Buried Prey

At the hospital, they compressed the wounds to control the bleeding, and waited for a doc, and after Lucas had been waiting for fifteen minutes or so, a plastic surgeon showed up, took a long look at the cuts, and said, “Not too bad, but the recovery is going to be uncomfortable. Let’s get them closed up.”

They closed the wounds with a local anesthetic, plus some kind of intravenous relaxer. Before they started, Lucas made a quick call to Weather, caught her just as she was leaving the hospital, told her that he’d been dinged up in a fight and was getting some stitches. She wanted details, and he passed the phone to the surgeon, who, after a minute, said, “Oh, yeah, I know you,” and told her that Lucas was worse than dinged up, but would nevertheless be home that afternoon.

When he got off, he said, “Weather Karkinnen, huh? I better do my best work.”

THEN LUCAS WENT AWAY for a while, came back sewn up and bandaged, and found Del sitting next to the hospital bed.

“The doc said that when you’re steady on your feet, we can drive you home. He’s going to come by and talk to you, though.”

“How’s everybody?” Lucas mumbled. He was still feeling fuzzy.

“Jenkins shot Hanson twice, in the middle of the chest. He’s over there, working through the shooting with the sheriff ’s department. The woman there, her name’s Betty Ludwig, she’s okay, she’s maybe got some bruises; they brought her in with you and gave her some pills. . . . Shrake’s with Jenkins, filling in the sheriff ’s guys on the investigation. They might be a little pissed that we didn’t give them a call—and they want a statement from you, but it doesn’t have to be today.”

“Not a big problem,” Lucas said. He was clearing up: Del’s voice was giving him something to focus on. “Have you heard from Johnston?” Johnston was the entry team leader at Hanson’s house.

“They got trophies. Locks of hair, underwear, a kid’s necklace. And home movies,” Del said. “They’ve got VHS movies of the Jones girls.”

“Don’t want to see that,” Lucas said.

“I don’t think anybody will—we know he took them, and now he’s dead. No point.”

THE DOC CAME IN a while later, looked at the bandages, asked Lucas a couple of questions, gave him a prescription for painkillers and antibiotics, and told him he could go. “Have your wife redo the dressing tomorrow, and every couple of days after that,” he said. “You’re welcome to come back to me, but you don’t have to.”

Lucas thanked him, and they walked out to the car.

“What I want to know,” Del said, as they pulled out of the hospital parking lot, “is what the fuck you were doing?”

Lucas said, “I wanted to get my hands on him. I was right behind him when he went in the house, he didn’t have a gun, so I went straight in and then he had the woman and a knife and I was moving so fast I just kept going. It seemed like the best way to keep her from getting cut. I wanted to get her away from him, to get between them. The guy was nuts. I was thinking he might kill her, just to do it. And I knew you guys were right behind me.”

“You didn’t get cut so Jenkins would have to shoot him?”

Lucas said, “I’m not that fuckin’ crazy. From the time I went through the door to the time I got to him, was maybe half a second. All I was thinking of, was to knock him down and get him away from her.”

THE SURGEON WAS RIGHT about the recovery being uncomfortable: the discomfort started when he got home, and Weather cornered Del and demanded details on how, exactly, Lucas had gotten hurt. When she found out, she chewed Lucas down to a stump, and then ordered him to bed. With cuts on both his face and back, he found that there was almost no comfortable way to lie in bed, and wound up half sitting, propped up by a pillow in the small of his back.

Jenkins and Shrake came by later in the day, to report on the crime-scene process. There’d be no problem with the shooting, they said, with the woman having been attacked, and Lucas having been slashed—and Hanson being a multiple child-killer.

Further, they said, Rose Marie Roux, the Public Safety commissioner and Lucas’s real boss, had gone to Hanson’s home, had viewed some trophies—underwear taken from victims, and VHS home movies from the eighties and nineties, including some that included the Jones sisters—and had then held a press conference. Hanson, she said, probably had murdered at least six or seven children, in addition to his uncle and Marcy Sherrill.

Weeks of investigation would be needed to figure out what he’d done, and who all the victims were.

ROSE MARIE SHOWED UP just as Jenkins and Shrake were leaving, ganged up with Weather to chew on Lucas some more. Weather said, “Shrake and Jenkins are worried that you’re down on them, because they pushed you around a little. Lucas, they are your best friends in the world. You’re not so dumb you can’t see that.”

Rose Marie nodded. “What she said.”

“They’re good with me,” Lucas said. “I think they know that.”

“Well, tell them,” Weather said.