Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  “Nothing,” Duncan said. “By the way, we can’t find Bob’s main notebook. That little one was mostly names and numbers, but he had a big one, too. One of those leather folders with a yellow legal pad in it. You didn’t see anything like that?”

  “No. Sounds like something we need,” Lucas said. “I’ll call Catrin Mattsson at Goodhue and have her run some people around to the places we know he stopped.”

  Lucas told them about Mattsson: that she was thorny, but seemed bright, and suggested that Duncan treat her with care.

  “I will do that,” Duncan said. “I met her last month, and we talked some.”

  “Then I’m outa here,” Lucas said. He turned at the door and said, “There was some blood on Bob’s notebook. We weren’t sure if it was his.”

  Duncan waved him off. “We checked it first thing, wanted to get some DNA going. Wasn’t blood at all. It was jelly.”

  “Jelly.”

  “Yeah. No DNA. No break,” Duncan said.

  Lucas took another step and turned back again: “I don’t know if you guys got it, but one of the funeral guys from Owatonna told me that Shaffer made a call just as he was arriving at the cemetery there.”

  Duncan said, “He was calling here, checking on the crew.”

  • • •

  BACK IN HIS OFFICE, Lucas called Del: “I’m going down to the Hole. What’s happening with the old folks? Are you free?”

  “Ah, man, Shaffer,” Del said. “I mean, Jesus Christ. He had kids, I mean . . . I really need to go with you, but I can’t. I was up all night, I’m dying, but they’re getting ready to roll. Me and Artie are watching them load up. The guns are all on board, now it’s food and water and talking with the lady who feeds the cats, and all the stuff you can do in the daylight.”

  Artie Martinez was another agent with the ATF.

  “All right. Talk to you when you get back,” Lucas said. “Take care.”

  “And you. Cocked and locked,” Del said.

  • • •

  THE DAY WAS a good one, with puffy dry clouds, the countryside beginning to show color as they got into August. Lucas had been tempted to take his Porsche for the run south, but wound up in the Mercedes again, with the feeling that he could be banging around on some back country roads: the 911 didn’t like gravel, or, for that matter, any bump or divot more than two inches high or deep.

  He’d planned to go through the cemeteries in the same order as Shaffer had, but found himself curious about the woman Shaffer had talked to. Instead of stopping at Demont and Owatonna, he went straight through to Holbein, calling ahead to the woman, Cathy Irwin. She was waiting when he arrived at her big white two-story home a block off Main Street.

  She was a pretty woman, and smart, and Lucas learned nothing from her. She was eager to help, but she’d spoken to Shaffer for only a few seconds, and had never seen him again.

  “Did he seem like he was in a hurry? Like he was excited?” Lucas asked.

  “No. He was just sort of . . . friendly. He seemed like an ordinary guy. He was polite, seemed perfectly relaxed, and thanked me, and went off toward the cemetery.”

  “Where’s that?” Lucas asked.

  “Down by the East Fork.”

  • • •

  LUCAS DIDN’T CARE for cemeteries, but Holbein’s was a pleasant-enough place, as cemeteries went, and if somebody had told him that he’d be buried there, after a life of, say, a hundred forty years and much more sex and barbecue, he would have been content with the prospect.

  The land lay above the narrow river, fenced off from the surrounding fields by ordinary barbed wire. The grass looked like it was probably cut every couple of weeks, and was now a little shaggy. Clumps of wild black-eyed barbecue and purple coneflowers grew here and there along the fence line. Bobbing their heads in the light breeze.

  Most of the graves were modest, with low tombstones, and the two sepulchers stood out as grim monuments to death: they were gray and age-stained—limestone, he thought, something Poe might have written about—with rusty iron gates. He walked around them, scratching for any kind of insight they may have inspired in Shaffer. He was still doing that when his phone rang.

  He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen: Mattsson, the Goodhue County investigator.

  “Yes,” he said. “This is Davenport.”

  “You better get down here, to Zumbrota,” Mattsson said. “We might have a witness. We might even have a suspect.”

  “I’m in Holbein,” he said. “I’ll be down as quick as I can.”

  “That’d be seven or eight minutes,” she said. “Unless you hurry.”

  Lucas hurried. Mattsson gave him directions, but as he accelerated out of Holbein, he had the uneasy feeling that he’d just made a mistake, or had missed something important. He didn’t know what it was, and the feeling was fleeting, gone before he got to Zumbrota.

  • • •

  THE WITNESS LIVED in what Mattsson called the Sugarloaf neighborhood north of town, in a stone-and-clapboard ranch-style house with a front-yard flower garden lining the walk between the garage and the front door. Mattsson was there with another deputy named Tom Greenhouse, and the witness, and the witness’s parents: the witness was eight years old.

  “It’s something,” Mattsson said. She met Lucas in the driveway. “It’s a kid, but there’s no reason to think she’s not reliable. She brought it up on her own, and her parents confirmed that she saw the guy last night.”

  “Let’s talk to her,” Lucas said.

  The witness, Kaylee Scott, was waiting in the living room with her parents, Reggie and Carol Scott, all three of them honey-blonds, all a little portly, more than a little anxious. The first thing Reggie asked Lucas was, “Do you think we should get out of town? Can you put us up?”

  “Let’s see what we’ve got,” Lucas said. “I’m not really up to speed on this.”

  The story was short and sweet: the night before, the Scotts had been returning from Red Wing, late, after visiting Carol Scott’s sister’s family. They’d driven down Highway 58 from Red Wing, then cut cross-country north of Zumbrota to County 6, and down County 6 to Sugarloaf Parkway. Just before they got to the parkway, they all agreed, Kaylee, who’d been sitting in the backseat, had blurted, “There’s Mr. Sprick!”

  Reggie, who was driving, said he hadn’t seen anything, and Carol was dozing.

  “I was looking right, where I was turning,” Reggie Scott explained. “He was in the left ditch—the east ditch.”

  When Kaylee said, “There’s Mr. Sprick!” Reggie had turned and asked, “What?”

  Kaylee said, “Mr. Sprick was down in the ditch.”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Sprick was walking in the ditch.” She said she’d seen him just as her father started to turn.

  Reggie and Carol had blown off the claim, thinking that Kaylee was sleepy and must have been imagining things. They went home and they all went to bed.

  Then, the next morning, they’d seen stories about Shaffer’s murder, and about police officers going through town, looking for someone who might have been seen late, in the area of the Zumbrota cemetery. The cemetery was only a few hundred yards north of the Sugarloaf area, and Highway 6 went directly past the turnoff to the cemetery.

  “Who’s Mr. Sprick?” Lucas asked.

  Kaylee said, “Mr. Sprick, the mailman.”

  “Mark Sprick, the letter carrier for the neighborhood,” Mattsson said. “I’ve got a guy keeping an eye on him, on his truck. He’s down south right now. We’ve been putting together a file, but there’s not much. Never been arrested as far as I can tell. He’s been married, he’s divorced now. Apparently threatened violence to his ex-wife but wasn’t arrested.”

  “How old?” Lucas asked.

  “Forty-one: right in the age slot.”

  Reggie Scott said, “We’re gonna need protection.”

  Lucas looked at the kid, who was sitting on a red velveteen couch, and asked, “Honey, how sure are
you that you saw Mr. Sprick?”

  “I saw him,” she said positively. “I said so right away. I saw his face looking at me.”

  “We need to talk,” Mattsson said to Lucas.

  • • •

  MATTSSON, LUCAS, AND GREENHOUSE talked on the front lawn. Mattsson said, “I think we pick him up, and squeeze.”

  “Is there any way to figure out who his friends are, if he has any?” Lucas asked. “Maybe touch them first, or at the same time? See what they have to say?”

  Greenhouse said, “After I found the girl, I talked to Catrin and then I called the chief of police. He knows Sprick, says as far as he knows, he’s an okay guy. He came here in high school, his parents still live here. He rents a house on the south side of town, apparently got in a loud argument with his ex once, when they were in the process of getting divorced. He was warned to stay away from her, but nothing official was ever done.”

  “Pure negligence,” Mattsson said. Greenhouse looked a bit uneasy, and she snapped, “What?”

  “The chief said his ex was a hell of a lot meaner than Sprick, and Sprick denied doing anything violent or that he threatened anyone,” Greenhouse said. “The chief said he thought Miz Sprick might have made some of it up.”

  Lucas said to Mattsson, “Better talk to the ex-wife, if she’s around.”

  “The chief says she’s in Faribault, works at a florist over there,” Greenhouse said.

  “I hate to leave Sprick running around loose,” Mattsson said. “If he gets a whiff of a witness . . .”

  “But it’d be best if we had something to hit him with, before he knows we’re coming,” Lucas said.

  “We could keep an eye on him, if you want to run over to Faribault,” Mattsson said.

  Lucas said, “Well . . . I could do that.”

  “You think it’s something?” Greenhouse asked.

  “It’s something. The girl saw somebody,” Lucas said.

  “And she sees Sprick all the time,” Mattsson said.

  “If it was Sprick, and he lives south of here, why was he north of the cemetery?” Lucas asked. “What’s out there that would have had him walking in the ditch?”

  They all looked north: they couldn’t see it, but beyond the heavily treed neighborhood, there wasn’t much but the cemetery, a couple of farm equipment dealers, a fairground, and then a lot of farm fields, stretching out for miles.

  “I don’t know,” Mattsson said. “Maybe he ditched a car up there? I do believe Kaylee.”

  • • •

  MATTSSON CALLED the Faribault cops and had one cruise by Busch’s Florist Shoppe. Andi Sprick was working. Lucas talked to Kaylee for a couple more minutes, and then to her parents, and left fairly sure that somebody had been in the ditch the night before. He suggested that Mattsson call her crime-scene deputy and have the Scotts show him where Kaylee had seen the man in the ditch.

  While they did that, he would go to Faribault, a fast run straight west. He got an address for the flower shop from the Faribault cops and punched it into the car’s nav system.

  • • •

  ON THE WAY, Lucas found himself losing faith in the sighting. He couldn’t have explained exactly why, except that the suspect, Sprick, was simply in the wrong place. Why would he have been in a ditch more than a quarter-mile north of the road to the cemetery, when, if anything, he should have been walking south? Lucas could make up any number of reasons why that might have happened, but they would be just that: made up. Didn’t feel right. Then there was the question of how Sprick could have run into Shaffer. Shaffer had been nowhere near Zumbrota, as far as they knew from his notes in the little notebook. Again, he could make up a reason that they collided . . .

  It was all very foggy.

  Busch’s Florist Shoppe was in a yellow-brick building on the edge of Faribault’s business district. The nav system put him at the front curb thirty-eight minutes after he left Zumbrota. He climbed out of the truck and went inside.

  Andi Sprick was a tall, thin, dark-haired woman who was not happy to see him. “I don’t have anything to do with Mark anymore,” she said, her voice shrill with resentment. “I’m having my name changed back to Shroeder.”

  “We’re not implying that this has anything to do with you,” Lucas said. They were in the back room of the flower shop, which smelled like a funeral. “We’re trying to get an idea of what your ex-husband was like.”

  “He’s a lazy, self-centered jerk without a single ounce of ambition,” she said. “He’d rather sit home and play video games than go outside and . . . and . . . have the wind blow on him. He doesn’t do anything.”

  “You didn’t see a violent streak in him?” Lucas asked.

  “Well, when we were getting divorced, he screamed at me . . .”

  “Miz Sprick . . .”

  “Shroeder . . .”

  “Miz Shroeder, we’re looking for somebody who might have strangled twenty young women.”

  She snorted. “You’re wasting your time with Mark. He wouldn’t make the effort. He . . .” She paused, then backed away from it. “I’m not being fair. Mark is everything I’ve said. He is snarky, lazy, unambitious. He once played an online space game for thirty-six straight hours, right through our second wedding anniversary.”

  “Ouch,” Lucas said.

  “But I’ve been in the car when he stopped to get out and carry a turtle across the road,” she said. “He’d never hurt anybody, or anything, not on purpose.”

  “You think you’ve seen deep enough into his . . . psychology . . . to say that for sure?”

  “His psychology is about ankle-deep,” Shroeder said. “And no, he didn’t do it. Even thinking he might . . . it’s just ridiculous.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, then Lucas said good-bye: and she’d convinced him.

  • • •

  BACK IN THE CAR, he called Mattsson: “I talked to Sprick’s ex-wife, and she said that there’s no way that Sprick’s involved. I believe her.”

  “Well, I’m talking to Sprick himself about that,” she said. “We decided we couldn’t wait. I’m at his house now.”

  “Oh, boy . . .” Lucas said.

  “That make you nervous?”

  “Makes me want to stay away from Zumbrota for a while,” Lucas said. “With a small town like that, everybody knows everything. Believe me, there are already five people on their phones to the TV stations. You’ll be up to your knees in media in an hour.”

  “I can handle that,” she said.

  “I hope so. If Sprick’s innocent, they could give you a hard time.”

  “I really do believe Kaylee,” Mattsson said. “I’m sure she saw something, and she says it’s Sprick.”

  Lucas was less sure. Eyewitnesses were often useless—or even worse than useless, because they could point you in the wrong direction. Kaylee had seen something, but it was impossible to know what. The man in the ditch might have been wearing the kind of hat Sprick wore, or might have walked the way Sprick walked, or carried a shoulder bag, if Sprick carried one of those . . . almost anything might have triggered off a pre-programmed Sprick response in the little girl’s brain.

  “Go easy,” he said. “You want me there? Or do you want to take it?”

  “We can take it. Not a problem. If you want to sit in, that’s okay, too.”

  “I’ll stop by,” Lucas said. “Just to hear his voice.”

  • • •

  ON THE WAY back to Zumbrota, Lucas took a call from the Star-Tribune’s lead crime reporter, Ruffe Ignace. “So . . . you down in Owatonna?” Ignace asked.

  “No,” Lucas said.

  “Let me rephrase that,” Ignace said. “Are you somewhere down south of the Twin Cities, investigating the Black Hole case and the murder of Robert Shaffer?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That sounds like a big ‘yes.’ Anything new?”

  “Yeah, but don’t feel like telling you what it is,” Lucas said.

  “Thanks. Another thing. I’m
sure you’ve heard of Emmanuel Kent, who’s threatening to kill you and Jenkins. Or maybe Shrake. I get those guys confused.”

  Lucas smothered a groan. “Yes, what about him? He’s probably harmless.”

  “Yeah, well, he might not be physically dangerous, but he might be, media-wise. He’s sitting outside City Hall, on a rug. He’s gone on a hunger strike, and says he won’t eat anything until you and Jenkins are fired. He’s got a big sign around his neck. He will drink water and a variety of donated fruit juices, to drag it out. His death.”

  “Aw, for Christ’s sakes,” Lucas said. “And you’re gonna blow this up into a crisis?”

  “No, not me, but we’ve got a feature writer working it—Janet Frost. She did that story on the guy who got stuck in the chimney last winter. She could jerk a tear out of a brass monkey. And a photographer, of course. I’m told Emmanuel’s quite articulate, not to say picturesque.”

  “What’s she gonna say?” Lucas asked. “We should have given a free pass to a bank robber, so the crazy guy can get a cheese sandwich once a week?”

  “I don’t know what she’s doing, but I thought I’d warn you, so that you’d owe me one. She’ll be calling you. I would counsel you not to use the phrase ‘the crazy guy.’ It reeks of the incorrect. Possibly even the Republican.”

  “All right, I owe you one.”

  “So what’s new?” Ignace asked.

  Lucas thought for a moment, about the fact that all the TV stations probably knew about it: “Off the record. Didn’t come from me.”

  “Sure.”

  “The Goodhue County sheriff’s investigator is questioning a Zumbrota man about his possible involvement in Shaffer’s murder.”

  “Stop the fuckin’ presses,” Ignace said. He said it in a way that wouldn’t stop any presses. “I’m thinking you sound skeptical.”

  “Maybe. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “But you think it’s bullshit.”

  “I’m sure the Goodhue County sheriff’s department has good reason to question the gentleman in question.”

  “Okay, I won’t put quotes on you thinking it’s bullshit,” Ignace said. “When Janet calls, remember: you’re a liberal, she’s a liberal. These are complicated issues, and though Kent’s story is a tragic one, and mental health care is certainly an issue deserving of additional serious funding by both the federal and state governments, his brother, in robbing those banks, was putting in danger the lives of many innocent people, including rug rats and chicks, maybe even hot chicks with serious boobies.”