Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  The route took him through the Twin Cities. He hadn’t gotten there when he glanced at the dashboard clock and was surprised how late it was. He worked it through his head. He’d pulled into the ditch around 8:45. It hadn’t gotten dark enough to move for another ten minutes, and then it had been twenty minutes to the O’Neill house. He’d been in the house for probably five minutes, then another ten minutes back to the car, running all the way. So: 9:30 at the car, then back to the house, talking with Horn, he probably hadn’t left the house until 9:40 or so. The bars in Alexandria closed at one o’clock, and it took three hours to get there.

  He was too late! He wouldn’t get there until closing time, and he didn’t even know exactly where the bars were.

  He slowed, thought about turning around. Giving it up. But: he’d mailed that first letter from Sauk Centre, and on the way out of town, had stopped at a bar for a couple of drinks. He knew how to get there, he knew where the bars were—there were a bunch of them on one big street, quick to get there from I-94.

  Hell, Sauk Centre was as good as Alexandria. He’d have only an hour or so to operate, he’d have to get lucky. But if he got lucky, the cops wouldn’t know what hit them. They’d be jumping around like their feet were on fire and their asses were catchin’.

  One thing he couldn’t do was drive slow. He’d have to drive fast, and then drive slow coming back. He did that, his back tense, waiting for the flashing red lights to pop up from behind a dip in the road. . . .

  Never happened.

  • • •

  HE GOT TO SAUK CENTRE an hour before closing; found the first two bars almost empty, a few lone divorced guys looking into their beers. The third bar, the Rusty Gate, had an available blonde, sitting with a nice-looking brunette, but the ages were wrong. He needed young. . . .

  He found a young one, all by herself, talking to the bartender at a place called College Town. Four cowboy-looking guys were shooting pool at the back of the bar, while another one, with his girlfriend, watched. A half dozen other couples were scattered around in booths.

  R-A took a stool at the bar, ignoring the blonde, and the bartender came over and said, “Getcha?”

  “Got Bud on tap?”

  “Yup.”

  The bartender went and got it, and when he came back, R-A asked, “You about to close?”

  The bartender looked over his shoulder at a clock and said, “You got a half hour.”

  The bartender went back to talking with the blonde, something about a traffic stop down in Iowa, and the Highway Patrol had taken somebody’s car apart looking for dope, and whoever it was never smoked dope or anything else . . . hardly even drank.

  R-A couldn’t follow it all. He studied the girl in the mirror behind the bar, and God help him, she was perfect. She had large, strong breasts and a small waist, blond ringlets down to her shoulders. She was wearing a white cotton sweater, with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, and he could see the dark shadow of a black brassiere.

  If he’d been ready for another one, for a real one, he’d have put her on his list, and would have watched her for weeks, and then would have closed in . . . and . . .

  He got lost in the fantasy, sipping the beer, and the bartender came over and said, “You want another?”

  R-A came back and looked at his glass. The beer was almost gone.

  The bartender said, “I only asked, because if you want a third one, you’ll be right at last call.”

  “Gimme another,” R-A said, swallowing the last of the beer and pushing the glass across the bar.

  • • •

  IT WENT LIKE THAT for fifteen minutes, the cowboys in the back laughing and jostling each other around, and R-A got a third one at last call. The bartender and the blonde were running down, and there was a burst of laughter from the back, and then three of the cowboys walked out toward the front, and two of them draped arms around the blonde, from opposite sides, and one of them asked, “Which one of us you goin’ home with, sweet thing?”

  The blonde pressed a finger to her perfect lips and her eyes opened wide and she said, “It’s so hard to choose . . . but, given the circumstances, maybe I’ll just go home with my husband.”

  The third cowboy said, “Goddamned right. Get your cookies in the oven and your buns in the bed.”

  She frowned and said, “George, that’s so old and stupid. Don’t say that stupid shit because—”

  “It makes you look stupid,” said another one of the cowboys.

  “Never made any claims otherwise,” the husband said.

  They were all on their feet, moving around, and went out the door in a group.

  • • •

  THAT WAS THAT. R-A finished his third Bud, nodded to the bartender, and went out to the street. Sinclair Lewis Avenue. Other bars were closing around him, up and down the street. Not an unaccompanied woman in sight.

  “Well, shit,” R-A said.

  • • •

  MATTSSON WAS ASLEEP in her apartment, but not at ease: too much going on, too many possibilities to think about. When the phone rang at 1:15, she was not entirely asleep, nor was she entirely surprised. The pressure was such that something had to happen.

  She kept her phone on her nightstand, picked it up and looked at the screen. There was no name, just a number, from Wisconsin. Thinking, Wrong number, she punched the answer bar and said, “Hello?”

  “Hello, Catrin . . .”

  She sat up: not a voice she recognized, and she had a good ear and a good memory. “Who is this?”

  “Well, this is Jack Horn. I understand you’ve been looking for me.”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “No joke, Catrin. You’ve got a pencil?”

  She fumbled the bedside lamp on and found a pencil and a slip of paper: “Yes.”

  “Marsha Wells. Picked her up outside the He’s Not Here bar on Hennepin Avenue. You don’t have her on your identified list yet, but she was in there. In the hole. You want to know what I didn’t like about her?”

  Mattsson was crawling across the bed to her hardwired phone, while punching up the contact list on her cell. She found Davenport’s cell number and began punching it into the hardwired phone as she said, “I’m scared to ask.”

  Horn laughed. “What I didn’t like was, she gave up too easy. I mean, I took her and . . . I took her and beat on her a little, to soften her up, but when I started fuckin’ her, she was like a rag. She just gave up. See, what I did was . . .”

  • • •

  THE PHONE WENT OFF on Lucas’s bedside table and he groaned, and fumbled for it: didn’t recognize the number. He punched “answer,” and said, “Yeah?”

  • • •

  MATTSSON HAD THE EARPIECE of the hardwired phone clamped to her ear, hoping Horn wouldn’t hear Davenport answer. As soon as she heard Davenport say, “Yeah?” she interrupted Horn’s rambling description of his rape of Marsha Wells. She said, maybe too loud, “Yeah, Mr. Horn, this is all pretty awful, but how do I know you’re really Mr. Horn? I mean you say you killed what’s-her-name, Marsha Wells, is that right?”

  She moved the mouthpiece of the wired phone close to the speaker on her cell phone, so Davenport could hear Horn.

  “Yeah, that’s right. Marsha Wells. Grabbed her, fucked her good, got me a piece of rope and put it around her neck, and was strangling her while I fucked her that last time. You know what happens when you’re fuckin’ some chick while you’re strangling her . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but how do I know that you’re not down in some bar someplace with Dick Wolfe or Bobbie McCauley and you’re not pulling my leg? If you’re really Horn, how’d you get this number?”

  “You can find anything on the Internet, if you look long enough,” Horn said. “What I did was . . .”

  • • •

  LUCAS HUNG UP and when Weather asked, “What?” he said, “Holy shit, Catrin Mattsson’s talking to Horn.” He called the duty officer and said, “This is Davenport. A Goodhue deputy named Catrin Ma
ttsson, lives in Red Wing, I got her number here, she’s talking to the Black Hole killer right now, right this minute, she’s keeping him on the line, we need to know where he’s calling from.”

  “You know what carrier . . . ?”

  “No, no, I don’t know a fuckin’ thing. Just find it, find where he’s calling from, what the number is. . . . Here’s her number . . .”

  “Get back to you.” And the duty officer was gone.

  • • •

  HORN FINISHED with his pornographic description of the final attack on Marsha Wells, then said, “I saw you on TV. I really like your looks, Catrin. Bet you wouldn’t give up, would you?”

  “I’d tear your fuckin’ heart out,” Mattsson said. Davenport had hung up, and she was hoping against hope that he was tracing the call. “If you’re really Horn.”

  “I’m really Horn,” he insisted.

  “If you’re really Horn, what were you doing in that ditch when Little Kaylee saw you?”

  After a moment of silence, Horn laughed and said, “Little Kaylee. I won’t tell you what I was doing, but I had a good reason for being in there. And I’ll tell you what, I was never one of those peter-whatever-you-call-’ems, peterists?”

  “Pederasts,” Mattsson said.

  “Yeah, I was never one of those. But Little Kaylee, she could get me in that habit, you know what I mean. That long blond hair and all.”

  “You touch her, I’ll kill you.”

  Horn laughed again. “Just kiddin’ you. I like a little tit on my girls. Listen, I don’t think you can trace this call, because I took precautions, but I better go anyway. I just wanted to chat. I’ll tell you what, Catrin: I really do like your looks.”

  • • •

  HER PHONE BURPED: a message coming in.

  Horn asked, “What was that?”

  “What was what?” She thumbed the message tab; a note from Davenport that said, “Keep him talking.”

  “That noise?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it was you. But don’t go, give me one little clue, one hint here: not about you, about this Wells woman. We need to track her, see if we can get dental records. Was she from the Twin Cities? Where would we find that?”

  “Come on, I know you got computers . . .”

  “You’d be surprised what isn’t in the computers . . .”

  “Ah, shit, you bitch, you’re keeping me on the line. Fuck you.”

  He was gone.

  • • •

  SHE SAT LOOKING at the phone for a minute, then went back to the hardwired phone and keyed in Davenport’s number. When he answered, she blurted, “You get him?”

  “He was calling from Sauk Centre,” Lucas said. “He was calling on Mary Lynn Carpenter’s cell phone—so he was real. I yanked the Sauk Centre chief out of bed, he said he’d put every guy he had on the road, take down every tag that they see. But Horn could have been out on I-94 by the time they started looking—and we’d have no idea which way he was traveling.”

  “Goddamnit . . .” Mattsson was so cranked that she found herself standing on her bed, without knowing exactly why. She sat down and said, “Now what?”

  “We’re hoping he doesn’t pull the battery on the phone. We’re hoping that we can call him on that phone in about two hours . . . and that he doesn’t answer. If we can do that, we can get pretty close to where he’s calling from. If we can call him a second time, we’ll get even closer.”

  “He’s gotta be from down here. He can’t be from up north,” Mattsson said.

  • • •

  R-A HAD BEEN out on I-94 when he called, because like everybody else on the Internet, he knew that the cops could find the cell phone tower that the call had come from. He clicked off, and tossed the phone on the passenger seat.

  He’d had a few beers, and now really didn’t want to get stopped, so he took it slow going back south, around the Cities. Stopped once at a truck stop to pee and buy a pack of cigarettes.

  He was most of the way home when the cell phone rang. That froze him. He didn’t answer, but he thought, What if all they had to do was call? And if the phone company could find out where the phone was, to forward the call, couldn’t the cops do that, too? Now he was scared.

  He looked for a side road—the phone had stopped ringing—but no side roads came up for a long minute, then another minute. The phone didn’t ring again, but R-A didn’t think he could wait: Were they coming for him right now?

  Then a turnoff came up, and he went down a blacktop road for a quarter-mile, did a U-turn, jumped out of the truck, the phone in his hand, and got into the toolbox in back. After carefully wiping the phone down, he laid it on the blacktop in front of his headlights, and beat it to death with a ball-peen hammer.

  Nobody came after him.

  He made it home in fifteen minutes. Didn’t talk to Horn.

  Crawled in bed and pulled the covers over his head.

  Nobody came . . .

  He couldn’t sleep, but lay there, his mind racing, tracing what he’d done that night. He hadn’t gotten a blonde, but hadn’t gotten caught, either.

  As he finally drifted toward sleep, he was thinking about the girl on the bar stool, and how perfect she was, and then thought about Mattsson, and how perfect she’d be, and then thought about the feeling of satisfaction that came from beating the phone to death.

  Then he was asleep.

  • • •

  LUCAS CALLED MATTSSON a few minutes before three o’clock. “We rang him. The phone was still operating. He was on Highway 52 just south of Cannon Falls. So, you were right: he’s from down south.”

  “I knew it. I knew it.”

  “And you were right. But: he was moving. He wasn’t where he lives, yet. He could have been headed for either Holbein or Zumbrota. One of those two places, I think.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “We’re going to give him time to get home. I’ll be in Zumbrota, because . . . I don’t know, because that’s where Shaffer was found. We’ll have the cops from both Zumbrota and Holbein ready to go. We need you guys from Goodhue to have a couple people ready—”

  “I’ll take care of that,” she said.

  “That’s why I called you,” Lucas said.

  “Good. I’m coming to Zumbrota with you,” she said. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “Five o’clock at the Zumbrota police headquarters,” Lucas said. “You know where it is?”

  “Of course.”

  “See you there. And, Catrin . . . bring your above-average guns.”

  15

  Lucas got to the Zumbrota city hall, which housed the police headquarters, a few minutes early. He parked on the side of the building, the sun still trying to find its shine, and a sleepy-looking chief came to the door and held it open for him.

  Lucas said, “Thanks,” and followed him back to the police wing, which had standard office cubicles for the cops, and an oval conference table. Two more cops were already sitting there. “Coffee?”

  “Yeah, that’d be fine,” Lucas said. He saw an SUV go by, headed into the parking lot, and he added, “There’s Mattsson. I’ll get the door.”

  He walked out to the lobby and saw Mattsson already walking over, her hands in her jacket pockets and shoulders hunched against the predawn cool. “If he’s really close by, he could see us getting together, all the lights,” she said.

  Lucas looked around and said, “Yeah, I suppose. I’m not sure anyplace else would be better.”

  She looked around and said, “Probably not. But why five o’clock in the morning?”

  “To give him time to go to sleep,” Lucas said. “If he kept the phone, and didn’t pull the batteries, we’re hoping it’ll ring a few times. What we’re really hoping is that he turned it off, so that it won’t ring. It’ll still be registered with the system, and we’ll be able to nail it down. We’ll keep calling until we get a good fix.”

  “What’s the worst case?”

  “He pulled the batteri
es and threw it in a ditch. If he did that, we won’t get him now, and when we do catch him, he wouldn’t have it, as evidence. That’s worst case.” Lucas looked at his watch. “They’ll start calling him two minutes from now.”

  Mattsson looked out at the quiet, dark town. “There oughta be a bigger ceremony,” she said.

  • • •

  THEY WENT BACK into police headquarters, and the chief had two cups of coffee waiting for them.

  They didn’t say much, until Mattsson said, “Getting kinda tense, here,” and one of the other cops asked, “What exactly are we gonna do if we get a good fix?”

  “Depends on how good it is,” Lucas said. “If it’s really good—the phone’s got a GPS function, and if they get some time with it, they should be able to tell us what house it’s in. With less time, we’d probably at least be able to tell what block it is in.”

  “If we know that,” the chief said, “I’ll be able to tell you, ninety percent, which house we should look at first.”

  “Got a judge ready to sign a warrant if we get an address,” Mattsson said. “He’ll sign it and fax it over. He said he’ll be sitting by the phone from four forty-five on, and if we get a solid fix, we’ll have it in one minute.”

  • • •

  THEY WAITED. Finally Lucas said, “Either things have gone really bad, or really good, and they’re working it hard.”

  One of the cops pulled a leather money clip out of his pocket, pulled dollar bills out of it, and said, “I got four bucks says it’s gone wrong.”

  The chief said, “Goddamnit, Mikey, why’d you have to go and say that?”

  A minute later, Lucas’s cell phone lit up and then rang and he punched the “answer” tab and the “speaker” setting, and the tech on the other end said, “The phone is dead. He must’ve pulled the batteries or trashed the phone. It’s not signed on anywhere.”

  “Goddamnit. You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. There’s only one answer to this—the phone either registers, or it doesn’t. If there’s a battery in it, it’ll show up. If there’s no battery in it, or the battery’s dead, it won’t. Or, a third choice—it could be buried, or something. Most likely, he either pulled the battery or trashed it.”