Buried Prey

“Hanging out until I can give you stuff to do—errands, nailing it down,” Lucas said. “When we get enough, we’ll go for a warrant. But before we do anything official, I want to know where he is, and be headed in that direction. The word’s gonna start leaking that we’re up to something.”

Sandy came back: “You were right. That’s his phone number, and he is with Verizon. We need a warrant to find out where his phone is coming from.”

“A warrant? Or just a subpoena? We don’t want to listen to him, we just want to know where he is.”

She said, “I didn’t split that hair. I’ve got the name of the guy we need to talk to at Verizon.”

Lucas said to Del, “Call the guy, try to whittle him down to a subpoena, then talk to the lawyers.”

Del nodded. Lucas said to Sandy, “Photos, next. Everything you can get in the next five minutes. Start with his driver’s license.”

She and Del left together, and Jenkins came in with a piece of paper in his hand. “I happened to look in the garage, and there was a dirt bike parked in there. I wrote the tag number on this piece of scrap paper.”

“That was lucky,” Lucas said. “Be sure you put the scrap paper in the file. Did you run it?”

“I did. The bike is registered to Brian Hanson.”

Shrake said, “We got him.”

“I think so,” Lucas said. “Listen, Sandy’ll have those photos in a minute. I’ve talked to three different women about them, and I want you guys to run them down, have them look at Roger’s face.”

He gave them phone numbers and addresses for Dorcas Ryan, Lucy Landry, and Kelly Barker. They took the information, and as they left, Lucas said, “Make it as fast as you can. Get the IDs, and get back here.”

WITH EVERYBODY OCCUPIED, Lucas walked up to the DNA lab and talked to the head of the unit, Gerald Taski, who was still excited about the hit on Darrell Hanson’s DNA. “This is the first time it’s happened with us,” Taski said. “But it opens up lots of possibilities. Say you get some DNA, and you think you know who the bad guy is, but you’re not sure, and you don’t want him to know that you’re looking at him. So you go to some other family member for DNA—you know, as a volunteer or you compel it with some other arrest—and use that DNA to nail down the first guy.”

“That makes me a little uncomfortable,” Lucas said. “Sounds like something the Nazis would think of.”

“But think of the efficiency,” Taski said.

“That’s what the Nazis would have thought of,” Lucas said.

“There’s a thing on the Net known as a corollary to Godwin’s Law, which says that the first guy to mention Nazis in a discussion, loses,” Taski said.

“I don’t want to know about Nazis,” Lucas said. “What I want from you is a piece of paper I can put in a warrant application that says the DNA from Bloomington is X number of degrees away from the killer. Like three or four degrees, whatever it is.”

“You think it’ll help identify him?” Taski asked.

“It already has. We got him, we just need a warrant,” Lucas said. “So . . . the piece of paper?”

SANDY CAME IN and said, “Moorhead wants a subpoena. The universities are pretty tight.”

“Isn’t Virgil over there somewhere? I think he just told me he was over there.” He stuck his head out of his office and called to his secretary, “Hey—where’s Virgil?”

“Pope County,” she said.

“Isn’t that close to Moorhead?”

She said, “Let me look at the map,” and she went off to a wall map, then called back, “It’s a ways, but right up I-94. Probably a hundred miles or so.”

Lucas went to his cell phone, and got Virgil: “You still in Pope County?”

“Until I finish eating breakfast,” Virgil said. “Then I’m heading home.”

“You’re not far from Moorhead, right?”

“Ah, shit,” Virgil said.

“You’re gonna need a subpoena,” Lucas said. “It’ll be waiting for you when you get there.”

LUCAS GOT EVERYBODY steppin’ and fetchin’, then retreated to his office and thought about it. He had enough for a warrant, but he really needed to find out where Roger Hanson was hiding out. He called Del: “What are we getting from Verizon?”

“I think we’re okay, but their lawyers are talking to our lawyers, and I think we’re gonna be prohibited from listening in . . . but we’ll be able to get where his phone calls are coming from.”

“That’s all we need. How long?”

“Well, we gotta wade through all this legal bullshit, and then it should be quick. It’s the legal bullshit that’s holding us up.”

“Stay on it. Push hard,” Lucas said.

AN HOUR AFTER he and Jenkins left, Shrake came back from St. Paul Park, having spoken to Dorcas Ryan, and said, “She says he looks more like Fell than the first guy you showed her. Said she’s still not a hundred percent, but she’s ninety-five percent.”

Jenkins called on his way in: he’d spoken to both Lucy Landry and Kelly Barker, and Landry agreed that the photo looked more like Fell than the first one—and Barker said she was a hundred percent that he was the attacker. “She says she’s absolutely sure.”

“All right. Get in here. We’re going for the guy, as soon as we get his location.”