Buried Prey

“My theory is, he hooked up with something big, a big muskie or something, while he was trolling. Maybe he hooked a walleye and the muskie took it, and he stood up and was trying to land him, and the fish came off and he sorta staggered backwards and went over,” Kushner said. “If he fell over.”

“Wouldn’t he kill the motor when he got the hit?” Lucas asked.

“I guess he normally would,” Kushner admitted.

“HE wasn’t trolling,” Cole said suddenly. He looked at his friend. “The boat was going forward.”

“Oh . . . shoot. That’s right.” Kushner scratched his forehead. “Brian was a back troller. He worked it slow. If the boat was going forward . . .” He shook his head.

“Interesting,” Lucas said. “There are three red life jackets hanging by the front door. Did he usually wear one?”

Cole said, “If it wasn’t too hot, he would. Law says you gotta have one in the boat, and there are crick dicks all over the place. No offense.”

“Thing is, there wasn’t one in the boat, and if he was wearing one, you think we might’ve found him,” Lucas said.

Kushner said, “Maybe. It’s a big lake. And the way that boat was driving around by itself, we don’t really know where he went over.”

Cole added: “He wasn’t wearing one. He only had three life jackets—couldn’t hardly get more than three people in the boat, so that was what he had. Enough for me’n Kush, if we came over in the evening, to go out.”

There wasn’t much more; on the way out to the cars, Childress asked, “You got what you wanted?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Is there a good motel in town?”

“The casino’s just down the road, that might be best,” he said. “Give me a call if you need anything.”

Childress took off, and Lucas called Del: “You think of anything?”

“I went over to Hanson’s house and asked around. One of his neighbors thinks he saw Hanson leave his house around eight o’clock,” Del said. “He left his lights on, and they were still on when the news got out that he’d fallen out of the boat. One guy, named Arriss, said he was about to go over and look in the windows and make sure he hadn’t had a heart attack or something.”

“So his lights were on . . . and he wound up here.”

“That seems to be the case. You get anything?”

“Maybe,” Lucas said.

THERE WAS STILL enough light that he could go back to Hanson’s cabin, so he did that. There were close-in cabins on both sides of Hanson’s place, and he walked across the side yard and up the steps to the place on the south, and knocked on the porch door. A woman came to the door, saw him standing there. A worried look crossed her face, and he got the impression that she was alone.

“Yes?”

He held up his ID and said, “I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I was just here a while ago with a Deputy Childress?”

“Oh, okay, I guess I saw you over there.” She came to the screen door. “What’s up?”

“Did you see or hear Mr. Hanson the night he disappeared?”

“I talked to my husband, and we both thought we heard a car come in, late in the night. We were both asleep. The next morning, we saw his car parked there, and then, a while later, the police came in. But that’s about it. We never saw him or anything. We were really shocked when we heard.”

The neighbors on the other side were named Jansen, she said, and she’d seen them come in a half-hour before. “They’ll probably be going out fishing, so if you want to talk to them, you should get over there.”

Mark and Debbie Jansen were eating dinner when he knocked, and Mark Jansen invited him in and offered him a cup of coffee and a chair at the kitchen table, both of which Lucas took. They hadn’t heard Hanson come in, nor had they heard the boat go out. They found out he was missing when the police came around.

“Guess they traced him from the bow number on the boat,” Mark Jansen said.

They chatted for another few minutes, Lucas finished his coffee, took their recommendation that he spend the night at the casino, and left. He was getting in the car when Mark hustled across the lawn and called to him, “Hey—Lucas.”

Lucas waited until he came up, and Jansen said, “Did you go in his garage?”

“Yeah. Looked at the boat,” Lucas said.

“Is his dirt bike in there?”

“No, I don’t remember seeing one.”

“This might be nothing, but later that night . . . it wasn’t three o’clock, it was more like five o’clock . . . just getting light, probably . . . I heard a bike start up,” Jansen said. “Like, up on the road. And it took off. I didn’t think of it until just now, and there are a lot of trail bikes and four-wheelers around here, but I don’ t know why you’d be starting one right there. . . . If that’s something.”

Lucas said, “Huh,” and, “Thanks. Something to think about.”

THE REASON TO THINK about it, he thought to himself as he drove away, was that if somebody drove Hanson’s car up to the lake, whether or not it was Hanson faking his own death, or a killer faking an accident, he’d have to have a way to get out, once he got in. If he didn’t have an accomplice, and he couldn’t use the car . . .