Buried Prey

shoot. They had a kind of tight-jawed routine—“Better to have a gun and not need it, than need one and not have it”—but behind that, he thought, was an urge.
    And the idea that they could take care of themselves was an illusion: put an asshole behind a bush, in the night, with a shotgun, and you were gonna get shot.
    Lucas had shot a number of people in his life, and found shootings always involved a bureaucratic nightmare and sometimes a few lawsuits; all in all, with a couple of exceptions, he’d prefer not to shoot. For Lucas, shooting wasn’t important; what was important was the hunt.
    Now he felt a quickening at the heart.
    Because he’d gotten a sniff of the quarry, he thought. John Fell was eighty percent the man who’d attacked Barker. The hunt was under way.

11
    Del was playing with a new camera when Lucas came in the next morning. “That fuckin’ Flowers got me interested,” Del said. “I’m taking a photography class at night.”
    “Weather gave me one,” Lucas said. “Kinda interesting. Wish I had more time for it. . . . So did you get free?”
    “I’m cool,” Del said. “What’d you find out yesterday?”
    Lucas told him about talking to Marcy Sherrill, about calling the schools, about Sandy finding Kelly Barker, and his conversation with Kelly and Todd Barker.
    “I may be wrong, but I’ve got the feeling that if we go to a full-court press, we’ll track him down pretty quickly,” Lucas said. “I’m at least eighty percent that it’s Fell who went after Barker, and ninety-five percent that Fell killed the Jones girls. If we get a name, all we need to do is get a DNA sample and run it against the Anoka sample.”
    “Won’t necessarily get him for the Jones killings that way,” Del said.
    “You told me back the first time I met you, that knowing was pretty important. Once we know . . .”
    “Sure—but it’s a bigger deal with drug dealers and burglars and people like that,” Del said. “People who are committing crimes five times a week. If you know, you’ll get them, sooner or later. But if they’re committing a crime once a year, and if they quit doing it ten years ago, that’s a whole different problem.”
    “It is,” Lucas agreed. “But not an insoluble one.”
     
     
    THEY SAT in Lucas’s office for an hour, plotting and making phone calls. The first went out to Anoka County, where, after some runarounds, Lucas talked to a detective named Dave Carson. He gave Carson a quick explanation of the Jones case, and then got the bad news: “There was apparently some tissue collected at the time, but the DNA analysis got screwed up . . . by, uh, you guys,” Carson said. “It was right after the lab opened, and there wasn’t much tissue, and the test failed. I don’t know why.”
    “Was any tissue saved?” Lucas asked.
    “No. It’s gone. We’ve been told since then that if we’d stored it for a few months, or a year or so, until techniques got better, we’d have been okay,” Carson said. “As it is . . . we got nothing.”
    “Who knows about it?”
    “Well, a couple of us guys here,” Carson said. “And maybe a couple guys at the BCA, if they’re still at the lab. I mean, it was twenty years ago, pretty near.”
    “Okay. Listen, if the question comes up, don’t mention this,” Lucas said. “We might want to put a little pressure on the suspect—let him think that we’ve got the DNA.”
    “Fine by us,” Carson said.
    “That didn’t sound good,” Del said, when Lucas got off the phone.
    “It wasn’t.” He explained what Carson had told him. “Goddamnit, if we had the DNA, all we’d have to do is identify the guy, and we’d have him.” He turned and looked out his window, where a police van was just pulling up to evidence intake.
    Another nice day. Hot, but not too hot.
    They sat and thought about it.
    “Are you going to talk to Ruffe? See if you can light a fire under Minneapolis?” Del asked after a while. Ruffe Ignace was a moderately trustworthy reporter at the Star Tribune . Trustworthy because he had an acute sense of where, how, and by whom his bread got buttered; but only moderately trustworthy because he was intensely ambitious.
    Lucas said, “Yeah. If we do it now . . .” He looked at the clock, found Ignace’s number on his computer, picked up the phone, and punched in the number.
    Ignace came up on his cell: “What?”
    “This is Davenport, over at the BCA.”
    “Tall guy, dark hair, constantly relives his