Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  “You don’t feel sorry at all for Manny?”

  “Of course I do,” Lucas said. “I’ve known a lot of those folks, ever since the beginning of my career. If somebody could figure out a way to help them, that they’d go along with, I’d say, ‘Go ahead, bump up my taxes, take care of them.’ But it’s a complex problem, and so far, nobody’s come up with a solution.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, and then Frost, apparently satisfied, thanked him for his help and rang off. He’d done all right, Lucas thought, although he probably shouldn’t have used the word “assholes.”

  He drove on for a while, thinking about the interview, and eventually decided that the most worrisome aspect of it was that Frost kept referring to the Kent brothers by their first names, Doyle and Manny.

  • • •

  HE GOT HOME too late for dinner, had a turkey sandwich and a glass of orange juice and told Weather and Letty about the day, and the dead body, and the interview in Wisconsin, and talking to Sprick. Weather said she had an interesting operation the next day, a revision of a breast enhancement botched by a cosmetic surgeon. As a board-certified plastic surgeon, Weather looked down on doctors who called themselves cosmetic surgeons; but happily reworked their mistakes.

  “This guy,” she said, talking about the other surgeon, “has a signature tit. I’d recognize it anywhere. All rounded and sculpted, nipples pointed up . . . doesn’t make any difference what your body looks like, that’s the tit you get. This woman now looks like she’s got bowling balls in her shirt. She’s a lawyer, used to be an A cup, she wanted to go to something like a C . . .”

  Lucas ate his sandwich and said the right things, and thought about the killer and what he might be doing, how he might be reacting to the pressure.

  When the meal was over, Letty went to go online with some friends, and Lucas and Weather went for a walk on the nice warm summer night, kids out on the sidewalks, convertibles cruising the boulevard. Weather said she thought they should get a dog from the humane society because she’d grown up with dogs, and she wanted the small kids to do that, too. Lucas said, “Uh-huh,” and wondered if the killer might be out taking a walk, thinking about blond girls . . .

  Back at the house, he told Weather he was going for a run, and he went upstairs to change clothes. About the time he put his right foot through the leg of his running shorts, he thought, Wait . . . a dog?

  11

  Lucas needed to talk to Duncan about the trip to Wisconsin, and the Sprick identification by Cindy Tucker, and talk to the Minneapolis cops about Emmanuel Kent, the hunger-striker.

  He was shot off his horse before he even got started.

  He’d slept late, as he usually did, rolling out of bed after nine o’clock. He got cleaned up and dressed, read the papers as he ate breakfast, talked to the kids for a while, and then called Duncan.

  Lucas told him the whole story about the Sprick identification. When he finished, Duncan said, “So . . . you’re saying it’s a dead end.”

  At that moment, an incoming call beeped through. Lucas said to Duncan, “I’ve got a call from Mattsson coming in. Let me get back to you.”

  “Hope it’s something . . .”

  He clicked over to Mattsson, who said, “Davenport? I got something really weird, man. I don’t know if it’s real or not, but my hair is standing straight up.”

  “What?”

  “I got a letter, here at the office, from somebody who says he’s the killer,” she said.

  “That’ll happen on these kinds of cases,” Lucas said. “We’ve already had a couple of confessions—”

  “I know, I know, but this is different. He names two victims that we don’t know about.”

  Lucas said, “Huh.”

  “Huh? What does that mean?” Mattsson asked.

  “Any indication that these . . . ?”

  “Yes. I’ve checked. Both women have been reported missing, one five years ago, one six. Both blondes, both young. Both drinkers.”

  “All right, that’s serious,” Lucas said. “I’ll call the lab. Put the letter and the envelope in separate evidence envelopes—”

  “Already did that,” she said.

  “Drive it up to the BCA. You know where that is?”

  “Give me the address.”

  He gave her the address, and she said, “Give me forty-five minutes.”

  “Catrin? Lights and siren.”

  He called Duncan and told him Mattsson was on the way.

  Duncan said, “I don’t need any false hopes. If this is a fake, my ass is gonna fall off.”

  • • •

  LUCAS SAID GOOD-BYE to the family and headed for the BCA. He and Duncan were waiting when Mattsson arrived with the letter. Lucas met her at the front door, and they carried it up to Duncan’s office. Mattsson was tense: “I don’t pray. All the way up here, I was trying to remember some prayer I could say that this is a break.”

  Duncan read through it, peering through the side of the evidence bag. When he was done, he read it again, then said, “He’s got pits in Eau Claire and Alexandria? If this gets out before we get him . . .”

  “We’ve got to start processing it, like right now,” Lucas said. “Almost all of the jawbones are intact. We need to find out if these women had dentists.”

  “What about DNA?” Mattsson asked.

  “Takes a few days,” Lucas said. “If we can find their dentists and get some X-rays, we could know by noon.”

  “I’ve got the guys who could find out,” Duncan said.

  Mattsson: “The note’s written on a typewriter.”

  Lucas said, “There’s something wrong about that. Who’s even got a typewriter anymore? The guy doesn’t seem like an idiot, but even an idiot knows that you can identify individual typewriters from the key strikes.”

  Duncan said, “Maybe he doesn’t watch those CSI shows.”

  They all stared at the note and talked about the possibility of fingerprints and DNA, until Hopping Crow came down to get it, and then Duncan went to assign investigators to talk to the relatives of the two missing women.

  “What do you think?” Mattsson asked Lucas.

  “It had a feeling of reality about it,” Lucas said. “But I don’t see a motive for sending it. He’s been lying low all these years.”

  “Maybe he’s getting stoked by the publicity.”

  “Maybe . . .”

  • • •

  THEY GOT COFFEE and donuts from the team room, and sat and talked about the killer, and how his psychology might work, that would cause him to create the letter: killing time.

  Talked about Letty for a while: “You got a smart kid there,” Mattsson said. “She told me she’s thinking about a law enforcement job, or intelligence. She says she’s going to Stanford.”

  “And much too soon,” Lucas said.

  “If she graduates from Stanford and goes for a law enforcement job, it’s gonna be something big-time: FBI, CIA.” Mattsson said that she’d graduated from River Falls: “Didn’t have the money for a really top-end school, so . . . here I am.”

  “Tone your act down about fifteen percent, kiss Duncan’s ass a little—he’s on his way up—and you could come work here,” Lucas said. “You’re smart enough, but you rub some of the guys the wrong way.”

  “’Cause this is a macho—”

  “No, no. There are women all over the place. It’s because you’re a little . . . snappish. On occasion.”

  “You’re saying I’m an asshole.”

  “A little snappish,” Lucas said. “That’s what I said, and I’m sticking to it.”

  • • •

  THEY’D BEEN TALKING for fifteen minutes, including a brief dispute about the definition of “snappish,” and Lucas said, “See?” and Mattsson said, “Fuck you,” when Duncan came back and said, “We’ve had some luck. We got to the parents of Melissa Scott and they said their daughter only went to one dentist all of her life, down in New Prague. We got his number, and he’s st
ill got her X-rays. He says they’re the old kind, the film kind, but he thinks he can put them on a view box and shoot a close-up with a digital camera, and then e-mail them up here.”

  “How long?” Lucas asked.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Duncan said. He looked at his watch. “Nine minutes now.”

  They walked up to Duncan’s office, and he checked his e-mail, nothing there, and they talked about nothing, and he checked again, nothing there, and then his computer made a chirping sound and the e-mail came in.

  The dentist’s shot was in color, but the X-ray was in black and white, and sharp and clear, the girl’s fillings standing out like white icebergs in a dark sea. Duncan printed it, and they hurried upstairs to the lab, where one of the techs had a digital file of all the jawbones taken from the Hole.

  Five or six investigators gathered around the tech’s chair, peering over his shoulder. They found a match in two minutes.

  “Okay, okay. He’s real, he’s live,” Duncan said, and everybody started talking at once, what to do, where to go, what it all meant. Duncan looked at Lucas and Mattsson: “Where does this get us?”

  “If there’s anything on the paper or the envelope . . .” Mattsson began.

  Duncan shook his head. “The lab people aren’t optimistic. The envelope has fingerprints, but it’s probably just mailmen . . . and yours. One set looks like a woman’s.”

  “How do they know the prints aren’t his?” Mattsson asked.

  “He used a self-stick envelope and there are no prints, even smeared, where you’d normally find prints. It looks like he sealed it under another piece of paper or maybe used gloves. If he was that careful when he sealed it, he was probably careful whenever he handled it.”

  “Shoot. No DNA from spit. How about the stamp?” Mattsson asked.

  “Stamps are all self-stick now—and this one is.”

  “Which makes me worry even more about the typewriter business,” Lucas said. “There’s something going on there.”

  “What?” asked Mattsson. “What could he be doing?”

  Nobody could suggest an answer to that.

  • • •

  MATTSSON WANTED to hang out with the team for a while, to speculate on the motives of the killer. Lucas said good-bye and headed south again. Something, he thought, was getting away from him. He’d spoken to everybody that Shaffer was known to have interviewed. When he’d left Shaffer, the day he was killed, Lucas had gone off to a police station where he’d learned nothing. Shaffer had gone to an Owatonna cemetery. The funeral home guys said he left there in a hurry, like he might have figured something out.

  From there he’d gone to the cemetery in Holbein, and maybe Zumbrota. . . . Why was that? What was he searching for in cemeteries? He’d professed himself excited by the discovery of the grave robbery, as a possible break, but that hadn’t worked out . . . had it?

  Lucas had started to walk the cemeteries, but had gotten diverted and hadn’t walked those at Demont and Owatonna. But Shaffer had figured something out by doing the cemeteries in a certain order. . . .

  So Lucas would.

  • • •

  AN HOUR LATER, he stood by himself next to the raw earth of Mead’s violated grave at Demont. The cemetery was small and barren, and Lucas looked down at the now filled-in grave, and then around at the other graves, and nothing occurred to him. What had they done that day, the day of the exhumation? He closed his eyes, swayed a bit in the wind, and rewound the tape of his memory. They’d watched the coffin being opened, and Lucas had turned away, and then they’d all looked at the headless body. . . .

  Still nothing. He tried to find something in that experience, but failed, and walked back to his truck. As he fired it up, something began pecking at the back of his mind, and he remembered a similar experience a few days before, when he was leaving the cemetery at Holbein.

  He had seen something, down in that grave. What was it?

  • • •

  HE MOVED ON TO Holy Angels in Owatonna, and again, spent some time looking around. He hadn’t been there with Shaffer, so there was no memory there to lean on. He walked around the sepulchers, looking for anything that might bring up Shaffer’s vision.

  Felt the pecking again. What was he seeing, but not recognizing?

  On to Holbein.

  Alone in the cemetery, he stood back and looked at the sepulchers and said, aloud, “What the fuck is it? What happened here? We have an asshole breaking into the sepulchers and . . .”

  The tumblers snapped into place.

  Keys.

  “Kiss my ass,” Lucas said aloud.

  • • •

  THE GRAVEDIGGER at Demont had to do some gymnastics to get the grave open; and he’d had to use a special key to open the casket. The casket had been undamaged, which meant the robbers had a key. Where would some random asshole get that key? How would he even know about it?

  And out here, they’d kept saying that the grave robbers had broken into the sepulchers, but when he’d looked at them . . .

  Not quite sure of himself, he hustled over to one sepulcher, and then the other. They both had old-style wrought iron doors with old locks. One lock was integral to the door, the other was locked shut with a chain, the links the thickness of his middle finger, the padlock the size of his hand. They looked like they’d been there since the nineteenth century, but nothing was broken.

  Keys.

  That’s what Shaffer had seen. The locks on all the sepulchers were different, and different still from the casket keys—somebody had to have access to a whole wide variety of keys, including casket keys.

  They’d thought the killer was a cemetery worker, but a cemetery worker wouldn’t have access to all those keys. So—a locksmith?

  Lucas got on the phone to Duncan, but Duncan was out of touch: “He’ll be right back,” the group secretary said, when Lucas checked with her. “I could hear his phone ringing on his desk. He has a Waylon Jennings ringtone.”

  “I might have something on the Hole. Tell him to call me as soon as he can.”

  • • •

  LUCAS HAD BEEN FOCUSING on his phone, and felt something like a chill wind blowing down his shirt. His hand went to his gun, and he looked around. Still all alone, standing next to the grave of Baby Boy Wilson.

  That chilled him even more, and he hurried off to his truck; and called Mattsson.

  “I got something,” he said. “I need to talk to somebody who knows everybody in Goodhue County.”

  “Tell me.”

  He told her, and when he’d finished, she said, “Coffin keys. Who’d have coffin keys? We’re back at cemetery workers? Where are you?”

  “In my truck, just backing out of the cemetery at Holbein,” Lucas said. “I was thinking locksmiths.”

  “I’m on my way back to the office, but I can cut over there. I’ll meet you.”

  “I’ll meet you in Red Wing,” Lucas said. “The Bobcat Cafe. I need to get lunch, anyway. And I want to go over Diamond Bluff. See if anybody has anything to say about cemetery workers.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she said.

  • • •

  SHE TOOK A LITTLE LONGER than that, but not much. She had a thin stack of printer paper in her hands as she slid into the booth across from him and said, “Something occurred to me.”

  “What?” He was swirling ice cubes around in a half-empty glass of Diet Coke.

  “If the killer took Carpenter at the cemetery, just because he could, and because he was due . . . how does this fit with the candy shop girl identifying Sprick or a Sprick look-alike, that Little Kaylee also saw in the ditch after Shaffer was killed?”

  Lucas: “Because he’s a cemetery worker who looks like Sprick? But I don’t know how that fits with him going over to Durand.”

  “I’ll tell you—it doesn’t,” she said. “I suppose he could have seen her in the cemetery sometime earlier, and found out she was from Durand, and then checked back from time to time to find out
when she was going to the cemetery. He’d know that it was isolated down there . . . I mean, if he was a scouter kind of guy.”

  Lucas said, “That’s . . . pretty complicated.”

  Mattsson eyed him for a minute, said, “You mean, unlikely.”

  “Not impossible.”

  “Okay.” She looked at the menu and asked, “You got any recommendations? For lunch?”

  “Yeah. I’d recommend that you stay away from the open-face roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes, brown gravy, and string beans. I was here yesterday, and my wife almost made me sleep outside last night.”

  “Too much information,” Mattsson said. And, “I stopped at the office and pulled this off the computer. List of locksmiths within seventy-five miles.”

  She handed him the paper she’d brought in, and Lucas took it and scanned it: “Not many down here.”

  “But a whole load of them on the south side of the Cities,” Mattsson said.

  “I don’t think he’s up in the Cities—I think he’s here.”

  “But he’s a locksmith?”

  “Or a cemetery worker. Or both. Somebody who could get a key to a coffin, and a bunch of sepulchers.”

  They ate lunch in a hurry, then crossed the river in Lucas’s truck and turned north to Diamond Bluff. As Lucas came off the bridge, he took a call from Duncan, and told him what they were doing. “That’s interesting. We’re already looking at every cemetery worker in the world. This certainly seems to confirm that idea. You got any interviews set up in Diamond Bluff?”

  “Not yet, but we’ll be there in one minute.”

  “Let me see what I can find out from up here,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

  Diamond Bluff was an unincorporated settlement, in which the major public establishment seemed to be the bar. They asked in the bar, but nobody could identify a town official of any kind, or even a better place to ask. Nobody in the bar knew who might run the cemetery.

  Out in the parking lot, Mattsson looked across the highway at the short clutch of streets between the highway and the river—there were only two, or maybe three—that made up the town. She put her fists on her hips and said, “I can’t believe nobody’s in charge. How could they get anything done?”