Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  “Not the Black Hole killer,” Lucas said.

  “No, I guess not.”

  • • •

  LUCAS THOUGHT ABOUT turning around, but figured he’d only further annoy Mattsson if he dropped out of what must be a fairly rare murder arrest for Goodhue County. Before he rang off, he asked, “Is she a shooter? Does she carry a gun?”

  “Never has. She’s more of the brass-knuckles type.”

  When Mattsson rang off, Lucas called Duncan and told him what he’d been told. “Sounds about right. Nobody here thinks it’s the Hole guy—but keep me up on it,” Duncan said.

  Mattsson knew where she was going, but Lucas didn’t, so he stuck close behind her as she rocketed along the back roads west of Red Wing, avoiding the town with its clogged-up traffic, to come at the city from its south side.

  Card’s house was off Highway 61 a couple of miles south of town, on a frontage road facing the highway, a simple one-story clapboard box with a detached garage in back. A concrete-block stoop led to the front door, which was right in the center of the house. A squat yellow truck was waiting for them at the south end of the frontage road, along with a couple of patrol cars. Mattsson pulled off in front of the truck, and Lucas was pleased to see several guys climb out, carrying rifles; the Emergency Response Unit.

  “I didn’t ask for them,” Mattsson said. “I don’t think we need them.”

  The team leader said, “Catrin, she murdered a woman last night and dumped the body on the nation’s hottest crime scene. She’s batshit crazy. Nuckin’ futs. She could be in there suckin’ on a gun right now, or she might decide to let us do it for her. Or take a few of us with her.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .” Mattsson wasn’t convinced.

  • • •

  THE TEAM LEADER was a short black-haired guy with muscles in his face. He nodded when Lucas introduced himself, said to the two of them, “We’ve contacted the neighbors. She’s in there. We’ve got two guys watching the back, they went up through the woods.” He pointed back behind the line of houses that faced the highway. “There’s a hardwired phone inside the house, and we’ve got both their cell phone numbers. Plan is, we’ll set up out front and call her, tell her to come out, and go from there.”

  “Far as I know, she’s not a shooter,” Mattsson said, repeating what she’d told Lucas. “Never had a weapons charge. She gets drunk and beats on people.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but I’ll give you ten to one that she’s got a gun in there. Everybody on this road will have one,” the team leader said.

  Mattsson nodded: “Probably. So take it easy.”

  The team leader looked at Lucas then back to Mattsson: “We’ll ask you and Agent Davenport to wait until we’re set up. Then, we see what happens.”

  Lucas said, “You guys be careful.”

  “Always.”

  • • •

  THE TEAM HAD already worked out the approach. Two cars carried several team members north on the highway, and once past the target house, they came back across to the frontage road and then south to the house. The team leader and three more of his men drove the six hundred yards up the road, parked in a neighbor’s empty driveway.

  The leader called Mattsson and said, “We’re making the call.”

  “Let’s go on up,” Mattsson said. Lucas followed her truck up the road, and they both pulled into the driveway in the visual shadow of the SWAT van, and got out.

  The team leader had moved to the corner of the neighbor’s garage with the talker, who was on the phone. The talker was saying, “. . . in which case, you have nothing to fear. But we’re a little nervous out here, you know, given the circumstances. If you’ll just come on out, we’ll check you out, and have a talk. No point in getting everybody upset . . . Uh-huh, uh-huh, well, if you look out the side window to the Pauls’ place, you’ll see our truck, you know, that’s no practical joke . . . Uh-huh, uh-huh, listen, Glenda, you know how this works, you’re a smart gal. We really, really don’t want anybody to get hurt here, that’s our one and only mission, to make sure nobody gets hurt.”

  Mattsson snorted, and the team leader turned to her and raised his eyebrows in a gesture that meant, “Please don’t do that.”

  The talker said, “. . . okay? Okay? No point in dragging it out, once we know you’re okay, that nobody’s going to get hurt, we can let you have lunch . . . uh-huh . . .”

  It went like that for a couple more minutes, then the talker said, “That’s great. That’s a great decision, Glenda. You come on out, and when you come out, you don’t have to put your hands up, we don’t want to embarrass anyone, just a chat . . . Uh-huh. Okay, I’ll look for you.”

  He looked up at the team leader and said, “She’s coming out.”

  The leader spoke into a shoulder microphone, and a few seconds later, the screen door on the front of the house pushed open, and a tall, heavyset woman stepped out, chunky arms up over her head. She was wearing a T-shirt, worn loose, and Lucas said, “Watch the T-shirt,” and the team leader repeated that to his men, who were moving in on the red-faced woman, rifles not quite pointing at her, but ready.

  They ordered her to kneel, and she did, putting her hands up over her head, but when one of the ERU team members stepped toward her, she snapped, “Hey, hey, hey, hands off the merchandise. You want to feel me up, get Blondie to do it.”

  She was looking at Mattsson. Mattsson walked over to her and patted her down. More ERU guys came from behind the house, and then Mattsson told Shales she could get back on her feet.

  Lucas moved in closer. Shales’s T-shirt said, in gold letters, “Playing for the Other Team,” and under that, in smaller letters, “Since ’69.”

  She looked exhausted and was drunk, on wine, and stood with her head down while one of the helmeted deputies read her rights and asked if she understood them. “Yeah, yeah, I heard it all before,” she said. She asked, “Why’re you pickin’ on me? I haven’t seen Harriet since she got pissed off and walked out of here.”

  “When was that?” Mattsson asked.

  “Couple days ago . . .” She peered at Mattsson, seemingly confused; maybe not seeing so well through the fog of alcohol. “Who in the fuck are you, anyway?”

  “I’m the investigator for the Goodhue County sheriff’s department, Miz Shales,” Mattsson said. “I’ve talked to you before, when you beat up that guy at the VFW parking lot.”

  “I remember you, you’re that fuckin’ Nazi who went to court and lied.”

  “You nearly beat the guy to death,” Mattsson said.

  “I didn’t beat up nobody,” Shales said, rocking on her feet. “That was a straight-out fight, the guy jumped me.”

  “Yeah, right,” Mattsson said. It was the next thing to a sneer, and Lucas thought, Uh-oh, and edged forward.

  “You’re trying to pin this one on me, too. I didn’t have nothing to do—”

  “With what, Glenda? With strangling your girlfriend and dumping her body like she was garbage? You know, there’s going to be DNA all over her. That’s better than fingerprints, and there’s no way to strangle a woman without . . .”

  Shales’s face was getting redder and redder. She gestured at Mattsson, who was four feet away, at the same time turning to face Lucas, as though she was about to say something about Mattsson, and Lucas thought again, Uh-oh, and he took another step forward, sensing the sucker punch that Shales was winding up, but he was too late.

  With more speed than any of them had suspected, Shales lashed out at Mattsson, hit her on the side of the head below her right eye, and Mattsson went down on her ass. Shales’s belly flopped on her, and she got in three or four good head shots before the other cops ripped her off the cop, rolled her, piled on, bent her arms behind her back, and cuffed her.

  “Ah, shit.” Mattsson rolled onto her stomach, then pushed up, dripping some blood from her nose as the team leader knelt next to her. Most of the blows had been to the side of her face, which was already going blue. The team leader helped her to
her feet and she looked down at Shales and said, “Tell you what, you piece of trash, even if we don’t get you for Harriet, you’ll do a few years for this.”

  “Awww . . .” Shales said, and then she began to cry, big harsh drunken sobs going huh-huh-huh. She was still facedown, and Lucas prodded her with the toe of his shoe and when she looked up at him, craning her neck, he asked, “You kill Harriet on purpose? Or was it some kind of an accident?”

  “I didn’t mean it,” she said, into the dirt. “I never meant to hurt her.”

  “So it was an accident?”

  “Yeah, it was, it really was.”

  All they wanted was confirmation. Shales could explain later how she strangled somebody by accident.

  “Get her out of here, and start processing the house,” Mattsson said to one of the cops.

  The team leader said, “You need to get somebody to look at your nose.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Lucas, still standing over Shales, prodded her with his toe again and asked, “How old are you, Glenda?”

  After another moment of weeping, she mumbled, “Twenty-seven.”

  Lucas stepped away and Mattsson asked, “What?”

  “Too young to be the Black Hole killer,” he said, his voice quiet. “Besides, the Black Hole guy is a guy.”

  “She’s too goddamned dumb, anyway,” Mattsson said.

  “You’ve got to get to the hospital and have them take a look at you,” Lucas said. “If nothing else, get some ice on your face, and pretty quick. If you don’t, you’re going to look like a pumpkin.”

  “You think I fucked up, there?”

  “No. I think you pushed her button, which was a good thing to do,” Lucas said. “We got her for killing the woman, ten seconds after we all witnessed her rights being read to her. You got popped, but you didn’t fuck up.”

  “Rough way to get it done, though,” one of the ERU cops said.

  “Shut up,” Mattsson said.

  Lucas showed a thin smile—couldn’t help himself—and Mattsson snapped, “What? You think it’s funny?”

  Lucas made the mistake of trying to go all comradely with her: “You know . . . you might have moved just a teeny bit faster. Or stood just a teeny bit further away.”

  She looked at him for a moment, then said, “Fuck you. I got her.”

  Lucas’s smile went away. “Yeah, you did,” and he walked away. Fuck him?

  The team leader touched Mattsson on her shoulder and said, “Come on. I’ll have one of the guys drive you in. Get some ice.”

  8

  Lucas was pissed when he got back to his truck, but it quickly wore off. Cops tended to have confrontational personalities, and Catrin Mattsson was an exaggerated version of that. It wasn’t all one way, either.

  The BCA teams were probably the best in the state, though both Minneapolis and St. Paul might have an argument with that—but too often, when dealing with sheriff’s departments, the BCA specialists tended to give off more than a whiff of superiority. Lucas himself had once gotten in a fistfight with a sheriff’s deputy, one that he probably could have avoided if it hadn’t been for a certain big-city attitude.

  To say nothing of his expensive suits and the big-titted mouthy cop-girlfriend he’d had with him. He smiled a bit as he remembered it.

  • • •

  FROM THE TIME he spent walking the cemeteries, without finding anything specific, he’d almost concluded that whatever Shaffer had discovered, hadn’t come only from the cemeteries: it’d come from some combination of information from the murder books, plus the cemeteries, or even something that had popped up in a random conversation somewhere. Because Shaffer had gone to the last two cemeteries alone, it was even possible that he’d actually encountered the killer face-to-face, purely by coincidence.

  He came to the highway, stopped, got on the phone and called Bea Sawyer, the crime-scene crew chief, and asked if Shaffer’s clothing had been processed for clues as to where he’d been killed.

  “Not completely processed, but they’ve been eyeballed,” she said. “We think it was probably indoors—there’s no obvious dirt, twigs, grass, anything that would suggest that he fell on the ground. He was wearing Ecco shoes with a distinct heavy tread on them, and there’s no significant dirt. They’re clean. Of course, it’s been dry, so even walking on streets and across lawns, he wouldn’t pick up much, but they were so clean that I suspect he was last walking on a hard surface. I think, indoors—I didn’t see any concrete dust, no pieces of blacktop, nothing like that. Nothing from a road or driveway. That could change, after we start looking at the fabric with a microscope.”

  Something to think about, Lucas thought, after he ended the call. Probably shot indoors. Shaffer had no indoor appointments that Lucas knew of, other than at the funeral homes. The last funeral home he was in was run by a man who’d just arrived two years earlier from Texas, and was distinctly not a suspect. Shaffer had to have gone inside a building again, after that. Where had he gone? And why?

  • • •

  HE THOUGHT ABOUT GOING back to the Hole, but he had no reason to.

  Another thing occurred to him. They’d been looking for similarities between the victims, that might point to the killer, but they hadn’t really thought about dis-similarities, if there was such a word.

  The last victim, Mary Lynn Carpenter, somewhat stood out: physically, she fit with the other victims, but she hadn’t been a party girl. She’d lived on the far edge of the circle—or even beyond the far edge—that Shaffer’s investigators had defined as the killer’s territory, and she’d apparently been taken in daylight hours, rather than at night, as the others apparently had been.

  She’d come from Durand, Wisconsin, he knew, a good distance east of the Mississippi. The question was, did the killer meet the woman in Durand? If so, what was he doing there? Durand was a small town, and isolated. If you were going someplace other than Durand, and crossing the river at Red Wing, there would be a better way to go to that other place than through Durand.

  But Carpenter hadn’t been killed in Durand. She’d been picked up at the tiny town of Diamond Bluff, right on the Mississippi, while cleaning up her grandparents’ graves.

  Then he thought, Well, of course. Another cemetery.

  • • •

  STILL SITTING at the highway stop sign, he called Duncan and asked, “Listen: you know we arrested a woman from down south of Red Wing?”

  “Nobody’s said anything to me.”

  Lucas filled him in, and Duncan asked, “No possibility that she did the rest of them, then?”

  “Almost none. She would have had to start killing when she was about twelve,” Lucas said.

  “Shoot. Too bad—it was a possibility, even if it was a thin one. Sorry to hear that Mattsson got hit about nine times. I’d have been happier if it’d been fifteen.”

  “Yeah, right. Listen, another thing popped into my head. The last victim, Carpenter, was not like the others.”

  “Yeah, we know that, but it hasn’t worked into anything.”

  “She was probably picked up in a cemetery, and Shaffer was killed after looking at either three or four cemeteries.”

  After a moment of silence, Duncan said, “Jesus. We’ve been so stretched, we didn’t even think of that. That might be something. The guy could be a cemetery worker, or maybe just a weirdo who hangs around them. Either way, we might be able to isolate him.”

  “Maybe. I’m going to run over to Durand and talk to Carpenter’s folks and maybe the cops and the mayor. I’ve read all the interviews, but I’m going to come at it from a different angle, not so much the personal stuff about her, as about the town, and what she did there.”

  “All right. If Mattsson already picked up the killer on this one, I’m going back to town to jack up the team on the cemetery angle. Stay in touch.”

  • • •

  LUCAS TURNED NORTH on Highway 61. He had the murder books in the back of the truck, and in town, he found a cafe, c
arried the relevant book inside, and ordered a hot beef sandwich with mashed potatoes, brown gravy, and green beans. He read through the interviews with Carpenter’s parents as he ate, and when he was done with that, called her mother, Sandra Carpenter, and was told that her husband was at work, but could come home for an interview.

  The drive to Durand took forty minutes. Lucas had been through the place a couple of times in the past, and it always reminded him of a TV version of an old Western town. The main street ran along the bank of the Chippewa River, with the shoulder-to-shoulder business buildings backing up to the water.

  The odd thing about it, to Lucas’s mind, was that there was almost nothing on the other side of the river. Most river towns form a circle around both ends of a bridge; Durand stretched for almost a mile and a half along Highway 25, from southwest to northeast, right along the water for much of it, but on the other side of the bridge, there was almost nothing.

  He crossed the bridge shortly after one o’clock, in bright sunlight, followed the navigation system through the town, right on Main Street, left past a park, to a small blue cottage a few streets back from the river. A man was standing in a picture window, watching, when Lucas parked in front, and came to the door as Lucas walked up the sidewalk.

  Clark Carpenter was a tall man, too heavy, with thinning blond hair and an untidy blond mustache. He held the door as Lucas walked up, said, “I’m Clark. Come on in.”

  Sandra Carpenter was waiting in the living room, sitting on a couch, in front of a silver-plated tray of cookies. She stood up when Lucas came in, with Clark trailing, and said, “Mr. Davenport? Sit down, please.”

  Lucas took the easy chair that faced the couch, and Sandra pushed the cookie tray toward him. He took a cookie.

  “We heard about Agent Shaffer. We met him here, once. He seemed like a very nice guy,” Clark said. “Smart guy.”

  “He was nice, and he was smart,” Lucas said. “We think he tripped over the killer. He had a lot more, mmm, knowledge of this case than I do, and I suspect something that he knew, with something that he saw that last day, led him to the killer. But he might not have known that, somehow, he was a threat to the killer. He turned his back on whoever it was, and was shot.”