Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas said, “Hey, Bea.”

  She turned and said, “Lucas, Del. Nice day, huh?”

  Breathing through his mouth, Lucas peered into the cistern, which was illuminated with LED work lights. He could see another person in a hazmat suit, ten feet down, suspended on a wooden platform over a murky gray liquid that could hardly be called water. The suit was sealed, with air lines leading into the helmet.

  “You’ve been down there?” he asked.

  “Yeah. That’s Hopping Crow down there now. We’re trying to find a way to get the water out, without disturbing the remains too much,” Sawyer said. “Larry’s placing pump lines with filters that we got from a septic-supply place in Red Wing. We’re improvising. Don’t know if it’ll work.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “Oh, we could get the water out with any pump that’s large enough,” she said. “Everything else would come, too. We need to gently remove it, with a flow fast enough to replace the inflow of groundwater. This cistern is essentially sitting on a spring.”

  “Hmm.” Lucas didn’t know about farm stuff.

  “How’s the skull count?” Del asked.

  “Seventeen, now,” Sawyer said. “There are more. We can feel them, but we can’t see them, and we don’t want to damage them. We need to see the dental work.”

  Del said, “Bobbing for Satan’s apples.”

  “Pretty fuckin’ poetic, Del,” Sawyer said.

  “Any more IDs?” Lucas asked.

  “Yes. One. A probable, anyway. When we were using another pump, it got jammed up, and when we pulled it, we found it had sucked up a plastic Visa card, still readable, issued to a Janice Williams. A Janice Williams from Cannon Falls disappeared eight years ago. She was a student at Dakota technical college. Her friends thought she might have gone to Miami—she knew some guy down there, and she’d talked about going down. Her parents thought she’d been kidnapped, and she’s never been back in touch. That’s all I know at this point, but I think it’s likely her, down there.”

  “Will we screw anything up . . .” Lucas paused when a man a few feet away suddenly bent over, then rapidly walked away, still bent, and began retching against a tree. They looked away and Lucas started again: “Will we screw anything up if we walk around here? To look the place over?”

  “Possibly, but I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said. “There have been five hundred people here today, and if there’s anything that hasn’t been stepped on, I don’t know what it would be.”

  Del asked, “Can you get DNA out of vomit?”

  Sawyer nodded. “Sure.”

  “If the killer popped the top off this thing two weeks ago, when this last woman disappeared, is it possible that he puked into the dirt, right where we’re standing?”

  They all looked at their feet and Sawyer said, “I wish you’d asked that question yesterday afternoon.”

  • • •

  SAWYER HAD BEEN SWEATING heavily in the hazmat suit, and she greedily sucked down one of Lucas’s Diet Cokes. A man stepped up behind them and said, “Hey, Lucas, Del. You guys got another Coke?”

  Lucas turned: “Hey, Jimmy. We were told there was a Wisconsin guy here. Didn’t know it was you.”

  “Yeah, I’d been poking around the Carpenter disappearance, over at Diamond Bluff.” James Bole was an agent with Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation, an earnest, square-shouldered, stocky man with strawberry blond hair and a neat strawberry blond mustache. He was familiar enough around the Minnesota BCA, working cross-river cases. He took one of Lucas’s Cokes and said, “Don’t have much. We didn’t know whether she’d been kidnapped or had gone down to the river and fallen in. Now she . . .” He gestured at the hole.

  “We heard,” Lucas said. “You take her car apart?”

  “Yeah, but there was no sign that anything happened to her inside the car. Didn’t find anybody’s prints but hers and her mother’s—nothing was wiped—so she probably drove it down there herself. One thing: when she was reported missing, her car was spotted by a Pierce County deputy. It’d rained not long before she disappeared, and when he found her car, he noticed that her tires had made tracks in the mud, and they were still pretty clear. He figured if she had been kidnapped, the kidnapper must’ve had a vehicle down there in the cemetery . . . otherwise, he would have had to carry her up a bluff, or down to a boat. There weren’t that many other tracks around, so he had casts made of all the different tire tracks.”

  “Good move,” Del said.

  “It’s thin, but it’s what we got,” Bole said. “All the tire tracks were probably made by trucks, all-weather tires, four different patterns, four different brands. I gave a list to Buford, he was here.”

  “Saw him down on the road . . .”

  • • •

  SHAFFER SHOWED UP, spotted them, lifted a hand, talked to Sawyer for a moment, then walked over. “Isn’t this something?”

  “It is,” Del said.

  “Get anything at all?” Lucas asked.

  Shaffer’s crew had interviewed the owner of the farm that surrounded the site, a woman named James, and from her had gotten a number of ideas that might help locate the people who’d known about the hidden cistern. Shaffer himself had interviewed the two kids who’d first smelled the decomposing body down the cistern, and the deputy who’d pried the lid off the hole.

  “You can’t see it now, but the whole site was covered with grass, with sod. The cistern was invisible: had to know it was here before you could put somebody into it, and not many people knew about it.”

  “That could help,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah. I hope. Have you seen . . . There they are. Gotta go talk to these guys.”

  He walked away, toward two guys who had a laptop propped against a tree trunk, entering . . . data.

  • • •

  THEY’D DRIFTED AWAY from the hole as they talked, mostly to get away from the stink. A squabble started at the hole, and they turned around to see Sawyer, in the hazmat suit, still holding the Diet Coke, faced off with a woman in a Goodhue County deputy’s uniform. The deputy was tall and pretty enough, but rangy like a basketball or volleyball player, with wide shoulders and a small butt. She looked like she’d been in a few fights; her nose wasn’t quite on straight. She had one hand resting on her pistol, like she might have to shoot her way out of the farm site.

  Sawyer was saying, “. . . everything goes through our office, and if you want reports, you’ll have to get them there. We can’t get them out to every Tom, Dick, and Harry—”

  “I’m not every Tom, Dick, and Harry—this is my jurisdiction and my job,” the deputy snarled. She’d come primed for a fight, Lucas thought, or perhaps spent her life angry. She was red-faced and angry now. “I want copies of everything, and I want them as soon as they come out.”

  Lucas stepped toward her and said, mildly enough, “Everything has to go through one system, or we’ll all get confused. If you’re authorized to get the reports, it’s not a problem: we just make an extra set of copies.”

  “Who’re you?” she asked, looking him up and down.

  “I’m a BCA agent,” Lucas said. “I’ve been assigned—”

  “And we’re second-class citizens?”

  “Hey—you’ll get the crime-scene stuff as fast as I do,” Lucas said. “You need to talk to Bob Shaffer to get on the distribution list. He’ll be the agent in charge. He’s around, I just talked to him.”

  “Bob Shaffer?” She took out a notebook. “How do you spell that?”

  Lucas said, slowly, “B-o-b . . .”

  Her eyes snapped at him and he’d had the sense that she’d almost smiled. Instead, she rasped, “Are you giving me a hard time?”

  “S-h-a-f-f-e-r,” Lucas said. “He’ll be happy to hear from you.”

  • • •

  HE BACKED AWAY, to where Del and Bole were standing. She watched him go, then folded the notebook and stalked off across the farmyard, toward the cars.

  �
�Wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley,” Del said.

  “Ah . . . Catrin Mattsson. She’s okay. Well, some of the time,” Bole said.

  “You know her?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah, I run into her occasionally,” Bole said. “She’s the lead investigator for Goodhue. Pretty much known for her attitude. Not dumb, though. Good investigator. She just doesn’t have a smooth, Del-like personality.”

  “It’s a tragedy,” Del said, as they watched her go.

  “Yeah, well . . . her looks somewhat make up for it,” Bole said. “The thing is, you BCA guys have a teensy-weensy tendency to throw your weight around on a deal like this. Busy, busy, busy. Don’t have a lot of time for the local-yokels.”

  Lucas: “Really?”

  “Well, like I said, it’s teensy-weensy.”

  • • •

  ALL CASES LIKE the Black Hole murders start slow. The investigators needed to know what they had, before they could start working patterns, asking questions, figuring out who might be a person of interest.

  Figuring out what they had was up to the crime-scene people and the medical examiners. That would not happen on the first day. Lucas and Del hung around the hole for a while, watching, passing out Cokes, then walked across the old farm site, getting a feel for cover and dimensions and views.

  The place was a perfect square, with the road at the south end. The other three sides were guarded by the remnants of a barbed-wire fence and a few old steel fence posts. The north side was covered with the remnants of a wood lot, and dozens of trees were scattered around the rest of the plot, apparently having grown up since the farm was abandoned. Everything else, except a thin clearing in the middle, was covered with a variety of brush and weeds.

  A single track, probably along the old driveway, crossed the ditch over a rusting culvert. The spear-like tops of a few old irises grew along the edge of the ditch, and a line of ancient lilac bushes lay along the line of what had been the driveway.

  There were probably a thousand identical plots in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

  When they were done walking it, Del said, “You couldn’t have invented a better place to get rid of bodies. Back country road, invisible cistern, nearest farmhouse a half-mile away. Roll in here at night, knowing where you’re going, pop the lid, drop the body, put the lid back down, and roll on out. Knowing it ahead of time, you could be in and out in five minutes, with never a trace of what you’d been doing.”

  “But you’d have random kids coming up here to park, like the kids who found it,” Lucas said. “It looks a little used, anyway. It’s possible the killer ran into somebody up here, one time or another.”

  “If he did, he’d just back out . . . drive around, wait until they were gone.”

  “Yeah. Probably not much there,” Lucas said. “If there’s anything, Shaffer’ll find it.”

  Del asked, “What do you want to do?”

  “Go home,” Lucas said. “But first, let’s go talk to the farm lady.”

  Del took a last look around: “The asshole really did fuck up a great place to park. Did I ever tell you about the time Cheryl and me—”

  “Jesus . . . noooo. . . .”

  • • •

  THE LAND AROUND the Black Hole plot belonged to a farmer named Sally James, who’d inherited it from her father twelve years earlier. James was in her mid-fifties, a stout red-faced woman whose blue eyes carried the glazed look of someone who’d been whacked in the forehead with a board.

  Lucas and Del found her at her own farmstead, a half-mile away, visiting with a couple of reddish-brown horses in a corral next to her barn. “I think they’re called sorrels, but I’m not sure I’m pronouncing it right,” Del muttered, as they walked up to her.

  When Lucas introduced himself and Del, James said, “I’ve already been interviewed three times by the police. As soon as they take the roadblocks down, there’ll be fifteen TV stations in here, knocking on the door. I don’t know what more I can say.”

  Lucas explained that there were two teams of BCA agents working the case, as well as the sheriff’s office and the Wisconsin DCI. Since the crimes had gone interstate, he expected that the FBI might take a look. “We like to talk to people in person, because something they say may ring a bell with something else that we find, later on,” Lucas said.

  “You don’t think I had anything to do with it?”

  “We don’t think anything in particular,” Lucas said. “We’re just getting started.”

  “How many do they have now? It was sixteen this morning,” she said.

  “Seventeen, now,” Del said. “There are more to come.”

  “My lord, my lord. Ah, come on in. We can sit in the kitchen.”

  • • •

  THE HOUSE WAS COOL, a relief from the day’s heat. The kitchen smelled like bread and cooked carrots, with an undertone of cabbage and pork chop. James fired up a coffeepot, and passed around thick china cups, and they drank coffee and talked about it.

  James started by sketching out a history of the place: the previous owner had sold his land to James’s father, but nobody wanted the house or outbuildings. Eventually, title to the land was taken by the county for back taxes. “The county tries to sell it every once in a while, but nobody wants it. Four acres in the middle of nowhere, old septic tanks in the ground, that cistern, old foundations . . . it’d probably take twenty grand to clean it up. So, it sits.”

  “Kids park there, to make out,” Lucas said.

  “From time to time, in the summer,” James said. “We’ve had Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts do overnighters there. And corn detasselers, like the kid who found the bodies.”

  “Does everybody around here know about the cistern?” Lucas asked.

  “No way,” she said. “I didn’t know about it. That cistern probably hasn’t been used for sixty, seventy years.”

  “Then how would the killer find out about it?” Del asked.

  “That’s a puzzle, and I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “There are these guys, treasure hunters, they go around to these abandoned farm sites with metal detectors and such, looking for old junkyards and buried treasure. Somebody like that could have found it. When this all came up, a deputy took me down there to look at it. I’d been in there a hundred times, and it never occurred to me that the cistern was still there. You couldn’t see it, all covered up with sod. Nobody found it by accident.”

  “This is good stuff,” Lucas told her. “From what you’ve told us, the killer has to be somebody who’s familiar with the place, and there aren’t many.”

  “Well . . .” There was doubt in her voice. “You know, this boy who found it, knew about the place because he was a detasseler.”

  Lucas smiled at her and said, “I was a city kid. I don’t totally understand detasseling. I’ve heard of it.”

  James explained that corn plants have both male and female parts, and are self-fertilizing. “When you’re hybridizing corn—crossbreeding it—two varieties of corn will be planted in alternating strips. Because the corn is to be crossbred, you don’t want one strip of the corn self-fertilizing. Instead, you want it to be fertilized only by the second variety. To do that, the tassels from the target variety are removed from the cornstalks, by hand, by pulling them out of the top of the stalk.”

  “Like castrating the corn,” Del said.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  The work was short-term, hot, tedious, and low-paid, usually done by high school kids sitting on detasseling machines that are driven up and down the rows of corn.

  “Me and my dad have always contracted out part of the farm to grow hybrid seed, so there are detasseling crews taking breaks in that old Clemens place, eating lunch, every summer. That could be twenty or thirty people at a time, mostly boys. Over the years, there have been hundreds of them—hardly anybody does detasseling for more than a year or two.”

  “Would the hybrid company have a list of employees?” Del asked.

  “Mmm, p
robably not,” she said. “The way it works is, you need a lot of kids for a real short time, and the work is nasty. So, the seed companies recruit people who can recruit kids—and that usually means teachers. A teacher might contract to detassel, say, a hundred and twenty acres. Then he’ll recruit a bunch of kids from his school, the company supplies the machine, and when the tassels start to pop, they go in and start pulling.”

  “Would the teachers have a list?” Lucas asked.

  “Maybe . . . and it’s the same teacher every year, usually. I’m sure the hybrid company would have that list, of the teachers. It’s Marks’s Best Seed Corn, over in Red Wing.”

  “Okay. That’s a place to start,” Lucas said.

  “What good would it do you? You’re going to investigate hundreds of people?”

  “With this many dead, we might,” Lucas said. “What you hope is, you punch the names into a computer, push a button, and your database kicks out names of sex offenders who match the names you put in.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Of course. Computers.”

  • • •

  THAT WAS ALL SHE HAD: scouts, lovers, treasure hunters, and detasselers. “Or teachers, I suppose. I’d go with the treasure hunters, myself. You get these bottle hunters, they love to find old outhouse pits. They’ll get in there with a shovel and dig them right out. They can get a hundred bottles out of a good one, and they’re worth some money.”

  “That happen over there?”

  She shook her head: “Not that I’ve ever seen. But you know, those people can be sneaky. They find a good spot, get a friend to drop them off early in the morning, and they can dig out a whole pit in a day. Fill it back in, I might never know. I doubt that I’m in there twice a year, mostly during detasseling season. If somebody dug in there during the fall, I probably wouldn’t go back in there until the next summer. It could be completely grown over.”

  “So . . . treasure hunters,” Lucas said.

  “Yup. Or a detasseler.”

  • • •