Buried Prey

be a mom-and-pop called Wadell’s Inn, on the far west side of town. He printed out satellite maps of the area.
    When Lucas got back from the Ramsey County Courthouse, he gave the warrant to the entry team, made sure they understood that they weren’t to serve it until two o’clock. “If he’s home, be careful. He’s shot one cop, and has nothing to lose by shooting another one. Call me when you’re in, and call me if you find anything significant.”
    The team leader, whose name was Johnston, said he would inform St. Paul of what they were doing, and Lucas suggested that he not make the call until they were moving. “I got nothing against St. Paul, but I really want to keep this close. If it leaks, and a TV station gets ahold of it, and if they ran a teaser on it . . . we don’t know for sure where Hanson is, and we don’t want him running. If we lose him at Waconia, he could be anyplace from Missouri to the Canadian border before it gets dark.”
    They went in two cars, Lucas and Del together in Lucas’s Lexus, with Del driving, and Shrake and Jenkins in Shrake’s Cadillac; they pulled out of the BCA parking lot at fifteen minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon.
    The day was hot and still, but there was nothing going on in the west: no sign of clouds. The air had the warm vibration that foretold of thunderstorms, but none were in the forecast for another couple of days.
    “Great day to make a bust,” Del said, as they headed south on I-35E.
    “What was it, four days ago? I was bullshitting Marcy.”
    “Ah, well.”
     
     
    THEIR FIRST TARGET was the AmericInn. On the way out of town, Lucas looked at the satellite maps that Del had printed. Waconia was a good-sized town—several thousand people, anyway—set on the south side of a five-square-mile lake. The town was about an hour from St. Paul on the far western edge of the metropolitan area; State Highway 5 hooked it to the metro area.
    Although it’d probably gotten started as a farm town, lying between Highway 5 to the south and the lake to the north, the satellite photos suggested Waconia had become another of the bedroom towns surrounding Minneapolis and St. Paul, with sprawling housing developments south of Highway 5. It wasn’t far—twenty minutes—from the richest residential real estate in Minnesota, the towns lying around Lake Minnetonka.
    They didn’t talk much on the way out: Lucas was preoccupied with thoughts of Marcy Sherrill, flashing again and again to the image of her face as she lay dead on the floor at Barker’s house. Del picked up his mood, and after 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