“No, I don’t keep a shell in the chamber; I keep the-”
“Israeli draw,” he said. “Not quite as quick that way.”
“I’ve never really needed a quick draw,” Lucas said. “If I think something is coming, I take the gun out and jack a shell into the chamber.”
“Yeah, yup, yup,” Todd said. “I got a carry permit, myself, but my employer doesn’t allow guns on the premises; a mistake I hope he never lives to regret.”
Both the Barkers appeared to be in their early thirties. The house had a starter-home feel to it, with mass- market furniture and inexpensive carpeting, an unpainted-furniture-style hutch in one corner, full of old dishes. An antique buffet, carefully polished, had pride-of-place in the living room, under a wall-mounted flat-screen television.
Todd Barker dropped onto the couch beside his wife, and gestured at an easy chair for Lucas. Lucas took it, gave them a quick summary of the Jones case, including the recovery of the girls’ bodies, and recited the details, as he remembered them, of the descriptions he’d accumulated on the man who’d called himself John Fell.
“Fairly big guy, but chunky to fat,” Lucas said. “Dark hair, black or dark brown, and curly. Broad face. If he’s the one who took the Joneses, he might also have killed a drug dealer who witnessed the kidnapping. The drug dealer was stabbed several times-many times-and that murder was never solved, either. But, if it’s him, he used a knife.”
“That sounds like him, and he used a knife on me, that’s for sure,” Kelly Barker said. She stretched her arms toward Lucas, and traced a finger down thin white scars on her forearms. “He really cut me up. He stuck my hand, too, right through my palm.” She held up her left hand so Lucas could see a wedge-shape scar in the palm. “I kept screaming, and trying to run backwards, and he stumbled and that gave me room and I ran. He ran after me for a little way, but then, he was too fat, he couldn’t catch me, and he ran back to his van. I ran out of the park and waved at people on the street and this man stopped and took me to the hospital.”
“Weird that you got in a car with somebody after that,” Todd said. “You know, a strange man.”
“He was a really nice guy, actually. His name was Nathan Dunn, he was a salesman, an older guy,” she said. “Anyway, he took me right to the hospital. I got blood all over his car. I was afraid I was going to bleed to death.”
Hospital officials had called the Anoka police, and the cops had quickly started a search for a red van driven by a dark-haired fat man. “They never found him.”
“Do you remember him well enough that if I put you with a police artist, you could put together a picture of him?”
“The Anoka police already did that,” she said. “Way back when it happened. Wait just one minute…”
She hopped off the couch, went into a side room; Lucas heard a file drawer open, and a minute later she came back, digging through a manila folder. “Here.”
She passed Lucas a sheet of paper, with a man’s face done with an old-fashioned Identi-Kit. He took it in, blinked: the face fit the description of Fell, though the Identi-Kit made it thinner. That wasn’t uncommon with eyewitness photo-sketches-police artists tended to go to averages, and if somebody was fat, they tended to lose weight in the sketches.
“We’ve got a little better computer tech now,” Lucas said, passing the sketch back to her. “If you have any time at all to come up to St. Paul…”
She did, and she would.
He dug for more details, and she had a few. Her attacker had parked the van off the park road, backing it into the bushes so it was right up against the walking path. “I saw it really close-it looked like some kind of… prisoner thing. There was a screen behind the driver, so you couldn’t get at him from the inside,” Kelly said. “I remember the screen. And there was more screen on the back windows, hung off bars, so you couldn’t break the glass. There were no side windows. That’s what I remember… the inside of the van. It was like a prison van.”
“What’d he say when he tried to grab you?” Lucas asked.
“I don’t really remember that. Even right afterwards. I was walking down this sidewalk in the park, and there was this place where bushes closed in-lilacs, I think-and he came out of them and grabbed me and waved the knife at me, and I saw the van and he was pulling at me and I was fighting him, and I broke out of his hand, and started backing up and he was trying to talk to me but he was slashing, too, and then he tried to grab me again and I yanked away and I ran… He came after me a little but I ran faster and faster, and I looked back and I saw him going into the bushes and then I heard the van, and I got off the sidewalk because I was afraid he’d chase me, and I could see the street up ahead and I ran as hard as I could… but he never came after me.”
“But you were right there: face-to-face.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “He was talking and…” She put a hand to her face. “… spitting. He got some spit on me, he was so close.”
“Do you remember what kind of knife?”
She shuddered: “Do I ever. It was this long curved meat knife, like you use for cutting roasts or something. Not like a big heavy butcher knife, but a long curved knife.”
“A kitchen knife, not a hunting knife or a jackknife.”
“Definitely a kitchen knife. Like one of those Chicago Cutlery things, with the wooden handle.”
“Then you ran and the Dunn guy came along. Did he get a look at the attacker?”
“Oh, no-I had to run down this path, through the bushes. Mr. Dunn didn’t even see me until the last minute. He almost ran over me. And I went to the hospital,” Kelly said. “But I can tell you, when I was fighting the guy, I scratched him, and I had blood and skin under my fingernails, and the police took it away. And there was a hair-I remember the guy at the hospital took it out from under my fingernail and he said, ‘Got a black hair.’”
“Ah-that could be important. Thank you,” Lucas said.
“Can you still get, you know, DNA from stuff that old?” Todd asked.
“If they’ve still got it, we can,” Lucas said. “The good thing is, people who do this kind of thing usually get caught, sooner or later, and we’ve got a DNA bank for sex criminals. So does the FBI. If he’s been arrested and convicted, he could be in the bank.”
“That is so exceptionally excellent,” Kelly said.
They talked for a few more minutes, but she had nothing more that really contributed to the case. Didn’t remember anything about a missing finger.
The DNA possibility was interesting. DNA had been used to clear quite a few men improperly convicted of rape or murder, but had been used to nail just as many who thought they’d gotten away with it, only to have a long-ago crime snatch them right off the street.
Barker also convinced Lucas that Fell, whatever his real name, was the killer, and that he’d continued operating after the Jones murders. If the Jones girls’ kidnapping was his first killing-and it might or might not have been-and Barker was another attempt, there’d be more.
As he was leaving, Kelly Barker asked, “Listen, do you mind if my agent gets in touch with Channel Three, and they give you a call? I’m pretty sure they’d be interested.” She said it earnestly, one showbiz personality to another.
“I can’t talk to them on the record, at least at this point,” Lucas said. “If you do talk to them, and they want to do some film, be sure you let me know. I mean, this guy might be watching. And there’s a woman at the Minneapolis Police Department, Marcy Sherrill, the head of Homicide-you should call her. She might have some ideas for you. Remember-you might be the only living person who could identify him.”
“I think we can take care of ourselves,” Todd Barker said, with a square-chinned grin. “Look around-there are four guns in this room. I can get to one of them in two seconds, from the threatalert to trigger.”
Lucas nodded: “Hope you have the two seconds.”
“Two seconds is nothing,” Barker said.
“Average high school kid, on a track, can run a hundred yards in twelve seconds or so,” Lucas said. “That’s about fifty feet in two seconds… from your front door to your backyard.”
“You think I should get a shotgun?” Barker asked.
“I think you should get good locks,” Lucas said.
Lucas walked back down the dark sidewalk to the Porsche, stood there for a minute, looking up at the sky,
