Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  Sands said to Duncan, “You said ‘possibilities.’ The key thing is one. Are there more?”

  “Yes. The last woman murdered was kidnapped from a cemetery. Shaffer was killed after visiting four cemeteries. You put that with the cemetery key thing, and we conclude that there’s a tight connection between somebody who works at these cemeteries, or is some kind of cemetery freak, if there is such a thing. That gets noticed by small-town folks, so we’re going down for a whole run of interviews on that point: short, single guy in late thirties or forties, who works in cemeteries or has something to do with them, or has a special interest in them. Maybe collects or makes keys.”

  They talked about those possibilities for a while, and then Roux asked, “Lucas—what are you going to do?”

  Lucas said, “I don’t know. We’re at the point where anything I could do, Jon and his crew can do better. We need lots of interviews, we need lots of legwork. I’ve got some things I’ve got to catch up on here. Virgil’s working a case down in the southeast corner of the state that I’d like to take a peek at, and Del is in Texas—”

  “Screw that,” Roux said. “I need you thinking about this case.”

  “As I was going to say, I’ll be thinking about this case,” Lucas said. “One thing befuddles me: Where did Shaffer take his insight about the keys? I’m going to mark every note that he took. . . . He made some kind of mental leap.”

  “Make the fuckin’ leap,” Roux said.

  • • •

  A SECRETARY STUCK her head into the room and said, “Excuse me?”

  Everybody looked at her. “We have a Sergeant McGraff on the phone from Goodhue County, for Catrin Mattsson. He says they have another letter, to her, that could be from the killer. A typewriter, from Alexandria.”

  Duncan said, “Okay. Put him in here on the speakerphone.”

  The secretary went away and a moment later, McGraff came up on the speaker and said, “Yeah, Catrin, it looks just like the first one you got. Kathleen was sorting through the mail and spotted it. We haven’t opened it, so everything inside should be clean.”

  Duncan identified himself and then said, “Get it up here, in an evidence bag. Like right now. Don’t let anybody else touch it.”

  McGraff said he would.

  When McGraff had gone, Sands said to Duncan, “You might review your staffing plans. This guy seems to be up in that Alexandria–Sauk Centre area.”

  Duncan nodded: “I’ll pull a couple more guys off and get them up there. Today. I’m going to run over to Eau Claire and interview this Heather Jorgenson, see what she has to say about Horn.”

  • • •

  THE MEETING ADJOURNED, but most of the agents milled around the open bay area, waiting for McGraff to show up. Lucas went back to his office, with Roux. “You’re not just going to sit in your office, are you? You going to Goodhue, or up north?”

  “Probably down to Goodhue, not up north. The guys going north might find him, but it’ll be walking door-to-door. I’m not good at that. I’ve got a feeling that these notes are all wrong. He might be trying to divert us away from the real opportunity.”

  “Good luck,” she said, and sighed. “If Elmer gets picked for vice president, I was thinking I might run for governor as a law-and-order Democrat. That’s a lot harder, if you’re blamed for not being able to keep law and order.”

  “I’d vote for you, anyway,” Lucas said. “Probably. Depending on who the Republicans put up.”

  • • •

  MCGRAFF SHOWED UP with the letter in the bag, gave it to a CSI guy called down from the lab, and a few minutes and a couple of changes of bags later, they got the letter and a clump of blond hair tied with a red ribbon.

  It said:

  Hi, there, Catrin. Got another name for you. Alice Wolfe, from Cannon Falls. Look for her in 2001, went dancing in Minneapolis and never came home. Never got to Minneapolis, either, ha-ha. You won’t find her at the Black Hole. I put her in the other pit. Oh, that’s right, you haven’t found that one yet. No problem, I’m sending some of her hair that I kept as a keepsake. Shake it out of the envelope, have your scientists do the DNA thing. It will keep them busy, anyway.

  That was all of it.

  “I’ll tell you all something,” Duncan said. “We’ll get DNA out of this hair, and we’ll match it to Wolfe’s relatives, and if it doesn’t match any of the DNA from the cistern and if Alice Wolfe is blond and did disappear, in 2001, that means, there is another pit.”

  “Another pit,” Roux said. “It’s a fuckin’ nightmare.”

  • • •

  LUCAS HUNG AROUND the office for a while, flipping through the murder books. He tried to call Flowers, but Flowers didn’t answer his cell phone. He left a message for a callback. He called Del, who answered but said he had nothing new to report, except that women in Texas had big hair.

  “I knew that,” Lucas said.

  He finally told his secretary that he was heading south, to listen to people who’d known Horn. He got a list from one of Duncan’s crew, and took off.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon either driving or talking—four cops, and a half dozen other people in town who had a variety of relationships with Horn: two landlords, the owner of the liquor store, and the owner of Croakers, a bar and grill where Horn would go to drink.

  Horn, he knew, was a tall man and thin, and everyone remembered him that way. He had odd-colored hair; that was mentioned by a couple of people. It was gray, but not old-gray—rather, slate-colored, tending almost to blue.

  He was a solitary character, like a gunfighter in a movie, a former landlady said, and had suspicious black eyes. Never saw him with a woman. She had been in his rented house a few times, when he wasn’t there, and had taken a look around. He had about a million comic books, but she’d never seen anything like porn, or anything else that might suggest he was obsessed with sex. He wore jeans and work shirts and boots, but always with a black sport coat, as though he were covering up a gun.

  “Was he?” Lucas asked.

  “Don’t know—never saw him with his coat off,” she said. “He had a metal safe in his bedroom. A gun safe, I’m pretty sure.”

  • • •

  ONE OF THE COPS SAID, “I don’t believe he had any close friends. I don’t think he had any friends, period. For one thing, he smelled like a skunk half the time. The other thing was, he was an asshole. Just fuckin’ mean. To animals. Dogs. I’ll tell you what, you didn’t want your dog to get loose in Holbein, because Horn would flat break its neck, or soak it down in that dog-spray stuff. He even shot a couple.”

  The owner of the liquor store said that Horn had been a regular customer: “We don’t like to see anyone going alcoholic, but Horn would put away two or three fifths of vodka a week; plus, he’d be drinking over at Croakers. Weren’t many nights he’d go home sober—but with his job, can’t say I’d blame him. Picking up dead animals all day.”

  The owner/bartender at Croakers said that he always sat by himself at the bar, by choice, and drank slowly, but thoroughly. “I felt kinda sorry for him, at the time, but every time I tried to chat with him, he’d kinda cut me off. After a while, I figured that was just the way he was, and let it go.”

  If told that Horn was a killer, they all agreed that they wouldn’t be particularly surprised.

  When Lucas talked to Letty that night, he said, “It was a curious thing—of all the assholes I’ve known in my life, I’ve never met anyone that someone didn’t have a good word for. Out of simple charity. Because they were nice people, and wouldn’t say a bad word about anybody. Not with Horn. Nobody liked him. Not one single person.”

  “Can you trust that? Maybe they liked him before he attacked that woman.”

  “That’s a point,” Lucas said.

  “It seems like he does have some kind of interest in sex,” she said. “There’s a tone in his notes. Like, I hate to say it, playful. Or kind of weird-flirty.”

  Lucas shook his head. “If you have so
mebody interested enough in sex that they’re kidnapping women, and they have the Internet, they’re gonna have some porn around.”

  “But we know he was kidnapping women,” Letty said. “That is absolutely nailed down. The truck, the blood, the fact that he disappeared. Maybe he was a kind of super-secret guy, or knew that the landlady was a snoop, so he kept the porn hidden.”

  “You make a good case, and it’s completely wrong,” Lucas said.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WENT TO BED at two o’clock. Weather got up early, as usual, to go in to the hospital. He was sleeping soundly when she sat on the corner of the bed and rubbed the back of his neck.

  That woke him, and he rolled halfway over.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  Too early: he was confused. “Morning?”

  She dropped a newspaper on his chest. “Guess what? You made the Star-Tribune.”

  13

  Lucas didn’t operate well on four hours of sleep, but as Weather left for work, he propped himself up in bed and turned on the reading light behind his head. The story in the center of the front page, by the feature writer Janet Frost, was what the crime reporter Ruffe Ignace called “a weeper.” It began with scene setting—Emmanuel Kent’s cardboard-box shelter that he set up every night beneath an overhang on the steps of a local Lutheran Church.

  The church no longer let him come inside for the night, because he tended to wreck the place. Before locking up at nine o’clock, they let him fill his empty two-liter plastic Pepsi bottles with water, and in the morning, they let him in to wash and use the toilet in a basement restroom.

  Sitting in the stygian darkness beneath the concrete overhang, partly concealed by the ivy, he carefully removes his boots before he goes to bed, and washes his feet with a rag he left to dry on the railing. “During the Great War, you could be shot on the spot if you got trench foot,” Manny said in his high-pitched, yet gravelly voice. “That’s a big danger for those of us forced to live outside. If you don’t take good care of your feet, you could get gangrene. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that, it’s endemic among the street population.”

  Guy sounded like he graduated from Harvard, Lucas thought, except that he had no idea about trench foot and World War I. And he thought, Janet Frost wouldn’t know a stygian darkness if one jumped up and bit her on the ass.

  The story recounted the beginning of the hunger strike, and the shooting that preceded it.

  Doyle could be impetuous, but he was not a dangerous man. Everybody liked him, Manny said. “The Woodbury police executed him. I’ll ask you this: What is the penalty for bank robbery in this state? Is it execution without a trial? No, it’s not—but that’s what was done to my brother. He was executed, shot down in cold blood.”

  The Woodbury police claimed that Doyle Kent fired a shot when he emerged from the bank, but no bullet was found.

  Lucas thought, Uh-oh.

  Down further in the story, Manny rolled a marijuana cigarette, which he uses to self-medicate. He lit it with a pink Bic lighter, and then, dry and warm, he said, “I’m definitely feeling weaker. I haven’t had anything but fruit juice since Saturday, but I’ll never quit until I get justice, or die,” he said. He added, “I went so far as to buy a gallon of gasoline, and I hid it. If I ever get the feeling that the police are about to remove me, or put me in jail, I will get my gas can, and I will immolate myself on the steps of City Hall. Won’t that make the mayor proud?”

  Then,

  Lucas Davenport, the senior BCA agent involved in the tracking of Doyle Kent, admitted that he had “no proof at all” that Kent had done the earlier bank robberies, and though the Woodbury police admitted firing twenty shots at Kent, striking him seven times, including three shots in the chest, three more in the shoulders and neck, and one in the stomach, Davenport joked that “I thought they showed great restraint.”

  Davenport was involved in a similar incident in which two women were shot down outside a bank. . . .

  Lucas said it aloud: “Ah, shit.”

  The story ended with a protracted scene in which Emmanuel Kent hunkered down under his blankets and looked up at the stars, and visualized a better life for himself, after he’d gotten his justice. Frost concluded with a statement that “a number of prominent attorneys” were considering filing a suit against Woodbury and the BCA, on Kent’s behalf, for excessive violence.

  • • •

  LUCAS TRIED TO GO back to sleep, but failed. He had decent relationships with most of the media, and earlier in his career, had had a child with a prominent female reporter for Channel Three, although they hadn’t married. He’d always been suspicious of television, because of the ways news got compressed to comic-strip chunks, but he’d been less suspicious of newspapers, because they seemed more professional; he hadn’t often felt deliberately victimized.

  Janet Frost had deliberately screwed him. She attributed a few partial quotes to him, and he couldn’t really disavow them, because they were correct, as far as he remembered—they just weren’t in context. And she’d left out critical bits of information, such as the fact that the women shot down outside the bank, in the earlier case, had shot a man inside the bank and had killed another victim in Wisconsin.

  • • •

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, groggy and annoyed, he got up, spent some time in the bathroom, looked at a suit and tie, then said, “Fuck it,” and put on jeans, a golf shirt, and a black sport coat.

  Downstairs, Letty said, “I read the story. I mean, Wow. Not even Channel Six would do that to somebody. You think it has anything to do with the Black Hole thing?”

  Lucas considered: “Maybe. It does feel like open season on the cops.”

  “You talk to Ruffe about it?”

  “He’s the guy who asked me to talk to her,” Lucas said.

  “That fucker.”

  “Hey! Language!”

  “Live with it,” she said.

  • • •

  RUFFE IGNACE CALLED precisely at nine o’clock: “I would have called earlier, but I know you don’t get up early.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Man, I’m really sorry,” Ignace said.

  “That makes me feel a lot better,” Lucas said. “I’ll tell you something, Ruffe: she’s a loose cannon. Sooner or later, she’s gonna screw the paper. She said I was joking when I said Woodbury showed great restraint, but she didn’t put in the explanation. She didn’t tell people that we had good reason to track Kent, and she didn’t say that Candy and Georgie LaChaise murdered that poor sonofabitch in Rice Lake and shot another one here in the Cities—”

  “I know, I know, I know. Listen, you’re pissed, and I don’t blame you,” Ruffe said. “I’m going to file a complaint with the ombudsman, so expect a call from him. In the meantime, I’m going to write a piece about how your guys are going to recover money from Bryan’s account down in the islands and how you’re hunting down the Black Hole guy now. Honest to God, Lucas.”

  Lucas was quiet for a minute, then said, “Ruffe, I appreciate it.”

  “It was a fuckin’ hatchet job,” Ruffe said. “I can’t stand it when people do that shit. I took this fuckin’ job because . . . fuck it, never mind. They’ll put my piece on the front page tomorrow, or I’m gonna fuckin’ quit. And believe me, they don’t want me to fuckin’ quit.”

  Ruffe slammed the phone down.

  Letty was looking at Lucas and said, “He was screaming. I could hear it from here.”

  Lucas grinned his coyote grin, the one that showed just a rim of white teeth: “Yeah. He’s almost a friend.”

  Letty asked, “You’ve been running around in circles. What’re you going to do?”

  Lucas said, “I don’t know. I’ve got an idea, but I don’t want to do it. It’s to look at the ADB, see who knows what.”

  “What would any of the assholes know? The guy has to be a deep dark secret—because if he wasn’t,
the word would have gotten around, and even the assholes would have ratted him out.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right, but what else have I got?”

  • • •

  THE ADB—The Assholes Database.

  Lucas had taken two years to put it together, and was still working on it. It contained more than eleven hundred names, with addresses and phone numbers, of Minnesota assholes, along with several dozen more from Wisconsin and Iowa, and a couple from the Dakotas and Canada. Most came from the Twin Cities, but there were at least a few from every county in Minnesota.

  A number of people knew about it, outside his own circle, but he was careful about sharing anything. The problem was, it wasn’t just a list of assholes, it was a list of people who’d deal with Lucas, but expected, with limitations, to get some payback, if they needed it.

  Quite a few of them needed it. Payback came in the form of testimony to judges: even though this particular dickweed did, in fact, loot the local Walmart, he has been a reliable source for Minnesota law enforcement, so instead of three years, how about one year plus time served?

  Lucas made a call before he left home, setting up a face-to-face talk. At noon, he was in Owatonna, talking to a guy named Toby in the back of Antoine’s bar and grill.

  Toby dealt in illegal python skins and black-bear gallbladders and paws. He paid a dozen farmers across the state to run snake barns. The skins went to Europe. A dozen bow hunters in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin kept the gallbladders flowing; shooting bears is not a problem in parts of the North Woods. Toby once told Lucas that he could get $1,500 for a really good dried gallbladder—they’d sell for up to $3,000 in China—and handled four to five hundred a year, shipped by UPS to a Chinese connection in San Francisco.

  He was staring into a glass of beer when Lucas came in. Lucas got a Coke at the bar and carried it back.

  Toby wore an old Army ball cap and a short-sleeved camo shirt over jeans. He would have a pistol strapped to his ankle, Lucas knew. He was a short, thick-set man with a three-day beard and a watery blue walleye. When Lucas sat down, Toby leaned forward and asked, in a low voice, “What do you hear about Maxine?”