Field of Prey

14

Late that same afternoon, R-A was standing behind the counter in the hardware store, while another clerk, Dick, was out in the small engine shop demonstrating a STIHL brushcutter before loading it in the back of a customer’s truck.

Andy O’Neill, who ran the local carpet store, wandered in, carrying a broken white PVC cap. “Hoped you were still open,” he said. “Run over the goldarn vent pipe for the septic with my lawn mower. You got any caps like this?”

“Six-inch,” R-A said. “We oughta have a few. You bust the pipe, too?”

“Just down to ground level. I’m gonna cut the broken part off with a hacksaw, stick the cap on. Never wanted it sticking up like that, anyway.”

“That oughta work,” R-A said. He took the cap and led O’Neill back to the plumbing section, found the replacement cap. “You need a hacksaw?”

“Got one,” O’Neill said.

When he was ringing up the sale, R-A caught O’Neill… peering at him.

“What? I got a hickey on my neck?”

“No, no,” O’Neill said. He was a tall man, as heavily muscled as R-A. “I been watching that Black Hole investigation thing. This girl over in Zumbrota says some postal clerk did it. They had a picture of him. You look like his brother, or something. You related?”

“Not unless my mother was doing something I didn’t know about,” R-A chuckled. “They don’t catch that guy, maybe I better grow a beard.”

“Does look like you,” O’Neill said. He hunted through the candy rack for a moment, found a candy bar. “Give me a Snickers, too. I don’t want it on the same receipt. My old lady looks at receipts.”

“Know how that goes,” R-A said. Though he didn’t.

R-A went home in a state: he wheeled Horn out to the living room and said, “Soon’s that sonofabitch thinks about it long enough, he’s gonna mention it to someone. Then it’ll get around town, and the law’s gonna come lookin’ for me.”

“Not against the law to look like somebody else,” Horn said.

“But… there’s probably other stuff,” R-A said. “Maybe some evidence that we don’t know about, but they’re looking to hang on somebody. Maybe some of that DNA. There was enough of it in Mary Lynn’s pussy, when I put her down the well. If they test me on it, I’m done.”

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

“Well, I know you got nothing against killing people,” R-A said.

“Against you killing people. I’m not killing anybody, not in this condition,” Horn said.

“Well, shit, I don’t exactly have a problem with it, either,” R-A said. “How’m I gonna do it? A gun’s so goddamn loud in the night.”

“Baseball bat?”

“Jesus Christ, Horn, this isn’t some drunk blonde,” R-A said. “O’Neill’s a big guy. Carrying rolls of carpet around, he’s probably twice as strong as me. He’d take a baseball bat and stick it up my ass.”

“Just kiddin’ you,” Horn said. “Think what you got downstairs.”

R-A thought, then his face brightened. “Your old Ruger.”

“That’s right. Not a lot of accuracy if you’re shooting more than twenty feet, but if you’re shooting at two inches…”

“Goddamn: I don’t think of you as being a dogcatcher,” R-A said.

“Neither do I, and I never did. There was a lot more to it—”

“Okay, okay. I apologize.” R-A rubbed his face. “Even so, they’ll tear the town apart when they find them.”

“Sure, but what’s worse — them tearing the town apart looking for a gunman, or coming to you directly and asking for a DNA sample?”

“I dunno, I dunno.”

“Got away with a .45 right here in town,” Horn said. “O’Neill’s out there on the edge, must have a two-acre lot.”

“The Ruger. Gotta do it soon,” R-A said. “Tonight. We can’t have him talking to anybody.”

“Maybe he already has,” Horn said.

“Nothing we could do about that,” R-A said. “We gotta play it like he hasn’t said anything.”

There was still light coming through the curtains, and would be for another hour or two. Horn said, “You can’t go out there until after dark. We’ve got time to plan it out.”

R-A said, “This could be the thing that kills me.”

“Maybe,” Horn said. “But you had a good run. If you still really don’t want to be caught, I’d think about running up to Alexandria, find yourself a blonde. Maybe even tonight. They won’t believe you’d be in two places in one night.”

R-A scratched his neck, under his chin, thinking about that. “That’d be one hell of a night,” he said after a few seconds. “I’d have to take O’Neill first, and that’d have to be after dark. Could I get up to Alexandria in time to do any good?”

“I don’t know. Figure it out.”

R-A: “Mattsson. Maybe they do get me, but I’m gonna get her first. I swear to God.”

So they planned it out, sitting in the living room. R-A had a few drinks, getting his guts up, and went down to the basement and got Horn’s Ruger Mark II .22 auto. It had a very long barrel, and was poorly balanced. He could live with it.

“Go up to the door, shoot him, kick the door shut, shoot the old lady,” R-A said, demonstrating the moves to an unnaturally intent Horn. “Gotta remember the part about kicking the door shut. If somebody hears bang! they might let it go. If they hear bang! bang! bang! they’ll be looking out the windows.”

“There won’t be much of a bang, but there’ll be some,” Horn said. “It won’t sound much like a gun. I never had anybody come out and ask, ‘You shoot something?’”

“I’ll take it down the basement before I go… see what it sounds like.”

“Don’t go running out the door after you shoot them,” Horn suggested. “If somebody does hear that first bang, and looks around, and they see somebody running, they’ll be looking around for sure.”

R-A was sitting on the couch and popped the magazine on the Ruger. He was about to push one of the shells out with his thumb and Horn said, “Don’t!”

“Don’t what?”

“Those shells are gonna have my prints on them,” Horn said. “I imagine you’d want to keep them on there. And not yours.”

R-A looked at the magazine. “Yup.” The magazine had a long slot down the side, and R-A counted the shells. “Ten of them. I’m gonna have to shoot one, to make sure it’s still working, that the spring hasn’t gone flat.”

“You can do that down the basement. There’s another magazine down there, too. It’s not loaded. I’d polish off some shells, then load it up, wearing gloves, of course. Just in case you need to reload.”

“Good. That’s good,” R-A said. “I’ll do that.” He pointed the gun at Horn’s head, but Horn didn’t bother to flinch. “Gotta remember: jack one in, safety off, one shot, boom, kick the door shut. Jack one in, safety off, one shot, boom, kick the door shut.”

“Here’s another thing,” Horn said. “Lot of people got those cheap game cameras now. They put them up in trees, set for night hours. You need something to cover your face — a sock or a ski mask, and a hat.”

“That’s good,” R-A said. “That’s a good idea.”

“And don’t forget: you need to type up that note.”

“Getting really fuckin’ complicated,” R-A said.

“Confusing is what it is,” Horn said. “When it comes to the cops, confusion is your friend.”

By the time they got it figured out, and R-A had gone down to the basement and fired a round into a hard-foam archery target, and then come back up, and finished typing the note he’d leave by the blonde’s body in Alexandria, red sunlight was streaming in through the low west windows in the parlor. It’d be dark in half an hour.

“Got to do it,” R-A said.

The night was almost always quiet in Holbein. Sometimes the kids would be out in the warm twilight, playing war with apples picked off neighborhood trees, and you’d hear shouting when somebody got ambushed or hit behind the ear with an unripe Haralson; or, if they were a little older, necking in the shadows. Three nights a year, a carnival would be in town, and you could hear it for miles around, and then there was the Fourth of July, which could get loud… but otherwise, the nights were slow and quiet, and a banging screen door was as noisy as it got.

The O’Neill house was right on the edge of town. The house faced neighbors on the other side of the street, but behind it, to the east, it was nothing but corn and soybeans all the way to the Mississippi.

After thinking it over, and thinking about the long hike he’d made back from Zumbrota, R-A parked almost a mile away, two big cornfields east of the O’Neill house. He’d come up from the back, and if he had to run for it, he could disappear into one of the cornfields and make it back to his truck in ten minutes or so. There was even a place to park, down through a pasture gate behind a screen of ditch weeds.

At least, that was what he figured out, after driving around for a while. He parked in the pasture and turned his truck lights out, and sat. If the owner of the field came along, he’d have no excuse for being there, so he took along a bottle of bourbon, put it in the backseat. If somebody jumped him, he’d say he’d pulled off where the cops wouldn’t find him, because, well, he was driving drunk.

Or, he could just kill the guy.

He’d work that out if it happened.

He looked out the window, tempted to take a drink. Full dark. He unscrewed the cap on the bourbon, took a hard swallow.

The first part of the plan went wrong.

From the road, R-A could see reasonably well: the moon was probably three-quarters, and the stars were bright. He walked across the narrow pasture to the cornfield — he could see the lights in the back windows of the O’Neills’ house — but as soon as he got in the corn, he couldn’t see anything. Worse, the rows ran in the wrong direction, at right angles to the direction he wanted to walk. After crashing through thirty feet of corn, he made a right turn, walked down the row, climbed the fence at the end of it, crossed the ditch to the road, and started jogging west. The gun was in the game pocket of a hunting shirt, and banged against his butt as he ran.

He crossed another narrow gravel road, crossed back over the ditch to the cornfield, and in this one, he found, the rows ran in the right direction. He walked along, arms and hands in front of his face so his face wouldn’t get cut by the corn leaves, and after eight or ten minutes, hit the fence behind the O’Neills’ house.

The trip from the truck had taken almost twenty minutes, far longer than he expected. He’d stick to the road going back, he decided, at least until he saw lights behind him.

The second part of the plan went well, at least from R-A’s perspective. The O’Neills didn’t bother to draw a lot of curtains in their house, especially on the sides. After pulling the ski mask over his head, R-A crossed the fence line and moved slowly — he was an experienced hunter — across the backyard, watching especially the house to the left side of the O’Neills’. There were lights over there, but he never saw anybody moving inside.

The O’Neill kitchen, he decided, was at the back of the house, because Mrs. O’Neill (Lucy? He thought that was right) was standing framed in a small high window. That’d be the window over the kitchen sink, where she was doing dishes. There were lights in the front of the house, and the peculiar blue glow of a television.

That would be Andy, watching the TV while his wife did dishes. R-A watched and listened; the neighborhood was quiet. More than quiet: it was still. He’d go for the front door, he decided. Take Andy O’Neill first.

He moved down the side of the house. There was a lit window on the second floor, under a dormer. A bedroom?

At the corner of the front porch, he knelt, concealed by a clump of arborvitae. Still time to turn back… but he couldn’t. Andy was a talker.

Took a breath. Muttered to himself: jack a shell into the chamber, pistol now cocked, flip the safety off. Check the safety again. Wait some more. Check the safety a third time.

He took a last look around, and a deep breath, stood up, walked around the corner of the house and up the porch steps. The front entrance had both an inner door and a screen door. He tried the screen door and found it unlocked. He pulled it just slightly open, then rang the doorbell.

O’Neill came to the door with a querulous look, impatient with the interruption, but not quite annoyed. R-A saw him coming and turned away, as though he were looking out across the lawn, but at the same time, kept his left hand on the handle to the screen door. As soon as he heard the door open behind him, and O’Neill saying… “Yes…” he turned and pulled open the screen door and swung the pistol up. With the muzzle two inches from O’Neill’s forehead he pulled the trigger twice, the gun went whump whump and O’Neill went down.

Mrs. O’Neill in the kitchen called, “Andy? Andy, what was that? Who’s there?”

R-A hopped across O’Neill’s body, kicked the door shut, and ran across the living room carpet to the kitchen door and got there just as Mrs. O’Neill stepped into the doorway. He was leading with the muzzle of the gun and whump whump and Mrs. O’Neill went down, but maybe not dead, and he stepped close and fired again, this time with the muzzle one inch from her temple, whump.

Five shots, four rounds left.

Then, from upstairs, “Mom? Mom? What was that?”

R-A turned back to the living room. He’d seen the wide steps going up, over the built-in bookcase, and he ran back through the kitchen door and turned toward the staircase, and saw the girl there, maybe ten years old, staring openmouthed at her father’s body by the door, then she saw him, and quick as a flash, turned and ran back up the stairs.

R-A was right behind her, slamming up the stairs, around the landing, saw a door closing, locking, kicked it as hard as he could, felt it give, but hold, kicked it again, close to the knob, and it caved, and he kicked it again and was in, but as he went through he heard the window shatter, and inside the door saw the girl at the window about to go out on the porch roof and he fired four times into her back, whump whump whump whump.

She was terribly hurt, but not dead yet, and rolled over on her back, and looked up at him, her eyes already going hazy, and she asked, “Why?” He leaned forward and tried to fire again, into her forehead, but nothing happened. He looked at the gun: empty magazine. He ejected the empty mag, slapped in a new one, and fired the last shot and the girl’s eyes shuddered and closed.

She was dead, but the window over the porch was shattered, no way to put that back. He turned off the room light and shut the door, and turned off more lights as he ran back down the stairs.

He stepped over to Andy O’Neill to make sure he was gone; and he was. And then over to Mrs. O’Neill. Gone. He turned out all the lights on the first floor, and with the house dark, left by the side entrance. He jogged across the backyard, crossed the fence, catching the crotch of his pants on the top strand of barbed wire. He carefully unhooked it, and ran through the cornfield.

The night was as silent as ever. Still. He ran on to the far fence line, then out of the field, out to the road, and along the road to the pasture where he’d parked.

Back at the house, Horn was waiting. “Done?”

“There were three of them. I didn’t know about the kid, but it wasn’t a problem.”

“What about the gun?”

“If they come for me tonight, it’s only because they knew I did it. The gun wouldn’t make much difference…”

“Roger, everything makes a difference,” Horn said. “The gun would be conclusive. You’ve got to get rid of it.”

“Not yet. Not tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll hide it so they’d never find it,” R-A said. “I’m not going out tonight without it.”

“If they hang you with it, it’s not my fault,” Horn said.

They’d worked the whole plan through, but R-A was high on adrenaline and said, “I gotta roll. Gotta roll.”

“Then roll. But roll slow. You don’t want to get stopped by a cop, with that pistol in the car.” Horn sniffed. “You been drinking?”

“Not much, a quick jolt.”

“Go use some mouthwash or toothpaste or whatever you got. You don’t need to get hauled in for drunk driving. You don’t need a cop to remember you.”

“All right. I’ve got some gum, just for that thing.”

And Horn said, “Give me one minute before you go. What was it like, up there at the O’Neills’? Had to be good…”

R-A headed north in his truck. All he had to do was find a blonde out in the open in Alexandria. Choke her out, drop the typewritten note on her chest. If it didn’t work out, it didn’t work out. He had to remember that: if it didn’t work out, it didn’t work out, and he’d turn around and go home. A ten percent risk, that was okay. Maybe a twenty-five percent risk. Anything more than that, turn right around.

The route took him through the Twin Cities. He hadn’t gotten there when he glanced at the dashboard clock and was surprised how late it was. He worked it through his head. He’d pulled into the ditch around 8:45. It hadn’t gotten dark enough to move for another ten minutes, and then it had been twenty minutes to the O’Neill house. He’d been in the house for probably five minutes, then another ten minutes back to the car, running all the way. So: 9:30 at the car, then back to the house, talking with Horn, he probably hadn’t left the house until 9:40 or so. The bars in Alexandria closed at one o’clock, and it took three hours to get there.

He was too late! He wouldn’t get there until closing time, and he didn’t even know exactly where the bars were.

He slowed, thought about turning around. Giving it up. But: he’d mailed that first letter from Sauk Centre, and on the way out of town, had stopped at a bar for a couple of drinks. He knew how to get there, he knew where the bars were — there were a bunch of them on one big street, quick to get there from I-94.

Hell, Sauk Centre was as good as Alexandria. He’d have only an hour or so to operate, he’d have to get lucky. But if he got lucky, the cops wouldn’t know what hit them. They’d be jumping around like their feet were on fire and their asses were catchin’.

One thing he couldn’t do was drive slow. He’d have to drive fast, and then drive slow coming back. He did that, his back tense, waiting for the flashing red lights to pop up from behind a dip in the road….

Never happened.

He got to Sauk Centre an hour before closing; found the first two bars almost empty, a few lone divorced guys looking into their beers. The third bar, the Rusty Gate, had an available blonde, sitting with a nice-looking brunette, but the ages were wrong. He needed young….

He found a young one, all by herself, talking to the bartender at a place called College Town. Four cowboy-looking guys were shooting pool at the back of the bar, while another one, with his girlfriend, watched. A half dozen other couples were scattered around in booths.

R-A took a stool at the bar, ignoring the blonde, and the bartender came over and said, “Getcha?”

“Got Bud on tap?”

“Yup.”

The bartender went and got it, and when he came back, R-A asked, “You about to close?”

The bartender looked over his shoulder at a clock and said, “You got a half hour.”

The bartender went back to talking with the blonde, something about a traffic stop down in Iowa, and the Highway Patrol had taken somebody’s car apart looking for dope, and whoever it was never smoked dope or anything else… hardly even drank.

R-A couldn’t follow it all. He studied the girl in the mirror behind the bar, and God help him, she was perfect. She had large, strong breasts and a small waist, blond ringlets down to her shoulders. She was wearing a white cotton sweater, with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, and he could see the dark shadow of a black brassiere.

If he’d been ready for another one, for a real one, he’d have put her on his list, and would have watched her for weeks, and then would have closed in… and…

He got lost in the fantasy, sipping the beer, and the bartender came over and said, “You want another?”

R-A came back and looked at his glass. The beer was almost gone.

The bartender said, “I only asked, because if you want a third one, you’ll be right at last call.”

“Gimme another,” R-A said, swallowing the last of the beer and pushing the glass across the bar.

It went like that for fifteen minutes, the cowboys in the back laughing and jostling each other around, and R-A got a third one at last call. The bartender and the blonde were running down, and there was a burst of laughter from the back, and then three of the cowboys walked out toward the front, and two of them draped arms around the blonde, from opposite sides, and one of them asked, “Which one of us you goin’ home with, sweet thing?”

The blonde pressed a finger to her perfect lips and her eyes opened wide and she said, “It’s so hard to choose… but, given the circumstances, maybe I’ll just go home with my husband.”

The third cowboy said, “Goddamned right. Get your cookies in the oven and your buns in the bed.”

She frowned and said, “George, that’s so old and stupid. Don’t say that stupid shit because—”

“It makes you look stupid,” said another one of the cowboys.

“Never made any claims otherwise,” the husband said.

They were all on their feet, moving around, and went out the door in a group.

That was that. R-A finished his third Bud, nodded to the bartender, and went out to the street. Sinclair Lewis Avenue. Other bars were closing around him, up and down the street. Not an unaccompanied woman in sight.

“Well, shit,” R-A said.

Mattsson was asleep in her apartment, but not at ease: too much going on, too many possibilities to think about. When the phone rang at 1:15, she was not entirely asleep, nor was she entirely surprised. The pressure was such that something had to happen.

She kept her phone on her nightstand, picked it up and looked at the screen. There was no name, just a number, from Wisconsin. Thinking, Wrong number, she punched the answer bar and said, “Hello?”

“Hello, Catrin…”

She sat up: not a voice she recognized, and she had a good ear and a good memory. “Who is this?”

“Well, this is Jack Horn. I understand you’ve been looking for me.”

“Is this a joke?”

“No joke, Catrin. You’ve got a pencil?”

She fumbled the bedside lamp on and found a pencil and a slip of paper: “Yes.”

“Marsha Wells. Picked her up outside the He’s Not Here bar on Hennepin Avenue. You don’t have her on your identified list yet, but she was in there. In the hole. You want to know what I didn’t like about her?”

Mattsson was crawling across the bed to her hardwired phone, while punching up the contact list on her cell. She found Davenport’s cell number and began punching it into the hardwired phone as she said, “I’m scared to ask.”

Horn laughed. “What I didn’t like was, she gave up too easy. I mean, I took her and… I took her and beat on her a little, to soften her up, but when I started fuckin’ her, she was like a rag. She just gave up. See, what I did was…”

The phone went off on Lucas’s bedside table and he groaned, and fumbled for it: didn’t recognize the number. He punched “answer,” and said, “Yeah?”

Mattsson had the earpiece of the hardwired phone clamped to her ear, hoping Horn wouldn’t hear Davenport answer. As soon as she heard Davenport say, “Yeah?” she interrupted Horn’s rambling description of his rape of Marsha Wells. She said, maybe too loud, “Yeah, Mr. Horn, this is all pretty awful, but how do I know you’re really Mr. Horn? I mean you say you killed what’s-her-name, Marsha Wells, is that right?”

She moved the mouthpiece of the wired phone close to the speaker on her cell phone, so Davenport could hear Horn.

“Yeah, that’s right. Marsha Wells. Grabbed her, fucked her good, got me a piece of rope and put it around her neck, and was strangling her while I fucked her that last time. You know what happens when you’re fuckin’ some chick while you’re strangling her…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, but how do I know that you’re not down in some bar someplace with Dick Wolfe or Bobbie McCauley and you’re not pulling my leg? If you’re really Horn, how’d you get this number?”

“You can find anything on the Internet, if you look long enough,” Horn said. “What I did was…”

Lucas hung up and when Weather asked, “What?” he said, “Holy shit, Catrin Mattsson’s talking to Horn.” He called the duty officer and said, “This is Davenport. A Goodhue deputy named Catrin Mattsson, lives in Red Wing, I got her number here, she’s talking to the Black Hole killer right now, right this minute, she’s keeping him on the line, we need to know where he’s calling from.”

“You know what carrier…?”

“No, no, I don’t know a fuckin’ thing. Just find it, find where he’s calling from, what the number is…. Here’s her number…”

“Get back to you.” And the duty officer was gone.

Horn finished with his pornographic description of the final attack on Marsha Wells, then said, “I saw you on TV. I really like your looks, Catrin. Bet you wouldn’t give up, would you?”

“I’d tear your fuckin’ heart out,” Mattsson said. Davenport had hung up, and she was hoping against hope that he was tracing the call. “If you’re really Horn.”

“I’m really Horn,” he insisted.

“If you’re really Horn, what were you doing in that ditch when Little Kaylee saw you?”

After a moment of silence, Horn laughed and said, “Little Kaylee. I won’t tell you what I was doing, but I had a good reason for being in there. And I’ll tell you what, I was never one of those peter-whatever-you-call-’ems, peterists?”

“Pederasts,” Mattsson said.

“Yeah, I was never one of those. But Little Kaylee, she could get me in that habit, you know what I mean. That long blond hair and all.”

“You touch her, I’ll kill you.”

Horn laughed again. “Just kiddin’ you. I like a little tit on my girls. Listen, I don’t think you can trace this call, because I took precautions, but I better go anyway. I just wanted to chat. I’ll tell you what, Catrin: I really do like your looks.”

Her phone burped: a message coming in.

Horn asked, “What was that?”

“What was what?” She thumbed the message tab; a note from Davenport that said, “Keep him talking.”

“That noise?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was you. But don’t go, give me one little clue, one hint here: not about you, about this Wells woman. We need to track her, see if we can get dental records. Was she from the Twin Cities? Where would we find that?”

“Come on, I know you got computers…”

“You’d be surprised what isn’t in the computers…”

“Ah, shit, you bitch, you’re keeping me on the line. Fuck you.”

He was gone.

She sat looking at the phone for a minute, then went back to the hardwired phone and keyed in Davenport’s number. When he answered, she blurted, “You get him?”

“He was calling from Sauk Centre,” Lucas said. “He was calling on Mary Lynn Carpenter’s cell phone — so he was real. I yanked the Sauk Centre chief out of bed, he said he’d put every guy he had on the road, take down every tag that they see. But Horn could have been out on I-94 by the time they started looking — and we’d have no idea which way he was traveling.”

“Goddamnit…” Mattsson was so cranked that she found herself standing on her bed, without knowing exactly why. She sat down and said, “Now what?”

“We’re hoping he doesn’t pull the battery on the phone. We’re hoping that we can call him on that phone in about two hours… and that he doesn’t answer. If we can do that, we can get pretty close to where he’s calling from. If we can call him a second time, we’ll get even closer.”

“He’s gotta be from down here. He can’t be from up north,” Mattsson said.

R-A had been out on I-94 when he called, because like everybody else on the Internet, he knew that the cops could find the cell phone tower that the call had come from. He clicked off, and tossed the phone on the passenger seat.

He’d had a few beers, and now really didn’t want to get stopped, so he took it slow going back south, around the Cities. Stopped once at a truck stop to pee and buy a pack of cigarettes.

He was most of the way home when the cell phone rang. That froze him. He didn’t answer, but he thought, What if all they had to do was call? And if the phone company could find out where the phone was, to forward the call, couldn’t the cops do that, too? Now he was scared.

He looked for a side road — the phone had stopped ringing — but no side roads came up for a long minute, then another minute. The phone didn’t ring again, but R-A didn’t think he could wait: Were they coming for him right now?

Then a turnoff came up, and he went down a blacktop road for a quarter-mile, did a U-turn, jumped out of the truck, the phone in his hand, and got into the toolbox in back. After carefully wiping the phone down, he laid it on the blacktop in front of his headlights, and beat it to death with a ball-peen hammer.

Nobody came after him.

He made it home in fifteen minutes. Didn’t talk to Horn.

Crawled in bed and pulled the covers over his head.

Nobody came…

He couldn’t sleep, but lay there, his mind racing, tracing what he’d done that night. He hadn’t gotten a blonde, but hadn’t gotten caught, either.

As he finally drifted toward sleep, he was thinking about the girl on the bar stool, and how perfect she was, and then thought about Mattsson, and how perfect she’d be, and then thought about the feeling of satisfaction that came from beating the phone to death.

Then he was asleep.

Lucas called Mattsson a few minutes before three o’clock. “We rang him. The phone was still operating. He was on Highway 52 just south of Cannon Falls. So, you were right: he’s from down south.”

“I knew it. I knew it.”

“And you were right. But: he was moving. He wasn’t where he lives, yet. He could have been headed for either Holbein or Zumbrota. One of those two places, I think.”

“What do you want to do?”

“We’re going to give him time to get home. I’ll be in Zumbrota, because… I don’t know, because that’s where Shaffer was found. We’ll have the cops from both Zumbrota and Holbein ready to go. We need you guys from Goodhue to have a couple people ready—”

“I’ll take care of that,” she said.

“That’s why I called you,” Lucas said.

“Good. I’m coming to Zumbrota with you,” she said. “Where do you want to meet?”

“Five o’clock at the Zumbrota police headquarters,” Lucas said. “You know where it is?”

“Of course.”

“See you there. And, Catrin… bring your above-average guns.”