making a couple of suggestions about how they might handle a room entry at the AmericInn-whether and when they should get in touch with the Carver County Sheriff ’s Office-he shut up and drove.
They got off the metro’s interstate highway loop at the southwest corner of I-494, took Highway 212 west for a couple of miles, then split off again onto Highway 5, rolling through the heavily built exurban countryside south of Minnetonka. They came into Waconia on a four-lane highway, past a Kwik Trip convenience store and a strip mall on the north side of the highway, then past a bank and a hardware store and auto-parts places, past a Holiday station and a hospital; then the AmericInn, coming up on the right.
Lucas got on his phone, called the leader of the entry team at Hanson’s house: “You in?”
“We’re there, we’re knocking, but we’re not in. Be another two minutes.”
“Call me.”
Jenkins and Shrake trailed them into the parking lot. Del said, “Got a white van.”
“I see it,” Lucas said. The van was halfway down the parking lot, among a scattering of other cars and trucks. They drove past it, and Lucas found a printout given him by Sandy, and as Del said, “Looks too new,” Lucas read out Hanson’s license plate number against the van in the parking lot: “Wrong number,” he said.
“He may have taken off,” Del said.
“We got another motel to look at.”
“You want to check here, see if he’s got a room?”
“Might as well.”
They parked, with Shrake and Jenkins a couple of spaces closer to the entrance. They got out, and Shrake walked around the nose of his car, with Jenkins, and blocked the sidewalk between Lucas’s truck and the motel entrance.
Shrake said, “We gotta talk before we go in.”
Lucas, frowning: “What?”
Jenkins said, “Shrake and Del and I are afraid you’re gonna pop this guy. You’re gonna do it in a way that drags us all down. We gotta know that you’re not going to drag three good friends through the shit, just so you can get even with somebody.”
Lucas felt a surge of anger, turned to Del. “You’re in this, too?”
“Yeah, and we’re not the only ones. Everybody who knows you is worried. Your family.”
“You’ve been talking behind my back,” Lucas said, even angrier.
Shrake nodded: “Yeah. We have. We didn’t want to insult you, if it wasn’t a problem. But it looks to us like you’ve got a problem. The way you’ve been setting up this bust. You’ve got something fancy going on with the entry team, we could smell it.”
“So what’re you gonna do: try to take my gun?”
“Maybe,” Shrake said. “If we’ve got to.”
“You think you could do it?” Lucas asked, taking a step back. Both Jenkins and Shrake were big and hard, and specialized in physical confrontation.
Jenkins said, “The three of us could, yeah.”
Lucas half turned to glance at Del, whose mouth was set in a solid line. Del said, “We don’t want your fuckin’ gun. What we want is a promise: you don’t drag your three friends through the shit just to bring down Hanson. You’re not an executioner. And we don’t want to witness an execution.”
Lucas looked at the three of them, shook his head, his voice cold: “You got no idea what this is doing.”
“I think we do,” Del said. “We’ve been worried about it for days. Talking about it. We couldn’t think of anything else to do.”
“All we want you to do is give us your word: no executions, no kind of fuckin’ phony setups,” Jenkins said. “We go in, we take him, the chips fall where they may. We do it straight up.”
Lucas was breathing hard, as torn as he’d ever been in his life: the three men were among his half-dozen best friends. What they were doing felt like betrayal, but the little man at the back of his head told him that they were sincere enough.
He said, “Fuck you.”
Shrake said, “You can’t even do that, huh?”
“What’re you going to do about it? I’ll go alone if I have to.”
“We’ll fuck with you,” Jenkins said. “We’ve got the Carver County Sheriff ’s Office on speed-dial. I’ll call them, I’ll get them over here. You go in and ask the desk clerk for the room number, and I’ll embarrass you by telling him not to give it to you.”
“You motherfuckers,” Lucas said, suddenly uncertain; he felt cornered-and maybe wrong.
Del said, very quietly, “We’ll believe whatever you say. You give us your word that we’re not going to an execution, we’ll take it.”
They were all grouped up in a bunch, and Lucas felt as though he were about to start shaking with frustration, but the man in the back of his head was persistent: the three of them were serious, and sincere, and were his friends.
Finally, he nodded: “All right. Straight up.”
“That’s good enough for us,” Shrake said, and he and Jenkins backed away, and let Lucas through, to lead them into the motel lobby.
The Motel clerk was a soft-spoken woman with carefully coiffed gold-tinted hair and a Fargo accent; her blue eyes got wide when Lucas showed her his ID. “We’re looking for a man named Roger Hanson who would have checked in probably yesterday. Heavyset, black hair, maybe a thick black beard. He’s driving a Chevrolet van.”
She said, “That doesn’t sound like anybody I’ve seen, but let me check.”
As she went to her computer, Lucas’s phone rang. He stepped away from the desk, and the entry team leader at Hanson’s house said, “Man, you’re not going to believe this. We’ve got a male body in the guy’s freezer. We’re gonna leave him until crime scene can go over the place, so we’ve got no ID.”
Lucas said, “Older, maybe middle seventies, white hair, stocky-”
“That’s him,” the team leader said. “Who is it?”
“Probably his uncle, Brian Hanson. Former detective over in Minneapolis. There are a couple of older guys in Minneapolis Homicide who could ID him for you. Also, the former Minneapolis chief, Quentin Daniel, worked with him. Daniel’s retired, and he could probably run over. I’ve got a phone number for him if you need it. Jesus: listen, anything else?”
“Lotsa porn, kiddie porn. This is the guy, Lucas. You got something going, right?”
“We’re right behind him, we think. Maybe.” He looked at Jenkins, who was standing by the motel counter. Jenkins shook his head. “Maybe not. I’ll stay in touch as things develop. Call me if you get anything that might tell you where he is. Do not let TV close to the place. Nobody talks. We still got a chance to sneak up on this guy.”
“Gotcha.”
Lucas rang off and Jenkins said, nodding to the clerk behind the desk, “They’ve got no Hanson. She doesn’t remember anybody who looks like him. There’s no van-but there’s that mom-and-pop place out at the end of town, and it’s cheaper.”
“Let’s go,” Lucas said. And to the clerk: “Please don’t tell anybody about this. We’re hunting the guy down, and if word gets out, he could be warned.”
She said, “I won’t tell anybody.”
“You’re welcome to talk all about it later,” Shrake told her. “But not until we’ve got him. He’s a dangerous man.”
Back out in the parking lot, Shrake asked, “Was that the entry team calling?”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah. They found a body in Hanson’s freezer. From the description, it’s almost certainly Brian Hanson. He’s killed two cops now, and Todd Barker may go yet.”
“And God knows how many kids,” Del said.
“So let’s find him,” Jenkins said.
On the way to the other motel, Lucas said to Del, “We’re gonna have to sit down and talk about this. It’s like you don’t trust me. We been through a lot of shit, man-”
