The Barkers lived in a gray-and-white rambler with a cracked driveway and a narrow two-car garage. A sidewalk curled from the driveway up to the front door.
Lucas got out, rang the bell, and Todd Barker opened the door. “Don’t want to be impolite, but have you got some kind of ID?” he asked.
“Sure.” Lucas fished out his ID and handed it over. Barker glanced at it, and said, “Okay. Come on in. . . . Uh, I have a pistol here that I’m going to put away. We didn’t know for sure who you might be.”
“Okay.”
A woman was sitting on a couch facing a television, which had been muted. She said, “Todd was a little upset that you were coming over.”
Todd said, “Not exactly upset . . .” He put a Smith & Wesson Airweight in a drawer that popped out of the side of a six-foot-tall grandfather clock, and pushed the door shut. “More like careful. We try to stay in Condition One at all times. Cocked and locked . . . Can I ask what you carry?”
“Uh, sure,” Lucas said. He pulled back his jacket to show his pistol in its shoulder rig. “Colt Gold Cup.”
“Terrific,” Todd said, enthusiasm showing in his face. “Cocked and locked, or . . .”
“No, I don’t keep a shell in the chamber; I keep the—”
“Israeli draw,” he said. “Not quite as quick that way.”
“I’ve never really needed a quick draw,” Lucas said. “If I think something is coming, I take the gun out and jack a shell into the chamber.”
“Yeah, yup, yup,” Todd said. “I got a carry permit, myself, but my employer doesn’t allow guns on the premises; a mistake I hope he never lives to regret.”
BOTH THE BARKERS appeared to be in their early thirties. The house had a starter-home feel to it, with mass-market furniture and inexpensive carpeting, an unpainted-furniture-style hutch in one corner, full of old dishes. An antique buffet, carefully polished, had pride-of-place in the living room, under a wall-mounted flat-screen television.
Todd Barker dropped onto the couch beside his wife, and gestured at an easy chair for Lucas. Lucas took it, gave them a quick summary of the Jones case, including the recovery of the girls’ bodies, and recited the details, as he remembered them, of the descriptions he’d accumulated on the man who’d called himself John Fell.
“Fairly big guy, but chunky to fat,” Lucas said. “Dark hair, black or dark brown, and curly. Broad face. If he’s the one who took the Joneses, he might also have killed a drug dealer who witnessed the kidnapping. The drug dealer was stabbed several times—many times—and that murder was never solved, either. But, if it’s him, he used a knife.”
“That sounds like him, and he used a knife on me, that’s for sure,” Kelly Barker said. She stretched her arms toward Lucas, and traced a finger down thin white scars on her forearms. “He really cut me up. He stuck my hand, too, right through my palm.” She held up her left hand so Lucas could see a wedge-shape scar in the palm. “I kept screaming, and trying to run backwards, and he stumbled and that gave me room and I ran. He ran after me for a little way, but then, he was too fat, he couldn’t catch me, and he ran back to his van. I ran out of the park and waved at people on the street and this man stopped and took me to the hospital.”
“Weird that you got in a car with somebody after that,” Todd said. “You know, a strange man.”
“He was a really nice guy, actually. His name was Nathan Dunn, he was a salesman, an older guy,” she said. “Anyway, he took me right to the hospital. I got blood all over his car. I was afraid I was going to bleed to death.”
Hospital officials had called the Anoka police, and the cops had quickly started a search for a red van driven by a dark-haired fat man. “They never found him.”
“Do you remember him well enough that if I put you with a police artist, you could put together a picture of him?”
“The Anoka police already did that,” she said. “Way back when it happened. Wait just one minute . . .”
She hopped off the couch, went into a side room; Lucas heard a file drawer open, and a minute later she came back, digging through a manila folder. “Here.”
She passed Lucas a sheet of paper, with a man’s face done with an old-fashioned Identi-Kit. He took it in, blinked: the face fit the description of Fell, though the Identi-Kit made it thinner. That wasn’t uncommon with eyewitness photo-sketches—police artists tended to go to averages, and if somebody was fat, they tended to lose weight in the sketches.
“We’ve got a little better computer tech now,” Lucas said, passing the sketch back to her. “If you have any time at all to come up to St. Paul . . .”
She did, and she would.
