Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  “She’s breathing, and her eyes were open a minute ago,” Lucas said. “But we’ve got to get her going.”

  The second cop was looking at Axel: “Don’t need an ambulance over here. R-A is . . . well, he’s dead.”

  The chief glanced at Axel, put his gun away and said, “Piece of shit: I should have thought of him.” He stood, took a phone out of his pocket, got on it and shouted, “Where the hell are they? Well, tell them to drive faster, we need them here right fuckin’ now. What? All right.”

  He hung up and said, “They’re outside. I’ll go get them.” He looked at the stairs and said, “Don’t believe they’ll get a gurney up that. Too narrow.”

  • • •

  THE PARAMEDICS took the cushions off a gurney, nestled Mattsson in them, then carried her up the stairs in the lengthwise curl of the mattress. One of them said to Lucas, “Her heart’s strong, her blood pressure’s a little low . . . she’s in shock.”

  At the top of the stairs, they strapped her into the gurney and ran her outside to the ambulance. “You coming?” one of the paramedics asked Lucas.

  “No. But if you’ve got some gauze pads in there, I could use them.”

  • • •

  “WE GOT MEDIA,” said the cop who’d come down with the chief. A TV van had stopped down the street, and a photographer hit the ground running, the camera on Mattsson as they loaded her into the ambulance, then panning to Lucas.

  The paramedic handed Lucas a bundle of gauze pads. Lucas took them, and saw Duncan’s truck swing wide around a corner, flashers burning out into the evening, and Lucas told the ambulance driver, “Hold on, one second.”

  Duncan piled up close behind the ambulance and jumped out, breathless, and said, “She in there?”

  “Yeah. Take a quick look, and we’ll send her off.”

  Duncan climbed into the ambulance and looked at Mattsson and said, “Ah, man. Ah, man, she’s hurt. That fuckin’ animal, I wanna cry.”

  Mattsson’s eyes fluttered, and she looked up and focused on Duncan. She smiled, showing a line of blood-crusted, broken teeth, and said in a voice that sounded like a rusty gate, “Jon. I know it’s my turn, but you’re gonna have to handle the media.”

  “Ah, Jesus, Catrin . . .” He took her hand.

  • • •

  WHEN MATTSSON WAS GONE—the paramedics thought her vitals were strong enough that they should skip the local clinic and take her straight to the Mayo at Rochester—Lucas went inside and washed his face, pinched his nose off with the gauze pads, and walked Duncan through the fight with Axel.

  Duncan recorded it, and then sealed the scene until the state crime-scene crew could get there, and the medical examiner’s investigators.

  “You need to get to the clinic, big guy,” Duncan said, when they were done. “Your nose is gonna be the size of a yam by morning.”

  “Worth it. I got her back,” Lucas said.

  Duncan slapped him on the back and laughed aloud and said, “Yes, you did. You got her back alive.”

  Duncan wouldn’t allow Lucas to drive himself to the Zumbrota clinic, but assigned a BCA guy to drive, and, after the docs were done with him, to take him home. At the clinic, the docs found nothing broken except a couple of blood vessels. They pushed a bunch of ointment up his nose, along with some cotton wads that looked like pencil stumps. That stopped the bleeding.

  “But your nose is gonna look like . . .”

  “A yam. I’ve already heard,” Lucas said.

  “I wasn’t going to say yam,” the doc said. “But yam is better than what I was going to say.”

  • • •

  THE OTHER AGENT, whose name was Jim, and who was going on his thirty-sixth hour without sleep, drove him home. As they left Zumbrota, Lucas called Letty.

  “How is Del doing?”

  “Good. And I can tell by your voice, you got her. How bad is she?”

  “She’s down at the Mayo. She was pretty beat up, raped, teeth broken, probably some broken bones.”

  “Better than dead,” Letty said. “Who was the killer?”

  “Guy who ran the hardware store . . .”

  He told her the whole story, sliding around the details in the death of Axel, and she filled him in on Del. “He’s stable. He’ll be back in Minnesota in a couple weeks. Cheryl is going to stay here to take care of him, but I’m going to head back as soon as I can get a ticket.”

  “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” Lucas said. “Look for a guy with a yam on his face.”

  He called Rose Marie Roux. “We got him. And we got Mattsson. He’s dead, and she’s alive.”

  “Perfect,” Roux said. “I’ll call the governor. He wanted to hear. He’s going to make a statement.”

  • • •

  LUCAS TOOK the next day off, but picked up Letty at the airport that night. The day after that, Shaffer was buried; the funeral had been delayed by the various processes and evidentiary needs of the medical examiner. Lucas and Weather drove up to the Iron Range town of Eveleth for the funeral, with two dozen BCA agents and their wives and husbands, and about a thousand other cops from around the state. At the funeral, June Shaffer gave him a wordless hug, and went on to sit by the coffin with her children.

  • • •

  LUCAS’S NOSE looked like a yam for three or four days, but was nearly back to normal when the family delivered Letty to Stanford. Everybody but Lucas cried when they said good-bye. Lucas didn’t cry because he just didn’t, but he couldn’t speak for a while, and he called her eight or nine times over the next two days.

  • • •

  MATTSSON.

  Mattsson was damaged, but out of the hospital in a week. Dental repairs would take a while, her ribs would knit in six weeks, a broken wristbone a while longer. Weather fixed her nose.

  She began visiting with Elle Kruger—Sister Mary Joseph—once or twice a week. Her problem involved neither the rapes nor the beatings, as much as the fact that she’d spent too many dark hours looking into the blank hollow eyes of death. She remained on the roster with the Goodhue County sheriff’s department for reasons having to do with health insurance, but had been told that a job was waiting at the BCA if she wanted it. She told everybody that she’d want it . . . in a while. Once a week or so, she’d come over and sit on Lucas’s back porch and drink a beer, not with Lucas, but with Weather. Talking about life.

  • • •

  TWENTY-ONE SKULLS were found in the Black Hole. Four were confirmed as taken after death in cemetery thefts. The other seventeen were murders. Nine were matched to missing women during the main investigation, five more afterward. Three were never identified. The BCA sent out 470 DNA kits to families worried that one of the bodies belonged to a relative who’d disappeared.

  Most of the skulls, after being released, were cremated by each individual victim’s family. The undifferentiated “material”—human remains taken from the Black Hole—was also cremated, after a ruling by the state attorney general about proper disposition.

  • • •

  TWO WEEKS after the sensational windup of the case, Janet Frost, the Star-Tribune feature writer, wrote a semi-investigative feature noting apparent discrepancies in Lucas’s and Mattsson’s stories of what had happened in R-A’s basement. She also pointed out that Lucas had entered R-A’s house without a search warrant.

  Mattsson rebutted the story on public television’s Almanac show. She was ferociously angry, and brutally candid about what had happened in Axel’s basement. Her story of the multiple rapes and beatings, along with the still-obvious bruising on her face and body, the splints on her arm, the broken nose and teeth, the file shots of Lucas’s blood-covered face, and video documentation of the murdered women’s skulls coming out of the Black Hole, were so appalling that the Star-Tribune was overwhelmed with complaints, subscription cancellations, and a few death threats. The paper stood by the story, but shoveled dirt on it as quickly as the editors could do it; there were no follow-ups.

  •
• •

  FROST HAD ALSO done a long, sentimental first-person follow-up story on Emmanuel Kent and his pledge to starve to death if Lucas, Jenkins, and the Woodbury cops were not brought to justice.

  Ruffe Ignace was so pissed off at Frost that he followed Kent after he left his City Hall protest site one night and watched him send another homeless man into a Burger King, to bring back a BK Triple Stacker, a large fries, and a vanilla shake. The next night he was back with a photographer to document it.

  The story crushed Kent’s protest. Two days later, he picked up his rug and left City Hall, and resumed his can-collecting and his dog- and cat-feeding routine.

  • • •

  FOR REASONS he couldn’t explain, Ignace’s story about Emmanuel Kent made Lucas feel worse about Kent’s situation than he already had. Pure liberal guilt, Weather claimed—a mentally ill man they knew about who went hungry sometimes, and had no shelter, and still spent money on stray dogs and cats; and here they were, by contrast, rich and comfortable and planning a trip to Paris, where the hotel they’d stay at would cost five hundred euros a night. But that was the way of the world, she said, and they gave away a lot of money to organizations that did good work. . . .

  Which didn’t make Lucas feel a lot better. He was chatting with Jenkins about it, within earshot of a young woman named Sandy, who worked part-time for the BCA as a research assistant. Sandy was a latter-day flower child who took Lucas aside and explained that he and Kent were attached by a karmic thread, and it was stress on this thread that was causing Lucas’s uneasiness.

  She concluded by saying, “I know you think this is crazy, Lucas, but ask Virgil about what I just told you. He’ll tell you, I’m right.”

  Virgil Flowers. The murder case he was working on had spiraled out of control, as his cases tended to do; but he took ten seconds to tell Lucas, “Sandy’s never wrong about this kind of thing. She has a strong insight into the karmic realities, so I would consider very carefully what she said.”

  “I’m a Catholic, for Christ’s sakes,” Lucas said.

  “Karma doesn’t care, Lucas. Karma just is,” Flowers said.

  A few days after that, Lucas used his connections in the Minneapolis police department to find out where Emmanuel Kent might be, which turned out to be lying under a tree in the circle of grass outside the Hennepin County Government Center. Several other homeless men hung out there. Lucas dropped by, and recognized Kent from newspaper photos.

  Kent was a tall man, radically thin by first-world standards. He had the dry, burned face of a man who’d spent too many years outside. He’d shaved recently, not more than three or four days earlier, but hadn’t had a haircut in months. A backpack with a bedroll sat on the grass next to him, a pair of shoes sat next to his head. A plastic garbage bag was by his feet, with a couple of Coke cans spilling out of the open mouth of the bag.

  He was talking with himself, while paging through a copy of Forbes. Lucas walked up, hands in his pockets, still uncertain about what he was going to do. But since he was a cop, he wasn’t shy about stopping to stare at Kent, who gradually became aware of the attention.

  Kent took him in, said, “You got a five?” Gave him another second’s worth of appraisal, and amended, “Or maybe a ten?”

  Lucas said, “I’m Lucas Davenport.”

  Kent took a second to sort through his mental stock of known names, and then said, “Aw, fuck you, man.”

  They looked at each other for ten seconds or so, without speaking. Lucas, who was wearing a summer-weight black-and-blue-checked wool suit by H. Huntsman, with a dusty red Brioni necktie, and who thought he might possibly have overdressed for the occasion, finally said, “I’ve been told that we’re tied together by a karmic thread.”

  “That sounds like crazy hippie New Age bullshit, man,” Kent said. He got slowly to his bare feet.

  “That’s something we agree on,” Lucas said. “But I kinda started worrying about you. For one thing, why don’t you go somewhere else? Like Santa Monica, or Pasadena, or Tucson, or something? Where it’s warm all year?”

  Kent looked around, up at all the glass and steel towers and said, “Well, this is my home, man.”

  “Gotta freeze your ass off in winter,” Lucas said.

  “No, I’m mostly okay,” Kent said. “Got places I can go on the really cold nights. They don’t make you pray to stay anymore.”

  “Huh,” Lucas said. Then, “Your brother helped you out with a few bucks, huh?”

  “Yeah. But that’s not the reason that you pissed me off. It’s because you never gave him a chance.”

  “I don’t want to argue with you about that, Manny,” Lucas said. “Your brother went around with a gun and scared the shit out of a lot of innocent clerks, and when we tried to stop him, he tried to kill some cops.”

  “That’s just your opinion, man.”

  “No, that’s the facts, Manny,” Lucas said. “But like I said, I don’t want to argue. I thought we might figure out something we could do about your situation.”

  Kent peered at him again, then said, “What, you want to give me twenty so I’ll go away?”

  “I know there’s no good fix,” Lucas said. “If it were up to me, there’d be a window in the government center where you could go for your weed, or whatever else you needed to help you get through the day. But that’s not happening. Not yet, anyway. So I’m asking you, what can I do?”

  Kent pondered that for a moment, then asked, “You’re serious?”

  “I am. I thought, I don’t know—how’d your brother get the money to you? You’re not always so easy to find.”

  “Got a box at Downtown Copy, Number 171,” Kent said. “He sent the money there.”

  “How about if I send you a Starbucks gift card, or a McDonald’s gift card, every once in a while?”

  “You trying to cheapskate me, Davenport? Buying me off with a latte?”

  “I’m trying to figure out how I can help, so my karmic thread doesn’t get twanged,” Lucas said.

  More thought, then “Money is the most fungible commodity, man. It’s not that I’m greedy, but money gets you everything else.”

  “Yeah, but if I send you money once a month, you’ll spend it all on weed, and you’ll still go hungry, and I’ll still get twanged,” Lucas said.

  Kent scratched one of his scraggly sideburns, then said, “What if you wrapped like a fifty around a loaded McDonald’s card, and sent that to me?”

  “I can do that,” Lucas said.

  “Still won’t make up for my brother,” Kent said.

  Lucas said, “Manny, I’m not worried about your brother. Your brother was an asshole. I’m worried about you.”

  “Well, fuck you then,” Kent said. But he sat down next to his backpack and dug out a blank business card and a pencil, and laboriously wrote his name and address on it, and handed it to Lucas.

  “I’ll send you something when I think about it,” Lucas said.

  “How about something now?” Kent asked. “I got mouths to feed.”

  • • •

  AFTER THEIR SUCCESSFUL carnal adventure at the farm, which led to the discovery of the Black Hole, Layton and Ginger continued to get it on that summer, but not at abandoned farmsteads. A friend worked in a motel and would give them a room for an under-the-counter twenty dollars, which the counterman split with the maid, 75-25. Layton also got the shirt off Ginger’s best friend, Lauren, but that was as far as he’d gotten on that project, before they all went off to different colleges. They would continue to write letters to each other until October, and then Ginger didn’t make it home at Thanksgiving, and Layton didn’t make it home at Christmas . . . and, you know how that all works, and it’s okay. Life moves on.

  • • •

  HORN’S BODY wasn’t found until the following spring. His skull grinned up at the bleak Minnesota sky all that winter, as the snowstorms came and went, the snowflakes drifting into his empty eye sockets.

  When the body and skull w
ere found, by a man cutting ditch weeds, the cops weren’t certain what they had, although a few suspected. A DNA check confirmed those suspicions.

  The discovery was a three-day wonder that eventually Twittered away into digital irrelevance, lost amid the noise of the computer age and a universal media that could always find a worse crime.

  Then nothing was left, except memories clutched to the hearts of the parents of the young women lost to the Black Hole; and the nightmares of Catrin Mattsson, which she feared would live forever.

  • • •

  For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit www.penguin.com/sandfordchecklist