“I was hoping we’d find a dirt bike,” Lucas said.
They began pulling the place apart, starting in the bedrooms and the basement, where people tended to hide things. Schmidt, a computer specialist, went to work on a PC found in the den, and a laptop that was sitting in the kitchen. Using specialist software, she pulled up both passwords in a matter of minutes and began probing the files in the two machines.
“Look for porn,” Lucas told her. “Image files.”
The going was slow: two hours after they arrived, they hadn’t turned up anything decisive, although Lucas found two file boxes full of photographs, and Schmidt found more on the computers-dozens of them included Darrell Hanson. Some of the photos looked exactly like Kelly Barker’s Identi-Kit construction; others did not.
Then Hanson arrived home, driving the white van, a little after six o’clock. Shrake went out to meet him, and Lucas focused on him like a cat on a mouse, his breathing deepening, his eyes dilating. Wanted to smash him-
“He look like the guy?” Jenkins asked. Jenkins was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Lucas as they looked out the back.
“Yeah,” Lucas said. “He does.”
Hanson had a screaming fit, and Lucas watched him have it, stalking around the room, staying one layer of cops away from him, watching him talk to Del and Shrake, Jenkins always at Lucas’s elbow. Hanson was a short, dark-haired man, thick through the chest, with a sallow face and heavy black hair. Del slowed him down, but didn’t calm him down: Hanson called an attorney, who lived a few minutes away, and twenty minutes after he arrived home, the attorney, a fleshy, sandy-haired man in a light blue suit, walked in.
Hanson showed the attorney the warrant that Lucas had served on him, and the attorney told him to sit down and shut up, and told Lucas to direct all questions to him, not to Hanson.
Lucas said, “That’s fine. We may have some questions later.”
Hanson said, “I want to know what’s going on.”
The attorney put a finger across his lips, but Lucas said, “I could give a speech, which doesn’t include any questions.”
The attorney scratched his neck, said to Hanson, “If you want to hear the speech, that’s okay. Do not respond.”
At that moment, Del came in, crooked his finger at Lucas. Lucas followed him through to the kitchen, out of earshot of the attorney and Hanson, and Del said, quietly, “We may have a problem.”
“Yeah?”
“I just looked at the white van,” Del said. “It’s a white van, all right, but both sides and the back are covered with large red roses. He works with some kind of flower farm place, wholesaling flowers. The people who talked to Bloomington, who’d seen the van, didn’t say anything about any roses. It’d be the first thing you noticed.”
“Man… I think it’s him,” Lucas said. “He looks right.”
“I don’t know. I got a bad feeling,” Del said. “I think we screwed the pooch.”
“I’m gonna make a speech,” Lucas said.
Lucas made a speech. They had reason to believe that Hanson’s father had been murdered, had not fallen out of the boat and drowned. Evidence pointed to somebody who knew him well. The same person was believed to have killed a Minneapolis police officer and two other people, and the description fit Hanson. He said, “The whole issue can be solved with a DNA test. We have blood from the shooter, and the DNA processing is being finished this afternoon. Is probably done now. We do not have permission to take DNA from Mr. Hanson, at this point, but we will get it, unless he voluntarily wants to give it up.”
“No,” said the attorney, whose name was Jim.
“Wait, wait,” Hanson said. “It’d clear me?”
“Yes,” Lucas said.
“I’m telling you not to do it, Darrell,” the attorney said.
“Jim, I know about DNA,” Hanson said. “It’ll clear me. It’s not my blood. In fact, they don’t even have to take any from me.”
“Darrell, we need to spend a lot more time talking this through before we start volunteering anything,” the attorney said. “We need to get a criminal attorney in here. I’m not really that hot on criminal law.”
“You’re doing fine,” Hanson said. But he turned to Lucas and said, “Two years ago, I went to Iraq with a civilian contractor called Wetland Restorations from Caplan, Missouri. We were there to consult on some marshlands at the southern end of the country, that they were trying to restore. Anyway, before we went, they did DNA on all of us, you know, in case we got blown up. Wetland has a DNA file on me.”
A tinted-blond woman in her forties came through the door carrying a Macy’s shopping bag and wearing a look of shock: Carol Hanson, Darrell’s wife, who, like Darrell, exploded at the cops, then began weeping.
Lucas went out back, while Del and Shrake tried to calm things down, and called the head of the BCA’s DNA lab, told him about the file at Wetland. He agreed to go back downtown, make some calls, try to get the file. “We got the file on the blood from the Bloomington shooting. If we can get a legit file from this place, we could tell you pretty quickly if there’s a match.”
Lucas went back to the search: the woman, Mrs. Hanson, had gone into the family room and was lying on a couch, with Shrake sitting across from her, talking to her. Didn’t want anyone to have a heart attack.
An hour after Lucas had talked to the man at the DNA lab, Hanson took a call, listened for a minute, then said, “Yes. You have my permission. Give it to them.”
To Lucas, he said, “They’re sending the DNA file to your lab. They’ll have it in one minute.”
“Aw, Darrell, that’s… I can’t be responsible for that decision,” the attorney said. “We gotta get somebody else in here.”
Lucas said, “Hey, if he didn’t do it, we don’t want to try to pin it on him. He’s got me about sixty percent believing him now. We’re gonna need another DNA sample, to be sure there isn’t something tricky going on-”
“I’ll do it,” Hanson said.
His wife had moved into the front room with him, and cried, “They completely tore apart our bedroom. It’s torn apart.” She started weeping again.
Another hour passed. They’d almost finished with the house, and Lucas called the DNA lab, was told that the computer was still running the comparison: “Almost there,” he was told. “The other file was good, and has Hanson’s name and Social Security number right on the file. I don’t think anyone’s trying to pull a fast one, but we’ll need to double-check.”
“Call me,” Lucas said.
“Twenty minutes.”
Lucas sat on a living room chair, and Hanson started going through the “never been arrested routine” that Lucas had heard fifty times from people who’d just been arrested, some of them for murder. “Honest to God, I have never, ever…”
The lab director, whose name was Gerald Taski, called.
He said, “You’re not gonna believe it. You’re not going to believe it, that’s all I can say. This is so weird, I only ever heard of one other case like it, out in LA…”
“Well, tell me,” Lucas said.
“It’s definitely not him,” Taski said. “You got the wrong guy.”
“That’s not good, but it’s not weird,” Lucas said. “What’s weird?”
“Your guy knows the killer.”
“What?” Lucas turned around and stared at Hanson, who flinched.
“He might not know he knows the killer, but the killer is very closely related to him,” Taski said. “Not more than a few generations removed. They probably shared a grandfather. Maybe a great-grandfather, but I don’t think it’s that far back. We need more analysis.”
Lucas listened for another minute, with Hanson, the attorney, and the other cops all watching him, then hung up and said, “Unless there’s some kind of really unusual bullshit going on, you’re clear.”
“I told you,” Hanson said, and his wife started weeping again, and half shouted, “You ruined our house.”
Lucas waved them down: “But-you’re closely related to the killer.”
