Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  He let it go; he could call back. When the phone stopped ringing, he asked, “Why?”

  “Because we know there’s nobody there with her, except her kids. She shouldn’t hear he’s dead on the telephone, from somebody who’s a hundred miles away.”

  “When I don’t answer . . .”

  “There could be a lot of reasons you don’t answer,” Letty said. “You might have left the phone in the car . . . Dad, somebody should be there with her. Believe me.”

  He thought about it for a minute, then said, “Okay,” and put the phone away.

  • • •

  THE CRIME-SCENE DEPUTY had the notebook sealed inside a transparent plastic bag, and Lucas and Mattsson put it on a car hood and bent over it, and the other cops shone a half dozen flashlights on it. Lucas turned the pages, awkwardly because of the bag, but got it done. There were brief notes on the grave opening at Demont, and the interview with the funeral directors in Owatonna. Then Shaffer had gone to a new page and had written Holbein at the top of it, and underlined the name. Beneath that were brief, unhelpful notes from an interview with a man named Robert Gibbons. Lucas didn’t immediately recognize the name, but Gibbons had told Shaffer that he hadn’t been in Holbein long enough to know about the break-ins at the local cemetery’s sepulchers.

  Lucas remembered something one of the other funeral directors had said about the funeral home in Holbein, and said to Mattsson, “I’m not sure, but I think this guy works as the funeral director over there.”

  Mattsson called over her shoulder to one of the deputies and told him to check the name.

  “Is that blood?” Letty asked.

  They looked at a pinkish smear at the bottom of the Holbein page. There hadn’t been blood anywhere else on the notebook.

  “Could be. Have to check,” Lucas said. He closed the book gently, to preserve the stain, and handed it back to the crime-scene guy. “Careful with it,” he said. “We need to get it into our lab as quick as we can. If that’s not Shaffer’s blood . . .”

  A deputy came over to Mattsson and said, “That guy, Gibbons—he’s the Holbein funeral director, like you thought.”

  “Let’s figure out what we’re doing here, and then we oughta run up and talk to this guy,” Lucas said. Mattsson nodded.

  A Goodhue County deputy named Mackey lived in Zumbrota, just around the block. He and Mattsson and a couple other senior deputies, and the Zumbrota chief of police, with Lucas and Letty, went over to Mackey’s house. They were the last car in the caravan over, and Letty couldn’t stop talking about the murder until Lucas said, “You want to shut up for a while? I’m having a hard time over here.”

  She said, “Okay,” and shut up.

  Mackey’s wife made them coffee and took some hot cross buns out of a refrigerated tube and put them in the oven, and the whole bunch of cops, and Letty, sat around the kitchen table and talked about the murder.

  They agreed that unless something very strange had happened, Shaffer had found the killer.

  “Had to be dark by the time he got to that cemetery,” Mattsson said.

  “Maybe,” Letty said. “He wasn’t killed there, though. Somebody drove him there.”

  You could almost hear the eyebrows go up. Letty continued: “He was shot once in the heart, from the back, and was lying there faceup. He wasn’t shot in the truck—didn’t look like there was enough blood anywhere. Somebody had to put him there. I suppose he could have been shot outside the truck, in the cemetery, but then, why bother to carry a heavy dead guy to the truck, and get blood all over yourself, and leave your own DNA behind? It would have been easier and safer to put him in some weeds, or drag him behind a tree, or walk away. He was shot somewhere else, and driven to the cemetery.”

  The convocation of cops looked at her, without saying anything, and then the deputy’s wife chirped, “Makes perfectly good sense to me.”

  Letty said, “Thank you.”

  Lucas: “You might be right. But you might be wrong, too. A lot of things that happen at crime scenes don’t have good reasons: killers get scared, freaked out, like anyone else. They do things in a panic. I’ll tell you one thing: the guy’s not a traveler. He’s not somebody from the Cities or Red Wing, come down to get rid of the bodies. Whether he drove Shaffer down here, or came separately and killed him here, he’s from somewhere close by. Shaffer found him in Owatonna, or in Holbein, or here in Zumbrota, or somewhere in between. Shaffer was in at least four cemeteries, and left at least two of them alive. How Shaffer got here, I don’t know. But the killer is close by.”

  The cops all looked at each other, nervously: biggest serial killer at large in America, right now, and right here.

  “Something else,” Lucas said. “If Letty’s right, and somebody drove him here, that means he knew what Shaffer was doing today—that he was looking at cemeteries. They had to talk, and the killer had to know what Shaffer was thinking, and that it was worth killing him about. Somehow. Some way. They had to talk.”

  • • •

  THERE WAS A KNOCK on the screen door, and a young cop stepped into the kitchen. He looked at Mattsson: “I ran around to those houses, like you said, and nobody heard any shots tonight. It’s cool enough so that people aren’t running their air-conditioning, but two of them had windows open. No shots.”

  Mattsson nodded and said, “Thanks, Terry. Go all the way up the road, hit the rest of them.” The cop backed out the door and Mattsson said to Letty, “You’re looking better.”

  One of the deputies asked Lucas, “What’re we doing tonight? Other than covering the scene?”

  “That’s about it,” Lucas said. “Stay away from the car, keep people away from the area until the crime-scene crew gets here. We need to talk to people who might have seen a car coming and going, and ask who they think it might have been.”

  Another of the deputies said, “Something just occurred to me—I need to talk to Jeff. Excuse me.”

  He went out on the back porch, and they could hear him on his cell phone as they worked through other possibilities. A couple minutes later he stepped back in and said, “The guy’s from here. Zumbrota.”

  “Why?” Lucas asked. The cop sounded so sure that it felt like a break.

  “I was thinking about what Letty just said, about the guy driving him here. Assuming there’s only one guy involved, and if he drove the body here, how’d he get away? Where’d he go? The answer is, he’d have to walk. On the other hand, if they met here—if the killer had his own car—and Shaffer was killed here, he could have been pretty much from anywhere.”

  Lucas: “And?”

  “I called Jeff, our crime-scene guy, and told him to look at the steering wheel on Shaffer’s car. It’s plastic—and it’s been wiped. The front seats are leather, and they’ve been wiped, too. Everything in the front of the car has been wiped. He can tell just by looking at them with a flashlight. If he’d never been in the car, why wipe it? Didn’t wipe the backseat.”

  They all considered that for a moment, and Letty said, “He drove Shaffer’s car with the body in it, and then had to walk away . . . unless he has an accomplice.”

  “That’s happened with a couple of serial killers,” Lucas said. “The Hillside Strangler in L.A. was actually two guys, related somehow, I’m not sure how. But it’s rare.”

  Mattsson said, “He was driving Shaffer’s SUV, so he could have had a bicycle in the back, or even a small motor scooter.”

  “Didn’t wipe the back,” the other deputy said.

  “Could have, but it doesn’t feel quite right to me,” Lucas answered. “Can’t sneak on a bike or a motor scooter, you have to go on roads. People would remember seeing a stranger on a bike, after dark. He was probably on foot.”

  “He’s not only from around here, like Lucas said,” the deputy said, knocking on the kitchen table. “He’s from right here—from Zumbrota.”

  Mattsson asked, “Who in Zumbrota could be a serial killer? Couldn’t be too many possibilities . . . single
male, probably in his late thirties or early forties, if his killing goes back as far as the grave robberies.”

  “Probably single,” Lucas said. “There have been a few married killers, even happily married. But probably single.”

  The Zumbrota chief said, “Boy, I’d have to think about that. I know everybody in town, just about, all the long-timers, anyway. There are a few single guys . . . not anybody I’d suspect of this.”

  “Get a list going,” Mattsson said. “Think about it more. If we get some DNA out of the car, it could be important.”

  • • •

  MATTSSON ASKED LUCAS, “How are we going to coordinate this? It’s our jurisdiction, too.”

  “Our crime-scene crew will do the science,” Lucas said. He paused as the deputy’s wife started a tray full of hot cross buns around the table. He took one and passed the tray on. “But I guess what we really need tonight is exactly what you’re doing: talking to as many people as you can, asking about unusual sightings. Guys walking or running on their own. We need every speck of information we can find. We’ll take rumors, even. Anything we can hook onto. I won’t be running the operation, they’ll appoint a new team leader first thing tomorrow.”

  “It is tomorrow, Dad,” Letty said.

  • • •

  THEY TALKED ABOUT other immediate needs—Lucas would tell the new crew leader to pull all of Shaffer’s cell phone records, and take his phone apart. He had an iPhone, so it probably had a file of his phone-call locations. “That might tell us where he was, and when, and who he was talking to. I’ll tell them to get that information to you as fast as we can pull it out. We need everybody pulling together to limit the confusion.”

  “We can do that,” Mattsson said. “I gotta tell you, I’m a little pissed about not being included in that exhumation at Demont. You BCA guys aren’t paying a hell of a lot of attention to what us folks are doing. I’ve been running my ass off all over the county, talking to people, and Shaffer acted like I was some loony on the sidewalk.”

  “He was . . . focused,” Lucas said. “He did what he did.”

  “I’m sorry he’s dead, but I didn’t like the way he handled things,” Mattsson said.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Lucas said. “When the new guy takes over, I’ll tell him to work with you. To pay some attention to what you’re thinking.”

  “If you’re not important enough to run it, why would they pay any attention when you tell them to work with me?” Mattsson asked.

  Lucas shrugged: “That’s the way it is.”

  Mattsson looked at him, without saying anything, then Letty reached out and touched her hand and said, “Dad’s good friends with the governor and with Rose Marie Roux. The BCA people pay attention to him.”

  Mattsson looked at him for another moment, weighing him, then glanced at Letty and said, “All right.”

  Lucas said, “Listen, for your guys out here, the ones who’ll be doing the walking. Make sure they go in pairs. Nobody out there alone. This guy . . . well, you know.”

  “Yeah. But you—what’re you going to do?”

  “I’m going up to Holbein and talk to the funeral home guy. You might want to come along.”

  She nodded again.

  “If we get anything, we’ll follow it up. You might want to keep some guys handy, in case that happens. If there’s nothing there, I’ll head on home, get some sleep,” Lucas said. “Then tomorrow, I’m going to look at everything everybody got, then I’m going back to Demont and Owatonna and Holbein, walk the same ground Shaffer did, talk to the same people in the same places, and see if I can figure out what Shaffer found that got him to the killer.”

  “Careful,” one of the deputies said. “Like you said, you don’t want to come up on him, without knowing it.”

  • • •

  THEY WENT TO HOLBEIN in three cars, Lucas in his SUV, another deputy chosen by Mattsson in a second car, and then Letty and Mattsson in Mattsson’s car. When Letty asked if she could ride with her, Mattsson shrugged and said, “Sure, if you want to.”

  “Tired of me?” Lucas asked.

  “I talk to you all the time,” Letty said. “I’d like to get another viewpoint.”

  They didn’t call ahead: in an excess of caution, they decided they wanted to talk to the funeral home director without his knowing they were coming.

  “Though I can’t see that he did it,” Letty said, as they walked out to the cars. “Looked like Shaffer’s notes on him were finished.”

  Mattsson nodded: “Yup. But then, there was that smear of blood, right after he finished writing. Maybe the funeral guy was right there.”

  • • •

  THE DRIVE TO HOLBEIN took ten minutes, and another couple of minutes to find the funeral director’s home. They knocked and rang the bell, and Gibbons’s wife showed up first, and then Gibbons, wearing blue flannel pajamas with little rocket ships on them. “He was murdered?” Lucas had seen the phrase “his jaw dropped,” usually in not-very-good novels, but he saw it now in both Gibbons and his wife. Their jaws dropped, and Letty looked at Lucas, and Lucas nodded: the funeral director was out of it.

  “We didn’t talk for very long, and he was perfectly okay when he left—I don’t think he was much interested in talking to me when he found out that I moved up from Texas only a couple years ago,” Gibbons said. “He seemed to be kinda in a hurry about something. He wanted to know if Neil Parsons—he was the former owner here—had told me anything about the sepulchers out at the cemetery, but Neil never did.”

  “Where’s Parsons now?” Mattsson asked.

  Gibbons tipped his head to the south. “In the cemetery.”

  He recapitulated the whole interview with Shaffer, and after twenty minutes, Lucas, Letty, Mattsson, and the other deputy were back out on the sidewalk. “I got nothing out of that,” Mattsson admitted. “Didn’t even scratch up an idea.”

  “Me neither,” Letty said.

  Lucas said, “All right. We’re heading home. I’ll be back tomorrow morning. We’re close to the guy, whoever he is. That’s new. Here’s something to sleep on: Shaffer saw something, and it took him straight to the guy. What did he see?”

  Mattsson: “Did he know what he was seeing?”

  • • •

  ON THE WAY HOME, Lucas took a text from June Shaffer that said, “Find him and kill him.”

  He passed the phone to Letty: “June Shaffer’s been notified.”

  “Ah, jeez,” she said. “If I ever get to be a cop, I’ll never be a notifier.”

  • • •

  LUCAS USUALLY SLEPT LATE. He and Letty hadn’t gotten back home until four in the morning, but he was up at nine, not rested but alert. Weather had taken the two small children, Sam and Gabrielle, to the park, but had left a note: call me when you get up. He called her and told her about Shaffer.

  “Oh my God. That poor June. How many kids did they have? Two, I think? Both in school?”

  “I think so,” Lucas said. “From what we could see, there were no defensive wounds, no struggle, and Shaffer was in shape, and did that aikido stuff—whoever did it shot him down in cold blood. I suspect he never saw it coming. Had to have been indoors, I think. He had to have gone somewhere, pretty much on impulse. He’s such a compulsive record-keeper that if he’d developed a serious clue, he would have made a note of it, or called someone. Anyway, I’m going back down there. I might be late getting back.”

  “Do not—DO NOT—take Letty.”

  “I’m not planning to, though I suspect she’s already sitting in the truck,” Lucas said.

  “Don’t take her,” she said. “Just find this guy.”

  Lucas finished cleaning up, and before he left the bathroom, saw on his shaving-TV a photo of Shaffer, with the report of his murder. The news report was light: they didn’t know much yet. He turned off the TV, got dressed, including a .45 that he carried in a belt rig, and went downstairs.

  Letty was sitting in an easy chair, legs casually crossed, pretending t
o read a magazine, and he said, “No.”

  She dropped the magazine. “Why not?”

  “Because you’re a kid. Besides, your mom made me swear I wouldn’t take you. Otherwise, I might.”

  “Listen, Dad—”

  “I don’t have time for an argument,” Lucas said. “I’ll be back tonight. Ask me again, when I get back. Though I’m not the one you have to convince. You need to work on your mom.”

  • • •

  WITH LETTY WATCHING from the garage door, Lucas backed out of the driveway and headed across town to BCA headquarters.

  The place was crawling with agents; he had to thread his way through a crowd listening at the conference room door. Henry Sands, the director, just back from Alaska, had already appointed an agent named Jon Duncan to run Shaffer’s crew, and Duncan was briefing the crew on Shaffer’s murder. When he saw Lucas, he waved him in and asked, “What do you know?”

  Lucas told them about the scene the night before, what he thought had happened. “I’m going down there now, and I’ll go over the same ground that we know that Shaffer covered. Do we have anything from the crime-scene crew yet?”

  Duncan shook his head: “Nothing definitive, nothing good. They’re working the front seat for DNA. We’re going to flood Zumbrota this afternoon, start talking to as many people as seems reasonable. Start checking off the single guys. But, a woman named”—he flipped a page in a notebook—“Cathy Irwin called here an hour ago and said she saw Shaffer’s picture on TV this morning, and she spoke to him for a couple of seconds in Holbein. He asked her for directions to the cemetery, and she told him where it was, and he drove away. That was about ten minutes to five. You already talked to Gibbons, the funeral director. We talked to him again from here, and he told us the same thing he told you: he had the impression that Shaffer was on to something. He even asked, but Shaffer brushed him off. But, he got that impression. We do know he was alive and operating then, a little before six o’clock.”

  Lucas took out his notebook and made a note of Cathy Irwin’s name. “I’ll talk to her,” he said. “Nothing from the Goodhue sheriff’s people?”