Buried Prey

He started up the stairs, caught the flash of the freezer. He stepped back, pulled it open, saw a pile of white meat packages, like the kind butchers use to package venison, and some boxes of sweet corn, and a shoe.

His brain said, What?

He brushed several boxes aside, and saw Brian Hanson’s frosted face and hair.

He thought, Holy shit. After a few seconds, he pushed the boxes of sweet corn back across the dead man’s face, closed the freezer top, and ran up the stairs. Remembered to turn off the basement light and shut the door. Walked to the front door, touched the speed-dial button on his cell phone, and Del said, “What?”

“I’m coming out.”

“Fifteen seconds.”

Lucas turned off the light, stepped out on the porch, pulled the door shut, walked as casually as he could down to the public sidewalk. Del pulled into the curb, and Lucas climbed into the Lexus.

“NO SIGN OF HIM,” Del said, as they pulled away. “No sign of anything. We’re clean. But Jesus, you were in there a long time.”

Lucas said, “Yeah.”

In his mind’s eye, Lucas could see Brian Hanson’s frozen face. He’d never particularly liked Hanson—too old-style for Lucas—but he hadn’t been a bad investigator.

They turned the corner and Del was saying something, and Lucas backtracked: he’d asked, “What’d you get?” and now was looking at Lucas a little oddly. He said, “You in there?”

“I found Brian Hanson dead in the freezer.”

Del laughed, and then stopped laughing. “You shit me. I mean, you were joking, you said something about finding him in the freezer.”

“I shit you not. The guy is down in the freezer in the basement, frozen stiff. He’s got frost all over his face. Freaked me out. And there’s a pile of kiddie porn, and a computer that’s gotta have more stuff—I didn’t look at it—and there’s a file full of stuff from Thailand advertising young girls for sale. Del, you can’t believe the shit in there. He’s some kind of antique dealer, the place is full of junk. . . .”

He went on for a while, and Del finally said, “That’s . . . insane.”

“It’s insane. That’s exactly right. It’s insane.”

They pulled up behind Del’s car, and Lucas stripped off the garden gloves and shoved them in his pocket, and put the rake back in the bag behind the seat, and Del said, “If he’s really insane, he’s gonna wind up spending life at St. Peter.”

St. Peter was the Minnesota hospital for the criminally insane.

Lucas shrugged.

Del said, “Man, if you kill him—”

“I’ve already had that lecture,” Lucas said. “Let it go.”

They sat for a couple of minutes, and then Del said, “If we can get a warrant from anyone, we can go in there tomorrow, clean the place out. We’ll have him in a few hours.”

“Gotta think about it,” Lucas said. “But what we’ve got to do for sure is get Shrake or Jenkins over here, to sit on the place overnight. If Hanson comes in, we’ve got to know about it—we don’t want him hauling his uncle out of there and getting away with it.”

“What else?”

“I got a Verizon bill from him, with his cell phone number. We need to get in touch with Verizon, find out where he’s calling from. Probably need a subpoena.”

“All of this is tomorrow,” Del said. “Let’s get Jenkins over here to sit on the house. Then tomorrow, we drop on him.”

“Don’t want him to go to St. Peter,” Lucas said. “I want to settle this now.”

Del looked at him, then said, “Don’t bullshit me: you’re not doing any more tonight.”

Lucas shook his head: “No. I’m satisfied. We got him—now I’ve got to figure out a way to get him. I’m gonna stop at the store, then I’m heading home.”

“The store?”

“I’m gonna get some Greek yogurt and a six-pack of Coke, so I’ll have it in my hand when Letty jumps me,” Lucas said. He grinned in the dark. “She’s a piece of work. And turn off your cell, so she can’t call you. I want her up all night, worrying about what happened.”

“That’s mean,” Del said.

“That’s life,” Lucas said. “You mess with someone, you can’t bitch too much when they return the favor. Even when it’s your daughter.”

23

Lucas crawled into bed and lay awake for an hour, trying to work out how they would take Roger Hanson. He thought they might have two days, before word got around that his team was working on something solid. After that, the law enforcement bureaucrats would get into it, trying to slice off a piece of the credit for breaking the case—and capturing the killer of a well-liked cop. When they got involved, it’d turn into a snake hunt, with cops all over the state beating the bushes, trying to drive Hanson into the open.

Lucas had a couple of huge advantages: he knew who the killer was, and he knew how to find him, through the cell phone. But to avoid curiosity about how he knew—about the black bag job—he needed to lay down a logical trail of deduction. He had some help on that from Darrell Hanson and his wife, who’d pointed the finger at Roger. A pointing finger wasn’t enough to get a warrant, then go on to an arrest, but it was a start.