Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  They were sitting in an otherwise empty lounge area outside the office of the Case Management Team.

  “But you were friendly with him—professionally, at least.”

  “Yeah, but I knew he was a creepoid,” she said, hugging herself. “He tried to be friendly with me, but the only things he could talk about were shooting . . . things.”

  “Why was he talking to you at all?”

  “He couldn’t pay his clinic bill. I mean, he had to be treated, but he had no money. He had this cheap-ass insurance from the city. You had a choice—you either took a high maximum payment with a high deductible, or vice versa, low max, low deduct. He took the high max, high deductible, and he couldn’t make the deductible. We worked out a payment plan with him.”

  “So . . . you didn’t know who he hung with. If he hung with anybody.”

  “I saw him with a guy once, when he was being treated, and I think it was a friend. I don’t know who it was.” She leaned toward Lucas, intent on the memory. “What I remember was, there is a place in Holbein called Arlo’s Finer Meats, and Horn and this other guy were carrying a dead deer—I think it was a deer—into the back. They had a deer-processing thing there. The reason I remember, in particular, is that my ex-husband was a deer hunter, and I’ve seen a lot of dead bucks. This deer had huge horns. Horns like I’d never seen. That’s why I’m not even a hundred percent sure it was a deer—it was just so big. Like an elk. But not that big, maybe.”

  “You remember what year this was?”

  “Not the year, but I can tell you it was probably a year before he attacked that woman.”

  They talked for another ten minutes, but she had nothing else. Lucas thanked her, went to his car, and called Duncan.

  “Big deer,” Duncan said. “Huge deer. I’m heading over to Arlo’s. I wonder if they might have shot it at a game farm? That’s where you get the biggest bucks.”

  “It’s a possibility,” Lucas said.

  “Lucas: thank you.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WENT HOME and found Letty waiting to talk to him. “I’ve been reading the murder books again,” she said. “I’ve got a question about the ropes. There were fourteen ropes found down in the Black Hole. Seven of them were quarter-inch nylon, three were quarter-inch polypropylene, two were three-eighths-inch nylon, and two were three-eighths-inch polypro. All of them were within a couple of inches of thirty inches long, and they all had knots tied at both ends.”

  “So his hands wouldn’t slip when he was strangling the women with them,” Lucas said.

  “But here’s the thing—even though they were extremely similar, they didn’t all come from the same length of rope. It wasn’t one rope he was cutting to get seven lengths of nylon. The lab says there are subtle differences in chemical composition and even in weave, by different manufacturers. So, the killer got them at some place with a lot of rope.”

  “Or a lot of different places with a lot of different ropes,” Lucas said. “They’ve checked the hardware stores everywhere, got no good information—even checked the marinas, because nylon’s used by boaters.”

  “There’s gotta be something weird about going someplace and buying a two-and-a-half-foot rope,” Letty said. “What could you use it for, besides strangling people?”

  “Lawn mower starter cords, boat tie-downs, I dunno.” Lucas thought about it for a few seconds, then said, “Think it over. There might be something in there.”

  • • •

  WEATHER CAME IN AND SAID, “You guys are on television again. That Mattsson is a very attractive young woman.”

  Lucas tried to think of a reply, but nothing came to mind. So he said, “What are we on television about?”

  “About Horn being dead. About looking for another guy. At least, that’s what the promo said.”

  “What? Jon wasn’t going to release that yet.”

  Letty, who’d worked at Channel Three for several years, as a student intern, said, “If you’ve got agents running all over Holbein and Zumbrota, how long did you think it’d stay confidential?”

  Lucas settled back in his chair. “All right. Not long, I guess.”

  “Well, get up. Let’s go watch,” Letty said.

  • • •

  THEY ALL WENT TRAIPSING into the family room, where Sam was playing with Legos in front of the TV, and Gabrielle was watching him work. They sat through an advertisement for Hyundai automobiles that were being blown out at record low prices while the boss was on vacation in Canada.

  Then the anchorman came up and said, “Breaking right now! An exclusive from Channel Three’s crime team! We’re switching you to Holbein, where . . .”

  They switched to an excited reporter in Holbein who said, “Greg, we’ve confirmed from a number of sources that the agents of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension are literally swarming through the towns of Holbein and Zumbrota, looking for a mystery ‘second man’ in the Black Hole case. And get this, Greg! The BCA now believes that Jack Horn is dead!”

  There followed shots of agents and cops coming and going from the Holbein police headquarters, and a shot of Duncan, in plain clothes, consulting with Mattsson, in her deputy’s uniform. “Those two are getting pretty friendly,” Lucas said, genuinely amused. “A few days ago, they were screaming at each other.”

  The reporter tried to interview Mattsson, but she brushed him off: “You need to talk to Jon Duncan. Everything goes through him.”

  “But are you closing in? Do you have somebody in your sights?”

  Mattsson smiled and shook her head, but the smile said, “Yes.”

  Duncan did say a few words, and Letty said, “He has nice hair and a good smile.”

  “Good hair is important,” Lucas said.

  “That’s all you got?” Letty asked. “They’re closing in, and all you got is, ‘Good hair is important’?”

  “This killer is not a dumb guy,” Lucas said. “I’m not sure they’re as close as they think they are.”

  Lucas was drifting away from the TV when the anchor said, in the same excited voice, “The C-Team also has an exclusive interview with Little Kaylee Scott, who may have seen the Black Hole killer again, and this time he was stalking her in her own neighborhood.”

  “Ah, shit.”

  “That could be a big deal,” Letty said.

  “It’s not,” Lucas said. He took one minute to explain.

  Weather said, “TV. It’s like if you’re not on it, you don’t exist. The single most pernicious idea in our culture.”

  18

  R-A and Horn were watching the news at the same time as Lucas. R-A was down four half-glasses of bourbon, and feeling a little wobbly.

  “Those fuckers are all over town,” he said. “They’re not exactly going door-to-door, but it’s pretty close. They’ll be knocking here anytime.”

  “Well, don’t let them in,” Horn said. “They get a look at me, and it really is all over.”

  “Can’t take a chance of that, no way,” R-A said. He stepped toward Horn, and then Mattsson was on the TV screen, and R-A said, “Ohhhhh . . . Jesus.”

  “Run back to the bathroom, stroke boy,” Horn said. “Run-run-run-run.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You still think you’re gonna get her? Looks like she’s hanging out with the state cops now.”

  “I’ll get her,” R-A said. “Too bad you won’t be here to see it.”

  “C’mon, R-A, are you—”

  He stopped talking because R-A stepped behind him and snapped his head off.

  • • •

  NOBODY CAME to the door the first night of the big Holbein-Zumbrota hunt. R-A was keeping his pickup in the garage for the time being, and was getting around in his ten-year-old Suburban. After pulling on some plastic kitchen gloves, he loaded Horn’s mummified corpse into the back of the Suburban, on a plastic sheet, tossed the head on top of the pile, and tied up the bundle. Horn was still wearing the clothes he’d been killed in, though you couldn’t see muc
h blood after fifteen years of rot.

  Horn’s wheelchair, which had once belonged to R-A’s father, he carefully washed, out behind the garage, with the Scrubbing Bubbles. When it was clean and dry, he folded and put it in the garage’s storage loft.

  At nine-thirty, he drove out of town, heading east. He thought about dropping the bundle on top of the Black Hole, which would be funny, but too risky. After driving around for a while, down narrow and narrower country roads, watching for headlights and nearby farm lights, he said screw it, spotted some tall weeds in a ditch, and threw the bundle into the ditch and the head after it.

  He didn’t particularly try to hide it. He was familiar with the countryside, and the way isolated neighbors watched out for each other. The thing that would create the most suspicion was a car parked on a road for a while, without good reason. He really didn’t need somebody wondering whose car that was, and what was going on.

  And he didn’t really care if Horn was found: what he really needed to do was get him out of the house.

  With Horn in the ditch, and no lights in sight, R-A turned around and headed back into town. Instead of going home, he drove a loop through it, a block over from the police station. There were all kinds of lights on, and a half dozen cars in the parking lot. Cops were still at it.

  He stopped at the K-Bar, run by a former marine who’d never gotten over it, had a couple of margaritas, and listened to the other guys at the bar talk: all of it was about the cops in town, and speculation about who they were after, and that the same guy had killed the O’Neill family.

  “Tell you what,” said one of the local blowhards, “if the town gets ahold of the guy before the cops do, I wouldn’t be surprised we had our first lynching. If they catch the sonofabitch, and if they don’t kill him on the spot, and if he gets convicted and doesn’t pull some technical shit on the court, then he’ll get life. He’ll be living better than a lot of the street people you see up in the Cities. Way better. Good medical care—”

  “Wouldn’t want to spend all my days locked up,” said another guy.

  “Either would I, but that’d be better than going to the chair,” said the blowhard. “But he’s gonna wind up in one of our country-club prisons, when what he should get is about four feet of rope up in a tree.”

  A couple guys nodded, but a couple more said, “Don’t know about that,” so it wasn’t entirely unanimous.

  R-A finished his second drink and left. Nobody said good-bye, because R-A was not especially well liked.

  Back home, he found Horn sitting in the living room, in the wheelchair. He no longer had the duct tape around his neck, which had held his head upright for the past decade and a half. R-A was not especially surprised.

  “You didn’t think you’d get rid of me that easy, did you?” Horn asked.

  “No, I really didn’t,” R-A said.

  “So what are we doing?”

  R-A said, “Mattsson.”

  19

  All during dinner, with Letty chattering away, more and more excited about going out to California, and Sam fretting about it and Gabrielle throwing mashed squash at him, and all during that, and the subsequent cleanup, Weather would catch Lucas’s eyes with a little smile, and Lucas knew precisely what that meant, and it was fine with him.

  They’d go to bed a little early, he’d be a little tired, and instead of staying up to read, he’d just tell everybody that he (yawn) really needed some sleep.

  As he passed Weather in the kitchen, he muttered, “Brace yourself, Bridget.”

  “I got all the bracing you can handle, big guy.”

  They both laughed because it was so stupid.

  • • •

  AT NINE O’CLOCK, still bouncing off each other a bit, with Letty in the second hour of a phone call with her best friend, who was also going off to school, Lucas and Weather both drifted away to their computers to answer any late e-mails before they actually got it on. Lucas had nothing interesting, dropped the lid on his laptop, and climbed the stairs to stick his head into Weather’s office, when his phone rang.

  He dug it out of his pocket and looked at the screen as he stopped in Weather’s doorway. “Duty officer,” he told her.

  “Oh, God. Maybe they caught him,” she said.

  “If they did, they won’t need me,” Lucas said. He answered: “Davenport.”

  “Lucas, this is Bob Rogers. Man, the ATF is telling us that Del and one of their officers was shot down in Texas.”

  “What!” He groped for a chair and sat down, bent over the phone.

  Weather: “What? What happened?”

  Lucas turned away, put a finger in his off-ear: “How bad?”

  “They can’t tell us. They’re both being taken to a hospital in El Paso. The ATF guy I talked to said that there was a big shoot-out, some old people with machine guns. There’s some kind of firefight going on right now. Or was. This all went down an hour ago.”

  “What about Cheryl? Has anybody notified her?” Lucas asked.

  “Oh my God,” Weather said.

  “We’re on the way,” Rogers said. “That’s the first thing we got going. We think somebody ought to get down there, and he’s your guy, and you’re old friends, we thought . . .”

  “I’m going,” Lucas said. “Give me ten minutes to get back to you. I’m going.”

  He hung up, white-faced, and stared at Weather, who said, “Who? It’s not Del?”

  “Yeah. He’s been shot. He’s in an ambulance going to El Paso, we don’t know the condition,” Lucas said. “I gotta go. I gotta find out how to get down there, probably aren’t any flights at night—”

  “Lucas, you’re rich,” Weather said. “Rent a jet.”

  Lucas looked at her and then down at his phone, thumbed through his contact list, and pushed a number that, under normal circumstances, he only called a couple of times a year.

  The governor answered: “You got the Black Hole guy.”

  “No. Do you still have that jet?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “I need it to go to El Paso. Right now. I’ll write you a check for whatever it is.”

  “What happened, Lucas?”

  “Del Capslock—you met him a couple times,” Lucas said. “You said he looked like he fell out of a boxcar.”

  “I remember.”

  “He was on an ATF job down by El Paso, involving some gunrunners from here in St. Paul. He’s been shot, we don’t know his condition. He’s my guy . . . my friend.”

  “All right. My plane isn’t actually here. It’s part of a co-op flight program. But some plane will be here,” the governor said. “You get started to Holman Field, I’ll call the FBO, and I’ll call you back and tell you where to go. You can write the check later.”

  “I’m gonna call his wife, Del’s wife, see if she wants to ride along. She will,” Lucas said.

  “That’s fine. My plane seats sixteen, you’ll get something similar. Go.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  • • •

  LUCAS HUNG UP AND SAID, “We’re set. I’m going.”

  Weather took his arm and said, “I can’t go, the kids . . . But you should take Letty. Letty to take care of Cheryl . . . no matter what’s happened.”

  Lucas thought for a second, then went to the door and shouted, “Letty!”

  She was downstairs and shouted back, “What? I’m on the phone.”

  Lucas: “Del’s been shot. We’re going to El Paso. Pack some clothes. You got five minutes.”

  After one second of silence, Letty yelled, “How hot’s it gonna be?”

  • • •

  THEY WERE OUT THE DOOR in seven minutes, Letty driving Lucas’s SUV, Lucas on the phone in the passenger seat.

  Cheryl said, “Of course I’m going. That goddamned fool, I told him this was going to happen, running around like a kid playing guns after, after, after . . .” And she began to sob.

  Lucas said, “You’re gonna need some hot-weather stuff, some blouses an
d shorts and jeans. Just throw them in a bag. We’ll be there in four or five minutes. We’ll buy more clothes in El Paso, if we need them.”

  “I’m doing that now. . . .” She began sobbing again.

  Lucas said, “We’re coming, hang on, we’re coming . . .” He hung up and said to Letty, “Slow down, you’re gonna kill us,” and, “You got the AmEx card I gave you?”

  “Are you kidding me? It’s practically glued to my body.”

  “Good. You gotta take care of Cheryl. Anything she needs, put it on the card. Anything.”

  • • •

  CHERYL WAS a middle-aged nurse who looked as though a hurricane had been blowing through her hair, and whose eyes were red and swollen from crying. She threw a carry-on-sized suitcase in the back of the truck and asked, “Have you heard anything more?”

  “Nothing, what about you?”

  “He was alive when they got him to the hospital, but the ATF guy is dead,” Cheryl said. “Del’s shot bad, Lucas, he’s shot bad . . .”

  “One goddamned place in the world that they’ll know about gunshot wounds, it’s gonna be El Paso,” Lucas said. “If they got him there alive, he’ll make it.”

  “Oh, God . . .”

  • • •

  THE GOVERNOR CALLED and gave them directions to the fixed-based operator. “There’s a guy named Jeff there, he’s putting together a flight plan. There were two pilots on stand-by, both from Washington County, they’re on the way, and supposedly, they’re both sober.”

  • • •

  THEY GOT TO THE FBO, found the plane in a pool of bright light outside a white-painted hangar. Jeff was inside a small office, and he said, “Hello,” without a smile, and added, “The governor says you’ve got a serious situation.”

  “We do,” Lucas said. “How soon can we get going?”

  “The plane’s prepped and ready to go. When . . .” A door banged open at the end of a hallway, and two men came through, pulling nylon bags. “. . . the pilots get here, and here they are. They’re the best we got.”