Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  He looked over at Lucas: “Can you switch off the Bryan case?”

  Lucas shook his head. “Not really. We still haven’t figured out whether he’s dead.”

  “He’s dead,” somebody said.

  Somebody else disagreed: “No, he’s not. Ten-to-one he’s in Honduras, or someplace like it.”

  Lucas said, “I just don’t know.”

  “What’s Flowers doing?” Roux asked.

  Lucas said, “Vacation, down in New Mexico. He left two days ago, pulling his boat. He won’t be back for three weeks.”

  “New Mexico’s a fuckin’ desert,” somebody offered.

  “He says there’s a musky lake,” Lucas said. “He said he’s gonna clean it out.”

  “He ought to bring the boat back. We could use it in the cistern,” Roux said. And: “All right. Bob, get your crew together and get going.”

  Shaffer, who had been sitting silently taking notes, nodded and stood up and said, “I want to talk to Jon and Sandy right now, my office. Everybody else, we’ll meet back here in a half hour.”

  Roux stood up and said, “Lucas, I want you to take a look at whatever Bob comes up with. Henry, I want updates every couple of hours today, and then every morning and evening until we close this out. Let’s get this done, guys. Let’s get it done in one big hurry.”

  While they were all there together, so they’d all hear it at once, Lucas pushed away from the wall and said, “I don’t think that’s going to happen, Rose Marie. If there are really that many dead women, and we didn’t know about it, didn’t connect the disappearances, then the killer is smart and careful. I mean, really careful. This could take time.”

  “I don’t want to hear that,” Roux snapped.

  “You need to,” Lucas snapped back. He looked around. “We don’t want anyone hinting to the media that this is gonna be a walk in the park, that we’ll get the guy next week. If we do, that’s fine. But if we don’t, the media’s gonna be a hair shirt, and we’re all gonna be wearing it.”

  All the cops looked at him for a moment, then Roux said, “Okay. He’s right. So: we have one guy talking to the media. Anybody else talks, you’ll be manning the new bureau down in Bumfuck, Minn. Everybody understand?”

  • • •

  LUCAS SPOKE TO SHAFFER for a few moments after the meeting broke up, with Del orbiting around them. Shaffer and Lucas didn’t particularly like each other, but had worked several ugly cases together, with good results. They agreed that Lucas would be on the distribution list for everything coming out of the investigation, but would stay away from the main case.

  “I might talk to a few people, if I come across any that are interesting,” Lucas said.

  “That’s fine,” Shaffer said. “If you get anything, be sure to update the files.”

  “I will do that,” Lucas said.

  Shaffer started to step away, then said, “Lucas: I appreciate what you said to Rose Marie. This could take a while. You were the right guy to tell her that.”

  Lucas nodded: “Had to be said.”

  • • •

  LUCAS AND SHAFFER had been successful, when they worked together, precisely because they were so radically different in style.

  Shaffer was a data collector and a grinder: with enough data, he believed, you could solve anything. His files were wonders, his spreadsheets were remarkable, his decision matrices were monuments to game theory. And they worked. Anytime his agents could collect enough relevant data, his clearance rate was exceptional.

  Shaffer looked like a grinder: neatly dressed at all times, in short-sleeved shirts in the summer, blue or white oxford cloth in winter, with bland neckties, wrinkle-free khaki trousers from Macy’s, and blue blazers. He exercised extensively and efficiently, ate right, didn’t drink or smoke. Married to his high school sweetheart, he was slender, of average height, with pale brown hair.

  He’d come up the hard way: a patrol officer in Duluth, then a detective, then up through the ranks at the BCA, until he’d become one of the go-to investigators. He knew statistics: he’d taken college courses in statistics and geography at the University of Minnesota’s extension school. He’d kept his nose clean.

  • • •

  LUCAS WAS A connection collector, an investigator who liked to knit people together, to put one source with another and let them fight it out. He thrived on mysteries.

  A tall, brooding man with dark hair, friendly blue eyes, and a sometimes frightening smile, Lucas was hawk-faced and heavy in the shoulders, and scarred from encounters with the misbegotten. Like Shaffer, he’d gone to the University of Minnesota, where instead of statistics, he’d studied hockey and women.

  He’d never had to work his way up. He’d spent a short time on patrol, and then jumped over three dozen senior men to become a Minneapolis detective. Nor had he tried very hard to keep his nose clean. He’d been pushed out of the Minneapolis police department after beating up a pimp who’d church-keyed one of his sources.

  He’d gotten back into the department when Roux, the new chief, made him a deputy chief, a political appointment. That job ended when Roux quit to become the state’s commissioner of public safety. But as soon as she reasonably could, Roux had dropped Lucas into the BCA, right into a top slot.

  His clearance rate, like Shaffer’s, was excellent. Lucas exercised, but inefficiently: running frequently, but not every day, playing basketball and senior hockey. Lucas had once had a reputation for chasing skirts; and catching them. He had a daughter out of wedlock, two children from his only marriage, and an adopted daughter. He’d drink a beer in the evening, and knew his barbecue.

  • • •

  WITH ALL THEIR natural differences, in career path and personality, Shaffer and Lucas were never going to be close: but with all the important differences, their real distaste for each other came on relatively minor issues. Shaffer was a natural socialist, who’d grown up in an Iron Range union family. He didn’t like rich people, not even self-made rich people.

  Lucas was self-made rich.

  Even worse than the money was Lucas’s whole lifestyle: the Porsche, his history with women, the wardrobe. Lucas bought his working clothes in men’s boutiques, and every couple of years, went to New York.

  To shop.

  Lucas thought of Shaffer, when he thought of Shaffer at all, as a clerk.

  Shaffer knew it.

  • • •

  WHEN HE’D FINISHED talking to Shaffer, Lucas and Del went down to his office, where Shrake and Jenkins were waiting. They were both big men, in suits that were too sharp, as though they’d fallen off a truck in Brooklyn. Both had even, extra-white teeth, and for the same reason: their real, natural, yellower teeth had been knocked out at one time or another. Lucas told them about the find at Red Wing.

  “We’re throwing Bryan out the window?” Shrake blurted.

  “No, Shaffer’s doing the work,” Lucas said. “We’ll be mostly talking.”

  “I hate to see that officious prick get all the glory,” Jenkins said. “He’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t give you a six-inch putt.”

  “He does good records,” Del said.

  “He’s also exactly the right guy to run this case,” Lucas said. “It’s gonna be all sorting bones and extracting DNA and running the spreadsheets.”

  “Still wouldn’t give you a putt,” Jenkins said.

  “Probably because he’s not fuckin’ stupid enough to play golf,” Lucas said. “Anyway, if Shaffer doesn’t find this killer in a hurry, they’ll be sniffing around our asses, looking for help. Let’s close out Bryan.”

  • • •

  BRYAN.

  Bryan had run a St. Paul investment company that turned out to be a Ponzi scheme, a scheme that had eventually come up a couple of Ponzis short. He’d been arrested and the state attorney general’s office was trying to get back the thirty-one million dollars that had been entrusted to him by 1,691 small investors, most of them elderly. Bryan said the money was gone—spent on fast Ita
lian cars, slow Kentucky horses, and hot Russian women, along with a $250,000 RV, which lost half its value when he turned the key on it, and an unprofitable ostrich ranch in Wyoming. Rumor said that a good deal more of the cash had gone up his nose.

  There were doubters.

  Bryan had divorced three years earlier, and his ex-wife, Bloomie, now lived in a house very near, but not quite on, the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach. According to the local conspiracy theorists, Bryan had seen the trouble coming, had given an overly generous divorce settlement to his wife, who would support him when the problems became public and the company went broke. There was also talk that he owned a Cabo San Lucas estate under a Mexican corporate shadow.

  That may have been true, but apparently had become irrelevant when Bryan’s court-ordered ankle monitor went dead, and his BMW M6 convertible had been found parked near the St. Croix gorge at Taylors Falls with the front seat soaked in his blood. No body had been found. There were, at latest count, 1,691 suspects in Bryan’s disappearance.

  “Well, we’ve already interviewed twelve of them, so that only leaves one thousand six hundred and seventy-nine to go. We should have that done by 2020,” Jenkins said.

  “Start with the ones young enough to move a body,” Lucas suggested. “That’ll cut the workload by ninety-eight percent.”

  “Are you gonna help?” Shrake asked.

  “First, I’m gonna go down and take a look at this cistern, this well, where they found all the bodies,” Lucas said. “Then this evening, I’ll be talking to the beautiful Carrie Lee Pitt, about Bryan’s missing clothes. I’m hoping she’ll let me peek in her closet.”

  “How come we’re not talking to Carrie Lee Pitt?” Jenkins asked.

  “Because that will take some savoir faire, which you don’t got any of,” Lucas said.

  Jenkins looked offended, lifted an arm and sniffed his armpit, and said, “Yes, I do.”

  • • •

  JENKINS AND SHRAKE LEFT, and Lucas turned to Del, who had taken Lucas’s visitor’s chair and put his feet up on a file cabinet.

  Del was a thin man, with a sun-darkened face of knobs and wrinkled plains, a little more than average height: a dusty guy in his mid-fifties, who looked like he lived on the street. He was wearing a long-sleeved turquoise cowboy shirt and faded jeans over hiking boots. “We’re going down to the well?”

  “Cistern,” Lucas said. “Yeah, I guess we better. But Jesus, that shirt makes me want to pluck my eyeballs out. You been hanging out at Goodwill again?”

  “From what I hear, if we’re going down to the well—the cistern—we’re gonna want to burn the clothes afterwards,” Del said. “I’d rather burn a polyester shirt than a two-thousand-dollar Italian suit. Or three-thousand-dollar Romanian shoes.”

  “British shoes. And when you’re right, you’re right.” Lucas pushed himself out of his chair. “We’ll stop at my place on the way out. You ready?”

  “As ever.”

  “Fifteen skulls so far,” Lucas said, as he turned off the office lights. “And there are more down the well.”

  “Somebody’s been a bad, bad boy,” Del said.

  • • •

  ON THE WAY OUT of the building, they ran into Sands, the BCA director. He was looking harried, and said, as they walked down the stairs to the first floor, “This can come to no good end. Remember I said that.”

  “It already did, for at least fifteen women,” Del said. “But we’ll get him.”

  “Not soon enough,” Sands said. He breathed in Lucas’s direction, and Lucas had to fight an impulse to step back: Sands’s breath was notorious. “It’s already not soon enough. Charlie’s already getting calls from the Today show.”

  Charlie handled the BCA’s media relations.

  • • •

  AT HOME, Lucas changed into worn Levi’s 505s and a blue chambray work shirt from Façonnable; he let the shirt hang loose to cover the .45 in his beltline.

  He and Del loaded an Igloo cooler into the back of his black Mercedes SUV, and Lucas threw a nylon daypack on top of the cooler. On the way out of town, they stopped at a BP station for gas, and picked up ice, bottled water, Coke and Diet Coke, and headed south across the Mississippi.

  “I have a psychological observation,” Del said, as they crossed the water.

  “Nobody’s more qualified to make one,” Lucas said.

  “It’s just this. You say, ‘fifteen skulls,’ and I say, ‘Somebody’s been a bad, bad boy.’ If an outsider had heard that, they’d think we had no feelings at all. I’d have sounded like an asshole.”

  A Prius passed Lucas, doing ninety, and then cut in front of him and slowed. Lucas tapped the brakes and said, “Blow me.” And to Del, “Not you, the Prius. And what you say is true. Not a new experience, for you, though.”

  “Or you. We sit around and bullshit about this stuff, like we’re reading a bus ticket, but when we start finding out about the victims, we’re gonna get pissed,” Del said. “We’re not pissed now, but we will be. We’ll find out about their lives, about what they wanted to do, and all the misery this killer caused, we’ll start brooding about it, and we’ll get pissed.”

  “Get to the point. I want to put on my Pink album.”

  “The point is this—Henry and Rose Marie are already pissed. They’re pissed because the politics might hurt them. They’re not pissed about fifteen women down the well, they’re pissed about how they’re going to look on TV. You know, the big-shot cops who let this happen right here in River City.”

  “In the interest of your continuing employment,” Lucas said, “let’s keep this psychological observation between you and me.”

  “You know what I’m saying,” Del said.

  “I do,” Lucas said. “It’s the way of the world, man. There are the worker bees, and the manager bees. The worker bees take care of the work, the manager bees take care of themselves.”

  • • •

  THEY WERE HEADED OUT on a good summer day, but hot, down Highway 52, through Cannon Falls, and on south. The cistern site was in rolling farm country west of the Mississippi River Valley, on a gravel road off Goodhue County 1. They spent a few minutes wandering around, after an off-map shortcut didn’t work out, and so took an hour to find the site.

  The road was blocked by two cop cars five hundred yards out, and a half dozen TV vans were parked on the shoulder of the road, reporters and photographers clustered on the shady sides of the vans.

  “Lot of TV,” Del said. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen this much.”

  “Gonna be rough,” Lucas said. “Shaffer’s gonna be hip-deep in bullshit before he’s through.”

  “Better him than us,” Del said.

  • • •

  THE COPS AT THE ROADBLOCK, both sweating furiously in their long-sleeved uniforms, looked at Lucas’s ID. Lucas said, “I got ice-cold Coke, Diet Coke, and water in the back.”

  “Cokes,” the cops said simultaneously, and Del dug them out of the cooler and passed them to Lucas, who handed them through the window to the cops and asked, “Who doesn’t get speeding tickets in Goodhue County?”

  “You’re good up to ag assault, far as I’m concerned,” the cop said, and they went on through.

  • • •

  “TOO MANY PEOPLE,” Del said, as Lucas pulled onto the shoulder of the dusty road, fifty yards short of the site. The shoulder was filled with cop cars, civilian cars and trucks and vans, and an empty heavy-equipment trailer.

  “Everybody’s gonna want to be here, just to say they were,” Lucas said.

  They got out of the truck, into the hot midday air smelling of roadside weeds. Lucas stuffed Cokes and bottles of water into the daypack, and they ambled along the gravel road toward the farm turnoff. Halfway to the cistern site, they ran into a BCA agent named Don Buford, who saw them coming and said, “I don’t suppose you got a beer in there?”

  “Got a Coke or a Diet Coke,” Lucas said. “Or a bottle of water.”

  “I’ll give yo
u ten dollars for a Diet Coke.”

  Lucas gave him the Coke and Buford looked around and said, “Ain’t this a great day? Hot, sunny, no wind. Tell you what, when you get up there, you’ll be praying for cold, wind, and rain. The smell . . . half the guys up there have been pukin’ their guts out.”

  “What’s there to see?” Lucas asked.

  Buford shrugged: “Just the site. They’re calling it the Black Hole of Goodhue. You know, like . . .”

  “. . . the Black Hole of Calcutta. We get it,” Del said.

  “The whole crime-scene crew is up there,” Buford said, rolling the cold Coke bottle across his forehead. “It’s a nightmare. Got boxes of skulls. Nothing for me, though. I’d eat a sandwich, if I could keep it down.”

  “We’re wasting our time?” Lucas asked.

  “Oh . . . no. You gotta go look, and look around,” Buford said. “Maybe tell you something about the guy who did this. Got to be some kind of crazy farmer. Somebody who butchers his own meat, or something. Some kinda . . .” Buford shuddered. “. . . monster.”

  • • •

  THEY LEFT BUFORD in the road and walked up a slight rise to the turnoff, showed their IDs to another cop, and walked up the grassy track into the heart of the old farmstead. There they found four people in hazmat suits peering into a hole in a concrete slab, and a dozen cops scattered through the trees and brush, watching.

  A yellow front-end loader’s lift bucket dangled over the hole, with a steel cable dropping into the hole itself. Off to one side was a stack of semi-transparent plastic tubs, the kind you can buy at Target, with paper stickers on the top-covers: human remains. A skull grinned out of one of them. A hundred feet from the hole, an air compressor was working, and in the other direction, a Honda generator. Power and air lines led to the hole. As they got closer, the stink hit them, and Lucas turned away.

  “Buford was right,” Del said. He dug into his pack and came up with a jar of Vicks VapoRub, opened it, and offered it to Lucas, who took out a bit on the end of a finger and rubbed under his nose. Del did the same, and they walked up to the hole, and a woman standing next to it in a dark blue hazmat suit with the hood down. Beatrice Sawyer, head of the crime-scene crew.