Buried Prey

Minneapolis police headquarters was full of pissed-off people the next morning, buzzing like a nest of killer bees. Lucas slipped through the swarm around Homicide, found the room he was looking for, used for training—and on the walls, photos of every academy graduating class.

At the time of the Jones killings, everybody he’d interviewed about Fell agreed that he was in his mid to late twenties. If he were a young-looking thirty, just to pad the age range a bit, he could hardly have gotten out of the academy before the mid to late seventies—couldn’t have been a cop for more than ten years, at the most.

Lucas went through ten years of classes, noting the names of the prospective cops who looked more or less like the Barkers’ description. There weren’t many. The killer was heavily built, almost square, she’d said. She emphasized the darkness of his hair, almost Mediterranean in tone, but said that his complexion was fair.

In ten years of photographs, there were nine possibilities. After noting down the names, he walked down to the office of Deputy Chief Marilyn Barin. Barin ran the Professional Standards Bureau, which included Internal Affairs. She was Lucas’s age, but had come up through patrol. They’d been friendly enough over the years, but not good friends; she’d been a casual friend of Marcy’s.

She looked up when Lucas knocked on her door frame. “Lucas. Thought you might come around today. This is brutal.”

Lucas took a chair and said, “A long time ago, I worked the Jones girls’ killing, and thought I had a lead on the killer. That was wiped out when we pinned it on a street guy. Turns out we were wrong about that—the guy who shot Marcy is the same guy who killed the Jones girls, and probably a few more over the years.”

Barin nodded. “I heard a couple people talking about your theory . . . and you’re a smart guy.”

He said, “I am a smart guy, and it’s way more than a theory, now. I wouldn’t bullshit you on something like this. The thing is . . .”

He explained the sequence of the original investigation, and the 911 calls that had led them down the path to Scrape. “It looks like—this is a leap—like the shooter might have had a contact inside the department, or might even have been a cop. The shooter yesterday used a Glock, according to Buster Hill. Bottom line is, I have a list of names of cops and probably ex-cops or never-were cops, and I’d like somebody to pull some personnel folders and some IA files and tell me if I’m barking up the wrong tree. Or the right one.”

Barin contemplated him for a moment, then swiveled in her chair and looked at a bulletin board above a bookcase, then swiveled back and said, “I gotta talk to the chief. I’ll tell him that we’ve got to go with the request. But I’ve got to clear it with him.”

“How long will that take?”

“Sit here,” she said. She got up and left the office. Five minutes later she came back and said, “You’re good to go. The chief called Cody Ryan down in IA. He’s waiting for you.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep you guys up-to-date. It’s sort of a reach. . . .”

“Do stay in touch,” she said. “We’re putting everything we’ve got on this thing. But if it should turn out to be a cop, or an ex-cop . . .” She rubbed her face. “Ah, God, I hate to think about that. I mean, at this point, I gotta tell you, I don’t believe it’ll be that way.”

CODY RYAN WAS another cop who’d moved into his job after Lucas left the Minneapolis force; Lucas knew him not at all. Which was good, since Lucas had been pushed off the force by IA, after he’d finally beaten up Randy Whitcomb for church-keying the face of one of his street contacts.

Ryan was a bluff, square man with gold-wire-rimmed glasses and a red face, a white shirt, and a red tie and blue slacks. Lucas introduced himself and Ryan said, “I just looked up your file. You were a bad boy.”

“I shouldn’t have hit him the last thirty times,” Lucas said. “The first thirty were pure self-defense.”

Ryan gestured at a chair: “Yeah, well . . . saw the pictures of the chick who got church-keyed. That might tend to piss you off. So: who’re we looking up?”

Lucas gave him the list of names, and Ryan started punching up computer files. He had records on six of the nine, nothing at all on the other three. “Makes me think they didn’t work here,” he said. “Might have gotten turned down for one reason or another. You’d have to go to the general personnel records for that. I don’t know if they’d have them that far back.”

“What do we have on the six?”