Buried Prey

“What about this car?”

“I’ll take it. We’ll drop my car somewhere, I’ll let you out in front of the house, then go around the block and park where I can see his driveway.”

Lucas nodded. “Thanks.”

They did that, and when Del took the wheel of the Lexus, he said, “Not that I’m happy about it.”

“You don’t have to do it.”

“Yes, I do,” Del said. “I got this vague memory of talking you out of chasing John Fell, way back when. Saying it was pointless. I wonder how many girls are dead because of it?”

“I’ve been sick about it,” Lucas said, staring stolidly through the windshield. “But even if we’d identified him, what were we going to do with it? We had no bodies, we had no witnesses, we had a dead guy whose fingerprints were on that fuckin’ box. . . .”

“Still . . .”

“Yeah. Still.”

THEY CIRCLED the block one more time, checking houses with lights: the house across the street from Hanson’s had lights, as did the one on the left. “If we’re gonna do it, best not to circle again,” Del said.

“Drop me off,” Lucas said, and pulled on the gloves.

Lucas climbed out in front of the lights-out house, walked quickly down the sidewalk and then up the walk to Hanson’s place, and rang the doorbell. Rang it again, did a quick check around, pulled out the rake, rang the doorbell again, and slipped the rake into the lock. The rake sounded like somebody shaking a tray of dinner forks: not hard, just shaking it a little. Lucas kept the turning pressure on the lock, and felt it go.

He took the knob, turned it, called, “Hey, Roger. You home?”

No answer. He stepped inside, pushed the door shut, and turned on the light. Burglary notes: if you’re burglarizing a house, don’t go through the door and leave the house dark, and look around with the flashlight. The neighbors will call the cops. On the other hand, turning on the light is absolutely normal.

Lucas called out again: “Hey, Hanson? Hey . . .”

Silence.

He started moving, going swiftly through the living room, through the kitchen to the back door. He unlocked it, cracked it open. Then back through the house, checking the three bedrooms. One had been turned into an office, one was filled with what looked like junk, the other held a bed. The bed was covered with twisted blankets, as though the sleeper had been struggling with them.

He spent three minutes in the bedroom, quickly pulling out drawers, checking through them, finding nothing interesting but a switchblade and, in another drawer, two ball bearings in a sock, the ball bearings the diameter of a fifty-cent piece. He’d seen similar things used as saps, but the ball bearings were so heavy that if you hit someone on the head with them, you’d kill them. Must be some other use he was unaware of . . . or maybe Hanson collected ball bearings.

In the bedroom closet, he found a stash of what looked like old printed pornography, in a stack four feet high. The magazines were cheaply printed, apparently in Asia, and featured girls who were too young.

Lucas thought, Yes.

And he flashed back to the porn he’d found in Scrape’s box. This was similar, but a decade or two newer. The same genre.

They had him, and it was time to go, he thought.

HE DIDN’T GO. His appetite whetted by the discovery in the bedroom, he checked out the office, and found a jumbled mass of income tax returns. He flipped through the recent ones, found declared incomes of $30,000 to $40,000, and business cards identifying Roger Hanson as an antique dealer, which explained the junk in the bedroom.

He found a file full of bank statements: the most recent one showed a balance of $789; and a file of Visa statements, showing a balance of $4,560. Hanson was broke. He found a drawer full of bills, thumbed them, pulled out a cell phone bill from Verizon and shoved it in his pocket.

He found a fat file stuffed with homemade brochures from Thailand, printed on color laser printers, advertising sex tours; and offering teenage girls. He put it back in place.

Listened. Nothing. No call from Del, yet. Risk was building. Looked at his watch: he’d been inside for eight minutes; the max he’d wanted to risk was five, and he was already three over.

But two more minutes . . .

He hurried through the kitchen to the back door. He pulled it closed, locked it as it had been. Checked a closet, saw nothing of interest. Opened another door, saw a steep stairs going into the basement. Flipped on a light, took the stairs, quickly as he could: two rooms: one a utility room with a washer, drier, washtub, furnace, water heater, a top-opening freezer.

The other side was filled with more junk—old, but not antiques. Weather bought antiques, and the antiquing trips had given Lucas the rudiments of an eye. His eye told him that this stuff was junk.

Glance at his watch: ten minutes. Time to run. His phone rang: Del.

“Yeah?”

“Get out of there, man,” Del said. “You been in there ten minutes.”

“Somebody coming?”

“Not yet,” Del said.

“I’m coming.”