Buried Prey

times like the bike’s seat was about three feet up his butt.
    When he finally got back to his house, he pushed the bike into the garage at the back and staggered inside, left his clothes in a heap and lurched into a shower. He had saddle sores, he thought; he couldn’t see them, but he could feel them, flat burns on the inside of his legs. As to the hemorrhoids . . .
     
     
    LUCAS, ON THE OTHER HAND, was completely comfortable, and perhaps even self-satisfied, especially after he went out to recover the Star Tribune . As Ignace had suggested, his story was on the front page: “Cop Says Jones Killer Probably Murdered More Girls.” Excellent. Marcy would have a spontaneous hysterectomy when she read that, and the Minneapolis cops might actually start working the case.
    He left the house an hour later with three names and addresses written in his notebook—the three former massage-parlor women, Lucy Landry, Dorcas Ryan, and Mary Ann Ang, whose last name was now Morgan. He’d interviewed the first two on his own, back in the eighties, and the third one with Del. He hadn’t remembered any of their names or what they looked like, but recognized Dorcas Ryan when she opened the screen door of her St. Paul Park home and he introduced himself. She said, “Man, it’s been a while.”
    “Yes, it has,” Lucas said.
    Ryan’s house was a little run-down, and not the neatest of places, but no less tidy than his would have been if he’d been living alone, Lucas thought. Like most people, he carried certain models in his head for old acquaintances. He’d often seen hookers go from fresh-faced high school girls to broken-down, sorrylooking creatures of twenty-two or twenty-three, with coke or meth habits, who seemed destined to slide into a grave before they were thirty.
    Ryan, on the other hand, looked pretty much like a schoolteacher or bookkeeper in her late forties or early fifties, one who took care of herself. She was dressed in jeans, a neat collar blouse, and loafers. She invited him inside, offered him a Coke. He declined, sat in her one easy chair while she took the couch.
    “You remember why I came to talk to you back then?” he asked.
    “Oh, yes. The Jones kids. I was amazed when they were dug up—I guess you were, too.”
    “I was,” Lucas said. “You remember the guy I was looking for? John Fell.”
    “Sure. We were talking about him for weeks. He never came back.”
    Lucas took a bundle of papers out of the briefcase he’d brought with him, and handed them to her. “I want you to look at a bunch of faces, and see if Fell is one of them.”
    “All right . . . Huh. Not real photographs . . .” She began shuffling through the Identi-Kit pictures, taking them one at a time, slowly. “They’re all pretty much alike. . .”
    Lucas had chosen a dozen faces, all with dark hair and round, heavy faces. She went through them, pulled a couple, compared them, and handed one to Lucas. “There’s something about this face. It’s got something. I think it might be him.”
    She’d chosen the face that Barker had put together, and Lucas felt the hunter’s pleasure uncoil in his stomach. Most cases had a moment or two when a fact or an idea snapped into focus, when you knew you’d just taken a large step, and this was one of those times.
    He nodded at her: “Thank you,” he said.
    “Are you looking up the rest of the girls?”
    “Lucy Landry and Mary Ann Ang,” Lucas said. “Those were the ones I could find, along with you.”
    “Lucy’s had a hard time,” Ryan said. “First she got Jesus, probably fifteen years ago, and that didn’t work out, so she tried Scientology, and that didn’t help, but it cost a lot of money, so she tried Buddhism and yoga, and those didn’t work, so she started drinking. I think that helped, because she’s still drinking.”
    “Sorry to hear that,” Lucas said. “What about Mary Ann Ang?”
    She shook her head. “Haven’t thought about her in years. I can barely remember her face. I do remember that she married a rich guy—like maybe a doctor. Had some kids. I’m not sure that anybody knows that she ever worked with us. She was only there a couple of months.”
    “Think it would mess her up if I interviewed her?”
    Ryan tipped her head: “That was not a good time, back then, you know . . . for any of us. We’re lucky we lived through it. If she’s doing good, jeez, it’d be an awful shame to mess her up.”
     
     
    LUCY LANDRY LIVED in an apartment