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Buried Prey

MARCY SHERRILL WAS CREMATED, and her ashes spread on her family’s farm. Brian Hanson was buried in a veterans’ cemetery. The two Jones girls were buried in a plot next to their grandparents, in St. Paul. Lucas went to all of the funerals. He had no idea what happened to Roger Hanson’s body, and didn’t care.

TODD BARKER ALMOST DIED from lung infections, but in the end, didn’t. Kelly Barker made several more appearances on Channel Three, talking about the experience of being shot at, and then helping her husband with his recovery; she never made Oprah. Jennifer Carey, who did most of the interviews, told Lucas later that Todd Barker thought his main mistake was, he hadn’t gone to the door with a gun in his hand. “He says he’s never going to make that mistake again,” Carey told Lucas. “He’s even bought a couple of new ones. He’s got a garage gun now, for when he takes the garbage out.”

DARRELL HANSON and his wife went through some preliminary motions to sue the state for damage to their house caused by the search, but settled out of court for a minor payment. One of the state lawyers, whom Lucas knew, said that the prospect of being publicly tied to Roger Hanson had changed their minds, especially since the search had produced the DNA test of Darrell Hanson, and had pointed the finger at Roger.

THE BCA’S LAB BOSS did a number of interviews about the use of DNA to spot a killer through tests done on a relative. He suggested that it opened whole new doors to a time when, effectively, everybody in the country would be traceable through DNA. He had T-shirts printed that said “DNA,” and, beneath that, “World Tour.” Everybody thought they looked cheap and ugly, but Lucas’s housekeeper found that they made excellent dust rags.

LUCAS WAS LARGELY HEALED in two weeks. Weather took the stitches out, humming as she did it. It hurt a little, but that didn’t seem to bother her.

LUCAS FINALLY SAT ALONE in his den, when the house was momentarily empty, and thought about it all. He hadn’t been responsible for the Jones girls’ kidnapping—that’d been all Hanson. The VHS tapes suggested that Hanson hadn’t had the girls very long before he killed them, so even if Lucas had pushed, and had been successful, he couldn’t have saved them.

All those others, though . . . he might have saved them if he’d persisted in his hunt for John Fell. Weather kept telling him that it wasn’t a perfect world, and anyway, he wasn’t perfect. Things would happen. Good, hardworking, innocent people died of cancer all the time—and Hanson had simply been a cancer in the social system.

Lucas knew all that was true, but it was not something he could emotionally buy into. He didn’t believe he could fix the world, but he felt like he could.

He just had to try harder.

ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

Rules of Prey

Shadow Prey

Eyes of Prey

Silent Prey

Winter Prey

Night Prey

Mind Prey

Sudden Prey

The Night Crew

Secret Prey