Field of Prey

20

Finding really big spuds is getting harder and harder,” Horn said. “That’s a good one, though.”

“You know what you can find?” R-A asked, as he carved the baking potato on the kitchen counter. “You got those big red sweet potatoes. The only thing is, they’re harder than regular potatoes. Be like hitting somebody with bare knuckles.”

“Could try it sometime, if the cops don’t get you first,” Horn said. Horn was looking a lot better, like he’d looked eleven or twelve years earlier, when he was alive. R-A was beginning to regret not getting rid of the body years before.

R-A finished carving, dried the potato with a paper towel, looked at it, said, “Close enough, I think.” He picked up a thin plastic glove, the kind food handlers wear, pulled it on, and slipped his four fingers into the holes through the potato, with his thumb wrapped around the bottom.

The fit was too tight, and he pulled the potato off his hand, did a little more whittling between the fourth and fifth finger holes, and tried again. This time, the fit was right: like a pair of brass knuckles, but made out of a big Idaho baking potato.

“This should put her down,” he said.

When going after women in the past, they’d tried several methods. The postal bag had worked well the first four times, but the fifth, with Heather Jorgenson, had been a disaster. They decided that in the future, the woman’s hands, feet, and mouth had to be securely taped. To do that, they had to be taken down in a hurry.

Their first thought had been chloroform or ether. Chloroform had been almost impossible to get without leaving a trail. Ether was tough to get, too, according to all the available sources at the time. Then they found out about John Deere diesel starting fluid, which is almost pure ether, and which they carried in the store. They’d turn the can upside down, punch a hole in the bottom with a nail to release the spray propellant, and then pour the ether into a bottle. And there you were.

One problem: induction was really slow. You could grab a woman, pull a bag over her head, with a rag inside, soaking wet with ether, and it might not knock her out for good for five minutes. She’d be screaming her head off all that time. Then, when she woke up, she’d be puking all over everything. Worse, you stank of ether. If you were pulled over by a cop, you’d be doing the stupid human tricks in one minute — and if the cop looked in the car, you’d either have to kill him, or hang.

So ether and chloroform were out.

Then R-A read somewhere about sapping people with potatoes. Usually, it’d be a potato in a sock, but after practicing with it for a bit, the method turned out to be unreliable. Better to fit the potato on your hand, punch them right in the mouth. They’d go down for the count, and by the time they were reoriented, they’d be trussed up like a Christmas turkey.

Quick, efficient, effective — and the potato would go out the truck window, to be run over by the regular traffic.

The hardest part of his investigation had been finding out where Mattsson actually lived. R-A could find a name, but not an address, on the Internet. She wasn’t listed in the county property tax records, which meant she was renting somewhere. He mentioned to a clerk at the store that he was looking for an old friend that he’d lost touch with, and the clerk suggested the court records for lawsuits and such.

That sounded smart, so R-A ran into Red Wing and found her in the court records: a divorce. The papers were being served to a downtown address, and when he went to look at it, found a storefront, with a locked door and a staircase off to one side. The mailbox said C. Mattsson. He took a look at the lock; he knew locks, because he sold them.

The lock was old, and not very good. Even better, the door had a glass panel, and if he could cut through the glass, he could slip his hand inside and unlock the door.

On the way back home, he stopped at Walmart and bought a pay-as-you-go cell phone, for cash. A burner, the dopers called them.

What else? He’d be climbing that stairs in the dark, and if he was wearing his usual boots, she might hear him coming. He had a cozy pair of moccasins for wearing around the house in winter. They oughta work.

“You better move fast,” Horn said, as sun spun down in a clear blue sky, and the night began coming up. They were sitting in the living room, looking out over the lawn. “You don’t have many days left, before they come in here.”

“I can get away with it,” R-A said.

Horn made a farting noise. “You got no chance. Fuck her while you can. Take a gun with you.”

“If I have to use a gun, I’m probably cooked anyway,” R-A said.

“The gun’s for you,” Horn said. “Gives you a choice.”

R-A rattled the ice cubes in his glass, and thought about it.

There was a bar in Red Wing called The Blue Ox, two blocks from Mattsson’s place, and that was where R-A set up. He got there at ten-thirty, nervous as a hen in a weasel house, and drank beer. Not too much beer, but some, maybe a six-pack spread over two and a half hours.

Every half hour or so, he’d tell the bartender to watch his stool, he had to pee. He’d stop at the men’s room, then go out the back door, walk down a block, and check the lights in Mattsson’s apartment.

An SUV was parked out front, and he assumed it was hers — there weren’t any garages around, and no other cars parked within a couple hundred feet. If she came out the door and he punched her, and then there was a guy behind her, an unknown lover… maybe another cop with a gun…

He would have a reason to carry a pistol. He’d brought it with him, because this whole night would be different. The other women he’d taken were usually drunk, often out of shape, unsuspecting, easy to take down. Mattsson could be a whole ’nother thing.

The lights were still on at midnight, but fifteen minutes later, were off. He wanted her a little groggy, so he gave her another fifteen minutes to get settled in bed, had one last beer, paid, and walked out of the bar.

He took his time walking down to the apartment. He’d done this nearly two dozen times, but was still jumpy, waiting for a cop car to turn the corner. He got to the Suburban, pulled on a jacket, checked the pockets: tape, plastic gloves, glass cutter and cutter guide, potato. The cutter guide was simply a piece of cardboard with a fist-sized circle cut out of it.

The tape had been pre-pulled, the end of it folded over, so he wouldn’t have to scratch around for the end. He took a breath, started the truck, drove around the block, and parked behind Mattsson’s SUV. Sat for a moment, sticking two pieces of tape across the top and bottom of the glass cutting guide, checked the block again, then got out, eased the truck door shut, and walked over to her door.

He stuck the guide to the door’s window, adjacent to the handle inside, and then ran the glass cutter around the inside of the cut-out circle of the guide. The cut was gritty, but quiet: he could feel the cut with his fingers, but he couldn’t hear it.

When he’d run around the initial groove a half dozen times, he went back to the truck and dropped the cutter guide and the cutter into the backseat. Another check, and he pulled on heavy plastic gloves, then stepped back to the door with the roll of tape. He stuck a strip of the tape inside the scored circle, and stuck the other end to the back of the glove on his right hand. With his left thumb, he put pressure on the glass circle, pushed, pushed, heard it crack, and then it popped. The tape kept it from falling inside and shattering. He fished it back outside, walked over to his truck, got in, and drove away.

A block down the street, he pulled over again, dumped all the tools except the thin gloves, the tape roll, a flashlight, the burner, and the potato into the back, and watched the windows in Mattsson’s apartment. No lights. He waited, slumped in the front seat, and then a cop car did turn the corner, and rolled slowly down the block, past him, past Mattsson’s, without slowing, to a stoplight. The car turned right on red, and rolled away….

R-A let out a breath.

Waited another ten minutes, then drove around the block again, looking for cops, and rolled to a quiet stop behind Mattsson’s SUV. Checked the block. Pulled on the moccasins and gloves. Got out, walked over to the door, stuck his hand inside, turned the knob. The door popped open. He listened, but expected no alarm, and didn’t get one.

The moccasins were good, and he climbed the stairs about as quietly as humanly possible, though he still created the occasional creak. He heard nothing from Mattsson’s apartment. Got to the top, and found four doors. He would have had no idea which one was hers, except that three of them had no number, and the fourth showed the numeral 1.

Another deep breath, a long listen, and he took the cell phone and potato from his jacket, slipped the potato on his right hand, and made the call.

Mattsson’s eyes clicked open. Her cell phone was a foot from her head, on the end table, waiting for the killer’s next call.

She picked it up and looked at the screen, which had nothing but an unfamiliar number. She picked up the hardwired phone and punched in Davenport’s cell phone number, and at the same time, she said, “Mattsson,” into her cell.

She recognized his voice with the first syllable. “How you doing, Cat?”

“Nobody calls me that,” she said. Davenport wasn’t answering. “I am coming for you.”

“Well, I know that,” the killer said. “There’ll be a big gunfight somewheres, and I’ll have my .30–06 B-A-R and take a couple of you-all down, and then you’ll kill me, and guess what, we won’t be even. I’ll be about twenty ahead. You know what I’m saying?”

“That’s crazy,” Mattsson said, then almost bit her tongue. Wrong word. “You need treatment. You need help. You really do…” Goddamn Davenport wasn’t answering. “You need to come in, because you don’t have to die.”

The killer laughed, a chuffing laugh, and said, “You ain’t gonna let me give up. Be honest, Cat. Ain’t gonna happen, not after I smoked that state cop. Anyway, I’m sure you’re tracking this by now, so I gotta go away. I just wanted to call you and tell you I left another little present for you up at the Black Hole. I know I’m gonna die, so, you know, a man’s gotta have some fun….”

He laughed a last time, and signed off.

Mattsson said, “Shit!” and jumped out of bed, called the Goodhue duty officer and was shouting at him, getting whoever was out there over to the Black Hole, more than one guy, everybody available, stop anyone on nearby roads.

She finished with the instructions, dressed, pulled her shoes on, grabbed her car keys, purse, gun, and headed for the door, leaving the lights on behind her.

No time, no time, she thought. He’ll be long gone.

She fumbled the chain off the door, yanked it open.

And there he was: she knew it the instant she sensed him.

R-A hit her, hard as he could, right on the point of the chin. The potato split and went flying and Mattsson went straight to the floor, and R-A was on top of her, like a tiger on a goat, slugged her again, rolled her, threw a twist of tape around her mouth, turned, taped her legs, turned again, wrenched her arms behind her. She was starting to struggle, just feebly, and made a loud moaning sound, and he taped her hands, and then wrapped more tape, sloppy but tight, across her lower face and mouth, threw more tape around her lower face, ankles, more around her arms, and more around her head. Then he dragged her fully inside, and pushed the door shut.

Her cell phone rang, but he kicked it away: didn’t want it anywhere near her.

He worked quickly, more wraps around her ankles, her arms and hands. She moaned again and started to struggle, but there wasn’t anything in it. He checked her pockets for weapons, found her pistol, but no knife. He left the pistol on the floor, wiped and tossed the burner — he didn’t need it anymore, and was afraid that if he carried it even a block, it would give the cops something they could use, like a location and time.

R-A looked around for anything he might have inadvertently dropped, that could give him away. Nothing. He was breathing hard, he realized, his heart going like a trip-hammer. He took a few seconds, tried to calm down, then picked her up, over his shoulder, carried her out into the hall, kicked the door shut again, and went down the stairs.

The streets were empty. He left her lying inside the door, walked quickly out to the Suburban, opened the back, then walked back, picked her up, and threw her inside. He climbed in after her, and took a quick couple of turns of tape across her eyes, to blind her.

A moment later, he was headed south out of the city. The available Goodhue cops should be heading west, toward the Black Hole.

He could loop around, and avoid them all.

With any luck…

His luck held.

He took her south to the town of Frontenac, then turned west and south on County 2. On the way, Mattsson apparently recovered from the punch, as he’d hoped she would, and began kicking at the inside of the truck, her boots pounding at the panels below the windows. After one particularly loud flurry, he started to laugh, and shouted back at her, “If you keep kickin’, you’ll wear yourself out. Then how’re you gonna fight me?”

That stopped her.

The blow to the head hurt Mattsson: she’d toppled backwards, and the back of her head cracked against the wooden floor, a second blow nearly as severe as the blow to her chin. Then the killer was on her, and he hit her again. She lost consciousness for a time, but she had no way to know how long. When she began to come back, her ankles and arms were already taped.

She was naturally a bit claustrophobic, and being bound, gagged, and blinded triggered all the phobia she had. She began to struggle against the tape, and then, because she could bend her legs, to mindlessly kick the panels on the inside of the truck.

The killer shouted something at her. She didn’t know what he said, but it stopped her kicking, because it interrupted the panic that had gripped her. When she’d controlled her breathing, she systematically tested the bonds on her legs, hands, and arms; and finding a cut in the carpeting of the truck she was in, she tried to scrape the tape off her eyes. If she could only see, she might make some progress. So she scraped, and turned, and scraped, and ripped up her forehead and both of her ears, and got nowhere.

She could get some leverage on the tape around her ankles, and tried to kick off her boots, but failed. Her arms were taped close to her body, and her hands were bound so tightly that she couldn’t feel her fingers.

The truck rolled on for a long time. Occasionally, she heard another car pass, but even that ended. The driver turned onto a gravel road, and that continued for several minutes, and then they were back on blacktop. He was picking his way across the countryside.

A new tactic: she straightened out the best she could, then rolled back and forth across the inside of the truck, trying to find something — anything — in the truck that she could use somehow.

She found nothing, and she began to panic again.

This could be it, she thought. She wouldn’t give up, but if he simply decided to strangle her, she was done. He was a madman, so she doubted that there would be any way to placate him. She had to work him, somehow. If she got the tape off her eyes, if she got it off her mouth, she had to talk to him, work him. She had quick hands, if she could get her hands free and get close enough to him, if she could blind him, scratch his eyes…

The ride seemed to go on forever.

Then it ended.

R-A used the remote to open the garage door, drove in, killed the engine, closed the garage door, and as it was rolling down, turned and called, “Honey, we’re home.”

Mattsson did nothing; no more kicking.

R-A said, “Okay, be that way.” He climbed out of the truck, went around to the back, opened the cargo doors, grabbed the tape between her ankles, dragged her halfway out of the truck, then tossed her up on his shoulder again. She struggled against him, but she was so bound up that it was hopeless, and so she stopped.

R-A carried her through the door into the house, where Horn waited in his wheelchair. “You got her.”

“Yes, I did,” R-A said. “Slick as a whistle.”

“Taking her straight down the basement?”

“Yup.”

Mattsson heard it all, but didn’t understand — it was the killer’s voice on both sides of the conversation.

R-A walked through the house to the basement door, with Mattsson still over his shoulder, dropped down the steps, banging her feet against the wall a couple of times, then around the corner and into the bomb shelter. He put her down on the concrete floor and said, “Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be right back.”

He was back in a minute, with another roll of tape and a box cutter with a razor blade. He said, “If you fight me, you’re gonna wind up getting cut, and it won’t do you no good. I’m working with a razor here.”

Sitting on her legs, to pin them, he taped her legs around her calves, then cut the tape off her ankles, peeled it away, then cut the laces on her boots and pulled them off with her socks. Then he re-taped her ankles with several wraps of tape.

Her arms were pinned by more wraps, and he left them, but peeled the tape off her wrists, then re-taped them, behind her back. Then he cut the tape that wrapped her eyes, and she looked up at him for the first time; her eyes as hard as marbles, and angry.

“Mmm, you are upset,” R-A said to her, in a teasing tone. “I’m going to leave that tape on your mouth, ’cause I don’t want to hear you pissing and moaning.”

She made some noises, but they were unintelligible, and he ignored them. He rolled her onto her stomach, sat on her back, straddling her, and began to cut her clothes away. That freed her arms, but as soon as her clothing was gone, he got the tape out again and, lifting her by her throat, again bound her arms to her sides. She began to flop around, so he waited until she was on her back, said, “Them’s some nice titties,” and backhanded her face, hard, and she stopped fighting.

He rolled her back over and cut her pants and underpants off. That done, he dragged her to a corner of the room and propped her up, and stepped away, and began taking his own clothing off.

He had to take off his boots to take off his jeans, but then he put the boots back on. When he was naked, R-A didn’t look like much: a wrinkled forty-something alcoholic with way too much wobbly fat around his waist, dead-fish pale below the neck and above the elbows, red nose. He had heavily muscled arms, and hard shoulders. He said, “I guess you know what’s coming next. I’m gonna fuck you.”

He dragged her to the weight bench, bent her over it, facedown, sat on her back, and took a half dozen wraps of tape around her neck and the bench. Then he cut her legs free and wedged himself between them.

And raped her.

After a while, he raped her a second time.

After another long time, he cut her neck free and said, “Okay, Cat, here comes your big chance. Here it comes, and you better grab it, because if you don’t, it’s gonna be nothing but fuckin’ you, until it’s time to get the rope.”

Mattsson had no idea what he was talking about. The rape, bad as it was, didn’t affect her much: it hurt, but she knew she could get over it. She did everything she could to avoid giving him any pleasure at all: she simply took it, without any reaction. Maybe later she’d need a shrink, maybe she’d need medical care: but that was later. What she needed now was to get loose.

Of course, if she did get loose, she’d kill him.

And he said to her, “Here comes your big chance…” and cut her neck free.

She turned her head: What could that mean?

R-A rolled her off the bench, leaving her legs free. He dragged the bench out of the room, came back, picked up the box cutter and the tape, which he’d left against a wall, and tossed them out through the door, toward the bench. He picked up his clothes, and the scraps of Mattsson’s clothes, and tossed them out on the bench. And finally, he held up a key and said, “This is what you’re fighting for.”

Mattsson was still lying on the floor, watched as he went to the door, pulled it closed, stuck the key in the lock, and turned it. They were locked in.

The room was probably fifteen feet long, and eight feet wide, nothing but gray-painted concrete block, some bare-bulb lights set in ceramic fixtures between the two-by-eight joists, and the door.

R-A came back to her, grabbed her ankles: she tried to kick him, and then tried to kick his hands off her, but he had a grip like iron, and twisted her ankles, rolling her over on her stomach again. He sat on her legs and said, “Hold still, there. I’m taking the tape off your wrists.”

She stopped fighting, and he peeled the tape away, then jumped back, away from her. She lay still for a moment, then glanced back at him, calculating the distance, and suddenly lurched away from him, to her feet, and turned to face him.

They were both naked in the cold room. Mattsson was on the balls of her feet, rubbing her hands, trying to get feeling back into her fingers, while R-A leaned against the far wall, waiting.

When her hands were coming back, she pulled the tape off her mouth and croaked, “Why?”

“I do like the pussy,” R-A said, “and I do like the killing, I got to tell you. I like the sound it makes, when you’re choking somebody out. But that’s not for a while, yet. It might not be at all, if you can take me.”

“Where are we?” Mattsson asked.

“Down my basement.”

Her tongue flicked out: it felt dry as dust. “I mean, what town?”

“Holbein.”

She looked around and asked, “I’m supposed to fight you?”

“That’s the only way you’re gonna get out of here.”

Mattsson pushed away from the wall behind her, and R-A did the same thing.

Mattsson had been judging him. He was out of shape, she thought: a lot of muscle, but a lot of fat, too. If she could get close enough, with either hand, she’d go for his eyes. Getting close enough would be a problem; when she moved away from the wall, he did, too, and then he fell into a boxing stance.

Mattsson took a step and he watched, then moved in on her and said, “Come on, come on, what are you gonna do? You’re a cop, you must’ve had—”

She waited until he was halfway through whatever he was going to say, and launched a roundhouse kick at his head. Nearly got him, but he pulled back in an eyelash of time and her foot just kissed his nose, just flicked it.

R-A blinked and stepped inside as her leg recoiled and hit her on the side of the face with a roundhouse right hand, like being hit with a brick, and she went down. Dazed, she tried to scramble back up, and he kicked her in the hip with a heavy boot and she went down again and he was on her, straddling her, beating her, and she was blacking out and nearly gone when he said, “A kick’s too slow, Cat. Something to remember for next time. But now, you got me all hot and bothered. Time for a little more fuckin’.”

He raped her again.

She was like a rag, after the beating, no way to resist.

She was on the concrete floor, blood seeping from her nose and mouth, when she heard the door open. He threw a cloth at her — an army blanket, as it turned out — and said, “See you later. You better get some rest, because you’re gonna need it.”

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