Buried Prey

quick conversations about Marcy Sherrill; by the time he went out the door, he was hurrying to get away from it. Twenty minutes later, he was back at the BCA headquarters in St. Paul. He called in Sandy, the researcher, and outlined Del’s idea about possible practice teachers. Her eyes narrowed as he talked, and she said, “I’ll try, but I’d be willing to bet that the schools don’t track that stuff. I’d probably have to go out to the teachers’ colleges, teachertraining courses. I don’t know—”
    “Give it a try,” Lucas said.
    When Sandy was gone, he looked up Willard Packard, and learned that he was still on the job. His driver’s license ID showed a square-built balding man with dark hair and glasses—he had a corrective lens restriction on his license—weighing 230 pounds. He was clean-shaven.
     
     
    DEL CALLED and asked what Lucas wanted to do: “I’m going out to Woodbury to talk to a cop. You could ride along.”
    “See you in ten minutes,” Del said. “Want me to pick you up a Diet Coke?”
    “Yeah, that’d be good.”
    Lucas needed to check off Packard, just to get the name out of his hair, but had lost faith in the prospect of Packard being the killer—too many things were a bit off. He didn’t look quite right, and the man who shot Marcy, now that he thought about it, hadn’t used the gun like a trained police officer. The gun itself might be a common police weapon, but the shooter apparently hadn’t behaved like a cop.
    Probably. But then you really couldn’t tell how a cop would behave in a shooting situation, until you’d seen him in one. You hoped the training worked, but there was no guarantee.
    He sat thinking about that for a moment, groped for something else, realized he was treading water. He picked up the phone and called Bob Hillestad, a friend in Minneapolis Homicide, on his cell phone. Hillestad said, without preamble, “It’s a bitch, huh?”
    “Yeah, it is,” Lucas said. “Where’re you hosers at? You got anything at all?”
    “No. We got nothin’. Wait: we got that DNA, and we’ll run it through the database. It’s like everybody’s got both hands wrapped around their dicks, saying, ‘He’ll be in the database.’ Maybe he will be, but I don’t believe it, yet.”
    “Heard anything from Bloomington?”
    “A couple of people saw a white van leaving the neighborhood, pretty fast, at the right time. So Bloomington’s getting a list of white van owners. You know how many that’ll be? Someplace up in the five-digit area, is what they’re telling me. They’re saying it could go to six digits.”
    “Good luck on that,” Lucas said.
    “We’re all scratching around like a bunch of hens,” Hillestad said. “You guys got anything?”
    “I decided to look at one guy based on nothing, and he’s not gonna work out. You know who’s getting that list for Bloomington?”
    “No, but they’re going through the DMV. You could check over there.”
    Lucas rang off, called the DMV, got routed around, and finally came up with a database guy who was doing the list for Bloomington. “I’m not a cop, but it’s absurd. What’re they going to do with it? On the other hand, it takes ten minutes and I don’t have to print it out—I’m just sending an electronic file, so, no skin off my butt.”
    “Once you get the file, can you alphabetize it by the owners’ names?” Lucas asked.
    “Sure.” There was a slurp at the other end; the guy had a cup of coffee. “You want me to shoot it to you?”
    “Not yet—but put the list somewhere you can get at it. Hey, wait, could you do something to scan it, see if you’ve got a guy named Willard Packard on it?”
    “Hang on. Give me a couple of minutes.”
    The guy went away, and Del came in and Lucas pointed him at a chair, covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said, “Just a minute. Talking to the DMV.”
    The DMV guy came back and said, “No Willard Packard on the white van list, but I looked up Willard Packard out in Woodbury, and he’s got a champagne Toyota minivan and a blue Ford Explorer. Champagne, white, not that close, but they’re both light.”
    “Thanks. Keep the list active,” Lucas said. He hung up and said to Del, “Our guy owns a champagne minivan, but not a white one.”
    “Eyewitnesses suck,” Del said. “Let’s go jack him up.”
     
     
    THEY JACKED UP Packard about one-millionth of an inch, and then he unjacked himself. He lived in an apartment complex behind a