Field of Prey

by John Sandford

  Then he was gone, and the room was thrown into a deep, abiding darkness.

  21

  Lucas woke up at nine o’clock, with a little more than three hours of sleep, when Letty called. “Cheryl’s up, we’re going pretty soon.”

  “Fifteen minutes, wait for me,” Lucas said. “Did Cheryl hear anything more?”

  “Not a thing—which I think is good,” Letty said.

  • • •

  DEL WOKE UP at ten o’clock, the three of them sitting around the foot of his bed. When he stirred and opened his eyes, Cheryl was bent over him, and she said, “You fuckin’ moron.”

  He groaned, “Hey, sweet.”

  “Don’t call me sweet. . . .”

  Lucas half-pushed her out of Del’s line of sight, and bent over him. “You fuckin’ moron.”

  “Hey . . . I don’t hurt much.”

  “You are hurt,” Lucas said. “Believe me. And you will hurt. What the fuck . . .”

  Cheryl pushed Lucas out of the way and cried, “Baby . . .”

  Lucas said, “I’m not calling you baby, I can tell you that . . .”

  Letty moved in: “How’re you doing, Del?”

  “I don’t know, how am I?” He seemed slightly confused by all the bodies, his eyes unsteady.

  Cheryl said, “You’re fine. You’ll be in bed for a few days, and we’ll get you home. No spinal involvement . . . I mean, you’re gonna hurt, but then you’ve been shot, so, what do you expect? How many times have I told you—”

  “I’m really gonna be all right?”

  Lucas moved Cheryl aside again and said, “They say there’s no problem about transplanting a new dick. The thing is, they’ve only got a batch of ‘smalls’ right now.”

  Cheryl and Letty, simultaneously, “Lucas!/Dad!”

  Del coughed and said, “Jesus Christ, don’t make me laugh.”

  And his eyes closed.

  • • •

  DEL KEPT WAKING UP and falling asleep. He was asleep and Lucas and Letty were in the hallway, talking quietly about finding some breakfast, when Lucas’s cell phone rang. Jon Duncan calling. He almost ignored it: BCA agents and Minneapolis cops had been calling all morning, along with Rose Marie and the governor.

  But he took it: “Davenport.”

  “How’s Del?”

  “He’s gonna make it, but he’s hurt bad.”

  “That’s what everybody tells me,” Duncan said. “God, I hope that’s right. I hope that’s good. But . . . I didn’t call about Del. Lucas . . .”

  “What?”

  “Catrin Mattsson. Nobody can find her. She isn’t at home—she left in the middle of the night, in a hurry. Her gun and cell phone were on the floor inside her door.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Jesus. He’s got her.”

  “We don’t know that, but we’re afraid that’s what it is,” Duncan said. “I don’t have all the details yet. I’m at home, just heading out there—”

  “I know that,” Lucas was almost shouting. “He’s got her, Jon. Holy Jesus, I got to get back there.”

  He rang off, and Letty asked, “What?”

  “Black Hole guy,” Lucas said. “He’s got Catrin.”

  Lucas’s instinct was to grab a cab to the airport and fly back to Minnesota right now. He couldn’t do that: there were people to call, arrangements to make. He got the pilots headed back to the airport, then talked at a hundred miles an hour at Letty.

  “You’ve got to take care of Cheryl,” he said. “Everybody’s happy about Del, but I can tell you, he’s not out of the woods. I don’t know what’s going to happen, so I’m going to have to lean on you. Put everything on the AmEx card. This won’t take more than a couple of days.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because that’s how long I’ve got to get her back. We believe he abuses the women for a while before he kills them.”

  “You mean, rapes them.” Looking at him with the stillness she’d shown a few other times, since Lucas had first met her; like just before she’d shot a cop.

  “That, and whatever else turns his crank,” Lucas said. “But it gives me some time, some little bit of time.”

  “The other guys . . .”

  “. . . won’t get him back,” Lucas said. “It’s on me.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WENT BACK to Del, leaned over him and said, “I want to stay, Del, but I gotta go. That Black Hole killer’s got Catrin Mattsson, the woman cop we saw at the hole. God only knows what he’s doing to her.”

  “Take off,” Del said. “Get him. See you when I get back.”

  Lucas was back at the airport in a half hour, and gone in forty- five minutes. He asked the pilots to tell him when they got close to a metro area, or crossed an interstate highway, so he could use his cell phone. They passed west of the Amarillo area, over I-40, and he called Virgil Flowers.

  “How jammed up are you?” he asked.

  “Pretty jammed,” Flowers said. “This killing has gone all weird. What’s up?”

  “The Black Hole killer’s got Catrin Mattsson.”

  “What!”

  “Yeah. I’m shredding the murder books, but I’ve already been through them twice, looking for anything. . . . I don’t know why I’m calling you, except that you know Catrin.”

  “Listen, Lucas, she and I never had any kind of close relationship,” Flowers said. “I mean, if I could help you out in any way, I’d drop everything and haul ass up there. But I don’t know what I could do. This thing down here . . . I don’t want it to get away from me.”

  “All right. Goddamnit, Virgil, I got nothing, I’m desperate. I’m calling you so you can tell me what to do.”

  “I don’t know, man. All I know about the case is what I’ve seen on TV, that little girl and the mailman guy.”

  “All right. Stay with your case, but if you think of anything . . .”

  “What are you going to do?” Flowers asked.

  “Duncan’s group is tearing Holbein and Zumbrota apart. I think maybe my best shot is to go over to Durand, Wisconsin, and find someone who knows somebody from Holbein or Zumbrota. I don’t know how to do that, but that’s what I’m going to do, if I have to go around and knock on store windows.”

  “Let me think about it,” Flowers said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  “I’m counting on you,” Lucas said.

  Flowers said, “I’ll tell you one thing. Catrin’s got this tough-girl act, but under the act, she really is tough. Smart. I think she could string this guy out for a while. Don’t stop pushing it.”

  • • •

  LUCAS MADE ANOTHER CALL, from west of Omaha, over I-80, to Duncan.

  “Jon, what’s going on? What can I do?”

  “Anything you can think of. We’ve got everybody working it, we know what happened, how he got her, but where she is now . . . we got no idea.”

  “Then give me what you’ve got.”

  Duncan said that when the sheriff’s officers got to the Black Hole, they’d found nothing—and Mattsson hadn’t shown up. They’d tried to contact her and failed, and so they’d gone to her apartment, and found that somebody had broken in through the street door.

  “He knew what he was doing—used a glass cutter to cut through the door panel.”

  Worried now, the cops had gone into her apartment, where they found her Glock, her cell phone, and a burner—a pay-as-you-go phone, that had been thoroughly wiped. The phone had been used to call Mattsson, a minute before Mattsson had called the Goodhue County duty officer. The phone had been purchased from a Walmart, but they didn’t know which one, and were working with Walmart’s inventory people to see if they could track it down.

  “What he did was, he called her at 1:07. She was in bed. They talked for only a minute, and he apparently told her that he’d left another body at the Black Hole site.

  “Less than a minute after the call ended, Mattsson called the duty officer at the Goodhue County sheriff’s office and told them to get everything s
tarted toward the Black Hole, and why. They did that.

  “But he called from Red Wing, not up by the Hole,” Duncan said. “In fact, we think he called from right outside Mattsson’s apartment door. She wears pajamas: they were on the floor next to her bed. We think she got dressed in a big hurry, picked up her weapon and ran out the door, and he punched her out right there. There are chunks of potato in the hallway and on the floor inside the door. We think he used the potato like brass knuckles, see . . .”

  “I know about that,” Lucas said. “You got any video of the street?”

  “Not a thing,” Duncan said. “We’ve gone up and down the streets around there, looking for a camera that might have caught him, but we’ve come up empty so far. We’re still looking.”

  “And nothing yet in Holbein.”

  “No. People here are getting a little surly: the newspaper editor thinks they’re getting unfairly blamed for harboring this guy.”

  “Ah, bullshit.”

  “Yes. But that’s what he said.”

  • • •

  LUCAS RANG OFF, then called Weather before they dropped the cell signal, told her he was on the way back, and about Del and Mattsson. He made a final call to Duncan as they crossed I-90 in southern Minnesota; nothing had changed.

  “I’m going to Durand,” he said. “I think that’s where we’ve got the best shot, short of you guys turning somebody up in Holbein.”

  “Stay in touch.”

  • • •

  FIFTEEN MINUTES before landing, Lucas went to the plane’s oversized bathroom, gave himself a cold sponge bath, changed into jeans and a vintage RL flannel shirt, and jammed the morning’s clothes back into his overnight bag. They landed in St. Paul in the early afternoon. Lucas’s truck was waiting in the parking lot. He thought about starting straight for Wisconsin, but decided he needed to stop home first, a half-hour detour.

  No time, he kept thinking. No time.

  He parked in the driveway, went into the garage through a side door and opened the cache he kept under a step that led up to the housekeeper’s apartment over the garage. He’d built the cache himself, and carefully, so that it was essentially invisible. Inside were several cold guns, a silencer, a lock rake, and a few other items that he didn’t really want anyone else to know about.

  Among them was a bottle of little gray pills, known in the truck driving trade as little white pills: the best speed he’d ever encountered. He’d gotten them from a line foreman at the Ford plant, when there still was a Ford plant.

  He shook four of the pills into his hand, popped one and put the other three in the breast pocket of his sport coat. Weather walked into the garage from the kitchen as he was closing the latch on the cache, and said, “I heard you come in. Anything new?”

  “No. I’m on my way to Wisconsin,” Lucas said.

  “Space those pills out. The third one can fool you—you’ll feel sharp, but your reflexes start to fall apart. Don’t kill yourself.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Don’t let anybody else kill you, either.”

  He kissed her and gave her a squeeze and said, “I’ll keep the phone plugged in. Call me anytime.”

  • • •

  DURAND WAS an hour out of St. Paul, even at the speeds Lucas was driving. The amphetamine had kicked in: he was clearheaded and focused. He was crossing the St. Croix River when he got a call. Virgil Flowers.

  “You still planning to go to Durand?” Flowers asked.

  “Yeah. I’m on the way.”

  “I’m looking at my Pad,” Flowers said. “The population is about two thousand people. Quite a few of those will be kids.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So there probably aren’t more than fifteen hundred adults. Get the Durand cops to call everybody they know. All their friends and relatives and everybody else. Ask who knows somebody from Holbein or Zumbrota. Then ask all those people to call everybody they know, and so on. It’s like a tornado-warning phone chain. You’ll get a lot of duplication, but you’ll touch everybody in town—at least, everybody with a phone—inside fifteen or twenty minutes, figuring each call at a minute or so each.”

  “Virgil: we need to do that. Right now. You do it, you can explain it better. Call the cops and tell them that. There’s a sheriff’s office in town, along with the cops. . . . Call them both and get it going.”

  “How far out of town are you?” Flowers asked.

  “Maybe forty-five minutes.”

  “Could have something by the time you get there,” Flowers said.

  • • •

  LUCAS WAS HEADING down the hill toward the Chippewa River bridge when he took a call from an unknown Wisconsin number. He answered, and was talking to a Durand cop. “We responded to that call from your agent Flowers, and we’ve got a couple of things for you. You need to talk to Shelly Linebarger at Andrew’s Rentals and also to a Melissa Saferstein at the Book Nook.”

  Lucas got the locations, and after crossing the bridge, turned north for two blocks and spotted the rental company in a standard concrete-block-and-tin-roof building on the east side of the highway. He hopped out and went inside, where three clerks, two men and a woman, were standing in a cluster behind the service counter, and turned to look at him.

  He said, “I’m Lucas Davenport and—”

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” the woman said. “I’m Shelly. We’ve got a customer from over in that area. He’s rented towable cement mixers from us a few times.”

  The renter’s name was Bob Bonet. They had a Visa card number for him.

  “He’s rented here a half dozen times. I asked him once why he comes all the way over here, and he said he could save quite a bit of money over rentals in the St. Paul area, where’s the next closest place he could get these one-and-three-quarter-yard mixers. I don’t know exactly where he lives, but it’s in the countryside by Holbein.”

  “You ever see his truck?”

  “Yeah,” one of the men said. “Every time he comes over. It’s a red Chevy dually, maybe four or five years old.”

  Lucas said, “Huh.” And, “Big guy? Tall as me?”

  “Almost as tall—and a lot wider.”

  Lucas got the Visa number, said, “Thank you,” went back to his truck and phoned the number to Duncan, who was in Zumbrota. “We got to check it, but I got a down feeling about it—he’s a big guy. Our guy isn’t that big, I don’t think.”

  “Gotta look,” Duncan said. “We’ll roll on it as soon as I can track the Visa number, and get an address.”

  “Stay by your phone, I may have another one coming,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  THE BOOK NOOK was a narrow book-and-magazine store on Main Street, with about as many knickknacks as books; crystals hung in the windows over a sleeping red-and-white tomcat.

  Lucas went inside and found Melissa Saferstein, whose candidate was the man who stocked her books from local and small presses—hunting and fishing books that focused on the North Woods, a variety of nature and photographic works of red barns and coyotes stalking field mice; like that.

  “Davis Tory. Davis, not David. Not Davy, for sure, he told me that straight-out. There’s something a little off-center about him. He’s a little too tense,” she said. Saferstein was a blonde, pushing hard at middle age, if not yet quite there.

  “You ever feel uneasy about him?” Lucas asked. “Like he might come on to you?”

  “Oh . . . no, I couldn’t really say that. He just seems really tense to me. I always thought it was because he works so hard. Doesn’t take time to schmooze, he just comes flying in the door, runs back and forth with his book boxes, and boom, he’s gone. And his language is atrocious. It’s motherfucker this, and goddamn that, and a few other words that I won’t repeat.”

  “Big guy?”

  “No, a fairly small guy,” Saferstein said. “Muscular, I guess from carrying all those book boxes around all the time. But, not too big, bald. One thing: he always takes a minute to say hel
lo to the cats. He likes cats, and they like him.”

  A black cat was at that moment walking across the counter to Lucas: he held out a knuckle for the cat to sniff, and then gave it a scratch behind the ears.

  “Like that,” Saferstein said.

  She had both an address and a phone number for Tory. Lucas wrote them down, and called Duncan again. “This guy’s got the right build. He’s from Cannon Falls, which is close, but not exactly the big cigar. We’ve got to look at him, but I’ve got my doubts.”

  “Anything’s better than sitting around on our hands,” Duncan said. “You got a third guy?”

  “Not yet,” Lucas said. “I’ll go up and talk to the cops, and see what they think.”

  • • •

  HE DROVE THROUGH TOWN, then up the hill to the government center. There was nobody in the police department office, and only one officer in the sheriff’s office—the guy who was running the communications.

  “They’re all out on the street, trying to make sure we didn’t miss anyone. Going out in the nearby countryside, too,” the deputy said. “If we didn’t get everybody in town, I don’t know who we could have missed. Some people are complaining that they’ve been called eight or ten times. We’ve got about thirty names for you, people from Minnesota, but we’ve been plotting them on Google, and most of them are from up around the Cities. Outside your zone, anyway. The two you got were the only close ones.”

  “So you’re slowing down?” Lucas asked.

  “Afraid so—nobody else to talk to. Sorry it wasn’t more help.”

  • • •

  “WE DON’T KNOW it wasn’t, yet,” Lucas said. “If you get anything else that looks good, call me.” He left his number, and walked out to the truck, looked at his watch. Six or seven more hours of daylight, not much more than that. He sat for two minutes, thinking about it, could feel the panic rising in his throat. He was nowhere: nowhere. And he had the sense he’d just wasted half a day. How much time did Catrin Mattsson have? Where was she? What had the killer done to her?

  Wherever she was, whatever had been done to her, hadn’t been done in Durand. He got in his truck, and pointed it at the Mississippi River.