Buried Prey

“I don’t know. Like I said, I’m running down a thread. Where’s Hanson’s boat?”

“Here, in the garage. I got the key.” He jangled a ring of keys, and led the way to the garage door.

The garage was no more than an old weathered shed, just big enough to keep snow off the boat and a collection of lawn care equipment, including a riding mower and a rototiller. There were axes and hoes and weed whips, a big block of wood, a chain saw sitting on a shelf; and it all smelled pleasantly of gasoline, oil, and grass.

The boat was an ordinary, ten–or fifteen-year-old aluminum fishing boat, a Lund with a red stripe down the side, scratched up like most fishing boats, from banging into docks. It was small for the lake, but perfectly usable, especially for walleye fishing, which is mostly done sitting down. As Virgil had said, the motor was nothing you’d want to pee over, and the boat-bottom was curved enough that peeing over the side would also be fairly unsteady, especially with the motor running.

As he was looking at the boat, Lucas gave Childress a brief explanation of Hanson’s connection to the Jones case. He concluded with, “We know that the Jones killer is still active, and that he killed Marcy. We know that Hanson died the day after the Jones girls’ bodies were found.”

“That’s a pretty heavy coincidence,” Childress said.

“Yes, it is. But it could be nothing but that,” Lucas said.

THE BOAT HAD NOTHING for Lucas, except the feeling that falling out of that particular boat, on a quiet lake, would be stupid.

“He got any fishing buddies around here?” Lucas asked.

“Two guys . . .” Childress took a little paper notebook out of his pocket, thumbed it, and said, “A guy name Tony Cole and another guy named Bill Kushner. They’re golfing buddies of his, and they fish together. Couple of older guys, like him. They live out here . . . down the way.”

“Ex-cops?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know about Kushner, except that he’s retired. Cole used to work at UPS out of Duluth. He’s retired, too.”

“They think he fell out of the boat?”

“They think it’s possible, but they don’t know,” Childress said.

“You know if they’re up here?”

“Yeah, they are. I can take you around after we get done here,” the deputy said.

“I appreciate that,” Lucas said.

As he spoke, they heard the crunch of a car’s tires on gravel, and Childress said, “That’s probably Miz Sedakis, that’s Hanson’s daughter.”

“He got any other kids?”

“Got a son. He was up here, I guess, I didn’t meet him.”

They walked outside, and found a fortyish woman getting out of a gunmetal-gray Lexus RX350; she was tall, and fleshy, with blond-tinted hair and oversized sunglasses.

“Clark,” she said. And to Lucas, “You’re Agent Davenport?”

“Yes.” They shook hands, and she asked, “Why are you up here?”

He told her, succinctly, about Hanson’s work on the Jones case, and then his disappearance the day after they were found. “It’s probably a coincidence, but it’s an odd coincidence. When we were doing the investigation, we had guys running all over the place, on the smallest pieces of information. On rumors. Anything. I wondered if maybe he talked to somebody, who might have remembered.”

Sedakis’s hand went to her throat: “You mean . . . you think somebody might have killed him?”

“I’ve got no reason to think that, except for the coincidence,” Lucas said. “I thought I’d come up here, talk to some of his friends, see if he said anything to anyone.”

“I certainly remember the Jones thing, even though I was young. I must’ve been in tenth grade,” Sedakis said. “I remember he was working day and night. We used to talk about it. He never was sure that the street person did it. He said there was some other detective down there who thought the street person might have been framed, and I think he half believed that.”

Lucas said, “That was me,” and then thought, I never saw that in Hanson: never saw any skepticism about Scrape. And he asked, “Did he say anything about it after the bodies were found?”

“I hadn’t talked to him for a couple of weeks before this accident. We live down in Farmington, and he was up in Golden Valley. Most of the time in the summer, he was up here. So . . . no. I guess ‘no’ is the answer.”

“When did he go back to the Cities?” Lucas asked.

“He didn’t actually keep us up to date on his travels. He was up here most of the summer.”

“He went back the night before he disappeared,” Childress said. “We got that from his golf buddies.”

“So . . . he went down the night the Jones girls were found.”

Childress nodded. “And turned around the next day.”

LUCAS ASKED to see the house. Childress took them in, asked them not to touch anything. Hanson had inherited the place from his father, who’d bought four acres on the lakeshore when the buying was good, back in the fifties. They’d had a trailer on the spot for twenty years, with the lakeshore prices rising all the time, and finally sold three of the acres for enough to put up the two-bedroom log cabin.