the south shore of a peninsula. He pulled up the drive next to the cabin, went inside, turned on a light, waited a bit, and turned it off. Realized he was about to fall asleep: set an alarm clock for three o’clock in the morning, and two hours later, was knocked out of a sound sleep.
Getting off the couch was painful, but he did it. Moving as quietly as he could in the dark, he went down to the dock, lifted the kayak that sat on the dock into the sixteen-foot Lund that was tied next to it, then untied the Lund and, using the kayak paddle, began to paddle out into the lake.
The night sky was clear, with twenty million stars twinkling down at him. The lake was flat, and quiet, other than the odd plonks and plunks you always heard around lakes. He saw one other boat, a long way north, running at some speed from left to right, and then out of sight. Vermilion was a big place, and it was easy to get lost…
He paddled for ten minutes, a few hundred yards offshore, then fired up the four-stroke engine, which was relatively quiet, and motored another half-mile out. Somewhere out here was a reef, he thought, where the old man often went walleye fishing. Didn’t matter too much…
Black as pitch; only a few lights on shore to guide him. He dropped the old man’s hat in the boat, lifted the kayak over the side, and eased into it. When he was settled, he horsed the boat around until it pointed back out into the lake, pushed the tiller more or less to center, and shifted the engine back into forward. The boat puttered off. He watched it for a minute, then turned the kayak back to shore. A half-hour later, he lifted the kayak back onto the dock and walked in the dark back up to the cabin.
He’d been out an hour. Couldn’t risk any more sleep. He locked the cabin, went to the garage, opened the side access door, and wheeled the dirt bike out onto the gravel. Closed the door, and started pushing the bike up the drive toward the road.
Heavier work than it looked, and he was sweating heavily by the time he got to the blacktop. Once there, he fired it up, and took off.
It’d be a long trip back to the Cities.
And he was so tired… so dead tired.
13
Lucas got up early the next morning, shaking out of bed as the Jones killer hit the northern suburbs on his bike; neither would ever know about that. But the killer was hurting. To ride a dirt bike from Vermilion to the Twin Cities was absurd, even for a regular rider. The killer wasn’t a regular rider, and on top of that, he was fat. He felt at times like the bike’s seat was about three feet up his butt.
When he finally got back to his house, he pushed the bike into the garage at the back and staggered inside, left his clothes in a heap and lurched into a shower. He had saddle sores, he thought; he couldn’t see them, but he could feel them, flat burns on the inside of his legs. As to the hemorrhoids…
Lucas, on the other hand, was completely comfortable, and perhaps even self-satisfied, especially after he went out to recover the Star Tribune. As Ignace had suggested, his story was on the front page: “Cop Says Jones Killer Probably Murdered More Girls.” Excellent. Marcy would have a spontaneous hysterectomy when she read that, and the Minneapolis cops might actually start working the case.
He left the house an hour later with three names and addresses written in his notebook-the three former massage-parlor women, Lucy Landry, Dorcas Ryan, and Mary Ann Ang, whose last name was now Morgan. He’d interviewed the first two on his own, back in the eighties, and the third one with Del. He hadn’t remembered any of their names or what they looked like, but recognized Dorcas Ryan when she opened the screen door of her St. Paul Park home and he introduced himself. She said, “Man, it’s been a while.”
“Yes, it has,” Lucas said.
Ryan’s house was a little run-down, and not the neatest of places, but no less tidy than his would have been if he’d been living alone, Lucas thought. Like most people, he carried certain models in his head for old acquaintances. He’d often seen hookers go from fresh-faced high school girls to broken-down, sorrylooking creatures of twenty-two or twenty-three, with coke or meth habits, who seemed destined to slide into a grave before they were thirty.
Ryan, on the other hand, looked pretty much like a schoolteacher or bookkeeper in her late forties or early fifties, one who took care of herself. She was dressed in jeans, a neat collar blouse, and loafers. She invited him inside, offered him a Coke. He declined, sat in her one easy chair while she took the couch.
“You remember why I came to talk to you back then?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. The Jones kids. I was amazed when they were dug up-I guess you were, too.”
“I was,” Lucas said. “You remember the guy I was looking for? John Fell.”
“Sure. We were talking about him for weeks. He never came back.”
Lucas took a bundle of papers out of the briefcase he’d brought with him, and handed them to her. “I want you to look at a bunch of faces, and see if Fell is one of them.”
“All right… Huh. Not real photographs…” She began shuffling through the Identi-Kit pictures, taking them one at a time, slowly. “They’re all pretty much alike…”
Lucas had chosen a dozen faces, all with dark hair and round, heavy faces. She went through them, pulled a couple, compared them, and handed one to Lucas. “There’s something about this face. It’s got something. I think it might be him.”
She’d chosen the face that Barker had put together, and Lucas felt the hunter’s pleasure uncoil in his stomach. Most cases had a moment or two when a fact or an idea snapped into focus, when you knew you’d just taken a large step, and this was one of those times.
He nodded at her: “Thank you,” he said.
“Are you looking up the rest of the girls?”
“Lucy Landry and Mary Ann Ang,” Lucas said. “Those were the ones I could find, along with you.”
“Lucy’s had a hard time,” Ryan said. “First she got Jesus, probably fifteen years ago, and that didn’t work out, so she tried Scientology, and that didn’t help, but it cost a lot of money, so she tried Buddhism and yoga, and those didn’t work, so she started drinking. I think that helped, because she’s still drinking.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Lucas said. “What about Mary Ann Ang?”
She shook her head. “Haven’t thought about her in years. I can barely remember her face. I do remember that she married a rich guy-like maybe a doctor. Had some kids. I’m not sure that anybody knows that she ever worked with us. She was only there a couple of months.”
“Think it would mess her up if I interviewed her?”
Ryan tipped her head: “That was not a good time, back then, you know… for any of us. We’re lucky we lived through it. If she’s doing good, jeez, it’d be an awful shame to mess her up.”
Lucy Landry lived in an apartment on the edge of St. Paul’s Lowertown, one of those districts of old brick warehouses that the planners thought they could make artsy. He called her from the street, got lucky. She was home and buzzed him into the lobby. She was on the eighth floor, and he went up in an old freight elevator that groaned and stank of onions and took its own sweet time.
Landry came to the door in a dressing gown, looked at him through half-drunk morning eyes, and said, “Yep, it’s you. You look tougher than you used to.”
“You okay?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, pulling the gown tight around herself. “Come on in. I work late, I should be sleeping for another couple of hours.”
She had one bedroom, a small living room with a kitchen to one side, a round wooden table to eat at, a corduroy-covered couch to sit on, and a TV peering across the couch. Lucas sat on one end of the couch and took out his pictures.
She went through them, pulled out the same picture that Ryan had. “That’s the closest,” she said.
“Just close, or do you think that’s him?”
“If I were putting a face on him, with this computer or whatever it is, that’s what I’d draw. There’s something not quite right around the mouth, but it’s pretty good.” She stood up, absently scratched her crotch while
