Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” Lucas said, and clicked off.

  Fuckin’ media.

  • • •

  SPRICK’S HOUSE WAS a small white clapboard place on the south side of town. A Zumbrota cop car was parked outside, with two Goodhue County cars. Lucas left his truck at the curb and went up the walk and knocked on the door. A Goodhue deputy came to the door, said, “We’re almost done,” and pushed the door open.

  Sprick and the cops were in Sprick’s living room.

  Sprick was six feet tall, blond and slender, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a frightened expression. He was sitting on a broken-down love seat. The only other furniture in the living room was a giant stereo system, with two five-foot-tall speakers and three smaller ones, a fifty-inch television, and an array of boxes with blinking lights. The cops were sitting on folding chairs, and Lucas, looking into the kitchen, saw a folding card table, apparently used as a dining table, that matched the chairs; and there were no other chairs in the kitchen.

  Post-divorce clean-out, Lucas thought.

  Mattsson said, “Mr. Sprick says he was home asleep last night.”

  “I was,” Sprick said. “I gotta get up at six o’clock. I got mail to sort, you can ask anyone.”

  Lucas said to Mattsson, “Let’s talk out front for a minute.”

  They went back through the front door, and Lucas asked: “What do you think?”

  “Well, he’s got an unbreakable alibi—he was home asleep—and he’s sticking to it. Won’t move at all.”

  “But what do you think?” He emphasized the think.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She looked back through the screen at the clutch of deputies. “We just can’t move him off the spot. Didn’t get up to pee, didn’t get up for a drink. He drank some beer last night, watched the last part of the Twins game—he got the score right, and what happened in the last couple of innings—then he went to bed, and didn’t move until the alarm went off at six. Period. End of story. His story. But Kaylee . . .”

  “You ask him to give up some DNA?” Lucas asked.

  “Yes. He says he’ll do it. Or fingerprints. Whatever we want,” Mattsson said.

  “Not a good sign,” Lucas said.

  “But Kaylee . . .”

  “. . . Saw something,” Lucas said. “You’re right there. I gotta tell you, though, you don’t have an arrest. Not that I see. Not unless he blurts something out.”

  She bit her lip, glanced sideways at the screen door, and the sound of Sprick’s voice, then nodded. “You’re right.”

  “And you’ve got trouble,” Lucas said, looking past her.

  She turned, and saw the mobile broadcast truck rolling down the street toward them. “Ah, boy.”

  “Tell them the truth—that you’re talking to a lot of people around town, and Sprick was one of them. Don’t commit to anything, don’t say Sprick’s a suspect. You’re doing the routine.”

  “I can do that,” she said, hitching up her gun belt as she looked down the street at the approaching van. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m gonna run for it,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  SPRICK LACKED the intensity of the Black Hole killer. He was a mistake, now trailing away in Lucas’s rearview mirror. In the same rearview mirror, he saw the TV van stop next to Sprick’s house, and Mattsson walking out to meet it.

  What next?

  He decided to start over, to do what he’d planned to do when he left St. Paul. Visit each of the four cemeteries, and talk to the Owatonna funeral home brothers, to see if Shaffer had left any clues behind, if they’d said anything to point Shaffer in a particular direction.

  He turned a corner and headed out to the main drag; another TV van turned the corner and rolled past him.

  Mattsson said she could handle it. Maybe she could. Maybe not.

  Not his problem.

  6

  R-A was having his early-evening drink, one of five or six he would have after work, and watching television with Horn, when he saw Catrin Mattsson on the evening news. She was talking to a TV reporter about the murder of Bob Shaffer.

  “Hoochy-coo,” R-A said. “Take a look at this one.”

  Mattsson was saying, “We are talking to everybody in the community who . . . who monitors the life of the community, looking for factors that might point us at the killer. Mr. Sprick, as the mail carrier, is one of those people.”

  The reporters didn’t believe her. They’d had it from the locals that Sprick might be the Black Hole guy. Mattsson tap-danced: she did not consider Mr. Sprick a suspect, she said, although, “to be plain, we don’t rule anyone out. It’s my feeling, and this is just a personal feeling, that we are very close to the killer—close physically, I mean. He’s close by, right now.”

  The cameraman zoomed in on a window in Sprick’s small house and caught the crinkle in the venetian blind, where Sprick was peering out. You couldn’t see anything but a black spot that might have been an eye—and of course it felt like a killer’s eye.

  “What about the witness? How much credibility are you giving her?” the reporter asked.

  “We haven’t identified the witness as a woman—” Mattsson began.

  The reporter interrupted: “Every person here knows who the witness is. We haven’t identified her because of her . . . demographics, so to speak. Given those demographics, how reliable do you think she is?”

  “I really can’t address that question . . .”

  • • •

  “DEMOGRAPHICS? What the fuck is she talking about?” R-A said to the TV. “Nobody from Zumbrota saw me. Demographics? Does that mean she’s from somewhere else? Or maybe she’s a hooker or something?”

  “Don’t know,” Horn said. “They’re being weird about it.”

  “Maybe just jerking my chain,” R-A said. “They probably figure I’m watching.”

  On the TV, somebody asked a semi-witty question, and Mattsson grinned at the reporter, a girlie grin. When she turned half-away from the camera, you could see her figure.

  R-A rattled the ice through his bourbon and took a nip and said to Horn, “Look at this woman, Horn. Look at those tits. Look at that uniform. That’s primo boner material right there. Isn’t she something?”

  After a long silence, Horn said, “Roger, you can’t do that. You can’t go killing this woman. You’d be a hell of a lot better off figuring out who this witness is, and what you might do about her. Figure out how she identified this Sprick guy. And who the fuck is Sprick, and why do they think he’s you?”

  R-A said, “I just, uh, I just . . .” He slumped back in his chair, and Horn recognized the attitude. R-A couldn’t think about the witness, not right now: he was purely fantasizing about what he’d do to Catrin Mattsson, down in the basement.

  “They’re going to get you, Roger, if you don’t pay attention,” Horn said. “You don’t have much more time, now. I thought that a month ago, when they lifted the lid off the cistern. They’ll get some of that DNA stuff and they’ll start checking everybody. God knows you put enough of it in those girls. They’ll ask every man in town for his DNA, and if anybody says ‘no’ . . . They’ll get your name, and they’ll come through those doors with guns, and they’ll kill you, because you killed one of theirs. Won’t be a trial.”

  “Oh, bullshit . . .” R-A tried to think seriously about that, but he couldn’t, as long as Mattsson was on the screen. R-A had a certain model woman that he went for: a kind of tight-looking blonde. Not all of them had been natural blondes, because he was careful, and sometimes he had to take what he could safely get . . . but he’d take a blonde anytime. And Mattsson certainly was blond.

  “Wonder if she shaves?” he said to Horn. “Remember when we pulled the underpants off what’s-her-name? Barbara? You remember?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Horn said. “I do remember that.”

  • • •

  THE TV INTERVIEW ENDED, and R-A picked up the remote and clicked around the other major chann
els and she popped up again and he groaned: “Look at this woman, Horn. Just think what she’d be like, bent over that ottoman, screaming her lungs out. It’s just, just . . .”

  Just that blondes, without their clothes on, looked so naked. R-A excused himself, went back to the bedroom, and left Horn staring at the TV. He was back ten minutes later, and sat back down, and Horn asked, “Feel better now?”

  “I know, it’s disgusting, for a grown man,” R-A said. He finished the now-watery bourbon in one gulp, and sucked on the slim remnants of the ice cubes.

  “Everybody jacks off once in a while,” Horn said. “Well, except me. But three or four times a day? You’re going to break it off, you’re not careful.”

  “You know what’s going on,” R-A said. “I need . . .”

  The weatherman came on, smiling out at them as he talked about continuing hot and dry, and the meteor showers that were coming up and how, if the weather held, they’d have a good view of them.

  They waited in silence until he finished—weather was a big deal in Minnesota, even for insane serial killers in the middle of the summer—and then picked up again: “I know what you need, but that’s even crazier than it usually is,” Horn said. “What I don’t like, is you’re putting both of us at risk.”

  “Yeah, what do you have to lose? You haven’t done anything in years, you haven’t done anything since we broke that head off old Gunter’s neck.”

  R-A laughed at the thought. Gunter had been one of the early sepulcher residents. Twisting off old Gunter’s head had been messy; he sometimes still dreamed about the neck tendons popping like a bunch of cornstalks, and then that dusty, nasty smell. “I’m going down the basement,” he said. “Gonna look around.”

  • • •

  THE BASEMENT DOOR came off the kitchen, and the basement itself was down a narrow twisting set of steps. R-A’s house had been built in 1882, in a style called Carpenter Gothic. The original foundation had been made of local stone, but in the 1960s, R-A’s grandfather had the house jacked up, rolled onto the back half of the lot, and he’d dug a new, deeper basement, with a foundation of concrete block.

  As a Carpenter Gothic, the exterior form of the house had been determined by whim as much as anything, and the foundation necessarily followed it. That meant that it had been possible to build a long, narrow room not obvious to the eye, entered through a steel door around a sharp corner, and behind a rack of Ball jars filled with canned fruit and vegetables.

  R-A’s grandfather had designed it as a bomb shelter, for the day when the Russkies dropped the Big One. The neighbors didn’t know about it, because after the bombs fell, they’d be out there with guns, looking for food.

  R-A was as meticulous about home care as his grandfather and father had been, and the basement remained dry, clean, and orderly, divided into separate spaces for a home shop, a mechanical room for plumbing and heating fixtures, and a large and orderly storage area.

  The bomb shelter had become a cell, where he beat, raped, and murdered his victims.

  • • •

  NOW, DROPPING DOWN into the basement, R-A pushed the rack of jars aside—the rack didn’t look like it, but it was quite sturdy, with casters on the legs. He pushed open the steel door and looked around.

  He quite liked it down in the bomb shelter, because it was so quiet. He kept a stack of pornographic bondage magazines on a cot, and now he sat down and picked one of them up. The bound victims in the magazines were usually blond, his personal preference, and he spent some time paging through them, revisiting old favorites. He’d actually duplicated some of the scenes portrayed in the magazines, but his memories weren’t as sharp as the magazine pictures.

  Now he found a tough-looking blonde, nude, bent over a bench in the photo, her hands tied behind her, her face turned toward the men disciplining her . . . R-A closed his eyes and visualized Catrin Mattsson in the same position.

  Closed his eyes and saw it all, and groaned, slipped one hand into his jeans. Deep in his heart he thought Horn might be right, that it was all coming to an end. The cops would never quit. But if he could have Mattsson first . . .

  He knew nothing about her, where she lived, what she did when she wasn’t working. He’d have to figure out a way to ambush her, or perhaps to draw her in. If she came to the door as Shaffer had, unaware, tracking a lead, he could take her right there in the hallway.

  But how to bring her in, without bringing in a troop of cops behind her?

  How would he do that?

  • • •

  A STEEL BAR ran from one side of the concrete wall to the other, a little more than seven feet off the floor. It had nothing to do with the bomb shelter—R-A had put it there, because he’d fantasized about hanging the girls up there, the better to whip them. He’d done it a few times, too, but it never worked out as well as he’d hoped it would—they usually fainted, and they’d bleed all over the place.

  He wasn’t a big fan of actual blood. He wanted submission, and sex, and . . . admiration? Well, fear, anyway. Respect.

  He went over and stood under the bar, and did five pull-ups. Stood under the bar, waiting for the burn to subside, and then did three more. Not bad: most American men his age couldn’t even do two.

  If he could get Mattsson down here . . . He looked around.

  You know what? What he’d do, he thought, was fight her. Get everything out of here, so she couldn’t build a weapon somehow, strip her buck naked, then get naked himself, and lock the door, and tell her what he was going to do to her.

  Tell her to fight for the key.

  Fight her.

  That’s what he’d do, he thought. He was handling himself now, the urge growing again. Before his mind went completely blank, he made two resolutions. He would figure out a way to beat the cops; and he’d have Catrin Mattsson.

  7

  Lucas spent four futile hours driving between and walking the cemeteries, checking out the sepulchers in Owatonna and Holbein, ending outside the cemetery in Zumbrota, where Shaffer had been found. He was alone for most of it—he’d had the Murphy brothers in Owatonna come out to Holy Angels, got them to recall everything that Shaffer had said, which led him nowhere—and finally he wandered through the Zumbrota burial ground, his hands in his pockets, feeling a little foolish.

  Cemeteries couldn’t talk, he thought. Yet . . .

  At four-thirty, he called Duncan, who was still at the office.

  “You going home?” Lucas asked.

  “Sooner or later. I talked to Mattsson about this Sprick. She thinks it’s something, but says you disagree.”

  Lucas told him the story, then asked, “How long are the murder books now? How many pages?”

  “Lord, I don’t know. Twenty-five hundred pages, for everything. Most of it’s junk.”

  “Do you have any staff around?”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to get somebody to xerox it all, for me, tonight. You can charge it to my group.”

  “Let me check, I’ll call you back,” Duncan said. He was back in a minute. “Maizy says she’ll do it, but it’ll take some time.”

  “It’ll take me a while to get back. Tell her to bind it up in those blue report covers, leave it on my desk if she’s finished before I get there.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “I can’t see what Shaffer was up to,” Lucas said. “It has to be a combination of what he already knew, from the files, and what he saw, or maybe . . . somebody he saw. I’m lost down here, this isn’t working. I need to study it, I need to soak it up.”

  “Okay. By the way, I’m supposed to tell you that Del crossed the Iowa line about an hour ago, heading south with the ATF. And there’s a note on your office door that says you should call Virgil.”

  • • •

  LUCAS CALLED VIRGIL FLOWERS, one of his agents. Flowers worked on his own, out of Mankato, Minnesota. He’d been on vacation in New Mexico, where, he said, he’d caught all the muskys in the state’s only musky lak
e.

  “What’s up?” Lucas asked, when Virgil answered.

  “Man, I hate to ask this, with Shaffer dead and you working the Black Hole. But you know my friend Rick Johnson?”

  “Yeah, I know him,” Lucas said. “There’s a goddamn accident waiting to happen.”

  “Actually, it’s happened several times already . . . anyway, Johnson needs some help on, mmm . . . a non-priority mission,” Flowers said. “I’m not doing anything heavy, and nobody’s called me for the Black Hole group, so I’d like to run over there. It’s down south of La Crescent.”

  “You’re not telling me what it’s about,” Lucas said.

  “No, but if Johnson is telling the truth, and I make a couple of busts, it’ll bring great credit upon the BCA.”

  “We don’t need credit,” Lucas said. “The legislature’s already adjourned. But, go ahead, on your best judgment. From the way you’re talking, I don’t want to know what it is. If it blows up in your face, it’s your problem.”

  “Deal. I just wanted you to know where I was,” Flowers said.

  “You taking your boat?” Lucas asked.

  Long pause. Then Virgil said, “Maybe.”

  “Let me know if you get in trouble,” Lucas said. “But before then . . .”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “That’s right.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WAS BACK in St. Paul in an hour. Weather called as he crossed the Mississippi and said that the housekeeper had picked up a rotisserie chicken and some potato salad, and when would he be home?

  “Half an hour, hold on for me,” he said. “I’ve got to stop at the office, and then I’ll be home.”