Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  Shaffer asked, “Where’s Holy Angels? How many years? Skulls?”

  “It’s in Owatonna. Yes, skulls, I think. Maybe fingers. This must’ve been”—he looked at his brother—“around the turn of the century?”

  His brother shook his head. “After that. Remember, we saw that one break-in when we had that boy back from Iraq. First one back, must have been near the beginning of the war.”

  Joe snapped his fingers and said, “Ah, right. You’re right.”

  “Any suspects?” Del asked.

  “Not as far as I ever heard,” Leon said. “And I would have heard. Nobody was ever caught. There were several break-ins, all about the same time, and then they stopped, and there weren’t any more. It’s possible that the robbers found out that the risk wasn’t worth the rewards they were getting.”

  “What about the other ones?” Shaffer asked. “The Holbein ones.”

  Leon shrugged. “Don’t know about those. Just heard about them. Probably ought to ask at Doncaster’s, up in Holbein.”

  “That’s the Holbein funeral home?”

  “Yes.” Leon nodded.

  “Okay.” Shaffer looked into the grave and said, “We’ll have to pull the coffin. We’ll want to close it and lock it to protect it, and then get it out so the crime-scene people can work it over. There may still be fingerprints inside, so you gotta be careful. Can you guys handle that?”

  Leon Murphy nodded. “We can.”

  “All really odd,” Joe said.

  Shaffer said, “I need somebody to take me to those other . . . what do you call them? Sepulchers? Those are the things that look like little stone cabins, right?”

  “Right,” Leon said.

  “I’ll want to look inside . . . want to get a feel for them.”

  “We can take you there. You want to go right now?”

  “I do,” Shaffer said. “I’ll want to look at everything you’ve still got on the Mead funeral . . . names, people who paid for stuff, flowers, whatever. I want to know who was there.”

  “We can look up that at the office, we’ll still have some of it,” Joe said. “They were Catholics, and it was a Catholic funeral, if I recall . . .”

  “It was,” Leon said.

  “. . . so you could probably find the officiating priest, he might be some help.”

  “I need it all,” Shaffer said.

  • • •

  SHAFFER WAS ALMOST TREMBLING with excitement. On the way back to the cars, he said to Lucas, “This is our first solid lead. The killer knew the Meads. Had to. Probably was at the funeral. We’ll go back to Roger Mead, try to contact Mrs. Mead’s husband. I’ll start working the funeral angle right now. You got any ideas?”

  “Those sound like the best ones,” Lucas said. “Some cop had to work those earlier grave robberies. Maybe they had some ideas about suspects, even if they never arrested anyone. Del and I could talk to whoever it was.”

  “Do that. Be sure to update us,” Shaffer said. “Bless me, this is something.”

  • • •

  BACK ON THE ROAD, Del said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Shaffer that wound up.”

  “He’s got a sniff of the guy, after a hard month,” Lucas said. “That’s always good.”

  “Gettin’ the sniff,” Del said. “Yeah, it is.”

  • • •

  LUCAS CALLED FROM the car, and was passed from the Steele County sheriff’s office to the Owatonna police department, where they talked to a detective sergeant named Ralph Bellman.

  “I remember that, those break-ins. Pretty darn creepy,” Bellman said. “Let me see . . .” They could hear him tapping on computer keys, and then he said, “Okay, I got it. Never made any arrests. Talked to some kids, we thought maybe it was some kind of, you know, Harry Potter thing. I don’t think the kids we talked to knew anything about it, so . . . we came up empty. We’ve got a bunch of reports, you’re welcome to them, but they don’t say much.”

  “Like to take a look anyway,” Lucas said. “We’ll be there in ten minutes or so.”

  • • •

  BELLMAN WAS RIGHT: there wasn’t much. Three sepulchers had been broken into, and the heads were stolen from the female bodies interred inside—four heads, total. Two of the female bodies were missing ring fingers. Three of the four male bodies had not been touched; the fourth was missing a ring finger.

  “Two of these places were really old—went back a hundred years,” Bellman said. He was a husky, cheerful man, balding with a long pale face. “The other one was from the forties. We think probably the missing fingers meant the bodies were buried with some jewelry, which was stolen. That made us think it wasn’t kids, but the missing heads made us think it might be. You know, midnight rituals and all of that.”

  “There were only three?” Lucas asked. “Only three of these things, and they broke into all of them?”

  “Right. I guess they’re not used much anymore,” Bellman said. “More of an old-timey thing.”

  “Could we get printouts of the reports?” Del asked.

  “Coming right up,” Bellman said. Then, hushed, “You think whoever did this is the Black Hole killer?”

  “We’re hoping it’s something,” Lucas said. They’d told Bellman about the grave and missing skull in Demont. “We were kinda hoping we could hook the three sepulchers down here to the grave up there.”

  Bellman kicked back in his chair, his forehead wrinkling. “Mead,” he said. “There are a few of them around, but I don’t know if they’re related to your Mrs. Mead. The people in these sepulchers died a long time before Mrs. Mead, though. I think probably the link was the valuables. Maybe they scored when they dug up Mrs. Mead, but didn’t want to do all the work, and the sepulchers looked like easy targets. If that’s it . . . the link wouldn’t go anywhere.”

  “Except that the robbers would have to know who was well-off enough to bury valuables,” Del said. “You’d have to be local to know that.”

  “Or well-off enough to have sepulchers,” Lucas said. “Those things can’t be cheap. At least not compared to just sticking somebody in the ground. And you could figure that out by driving by the cemetery.”

  Del said, “Okay. But they had to know about Mrs. Mead, and the rings in her hand. Wonder what Shaffer’s getting?”

  4

  Shaffer was on the cusp of solving the Black Hole killings, he thought. The idea came to him as he stood in front of one of the sepulchers at Holy Angels cemetery in Owatonna. He confirmed it by backtracking to the other two. He didn’t want to talk about it, because it sounded . . . too easy. Possibly even stupid. Should that turn out to be the case, he didn’t need Davenport or Capslock gossiping about it.

  He said good-bye to the Murphys and headed north and east to Holbein. He’d just gotten into town, when he saw a young woman loading her kids into a van. He slowed, rolled his window down, and said, “I’m a police officer with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Could you point me to the cemetery?”

  “Sure,” she said. She pointed down the street and said, “Take this street down about four blocks, one block past the stoplight, and you’ll see the turnoff for 19. Take that about, oh, a little ways. You’ll go over a bridge on the Zumbro, and the cemetery will be right there on your left.”

  “Thank you,” Shaffer said.

  The cemetery was on a piece of high ground above the East Fork of the Zumbro, which, at this point, downstream from the dam and fishing hole, wasn’t much more than a creek. The cemetery was smaller than Holy Angels, but bigger than the one at Demont. There were two sepulchers, both of a gray limestone stained with age, both with iron gates, both surrounded by ankle-high grass and weeds. He paused at the first one, and moved on to the second, which was just as old as the first.

  They confirmed what he’d seen in Owatonna.

  He said, “Huh,” but with a clutch in his stomach. He’d worked a lot of hard cases, and the tightness wasn’t unfamiliar: he was on to something.

  On the way out of
the cemetery, he took a call from his wife: “Will you be home in time for the game?” she asked.

  “Probably not for the first few innings. I’ve got something going here. You better take him, and I’ll try to get up there as soon as I can.”

  “You’ve got something going?”

  “Maybe. It’s thin, but maybe,” Shaffer said.

  • • •

  HE DROVE BACK into Holbein, found the funeral home, and talked to the owner, who’d taken over two years before, after half a lifetime in Texas. He was not around at the time of the sepulcher break-ins, and had no idea of who might know about them.

  Back in the car, he drove over to the police department, but there was nobody home. Earlier in the investigation, he’d learned that there were usually only two officers working at a time, and they spent most of their time patrolling. When somebody needed to call them, they went through City Hall, but City Hall was already closed. In an emergency, they could be reached through the Goodhue County sheriff’s dispatcher, but this wasn’t exactly an emergency.

  Shaffer was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he drove back to Sperry’s, the supermarket, parked, went inside, and after a one-minute look-around, guiltily bought a couple of jelly-filled bismarcks. He took them out of the bag and threw the bag into a trash can outside the door. Back in the truck, he sat eating a bismarck with his left hand, while he made a couple notes in his notebook. He managed to drip a pinhead-sized drop of cherry filling on the page, said a rare bad word—fuck me—licked his little finger, and wiped it off.

  When he put the notebook away, he sat in the truck and ate the second bismarck, and at some point, realized he was looking up the hill at a Hardware Hank store.

  Another idea. He started the truck, drove up the hill to the store, parked, went to the entrance, and found it locked. He looked at his watch: ten after six. A sign in the window said summer store hours were seven to six. An unusually early closing, for a farm town, he thought. But he was an urban kid, like Lucas, and wasn’t sure about that.

  Below the “Closed” sign was another, handwritten one that said, “In case of emergency, contact Roger Axel.” Below that was a phone number and an address. The address included a house number on First Avenue, and Shaffer turned away from the door and walked back to the street. Main Street was down the hill; First Avenue was fifty feet uphill.

  He walked up and looked at the closest house number: Axel lived in the next block. Shaffer went that way, shadows now lengthening across the sidewalks. He was feeling the energy of a possible solution: thin, but maybe something.

  • • •

  ROGER AXEL was having his regular after-work drink with Horn when there was a knock at the door, a metallic rap-rap-rap of the horseshoe knocker. R-A, as the locals called him, paused halfway between the kitchen and the living room, bourbon in hand, and said, “Who in the hell would that be?”

  “One good way to find out,” Horn said.

  It was well after six o’clock. R-A put the glass down and went to the door, pulled the curtain aside, and peered out at an unfamiliar sandy-haired man. The man said, “Hello?” and seemed pleasant enough, so R-A opened the door and said, “Yeah? Who’re you?”

  The man showed him an ID case and said, “My name is Shaffer, I’m an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Could I have a word with you?”

  “What’s this about?” R-A asked, stepping through the door and onto the front porch. R-A was a small man, with a soft belly but a bench-lifter’s hard shoulders and arms. He had the red nose of a hard drinker, and slack, grainy skin around protruding eyes. He was balding, a scrim of thin blond hair brushed over a freckled scalp; his fingers were stained with nicotine.

  “I’m looking for the answer to a peculiar question, and I thought you might be able to help me,” Shaffer said.

  He asked the question, and R-A frowned and said, “Hmm. I’d have to think about that for a moment. C’mon in.”

  He left the door open behind him and Shaffer stepped inside. R-A said, “Push that door shut, will you? We got flies. I was just getting a bourbon and ice for myself and Horn. You want one?”

  “Oh, no, thank you . . .” Shaffer stepped into the living room and looked up at the walls: the ceiling was high, eleven or twelve feet, and ringed all around with stuffed heads: deer, antelope, a couple of bears, a mountain sheep, moose antlers minus the moose head.

  Shaffer stepped farther into the room and in the back of his head, barely at the conscious level, he thought, Headhunter. Then he noticed the figure in the wheelchair. Horn was looking right at him, and Shaffer blurted, “What the hell?”

  R-A had taken a .45 off a bookshelf, where he kept it cocked and locked. He flipped the safety off and shot Shaffer in the back, through the heart. In the small room, the blast was deafening; but with all the walls and shelves between them and the nearest neighbors, R-A was almost sure he’d get away with it.

  Shaffer essentially died on his feet, the hollow-point .45 slug clipping his spinal cord and blowing out his heart. He never had another conscious thought, but took a half-step forward and did a slow pirouette and sank to the floor, then went flat.

  R-A put the .45 back on the bookshelf, between The L.L. Bean Game & Fish Cookbook and Bill Gardner’s Time on the Water, and looked down at the body, which was still trembling and shaking, as Shaffer’s brain died. R-A was familiar with the phenomenon.

  There was blood to be considered. “Goddamn blood’ll get in the floor cracks and smell to high heaven if we don’t clean it quick,” R-A told Horn.

  “Plastic garbage bag,” Horn suggested.

  R-A hurried into the kitchen, got a bag, laid it flat on the floor, and heaved Shaffer’s body onto it. The body was as loose as a sack of Jell-O; there was a pool of blood under it, which had left a huge blot on Shaffer’s shirt. More blood was seeping into the oak-plank floor, and he hurried back to the kitchen to get paper towels and a spray bottle of Scrubbing Bubbles, and cleaned it up.

  “Now what?” he asked, when that was done. Shaffer was staring up at him.

  “I wouldn’t put those paper towels in your trash can, that’s for sure,” Horn said. He was a shriveled, dark-complected old man. “Best to burn them.”

  “I have to get rid of the body. I could use his car, if I can find it,” Horn said.

  “Look at his keys,” Horn said. “If it’s got one of those remote opening things, it’ll beep and blink its lights at you.”

  “Good idea,” R-A said. He stooped, as if to look for the keys right then, but Horn snapped: “Stop. You fuckin’ moron. Didn’t you spend about a hundred hours reading about DNA? Use some gloves. And don’t go flashing those car lights with the remote, and then going right over to it. Wait until dark, anyway.”

  R-A said, “Right.” He looked out in the street. There were no unfamiliar cars parked in front of the house. But it had to be close by, he thought. Maybe at the store. “What else?”

  “The slug probably went through him and hit somewhere over by the fireplace. You might want to find the hole and patch it.”

  “Yeah. Keep talking.”

  “Town’s too small to leave the body here. I’d move it somewhere. Zumbrota, maybe.”

  “Yes, but . . . how would I get back here? Without somebody noticing?”

  “Run? Walk?”

  “That’s eight miles,” R-A said.

  “You just shot a police officer. You’ll get life for that, without parole, even if they never did connect you to the girls, which they would,” Horn said. “Walking eight miles is out of the question? What would it take you, three hours, maybe?”

  “Hmm . . . I’ll think about it,” R-A said, looking at the body. He was in fair shape, he thought, for a man who smoked and drank too much. Three hours was not impossible—he walked that far, over rougher ground, during deer season. “In the meantime . . . where’d I leave that drink?”

  • • •

  JUNE SHAFFER called Lucas at eleven o’clock a
nd asked, “Have you heard from Bob?”

  “No. I haven’t seen him since we left Demont,” Lucas said. He was sitting in his study, reading a book called How Much Is Enough? He’d already determined that he had enough. “Last time I saw him, he was headed over to a cemetery in Owatonna.”

  “I’m getting really worried,” she said. “He hasn’t called me. He told me he’d miss supper, but he’d be here for at least part of Todd’s ball game. He didn’t make it and his cell phone is turned off, and sends me to the answering service. I’ve left messages, but he hasn’t called.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Lucas said. “The last time I saw him, he was with a couple of guys from a funeral home. I could give them a call.”

  “Could you? This is really not like him, and with him investigating a crazy man. And the last thing he told me was that he might be getting somewhere.”

  “Yeah? Okay, let me check.”

  • • •

  LUCAS CALLED JOE MURPHY, who said he’d last seen Shaffer as he was leaving Holy Angels cemetery. “I don’t know what was up, but he looked at the sepulchers out there, and all of a sudden, he was in a hurry. He looked . . . intense . . . about something. I don’t know what.”

  “Did he take any phone calls while you were with him?”

  “Hmm. He was talking on his cell when we first got to the cemetery, and he got out of his truck. I didn’t hear what he said.”

  Murphy didn’t have anything else—Shaffer had looked at all three sepulchers, and had walked back and forth between them, then had enough and went hurrying back to his car.

  “Never called or came back,” Murphy said.

  “And you don’t know where he was going?”

  “No, but he asked about the sepulchers up in Holbein. The break-ins up there. He could have been headed that way.”

  • • •

  WHEN LUCAS FINISHED with Murphy, he woke up Bellman, the detective sergeant from Owatonna, and asked if Shaffer had stopped by. He had not. “If he had, I would have seen him—the boss was gone all day up to the Cities, and any investigative inquiries would have come to me. You lose him, or something?”