Buried Prey (31 page)

“You’re not going back to Paulson?”

Lucas shook his head: “We’ve got enough that Carsonet will give it to us. And I’d just as soon not ask Paulson again. He might wonder what happened the first time. . . . I mean, I pretty much swore that Darrell Hanson was the one.”

“Gotcha,” Del said. He looked at his watch. “I’ll go call my guy at Verizon.”

LUCAS STARTED PUTTING TOGETHER a search warrant for Roger Hanson’s house. He was halfway through when Virgil Flowers called from Moorhead. “There’s not a lot, but it’s suggestive. He majored in education with a minor in English, and dropped out halfway through the first semester of his senior year. He
was
practice teaching that semester, up in Red Lake Falls.”

“Go home,” Lucas said.

He looked up Red Lake Falls on the Net, called the superintendent, whose name was Lawrence Olafson, explained the situation, and was told that three or four teachers might possibly remember what happened when Hanson was teaching. He offered to have the teachers called out of their classrooms, and Lucas took him up on it, and asked him to keep the conversation confidential.

The first teacher, Steve Little, called fifteen minutes later: “I talked to George Anderson, he was also supposed to call you; he says he doesn’t remember anything about that, so he won’t be calling.”

“Okay, but you’re calling . . . do you remember the guy?” Lucas asked.

“Oh, yeah. Larry thought you might be wondering if there was sex involved, and there was. I’d forgotten his name, Hanson, I’d forgotten that, but he got tangled up with a young girl here. Pretty voluntary on her part, I remember, but she was like way too young for that to mean anything. They could have got him on rape, but her parents didn’t want anything to do with that. As I remember. I could be wrong.”

“So what happened?”

“They threw his ass out,” Little said. “As they should have. And Moorhead threw his ass out, and that was the end of it. As I remember. Look, I’m not swearing to any of this, this was a long time ago.”

“So they didn’t do anything legal. No prosecution?”

“No, I don’t think so. Except throw him out,” Little said. “If you did the same thing now, of course, it wouldn’t make any difference what the girl wanted or the parents wanted. They’d arrest him and put him in jail. Back then, things were different.”

“Do you remember how old the girl was?” Lucas asked.

“Let me think . . . I mean, I still know her, that was almost thirty years ago, and I’d guess she must be in her early forties . . . So I guess she was thirteen. Maybe fourteen.”

“Thin, blond?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. Is that important?”

“It could be,” Lucas said. “Listen, Steve, we may be getting back to you. If you were lining up somebody else to call, that won’t be necessary. This was just an informal check to confirm some information we had. If we need something more formal, we’ll send some people up to take depositions from you all. And thank you. You’ve been a help.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Read the
Star Tribune
. Or give me a call in a week or so, and I’ll tell you,” Lucas said.

DEL CAME IN and said, “He’s still in Waconia. We made the call, he picked up there.”

“So we’re set,” Lucas said. “We want to be out of here in half an hour. I’m going to talk to Carsonet—he knows I’m coming—so I’ll be back pretty quick. I want you to get an entry team together. I’ll give them the warrant, and I want them to hit Hanson’s house at two o’clock. That’ll just about get us into Waconia. Then Google Waconia, figure out what they have in the way of motels. And call Darrell Hanson, ask him if he’s got any relatives in Waconia. See if you can figure out where Roger is, exactly.”

“How many of us are going?”

“You, me, Jenkins, and Shrake. More than enough.”

24

Lucas got the warrant. Del called Darrell Hanson, and was told that as far as he knew, he had no relatives in Waconia. Del did a search of Waconia on the Internet and found two motels, an AmericInn and what appeared to be a mom-and-pop called Wadell’s Inn, on the far west side of town. He printed out satellite maps of the area.

When Lucas got back from the Ramsey County Courthouse, he gave the warrant to the entry team, made sure they understood that they weren’t to serve it until two o’clock. “If he’s home, be careful. He’s shot one cop, and has nothing to lose by shooting another one. Call me when you’re in, and call me if you find anything significant.”

The team leader, whose name was Johnston, said he would inform St. Paul of what they were doing, and Lucas suggested that he not make the call until they were moving. “I got nothing against St. Paul, but I really want to keep this close. If it leaks, and a TV station gets ahold of it, and if they ran a teaser on it . . . we don’t know for sure where Hanson is, and we don’t want him running. If we lose him at Waconia, he could be anyplace from Missouri to the Canadian border before it gets dark.”

They went in two cars, Lucas and Del together in Lucas’s Lexus, with Del driving, and Shrake and Jenkins in Shrake’s Cadillac; they pulled out of the BCA parking lot at fifteen minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon.

The day was hot and still, but there was nothing going on in the west: no sign of clouds. The air had the warm vibration that foretold of thunderstorms, but none were in the forecast for another couple of days.

“Great day to make a bust,” Del said, as they headed south on I-35E.

“What was it, four days ago? I was bullshitting Marcy.”

“Ah, well.”

THEIR FIRST TARGET was the AmericInn. On the way out of town, Lucas looked at the satellite maps that Del had printed. Waconia was a good-sized town—several thousand people, anyway—set on the south side of a five-square-mile lake. The town was about an hour from St. Paul on the far western edge of the metropolitan area; State Highway 5 hooked it to the metro area.

Although it’d probably gotten started as a farm town, lying between Highway 5 to the south and the lake to the north, the satellite photos suggested Waconia had become another of the bedroom towns surrounding Minneapolis and St. Paul, with sprawling housing developments south of Highway 5. It wasn’t far—twenty minutes—from the richest residential real estate in Minnesota, the towns lying around Lake Minnetonka.

They didn’t talk much on the way out: Lucas was preoccupied with thoughts of Marcy Sherrill, flashing again and again to the image of her face as she lay dead on the floor at Barker’s house. Del picked up his mood, and after making a couple of suggestions about how they might handle a room entry at the AmericInn—whether and when they should get in touch with the Carver County Sheriff ’s Office—he shut up and drove.

They got off the metro’s interstate highway loop at the southwest corner of I-494, took Highway 212 west for a couple of miles, then split off again onto Highway 5, rolling through the heavily built exurban countryside south of Minnetonka. They came into Waconia on a four-lane highway, past a Kwik Trip convenience store and a strip mall on the north side of the highway, then past a bank and a hardware store and auto-parts places, past a Holiday station and a hospital; then the AmericInn, coming up on the right.

Lucas got on his phone, called the leader of the entry team at Hanson’s house: “You in?”

“We’re there, we’re knocking, but we’re not in. Be another two minutes.”

“Call me.”

JENKINS AND SHRAKE trailed them into the parking lot. Del said, “Got a white van.”

“I see it,” Lucas said. The van was halfway down the parking lot, among a scattering of other cars and trucks. They drove past it, and Lucas found a printout given him by Sandy, and as Del said, “Looks too new,” Lucas read out Hanson’s license plate number against the van in the parking lot: “Wrong number,” he said.

“He may have taken off,” Del said.

“We got another motel to look at.”

“You want to check here, see if he’s got a room?”

“Might as well.”

They parked, with Shrake and Jenkins a couple of spaces closer to the entrance. They got out, and Shrake walked around the nose of his car, with Jenkins, and blocked the sidewalk between Lucas’s truck and the motel entrance.

Shrake said, “We gotta talk before we go in.”

Lucas, frowning: “What?”

Jenkins said, “Shrake and Del and I are afraid you’re gonna pop this guy. You’re gonna do it in a way that drags us all down. We gotta know that you’re not going to drag three good friends through the shit, just so you can get even with somebody.”

Lucas felt a surge of anger, turned to Del. “You’re in this, too?”

“Yeah, and we’re not the only ones. Everybody who knows you is worried. Your family.”

“You’ve been talking behind my back,” Lucas said, even angrier.

Shrake nodded: “Yeah. We have. We didn’t want to insult you, if it wasn’t a problem. But it looks to us like you’ve got a problem. The way you’ve been setting up this bust. You’ve got something fancy going on with the entry team, we could smell it.”

“So what’re you gonna do: try to take my gun?”

“Maybe,” Shrake said. “If we’ve got to.”

“You think you could do it?” Lucas asked, taking a step back. Both Jenkins and Shrake were big and hard, and specialized in physical confrontation.

Jenkins said, “The three of us could, yeah.”

Lucas half turned to glance at Del, whose mouth was set in a solid line. Del said, “We don’t want your fuckin’ gun. What we want is a promise: you don’t drag your three friends through the shit just to bring down Hanson. You’re not an executioner. And we don’t want to witness an execution.”

Lucas looked at the three of them, shook his head, his voice cold: “You got no idea what this is doing.”

“I think we do,” Del said. “We’ve been worried about it for days. Talking about it. We couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

“All we want you to do is give us your word: no executions, no kind of fuckin’ phony setups,” Jenkins said. “We go in, we take him, the chips fall where they may. We do it straight up.”

Lucas was breathing hard, as torn as he’d ever been in his life: the three men were among his half-dozen best friends. What they were doing felt like betrayal, but the little man at the back of his head told him that they were sincere enough.

He said, “Fuck you.”

Shrake said, “You can’t even do that, huh?”

“What’re you going to do about it? I’ll go alone if I have to.”

“We’ll fuck with you,” Jenkins said. “We’ve got the Carver County Sheriff ’s Office on speed-dial. I’ll call them, I’ll get them over here. You go in and ask the desk clerk for the room number, and I’ll embarrass you by telling him not to give it to you.”

“You motherfuckers,” Lucas said, suddenly uncertain; he felt cornered—and maybe wrong.

Del said, very quietly, “We’ll believe whatever you say. You give us your word that we’re not going to an execution, we’ll take it.”

They were all grouped up in a bunch, and Lucas felt as though he were about to start shaking with frustration, but the man in the back of his head was persistent: the three of them were serious, and sincere, and were his friends.

Finally, he nodded: “All right. Straight up.”

“That’s good enough for us,” Shrake said, and he and Jenkins backed away, and let Lucas through, to lead them into the motel lobby.

THE MOTEL CLERK was a soft-spoken woman with carefully coiffed gold-tinted hair and a Fargo accent; her blue eyes got wide when Lucas showed her his ID. “We’re looking for a man named Roger Hanson who would have checked in probably yesterday. Heavyset, black hair, maybe a thick black beard. He’s driving a Chevrolet van.”

She said, “That doesn’t sound like anybody I’ve seen, but let me check.”

As she went to her computer, Lucas’s phone rang. He stepped away from the desk, and the entry team leader at Hanson’s house said, “Man, you’re not going to believe this. We’ve got a male body in the guy’s freezer. We’re gonna leave him until crime scene can go over the place, so we’ve got no ID.”

Lucas said, “Older, maybe middle seventies, white hair, stocky—”

“That’s him,” the team leader said. “Who is it?”

“Probably his uncle, Brian Hanson. Former detective over in Minneapolis. There are a couple of older guys in Minneapolis Homicide who could ID him for you. Also, the former Minneapolis chief, Quentin Daniel, worked with him. Daniel’s retired, and he could probably run over. I’ve got a phone number for him if you need it. Jesus: listen, anything else?”

“Lotsa porn, kiddie porn. This is the guy, Lucas. You got something going, right?”

“We’re right behind him, we think. Maybe.” He looked at Jenkins, who was standing by the motel counter. Jenkins shook his head. “Maybe not. I’ll stay in touch as things develop. Call me if you get anything that might tell you where he is. Do not let TV close to the place. Nobody talks. We still got a chance to sneak up on this guy.”

“Gotcha.”

Lucas rang off and Jenkins said, nodding to the clerk behind the desk, “They’ve got no Hanson. She doesn’t remember anybody who looks like him. There’s no van—but there’s that mom-and-pop place out at the end of town, and it’s cheaper.”

“Let’s go,” Lucas said. And to the clerk: “Please don’t tell anybody about this. We’re hunting the guy down, and if word gets out, he could be warned.”

She said, “I won’t tell anybody.”

“You’re welcome to talk all about it later,” Shrake told her. “But not until we’ve got him. He’s a dangerous man.”

BACK OUT in the parking lot, Shrake asked, “Was that the entry team calling?”

Lucas nodded. “Yeah. They found a body in Hanson’s freezer. From the description, it’s almost certainly Brian Hanson. He’s killed two cops now, and Todd Barker may go yet.”

“And God knows how many kids,” Del said.

“So let’s find him,” Jenkins said.

On the way to the other motel, Lucas said to Del, “We’re gonna have to sit down and talk about this. It’s like you don’t trust me. We been through a lot of shit, man—”

“Ah, for Christ’s sakes, I’d trust you with my life,” Del said. “I
have
trusted you with my life. We’re just not sure whether we can trust you with
your
life. That’s what we’re all worried about.”

“I’m pretty fuckin’ pissed.”

“Ah, stick a sock in it,” Del said.

WADELL’S INN WAS an older place at the far western edge of town, a single-story, L-shaped affair, gray with dirty white trim, fifteen or twenty small rooms stretching east from the entrance at the far end, all facing a gravel parking lot. Each room had a door facing the parking lot, and a window next to the door. The entrance lobby, the other arm of the L, was built as a ranch-style house, and might have doubled as the owner’s residence. There was nothing behind the motel but farm fields; another mom-and-pop convenience store, called the Pit Stop, sat across the highway.

As they came up, Del said, “There’s the van.”

An older white van was parked halfway down the line of rooms. As they went past, Lucas looked at the numbers of the tag and said, “That’s him.”

Del rolled past the motel at full speed, followed by Shrake; they did a U-turn a quarter mile down the road and came back, sliding into the residence side of the L, where they couldn’t be seen from the van.

They hopped out, and Lucas and Del went into the lobby, while Jenkins and Shrake stood at the corner of the L, where they could keep an eye on the van.

A THIN, OLD, sun-blasted woman sat in a closet-sized office behind the lobby desk, smoking a cigarette and looking at a computer screen. She stood up when Lucas came in, followed by the others, all of them blinking in the dim light.

Lucas showed his ID and said, “We’re police officers with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We are looking for a man named Roger Hanson, who owns that white van parked halfway down your lot. Black hair, heavyset guy. We need to know what room he’s in, and we need a key.”

“I don’t know what his name is, but he’s in Fifteen,” the woman said. Her voice was a crow-like croak, rough from a lifetime of cigarettes. “I got a key here.”

She went through a drawer and came up with a key on a plastic tag. Lucas took it and said, “Please stay inside. Lock the door when we leave. We’ll let you know when it’s safe to come out.”

“He’s dangerous?” she asked.

“He’s a killer,” Del said.

THEY WENT BACK OUT, heard the old woman lock the door. Lucas said, “All right. How’re we gonna do this?”

Shrake said, “I went down and peeked at the first door. They’re metal fire doors. We won’t be able to kick it.”

“I’ve got a key, but that’ll be slower,” Lucas said.

Jenkins said, “You turn it, get it open. I’ll kick it, in case it’s chained, and hop back. Shrake and Del can have their guns ready, and pop right through.”

Lucas nodded. “That works. Let’s do it.”

They went down the walkway under the eaves of the motel, Del and Shrake pulling their guns. Halfway down to Fifteen, Jenkins whispered, “There’s an eighteen-wheeler coming. If you get the key in then . . .”