Buried Prey

Lucas was yelling out reasons why it couldn’t be right: one of the best hospitals in the metro area was five minutes from the Barkers’ house; they would have transported her no matter what, there was a lot of confusion, that fuckin’ Jenkins had it wrong.
    Del just drove and once in a while, shook his head. Jenkins, he believed, wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. He was a thug, but a smart one, and not insensitive. He didn’t say it, kept his foot down and shook his head as Lucas shouted out possibilities.
     
     
    THERE WERE BLOOMINGTON COPS all over the place, and the street down to Barker’s house was blocked off. Del rolled the Lexus past the blocking black-and-white, hanging his BCA credentials out the window, and put the truck in a vacant spot a halfblock from the Barker house.
    They climbed down and jogged past a half-dozen uniformed Bloomington cops coming and going, cutting across a couple of yards, swerving around a loop of crime-scene tape to a detective standing out in the yard. He looked up as Lucas and Del came up and said, “I know you—”
    “Davenport and Capslock, with the BCA,” Lucas said. “We heard that Marcy Sherrill was down. Is she . . . ?”
    The cop shook his head: “You were with Minneapolis, right?”
    “Yeah, we both were. We’re close friends of hers.”
    “I’m John Rimes, I’m running the scene right now. I’ll let you go in,” he said. “But you might not want to . . . have to go around to the side door.”
    “Man, she’s . . .” Lucas held his hands out, palms up, pleading.
    Rimes nodded. “She’s gone. We got two more down, another cop named Buster Hill, and Todd Barker, the husband here—”
    “Aw, man.” Lucas stopped, put his hand to his forehead. Del put a hand on his shoulder. “Aw . . . can’t be right.”
    “I’m sorry,” Rimes said.
    “I interviewed them a couple days ago; this is part of the Jones investigation,” Lucas said, as they walked around to the side of the house. A kind of black dread was enveloping his brain. “I talked to Marcy a couple times today.”
    Del said, “Easy . . .”
    Lucas shook him off. “I’m okay.”
    Rimes said, “Hill got off a couple of shots and it looks like he hit the guy—we’ve got a blood trail going around the side of the house over to the next street. Not much, but it’s a trail.”
    Del asked, as they went through the side door, “Anybody get the tags?”
    “No, but a guy down the street said it was a white cargo van. . . . Of course, there are only about thirty thousand of those.”
    Lucas said to Del, “It’s him. It’s the van. It’s the guy.”
    Rimes asked, “Who?” but Lucas shook his head.
    Then they were crossing a kitchen toward a crowd of people in the living room, and Rimes said, “Make a hole,” and people stepped back and Lucas looked down and suddenly, shockingly, saw Marcy, eyes still open, faceup on the living room rug, only a small hole under her chin, but a big puddle of blood under her neck. She was wearing a white silky blouse with bloody handprints down the front, where somebody had tried to tend to her. Her eyes were blank as the sky.
    “Aw, Christ,” he said, and he began to shake.
    Around her, the house was a shambles, overturned chairs and blood tracks on the carpet, telling the story.
    “This Hill guy was hit in the leg. He started screaming for an ambulance, but she was gone,” Rimes said. “He said he knew she was gone the minute he looked at the wound. Hill’s gonna be okay, the husband’s hurt bad, but he’ll make it. He took two in the chest and one in the shoulder. . . . Sherrill was hit right under the chin.”
    “Took out her spinal cord,” said a crime-scene guy. “Instantaneous. Like she was decapitated.”
    Rimes shook his head at the guy and said, “Thank you,” and the guy looked at Lucas’s face and went away.
    Rimes said, “The woman, this Kelly Barker, she wasn’t hurt. She said the shooter was a big fat guy with a black beard. We’re gonna get DNA on him, so he’s toast if we can put our hands on him.”
    Rimes’s voice was quiet, but intense, a recitation of what he’d learned since he took over the scene. He asked Lucas, “You need to sit down?”
    Lucas turned toward Del but he couldn’t find his voice, couldn’t even find any spit in his mouth, not enough moisture to force out a word, and he shook his head and went back through the kitchen and out to the backyard and sat down on the grass.
    Del was on his