Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  Other thoughts began to impinge. Axel: he’d heard the name before, but where? Somewhere in the murder books? That didn’t seem right, but he’d heard the name.

  And he thought, Ropes. The fuckin’ ropes. They were burn-cut on both ends. You had to have a dedicated burn-cutter to do that, and where’d you find those? At a hardware store. Would you go to a hardware store once or twice a year, year after year, and buy a four-foot rope? Probably not. That’s something people would remember. But if you could cut the rope yourself, because you owned the place . . .

  Shaffer’s crew had gone around to hardware stores asking about ropes, but hadn’t gotten anywhere—they’d never realized that it wasn’t the ropes that were important, but the cuts. You could get rope anywhere, but burn cuts, at both ends, only at a hardware store.

  And the cut-glass door at Mattsson’s apartment: Where would you get glass cut? Who’d know how to do that, neatly and efficiently? A guy who worked at a hardware store.

  Axel’s name popped back into his head. Yes. He had it: he’d heard it from Toby, the snakeskin dealer. Axel was a big-game hunter and possibly a friend of Horn’s. And the woman who’d seen Horn and a friend unloading a huge deer at a butcher shop—Axel, the headhunter.

  All coming together, in the space of fifteen seconds as he hurried across the parking lot, got into the truck, and started it. As he pulled out of the parking lot, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw a line of store employees at the window, watching him go.

  He went straight up to the hardware store and parked in front of it, and walked over to the front door. The store was nearly dark, lit by a variety of LED lights on the office equipment and alarms, and a lone fluorescent light in the back. He saw a movement, banged on the door with his fist. A moment later, a man in an apron emerged from the dark and waved him off. Lucas banged hard, again, held up his ID.

  The man, tall, thin, and bald, squinted through the glass at him, then unlocked the door, opened it, and said, “We’re closed.”

  “I’m a police officer,” Lucas said. “I need to talk to Roger Axel.”

  “He’s not here. He hurt himself this morning when a tool rack fell on him. He had to go home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  The clerk pointed down the street. “About two blocks down there, in that big old gray house halfway down the second block.”

  “Could you give me the address?”

  “Hang on a second.”

  The clerk stepped back into the building and Lucas followed through the door. The clerk said, nervously, “I’m not sure . . .”

  Lucas: “I need the address. And while I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, at this point, I need to warn you, if you call Axel, or warn him that I’m coming, I will arrest you and I will put you in prison for the rest of your natural life. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  The clerk peered at him, and his Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times, and then he said, “You think he’s the Black Hole guy.”

  “I do,” Lucas said. “How’d you pick that up?”

  “If he’s not, don’t tell him what I’m gonna say. ’Cause I need this job.”

  “If he’s not, I won’t tell him anything,” Lucas said. “So how’d you pick it up?”

  “Because I think it’s possible,” the clerk said. “I’ve known him for six years, and by God, I think it’s possible.”

  “Get the address,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  THE CLERK found the address in Axel’s personal checkbook, which was lying on his desk. Lucas noted it, and asked, “What about this accident he had this morning?”

  The clerk said, “It was strange. He pulled a tool rack down on himself. It sort of made sense at the time, but, if you really think about it, you don’t quite see how it happened. One thing was, he got this great big long scratch on his face, like from a nail. If you didn’t know it was from a nail, you’d think it was from a fingernail. Like a woman’s fingernail.”

  “I want you to lock up, right now, and go home, and wait,” Lucas told the clerk. “Don’t answer the door, if it’s not a cop.”

  “Yes, sir,” the clerk said, pulling off the apron. “I’ll wait until I hear from you.”

  • • •

  LUCAS CALLED DUNCAN as he walked out to the car: “Where are you at?”

  “Red Wing. Looking at tapes.”

  “I’ve got him,” Lucas said. “He runs the hardware store in Holbein. His name is Roger Axel. I’m a block from his house and I can’t wait. I’m gonna kick the door and go in. Get everybody here, quick as you can.”

  “Holy shit, Lucas, you gotta wait. You gotta wait—”

  “I can’t wait. I can’t. It’s getting dark, and if he’s gonna kill Mattsson tonight, he’ll do it when it gets dark. Call a judge and get a warrant going.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Based on . . . testimony from the supermarket management which leads us to believe that Axel is the bad guy. Shit, I don’t know, Jon, I just know he’s the guy. And I can’t wait.”

  Lucas rang off and locked his car as he passed it, and started walking down the block toward Axel’s house. Halfway there, he broke into a jog. Would Axel have had the gall to keep Mattsson in his own house, virtually in downtown Holbein? Maybe, but maybe not. Lucas couldn’t take the chance of killing him, because if he’d put Mattsson somewhere else, they needed to know where.

  He ran.

  The streets were empty, but one elderly man in a hat, sitting on his front porch, reading a newspaper by the porch light, turned to watch him go by, a man in jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt, out jogging on a hot night. Not something you see every day.

  • • •

  LUCAS GOT TO AXEL’S HOUSE, slowed down, caught his breath, and walked up on the porch. Checked the house number to make sure he had it right. Thought about it for a second, then rang the doorbell. Nobody answered, but Lucas felt the man in the house; felt footfalls. Somebody had moved from one room to another, in a hurry.

  Well, hell: he didn’t really need the job.

  He took a step back, and kicked the door. The door was not quite an antique, but it was old, and much used, and blew inward. Lucas went in after it, pulling his .45 as he did, and saw movement to his right and saw Axel there, reaching into a bookcase. Lucas pointed the .45 at Axel’s head and shouted, “Stop there.”

  Axel stopped, his hand still in the bookcase. The facial resemblance to Sprick, the postman, was remarkable. Lucas said, “If you pull a gun out of there, I’m going to shoot you in the head. Pull your hand out.”

  “Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck do you want?” Axel demanded. He pulled his hand out of the bookcase, empty.

  “You know who I am,” Lucas said. “I’m a cop, and you’ve got Catrin Mattsson. Where is she?”

  “You’re nuts,” Axel said.

  He turned, and with the change of light, Lucas could see the pattern of fingernail scratches on his face; all doubt disappeared.

  “If you don’t tell me where she is, I’m gonna shoot you in the gut,” Lucas said. “I swear to God. I’m gonna see if I can poke a round through your spine, so even if you come out of it alive, you’ll be a cripple for the rest of your life. You got three seconds.”

  “Got you now,” Horn said, from behind Lucas.

  Axel said, “No way he’s got me. He’s only one man.”

  He said it so naturally that Lucas flinched: snapped a look backwards. Nobody there. “Two seconds,” he said.

  “Fuck you. Shoot me,” Axel said, squaring up with Lucas.

  “He’s gonna do it,” Horn said.

  “No, he won’t,” Axel said. He took a step forward and Lucas did the same, closing up to four feet, the gun still high, and then Axel juked left. Lucas had been in two hundred fights in his life. He enjoyed fighting. He was good at it. He’d seen the juke coming, and swatted the other man with the .45.

  Axel went down when Lucas hit him, and Lucas took a quick look a
round: there was nobody else in the house. He holstered the pistol, and when Axel tried to push himself to his knees, Lucas kicked him in the shoulder, hard as he could. Axel half-grunted, half-screamed, went down and then rolled, fast, and then rose up fully on his feet and charged.

  Lucas waited until he came in, slipped a wild punch, then hit Axel hard, on the forehead. The blow straightened him up, dazed him. He stumbled back, hit a wall, straightened up and lifted his fists, but only neck high. Lucas hit him in the eye and then hit him again, and again, and again, all the frustration coming out now, and Axel went down again, on his stomach.

  • • •

  LUCAS KICKED HIM HARD in the other shoulder, and Axel squealed, and Lucas stepped to the door and pushed it shut. It was broken, and didn’t close all the way, but it was good enough.

  Axel was still facedown, trying to push up, but his shoulders were ruined, and he was having trouble. Lucas kicked him in the hip, knocking him flat, then straddled him, grabbed his wrists, and lifted him off the floor, rotating his arms back and up, stressing them in Axel’s shoulder sockets, and Axel began to scream and Lucas shouted, “Where is she?”

  “I don’t have—”

  Lucas lifted his arms higher, felt one begin to dislocate, and Axel screamed, “Down the basement. She’s down the basement.”

  Lucas lifted higher, and felt the second arm begin to dislocate: “She still alive?”

  “Yes. Yes. She is,” he screamed. “She’s alive.”

  Lucas reached under Axel’s neck, lifted him up by his shirt collar, then swatted him with the back of his hand, knocking him to the floor again, then said, “Crawl to the basement door. Crawl there, or I swear to God, I will kick you to death right here.”

  To prove it, he kicked Axel in the ribs.

  Axel tried to crawl, sobbing with pain as he did it. His arms were unable to support his body weight and he wound up shuffling forward on his knees into the kitchen, to a gray door set in the kitchen wall.

  “Here,” he said.

  Lucas kicked him between the shoulder blades, and he smashed forward and down, his face bouncing off the tile floor.

  • • •

  IN THE BOMB SHELTER, Mattsson had managed to crawl back to her corner. She felt she was dying. She was freezing, hadn’t had water for nearly twenty hours, had several broken bones. The next time he came, she thought, would be the end, and there was no way she’d be able to stop it.

  She had at least the satisfaction of knowing that she’d hurt him. The scratches might provide somebody with evidence that would hang him, and might show somebody that she’d at least fought back. They’d think well of her, the other cops would.

  Huddled there, she’d occasionally hear footfalls as Axel crossed one of the rooms on the first floor of the house, above her. Eventually, she would hear him coming down the steps, and when that happened . . .

  Then, after a lot of time, she heard running footfalls, and then a louder noise, still muffled, and then a heavy thump. A thump like a body hitting a floor, a sound she’d heard several times in her career, usually when she and another cop were breaking up a bar fight.

  She pushed herself up.

  • • •

  LUCAS SNAPPED ON the basement light and pushed Axel down the stairs ahead of him. Pushed harder than he intended, but he was insanely angry, and Axel collapsed and tumbled down them, bouncing off the walls, but at the bottom, managed to come to his knees. His face was a red mask of blood, flowing from cuts in his forehead, and from a broken nose.

  He looked around, grabbed a wooden dowel rod off a shelf and used it as a cane to push himself to his feet.

  “You swing that thing at me, I’m gonna turn you into a fuckin’ Popsicle,” Lucas said.

  Axel staggered backwards, and with Lucas coming down fast, managed to reach back, snatch a Ball jar off a shelf and throw it at Lucas’s head. Lucas dodged and stepped forward and Axel jerked the dowel rod straight up, and more out of dumb luck than anything, rammed it into the bottom of Lucas’s nose, a stunning blow that instantly clouded Lucas’s eyes with tears.

  Lucas had been stunned before. He swung a fist where he’d last seen Axel’s head. His head was still there and Axel fell back into a rack of ancient canned vegetables, and sank to the floor.

  Several of the jars fell off the shelf and shattered around him, and Lucas bent and grabbed Axel by the shirt again, yanked him out of the mess, and threw him spinning against a concrete wall, where he hit face-first. Axel went down again, and Lucas grabbed an arm and wrenched it back and up and shouted, “Where?”

  “Around the corner, around the corner, Jesus, I’m hurt, I’m hurt, around the corner,” Axel sobbed. “Don’t hurt me no more.”

  Lucas dragged him around the corner and found himself looking at a gray steel door with a key sticking out of the lock. A light switch was next to it. He turned the key and pulled the door open. The room behind the door was dark: he flipped the switch.

  • • •

  MATTSSON HAD HEARD the fight—sounded like a fight—and a thrill went through her, lifting her to her feet. She pressed back against the wall, waiting, heard the key rattling in the lock.

  The door opened, the light snapped on, and Davenport was there, blood running like a creek out of his nose, across his mouth and chin. Axel was lying facedown by his feet.

  She asked, “Where the fuck have you been?”

  Lucas said, “Catrin. I just, uh . . . just . . .”

  • • •

  HE BACKED UP a few steps, one hand going to his nose, the blood running over his fingers. He nearly stumbled over Axel, who was pushing up with one arm, rolling over onto his back.

  Axel looked up at Mattsson and said, “You got me, Cat.”

  Mattsson looked at him for a moment, then asked, “How bad are you hurt? Who else is up there?”

  Lucas said, “I’m not bad, he just . . .”

  He was looking at her, and unconsciously shook his head, and she asked, “How bad am I?”

  Lucas didn’t answer directly. He said, “Gotta get an ambulance . . .” He fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone. She put an arm out, held on to his shirtsleeve, stepped around him, pulling him around a bit, almost as though they were square-dancing, and said, “Just excuse me, I’m just . . .”

  There was a crowbar on a workbench, a three-foot-long piece of cold steel. Lucas was turning after her, but she just kept going around behind him, sweeping up the crowbar as she did and she came around to Axel, half-sitting, looking up at her, his eyes widening at the last minute as the crowbar came around and

  WHACK!

  She hit him, once, at the hairline just above his eyes. The bar shattered his skull, blowing bits of brain matter out to the sides.

  Lucas recoiled: “Jesus.”

  Mattsson looked up at him, held onto his shirt.

  Lucas said, “Okay. Now we need a story.”

  Mattsson fell down, landed on Axel’s body and rolled away from him, and Lucas tried to pick her up but she said, “Leave me, make the call.”

  Mattsson looked up at him, and he crouched next to her and said, “After a fight, I dragged him down here. I let you out, and I was focused on you, when you came out, I was holding you up, and he suddenly stood up and picked up that bar, and you saw it and wrenched it free and swung it.”

  “That should do,” she said, and fainted.

  25

  Lucas looked around, spotted a mover’s pad on one of the well-ordered shelves, unfolded it, spread it on the floor, picked Mattsson up, placed her on the pad, and wrapped it around her.

  She started to come around while he was doing that, and said, “I hurt bad. He hurt me bad.”

  • • •

  HE SAT on the floor next to her, looked at his phone, pushed the button for Duncan.

  Duncan came up instantly and shouted, “What? What?”

  Lucas said, “I got her. I got Catrin. She’s hurt bad. This guy, this hardware store guy, is dead. Gonna need some med
ics in a hurry, for Catrin.”

  “Jesus! Lucas! You got him, oh, Jesus.” He was shouting again. “We’re coming, we got an ambulance on the way . . . but where are you exactly?”

  “I know that,” Lucas said. He found the paper with the address on it and read the address to Duncan.

  “Ambulance will be there in four or five minutes, cops will be there in two minutes. We’re coming fast as we can.” Duncan had calmed down just a bit. “What happened . . . did he . . . hurt her?”

  He meant raped. Lucas said, “Yeah, I guess. She’s pretty out of it. She’s hurt. He beat the hell out of her, along with everything else.” And he said, “Ah, jeez, I’m getting blood all over everything.”

  “We’re coming. . . . How did this guy get killed? You shoot him?”

  “No. I had him on the floor, down in his basement workshop. I turned my back to help Catrin, he came up, she saw him coming, grabbed a crowbar off a workbench and smacked him with it. Right in the middle of the head.”

  “Aw, boy . . . we’re coming, man.”

  • • •

  LUCAS CLICKED OFF and looked down at Mattsson; wrapped in the mover’s pad, she began shaking uncontrollably as she looked up at him. But her eyes were focused and she said, “Picked up the crowbar . . .”

  “That’s right.”

  “I should be unconscious when the ambulance guys get here . . . then I can tell that story when I come back.”

  Lucas half-laughed: “Yeah, not a good idea to mix it up. You don’t have to be too clear, because, you know . . .” He touched his palm to his face, and came away with a blood-smeared palm. “. . . it was all crazy and confusing and we were hurt.”

  • • •

  “DAVENPORT! DAVENPORT!” A male voice from the first floor.

  Lucas shouted, “Down here,” and stepped over to the stairs.

  Two cops came down, the chief and another guy, the chief with his gun in his hand, both looking frightened. The chief looked at Lucas and said, “God, you okay?” and then, without waiting for an answer, he knelt beside Mattsson and asked, “Is she . . . ?”