Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  “She called me three weeks ago,” Lucas said. “I told her you were dealing out of Madison.”

  Toby bobbed his head. “Madison. That’s good. Maybe she’ll kill a couple of fuckin’ hippies and the Madison cops will put her in prison.”

  “Not gonna happen, Toby,” Lucas said. “There’s only one guy on her list right now, and she knows what you look like.”

  Maxine Knowles was a radical animal-rights activist pledged to kill Toby. She’d been warned off, but she continued to look for him. She owned a Remington Mountain Rifle in .243, and was reportedly an excellent shot.

  “Fuckin’ crackpot,” Toby said. Then, “What’s up?”

  “It’s this Black Hole killer. We’re looking for a guy named Jack Horn.”

  Toby nodded: “Seen it on TV.” He pointed his beer bottle at a TV in the corner. “They have been talking about it all morning. First thing up, every time.”

  “People who knew him said he was a serious hunter,” Lucas said. “I wondered if he ever hunted with you.”

  Toby shook his head: “Never worked with him. Heard about him, talking to guys this morning. Supposedly a pretty good shot, a reloader, used to go out to Wyoming two or three times a year, to shoot prairie dogs.”

  “Right: So who would have shot with him, around Holbein? Or Zumbrota?” Lucas asked.

  “Oh, boy: none of this gets back to me, right?”

  “Right.”

  Toby scratched his head. “Blair Tucker would be number one. He’s a well driller, got a place just outside of Holbein. He’s big on reloading and prairie dogs. Roger Axel would be another possibility, runs the hardware store in Holbein, though he’s mostly into head-hunting: you know, a one-of-everything guy. But he’s mostly into big game, so he might not have had much to do with Horn. Dan Weil is another one. Dan has a private two-thousand-yard range out of Holbein towards Red Wing. Horn used to shoot there.”

  “This range is up toward the Black Hole?”

  “Well, yeah. More or less. Not real close, but that direction,” Toby said.

  Lucas wrote the names down, and asked if there was anything he could do for Toby, who said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “What happened?” Lucas asked.

  “You heard of the Raleigh Duane Cornwall case, up in Canada?”

  Lucas looked around the bar, then leaned closer to Toby and said, “Am I wearing a Mountie hat? Look around, Toby. We’re not in Canada. My jurisdiction stops at the border.”

  “Yeah, but if somebody could put in a word . . . Raleigh’s one of my best boys, and what happened to him isn’t fair.”

  The story was about as stupid as any Lucas had ever heard. According to Toby, Cornwall had known the location of an extremely large, extremely old black bear—the best kind for gallbladders. The bear lived on an island in the Rainy River, which was the border between the U.S. and Canada. Cornwall paddled out to the island in a car-topped canoe, set up a lightweight tree stand, spread around a can of bear bait, which consisted of stale donuts and a quart of bacon grease, and climbed up in the tree stand with his bow, to wait.

  The bear showed up ten minutes later, moving fast. Cornwall drew on it, but as he was about to let the arrow fly, the bear sensed him, and stopped quick. Cornwall reacted by yanking the bow off his lead, and let the arrow go. He’d reacted too much—the arrow hit the bear in the ass. The bear let out a yelp, spotted Cornwall in his tree, trotted over, and started climbing.

  Cornwall had just the instrument for such an occasion: a .357 Magnum. The bear got halfway up the tree to the stand, Cornwall shot him twice, and the bear dropped like a rock.

  “The thing is,” Toby said, “the island turned out to be in Canada. I mean, just across the line. Who was to know? There aren’t any markers. And there was a goddamn provincial game warden who heard the shots, and come up on Raleigh from behind.”

  He caught Raleigh standing there with a gallbladder in his hand, a pistol in his holster, and a twist of cocaine in his shirt pocket.

  “They got him for illegal entry, importation and possession of an illegal firearm, importation and possession of illegal drugs, and shooting a bear out of season. He could be looking at fifteen years.”

  Lucas said, “Toby, man, I’d like to help. But I gotta say, with a guy like that . . . the rest of us are probably better off without him walking around loose.”

  • • •

  LUCAS LEFT TOBY looking morosely at his beer, and headed toward Holbein.

  The first guy on the list, Blair Tucker, was sitting in his office, which was surrounded by flatbed trucks loaded with pieces of well-drilling equipment. He was counting twenty-dollar bills, when Lucas stuck his head in.

  “Yeah, I’m Blair,” Tucker said, sliding the stack of bills into his desk drawer. “What can I do for you?” He had an environmental likeness to Toby, the spare dry face of a man who spent his time working outdoors.

  Lucas showed him his ID. “I’m looking for a guy named Horn.”

  “I figured somebody’d be coming around,” Tucker said. He’d known Horn, but said he hadn’t hung with him. “I knew he was some kinda fruitcake. The thing is, he didn’t get off on the shooting, he got off on the killing. The guy would kill a hummingbird if he had a chance. With a hammer. Knew another fellow who went squirrel hunting with him, said old Horn shot a heron, walking along a pond. Just to see the feathers fly. Then didn’t even pick them up. The feathers.”

  Tucker didn’t know anything good, but confirmed Lucas’s picture of Horn as a killer. When Lucas left Tucker’s place, driving into town, he thought about Horn’s disappearing act: not many people could simply walk away from their house, and never again use an ID or a credit card or a cell phone, and set up again in a new town, and start a new life all over.

  Though it had been done . . . the mob guy from Boston had done it.

  He was on the outskirts of Holbein when Mattsson called: “Where are you?”

  “Holbein.”

  “Good. I just got a call from Reggie Scott, Kaylee’s father. Kaylee was out riding her bike with a girlfriend, and says she saw Mr. Sprick staring at her from his car. Said he drove by really slow, staring at her. She said he looked at her in a really mean way, and scared her.”

  “Have you talked to Sprick?”

  “On the way. I’ll be there in a half hour,” Mattsson said.

  “I’ll be there in eight minutes,” Lucas said. “Exactly when did she see him?”

  “Five minutes ago.”

  Lucas looked at his watch, noted the time, and said, “I’m on the way.”

  Kaylee or Sprick? Sprick first, Lucas decided. He had Sprick’s cell phone number and as he drove into Zumbrota, called him. “Where are you?”

  “At the office. They pulled me off my route, they got me subbing, sorting mail. What happened?”

  “Where’s the post office?”

  • • •

  LUCAS PARKED at the Shell station across the street and walked over to the post office and found Sprick sitting in the back, not doing much of anything. “Now what?” Sprick asked.

  “Where were you fifteen minutes ago?” Lucas asked.

  “Right here.”

  “A half hour ago?”

  “Right here,” Sprick said. “I’ve been here since six o’clock this morning. I had a break at ten and walked up to the Shell station and got some coffee. That took five minutes. Then I came back and I’ve been here ever since. Three guys here with me.”

  One of the three other guys, who’d been listening while trying to look like he wasn’t, glanced at Lucas and Lucas asked, “Was he?”

  “Right here,” the guy said. “And he’s a guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “What happened fifteen minutes ago?” Sprick asked.

  “Kaylee said she saw you, in your car. Said you were stalking her.”

  “Aw, for Christ’s sakes. What’d I do to deserve this? What the heck did I do?” He threw his hands up.

  • • •

>   FROM HIS CAR, Lucas called Mattsson: “Sprick was at the post office, sorting mail, since six o’clock this morning. He has three witnesses, and they don’t look like a criminal conspiracy.”

  “Meet me at the Scotts’ house,” Mattsson said. “I’m getting tired of this.”

  “I’m way past tired of it,” Lucas said.

  “I saw that story in the paper this morning,” Mattsson said. “You sound like quite the fashionable gunslinger.”

  “Hey, Catrin? Stick a sock in it.”

  “In what?”

  “See you at the Scotts’.”

  • • •

  KAYLEE SCOTT insisted that she’d seen Mr. Sprick. She had a witness. “We were riding our bikes over to the swimming pool,” Kaylee said. “He went by in his truck real slow. He looked out the window at me, a really mean look. It was him.”

  Another little girl, with a bobbed blond hairdo, her bangs right down to her eyebrows, nodded solemnly as she said, “He did. Look mean at us.”

  Her name was Jane Windrew, and she was sitting between her parents, Marge and Lanny. Mattsson asked Jane, “Do you know Mr. Sprick?”

  “Mr. Sprick. Yes. We’d see him in his truck, every day, until he scared Kaylee.”

  Reggie Scott said, “I’m telling you, the guy’s a maniac.”

  Lucas said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that talk to yourself. Sprick has three witnesses who say he never left the post office today, except for five minutes at ten o’clock, to walk across the street to the Shell station.”

  “We prefer to believe our daughter,” Carol Scott said.

  Mattsson asked, “Who else was around there, on the street? Just you two, or were there more girls?”

  “It was just us,” Jane said.

  “Were there any other adults around? If you’d yelled or screamed, would anybody have heard you?” Lucas asked.

  The girls looked at each other, and then Kaylee turned back to Lucas and said, “I dunno. I didn’t see anybody. We were just riding down the street.”

  “Sprick drives a Subaru,” Mattsson said to Kaylee. “You said he was driving a truck. What kind of truck? Like a truck like your dad’s, an SUV? Or a pickup, or . . .”

  “A pickup,” Jane said. “It was dark brown.”

  “Black,” said Kaylee.

  “I think it was dark brown,” Jane said.

  Reggie Scott said, “Whatever. What color’s Sprick’s Subaru?”

  Mattsson said, “Silver. Silver and gray. Nothing like black or brown.”

  “It was him,” Kaylee said. Her mother gave her a hug and asked Lucas, “Why don’t you believe us? It’s not like Sprick would be stalking her in his own truck.”

  Mattsson said, “We do believe her—the girls—that they saw someone. We just know it wasn’t Sprick that they saw.”

  “You know, you’d think you guys never heard the phrase ‘Going postal,’” Carol Scott said. “Who knows what they’re cooking up down there.”

  “Down where?” Lucas asked. “The post office?”

  “We know what our daughter saw,” Carol Scott said again.

  Lucas turned to Jane and asked, “When he went by, did you look at him right in the face?”

  Her eyes shifted. Lucas glanced at Mattsson, and she’d picked it up. Jane said, “Not exactly. I saw him go by, and Kaylee said, ‘It’s Mr. Sprick,’ and I saw it was him.”

  “Did you actually see his face?”

  Again, the eye shift. “Well, Kaylee said—”

  “Pretend that you were riding the bicycle on your own,” Mattsson said. “Close your eyes and pretend. Did you see his face?”

  She didn’t close her eyes, but she said instead, “Kaylee . . . I believe Kaylee.”

  Jane’s mother said, “Okay. That’s enough. I think we better hit the road.”

  Carol Scott said, “Hey, you know what they saw.”

  Marge Windrew said, “I’m not exactly sure what Jane saw, but we’ll take some steps to make sure she’s safe.” She nodded to her husband. “Let’s go. I really don’t want Jane to be more traumatized than she is already.”

  Mattsson said to the Scotts, “I talked to the sheriff when I was on the way over here. He’s going to put some unmarked cars in the neighbors’ driveways for the next few days, just in case the prowler should come back.”

  “When are they going to start?” Carol Scott asked. “How’ll we recognize him? I even hate to answer my door.”

  “They’ll come by and introduce themselves, tell you where they’ll be,” Mattsson said. “You and the Windrews will both get a phone number, in case you should be . . . disturbed. You call, we’ll have somebody at your door in a half minute. Literally half a minute, maybe less.”

  • • •

  LUCAS, MATTSSON, and the Windrews left at the same time, walking out to the curb where Lucas and Mattsson had parked. The Windrews lived a block away. Lucas caught up with them and asked, “You seemed a little skeptical about this. I don’t want to cause you any trouble with your neighbors, or with your daughter’s friend, but . . . I was wondering why you sounded that way.”

  The Windrews looked at each other, and then Lanny Windrew said to his wife, “You better tell them.”

  Marge said, “Before the kids left for the pool, I heard them talking, and Kaylee said that if Mr. Sprick came around again, and looked at her, they could both go on television. We don’t care if Jane ever goes on television. The Scotts . . . think differently about that.”

  Mattsson brushed her hair back and said, “Damnit.” To Jane: “You never actually saw Mr. Sprick at all?”

  Jane said, “I saw the truck.”

  “But not Mr. Sprick.”

  “Not exactly. But it could have been him.”

  • • •

  WHEN THE WINDREWS walked away, Mattsson said, “That’s that. I’ll talk to the sheriff—I think we should have a cop here anyway.”

  “That’s up to you and the sheriff,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah. Okay. I’m sorry I dragged you over here. What’ve you been up to? Have you been down here all day?”

  Lucas told her about talking to Toby, in Owatonna.

  “I don’t know the first two guys, but I know Dan Weil,” Mattsson said. “Over-the-top gun nut. He bought a creek bed off a bunch of farmers, brought in a bulldozer and cut a strip right along the creek, more than a mile long, piled up fifty feet of dirt at the end of it. Guys go out there with .50-cals, try to hit targets at a measured mile.”

  “He live out there?”

  “No, but he doesn’t live far from it,” she said. “You want to run over and talk to him?”

  Lucas did. “What else we got to do?”

  • • •

  WEIL LIVED in a neat ranch-style house out in the countryside, with apple and plum trees spotted around the two-acre yard, and a big metal-sided garage/workshop off to one side. Weil was a civil engineer, and worked out of a studio attached to the end of his garage. A tall thin man with round, gold-rimmed military-style glasses, he had cold blue eyes and a prominent nose under a sandy crew cut. He wore an olive drab shirt with epaulets, jeans, and cleated boots. He invited them in, and sat on a drawing-board stool while they took a couple of leather visitor’s chairs. A line of five heavy gun safes sat at one end of the studio.

  “All kinds of stuff,” he said, in answer to a question from Lucas. “I got more work than I can handle—driveways, embankments, flowage ditches, surveys for building slabs. Anything you’d use a bulldozer or a Bobcat or a grader for.”

  Mattsson asked, “How well did you know Horn?”

  “Not well.” He seemed to think about that for a second, then added, “He was out here often enough. He wasn’t one of the big-caliber, long-range guys. He shot small stuff out to five hundred yards or so: .22-250, .223. Biggest I ever saw was a 6mm Remington. Had an old .220 Swift if I remember correctly. Said he used to bark squirrels with it. But he didn’t talk much. He hung around, but not out, if you know what I mean. He
wasn’t a hang-out kinda guy.”

  “And he was a killer,” Lucas said.

  “Oh yeah.” Weil blinked. “That was the thing about him. He liked killing. He liked death. Most of us guys out here, we’re interested in guns, loads, ballistics, technique. We’ve got guys out here who’ve never killed a thing in their whole lives. Engineers, a lot of them. Shooting paper. Horn wanted to kill stuff. Came back and told me one time that he killed a thousand prairie rats out in Wyoming. I said, ‘Well, that’s real good, Mr. Horn.’ But you know . . . a thousand? That’s somewhat excessive, if you ask me, and I’m a gun nut.”

  Weil hadn’t seen him, or heard of him, since the attack on the woman in Faribault. He wasn’t surprised about the attack: “Of all the guys who’ve come out here, if you’d told me what happened without who it was that did it, I’d have guessed Horn.”

  They talked awhile longer, and Weil said, “Wherever he is, he won’t stay away from guns. If I were you, I’d take his picture around to every gun range in the country. Somebody’ll recognize him.”

  Lucas: “We can do that. Not a bad idea, either.”

  • • •

  AS THEY WERE LEAVING, Weil asked them what they shot. Mattsson said a Glock 9mm, and Lucas said a .45, and Weil said, “A .45, huh? You any good with it?”

  Lucas said he was pretty good, and ten minutes later, they were all out at the range, banging away at steel plates with pistols. When they got done, Weil said to Lucas, “You are good, for a cop,” and to Mattsson, “You’re above average. Most cops don’t shoot for shit.”

  “What does it mean,” Lucas asked, “barking a squirrel?”

  “You get a squirrel way up in a tree, and you’re out there with a .223 or something. You hit a squirrel with that, it’ll blow the meat right off the bones. So what you do is, you shoot the tree bark right under its head. The concussion and the fall kills the squirrel. Supposedly.”

  “That’d take a good shot.”

  “It’d take an okay shot,” Weil said. “Not great.”

  • • •