Field of Prey

12

Duncan’s team met at nine o’clock the next morning. Lucas arrived at eight-thirty, and made some calls: Jenkins and Shrake, still in Florida, said that the papers they’d found in the truck of Bryan’s car would hang him for fraud, no question about it. They’d also found an account from the Cayman Islands, and had talked to a fed about it.

“He’s stashed better than fifteen million in the bank, and the feds have got a hold on it,” Jenkins said.

“I thought those offshore guys wouldn’t talk to us,” Lucas said.

“They won’t tell you anything new, but the feds say if they have the proof, the bank’ll give it up — they’re scared to death that the islands will go on an embargo list. So, if you’ve got the facts and figures, and put a gun to their head, they’ll cooperate. We put a gun to their head. All it took was a call to the IRS.”

“Good move,” Lucas said. “How’s the golf weather?”

Flowers was working down on the Iowa line: “I’ll have something for you in the next couple of days. Alert the media.”

Del was in Texas: “They’ve off-loaded a few guns, we got them in Technicolor. The big meeting is probably two or three days away yet, down near El Paso. The ATF is recording everything going in and out of their cell phones. As soon as the deal goes down, we’re gonna throw a net over them.”

“You buy a cowboy hat yet?”

Long silence, then, “It’s really hot and sunny down here.”

“Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said. “How about the boots? You buy the boots?”

Another long silence.

Rose Marie Roux leaned in his office doorway: “You haven’t got him yet.”

“I was there when we opened Shaffer’s notebook,” Lucas said.

“That wasn’t really you,” she said. “That could have been anybody.”

Lucas said, “Yeah, but it wasn’t.”

Roux said, “Lucas, I don’t give a wide shit about who got where first. I want the guy. Now. And I’ll tell you something else — you might have your own media problem. I talked to this Janet Frost from the Strib, and she seems to have a problem with you, involving this shooting in Woodbury and the hunger-strike guy.”

“Aw, for Christ’s sakes,” Lucas said. “I tried to help her out.”

“Don’t feel sorry for yourself, feel sorry for me. I mean, what could I do that I haven’t, to get the Black Hole guy? It’s not like I didn’t drive the squad car fast enough.”

“Yeah, but you politician assholes swim in the media sea — you love it, when it’s on your side,” Lucas said. “I might get whacked for doing the right thing.”

“You could still solve both problems if you caught this guy in the next day or two. You’d be the big hero, and I’d still be your boss.”

The meeting went off precisely at nine o’clock. Mattsson showed up and took a chair next to Lucas, leaned toward him and said, “I talked to every cop shop in the county. Nobody’s ever had a hint of Horn. A lot of cops knew him personally, and so did everybody in Holbein, but nobody’s had even a sniff of him, after that night in the truck.”

“According to the original reports from Faribault, the victim said she stabbed him several times,” Lucas said. “I am really curious about what happened to him… how he walked out of there, after being in a bad car wreck and getting himself stabbed.”

“I’m curious about why he’d go to Sauk Centre,” Mattsson said.

“We don’t know that he did,” Lucas said quietly. “I don’t think a guy smart enough to pull off this many killings, and tough enough to walk out of the wreck of his truck, and get away… I don’t think he’d mail that letter from his hometown. Or type it.”

“Huh,” she said.

Lucas grinned at her: “What? You don’t think a killer would be rotten enough to lie to us?”

“You think he’s still down in Goodhue?”

“I didn’t say that. You couldn’t hide Horn anywhere around Holbein, but you get up north, in tourist country,” Lucas said. “Up north, you could hide him. And it’s possible…” He scratched his head.

She prompted him, “What?”

“You’ve got to look around Goodhue to see if he had any friends.”

“I’ve already asked about that,” Mattsson said.

“Good. Because I’d think he might have needed help, from someone willing to keep a really ugly secret.”

Henry Sands, the BCA director, and victim of one of the most serious rounds of backbiting in BCA history, post Alaska, said, “All right, folks, let’s get this going….”

Duncan took over as soon as Sands finished outlining what everybody knew at that point.

“As everybody knows,” Duncan said, “we’ve finally got a suspect, Jack L. Horn, formerly of Holbein.”

Duncan outlined Horn’s history. When the police raided his house after the kidnapping attempt, they didn’t find much in the way of personal possessions, but they did get a link to his past through his Social Security number. The number had been issued in 1984, but his age at the time of issuance was uncertain. It had been issued so he could take a job at a taco restaurant in Des Moines. Subsequent jobs put him in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Cheyenne job was with an over-the-road trucking company, as a driver.

“Nobody knew him very well at any of his jobs,” Duncan said. “We haven’t been able to track down his parents or any relatives, but we’re still working on that. We’ll be interviewing everyone who knew him around Holbein, so that may come to something.”

Duncan had decided to shift half of his crew to the Sauk Centre area, where the letter had been mailed from. “We have Horn’s photo — Dick, pass those copies around — although they are pretty dated, and not very good. Various licenses and so on. We’ll be plastering the media with them.”

They all looked at the photos, then Sands asked, “Since we know for sure that he was around Sauk Centre, and since we know for pretty sure that he’s not living in the Holbein area… why are you keeping so many people down south?”

“Because we’ve developed a number of other possibilities,” Duncan said. “We know that he broke into one casket and several sepulchers down there, but Lucas says each one of those things needs a different key. He believes that’s what Shaffer figured out. He thinks Shaffer then used that insight to… to…”

“… figure out who might have all those keys,” Lucas interjected.

“Right,” Duncan said. “He figured something out, or talked to somebody about it, and then, based on what that hypothetical person said, Shaffer found Horn, or vice versa, and was murdered.”

Sands said to Duncan, “You said ‘possibilities.’ The key thing is one. Are there more?”

“Yes. The last woman murdered was kidnapped from a cemetery. Shaffer was killed after visiting four cemeteries. You put that with the cemetery key thing, and we conclude that there’s a tight connection between somebody who works at these cemeteries, or is some kind of cemetery freak, if there is such a thing. That gets noticed by small-town folks, so we’re going down for a whole run of interviews on that point: short, single guy in late thirties or forties, who works in cemeteries or has something to do with them, or has a special interest in them. Maybe collects or makes keys.”

They talked about those possibilities for a while, and then Roux asked, “Lucas — what are you going to do?”

Lucas said, “I don’t know. We’re at the point where anything I could do, Jon and his crew can do better. We need lots of interviews, we need lots of legwork. I’ve got some things I’ve got to catch up on here. Virgil’s working a case down in the southeast corner of the state that I’d like to take a peek at, and Del is in Texas—”

“Screw that,” Roux said. “I need you thinking about this case.”

“As I was going to say, I’ll be thinking about this case,” Lucas said. “One thing befuddles me: Where did Shaffer take his insight about the keys? I’m going to mark every note that he took…. He made some kind of mental leap.”

“Make the fuckin’ leap,” Roux said.

A secretary stuck her head into the room and said, “Excuse me?”

Everybody looked at her. “We have a Sergeant McGraff on the phone from Goodhue County, for Catrin Mattsson. He says they have another letter, to her, that could be from the killer. A typewriter, from Alexandria.”

Duncan said, “Okay. Put him in here on the speakerphone.”

The secretary went away and a moment later, McGraff came up on the speaker and said, “Yeah, Catrin, it looks just like the first one you got. Kathleen was sorting through the mail and spotted it. We haven’t opened it, so everything inside should be clean.”

Duncan identified himself and then said, “Get it up here, in an evidence bag. Like right now. Don’t let anybody else touch it.”

McGraff said he would.

When McGraff had gone, Sands said to Duncan, “You might review your staffing plans. This guy seems to be up in that Alexandria — Sauk Centre area.”

Duncan nodded: “I’ll pull a couple more guys off and get them up there. Today. I’m going to run over to Eau Claire and interview this Heather Jorgenson, see what she has to say about Horn.”

The meeting adjourned, but most of the agents milled around the open bay area, waiting for McGraff to show up. Lucas went back to his office, with Roux. “You’re not just going to sit in your office, are you? You going to Goodhue, or up north?”

“Probably down to Goodhue, not up north. The guys going north might find him, but it’ll be walking door-to-door. I’m not good at that. I’ve got a feeling that these notes are all wrong. He might be trying to divert us away from the real opportunity.”

“Good luck,” she said, and sighed. “If Elmer gets picked for vice president, I was thinking I might run for governor as a law-and-order Democrat. That’s a lot harder, if you’re blamed for not being able to keep law and order.”

“I’d vote for you, anyway,” Lucas said. “Probably. Depending on who the Republicans put up.”

McGraff showed up with the letter in the bag, gave it to a CSI guy called down from the lab, and a few minutes and a couple of changes of bags later, they got the letter and a clump of blond hair tied with a red ribbon.

It said:

Hi, there, Catrin. Got another name for you. Alice Wolfe, from Cannon Falls. Look for her in 2001, went dancing in Minneapolis and never came home. Never got to Minneapolis, either, ha-ha. You won’t find her at the Black Hole. I put her in the other pit. Oh, that’s right, you haven’t found that one yet. No problem, I’m sending some of her hair that I kept as a keepsake. Shake it out of the envelope, have your scientists do the DNA thing. It will keep them busy, anyway.

That was all of it.

“I’ll tell you all something,” Duncan said. “We’ll get DNA out of this hair, and we’ll match it to Wolfe’s relatives, and if it doesn’t match any of the DNA from the cistern and if Alice Wolfe is blond and did disappear, in 2001, that means, there is another pit.”

“Another pit,” Roux said. “It’s a fuckin’ nightmare.”

Lucas hung around the office for a while, flipping through the murder books. He tried to call Flowers, but Flowers didn’t answer his cell phone. He left a message for a callback. He called Del, who answered but said he had nothing new to report, except that women in Texas had big hair.

“I knew that,” Lucas said.

He finally told his secretary that he was heading south, to listen to people who’d known Horn. He got a list from one of Duncan’s crew, and took off.

He spent the rest of the afternoon either driving or talking — four cops, and a half dozen other people in town who had a variety of relationships with Horn: two landlords, the owner of the liquor store, and the owner of Croakers, a bar and grill where Horn would go to drink.

Horn, he knew, was a tall man and thin, and everyone remembered him that way. He had odd-colored hair; that was mentioned by a couple of people. It was gray, but not old-gray — rather, slate-colored, tending almost to blue.

He was a solitary character, like a gunfighter in a movie, a former landlady said, and had suspicious black eyes. Never saw him with a woman. She had been in his rented house a few times, when he wasn’t there, and had taken a look around. He had about a million comic books, but she’d never seen anything like porn, or anything else that might suggest he was obsessed with sex. He wore jeans and work shirts and boots, but always with a black sport coat, as though he were covering up a gun.

“Was he?” Lucas asked.

“Don’t know — never saw him with his coat off,” she said. “He had a metal safe in his bedroom. A gun safe, I’m pretty sure.”

One of the cops said, “I don’t believe he had any close friends. I don’t think he had any friends, period. For one thing, he smelled like a skunk half the time. The other thing was, he was an asshole. Just fuckin’ mean. To animals. Dogs. I’ll tell you what, you didn’t want your dog to get loose in Holbein, because Horn would flat break its neck, or soak it down in that dog-spray stuff. He even shot a couple.”

The owner of the liquor store said that Horn had been a regular customer: “We don’t like to see anyone going alcoholic, but Horn would put away two or three fifths of vodka a week; plus, he’d be drinking over at Croakers. Weren’t many nights he’d go home sober — but with his job, can’t say I’d blame him. Picking up dead animals all day.”

The owner/bartender at Croakers said that he always sat by himself at the bar, by choice, and drank slowly, but thoroughly. “I felt kinda sorry for him, at the time, but every time I tried to chat with him, he’d kinda cut me off. After a while, I figured that was just the way he was, and let it go.”

If told that Horn was a killer, they all agreed that they wouldn’t be particularly surprised.

When Lucas talked to Letty that night, he said, “It was a curious thing — of all the assholes I’ve known in my life, I’ve never met anyone that someone didn’t have a good word for. Out of simple charity. Because they were nice people, and wouldn’t say a bad word about anybody. Not with Horn. Nobody liked him. Not one single person.”

“Can you trust that? Maybe they liked him before he attacked that woman.”

“That’s a point,” Lucas said.

“It seems like he does have some kind of interest in sex,” she said. “There’s a tone in his notes. Like, I hate to say it, playful. Or kind of weird-flirty.”

Lucas shook his head. “If you have somebody interested enough in sex that they’re kidnapping women, and they have the Internet, they’re gonna have some porn around.”

“But we know he was kidnapping women,” Letty said. “That is absolutely nailed down. The truck, the blood, the fact that he disappeared. Maybe he was a kind of super-secret guy, or knew that the landlady was a snoop, so he kept the porn hidden.”

“You make a good case, and it’s completely wrong,” Lucas said.

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

Lucas went to bed at two o’clock. Weather got up early, as usual, to go in to the hospital. He was sleeping soundly when she sat on the corner of the bed and rubbed the back of his neck.

That woke him, and he rolled halfway over.

“Good morning,” she said.

Too early: he was confused. “Morning?”

She dropped a newspaper on his chest. “Guess what? You made the Star-Tribune.”