Buried Prey

will that take?”
    “Sit here,” she said. She got up and left the office. Five minutes later she came back and said, “You’re good to go. The chief called Cody Ryan down in IA. He’s waiting for you.”
    “Thanks. I’ll keep you guys up-to-date. It’s sort of a reach. . . .”
    “Do stay in touch,” she said. “We’re putting everything we’ve got on this thing. But if it should turn out to be a cop, or an ex-cop . . .” She rubbed her face. “Ah, God, I hate to think about that. I mean, at this point, I gotta tell you, I don’t believe it’ll be that way.”
     
     
    CODY RYAN WAS another cop who’d moved into his job after Lucas left the Minneapolis force; Lucas knew him not at all. Which was good, since Lucas had been pushed off the force by IA, after he’d finally beaten up Randy Whitcomb for church-keying the face of one of his street contacts.
    Ryan was a bluff, square man with gold-wire-rimmed glasses and a red face, a white shirt, and a red tie and blue slacks. Lucas introduced himself and Ryan said, “I just looked up your file. You were a bad boy.”
    “I shouldn’t have hit him the last thirty times,” Lucas said. “The first thirty were pure self-defense.”
    Ryan gestured at a chair: “Yeah, well . . . saw the pictures of the chick who got church-keyed. That might tend to piss you off. So: who’re we looking up?”
    Lucas gave him the list of names, and Ryan started punching up computer files. He had records on six of the nine, nothing at all on the other three. “Makes me think they didn’t work here,” he said. “Might have gotten turned down for one reason or another. You’d have to go to the general personnel records for that. I don’t know if they’d have them that far back.”
    “What do we have on the six?”
    Ryan hit a Print button, and started passing the files over to Lucas. Four of the six were clean in IA’s eyes—minor citizen complaints that didn’t amount to much. Only one of the four was still on the force, a patrol sergeant working out of the second precinct. Lucas checked his dates: he’d come out of the last class that Lucas had looked at, which meant that he’d be close to the prime age for the killer. The file included an ID photograph; the guy wore glasses and really didn’t look much like Barker’s reconstruction. He was square, but not fat.
    The other three had come out of earlier classes; two had quit the force relatively early on, one had retired. Nothing in the IA reports suggested that any of them had ever had problems with women.
    Of the two with more serious IA reports, one was for excessive use of force on three separate occasions, but with nothing involving sex. The final one involved a complaint by a dancer that the officer, a Willard Packard, had pressured her for sex, suggesting that there might be some benefits in sleeping with a police officer.
    Packard had replied that he suspected the woman of prostitution, and had moved her along when he found her loitering outside the club, talking with customers. He said she was clearly soliciting, and had filed the complaint as a way of getting back at him.
    An IA investigator named John Seat had concluded that both might be telling the truth—that she had been soliciting, and that Packard might have pressured her for freebies. Seat had been unable to come up with any hard evidence, and when the complainant told IA that she was tired of the whole thing and wanted to drop the complaint, the investigation ended and Packard walked.
    Packard continued with the force for another three years, then resigned, with a note that he’d gone to work with a suburban department east of St. Paul.
    “Sounds to me like Seat was pretty sure he was pushing her, but what are you gonna do? It’s all talk, no action, and no witnesses,” Ryan said.
    Lucas looked at a photograph: There was a resemblance to the Identi-Kit portrait, though Packard had a bulbous nose, and Barker had shown the killer’s nose as harsh and angled. But eyewitnesses, like Barker, were notoriously unreliable. That she could assemble a coherent image at all, that was picked out by other witnesses, was unusual. Getting a nose wrong—making it more “evil”—was a small enough thing. “Think I’ll look him up,” Lucas said. “Our guy used to go to a massage parlor. He liked his hookers.”
    “Long time ago, though,” Ryan said. “He could be dead.”
     
     
    ON HIS WAY OUT, three different detectives hooked Lucas into