Buried Prey

Carter’s whole life had been pointed toward retirement; and he had such an enormous gut on him, Lucas thought it unlikely that he’d live for more than a few years into it.

The thought of Carter again brought up the faces of the dead Jones girls, grinning their bony smiles through the yellow plastic at the bottom of the condo excavation. The Jones girls . . .

JUST AFTER DAWN, Lucas rolled out of bed and padded down the hall in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, down the stairs to the front porch. He cracked the front door and peeked outside. There were three newspapers scattered down the walk, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Star Tribune, and the New York Times.

The Times, the one he didn’t want at the moment, was closest; the Pioneer Press was six feet farther out, the Star Tribune five feet beyond that. He didn’t want to go running out in his shorts if, say, a troop of Girl Scouts were passing by. No young girls were in sight, and he pushed the door open, trotted down the sidewalk to the Star Tribune, grabbed it, snatched the Pioneer Press on the way back, and got to the door two seconds before it closed and latched itself.

Someday, he thought, it’d snap shut with him outside. Probably in the winter. The obvious solution would be to unlock the door, but then he’d forget to lock it, as would everybody else, and the door would be open all the time.

Besides, he got a little thrill from beating the door in his underwear.

The Star Tribune had the Jones story on the front page, front and center. The Pioneer Press had it on an inside page. They’d missed the story, Lucas decided, probably saw it on the ten o’clock news, and then tried to recover. They hadn’t, very well.

Lucas dropped the Pioneer Press on the floor by the door and carried the Star Tribune into the den, kicked back in his work chair, read through the story. The Strib had gotten to the Jones girls’ parents—now divorced, the story said, both remarried, George Jones with more children, though his ex-wife was childless. A second tragic story there, Lucas thought, thinking of Weather, pregnant, up in the bed; of the children who would comfort him in his old age.

He finished the story, read through comments by the Minneapolis chief—they’d throw everything they had at the case. Right. Still sleepy, Lucas went back upstairs, and found Weather getting ready to go in to work.

“Where’re you working this morning?”

She yawned: “Regions.”

“Anything interesting?” he asked.

“It’s all interesting . . . but no.”

“I’m going back to bed,” Lucas said.

HE FELL ASLEEP immediately, woke up three hours later, feeling sharp, picked up his cell phone from the bedstand, turned it on, and dialed.

Del came up, and Lucas asked, “You read the paper this morning?”

“Yeah. I was wondering if you’d call.”

“I want to get in on this,” Lucas said.

“I wouldn’t mind, but the politics will be a little crude,” Del said. “It’s a Minneapolis case.”

“They won’t do it as well as you and I would,” Lucas said.

“That’s true,” Del said.

“Besides, we wouldn’t have to tell them . . . right away.”

They thought about that for a minute. An unstated rivalry existed between the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the cops in Minneapolis and St. Paul. If you asked a Minneapolis leadhomicide detective, he would say something like, “A guy at the BCA probably handles twenty murders in his career. I see twenty in a year.”

The BCA guy would say, “Yeah—gangbangers. You catch the guy sitting on a couch with a beer and a gun. When we go in, we go in late, and they’re always the hard ones.”

To which each side would say to the other, “Bullshit.”

Lucas asked, “You remember John Fell?”

“I remember the name. That’s the guy you were looking for,” Del said.

“There’s a good chance that he’s the killer. Even at the time, I thought there was some chance, but now that Terry Scrape is pretty much ruled out, I think we need to find him,” Lucas said.

“Long time ago,” Del said.

“Yeah.”

“We oughta get a cup of coffee, sit and think.”

“Give me an hour—I’ll see you down at the café.”

“Bring your notebook,” Del said. “We’re gonna need a list.”