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  Tabular array of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Affiliate 1

Then

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Affiliate 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter eight

Affiliate 9

NOW

Affiliate ten

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter xiii

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Affiliate 16

Chapter 17

Affiliate 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Affiliate 25

ALSO Past JOHN SANDFORD

Rules of Prey

Shadow Casualty

Eyes of Prey

Silent Prey

Wintertime Prey

Dark Prey

Mind Casualty

Sudden Casualty

The Night Crew

Hole-and-corner Prey

Certain Prey

Piece of cake Prey

Chosen Prey

Mortal Prey

Naked Prey

Hidden Prey

Broken Prey

Dead Watch

Invisible Prey

Phantom Casualty

Wicked Prey

Tempest Prey

KIDD NOVELS

The Fool's Run

The Empress File

The Devil'due south Code

The Hanged Man'southward Vocal

VIRGIL FLOWERS NOVELS

Dark of the Moon

Estrus Lightning

Rough Country

Bad Blood

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

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Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), xc Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen'south Green, Dublin ii, Ireland (a partition of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Grouping (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia • (a segmentation of Pearson Australia Grouping Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Customs Heart, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Due north Shore 0632, New Zealand (a partitioning of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Artery, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, Southward Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright © 2011 past John Sandford

All rights reserved. No role of this book may exist reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic class without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sandford, John, appointment.

Buried casualty / John Sandford.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-51503-7

i. Davenport, Lucas (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Minnesota—Minneapolis—Fiction. 3. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)—Fiction. 4. Series murders—Fiction. five. Serial murder investigation—Fiction.

6. Minneapolis (Minn.)—Fiction. I. Title. PS3569.A516B

813'.54—dc22

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's 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 fabricated every try to provide accurate phone numbers and Internet addresses at the fourth dimension of publication, neither the publisher nor the writer assumes any responsibleness for errors, or for changes that occur subsequently publication. Further, the publisher does not accept any control over and does non assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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For Michele

ane

The get-go 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 jump 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 metropolis cake. 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 world.

At present gone silent every bit death.

The equipment operators gathered in twos and threes, yellow helmets and deerskin piece of work gloves, jeans and rough shirts, to talk about the state of affairs. 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 i end of the gash, twelve men and four women gathered effectually a package of plastic sheeting, once articulate, at present a pinkishyellow with age. It was still set down in the earth, but the dirt on top of it had been swept abroad by hand. A few of the people were construction supervisors, marked past yellow, white, and orange hard hats. The rest were cops. One of the cops, whose proper name was Hote, and who was Minneapolis's sole common cold-case investigator, was kneeling at the end of the bundle with her face up four inches from the plastic.

Ii dead girls grinned back at her, through the plastic, their desiccated pare 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 24-hour interval they were murdered.

Hote looked up and said, "It's them. I'yard pretty certain. Sealed in there."

THE Day WAS HOT, hardly a cloud in the sky, the July sun burning downward; but the soil was absurd and damp, and smelled of rotted roots and a scrap of sewage, from the torn-up sewer lines leading out of the hole. Some other woman, who'd walked into the pit in low heels and two-hundred-dollar black wool slacks that were at present flecked with the tan world, asked, "Can you tell what happened? Were they expressionless when they were sealed in?"

Hote stood upward and brushed the dirt from her jeans and said, "I recollect so. Information technology looks to me like they were hanged."

"Strangled?"

"Hanged," Hote repeated. "There appears to be some upward deportation of the cervical spine in both girls—but that's looking through a lot of plastic. Their arms go behind them, instead of lying by their sides, so I think they'll be tied or cuffed. Anyway—let'southward become them over to the ME."

"What else?"

"Marcy . . ." Hote was always reluctant to commit herself without all the facts; a personal characteristic. Almost cops were willing to bullshit endlessly about possibilities, including conflicting abduction and satanic cults.

"Anything?"

"There'southward a lot of tissue left," Hote said. "They're mummified—information technology'southward nigh similar they were freeze-dried inside the plastic."

"Will there be annihilation organic left by the killer?" The woman meant semen, simply didn't use the word. If they could recover semen, they could become DNA.

"If in that location was anything to begin with, it's possible there are all the same traces," Hote said.

"Since inappreciably anybody had heard of Dna back so, nosotros might notice the killer'southward hair on them. . . . But, I'one thousand no scientist. So who knows? Permit'south become them to the ME."

Ane of the cops in the dorsum said, "Marcy? Davenport's coming downwards."

Marcy Sherrill, caput of Minneapolis Homicide, turned and looked over her shoulder. Lucas Davenport, a nighttime-haired, broadshouldered man in blackness slacks, French-blue shirt, his adjust jacket hung by a finger over his shoulder, was trudging downward the earthen ramp toward the grouping effectually the plastic sepulchre. He looked as though he'd but stepped out of a Salvatore Ferragamo advertizement, his eyes, shirt, and tie all entangled in a fashionable bluish vibration.

She said, "Okay. This makes my day."

An older man said, "He worked on it. This." He gestured at the plastic.

"I don't think so," Sherrill said. "He'd have been too young."

"I remember," the old human being said. "He was all over information technology. I think it was his first case in plainclothes."

SHERRILL WAS THE SENIOR active Minneapolis cop on the scene, a solid, raven-haired woman in her late thirties, with a great slashing white smile and what an older generation of cops chosen a "good figure." She'd had a reputation as a cop not afraid of a fistfight, and still carried a lead-weighted sap on a primal ring. Sherrill had come on the police force forcefulness at a time when women were still suspect when it came to doing street work. She'd erased that mental attitude quickly enough, and now was accepted as a cop-cop, rather than as a woman cop, or, as they were however occasionally called, a Dickless Tracy. She'd hardly mellowed as she moved up through the ranks and would someday, most people thought, either be the Minneapolis main or get into politics.

There were five retired cops in the group around her, men who'd worked on the original investigation. Equally presently every bit the bodies had been discovered, the police force had been called, and discussion of the discover had begun leaking out. All over the metro surface area, crumbling cops and ex-cops got in their cars and headed downtown, to look for themselves, to meet the girls, and to talk about those days: the hot summers, the cold winters, all the fourth dimension on the sidewalks before loftier-tech came in, computers and cell phones and DNA.

DAVENPORT CAME Upwardly, and the grey-hairs nodded at him—they all knew him, from his time in Minneapolis—and he shook hands with a couple of them, and a couple who didn't like him edged abroad, and Sherrill asked, "How'd you hear?"

"It'southward gone viral, at least in the cop shops," he said, peering at the plastic sheeting. He worked for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and, with his close relationship with the governor, was probably the most influential cop in the state. Minneapolis was technically within his jurisdiction, just he was polite. He flipped a pollex at the sheeting and asked, "Do you lot mind if I look?"

"Become ahead," Sherrill said.

Hote pointed and said, "They're faceup, heads at that end."

Lucas squatted in Hote'south knee prints at the end of the plastic, looked downwardly at the withered faces for a full thirty seconds, then, paying no attention to the swell crease on his wool-blend slacks, got on his knees and crawled slowly downwards the length of the bundle, his face an inch from the plastic. Later a moment, he grunted, stood up, brushed his knees, then said, "That's Nancy on the left, Mary on the correct."

"Hard to know for sure," Hote said. "It likely is them—the size is right, the hair coloring . . ."

Lucas said, "It'south them. Nancy was the taller one. Nancy was wearing a blouse with trivial red hearts on it, that she got from her father on Valentine's Day. It was the last gift he gave her. It's wadded up betwixt her thighs. I can see the hearts."

Sherrill looked up at the sides of the trench and said, "I wonder what the address was here? We need to pull some aerials and figure out which ane was which. I idea the guy who did it . . ."

"Terry Scrape," Lucas said. "He didn't do it."

She stared at him: "I thought that was settled. That he was killed . . ."

Lucas shook his head. "He was. I was there. I thought, dorsum then, that in that location was a chance he was involved. Simply with this . . . I don't think so. There was somebody else. Somebody with a lot more energy than Scrape ever had. Somebody pretty smart. I could feel him, just I could never observe him. Anyway, he hung it on Scrape like a chapeau on a witch, and we had us a witch hunt."

"I gotta look at the file," Sherrill said.

"Scrape lived way over by Uptown," Lucas said, remembering. "There's no style he killed these kids and buried them in the basement of a individual house, nether the concrete flooring. He was but hither for a few weeks, homeless most of the time. He lived in a hole under a tree, for office of the time, for Christ'due south sakes. He didn't even have a machine."

"Gotta get the addresses, see who was living here," Sherrill said again.

Lucas looked upwardly out of the hole at the surrounding neighborhood, as Sherrill had, and said, "I knocked on two hundred doors. Me and Sloan. We never got within two miles of this place. Never crossed the river."

"Mark Towne owned a bunch of these houses down here," said i of the older cops. "The Towne Houses. I don't know if these were his."

Lucas said, "That seems right to me. Earlier the kids came in, it was more often than not elderly. Retired railroad workers, lots of them. Towne was buying them up for a few m bucks apiece."

Sherrill said, "We'll check."

"Towne got killed in a car crash, perchance ten, fifteen years ago," somebody offered.

Lucas nodded at the bodies: "How'd they come out clean like this? Then flat?"

A guy in a yellow helmet said, "I was pulling up the pieces of the basement slab, to load 'em upwards." He gestured at his True cat. "I got hold of that one block and tipped it up, and there they were."

"Yous could see them?" Lucas wasn't disbelieving, just curious.

"I could see the plastic and something in the plastic. I had to check in case . . ." He stopped and looked effectually the hole, searching for a place that didn't look dorsum at him with bony center sockets. "You know what? I got the creeps looking at it. I had a feeling it was something bad, before I ever got down to look."

Lucas nodded at him, said, "Bad twenty-four hour period," and so turned back to Sherrill. "I'd keep the slabs effectually. He must've poured the concrete right over the top of them. You might find fingerprints, some kind of impressions. Something."

She nodded. "We'll practice that."

"And you lot gotta find the Joneses, the parents, and let them know, correct away. Before the news gets out. If y'all desire, I've got a researcher who can find them, and I can take her call you with the telephone numbers. I heard they got divorced a couple years afterward the kids were killed . . . simply I don't know that for sure."

"If you've got somebody who could practise that . . . simply have him call me."

"Her," Lucas said. And, "I will."

SHERRILL AND DAVENPORT drifted away from the group, and Sherrill asked, "Oasis't seen y'all for a while. How've you been?"

"Busy, just zilch crazy," Lucas said. He touched her on the shoulder, and added, "This Jones thing. It was astonishing, if yous worked it. Big news—beautiful piddling blond girls, vanishing like that. The way things are now, I doubt anybody volition care. It was too long agone. Merely the guy who did it is still effectually. Nosotros tin't let it slide."

"We won't let it slide," she said.

"Just you've got other things to do, simply like I do. And the girls are expressionless."

"You lot sound like you lot've got a special involvement," Sherrill said.

Lucas looked over to the plastic-wrapped bodies: "You know, all those years ago . . . I kinda messed upward. I've ever thought that, and now . . . here it is, back in my face."

A Channel Three Television truck slowed on the open up street at the far end of the gash. Ane of the older cops chosen, "Nosotros got media."

Lucas said to Sherrill, every bit they stepped back to the group around the grave, "Yous got my number if you need anything. I'll get you that in

formation on the Joneses."

She said, "I'm still a picayune pissed virtually the terminal time."

The winter before, Lucas had trampled all over a Minneapolis investigation of a series of murders that started in a Minneapolis infirmary. It had all ended with a shoot-out in a snowstorm, to which Sherrill felt she had not been properly invited. Grenades had been involved.

Lucas grinned and said, "Yeah, well, tough shit, sweetheart. Mind, I think a lot about this thing. If you need me, call. Actually."

She softened, but but half an inch—she and Lucas had once spent a calendar month or then in bed, and that month had been as contentious equally their hands-off relationship since so. "I volition." And, "How's Weather feeling?"

"Getting meliorate; she was pretty cranky last month."

"Say hello for me."

Lucas said he would, looked a concluding time at the hole with the plastic-wrapped bodies: "Man, it seems like it was a month ago. That was the yr of Madonna. Everybody listening to Madonna. And Prince was huge. Soul Aviary was coming up. I used to go to the Soul Aviary concerts every time they played 7th Street Entry. And we'd ride effectually at dark, look at the crack whores, heed to 'Similar a Virgin' and 'Crazy for You' and 'Fiddling Red Corvette.' Hot that summer. And I mean, Madonna was young, mode back then."

"And then were nosotros," said one of the former cops. "I used to dance."

Another asked, "What're you gonna do about this?"

"We've got one more guy to catch," Lucas said. "I detest to remember what this cocksucker's washed between now and and then. Excuse the French."

LUCAS WENT Back to his office, in the BCA edifice on the north side of St. Paul. It was a solid, mod edifice, which felt more similar a suburban function complex than a police headquarters. He climbed the stairs to his second-floor office, with a quick flash of a hand at a friend downwardly a hallway. His secretarial assistant said, "Hi, I need to—" and he said, "After," and went into his role and closed the door.

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