Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  “Learn anything?”

  “No. I’m missing something, though. I can feel it. Give it a week, and it’ll be driving me nuts.”

  • • •

  THE BLACK HOLE books were sitting in a pile on his desk, two red, two black, and one blue. He picked them up and headed home, talked to the kids, ate chicken and potato salad, and then went and sat in the den with the five books.

  An hour into it, Letty came by and asked if she could read behind him: “Feel free,” he said. He explained that he was reading from beginning to end. She picked up the last book, and said she’d read from end to beginning.

  “Did you see Catrin on TV?” Letty asked, as she settled into the other reading chair.

  Lucas looked up from the book: “No. She do good?”

  “She’s good, for a cop without any training,” Letty said. Letty had interned at Channel Three for four years, from the time she was in ninth grade. “And she really, really liked it. Even when Jim Burns got on her case, about pulling the trigger on the mailman guy. You can tell when they like it: their eyes shine.”

  “Mmm. Hope she doesn’t like it too much—that can get you in trouble.”

  “Or a good job in PR,” Letty said.

  They sat comfortably together in the den, reading. Weather looked in at ten o’clock to say she was going to bed. Lucas read until midnight, then went to bed, leaving Letty reading in the big leather chair.

  • • •

  HE WAS BACK DOWNSTAIRS at nine o’clock the next morning when she rolled through the kitchen door in her nightgown, yawning, and Lucas asked, “Find anything good?”

  “Lots of interesting stuff—the autopsies were pretty awesome—but nothing that goes anywhere. Not, at least, until you’ve got a serious suspect. They think they might have his DNA.”

  “Yeah, I saw that. Not a sure thing, though.”

  “But it’s male. No male bodies, yet,” she said.

  Lucas scratched his neck and then said, “When those sepulchers were broken into . . . they only took female heads. I wonder why? Could there be something in that?”

  They both thought about it for a minute, then Letty laughed and said, “If there is, I’m not smart enough to see it, and we both know I’m smarter than you.”

  Lucas said, “You know, I could still get you into St. Thomas.” St. Thomas University was only a couple miles from their house.

  “Fuck a bunch of Tommies,” she said.

  “Uh . . .”

  “Sorry,” she said, without being sorry. “To get back on topic, I don’t see anything in the missing heads.”

  “Wonder if the killer’s some kind of spooky creep? Is that redundant? Spooky creep? Anyway, if he is, people would know,” Lucas said. “Maybe we could leak that to Ruffe, or to Channel Three. People tend to know about personalities like that.”

  “Are you going down there again today?”

  Lucas yawned and said, “No. I’m gonna hang out with you guys, and do some reading, go shopping, maybe watch a ball game, and try to think. I’d like to go up north and do some fishing. No time for that, though.”

  “It’s crazy,” Letty said. “It’s like a huge crisis, and there’s not much to do.”

  “There’s a lot to do: we’ve got several thousand pages to read, though most of it seems like junk.”

  For the rest of the Sunday, Lucas basically screwed off; went shopping for new running shoes, watched a ball game, ditched the kids to eat with Weather and friends at the Town and Country Club.

  That night, he started reading again.

  Duncan & Co. had tracked down every registered sex offender in Goodhue County and every bordering county (Dakota, Rice, Steele, Dodge, Olmstead, and Wabasha), and had done modus operandi checks on every registered sex offender in Minnesota and Wisconsin. They’d posted notices in every Minnesota prison with rewards for any inmate who could point them at a credible suspect. They’d found, now, a dozen serious treasure hunters and were working through the treasure-hunter chain to find any they’d missed.

  They had DNA studies of all the victims. Sprick’s life history had been taken back to his teenage years; they’d reviewed every police report of missing women for twenty-five years. They’d gotten lists of all the people known to have detasseled corn at the James farm, and run them against sex offender lists. They’d found two, but both were currently living out of state, one in the Nevada State Prison.

  One of the detasseling contractors refused to speak to cops, and had demanded a public defender to represent him. That had stirred some interest, until it turned out that he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party who’d been in New York the week that Carpenter was killed. He’d demanded a lawyer because, he said, he was sure the Black Hole case was a government setup to crush the workers and forerunners of the coming anticapitalist revolution.

  Whatever.

  Shaffer had traced the phone records of all the Black Hole women who’d been identified. The result had caused some argument: the most recent victims had last been registered at cell towers between Rochester and the Twin Cities, but there was a cluster around the University of Minnesota. Some of the agents argued that they might be looking for an ex-student; others argued that the bars around the university were simply the best hunting grounds for somebody looking for young blond women. That brought up a subsidiary argument: if he came from the south to the university area, but mostly took women who also came from the south . . . did he scout them as high school students, or children? Could he be a teacher, or somebody who dealt with young women? A coach, perhaps, who’d see young women from a variety of different schools?

  And a bewildering variety of other information, facts and theories and speculation and rumor, everything that ten or twelve hardworking cops could dig up in almost a month of relentless work, and every bit of it reported upon.

  Lucas went to bed with his mind churning.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, with Weather already gone to work, he was debating whether to go back south, or to spend the time reading, when his cell phone rang: Hopping Crow, from the crime-scene crew. “Yeah? What’s up, Larry?”

  “You know that Black Hole site?” Hopping Crow asked.

  “You mean the one west of Red Wing? Where they found all those skulls?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Bea and I just got here, with Rick Johnson from the U. Shaffer wanted us to do some GPR surveys, see if any other bodies popped up.” GPR—Ground Penetrating Radar.

  “Yeah? Did some?”

  “No, but there’s a dead woman lying on top of the place where the cistern was. She’s been strangled.”

  “Larry . . .”

  “I’m not joking, Lucas. I’ve already called Duncan and the team’s on the way. And I mean . . . Jesus Christ, Lucas . . .” Hopping Crow was freaking out.

  • • •

  LUCAS WAS OUT of the house in five minutes, and on the phone to Catrin Mattsson, who was at home, eating breakfast, as Lucas had been. “The crime-scene crew just pulled into the Black Hole site, and say they’ve found the body of a young woman there, apparently strangled.”

  “What!” Mattsson was screaming. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

  “We are telling you, right now,” Lucas said. “They just got there, I just found out, and you’re the first person I called. I’m on my way, I’ll see you there.”

  “Wait, wait . . . Any ID on the body?”

  “Catrin, we called you so fast, we don’t know shit about anything,” Lucas said. “You can find out everything we know by going over there.”

  “I’m going,” she said.

  “Those are crime-scene people there—you probably ought to get some more deputies out there, to control the site. Don’t let them trample over everything.”

  “Right, right, right, I’m on the way.”

  • • •

  LUCAS LET HIS NAVIGATION SYSTEM take him to the Black Hole, running fast down the welter of highways south of the Twin Cities. On the
way south, he talked to Duncan, who was running a few minutes behind Lucas, because he was coming down from a northern suburb.

  “I’ve been talking to Bea,” Duncan said. “She says they’ve taped off the scene, but they may have run over some stuff going in, before they found the new body. Anyway, what do you think?”

  “I’ve got to look at it,” Lucas said. “The guy has been so quiet for so long, it’s hard to believe that he’s come out of the woodwork to taunt us.”

  “Maybe he figures that since everybody’s looking for him anyway, and since he nailed Shaffer, he might as well. And he is nuts.”

  “Yes, he is. I’ve dealt with a couple of crazies who were talking directly to us, so all that’s possible,” Lucas said. “I’ve been reading the paper again. One of the newer bones that they took out of the hole, left radius nine, had a break that preceded the killing, and was healing badly, which means the victim hadn’t been to a hospital. The docs said that healing had just begun, had been under way for no more than a couple of days at most. Shaffer thought that meant the killer was holding the women for a while before strangling them, and that he was probably raping and torturing them. Most of them were apparently nude, since the clothing remnants turned up don’t contain bones. This new victim is clothed. So that’s out of kilter. If this woman hasn’t been raped . . .”

  “That’s good and bad. Good for her, I guess, but if she’s been raped, there’ll be some DNA. Bea told me the body didn’t look like it had been washed, what they can see of it. They can see a bra strap. Can’t tell about rape, because they haven’t moved the body yet. From what I’m hearing from Bea, the body seems to have been treated with some respect. Placed neatly on the ground. I gotta say, that doesn’t sound like somebody who’d throw a body down the hole.”

  “Okay. I’m thirty miles out. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  • • •

  THE DAY WAS another good one, with a few fair-weather clouds floating overhead, and warm and humid. Here and there, in the ditches, the sumac was showing orange leaves, and the dust from gravel roads hung in the air for a while, as it does on the windless, humid days; a good day not to be dead.

  When Lucas arrived at the Black Hole, the crime-scene van was parked across the entrance, and three Goodhue County patrol cars were arrayed across the road, along with Mattsson’s SUV. Lucas parked and walked around the tape, and then along a taped pathway that swung wide of probable entry lanes, to the former hole, which was now just a large square of raw earth.

  The woman’s body had been placed exactly in the middle of the square, on her back, arms along her sides, with the palms turned up, as in a yoga corpse pose. She had been in her mid- to late-twenties, mid-height, maybe five-six or five-seven, with narrow shoulders and short-cut black hair. She was wearing a pink cotton blouse, inexpensive fashion jeans, running shoes with white socks.

  The crew was working inside a circle of tape. Mattsson was standing outside the tape, looking in, and when she saw Lucas approaching she suppressed what might have become a scowl, and said, “Davenport.”

  “What’s the story?”

  “She was murdered, strangled,” Mattsson said. “Not by the Black Hole guy. Whoever killed her, dumped her here, so we might think that. A really, really dumb guy. She’s got an old black eye, and an old cut lip, like she might have been in a fight, maybe a week ago. Just eyeballing it, I’d swear it was a domestic.”

  Bea, the crime-scene chief, came over, heard the last part of what Mattsson said, and nodded to Lucas. “Manually strangled. You can see the finger bruising. Every one of the Black Hole killings was done with a rope, as far as we can tell—we actually have several of the ropes, and we have a lack of hyoid damage that is consistent with rope. Also, just from what we can see, the bruises, she may have been in an abusive relationship. Almost all the women we’ve identified from the Hole were women who were blond and busty—she’s thin and dark-haired. She’d also be toward the older end of the victims . . . So I agree with Officer Mattsson. Probably not the Black Hole guy.”

  “Anything in her pants pocket?” Lucas asked. “ID . . . anything?”

  Bea was shaking her head. “Pockets are empty.”

  To Mattsson: “Anybody call with a missing person?”

  “First thing I checked,” Mattsson said. “Not here, none of the counties around here, including across the river. But . . . I think she’s from Red Wing. I don’t know her, but I think I’ve seen her, and more than once. Not with any crime thing. I think she might work someplace I go shopping. Maybe Target or Walmart or Walgreens or Econofoods.”

  “Like a cashier?”

  “Something like that,” Mattsson said. “I spend some time in the hospitals, too—could be a nurse.”

  “Maybe we should try to get a photo.”

  “Already done,” Mattsson said. “We transmitted a mug down to the office, printed them out, and we’ve got a couple of guys running around trying to nail down who she is . . . if she actually works in town.”

  “Well, shit, Catrin, what do you need us for?”

  She looked at him for a moment, then shook her head and said, “I don’t think we do—not on this one.”

  • • •

  BEA TOLD THE STORY of how they found the body—nothing to it, they drove into the site, and there she was. “There will be DNA, when you find the guy who did this.”

  “What about the GPR—you gonna go ahead with that?” Lucas asked.

  “We’re doing it now, but we haven’t seen anything,” Bea said. “I mean . . .” She gestured at the body.

  She went back to work, doing an inch-by-inch search down the path from the road to the dirt patch. Lucas turned to Mattsson and asked, “Anything more from Sprick? Or about him?”

  “Got a flat tire there,” she said. “I still think there’s something going on with him, but I don’t know what. The thing is, I’ve been back to Kaylee twice, now, and she’s rock solid that she saw Mr. Sprick in the ditch.”

  “Sometimes—” Lucas began.

  Mattsson rode over him: “Which reminds me, I got some kinda bad news about all that.”

  Lucas grinned at her: “Bad news in a case with this many dead . . . that’s gotta be really bad.”

  “More of an annoyance, than bad,” she said. “First of all, Kaylee’s parents told everybody they met yesterday that Kaylee had seen Sprick, and half the people in Zumbrota believe he’s the killer.”

  “Ah, jeez. Is there a second-of-all?”

  “Yeah. They’ve been grooming Kaylee for beauty contests and they’re sort of . . . exploiting . . . this whole thing. She’s being interviewed by Channel Three this afternoon. I tried to talk them out of it, but her father said that this was her ‘big chance.’ Could put some pressure on us.”

  “We’ve already got pressure, couldn’t be much more. If you’re careful about it, when you’re interviewed—they’ll come to you, because you’re the one Kaylee’s parents know—you might be able to embarrass the interviewer enough to tone down the whole thing.”

  She thought about it for a second, then said, “Maybe I’ll do that.”

  “And I need to ask you something, kind of half-seriously,” Lucas said.

  She cocked her head.

  Lucas asked, “Is there any possibility that somebody’ll get drunk and decide to eliminate the killer? I mean, Sprick?”

  “What an interesting question,” she said. “I don’t know the answer to that, but I’ll talk to the Zumbrota chief.”

  • • •

  THEY WATCHED BEA for another minute, then Lucas said, “I’m gonna go talk to the GPR guys.”

  The GPR guys were dragging the bright orange ground-penetrating radar antenna through small openings in the brush of the farmyard, well away from the body. They were sweating from the work, and stopped when Lucas came up. “Anything?”

  “Nothing. Not so far . . .”

  He watched for a moment, then saw Duncan walking across the site, to the body. Mattsson
was still standing there, watching the processing of the body. Lucas turned back to the GPR guys and asked if he could get a printout of the radar map, and one of them said, “Sure.”

  “You ever find any buried treasure?”

  “I keep thinking I might, but I never do,” the other one said. “I found a misplaced gas pipe, once.” They came up to an end-marker and turned to drag the antenna back down the field. Lucas glanced over at the body, and saw Mattsson and Duncan, Mattsson with her hands on her hips, Duncan barking at her.

  He thought, Uh-oh, and considered going over, but then Mattsson walked away from Duncan and pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and put it to her ear. She listened for a minute, then looked wildly around the yard, saw him, shouted, “Davenport! Davenport! We got her . . .”

  Lucas said, “Excuse me,” to the GPR guys, and trotted after Mattsson. As he passed Duncan, he said, “I got this, Jon.”

  • • •

  HE CAUGHT MATTSSON at the road. Their cars were parked at opposite ends of the abandoned farmstead, and as she turned toward hers, she shouted, “Follow me: I’ll call you.”

  Lucas jogged down to the Benz, climbed in, did a U-turn, and followed her down the dusty road toward the blacktop. A half-mile down, his phone rang and Mattsson was there.

  “Her name is Harriet Card and she lives a mile south of town, south of Red Wing. She’s a cashier at Target. She got a restraining order against her partner a year ago, but withdrew it a couple of months later. A friend of hers at Target says they got back together, but they’ve been having trouble again. They lived at Card’s place.”

  “You got his name?”

  “Her name. Her girlfriend’s name is Glenda Hannah Shales and she has two convictions for assault and battery and on the last one, did a year and a day in Shakopee. You know that old dykes-on-bikes business? She’s like that. She’s a drinker and a mean bitch. I’ve dealt with her before.”

  “We’re going to her place?”

  “Yes. We’ve got the ERU on the way now, they’ll wait for me before we go in,” Mattsson said.