Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  “Yeah?”

  “You go up there and write you a note. The note says, ‘It’s hardly worth killing women anymore, when all that’s on the other side is a bunch of dumb flatfeet. No fun in fooling you. You couldn’t find your own pussy with two hands and a flashlight.’”

  “That’s gonna impress her,” R-A said.

  “Get her attention, for sure,” Horn said. “Then you say, ‘You can’t even figure out who’s down that Black Hole, and I didn’t even try to hide who it was. You want some names? There’s Shawna Rivers from New Prague, I took her off four years ago, her skull’s down there. Then there’s Melissa Scott, she was eight years ago, and she was a fun little thing. I turned that girl every way but loose, and I still get a big ol’ boner just thinking about it. She was begging for more by the time I got tired of her and choked her out. Here you were on the TV whining about twenty skulls—you haven’t even figured out the pits in Alexandria and Eau Claire. I’ve been doing this for a long time, honey. I’d be embarrassed if it were only twenty, after all the work I’ve put into it.’”

  R-A dropped back onto the weight bench. “Okay. That will get her attention. Why do I want to do that?”

  “Let me finish. Tomorrow, you tell the boys at the store that you’ve got to run up to the Cities. You run right through the Cities to Sauk Centre and mail that letter. Don’t go licking any stamps or any envelope glue, or they’ll get you on that DNA. When she gets that letter, she’ll be someone. You could tell when you saw her on the TV that she wants to be someone. So she’ll be waiting to talk to you. You tease her, and tease her . . . We get her turned around, get her on TV, get her running around like a rat, sooner or later, we’ll figure out a way to pull her in, and take her.”

  “Take her in Sauk Centre?”

  “No, dumbass. You mail the letter from Sauk Centre to pull the attention up that way. They’ll still be down here, some, but they’ve been down here for a month and they ain’t got shit. They’ll be worried because you mentioned Alexandria, and another pit, and Sauk Centre is the next place down the highway. They’re already panicked. If there’s more pits out there, and they don’t get you quick, they’ll all lose their jobs. You let them worry about that for a couple of days, then . . .”

  “This is gonna be nasty, isn’t it?” He grinned at Horn.

  “Then you go up to Alexandria and take a nice little blond girl, and you choke her out, and you leave a note with her. From the same typewriter,” Horn said. “The note is in one hand, which is pointing out somewhere, and the note says, ‘The Alex pit is over that way . . . but pretty far. When I take the next one, I’ll point to her, too. Maybe the lines will cross over close enough that you’ll find it. It’s not like the Black Hole, it’s something completely different. Good luck!’ See, the thing is, they do all that analysis shit, and they’ll see it’s the same typewriter. They’ll believe you, and the next thing you know, they’ll be marching through the streets of Alexandria.”

  “So.” R-A sat on the bench, dropped the dumbbells. He’d just lifted a total of two thousand pounds with each arm; both his arms and legs burned with acid buildup. “Everybody is up there looking . . . and Miss Big-Tit Goodhue County Sheriff’s Deputy is out of the action. Then we feed her something that’ll get her out in the open . . . and she comes in. What do we feed her?”

  “Don’t have that yet,” Horn said. “I’ll think of something.”

  • • •

  R-A THOUGHT ABOUT IT all morning, working around the store, and sitting in his office, figuring out inventory and bills. One of the bills, for nine hundred dollars, covered the wholesale cost of six aluminum Wave-Busters, used by boaters when back-trolling. He bought twelve a year, and reliably sold them. Still had four left. When he sold three of them, he’d run over to Greg’s Machine, five miles north of Durand, and get six more. Probably wouldn’t have to do that until February, he thought.

  Wouldn’t have to stop at the candy store . . . although . . . Mary Lynn’s assistant had been cute, if he remembered her right. A little flat-chested, but a possibility.

  He punched the “pay” button on his computer-books program, and the printer spit out a check for nine hundred bucks.

  Mary Lynn had been a disappointment. She’d given up too quick.

  But this deputy, this Mattsson . . . she looked like a fighter.

  • • •

  HE WALKED HOME at noon, and wrote the note, using his dead mom’s old Royal typewriter. The ribbon was crappy and dry, but the words were clear enough. He called Roy, at the store, said he was feeling a little rocky, and was taking the afternoon off.

  “You going to Sauk Centre?” Horn asked, when R-A got back home.

  “Worth a try,” he said.

  “Rolling the bones,” Horn said. “It’s getting interesting, now.”

  R-A got in the car just about the time Lucas crossed the Mississippi on his way to Durand. Sauk Centre was two and a half hours away. If he dropped the letter as soon as he got there, Mattsson could get it as early as the next day.

  10

  Lucas didn’t want to tell Mattsson about Cindy Tucker’s identification of Sprick on the telephone: face-to-face would be better, he thought. He called her, said something interesting had turned up, and where was she, anyway?

  Sitting at home, she said, with a Blue Ice pack freezing her face.

  • • •

  MATTSSON HAD AN APARTMENT in downtown Red Wing, the only apartment on the second floor of a brown-brick building, above Bunny’s Nail Parlor. If you stood in just the right place at a back bathroom window, and pushed a curtain aside, and looked at just the right angle, you could see a tree on the far side of the Mississippi.

  Lucas came out of the bathroom after washing his hands and said, “You can almost see the river from the bathroom.”

  “Yeah. When I rented it, it was called a ‘view apartment,’” Mattsson said. “I told the landlady if she planned to charge me extra for the view, I’d bust her for fraud.”

  Mattsson was sitting on a plaster banco in the kitchen, which smelled pleasantly of a peppery tomato soup. The Blue Ice bags were back in the freezer, getting cold again; the bruise on Mattsson’s face was the size of Lucas’s hand. He pulled out a chair at the kitchen table, sat down across from her, and said, “You always want to have a good start with a new landlady.”

  “Ah, she wanted me in here,” Mattsson said. “Reliable job, so she gets paid, and it’s always good to have a cop around, keeping an eye on the place. I wanted it because it’s got space. So . . . you figured something out?”

  “What happened with Shales?”

  “She spilled her guts. She’s a sad case. She said Harriet Card was the only person who ever loved her. Last night, Card told her that it wasn’t working out. They started fighting, and Shales choked her. Won’t be a trial—she’ll eventually plead out, probably take ten.”

  “Good when that happens, cuts all the crap out,” Lucas said. “So listen . . . I showed your photo of Sprick to the candy store girl. She says it’s six-out-of-ten Sprick was over there three or four times a year.”

  Mattsson sat bolt upright: “What?”

  “Yeah. She sorta half-ass identified him.”

  “Jesus! Davenport!”

  “Calm down. I don’t think he’s the guy,” Lucas said. “The question is, why did Kaylee identify him from the ditch, and why did Cindy Tucker identify him as a guy who was in her store several times a year?”

  “I could think of one really good reason,” Mattsson said. “It’s him.”

  “But it’s not him. For one thing, Cindy said he’s on the short side. Distinctly on the short side. Sprick must be six feet tall. I mean, we should go over there and talk to him, but I’ll bet he’s as confused as we are. So we want to ask, does he have male relatives of the same age? A brother? Somebody who could be mistaken for him? Somebody shorter?”

  “Let’s do that,” she said. “Let me get my Blue Ice and some gloves: I can hold it on my face
driving over.”

  • • •

  THEY DID THAT.

  Lucas followed her over, a half hour from downtown Red Wing. Ten minutes out, he took a call from Rose Marie Roux. “Where are you?”

  “Down by Red Wing,” Lucas said.

  “How’s the hunt?”

  “We’re getting some movement—I’m keeping Duncan up to date,” Lucas said. “You probably already know this, but the body found at the Hole this morning doesn’t have anything to do with the guy we’re looking for.”

  “I heard. The thing is, the media were saying at noon that we probably had caught the killer,” Roux said. “Now they’re having to say that we haven’t caught the killer, and you know how annoyed they get when they’re wrong. They start looking for somebody to blame that’s not them.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck ’em.”

  “Yeah. Sometimes I wish I could run into Channel Three with a dynamite belt and blow the whole place to kingdom come,” Roux said.

  Lucas: “Did something happen?”

  “Three has out an editorial. They’re saying the investigation has been incompetent, that this killer is going to kill more people,” Rose Marie said. “They say I should fire Sands. If I don’t, the governor should step in and fire both of us. They say we’re an embarrassment to law enforcement.”

  “Oh, boy. Why don’t they blame the FBI? They had that profiler guy talking to Shaffer every day.”

  “Because they’re not going to get the FBI fired,” Roux said. “Me, they could bag.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “It’s getting that way,” Roux said. “If we don’t get this guy soon . . .”

  “But you and the governor are asshole buddies,” Lucas said.

  “He won’t fire me—but I’ll have to go.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Lucas said. “I bet Mary Lynn Carpenter’s father a thousand dollars that I’ll have the guy in two weeks. Can you hold on that long?”

  “Maybe. Can I tell the governor you said that? He trusts you.”

  “Go ahead. Tell him two weeks, not more,” Lucas said.

  “Could he say it on television? Two weeks?” Roux asked.

  Lucas had to laugh: “Jesus, it’s that bad?”

  • • •

  JUST BEFORE THEY GOT to Zumbrota, where Sprick lived, he took another call, this time from Ignace, the Star-Tribune reporter: “Janet Frost is trying to get you, for that story on the crazy hunger-strike guy, but she hasn’t been able to get your phone number. I told her I didn’t have it, but I’d call around the BCA and try to get it. Can I give it to her?”

  “Ah, jeez, I don’t want to talk to her.”

  “Well, her next move is to come over to your house tonight and pound on the door. So . . . She’s going to get you one way or another.”

  “Give me her number, and I’ll call her.”

  • • •

  LUCAS TOOK THE NUMBER as they crossed the Zumbro bridge into Zumbrota. Five minutes later, they were parked outside Sprick’s house behind a Channel Three van. The lights were on in the house, but all the shades were pulled.

  When Lucas and Mattsson got out of their trucks, a reporter hopped out of the van and said, “Officer Mattsson . . . Agent Davenport. What’s up?”

  “Mr. Sprick invited us over to play canasta,” Lucas said, and he continued up the sidewalk.

  Mattsson, trailing behind, asked the reporter, “Are you still doing that story on Kaylee?”

  The reporter looked at his watch: “Should be running in ten minutes.”

  The cameraman had come around from the driver’s seat with a camera on his shoulder. The reporter, stopping short of Sprick’s property, called, “Is it true that you were hospitalized after the fight with Glenda Shales this morning?”

  Lucas turned to Mattsson as she came up behind him. “If you talk to these guys, they’ll bite you in the ass. I promise you.”

  “I kinda like it,” she said.

  “Yeah. Until they bite you. They’re like crocodiles. They will bite, sooner or later,” he said.

  Sprick came to the door, peered out, then opened it. “What?”

  Lucas said, “We need to talk to you, but that camera’s running out there, and the microphone could probably pick up an ant walking across the sidewalk.”

  Sprick stared at them for a moment. He was haggard, and maybe a little drunk. Lucas could smell the beer from the porch. Sprick looked past Lucas to the TV truck, then said, “Come on in.”

  He shut the door behind them, and pointed to the living room, where the chairs were. “I still didn’t do it.”

  “I’ve only got one question for you,” Lucas said. “How often do you go to Durand, Wisconsin?”

  “Durand? Wisconsin? I’ve heard of it, I’ve seen it on addresses on envelopes, but I don’t know exactly where it is,” Sprick said. “I’ve never been there.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. You find another body?”

  “No, but a woman there said she recognized you as having been in her store, a few times every year.”

  Sprick rolled his head back in exasperation. “I’ve never been there . . . never in my life.”

  Mattsson said, “We’ve got two people identifying you as being associated with crime scenes. If we believe you . . . have you ever seen anybody around here that could be mistaken for you? Do you have a brother, or a cousin, or somebody like that?”

  Sprick was shaking his head. “I’ve got two sisters, and they don’t look like me. I’ve got a couple of cousins, but they live over by Milwaukee, and they don’t look any more like me than anybody else does.”

  “You don’t know anybody that looks like you? From right around here?” Lucas asked.

  “No. I know about every single person in town, and I don’t think anyone looks enough like me that Kaylee would make that mistake.”

  “The Kaylee interview is going on the air tonight,” Lucas said.

  “I know, they’ve been promoting it all afternoon,” Sprick said. “That fuckin’ Little Kaylee, that’s what they’re calling her, is gonna hang me up by my nuts. I can’t even go outside.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WENT HOME after the interview with Sprick. He was tired. He’d gone running out that morning to look at a dead body, and hadn’t stopped since. On the way north, he looked at the number that Ignace had texted him, the woman who was doing the story on Emmanuel Kent. He punched it into his phone, listened to it ring three times, and was about to hang up, when she answered: “Janet Frost.”

  “This is Lucas Davenport, with the BCA. I understand you’ve been trying to get in touch.”

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you for calling back,” she said. She had a nice sexy voice, with a suppressed giggle in it. “You know about Emmanuel Kent? He’s on a hunger strike, outside City Hall. He says he’s on it because you set up an ambush to kill his brother.”

  “I wasn’t even there,” Lucas said.

  “No, but you were obviously behind it—the smart guy behind it,” Frost said. “The Woodbury police told us that you or this other agent, Agent Jenkins, were passing on surveillance to them that led up to the shoot-out.”

  “That’s partly true,” Lucas said. “But we weren’t doing the surveillance—that was all done by the local police forces, and as Kent moved around the Twin Cities, they kept an eye on him, and let us know what he was up to. All we did was keep everyone informed. Then, he started cruising the bank out in Woodbury, and we notified the Woodbury force that he appeared to be coming their way.”

  “Instead of killing him, why didn’t you just stop him? Warn him?” Frost asked.

  “Because he would have laughed us off. We had word that he was the guy doing this, but we had no proof at all,” Lucas said. “Remember, he’d robbed five banks—he was a very efficient robber, very skilled at it. But sooner or later, he was going to run into a problem, and he was going to kill some innocent person trying to get out of it. He went into the banks with a gun,
and sooner or later, he’d pull the trigger. That was our belief. He certainly seemed prepared to do so. When he was confronted by Woodbury officers, he pulled the trigger first.”

  “He was shot seven times by Woodbury officers. The officers admit that they fired at least twenty bullets.”

  “Yes. I thought they showed great restraint,” Lucas said.

  “Restraint? Shot seven times?”

  “Sure. Have you ever fired a semiautomatic pistol?”

  “No, I—”

  “The feds say a novice shooter can fire three times in a second—and a trained man can fire twice that many,” Lucas said. “With four trained officers there, all shooting, twenty rounds total, they probably were firing for a second or so. Not as much as two seconds.”

  Frost was silent for a moment—taking notes, Lucas hoped—then said, “Somehow, though, it doesn’t seem fair, four policemen, behind their cars . . .”

  Lucas hesitated, then said, “Well, Janet, it wasn’t supposed to be fair. This wasn’t High Noon. The Woodbury officers were attempting to stop an armed bank robber who opened fire on them. This is not a video game where you get a do-over. When Kent opened fire, somebody was going to get shot, and the police officers involved were desperately anxious that it not be them. Go look at a gunshot wound sometime, and you’ll see why.”

  “You know what Doyle was using the money for? He was supporting his brother on the street—”

  “That’s not exactly the whole story,” Lucas said. “When he hit the bank in Golden Valley, he took out twelve thousand dollars, and he apparently spent it all during the month before he hit the Woodbury bank. As close as I can tell, from the psychiatrist’s report on Emmanuel Kent, Doyle Kent might have given his brother two hundred dollars during that month. So he wasn’t exactly supporting him in style. That’s two percent of his take.”

  “And yet we have this result: a street person starving in front of City Hall,” Frost said.

  “I can’t solve that problem,” Lucas said. “That’s somebody else’s job. My job is to try to keep the assholes from robbing banks and killing innocent people.”