Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  “Maybe everyone just takes care of himself,” Lucas suggested.

  They went down to the cemetery. It was both pleasant and predictably melancholy, with big trees and grass that had been cut, but not recently.

  “Now what?” Mattsson asked.

  “We’re not doing any good, standing around like this,” Lucas said.

  “Tell you what,” Mattsson said. “You can drop me at the office and I’ll start calling people. I’ll have a list of names by the end of the day. I’ll call all the funeral homes. They gotta know who’s running these places.”

  “Look for locksmiths,” Lucas said. “I’ll give your list to Duncan, and have him run them all.”

  • • •

  “YOU EVER THINK it might be like this?” Lucas asked, as they walked back to his truck.

  “What?”

  “Investigating. You get what feels like a hot lead, but you can’t find anyone to talk to?”

  “It’s worse than that, in my job, anyway. You get a hot lead, but the crime was so low-rent that the lead bores you,” she said. “So—what’re you going to do?”

  “I’m going to read the murder books again. Shaffer knew more than I do—I’m pretty sure the key thing is what he figured out. The question is, how’d he take the next step? It’s gotta be in what he knew.”

  “Okay. That’s boring.”

  • • •

  THEY NEVER DID any of that, because as they were leaving, Duncan called and asked Lucas where he was.

  “Over in Diamond Bluff.”

  “Look—I never could find who takes care of the cemetery at Diamond Bluff, but we’ve had something else come up. There was a funeral down in Zumbrota this morning—just wound up a few minutes ago. We’re being told that the funeral party found Shaffer’s wallet and the other notebook. The big one. They say it looks like somebody threw them in a patch of long grass. One of the funeral party picked up the wallet—they thought somebody had lost it—but they haven’t touched the notebook. We’re hoping for prints or DNA. Could you get that Goodhue crime-scene guy and go get it?”

  “Yeah, but don’t we have a few guys still up at the Hole? They’d be closer.”

  “No. They wound that up this morning, they’re already back,” Duncan said. “Besides, I want to know what’s in that notebook just as soon as I can.”

  “On my way,” Lucas said.

  Mattsson had been listening, and she said, “Take me back to my truck, and I’ll follow you over. Actually, if you follow me over, we’ll get there faster. I know the shortcuts. I’ll call Johnston now.” Johnston was the Goodhue County crime-scene investigator.

  • • •

  THE RUN WAS a fast one: down across the river through Red Wing with Lucas’s flashers going, and then a two-truck caravan rocketing cross-country to Zumbrota. When they arrived at the cemetery, they saw a hearse, a line of civilian cars, a Zumbrota cop car, a Goodhue sheriff’s car, and a cluster of people in suits and somber dresses. Off to one side, an open grave and a rank of folding chairs.

  Mattsson pulled up and hopped out, with Lucas a few steps behind. She turned and said, “Johnston’s already here. He was cleaning up at the Hole from yesterday, taking some site photos.”

  Johnston was, in fact, taking photos of the wallet and the notebook, which lay by a tree ten yards from the still-open grave; the mourners were spread around him in a semicircle, watching him work. The notebook was actually a yellow legal pad, inside a leather cover.

  When Mattsson and Lucas walked through the semicircle of mourners, Johnston looked up and said, “Almost done. I need another two or three shots.”

  “You got any of those plastic see-through evidence bags?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “When you’re finished with the photos, let’s get the notebook in a bag. I want to take a look.”

  • • •

  MATTSSON WALKED OVER to the mourners, Lucas a few steps behind, and asked, “Who found the notebook?”

  A white-haired older man, in a dark blue suit, white dress shirt, and shiny blue necktie, raised his hand and said, “That’d be me.”

  “Tell us about it,” Lucas said.

  The mourners had come to the cemetery in a short convoy, he said. When they got to the new gravesite, they’d all gotten out, sat in the folding chairs, and listened to a few words from the Lutheran minister who was presiding. When he mentioned the minister, the minister raised his hand, and Mattsson nodded at him.

  “. . . was talking about Gillian and her good works, and I happened to look over there by that tree, and I saw it. The wallet. I wasn’t sure it was a wallet, but it looked like one. When we finished here, I walked over there to check, and it was, and I picked it up.”

  He automatically checked the cash compartment, which was empty, then opened it to the driver’s license window. When he saw the name, he replaced it where he found it and told the crowd.

  They’d called the local cops, who’d come over in five minutes or so, and shooed everybody away from the tree. One of the cops had spotted the notebook, which was lying fifteen feet away, in a patch of long grass behind a tombstone. Nobody had touched it.

  Johnston finished the photography, chimped the photos to make sure they were correctly exposed, and present on both the main and backup memory cards, then put the camera in his car. He took plastic gloves out of his kit, pulled them on, and carried two evidence bags over to the wallet and notebook.

  They did the notebook first, and when it was safely isolated in the oversized evidence bag, Lucas asked Johnston to open to the last pages. There wasn’t much from Shaffer’s last day—names, mostly, written in blue ink.

  On the last page was the enigmatic notation “Horn,” surrounded by a double-lined box.

  Lucas asked Mattsson, “What does that mean? Horn?”

  The Zumbrota chief of police, standing behind him, looking over his shoulder, said, “You gotta be shittin’ me.”

  Lucas turned: “What does it mean?”

  The chief said, “That’s the killer: he was saying that Jack Horn is the goddamned Black Hole killer?”

  Lucas and Mattsson, simultaneously: “Who’s Jack Horn?”

  • • •

  THE CHIEF TOLD THEM.

  “Years ago, jeez, must’ve been ten or eleven years, a woman was attacked over in Faribault, by a guy named Jack Horn. From Holbein. He was the dogcatcher over there, I believe.”

  “He was,” said one of the mourners.

  The chief went on: “Anyway, he attacked this waitress. Can’t remember her name, off the top of my head. It was at night, he threw a bag over her head, I think a postal bag, it was, and tied up the bag and threw her into his truck. She had a knife with her, and she cut her way out, and then she stabbed him while he was driving. Maybe several times. He crashed the truck, and she managed to get out and ran away. Got to a house and called for help. When the Faribault police got there, they found the truck upside down in the ditch, and lots of blood, nobody there. They went to his house, but Horn was never seen again. Never tried to get to any of his stuff. A lot of people thought he’d crawled away from the truck and gone off somewhere and died in a hole. Never found a body, though. Everybody for a hundred miles around was looking for him, including us. Hell, not a hundred miles—all over the state, and down in Iowa.”

  “This woman, the waitress?” Mattsson asked. “Do you remember anything about her?”

  “A couple things,” the chief said. “You’re gonna have to check me on this, but she was attacked in the summer, I believe, and she was young and blond.”

  Lucas took his phone out and stepped away.

  Mattsson: “You calling in the team?”

  “Yes.”

  Before Lucas could call, the chief said, “I’ll tell you something else. The seat cover was taken out of the truck, and the Faribault cops put it somewhere, as evidence. I don’t think they did DNA at the time, but I remember hearing from somebody that they compared the blood from
the truck with some, mmm, stains they found on his bedsheets, and it was the right guy. The blood came from Horn. Then, a few years ago I heard that you guys, you BCA guys, came down and took samples of his blood to do the DNA thing, and put it in your database.”

  A tall, elderly man cleared his throat and said, “Jorgenson. Heather Jorgenson.”

  Mattsson: “Excuse me?”

  “The woman who got away from the killer was named Heather Jorgenson. She was a relation of Luther Jorgenson, who used to live here in town, but he moved up to the Twin Cities years ago. Luther came over to my house to service the water softener, and we talked all about it. Biggest thing that ever happened to their family.”

  The chief said, “I think John’s right. Now that I think about it, I talked to Luther about it myself. Jorgenson.”

  Lucas said to Mattsson, “Why don’t you call the Faribault police, see what they’ve got. We can go on over there when we’re done here.”

  The chief said, “If Horn’s still out there, hiding out after all these years, that kinda scares the shit out of me. There’s a lot of us around that he don’t like.”

  • • •

  R-A HAD BEEN PARKED near the fairgrounds when the white-haired guy picked up the wallet, and a moment later, showed it to the rest of the people in the funeral party. R-A should have left then, but he couldn’t: he had to see how it came out.

  Now the cops would have two hard pieces of evidence: a name associated with an earlier sex crime that fit the precise pattern of the Black Hole killer, and a letter mailed from Sauk Centre, which was a hundred miles away, to the northwest. Horn hadn’t cared about being identified, because if he was ever seen, the jig was up anyway. The important thing was to move the cops away from Holbein. With any luck at all, the BCA would shift the center of its investigation up there, looking for a man they wouldn’t find.

  They’d go because they’d know for sure that Horn couldn’t be in Goodhue County, where he’d be known and chased on sight. . . .

  Horn had suggested another step: killing a woman from the Alexandria area, still farther to the northwest. That would really pull the investigators away from Holbein . . . but any killing was a risk. Risk was interesting, but now he had another goal in life.

  Mattsson.

  Sheer foolishness, Horn had said. He was right, but Mattsson had entered R-A’s thoughts and dreams, and she wouldn’t get out. When the BCA investigators left for Sauk Centre, she’d be almost alone, working the case.

  He watched the funeral party as they all moved over to the tree where the white-haired man had found the wallet, and as one of the men got on his cell phone. A few minutes later a Zumbrota cop car rolled into the cemetery.

  Still, he waited, watching through a pair of image-stabilized hunting binoculars as the rest of the troops arrived.

  Including Mattsson. She got out of her SUV, waited for a tall, well-dressed guy to catch up with her, from another truck. After that, he couldn’t see much, as Mattsson and the cops were surrounded and obscured by the funeral party.

  Mattsson. Yum.

  12

  Duncan’s team met at nine o’clock the next morning. Lucas arrived at eight-thirty, and made some calls: Jenkins and Shrake, still in Florida, said that the papers they’d found in the truck of Bryan’s car would hang him for fraud, no question about it. They’d also found an account from the Cayman Islands, and had talked to a fed about it.

  “He’s stashed better than fifteen million in the bank, and the feds have got a hold on it,” Jenkins said.

  “I thought those offshore guys wouldn’t talk to us,” Lucas said.

  “They won’t tell you anything new, but the feds say if they have the proof, the bank’ll give it up—they’re scared to death that the islands will go on an embargo list. So, if you’ve got the facts and figures, and put a gun to their head, they’ll cooperate. We put a gun to their head. All it took was a call to the IRS.”

  “Good move,” Lucas said. “How’s the golf weather?”

  • • •

  FLOWERS WAS WORKING down on the Iowa line: “I’ll have something for you in the next couple of days. Alert the media.”

  • • •

  DEL WAS IN TEXAS: “They’ve off-loaded a few guns, we got them in Technicolor. The big meeting is probably two or three days away yet, down near El Paso. The ATF is recording everything going in and out of their cell phones. As soon as the deal goes down, we’re gonna throw a net over them.”

  “You buy a cowboy hat yet?”

  Long silence, then, “It’s really hot and sunny down here.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said. “How about the boots? You buy the boots?”

  Another long silence.

  • • •

  ROSE MARIE ROUX leaned in his office doorway: “You haven’t got him yet.”

  “I was there when we opened Shaffer’s notebook,” Lucas said.

  “That wasn’t really you,” she said. “That could have been anybody.”

  Lucas said, “Yeah, but it wasn’t.”

  Roux said, “Lucas, I don’t give a wide shit about who got where first. I want the guy. Now. And I’ll tell you something else—you might have your own media problem. I talked to this Janet Frost from the Strib, and she seems to have a problem with you, involving this shooting in Woodbury and the hunger-strike guy.”

  “Aw, for Christ’s sakes,” Lucas said. “I tried to help her out.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for yourself, feel sorry for me. I mean, what could I do that I haven’t, to get the Black Hole guy? It’s not like I didn’t drive the squad car fast enough.”

  “Yeah, but you politician assholes swim in the media sea—you love it, when it’s on your side,” Lucas said. “I might get whacked for doing the right thing.”

  “You could still solve both problems if you caught this guy in the next day or two. You’d be the big hero, and I’d still be your boss.”

  • • •

  THE MEETING WENT OFF precisely at nine o’clock. Mattsson showed up and took a chair next to Lucas, leaned toward him and said, “I talked to every cop shop in the county. Nobody’s ever had a hint of Horn. A lot of cops knew him personally, and so did everybody in Holbein, but nobody’s had even a sniff of him, after that night in the truck.”

  “According to the original reports from Faribault, the victim said she stabbed him several times,” Lucas said. “I am really curious about what happened to him . . . how he walked out of there, after being in a bad car wreck and getting himself stabbed.”

  “I’m curious about why he’d go to Sauk Centre,” Mattsson said.

  “We don’t know that he did,” Lucas said quietly. “I don’t think a guy smart enough to pull off this many killings, and tough enough to walk out of the wreck of his truck, and get away . . . I don’t think he’d mail that letter from his hometown. Or type it.”

  “Huh,” she said.

  Lucas grinned at her: “What? You don’t think a killer would be rotten enough to lie to us?”

  “You think he’s still down in Goodhue?”

  “I didn’t say that. You couldn’t hide Horn anywhere around Holbein, but you get up north, in tourist country,” Lucas said. “Up north, you could hide him. And it’s possible . . .” He scratched his head.

  She prompted him, “What?”

  “You’ve got to look around Goodhue to see if he had any friends.”

  “I’ve already asked about that,” Mattsson said.

  “Good. Because I’d think he might have needed help, from someone willing to keep a really ugly secret.”

  Henry Sands, the BCA director, and victim of one of the most serious rounds of backbiting in BCA history, post Alaska, said, “All right, folks, let’s get this going. . . .”

  • • •

  DUNCAN TOOK OVER as soon as Sands finished outlining what everybody knew at that point.

  “As everybody knows,” Duncan said, “we’ve finally got a suspect, Jack L. Horn, formerly of Holbein.” />
  Duncan outlined Horn’s history. When the police raided his house after the kidnapping attempt, they didn’t find much in the way of personal possessions, but they did get a link to his past through his Social Security number. The number had been issued in 1984, but his age at the time of issuance was uncertain. It had been issued so he could take a job at a taco restaurant in Des Moines. Subsequent jobs put him in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Cheyenne job was with an over-the-road trucking company, as a driver.

  “Nobody knew him very well at any of his jobs,” Duncan said. “We haven’t been able to track down his parents or any relatives, but we’re still working on that. We’ll be interviewing everyone who knew him around Holbein, so that may come to something.”

  Duncan had decided to shift half of his crew to the Sauk Centre area, where the letter had been mailed from. “We have Horn’s photo—Dick, pass those copies around—although they are pretty dated, and not very good. Various licenses and so on. We’ll be plastering the media with them.”

  They all looked at the photos, then Sands asked, “Since we know for sure that he was around Sauk Centre, and since we know for pretty sure that he’s not living in the Holbein area . . . why are you keeping so many people down south?”

  “Because we’ve developed a number of other possibilities,” Duncan said. “We know that he broke into one casket and several sepulchers down there, but Lucas says each one of those things needs a different key. He believes that’s what Shaffer figured out. He thinks Shaffer then used that insight to . . . to . . .”

  “. . . figure out who might have all those keys,” Lucas interjected.

  “Right,” Duncan said. “He figured something out, or talked to somebody about it, and then, based on what that hypothetical person said, Shaffer found Horn, or vice versa, and was murdered.”