Buried Prey

talk. Want her to talk about John Fell.”
    “If it is John Fell—”
    “It is. . . . You take care of Berg?”
    “Yeah. He’ll be out tonight. I don’t want to fuck with it.”
     
     
    LUCAS TOOK THE WHEEL, and they headed across town to Fairview Southdale, a trauma center four or five miles north of the Barker house. They parked outside the emergency exit, threw the “Police” card on the dashboard, and went inside. Two Bloomington uniformed cops saw them coming and pushed off a counter they’d been leaning against. Lucas held up his ID and asked, “Is Kelly Barker still here?”
    “Up in surgical waiting,” one of them said, and pointed the way.
    Barker, when they found her, was sitting upright in an overstuffed chair, but was sound asleep. A Minneapolis cop sat on the couch across from her, reading a copy of Modern Hospital . Lucas introduced himself and Del, and the cop said, “She’s been trying to get some sleep.”
    Lucas said, “Kelly,” and touched her shoulder, and she started, her eyes popping open. She looked at Lucas for a minute, as though she didn’t recognize him, then shook her head and said, “Is he all right?”
    “We just got here,” Lucas said. “We don’t know the status on anyone.”
    “That lady police officer died.”
    “Yeah . . .”
    “She seemed nice. It’s so awful,” Barker said. “Everything was going so well this morning and afternoon, and then this man . . .”
    It all came out in a gush; what they’d been talking about, the man at the door, the explosion of gunfire, the screaming of the wounded, the rush to the hospital.
    “They say the man was shot, but I don’t see how. The police officer, Buster, was upside down on the floor; he shot two times, I think, but they say he might have hit him.”
    “There was a blood trail,” Lucas said. “It’s the only good thing to come out of this whole disaster. All we have to do now is identify him: we’ve got all the proof we need, if we can just lay our hands on him.”
    “How are you going to do that?”
    “I’ve got John Retrief headed this way with a laptop. Since you’re waiting here on the operation, we were hoping you’d help revise the head shot.”
    “Sure. I’m lined up to go on WCCO and KSTP tomorrow. Channel Three wants me but I told them I couldn’t do it until noon, and I told them all I needed like, heavy makeup, because I’m so distraught.”
    Lucas thought: she didn’t look all that distraught, and he felt the anger burning away in his chest. He pushed it back and asked, “What about Todd? What’ve you heard?”
    “Only that he’s shot pretty bad, there’re some holes in his lungs and they have to reconstruct his shoulder when he’s recovered enough to do it,” she said. “They brought Buster out a while ago; he’s in recovery—or maybe he’s out by now—there are some more police officers down there. If it wasn’t for Buster shooting that nut, we’d all be dead now.”
    The shooter, she told him, had a heavy square-cut black beard like some Iranians she saw on television. “But it was him—it was my stalker, all right. I saw his eyes. I thought he was going to kill me.”
    They talked awhile longer, then Lucas called Retrief and was told that he’d just passed the airport and was probably fifteen minutes away. “As soon as you’re done with Miz Barker, I want you to send copies to all the media outlets you’ve got,” Lucas said. “Everyone in the state. And down to Des Moines, out to Fargo, over to Milwaukee, with a response back to us. Tag it with something about a Midwestern serial killer of young girls, so it attracts some attention outside the state. Localize it for them.”
    “I’ll do it—too late for the regular news tonight, but they’ll all have it at the crack of dawn tomorrow.”

    THEY LEFT BARKER on the couch, and stopped by the intensive care ward, where Buster Hill was sitting slightly upright. Two Minneapolis detectives were sitting with him, nodded when Lucas and Del stepped in.
    “Thought you might come by,” said the older of the two cops, a guy named Les MacBride. He turned to Hill: “Davenport and Capslock, BCA.” The younger of the two detectives was named Clarence.
    “Heard of you from Marcy,” Hill said to Lucas and Del. “God, this is the most awful day of my life. She was such a great kid.”
    “How’re you doing?” Lucas asked.
    “Hurts,” Hill said. “But . . . the thing about Marcy is what’s got me really