Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  “All right. Listen, ping it every ten minutes,” Lucas said.

  “For how long?”

  “Forever,” Lucas said. “Keep pinging it forever.”

  • • •

  MATTSSON GOT UP, walked out to the lobby, in disgust, then turned and walked back. She asked Lucas, “What’re you going to do?”

  “See if I can get breakfast somewhere,” Lucas said. “Probably go back home.”

  “There’s nothing here in Zumbrota, but there’s an all-night pancake place on the highway up in Holbein,” the chief said. “I’ve eaten there a few times, never actually gotten food poisoning.”

  “The Teepee,” Mattsson said. “That’s good enough. Goddamnit, I thought I’d be outside somebody’s house right now, getting ready to kick the door.”

  • • •

  THE TEEPEE was a red A-frame pancake house with faux Indian signs painted on the roof, and four cars parked outside. One skinny trucker sat on a bar stool drinking coffee, looking them over when they walked in, and two heavyset guys hunched over eggs and sausage in a booth. The waitress was talking to the cook through a service slot, and followed them to a corner booth.

  “How you doing, hon?” she asked Mattsson. She plopped two plastic water glasses on the table and took a long look at Lucas.

  Lucas said, “I’m also a cop, but I’m not a ‘hon.’”

  “I decide that,” the waitress said. “I figured you were another cop, or the two of you was just up from the Motel 6.”

  “Hey!” Mattsson said. “He could be my dad.”

  “Doesn’t look like your dad,” the waitress said. She gave Mattsson a broad wink.

  “I’m sitting right here,” Lucas said.

  “So shoot me,” the waitress said. “You all want coffee?”

  • • •

  THEY GOT PANCAKES and lots of butter and syrup, and Lucas got a Diet Coke and Mattsson got coffee, and they talked about the phone call she’d gotten from the killer. Mattsson went out to her truck and got a notebook, and brought it back, opened it as she sat down and said, “I wrote it all down. I got it pretty much word for word.”

  She recited the entire conversation, and when she finished, Lucas said, “He called you a bitch and hung up.”

  “Yes.”

  Lucas thought about it for a minute, then said, “He still had Carpenter’s phone—so he keeps trophies. At least, some trophies.”

  “If we ever figure out who he is, that’ll hang him,” Mattsson said.

  “Unless . . .”

  “It’s in a ditch,” they said simultaneously.

  • • •

  THEY FINISHED the pancakes and got another round of Diet Coke and coffee, and Mattsson asked, “I’ve been thinking about what you said about working for the BCA. If I put in for it, what are my chances of getting hired? I’ve got a good clearance record, I could get one of your guys to recommend me.”

  Lucas studied her for a moment, then said, “That fuckin’ Flowers.”

  She said, “Well, yeah, Virgil. We’ve talked a few times. He helped me out on a hijacking case. You guys don’t get along?”

  “We get along fine,” Lucas said. “He’s one of my guys. If Virgil recommended you, that’d be a step up. I’d chip in. You’re smart and you’re not afraid to stick your face into it. I gotta tell you, though, things get seriously political up there, and the question is, how well do you deal with office politics?”

  “I do sometimes get impatient . . .”

  They were still talking about that at six o’clock when Mattsson took a call. “Duty officer,” she said, looking at the screen on her phone. She answered, listened a moment, then stood up and said, “What!”

  Everybody in the place turned to look at her, and she started toward the door and called to Lucas, “Pay the bill. We gotta go! Like, right now!”

  The waitress called, “Twelve forty-eight,” and Lucas threw a twenty at the table and hustled out after Mattsson, who was halfway to her truck.

  “What?” he shouted.

  “We got a triple murder,” she called back.

  “Where?”

  “Right here,” she shouted. “A half-mile from here.”

  “What is it about you? Every time we talk, somebody’s dead.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, but in a collegial way this time.

  • • •

  SHE TOOK OFF, lights and siren, with Lucas behind her, off the highway and through the middle of town, cars pulling off the road to let them by. They went through the small business district, and out to the edge of town, where two cop cars sat next to a semi-stately two-story house. A crowd of neighbors was gathering across the street. Mattsson pulled right up to the edge of the yard, Lucas parking across the street, and they both climbed out and hustled toward the chief of police, who was there in jeans and a flannel shirt, and a cop in uniform.

  The chief said, “My God, that was fast. Where were you?”

  “At the Teepee,” Mattsson said. “What happened?”

  The chief nodded at the cop. “George was on patrol, and he drove by.” He said to the cop, “You tell ’em, George.”

  • • •

  THE COP WAVED a hand at the front porch and said, “I was driving by, because, you know, we was waiting on you and that phone call. So the chief called and sez it was all off, the phone was dead, and I was heading back in, and looked up there and I could see the window was busted out, above the porch. Could see the sun off the other windows, but that one window was like this black eye, with the curtain there, flapping out the window. At first I just figured the window was open, then I seen it was, you know, busted out, and there’s something out on the roof. I don’t know, I just thought, I don’t know, that weren’t right. So I walks up the front walk and go to ring the doorbell, and I look through the window on the door and seen Andy laying there on the floor in a big pool of blood.”

  The cop started screaming for help, and for the first time in his life, took the gun out of his holster and pushed open the door, “with my knee, so I didn’t mess up any prints. I had to make sure, you know, that the people inside was dead, that they didn’t need help. Medical help.”

  He found Lucy O’Neill at the kitchen door, obviously dead, like her husband. He knew the O’Neills had a daughter, and since it was unlikely that either of them had been killed upstairs and dragged down, he followed his muzzle to the second floor, where he found young Janice O’Neill dead on her bedroom floor. He’d had his phone live the whole time, and he cleared the second floor and then, when the chief arrived, ran down to meet him.

  Now he looked back up at the house: “Never in my life seen anything like it,” he said. Then he started to cry and the chief patted him on the shoulder, and the cop tried to get himself back, saying, “I never touched anything in there, except the floor, with my shoes. Oh, and I had to turn on a light switch in the little girls’ room.”

  “You did good, George,” Lucas said. “That’s a real professional job of it.”

  And to Mattsson, “Let’s go look. I’ll get the crime-scene crew down right now.”

  He got on his phone and made the call to the BCA duty officer, told him the situation, then followed Mattsson up to the house, across the porch, and then, carefully, through the front door.

  Andy O’Neill was on his back, his sightless eyes still open. Lucas said, “Shot with a .22.”

  “Uh-huh. Blood spatter.” She pointed at the door, at a streak of blood toward the bottom. “Like he hit his head on it going down.”

  They moved over to Lucy O’Neill—more .22s, and Mattsson said, “Got brass. He was shooting an auto.”

  Lucas moved back to Andy O’Neill, looked around, spotted a shell, then two more as he stepped back to Lucy O’Neill. He said, “With any luck, some of them will have thumbprints.”

  • • •

  THEY WALKED CAREFULLY up the stairs. Before they went up, Lucas said, “Walk right on the edge of the stairs. If he was hurrying, he would have bee
n in the middle, and we might find a tread.”

  At the top landing, they looked down to their right, saw lights and an open door. Lucas led the way down the hall, stuck his head in the room, and saw the girl curled on the floor just inside the window. She was wearing fashion jeans, a black blouse, and one black leather shoe. She had a black cord around her neck, strung with a pewter symbol of some kind, a winged heart.

  “She heard the shots from downstairs,” Lucas said. “Maybe . . . looked down the stairs, then ran back up here and tried to go out the window.”

  They peered out the window and saw, on the porch roof, a school backpack. “Threw the backpack at the window, but the shooter got to her before she managed to get out,” Mattsson said. “Where’s her other shoe? Did the guy take it?”

  “By the bed,” Lucas said.

  “Got it.”

  Lucas looked at Mattsson and said, “I think . . . I’d bet a million bucks that this is our guy. No way this town is going to get a triple, right when we’re hunting down the Black Hole guy. He came here and killed them for some reason. This isn’t simple craziness. He picked on them because they knew something. We need to talk to everybody they knew. Starting right now.”

  “I’ll get the whole goddamn sheriff’s department down here,” Mattsson said.

  “I can get at least a few guys, plus the crime-scene crew,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to the neighbors right now. He fired nine or ten shots, sometime during the evening—it looked to me like the woman downstairs was washing dinner dishes.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “The girl broke the window out, so he was shooting, at least four shots, with an open window. When he shot the man, the door had to be open. That’s more shots. Somebody had to have heard the shots.”

  Mattsson looked at the girl, then up at Lucas. A tear trickled down one cheek and she wiped it away and said, “If I find this guy, and if he does anything other than get down on his knees with his hands up in the air, I’m gonna kill him.”

  Lucas, with an image of Letty in his mind, said, “See, there’s one difference, right there, between us older BCA professionals, and you younger sheriff’s deputy amateurs.”

  She tipped her head away, and her eyes narrowed, waiting for the insult. “What?”

  “As an old pro, you’d never, ever, tell anyone that,” Lucas said. He was smiling, the hard, feral smile that tended to frighten people. “You’d just do it.”

  She poked him in the chest with her index finger. “You’re right. I do have some things to learn. Thank you.”

  • • •

  THEY WENT BACK DOWN the stairs and made their calls for help, then got the Holbein cops—there were four of them now—to find the immediate neighbors and send them back to their own homes, where they could be interviewed. Lucas and Mattsson started with the closest house, the Carson family, Randy, Sheela, and their sons Bob and Don.

  They hadn’t heard a thing.

  “Our front door was open, but I didn’t hear anything like a shot. Not even a backfire,” Randy Carson said. The two boys, sitting on the couch with their mother, nodded: Bob, the younger boy, maybe fourteen, said, “I was upstairs on my bed, reading a comic, and I thought I heard something, but not a shot. I thought maybe Dad or Don were doing something out in the garage.”

  “What time was that?” Mattsson asked.

  The boy pressed a finger against the side of his nose, thinking. “It was dark, but I don’t know the exact time.” He looked at his brother and said, “You came up. I was still reading the comic, and you were talking to Nina.”

  “Who’s Nina?” Lucas asked.

  “His girlfriend,” Bob said.

  “Sorta my girlfriend,” Don said. He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and said, “She called me at nine-oh-three, and I came up to my bedroom to talk to her.”

  “I heard the noise just a few minutes before that,” Bob said.

  Mattsson: “So around nine o’clock, give or take.”

  “I guess so,” Bob said. “But it wasn’t any shots. We all go hunting, and I know what shots sound like.”

  • • •

  WHEN THEY WERE DONE with the Carsons, they went to the next three closest houses. Nobody had heard anything.

  “That’s not right,” Lucas said, as they left the last of the interviews.

  “Could have been a silenced pistol,” Mattsson suggested.

  “Where would he get it?” Lucas asked. “You don’t get a silencer down at the hardware store.”

  She shrugged: “I don’t know. I’ve never dealt with a silencer. Never even seen one, except on television. What else could it be?”

  Lucas rubbed an ear, then took out his cell phone and made a call. There was no answer, so he called it again, and this time a man answered. “What?”

  “This is Davenport,” Lucas said.

  “Oh, shit. What happened?”

  “We got a triple, down in Holbein. I’m trying to figure something out. The killer shot a man in an open doorway, at least two shots. He shot a girl in an open window, at least four more. The people in the nearest house, maybe”—he looked at the Carsons’ house—“maybe a hundred fifty feet away. Their door was open, they didn’t hear anything like shots. Quiet night, right around nine o’clock, no traffic nearby.”

  “You know what caliber?”

  “Looks like a .22,” Lucas said.

  “Is this the Black Hole guy? What’s his name? Horn? The dogcatcher? Shooting with an auto, you found some brass on the floor?”

  “Yeah, we did find some brass. We think it’s Horn. Why do you think it’s Horn?”

  “Because Ruger made a sound-suppressed .22 auto pistol, the Mark II, for pest control officers. It’s a Class II weapon, so it has to be registered with the ATF. You might want to check with them.”

  “Wayne: thank you.”

  “Also: the Mark III, that’s the current model, some versions have a threaded barrel for suppressors or compensators, so that’d be another possibility.”

  Lucas rang off and Mattsson said, “What?”

  “There’s a pretty common pistol that was sold with a silencer, to pest control officers.”

  She looked down at her shoes, then back up, and turned in a full circle, looking at the neighbors and the houses up and down the silent street. “Horn. Where in the hell is he hiding? He can’t be hiding in this town.”

  “What could the O’Neills have known, that they wouldn’t call in?” Lucas asked. “Could they have been hiding Horn? That seems crazy.”

  “When Crime Scene gets here, you gotta have them tear the place apart. But I don’t believe they were hiding him,” Mattsson said. “I don’t believe it. I think one of the O’Neills saw the same thing Shaffer did, and he knew it, and he had to shut them up.”

  16

  The next three hours were busy. Jon Duncan showed up with two other BCA agents and the crime-scene crew, again. Bea Sawyer said to Lucas and Mattsson, “We gotta stop meeting like this.”

  “It’s pretty goddamn bad,” Lucas said. “There’s a dead girl up there, reminds me of Letty.”

  Sawyer patted him on the arm and said, “Aw, boy. But you’ll get the guy, okay? You’ll get him.”

  “Won’t get the girl back,” Lucas said. “Listen: one thing we need to know right away: Were the O’Neills hiding Horn? If they were, you should be able to figure that out.”

  “We will.”

  Duncan said, “We were wondering what he was doing here at nine o’clock, up in Sauk Centre at one, and then down here at three? Just trying to decoy us up north?”

  Mattsson nodded. “I gotta believe it was.”

  • • •

  HORN WAS CLOSE BY, but where? Mattsson was almost certainly right, Lucas thought—he couldn’t hide in Holbein, or any of the other nearby towns. Everybody they talked to said he hadn’t had any real friends, and even if he had one, how could he have hidden for all those years?

  Not right.

  • • •
>
  WHEN THE SCENE at the O’Neill house was running smoothly, Lucas told Mattsson he was going home: “We’ll have a bunch of guys down here, we’ll keep pinging that phone, in case it comes back online. . . . If you think of anything, let me know. When we get a time of death, get your people and the city cops to knock on every door for six blocks in every direction and ask who they saw driving around.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Take a nap, first thing. Then go back to the books. There’s gotta be something.”

  • • •

  HE PULLED OUT, and he held up a hand to her as he went. Smart, good-looking woman: maybe a little rough around the edges, but he was starting to get a vibration from her. Old enough to be her dad? I don’t think so. He didn’t know anything about her personal life, but there was that vibration . . . and if he hadn’t been so happily married, he’d have happily gotten her ankles up around her ears.

  He’d just thought that, when a name popped into his head. Flowers. That fuckin’ Flowers was a friend of hers. Few tall, well-built single blondes who were friends of Flowers had gotten away with their honor intact.

  He punched the phone button to bring up the car’s cell connection, then used the hockey puck to select Flowers’s name, and called him. Flowers answered on the second ring. “Where are you?” Lucas asked.

  “Down in Le Crescent. Not in the boat. Working.”

  “On your mystery case.”

  “Lucas, if you want to know about it . . . but I promise you, you’re better off not knowing.”

  “All right. I’m up in Goodhue County, in Holbein,” Lucas said.

  “Early for you,” Flowers said.

  “We got a triple.”

  “Uh-oh! That’s gotta be a first for Holbein.”

  “It’s the Black Hole killer. I’m working it with Catrin Mattsson,” Lucas said. “Your name has come up, a time or two. Got me curious: You work any night shifts with that girl?”