Table of Contents
ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD
Rules of Prey
Shadow Prey
Eyes of Prey
Silent Prey
Winter Prey
Night Prey
Mind Prey
Sudden Prey
The Night Crew
Secret Prey
Certain Prey
Easy Prey
Chosen Prey
Mortal Prey
Naked Prey
Hidden Prey
Broken Prey
Dead Watch
Invisible Prey
Phantom Prey
Wicked Prey
Storm Prey
KIDD NOVELS
The Fools Run
The Empress File
The Devils Code
The Hanged Mans Song
VIRGIL FLOWERS NOVELS
Dark of the Moon
Heat Lightning
Rough Country
Bad Blood
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Copyright 2011 by John Sandford
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sandford, John, date.
Buried prey / John Sandford.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-51503-7
1. Davenport, Lucas (Fictitious character)Fiction. 2. Private investigatorsMinnesotaMinneapolisFiction. 3. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)Fiction. 4. Serial murdersFiction. 5. Serial murder investigationFiction.
6. Minneapolis (Minn.)Fiction. I. Title. PS3569.A516B
813.54dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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For Michele
The first machines on the site were the wreckers, like steel dinosaurs, plucking and pulling at the houses with jaws that ripped off chimneys, shingles, dormers, and eaves, clapboard and brick and stone and masonry, beams and stairs and balconies and joists, headers and doorjambs. Old dreams, dead ambitions, and lost lives, remembrance roses and spring lilacs, went in the dump trucks all together.
When the wrecking was done, the diggers came in, cutting a gash in the black-and-tan soil that stretched down a city block. A dozen pieces of heavy equipment crawled down its length, Bobcats and Caterpillar D6s and Mack trucks, and one orange Kubota, grunting and struggling through the raw earth.
Now gone silent as death.
The equipment operators gathered in twos and threes, yellow helmets and deerskin work gloves, jeans and rough shirts, to talk about the situation. Slabs of concrete lay around the trench, pieces of what once had been basement floors and walls. Electric wire was gathered in hoops, pushed into a corner of the hole, to await removal; survey stakes marked the lines where new concrete would go in.
None of it happening today.
At one end of the gash, twelve men and four women gathered around a bundle of plastic sheeting, once clear, now a pinkishyellow with age. It was still set down in the earth, but the dirt on top of it had been swept away by hand. A few of the people were construction supervisors, marked by yellow, white, and orange hard hats. The rest were cops. One of the cops, whose name was Hote, and who was Minneapoliss sole cold-case investigator, was kneeling at the end of the bundle with her face four inches from the plastic.
Two dead girls grinned back at her, through the plastic, their desiccated skin pulled tight over their cheek and jaw bones, their foreheads; their eyes were black pits, their lips were flattened scars, but their teeth were as white and shiny as the day they were murdered.
Hote looked up and said, Its them. Im pretty sure. Sealed in there.
THE DAY WAS HOT, hardly a cloud in the sky, the July sun burning down; but the soil was cool and damp, and smelled of rotted roots and a bit of sewage, from the torn-up sewer lines leading out of the hole. Another woman, whod walked into the pit in low heels and two-hundred-dollar black wool slacks that were now flecked with the tan earth, asked, Can you tell what happened? Were they dead when they were sealed in?
Hote stood up and brushed the dirt from her jeans and said, I think so. It looks to me like they were hanged.
Strangled?
Hanged, Hote repeated. There appears to be some upward displacement of the cervical spine in both girlsbut thats looking through a lot of plastic. Their arms go behind them, instead of lying by their sides, so I think theyll be tied or cuffed. Anywaylets get them over to the ME.
What else?
Marcy... Hote was always reluctant to commit herself without all the facts; a personal characteristic. Most cops were willing to bullshit endlessly about possibilities, including alien abduction and satanic cults.
Anything?
Theres a lot of tissue left, Hote said. Theyre mummifiedits almost like they were freeze-dried inside the plastic.
Will there be anything organic left by the killer? The woman meant semen, but didnt use the word. If they could recover semen, they could get DNA.
If there was anything to begin with, its possible there are still traces, Hote said. Since hardly anybody had heard of DNA back then, we might find the killers hair on them.... But, Im no scientist. So who knows? Lets get them to the ME.
One of the cops in the back said, Marcy? Davenports coming down.
Marcy Sherrill, head of Minneapolis Homicide, turned and looked over her shoulder. Lucas Davenport, a dark-haired, broadshouldered man in black slacks, French-blue shirt, his suit jacket hung by a finger over his shoulder, was trudging down the earthen ramp toward the group around the plastic sepulchre. He looked as though hed just stepped out of a Salvatore Ferragamo advertisement, his eyes, shirt, and tie all entangled in a fashionable blue vibration.
She said, Okay. This makes my day.
