If only the Barker woman had been there alone, if only he hadn’t been hit by the bullet. Who were those people, anyway? Must have been cops. Maybe bodyguards? Had it been a trap? He wondered if he’d hit them, thought he might have. He’d emptied the pistol at them…
If they were cops, they’d never stop looking for him, especially if he’d hit one. He turned on the radio, looking for news, but none of the radio stations did news anymore. He turned it back off, tried to concentrate on his driving. His side hurt worse, the pain growing, and he started to sweat.
He could handle the pain, he thought. He could even handle the wound. He had that half-tube of oxycodone, left over from the root canal, along with some antiseptics of some kind.
But he needed to get home. Once he was home…
Sweat was running freely down his face by the time he turned into his driveway and pulled into the garage. He didn’t know why he was sweating-he wasn’t hurt that bad. There was some pain, but it was a dull ache, rather than agonizing.
He clambered out of the van and went inside, straight to the bathroom, pulled his shirt off, peeled the newspaper off his skin, and looked at the wound. Still bleeding, but not that much. All right. He dug through his medicine cabinet-got the tube of oxycodone, found another tube, from an ear infection, with some amoxicillin, two tabs. Not much else, besides some Band-Aids and a tube of Band-Aid antiseptic cream.
Then he remembered the first-aid kit that came with the van. He’d never bothered to open it, but wouldn’t that have some gauze in it? He went back out to the garage, found the kit, found four gauze pads inside it, and a roll of medical tape. He carried it back to the bathroom, wiped some antiseptic cream over the wound, then covered the wound with the gauze pads. He tried the tape, and managed to stick the pads on, but they wouldn’t hold, he thought. The tape was not long or strong enough, meant to go around fingers or toes. He got a bread bag, ripped off a piece of plastic large enough to cover the gauze pads, then taped it to his body with long strips of duct tape.
Not bad, he thought, looking in the mirror. He hurt, but he wasn’t going to die, unless he got infected. He popped an oxycodone and one of the antibiotic pills, then, on reflection, popped another one of each.
Still hurt, but there was nothing more he could do about it. He went into his living room and lay down on the couch, moved around until he was as comfortable as he could get, and turned on the TV, flipped around the channels.
Nothing. The news wasn’t up yet. Nobody was breaking in with a news flash-maybe nobody had been hit.
If he’d been really unlucky, somebody might have gotten his license tag numbers, but there was nothing he could do about that. And if they had, the cops would already be at his door… and they weren’t.
With that thought, he dozed; tired from the action, knocked down by the dope.
When he woke, he was disoriented for a moment, looked at the time. After nine-thirty. The news would be coming up.
He was anxious, waiting for it. Anxious to see what he’d done, where the coverage was. Anxious to see how he’d been described. To see what they knew…
He went out to the kitchen, got three wieners out of the refrigerator, and a jar of sauerkraut; slathered the wieners in the sauerkraut, stuck them in the microwave, got out three hot dog buns, got a bottle of horseradish- mustard out of the refrigerator, squirted the buns full of the mustard.
The microwave beeped and the meal was ready: he sat on the couch watching the end of a complicated cop drama, and the news came on.
A woman standing outside the Barker house: “A bearded gunman who may be the killer of the two Jones sisters struck again this evening, murdering a Minneapolis police office, wounding another police officer, and also wounding Todd Barker, the wife of Kelly Barker, who is believed to have been attacked by the same gunman in 1991 in Anoka. Officer Buster Hill is in guarded condition tonight, and Todd Barker is in critical condition at Fairview- Southdale Hospital in Edina….”
The killer watched with dulled interest as the reporter recounted the shooting, and then interviewed a police spokesman, who said, “We believe Officer Hill wounded the gunman in the exchange of gunfire. We found traces of blood along what we presume to be the route the gunman took away from the house. The blood has been picked up by our crime-scene crews and will be taken to the BCA where we will…”
And then the police spokesman said the word that the killer hadn’t thought about, but knew quite well. The thing that had, really, pushed him to Thailand.
The officer said, “… process it for DNA. When we find him, we’ll then know that we have him for sure, and we think that finding him is now only a matter of time.”
The killer knew all about DNA. DNA seemed like a cloud, something that contaminated everything you touched. He’d been afraid that if he simply continued taking girls, that someday he’d be tagged by DNA. Now he sat up, staring at the TV, felt like screaming at it. Felt like throwing one of the Indian clubs through it, to shatter the screen, but didn’t.
Just stared, the chant going through his head: DNA, DNA, DNA…
Had to get out of here, he thought, looking around the house. Had to get away from the smell, the blinking lights on the porn servers, the junk that was scattered all over the place. Had to get away from this piece-of-shit life, had to find a den, had to get well. Had to heal.
Had to put a pillow over his head, shut out the world.
Hide.
19
Minneapolis police headquarters was full of pissed-off people the next morning, buzzing like a nest of killer bees. Lucas slipped through the swarm around Homicide, found the room he was looking for, used for training-and on the walls, photos of every academy graduating class.
At the time of the Jones killings, everybody he’d interviewed about Fell agreed that he was in his mid to late twenties. If he were a young-looking thirty, just to pad the age range a bit, he could hardly have gotten out of the academy before the mid to late seventies-couldn’t have been a cop for more than ten years, at the most.
Lucas went through ten years of classes, noting the names of the prospective cops who looked more or less like the Barkers’ description. There weren’t many. The killer was heavily built, almost square, she’d said. She emphasized the darkness of his hair, almost Mediterranean in tone, but said that his complexion was fair.
In ten years of photographs, there were nine possibilities. After noting down the names, he walked down to the office of Deputy Chief Marilyn Barin. Barin ran the Professional Standards Bureau, which included Internal Affairs. She was Lucas’s age, but had come up through patrol. They’d been friendly enough over the years, but not good friends; she’d been a casual friend of Marcy’s.
She looked up when Lucas knocked on her door frame. “Lucas. Thought you might come around today. This is brutal.”
Lucas took a chair and said, “A long time ago, I worked the Jones girls’ killing, and thought I had a lead on the killer. That was wiped out when we pinned it on a street guy. Turns out we were wrong about that-the guy who shot Marcy is the same guy who killed the Jones girls, and probably a few more over the years.”
Barin nodded. “I heard a couple people talking about your theory.. and you’re a smart guy.”
He said, “I am a smart guy, and it’s way more than a theory, now. I wouldn’t bullshit you on something like this. The thing is…”
He explained the sequence of the original investigation, and the 911 calls that had led them down the path to Scrape. “It looks like-this is a leap-like the shooter might have had a contact inside the department, or might even have been a cop. The shooter yesterday used a Glock, according to Buster Hill. Bottom line is, I have a list of names of cops and probably ex-cops or never-were cops, and I’d like somebody to pull some personnel folders and some IA files and tell me if I’m barking up the wrong tree. Or the right one.”
Barin contemplated him for a moment, then swiveled in her chair and looked at a bulletin board above a bookcase, then swiveled back and said, “I gotta talk to the chief. I’ll tell him that we’ve got to go with the request.
