Field of Prey

2

The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is housed in a modern redbrick-and-glass building in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lucas Davenport had once explained the somewhat odd name to an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation this way: “In Minnesota, see, we actually apprehend the assholes, instead of just investigating them.”

The fed said, “Really? Doesn’t that get you in trouble? I’d think the paperwork would be a nightmare.”

Lucas parked his Porsche 911 in the lot below his office window, where he could keep an eye on it. The last time he’d parked it out of eyesight, somebody had stuck a vegan bumper sticker on it that said: “Beef: It’s What’s Rotting In Your Colon.”

He hadn’t found it until he pulled off the interstate, wondering why other drivers were honking at him: A tire problem? Something about to fall off? When he saw the sticker, he crawled home in shame, through the back streets, and then spent a half hour peeling it off, cursing the rotten bastard who’d stuck it there.

Today, he would park within pistol range.

His office was on the second floor, in a corner, and when he got there… there was nobody home. He walked back out to a conference room, where the door was open. One of his agents, Del Capslock, was sitting at the conference table, looking solemn, part of a crowd of solemn agents. Lucas was sure he hadn’t missed a scheduled meeting, so…

Del looked out through the door, saw Lucas, and crooked a finger at him.

Lucas had been out of the office since the previous afternoon. Before leaving, he’d heard that the BCA crime-scene crew was leaving for a murder site west of Red Wing, a small Mississippi River town something less than an hour south of St. Paul, famous for boots and country crocks and the state reform school: “If you don’t eat your Cap’n Crunch, the cops will send you to Red Wing.”

Something about a cistern, with a body in it.

Lucas slipped into the conference room. All the chairs were full, so he propped himself in a corner. Henry Sands, a bald man of limited emotional dimension, sat at the head of the table, the flats of his hands pressed to his temples, as though he were trying to hold his head together. Not a good sign, since Sands was the director of the BCA.

Rose Marie Roux, the commissioner of public safety, and Sands’s boss, whose office was in a different building entirely, was sitting at one corner of the table, rubbing her forehead with the tips of her fingers. Another bad sign.

Almost everyone else — a dozen people, ten male, two female — were staring at them, waiting, or looking at a variety of yellow legal pads, laptops, and iPads. When nobody else spoke, Lucas did. “How bad is it?”

Roux looked up and said, “Lucas. Good morning. They’ve got fifteen skulls. They don’t have them all, yet. They’re not even sure that they’ve got most of them. We just had Beatrice Sawyer on the phone, and she said it’s like excavating ten feet of cold bean soup. She says there might be four feet of bones at the bottom.”

“Holy shit.”

“That’s the prevailing sentiment,” Roux said. She was a heavyset woman with a notorious smoking habit and hair of an ever-changing color. A politician and former prosecutor, Minneapolis police chief, and, briefly, a street cop, she was one of Lucas’s oldest friends and a longtime ally.

“Have they identified anyone?” Lucas asked.

Sands said, “Mary Lynn Carpenter. She disappeared from Durand, Wisconsin, two weeks ago. They found her car at the Diamond Bluff cemetery, across the river from Red Wing. She’d go there every once in a while to clean up her grandparents’ graves. The cemetery’s on the Mississippi, above a slough. They’d been looking for her body in the river.”

“Who else?” Lucas asked.

Sands shook his head. “Don’t know, but Beatrice said that judging from the skulls, they’re all women. Carpenter had been strangled with a piece of nylon rope. It’s still around her neck. What’s left of her neck. She’s probably been in the well for two weeks.”

“Cistern,” somebody said.

“Can’t they pump it out?” Lucas asked.

“They’re trying, but the bottom of the cistern is cracked and the crack’s below the water table,” Sands said. “Water seeps back in almost as fast as they can pump it out. They can’t pump too fast, because they don’t want to lose any of the… material.”

“What towns are down there? Besides Red Wing?” Roux asked.

One of the agents was looking at a laptop and said, “Not much — closest town, besides Red Wing, is Diamond Bluff, across the river in Wisconsin, less than five hundred people. That’s where Carpenter was when she disappeared. Ellsworth is fourteen miles away, also in Wisconsin, three thousand people. In Minnesota, there’s Lake City, seventeen miles south of Red Wing, Holbein, fourteen miles southwest, Zumbrota, eight miles past Holbein, Hastings, more or less twenty-five miles north, and Cannon Falls, twenty miles west. The cistern is eight miles from Red Wing, nine miles from Holbein, eleven from Lake City, quite a bit further from Cannon Falls and Hastings.”

“Are we talking to the Wisconsin DCI?” Lucas asked.

“We are,” Sands said. “They already had an agent involved, on the Carpenter disappearance. He’s down at the scene now.”

Another agent, a woman, jumped in: “On a sheer numbers basis, the killer’s probably from Red Wing. Next most likely is that he’s from here in the Cities — we’re fifty miles from the cistern. But if you were originally from that area, and knew about the cistern, and you were living up here and needed a body dump…”

A third agent: “We don’t have the facts. We’ve got to identify more of the bodies before we can start talking about where the killer’s from. Right now, with one identifiable body, picked up in that area, I’m betting he’s from down there. If we find a couple more from down there…”

That set off a round of squabbling, until Roux held up a hand and said, “Okay, okay, okay. You guys can do the numbers later. Henry, we need a structure here. We need the most intense investigation we’ve ever run, because, my friends, this is pretty much it. You are all standing in front of the fan that the shit just hit. They’ll be screaming about this from every TV station in the nation tonight and they will continue screaming until we get the killer. Is that perfectly clear to everyone?”

Everyone nodded.

Sands said, “Bob Shaffer will run the investigation. There’ll be a lot of ins and outs to the case, so he’ll need a lot of guys. Anybody who isn’t closing out a case, Bob’ll be talking to you. The only exemptions are Lucas’s crew…”

He looked over at Lucas: “Can you switch off the Bryan case?”

Lucas shook his head. “Not really. We still haven’t figured out whether he’s dead.”

“He’s dead,” somebody said.

Somebody else disagreed: “No, he’s not. Ten-to-one he’s in Honduras, or someplace like it.”

Lucas said, “I just don’t know.”

“What’s Flowers doing?” Roux asked.

Lucas said, “Vacation, down in New Mexico. He left two days ago, pulling his boat. He won’t be back for three weeks.”

“New Mexico’s a fuckin’ desert,” somebody offered.

“He says there’s a musky lake,” Lucas said. “He said he’s gonna clean it out.”

“He ought to bring the boat back. We could use it in the cistern,” Roux said. And: “All right. Bob, get your crew together and get going.”

Shaffer, who had been sitting silently taking notes, nodded and stood up and said, “I want to talk to Jon and Sandy right now, my office. Everybody else, we’ll meet back here in a half hour.”

Roux stood up and said, “Lucas, I want you to take a look at whatever Bob comes up with. Henry, I want updates every couple of hours today, and then every morning and evening until we close this out. Let’s get this done, guys. Let’s get it done in one big hurry.”

While they were all there together, so they’d all hear it at once, Lucas pushed away from the wall and said, “I don’t think that’s going to happen, Rose Marie. If there are really that many dead women, and we didn’t know about it, didn’t connect the disappearances, then the killer is smart and careful. I mean, really careful. This could take time.”

“I don’t want to hear that,” Roux snapped.

“You need to,” Lucas snapped back. He looked around. “We don’t want anyone hinting to the media that this is gonna be a walk in the park, that we’ll get the guy next week. If we do, that’s fine. But if we don’t, the media’s gonna be a hair shirt, and we’re all gonna be wearing it.”

All the cops looked at him for a moment, then Roux said, “Okay. He’s right. So: we have one guy talking to the media. Anybody else talks, you’ll be manning the new bureau down in Bumfuck, Minn. Everybody understand?”

Lucas spoke to Shaffer for a few moments after the meeting broke up, with Del orbiting around them. Shaffer and Lucas didn’t particularly like each other, but had worked several ugly cases together, with good results. They agreed that Lucas would be on the distribution list for everything coming out of the investigation, but would stay away from the main case.

“I might talk to a few people, if I come across any that are interesting,” Lucas said.

“That’s fine,” Shaffer said. “If you get anything, be sure to update the files.”

“I will do that,” Lucas said.

Shaffer started to step away, then said, “Lucas: I appreciate what you said to Rose Marie. This could take a while. You were the right guy to tell her that.”

Lucas nodded: “Had to be said.”

Lucas and Shaffer had been successful, when they worked together, precisely because they were so radically different in style.

Shaffer was a data collector and a grinder: with enough data, he believed, you could solve anything. His files were wonders, his spreadsheets were remarkable, his decision matrices were monuments to game theory. And they worked. Anytime his agents could collect enough relevant data, his clearance rate was exceptional.

Shaffer looked like a grinder: neatly dressed at all times, in short-sleeved shirts in the summer, blue or white oxford cloth in winter, with bland neckties, wrinkle-free khaki trousers from Macy’s, and blue blazers. He exercised extensively and efficiently, ate right, didn’t drink or smoke. Married to his high school sweetheart, he was slender, of average height, with pale brown hair.

He’d come up the hard way: a patrol officer in Duluth, then a detective, then up through the ranks at the BCA, until he’d become one of the go-to investigators. He knew statistics: he’d taken college courses in statistics and geography at the University of Minnesota’s extension school. He’d kept his nose clean.

Lucas was a connection collector, an investigator who liked to knit people together, to put one source with another and let them fight it out. He thrived on mysteries.

A tall, brooding man with dark hair, friendly blue eyes, and a sometimes frightening smile, Lucas was hawk-faced and heavy in the shoulders, and scarred from encounters with the misbegotten. Like Shaffer, he’d gone to the University of Minnesota, where instead of statistics, he’d studied hockey and women.

He’d never had to work his way up. He’d spent a short time on patrol, and then jumped over three dozen senior men to become a Minneapolis detective. Nor had he tried very hard to keep his nose clean. He’d been pushed out of the Minneapolis police department after beating up a pimp who’d church-keyed one of his sources.

He’d gotten back into the department when Roux, the new chief, made him a deputy chief, a political appointment. That job ended when Roux quit to become the state’s commissioner of public safety. But as soon as she reasonably could, Roux had dropped Lucas into the BCA, right into a top slot.

His clearance rate, like Shaffer’s, was excellent. Lucas exercised, but inefficiently: running frequently, but not every day, playing basketball and senior hockey. Lucas had once had a reputation for chasing skirts; and catching them. He had a daughter out of wedlock, two children from his only marriage, and an adopted daughter. He’d drink a beer in the evening, and knew his barbecue.

With all their natural differences, in career path and personality, Shaffer and Lucas were never going to be close: but with all the important differences, their real distaste for each other came on relatively minor issues. Shaffer was a natural socialist, who’d grown up in an Iron Range union family. He didn’t like rich people, not even self-made rich people.

Lucas was self-made rich.

Even worse than the money was Lucas’s whole lifestyle: the Porsche, his history with women, the wardrobe. Lucas bought his working clothes in men’s boutiques, and every couple of years, went to New York.

To shop.

Lucas thought of Shaffer, when he thought of Shaffer at all, as a clerk.

Shaffer knew it.

When he’d finished talking to Shaffer, Lucas and Del went down to his office, where Shrake and Jenkins were waiting. They were both big men, in suits that were too sharp, as though they’d fallen off a truck in Brooklyn. Both had even, extra-white teeth, and for the same reason: their real, natural, yellower teeth had been knocked out at one time or another. Lucas told them about the find at Red Wing.

“We’re throwing Bryan out the window?” Shrake blurted.

“No, Shaffer’s doing the work,” Lucas said. “We’ll be mostly talking.”

“I hate to see that officious prick get all the glory,” Jenkins said. “He’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t give you a six-inch putt.”

“He does good records,” Del said.

“He’s also exactly the right guy to run this case,” Lucas said. “It’s gonna be all sorting bones and extracting DNA and running the spreadsheets.”

“Still wouldn’t give you a putt,” Jenkins said.

“Probably because he’s not fuckin’ stupid enough to play golf,” Lucas said. “Anyway, if Shaffer doesn’t find this killer in a hurry, they’ll be sniffing around our asses, looking for help. Let’s close out Bryan.”

Bryan.

Bryan had run a St. Paul investment company that turned out to be a Ponzi scheme, a scheme that had eventually come up a couple of Ponzis short. He’d been arrested and the state attorney general’s office was trying to get back the thirty-one million dollars that had been entrusted to him by 1,691 small investors, most of them elderly. Bryan said the money was gone — spent on fast Italian cars, slow Kentucky horses, and hot Russian women, along with a $250,000 RV, which lost half its value when he turned the key on it, and an unprofitable ostrich ranch in Wyoming. Rumor said that a good deal more of the cash had gone up his nose.

There were doubters.

Bryan had divorced three years earlier, and his ex-wife, Bloomie, now lived in a house very near, but not quite on, the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach. According to the local conspiracy theorists, Bryan had seen the trouble coming, had given an overly generous divorce settlement to his wife, who would support him when the problems became public and the company went broke. There was also talk that he owned a Cabo San Lucas estate under a Mexican corporate shadow.

That may have been true, but apparently had become irrelevant when Bryan’s court-ordered ankle monitor went dead, and his BMW M6 convertible had been found parked near the St. Croix gorge at Taylors Falls with the front seat soaked in his blood. No body had been found. There were, at latest count, 1,691 suspects in Bryan’s disappearance.

“Well, we’ve already interviewed twelve of them, so that only leaves one thousand six hundred and seventy-nine to go. We should have that done by 2020,” Jenkins said.

“Start with the ones young enough to move a body,” Lucas suggested. “That’ll cut the workload by ninety-eight percent.”

“Are you gonna help?” Shrake asked.

“First, I’m gonna go down and take a look at this cistern, this well, where they found all the bodies,” Lucas said. “Then this evening, I’ll be talking to the beautiful Carrie Lee Pitt, about Bryan’s missing clothes. I’m hoping she’ll let me peek in her closet.”

“How come we’re not talking to Carrie Lee Pitt?” Jenkins asked.

“Because that will take some savoir faire, which you don’t got any of,” Lucas said.

Jenkins looked offended, lifted an arm and sniffed his armpit, and said, “Yes, I do.”

Jenkins and Shrake left, and Lucas turned to Del, who had taken Lucas’s visitor’s chair and put his feet up on a file cabinet.

Del was a thin man, with a sun-darkened face of knobs and wrinkled plains, a little more than average height: a dusty guy in his mid-fifties, who looked like he lived on the street. He was wearing a long-sleeved turquoise cowboy shirt and faded jeans over hiking boots. “We’re going down to the well?”

“Cistern,” Lucas said. “Yeah, I guess we better. But Jesus, that shirt makes me want to pluck my eyeballs out. You been hanging out at Goodwill again?”

“From what I hear, if we’re going down to the well — the cistern — we’re gonna want to burn the clothes afterwards,” Del said. “I’d rather burn a polyester shirt than a two-thousand-dollar Italian suit. Or three-thousand-dollar Romanian shoes.”

“British shoes. And when you’re right, you’re right.” Lucas pushed himself out of his chair. “We’ll stop at my place on the way out. You ready?”

“As ever.”

“Fifteen skulls so far,” Lucas said, as he turned off the office lights. “And there are more down the well.”

“Somebody’s been a bad, bad boy,” Del said.

On the way out of the building, they ran into Sands, the BCA director. He was looking harried, and said, as they walked down the stairs to the first floor, “This can come to no good end. Remember I said that.”

“It already did, for at least fifteen women,” Del said. “But we’ll get him.”

“Not soon enough,” Sands said. He breathed in Lucas’s direction, and Lucas had to fight an impulse to step back: Sands’s breath was notorious. “It’s already not soon enough. Charlie’s already getting calls from the Today show.”

Charlie handled the BCA’s media relations.

At home, Lucas changed into worn Levi’s 505s and a blue chambray work shirt from Façonnable; he let the shirt hang loose to cover the .45 in his beltline.

He and Del loaded an Igloo cooler into the back of his black Mercedes SUV, and Lucas threw a nylon daypack on top of the cooler. On the way out of town, they stopped at a BP station for gas, and picked up ice, bottled water, Coke and Diet Coke, and headed south across the Mississippi.

“I have a psychological observation,” Del said, as they crossed the water.

“Nobody’s more qualified to make one,” Lucas said.

“It’s just this. You say, ‘fifteen skulls,’ and I say, ‘Somebody’s been a bad, bad boy.’ If an outsider had heard that, they’d think we had no feelings at all. I’d have sounded like an asshole.”

A Prius passed Lucas, doing ninety, and then cut in front of him and slowed. Lucas tapped the brakes and said, “Blow me.” And to Del, “Not you, the Prius. And what you say is true. Not a new experience, for you, though.”

“Or you. We sit around and bullshit about this stuff, like we’re reading a bus ticket, but when we start finding out about the victims, we’re gonna get pissed,” Del said. “We’re not pissed now, but we will be. We’ll find out about their lives, about what they wanted to do, and all the misery this killer caused, we’ll start brooding about it, and we’ll get pissed.”

“Get to the point. I want to put on my Pink album.”

“The point is this — Henry and Rose Marie are already pissed. They’re pissed because the politics might hurt them. They’re not pissed about fifteen women down the well, they’re pissed about how they’re going to look on TV. You know, the big-shot cops who let this happen right here in River City.”

“In the interest of your continuing employment,” Lucas said, “let’s keep this psychological observation between you and me.”

“You know what I’m saying,” Del said.

“I do,” Lucas said. “It’s the way of the world, man. There are the worker bees, and the manager bees. The worker bees take care of the work, the manager bees take care of themselves.”

They were headed out on a good summer day, but hot, down Highway 52, through Cannon Falls, and on south. The cistern site was in rolling farm country west of the Mississippi River Valley, on a gravel road off Goodhue County 1. They spent a few minutes wandering around, after an off-map shortcut didn’t work out, and so took an hour to find the site.

The road was blocked by two cop cars five hundred yards out, and a half dozen TV vans were parked on the shoulder of the road, reporters and photographers clustered on the shady sides of the vans.

“Lot of TV,” Del said. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen this much.”

“Gonna be rough,” Lucas said. “Shaffer’s gonna be hip-deep in bullshit before he’s through.”

“Better him than us,” Del said.

The cops at the roadblock, both sweating furiously in their long-sleeved uniforms, looked at Lucas’s ID. Lucas said, “I got ice-cold Coke, Diet Coke, and water in the back.”

“Cokes,” the cops said simultaneously, and Del dug them out of the cooler and passed them to Lucas, who handed them through the window to the cops and asked, “Who doesn’t get speeding tickets in Goodhue County?”

“You’re good up to ag assault, far as I’m concerned,” the cop said, and they went on through.

“Too many people,” Del said, as Lucas pulled onto the shoulder of the dusty road, fifty yards short of the site. The shoulder was filled with cop cars, civilian cars and trucks and vans, and an empty heavy-equipment trailer.

“Everybody’s gonna want to be here, just to say they were,” Lucas said.

They got out of the truck, into the hot midday air smelling of roadside weeds. Lucas stuffed Cokes and bottles of water into the daypack, and they ambled along the gravel road toward the farm turnoff. Halfway to the cistern site, they ran into a BCA agent named Don Buford, who saw them coming and said, “I don’t suppose you got a beer in there?”

“Got a Coke or a Diet Coke,” Lucas said. “Or a bottle of water.”

“I’ll give you ten dollars for a Diet Coke.”

Lucas gave him the Coke and Buford looked around and said, “Ain’t this a great day? Hot, sunny, no wind. Tell you what, when you get up there, you’ll be praying for cold, wind, and rain. The smell… half the guys up there have been pukin’ their guts out.”

“What’s there to see?” Lucas asked.

Buford shrugged: “Just the site. They’re calling it the Black Hole of Goodhue. You know, like…”

“… the Black Hole of Calcutta. We get it,” Del said.

“The whole crime-scene crew is up there,” Buford said, rolling the cold Coke bottle across his forehead. “It’s a nightmare. Got boxes of skulls. Nothing for me, though. I’d eat a sandwich, if I could keep it down.”

“We’re wasting our time?” Lucas asked.

“Oh… no. You gotta go look, and look around,” Buford said. “Maybe tell you something about the guy who did this. Got to be some kind of crazy farmer. Somebody who butchers his own meat, or something. Some kinda…” Buford shuddered. “… monster.”

They left Buford in the road and walked up a slight rise to the turnoff, showed their IDs to another cop, and walked up the grassy track into the heart of the old farmstead. There they found four people in hazmat suits peering into a hole in a concrete slab, and a dozen cops scattered through the trees and brush, watching.

A yellow front-end loader’s lift bucket dangled over the hole, with a steel cable dropping into the hole itself. Off to one side was a stack of semi-transparent plastic tubs, the kind you can buy at Target, with paper stickers on the top-covers: human remains. A skull grinned out of one of them. A hundred feet from the hole, an air compressor was working, and in the other direction, a Honda generator. Power and air lines led to the hole. As they got closer, the stink hit them, and Lucas turned away.

“Buford was right,” Del said. He dug into his pack and came up with a jar of Vicks VapoRub, opened it, and offered it to Lucas, who took out a bit on the end of a finger and rubbed under his nose. Del did the same, and they walked up to the hole, and a woman standing next to it in a dark blue hazmat suit with the hood down. Beatrice Sawyer, head of the crime-scene crew.

Lucas said, “Hey, Bea.”

She turned and said, “Lucas, Del. Nice day, huh?”

Breathing through his mouth, Lucas peered into the cistern, which was illuminated with LED work lights. He could see another person in a hazmat suit, ten feet down, suspended on a wooden platform over a murky gray liquid that could hardly be called water. The suit was sealed, with air lines leading into the helmet.

“You’ve been down there?” he asked.

“Yeah. That’s Hopping Crow down there now. We’re trying to find a way to get the water out, without disturbing the remains too much,” Sawyer said. “Larry’s placing pump lines with filters that we got from a septic-supply place in Red Wing. We’re improvising. Don’t know if it’ll work.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, we could get the water out with any pump that’s large enough,” she said. “Everything else would come, too. We need to gently remove it, with a flow fast enough to replace the inflow of groundwater. This cistern is essentially sitting on a spring.”

“Hmm.” Lucas didn’t know about farm stuff.

“How’s the skull count?” Del asked.

“Seventeen, now,” Sawyer said. “There are more. We can feel them, but we can’t see them, and we don’t want to damage them. We need to see the dental work.”

Del said, “Bobbing for Satan’s apples.”

“Pretty fuckin’ poetic, Del,” Sawyer said.

“Any more IDs?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. One. A probable, anyway. When we were using another pump, it got jammed up, and when we pulled it, we found it had sucked up a plastic Visa card, still readable, issued to a Janice Williams. A Janice Williams from Cannon Falls disappeared eight years ago. She was a student at Dakota technical college. Her friends thought she might have gone to Miami — she knew some guy down there, and she’d talked about going down. Her parents thought she’d been kidnapped, and she’s never been back in touch. That’s all I know at this point, but I think it’s likely her, down there.”

“Will we screw anything up…” Lucas paused when a man a few feet away suddenly bent over, then rapidly walked away, still bent, and began retching against a tree. They looked away and Lucas started again: “Will we screw anything up if we walk around here? To look the place over?”

“Possibly, but I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said. “There have been five hundred people here today, and if there’s anything that hasn’t been stepped on, I don’t know what it would be.”

Del asked, “Can you get DNA out of vomit?”

Sawyer nodded. “Sure.”

“If the killer popped the top off this thing two weeks ago, when this last woman disappeared, is it possible that he puked into the dirt, right where we’re standing?”

They all looked at their feet and Sawyer said, “I wish you’d asked that question yesterday afternoon.”

Sawyer had been sweating heavily in the hazmat suit, and she greedily sucked down one of Lucas’s Diet Cokes. A man stepped up behind them and said, “Hey, Lucas, Del. You guys got another Coke?”

Lucas turned: “Hey, Jimmy. We were told there was a Wisconsin guy here. Didn’t know it was you.”

“Yeah, I’d been poking around the Carpenter disappearance, over at Diamond Bluff.” James Bole was an agent with Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation, an earnest, square-shouldered, stocky man with strawberry blond hair and a neat strawberry blond mustache. He was familiar enough around the Minnesota BCA, working cross-river cases. He took one of Lucas’s Cokes and said, “Don’t have much. We didn’t know whether she’d been kidnapped or had gone down to the river and fallen in. Now she…” He gestured at the hole.

“We heard,” Lucas said. “You take her car apart?”

“Yeah, but there was no sign that anything happened to her inside the car. Didn’t find anybody’s prints but hers and her mother’s — nothing was wiped — so she probably drove it down there herself. One thing: when she was reported missing, her car was spotted by a Pierce County deputy. It’d rained not long before she disappeared, and when he found her car, he noticed that her tires had made tracks in the mud, and they were still pretty clear. He figured if she had been kidnapped, the kidnapper must’ve had a vehicle down there in the cemetery… otherwise, he would have had to carry her up a bluff, or down to a boat. There weren’t that many other tracks around, so he had casts made of all the different tire tracks.”

“Good move,” Del said.

“It’s thin, but it’s what we got,” Bole said. “All the tire tracks were probably made by trucks, all-weather tires, four different patterns, four different brands. I gave a list to Buford, he was here.”

“Saw him down on the road…”

Shaffer showed up, spotted them, lifted a hand, talked to Sawyer for a moment, then walked over. “Isn’t this something?”

“It is,” Del said.

“Get anything at all?” Lucas asked.

Shaffer’s crew had interviewed the owner of the farm that surrounded the site, a woman named James, and from her had gotten a number of ideas that might help locate the people who’d known about the hidden cistern. Shaffer himself had interviewed the two kids who’d first smelled the decomposing body down the cistern, and the deputy who’d pried the lid off the hole.

“You can’t see it now, but the whole site was covered with grass, with sod. The cistern was invisible: had to know it was here before you could put somebody into it, and not many people knew about it.”

“That could help,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. I hope. Have you seen… There they are. Gotta go talk to these guys.”

He walked away, toward two guys who had a laptop propped against a tree trunk, entering… data.

They’d drifted away from the hole as they talked, mostly to get away from the stink. A squabble started at the hole, and they turned around to see Sawyer, in the hazmat suit, still holding the Diet Coke, faced off with a woman in a Goodhue County deputy’s uniform. The deputy was tall and pretty enough, but rangy like a basketball or volleyball player, with wide shoulders and a small butt. She looked like she’d been in a few fights; her nose wasn’t quite on straight. She had one hand resting on her pistol, like she might have to shoot her way out of the farm site.

Sawyer was saying, “… everything goes through our office, and if you want reports, you’ll have to get them there. We can’t get them out to every Tom, Dick, and Harry—”

“I’m not every Tom, Dick, and Harry — this is my jurisdiction and my job,” the deputy snarled. She’d come primed for a fight, Lucas thought, or perhaps spent her life angry. She was red-faced and angry now. “I want copies of everything, and I want them as soon as they come out.”

Lucas stepped toward her and said, mildly enough, “Everything has to go through one system, or we’ll all get confused. If you’re authorized to get the reports, it’s not a problem: we just make an extra set of copies.”

“Who’re you?” she asked, looking him up and down.

“I’m a BCA agent,” Lucas said. “I’ve been assigned—”

“And we’re second-class citizens?”

“Hey — you’ll get the crime-scene stuff as fast as I do,” Lucas said. “You need to talk to Bob Shaffer to get on the distribution list. He’ll be the agent in charge. He’s around, I just talked to him.”

“Bob Shaffer?” She took out a notebook. “How do you spell that?”

Lucas said, slowly, “B-o-b…”

Her eyes snapped at him and he’d had the sense that she’d almost smiled. Instead, she rasped, “Are you giving me a hard time?”

“S-h-a-f-f-e-r,” Lucas said. “He’ll be happy to hear from you.”

He backed away, to where Del and Bole were standing. She watched him go, then folded the notebook and stalked off across the farmyard, toward the cars.

“Wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley,” Del said.

“Ah… Catrin Mattsson. She’s okay. Well, some of the time,” Bole said.

“You know her?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, I run into her occasionally,” Bole said. “She’s the lead investigator for Goodhue. Pretty much known for her attitude. Not dumb, though. Good investigator. She just doesn’t have a smooth, Del-like personality.”

“It’s a tragedy,” Del said, as they watched her go.

“Yeah, well… her looks somewhat make up for it,” Bole said. “The thing is, you BCA guys have a teensy-weensy tendency to throw your weight around on a deal like this. Busy, busy, busy. Don’t have a lot of time for the local-yokels.”

Lucas: “Really?”

“Well, like I said, it’s teensy-weensy.”

All cases like the Black Hole murders start slow. The investigators needed to know what they had, before they could start working patterns, asking questions, figuring out who might be a person of interest.

Figuring out what they had was up to the crime-scene people and the medical examiners. That would not happen on the first day. Lucas and Del hung around the hole for a while, watching, passing out Cokes, then walked across the old farm site, getting a feel for cover and dimensions and views.

The place was a perfect square, with the road at the south end. The other three sides were guarded by the remnants of a barbed-wire fence and a few old steel fence posts. The north side was covered with the remnants of a wood lot, and dozens of trees were scattered around the rest of the plot, apparently having grown up since the farm was abandoned. Everything else, except a thin clearing in the middle, was covered with a variety of brush and weeds.

A single track, probably along the old driveway, crossed the ditch over a rusting culvert. The spear-like tops of a few old irises grew along the edge of the ditch, and a line of ancient lilac bushes lay along the line of what had been the driveway.

There were probably a thousand identical plots in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

When they were done walking it, Del said, “You couldn’t have invented a better place to get rid of bodies. Back country road, invisible cistern, nearest farmhouse a half-mile away. Roll in here at night, knowing where you’re going, pop the lid, drop the body, put the lid back down, and roll on out. Knowing it ahead of time, you could be in and out in five minutes, with never a trace of what you’d been doing.”

“But you’d have random kids coming up here to park, like the kids who found it,” Lucas said. “It looks a little used, anyway. It’s possible the killer ran into somebody up here, one time or another.”

“If he did, he’d just back out… drive around, wait until they were gone.”

“Yeah. Probably not much there,” Lucas said. “If there’s anything, Shaffer’ll find it.”

Del asked, “What do you want to do?”

“Go home,” Lucas said. “But first, let’s go talk to the farm lady.”

Del took a last look around: “The asshole really did fuck up a great place to park. Did I ever tell you about the time Cheryl and me—”

“Jesus… noooo….”

The land around the Black Hole plot belonged to a farmer named Sally James, who’d inherited it from her father twelve years earlier. James was in her mid-fifties, a stout red-faced woman whose blue eyes carried the glazed look of someone who’d been whacked in the forehead with a board.

Lucas and Del found her at her own farmstead, a half-mile away, visiting with a couple of reddish-brown horses in a corral next to her barn. “I think they’re called sorrels, but I’m not sure I’m pronouncing it right,” Del muttered, as they walked up to her.

When Lucas introduced himself and Del, James said, “I’ve already been interviewed three times by the police. As soon as they take the roadblocks down, there’ll be fifteen TV stations in here, knocking on the door. I don’t know what more I can say.”

Lucas explained that there were two teams of BCA agents working the case, as well as the sheriff’s office and the Wisconsin DCI. Since the crimes had gone interstate, he expected that the FBI might take a look. “We like to talk to people in person, because something they say may ring a bell with something else that we find, later on,” Lucas said.

“You don’t think I had anything to do with it?”

“We don’t think anything in particular,” Lucas said. “We’re just getting started.”

“How many do they have now? It was sixteen this morning,” she said.

“Seventeen, now,” Del said. “There are more to come.”

“My lord, my lord. Ah, come on in. We can sit in the kitchen.”

The house was cool, a relief from the day’s heat. The kitchen smelled like bread and cooked carrots, with an undertone of cabbage and pork chop. James fired up a coffeepot, and passed around thick china cups, and they drank coffee and talked about it.

James started by sketching out a history of the place: the previous owner had sold his land to James’s father, but nobody wanted the house or outbuildings. Eventually, title to the land was taken by the county for back taxes. “The county tries to sell it every once in a while, but nobody wants it. Four acres in the middle of nowhere, old septic tanks in the ground, that cistern, old foundations… it’d probably take twenty grand to clean it up. So, it sits.”

“Kids park there, to make out,” Lucas said.

“From time to time, in the summer,” James said. “We’ve had Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts do overnighters there. And corn detasselers, like the kid who found the bodies.”

“Does everybody around here know about the cistern?” Lucas asked.

“No way,” she said. “I didn’t know about it. That cistern probably hasn’t been used for sixty, seventy years.”

“Then how would the killer find out about it?” Del asked.

“That’s a puzzle, and I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “There are these guys, treasure hunters, they go around to these abandoned farm sites with metal detectors and such, looking for old junkyards and buried treasure. Somebody like that could have found it. When this all came up, a deputy took me down there to look at it. I’d been in there a hundred times, and it never occurred to me that the cistern was still there. You couldn’t see it, all covered up with sod. Nobody found it by accident.”

“This is good stuff,” Lucas told her. “From what you’ve told us, the killer has to be somebody who’s familiar with the place, and there aren’t many.”

“Well…” There was doubt in her voice. “You know, this boy who found it, knew about the place because he was a detasseler.”

Lucas smiled at her and said, “I was a city kid. I don’t totally understand detasseling. I’ve heard of it.”

James explained that corn plants have both male and female parts, and are self-fertilizing. “When you’re hybridizing corn — crossbreeding it — two varieties of corn will be planted in alternating strips. Because the corn is to be crossbred, you don’t want one strip of the corn self-fertilizing. Instead, you want it to be fertilized only by the second variety. To do that, the tassels from the target variety are removed from the cornstalks, by hand, by pulling them out of the top of the stalk.”

“Like castrating the corn,” Del said.

“Exactly,” she said.

The work was short-term, hot, tedious, and low-paid, usually done by high school kids sitting on detasseling machines that are driven up and down the rows of corn.

“Me and my dad have always contracted out part of the farm to grow hybrid seed, so there are detasseling crews taking breaks in that old Clemens place, eating lunch, every summer. That could be twenty or thirty people at a time, mostly boys. Over the years, there have been hundreds of them — hardly anybody does detasseling for more than a year or two.”

“Would the hybrid company have a list of employees?” Del asked.

“Mmm, probably not,” she said. “The way it works is, you need a lot of kids for a real short time, and the work is nasty. So, the seed companies recruit people who can recruit kids — and that usually means teachers. A teacher might contract to detassel, say, a hundred and twenty acres. Then he’ll recruit a bunch of kids from his school, the company supplies the machine, and when the tassels start to pop, they go in and start pulling.”

“Would the teachers have a list?” Lucas asked.

“Maybe… and it’s the same teacher every year, usually. I’m sure the hybrid company would have that list, of the teachers. It’s Marks’s Best Seed Corn, over in Red Wing.”

“Okay. That’s a place to start,” Lucas said.

“What good would it do you? You’re going to investigate hundreds of people?”

“With this many dead, we might,” Lucas said. “What you hope is, you punch the names into a computer, push a button, and your database kicks out names of sex offenders who match the names you put in.”

“Ah,” she said. “Of course. Computers.”

That was all she had: scouts, lovers, treasure hunters, and detasselers. “Or teachers, I suppose. I’d go with the treasure hunters, myself. You get these bottle hunters, they love to find old outhouse pits. They’ll get in there with a shovel and dig them right out. They can get a hundred bottles out of a good one, and they’re worth some money.”

“That happen over there?”

She shook her head: “Not that I’ve ever seen. But you know, those people can be sneaky. They find a good spot, get a friend to drop them off early in the morning, and they can dig out a whole pit in a day. Fill it back in, I might never know. I doubt that I’m in there twice a year, mostly during detasseling season. If somebody dug in there during the fall, I probably wouldn’t go back in there until the next summer. It could be completely grown over.”

“So… treasure hunters,” Lucas said.

“Yup. Or a detasseler.”

They pushed her a bit more, but she couldn’t think of anyone else who’d be familiar with the place. She’d had a boyfriend for fifteen years, she said, but he lived in Holbein and rarely came out to the farm. “He’s a city boy, like you. When we do an overnight, I’ve got to go to him. He doesn’t like the quiet out here. I’ll tell you, though, he wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

“I’d like to get his name,” Lucas said. “For the record, you know?”

Out in the car, Del said, “He’s a city boy like you. Likes to hear them cars.”

“Hey. She’s right.”

“Holbein, if I’m not mistaken, is about the size of my dick,” Del said. “There’s probably only one car.”

“Let’s go look,” Lucas said. “It’s not exactly on the way home, but it sort of is, and we’re not wasting our time backtracking.”

Holbein was larger than Del’s dick, unless Del had been hiding his light. It was an older place, once a milling town on the East Fork of the Zumbro River, population now 5,706, according to a sign just outside of town. Driving through to the business district, the place seemed… usual.

Radically usual.

White- and blue-pastel clapboard houses on small lawns, most of the houses built sometime not long after the turn of the twentieth century. As they drove through the older neighborhoods around the business district, they saw only a handful of houses, obviously infills, that might have been built after World War II.

The East Fork of the Zumbro twisted along one edge of town, piling up in a small lake, behind what had probably been a miller’s dam a century and a half earlier. The dam was not original, and was now a heavy, inelegant chunk of mossy concrete. The lake was surrounded by the city park, with an unoccupied kids’ play area and a band shell, and a thumb-like protrusion of dirt and grass that stuck out into the lake, with a sign that said, “Ol’ Fishin’ Hole.”

“I could live here,” Del said.

“No, you couldn’t. You’d turn into a coot and hang out at the general store, with your fly down,” Lucas said. “You’d be known for goosing middle-aged women. You’d be the town embarrassment.”

Del nodded. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

They did a loop through the business district, which covered maybe a dozen square blocks. As Lucas had noticed before in small-town Minnesota, there seemed to be one of everything. Not many choices, but one of everything: one car dealer, one farm implement dealer, one hardware store, one lumberyard, an off-brand cell phone store, a computer repair shop, a fern restaurant, one diner, a VFW for the Lutherans, a Knights of Columbus for the Catholics, and for those who preferred getting hammered in secular surroundings, a bar. Sometimes more than one bar, even in towns no bigger than Del’s dick.

“Remember when Flowers did that survey in a small town, to see who they all thought might be the bomber?” Del said, as they cruised. “Maybe we could do something like that.”

“It’s a thought. Virgil will be back in three weeks, and if Shaffer doesn’t have anything by then, we could ask him to set it up. The problem is, the killer probably isn’t from here.” Lucas looked out the window at the small, innocent houses. “He’s probably from Red Wing. Red Wing has a lot bigger population, is closer to the cistern. A lot more of the detasseler kids would come from there, than from here.”

“We gotta call the people at this Marks’s Seed Corn, see who’s who,” Del said.

Lucas shook his head: “No. That’s not us. That’s Shaffer, and I’d bet he’s already all over it. He’s got the clerks to handle it.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Think about it, mostly. See what Shaffer gets, read the reports. What we really need to know is who the victims are. Where they came from, what’s the earliest killing. The earliest killing is going to be close to the killer’s home ground. It’ll also give us some idea of how old he is now. He probably started as a young man, late teens, early twenties. If there are twenty dead, and he’s doing four a year, then he’s probably in his mid- to late-twenties. If he’s doing one a year, he’d probably be in his forties, or close to it.”

“He’s not dumb, he’s been getting away with this for a long time, with nobody suspecting,” Del said. “I think that means he probably wasn’t a teenager when he started. He’s not reckless, he’s thought about it. And if he was doing four a year, and they’re all local, we would have noticed.”

“So move the ages a little, make him a little older… We’ll know, when we start putting names on the victims.”

“A lot of names, man.”

“Yeah.” They’d made a circle through some of the back neighborhoods, with newer houses, then turned back onto Main Street and rolled down the hill toward the business district. “You seen enough?”

“Mostly. And one of the things I’ve seen is that supermarket. I bet they got donuts. All these small-town markets got bakeries.”

“Aw, for Christ’s sakes,” Lucas said. He went on for a block, down a gentle hill, and turned into the supermarket parking lot. “Two cherry-filled, if they’ve got them. Or raspberry.”

“Right.”

“Don’t let them know you’re a cop,” Lucas said. “It’s embarrassing.”

Del disappeared into the store, came back out with a white paper bag, and they sat in the parking lot for five minutes, eating the donuts, looking up the hill at the hardware store, and the lumberyard, and Sally’s Paws and Claws, “For All Your Kitty and Doggy Needs.”

Del said thoughtfully, “I’d like a little pussy.”

Lucas chewed and swallowed and said, “Yeah? Have you talked to Cheryl about it?”