Field of Prey

23

Lucas was coming up to the Red Wing bridge on the Mississippi when his phone rang. Letty calling from El Paso.

“What’s up?”

“They’ve taken Del back into the operating room,” she said.

“Ah, no. Why? How bad?”

“They say he’s sprung a leak — that’s Cheryl’s language, not the doctor’s. The doctor told me that it wasn’t unusual. The shot that did all the damage just nicked the point of his pelvis and sprayed some bone fragments back into his intestinal cavity. He started running a fever and they think they have some contamination to clean up. The doc said they should be able to handle it, but it’s not good.”

“Ah, man. Ah, man, I oughta be there,” Lucas said.

“Not until you get Catrin back,” Letty said. “When will that be?”

“Tonight. I’ll get her back tonight.”

“I’ll call you when they take Del out of the operating room,” Letty said. “Cheryl’s trying not to freak out. You call me when you get Catrin.”

“Deal,” Lucas said. “You turned out to be a pretty good kid, you know? Even if you do date soccer players.”

He called Duncan, and asked where they were.

“We took about ten guys to interview Bonet. He pronounces his name bone-ay. Anyhow, he’s not the guy. We know that because he was at a party here until sometime after twelve last night, with his wife. He couldn’t have gotten to Red Wing even if he fit the rest of the profile: he’s big, he’s too young, and he’s got a wife who’s been with him since high school, and they’ve got four young kids.”

“All right. How about the other guy?”

“We’re saddling up right now,” Duncan said. “From the facts and figures, he looks better.”

“I’ll see you there,” Lucas said. “I’m crossing the Mississippi.”

He turned on his flashers and ran through Red Wing in a hurry, the navigation system taking him up Highway 61, the one that Bob Dylan revisited, and then west toward the town of Cannon Falls.

Davis Tory’s house was in the countryside two miles east of the town. Duncan called and said, “We’re coming up to Tory’s place now.”

“I’ll be there in one minute if my nav system is right,” Lucas said.

“See you there.”

The house was a quarter-mile or so down a lane off County 19. Lucas took the turn, accelerated up a long, low hill, and when he came to the crest, saw two SUVs and two sheriff’s cars climbing up a blacktop driveway toward a modern house that sat a hundred yards or so back from the road.

Lucas felt a touch of hope: the place was surrounded by a huge green lawn, carefully trimmed. There was a flagpole out front, with an American flag at the top. The house was barn-red, and behind it, off to the side, was a large metal building, the same color as the house.

The place looked obsessively neat, and Lucas was looking for somebody obsessive. The first cops out were wearing vests and helmets, and went to both the front and side doors. Lucas turned up the driveway in time to see somebody at the door of the house — a woman with pixie-cut dark hair in a blue dress. She said something to the cops, and pointed around to the side of the house, and then came out with them.

Lucas pulled up behind the last SUV and got out: Buford, the BCA agent, was there, an M-16 on the car seat next to his leg.

To Lucas: “He’s in the barn. That’s his wife.”

The helmeted cops were leading the woman toward the metal building. She pulled open a door and shouted something inside. A moment later, a man came out, short, muscular, and balding, in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, just as Saferstein had described him.

Buford said, “Shit: it ain’t him.”

Lucas: “Yeah?”

“The guy would have run, or put up a fight,” Buford said. “He and his old lady just look scared.”

“Yeah.”

Lucas turned away for a moment, looking out across the countryside. Another beautiful day, the corn gone dark green, the soybeans a lighter green, rolling away for miles and miles. And down the road, a white van with a big “3” on the side.

He turned back and walked along behind Buford to the cluster of cops around Tory.

Tory was saying, “… can look at the computer. I was on there until after midnight, writing invoices. They should be date-stamped on the program. I’ll tell you what, I know you’re supposed to have a search warrant and all, but this is no joke: I’m giving you permission to go in the house and the barn and anywhere else you want to go, and look at anything you want.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Duncan said. “But if it’s okay…”

“I wouldn’t do that, if it wasn’t for this crazy man running around the countryside,” Tory said. “You’d be up to your knees in lawyers, but this guy, somebody’s got to get your cop back, this what’s-her-name.”

“Catrin Mattsson,” Duncan said.

Lucas asked, “How’d you know about Catrin?”

Tory, showing a streak of sweat on his scalp, wiped it back with the heel of his hand and said, “It’s all over TV. They’re not doing anything else.”

Lucas said, “Speaking of which…”

They all turned and looked down to the road, where the van had pulled off to the side. As they watched, a cameraman came running around the nose of the van, a camera on his shoulder.

Tory asked, “Should I smile for the camera?”

Lucas left.

He drove to Holbein. On the way, Duncan called and said, “You took off?”

“I’m going to Holbein. I don’t know… I think the answer is in Holbein or Zumbrota. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Whatever it is, you’re gonna be on your own,” Duncan said. “The Red Wing cops found a video camera at a liquor store on Plum Street, which turns into Highway 58, which is the fastest way down to Holbein and Zumbrota. They say they can almost read the plates on every car and truck that went by last night. We’ve got a guy on the way down there, he’s going to get some screenshots off the video and pull the plates, starting with any dark-colored pickups, and then everything else. I’m going over there with Buford, we got a lot of tape to look at… I think it might be our best shot.”

“What about the other guys?”

“Some of them I’ve got to send home. They haven’t had any sleep for two days now, and they’re out of gas. I’m also gonna drop a couple guys off at the Black Hole… you know, if the guy’s nuts…”

“I hear you, Jon. Jesus, if he’s already killed her…”

“Keep the faith, bro.”

Ten minutes to five. Lucas went to the bank, found it about to close. He identified himself and told the receptionist, “I need to talk to your president, or your manager. The boss.”

A couple of years earlier, Virgil Flowers had been stuck with a similar problem, and he’d partly solved it by the simple expedient of asking the smartest people in a small town who they thought the killer might be. He got back a long list, but, sure enough, the killer had been on the list. But Flowers had had more time. Lucas looked at his watch: he had no time, no time.

Flowers’s technique had created a scandal in law enforcement circles, where many argued that the technique had been severely unprofessional, and nobody had tried it again, as far as Lucas knew.

Not that Flowers particularly cared about the question of professionalism. Lucas had once been with him when Flowers had tried to stop a killing by shooting the prospective killer in the chest. He’d hit her in the foot.

Lucas had nothing else: his brain felt like it was stuffed with fudge: nothing was moving. So he sat on a black leather couch while the receptionist…

“Yes? Officer? Can I help you?”

The branch manager was named Sandy Rodriguez. She took him back to her office and said, “I really want this guy caught.”

“We’ll get him,” Lucas said. “The question we’re dealing with now is, will we get him before he kills Catrin Mattsson?”

“My family said a prayer for her at lunchtime,” Rodriguez said, as she sat behind her desk. “How can I help?”

Lucas said, “I’ll tell you the absolute truth, and trust that you won’t go talking to the television people. We’ve got a huge pile of information that we can use when we get a name. We got two possible names today, and we were able to eliminate them almost immediately.”

“That book man, up by Cannon Falls…”

“That’s been on television already?”

“About fifteen minutes ago.”

“Aw, jeez. We’re trying not to hurt people… anyway, I came here because bankers are smart and knowledgeable about their communities… and I want to ask… if you were to come up with a list of people who you thought might be able to do something like that… from here in Holbein… who’d be on your list?”

She looked at him steadily for a few seconds, then shook her head once and said, “Nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody. I can say that, because, I’ve been thinking about it. So has everybody in town. I talked to three or four… or five, or maybe six… different people today about it, almost everybody who was in my office today talked about it. We don’t know. Nobody knows. We can’t come up with a name. We all know people who are troubled, but we wouldn’t even suspect that they could do anything like this… and for so long. That’s the thing. There’s a boy in my oldest son’s class, he’s very troubled… but he’s fourteen.”

“Not him,” Lucas said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Lucas said, “Okay. Then give me five names of people who might know, smart people who know the community….”

Lucas got five names from her, and he hurried along Holbein’s Main Street like a gust of wind, cornering the people on Rodriguez’s list, asking the question, getting shakes of the head… and a few more names. When he ran the names through the BCA databases, he always found disqualifying problems: too young, too tall, and in one case, too much in the Hennepin County Jail for the last four months.

Letty called, as he was walking past a tiny park, with three loose dogs playing with each other as their owners chatted. “Del’s out of the OR, but he’s still asleep,” Letty said. “The docs said they got two tiny holes, and they think they got them all this time. They say he’s strong, and unless something weird pops up, he’s going to make it.”

“They said that?”

“They did. Cheryl was all over them, and that’s what they said, and she believes them. He’s going to be asleep for a few hours. We’re going back to the hotel and try to sleep ourselves.”

“All right. That’s good, that’s good. Jesus, that takes a load off,” Lucas said.

“What about Catrin?”

“I’ll find her. I’m going to find her.”

At seven-thirty, he was sitting in the supermarket parking lot, watching shoppers come and go. The killer had had Mattsson for eighteen hours. If she wasn’t dead yet, she’d be dead soon. Looking out at quiet streets, at the lights coming on in the windows, at the ash trees marching up the hills… What could he do?

He worried it, worked it… called the duty officer: “Could you get the DMV to try to run all dark pickup trucks against owners in Holbein and Zumbrota?”

“They’re trying to write a program right now that’ll do that, but they’re not getting it done very quick,” the duty officer said. “The whole data thing is complicated, and has all kinds of protections, and all the programming is outdated… it’s all fucked up.”

“Who got them to do that?”

“Jon did — couple days ago. They’re still thrashing around.”

Lucas rang off, took one of the gray pills from his shirt pocket, swallowed it with a sip of warm Diet Coke. Looked down at the supermarket. The killer could be down there right now. They’d all know him, they’d be chatting with him, but they wouldn’t know….

A light went on.

Of course they’d know him. They didn’t know he was the killer, but they’d probably see him every day.

Sonofabitch. He took his phone out, his soul touched by despair, because he knew what he’d find: he’d deleted the photos of Sprick sent to him by Mattsson when he was talking to the candy-shop woman. He’d deleted them for no good reason, except that he always cleaned up his phone; simply a habit.

Sprick. He fired the truck up, hit the flashers, and took off. Sprick was eight miles away, more or less. Six minutes. He didn’t know how much time he had left, but with the orange sun sliding down in the western sky, he felt there wasn’t much, not much at all.

The killer would get rid of Mattsson’s body after dark, he thought, when he’d feel safest, when he could drive around, find a safe spot out in the countryside. He had no time.

Lucas was traveling a bit over a hundred miles an hour when he left town, and never slowed down, except once, to sixty, when he overtook a John Deere tractor using two-thirds of the road, four miles out of Zumbrota.

He was chanting out loud: “Be there, be there.”

He had to slow down going through Zumbrota, but got to Sprick’s house a little more than eight minutes after he left Holbein. Lights in the window. He parked, the flashers still blinking out into the evening, ran up the sidewalk. Sprick’s curtains were pulled, but Lucas saw movement at one of the windows, and banged on the door with his fists.

Sprick opened the door and peeked out. “What now?”

“I gotta take your picture. I got no time, but I need to take your picture,” Lucas said.

Sprick was wearing a gray army-style T-shirt, which was fine. Lucas put him against an eggshell-white wall, gave Sprick a ten-second explanation of what he was doing, and used his cell phone to snap a half dozen close-ups.

“Thank you,” he said, after checking them. He ran back toward the car, and Sprick called, “Good luck. Get him!”

Ten minutes more, and Lucas rolled down the hill to the Holbein supermarket again. He hustled across the parking lot and into the store. A cashier was waiting on a woman in the single open checkout lane, and Lucas hurried over and asked, “Where’s the manager?”

“What?” She looked at him, sweating, rushed, his hair messed up, like she expected him to produce a gun and a mask.

“The manager! The manager!” he said. “I’m a cop, I need the manager! Right now! Right now!”

The cashier picked up a phone and said, “Manager to checkout. We need a price check on Vlasic Kosher Dills.”

Lucas said, “What?”

The cashier said, “You said you needed him right now. That’ll get him right now.” She turned and looked toward the distant bakery counter, where a heavyset short man in a pink shirt had turned the corner and was half-running toward them. “Here he comes.”

“The pickle thing was a code?” Lucas asked, taking a corner of a half-second to be amused.

“Just like in a hospital,” she said. “It means ‘emergency.’”

“That’s neat,” said the woman checking out.

The manager hustled up and asked, “What’s the problem?”

Lucas had his ID out: “I need you to get all your people, all the ones who interact with your customers. I need them… over there.” He pointed toward the beer lane. “Right now. You gotta get them in a hurry. Please.”

“What’s—”

“Just get them,” Lucas said.

The manager got them, and got a shelf-stocker to stand in the checkout lane to apologize to any shoppers for a short delay. With a half dozen store employees gathered around, Lucas said, “This is really important. I’m going to show you a photograph. Just for one second. I don’t want you to look for differences, or why it couldn’t be who you think it is: I just want a name of who it might be. Who you think it is with a quick look.”

He looked around at the group: “Everybody understand?”

They all nodded.

Lucas turned on the cell phone and picked a photo, the one in which Sprick looked most stolid, most unremarkable.

He turned the phone around in his hand, then said, “Here it comes.” He swung it in a slow arc, in front of their faces, giving each person perhaps a second to look at it.

Nobody said anything for two or three seconds, then the manager said, “Uh, yeah, that’s R-A. That’s Roger Axel.”

“Who’s he?” Lucas asked.

The rest of them were nodding, and the cashier said, “I see him every day. He runs the hardware store.”

She pointed out the window, and up the hill. Lucas could see the hardware store sign. He’d been sitting in the parking lot, looking at it. Just as Shaffer would have been, if he’d been in his truck, eating a donut. Then maybe he had an idea, about where you’d make keys, and maybe he dribbled a little jelly into his notebook….

The manager said, “You don’t think he’s…” but he was talking at Lucas’s back.