”
    Todd said, “Not exactly upset . . .” He put a Smith & Wesson Airweight in a drawer that popped out of the side of a six-foot-tall grandfather clock, and pushed the door shut. “More like careful. We try to stay in Condition One at all times. Cocked and locked . . . Can I ask what you carry?”
    “Uh, sure,” Lucas said. He pulled back his