Buried Prey

Lucas thought for a few more seconds, then said, “Yes. I can. I’d rather do it myself, I’ll kill him if I can, but if the Bloomington cops get him . . . I can live with it.”

Letty leaned forward out of her chair and said, “Get with Del. If you wind up putting him down, Del’s the guy you want with you.”

Lucas nodded. “Of course.” And, a few seconds later, “I don’t think you need to review this conversation with your mom.”

Letty said, “She’s so smart—she knows what we’re talking about. That’s why she’s upstairs with Sam, to get out of the way.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“So stop sitting there like a robot,” Letty said. “Call people on the phone. Get Del over here. Get it going.”

Lucas stared at her for a moment, unblinking; she didn’t flinch. And he thought, She’s way too young to think like this. But then, given her history, she really hadn’t been young since she was nine; that had been the last year of her childhood.

17

Del called ahead, and showed up in the truck a little after ten o’clock. Lucas was waiting in the driveway and said, “Let’s go over to Fairview. Kelly Barker’s still over there.”

“What’s she got for us?”

“I want to see what she says. And I want to get her with Retrief, working up another head shot. Then we paper the TV stations with it overnight.”

“Bloomington probably has that under way.”

“I want to make sure—and I need to hear her talk. Want her to talk about John Fell.”

“If it is John Fell—”

“It is. . . . You take care of Berg?”

“Yeah. He’ll be out tonight. I don’t want to fuck with it.”

LUCAS TOOK THE WHEEL, and they headed across town to Fairview Southdale, a trauma center four or five miles north of the Barker house. They parked outside the emergency exit, threw the “Police” card on the dashboard, and went inside. Two Bloomington uniformed cops saw them coming and pushed off a counter they’d been leaning against. Lucas held up his ID and asked, “Is Kelly Barker still here?”

“Up in surgical waiting,” one of them said, and pointed the way.

Barker, when they found her, was sitting upright in an overstuffed chair, but was sound asleep. A Minneapolis cop sat on the couch across from her, reading a copy of Modern Hospital. Lucas introduced himself and Del, and the cop said, “She’s been trying to get some sleep.”

Lucas said, “Kelly,” and touched her shoulder, and she started, her eyes popping open. She looked at Lucas for a minute, as though she didn’t recognize him, then shook her head and said, “Is he all right?”

“We just got here,” Lucas said. “We don’t know the status on anyone.”

“That lady police officer died.”

“Yeah . . .”

“She seemed nice. It’s so awful,” Barker said. “Everything was going so well this morning and afternoon, and then this man . . .”

It all came out in a gush; what they’d been talking about, the man at the door, the explosion of gunfire, the screaming of the wounded, the rush to the hospital.

“They say the man was shot, but I don’t see how. The police officer, Buster, was upside down on the floor; he shot two times, I think, but they say he might have hit him.”

“There was a blood trail,” Lucas said. “It’s the only good thing to come out of this whole disaster. All we have to do now is identify him: we’ve got all the proof we need, if we can just lay our hands on him.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I’ve got John Retrief headed this way with a laptop. Since you’re waiting here on the operation, we were hoping you’d help revise the head shot.”

“Sure. I’m lined up to go on WCCO and KSTP tomorrow. Channel Three wants me but I told them I couldn’t do it until noon, and I told them all I needed like, heavy makeup, because I’m so distraught.”

Lucas thought: she didn’t look all that distraught, and he felt the anger burning away in his chest. He pushed it back and asked, “What about Todd? What’ve you heard?”

“Only that he’s shot pretty bad, there’re some holes in his lungs and they have to reconstruct his shoulder when he’s recovered enough to do it,” she said. “They brought Buster out a while ago; he’s in recovery—or maybe he’s out by now—there are some more police officers down there. If it wasn’t for Buster shooting that nut, we’d all be dead now.”

The shooter, she told him, had a heavy square-cut black beard like some Iranians she saw on television. “But it was him—it was my stalker, all right. I saw his eyes. I thought he was going to kill me.”

They talked awhile longer, then Lucas called Retrief and was told that he’d just passed the airport and was probably fifteen minutes away. “As soon as you’re done with Miz Barker, I want you to send copies to all the media outlets you’ve got,” Lucas said. “Everyone in the state. And down to Des Moines, out to Fargo, over to Milwaukee, with a response back to us. Tag it with something about a Midwestern serial killer of young girls, so it attracts some attention outside the state. Localize it for them.”

“I’ll do it—too late for the regular news tonight, but they’ll all have it at the crack of dawn tomorrow.”