Buried Prey

“And you came to me because you knew it was thin, and you also knew that Marcy and I dated for a while.”

“That was a factor,” Lucas said. “I won’t bullshit you, Dwayne: we do think we’ve got enough, but we know we’re on the edge.”

“Give me one minute to think,” Paulson said. He turned in his desk chair so that his back was to them, and tilted his head back. They looked at his small bald spot for a minute, then two, and finally he turned back and said, “This guy just walked into that house down in Bloomington and opened fire, with no warning.”

“That’s right.”

“It sounds like he’s an absolute danger to himself and others. He may be undergoing a psychotic break.”

“Absolutely,” Del said.

“I wouldn’t give it to you without that. Make a note of that in your app, and I’ll give it to you.”

Lucas took the paperwork from his pocket: “I left space for additional notes,” he said.

THEY LEFT with the warrant in their pockets, and Lucas said, “The more I’ve thought about it, the surer I am. No big thing pointing to him, but a lot of little ones. And he’s a planner. He’s not the kind of guy to leave big clues hanging around.”

Back at the BCA, Lucas called John Simon, the director, and told him what was happening. Simon had almost no control over Lucas’s unit, and resented it, but lived with it. “Just take it easy. I don’t want a bunch of dead people,” he said. “I don’t want any dead people.”

22

Lucas, Del, Jenkins, Shrake, and two crime-scene techs, Norman Johnson and Delores Schmidt, went into Hanson’s house a little after three o’clock in the afternoon.

The place was empty, but lived-in: it smelled like good cooking, there were two dozen plants on the ground floor alone, and more on the stairway and through the second floor, where the bedrooms were. They were well watered and healthy, and the refrigerator was full of fresh food. A two-car garage faced the alley in back, but was empty.

“I was hoping we’d find a dirt bike,” Lucas said.

They began pulling the place apart, starting in the bedrooms and the basement, where people tended to hide things. Schmidt, a computer specialist, went to work on a PC found in the den, and a laptop that was sitting in the kitchen. Using specialist software, she pulled up both passwords in a matter of minutes and began probing the files in the two machines.

“Look for porn,” Lucas told her. “Image files.”

The going was slow: two hours after they arrived, they hadn’t turned up anything decisive, although Lucas found two file boxes full of photographs, and Schmidt found more on the computers—dozens of them included Darrell Hanson. Some of the photos looked exactly like Kelly Barker’s Identi-Kit construction; others did not.

Then Hanson arrived home, driving the white van, a little after six o’clock. Shrake went out to meet him, and Lucas focused on him like a cat on a mouse, his breathing deepening, his eyes dilating. Wanted to smash him—

“He look like the guy?” Jenkins asked. Jenkins was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Lucas as they looked out the back.

“Yeah,” Lucas said. “He does.”

Hanson had a screaming fit, and Lucas watched him have it, stalking around the room, staying one layer of cops away from him, watching him talk to Del and Shrake, Jenkins always at Lucas’s elbow. Hanson was a short, dark-haired man, thick through the chest, with a sallow face and heavy black hair. Del slowed him down, but didn’t calm him down: Hanson called an attorney, who lived a few minutes away, and twenty minutes after he arrived home, the attorney, a fleshy, sandy-haired man in a light blue suit, walked in.

Hanson showed the attorney the warrant that Lucas had served on him, and the attorney told him to sit down and shut up, and told Lucas to direct all questions to him, not to Hanson.

Lucas said, “That’s fine. We may have some questions later.”

Hanson said, “I want to know what’s going on.”

The attorney put a finger across his lips, but Lucas said, “I could give a speech, which doesn’t include any questions.”

The attorney scratched his neck, said to Hanson, “If you want to hear the speech, that’s okay. Do not respond.”

At that moment, Del came in, crooked his finger at Lucas. Lucas followed him through to the kitchen, out of earshot of the attorney and Hanson, and Del said, quietly, “We may have a problem.”

“Yeah?”

“I just looked at the white van,” Del said. “It’s a white van, all right, but both sides and the back are covered with large red roses. He works with some kind of flower farm place, wholesaling flowers. The people who talked to Bloomington, who’d seen the van, didn’t say anything about any roses. It’d be the first thing you noticed.”

“Man . . . I think it’s him,” Lucas said. “He looks right.”

“I don’t know. I got a bad feeling,” Del said. “I think we screwed the pooch.”

“I’m gonna make a speech,” Lucas said.