Field of Prey

3

Lucas and Del were back in St. Paul by mid-afternoon. Other than reading some of the incoming reports from the crime-scene team and Shaffer’s group, and talking to Shaffer’s crew, they did nothing more about the Black Hole for three weeks.

Three weeks of an odd, edgy summer.

The cops all wanted to get the killer, of course, but it seemed at first that they’d never get any work done. Everybody wanted updates. The FBI sent around a profiler, and the profile was leaked, and the populations of all the small towns south of the Twin Cities began speculating about how well their neighbors fit the profile. That led to a couple of bar fights, screaming front-lawn confrontations, and unnecessary investigations prodded by round-the-clock media coverage.

Media reporting led to further problems. Both Fox and CNBC put investigation teams on the story, and both came up with lists of sexual offenders who fit “serial killer profiles” invented by the news teams with the help of experts from the West and East Coasts.

Disclosure of the lists led to disclosure of specific names, and the kind of conspiratorial “he could have done it” stories that had the cops jumping through their butts just knocking down the stories.

Three weeks in, Shaffer’s crew had turned up almost nothing that they hadn’t known about after the second day. The media, running out of easy stories, began sniffing around for those responsible for what was obviously an incompetent investigation. Rose Marie Roux took the brunt of the attacks. Henry Sands, without saying much about it, took off for a week-long Alaskan fishing trip right in the middle of it. Smart, some people said. Chicken-shit, said others.

All the attention, and the lack of progress, began to have an impact on morale: agents working off the clock, arguing, scratching their fingernails on blackboards of futility.

Lucas’s group wasn’t working the Hole, and so were out of the line of fire. Instead, they focused on finding Bryan, the Ponzi guy.

They’d had a minor breakthrough earlier in the investigation when Lucas read through a long list of Bryan’s American Express card purchases from the year before, and on that list he found… suits from Gieves & Hawkes, a dozen neckties from Ermenegildo Zegna, a dozen more from Hermès, and boots from John Lobb.

He’d been through Bryan’s house, including his walk-in closet, after Bryan disappeared. Lucas knew his clothes — and he hadn’t seen anything that’d really rung his bell, as those labels would.

To make sure, he and Shrake went back, and Lucas sifted through the clothes hangers, jacket by jacket. Nice threads — Ralph Lauren Purple Label, etc., but nothing from Gieves & Hawkes, no boots from John Lobb.

Lucas had interviewed Carrie Lee Pitt, Bryan’s last-known lover, the night he got back from the Black Hole.

Carrie Lee was an unnatural blonde with a Missouri accent. She was almost, but apparently not quite, hot enough to be a rich guy’s trophy wife. She was taking on-camera lessons in hopes of becoming a sideline interviewer for NFL broadcasts, trying to pick up the all-important hooker vibe.

“Y’all come right in,” she’d said at the door of her condo in downtown Minneapolis. Her red lipstick was slightly smeared, as by a cocktail glass, and she smelled of Chanel 5. “I want to cooperate in every way possible.”

She left the pink tip of her tongue parked outside of her upper lip, which made Lucas think of oral sex, as it was supposed to.

“What I really need to do is look at Mr. Bryan’s clothes,” Lucas said.

“You’re welcome to it. I don’t think he’ll be needing them.”

“We’ll see,” Lucas said.

They went back to the shuttered double closet, and he went through the labels. Carrie Lee helped him look, one breast pressing comfortably against the back of his arm. The missing clothing was still missing; Lucas went home and jumped the old lady.

“That sonofabitch is alive,” Lucas said the next day. “He’s not hiding out in a jungle. More like Paris.”

Shrake and Jenkins developed a theory: Bryan had among his conquests, somewhere, a nurse. The nurse had taken a pint of blood out of Bryan’s body, just like she would a blood donor, and he’d smeared it around the inside of his car and then snuck away.

When pressed, Jenkins admitted that they had not one scintilla of evidence that would directly suggest that. They couldn’t find a nurse, and Bryan, healthy as a horse, who went to a clinic on the rare occasions when he needed a tetanus or flu shot, had never established a regular doctor.

They continued to push, interviewing Bryan’s bankers, friends, business associates, and his ex-wife. They looked at his known phones, credit cards, the places he’d taken vacations. They had a watch on with Homeland Security and customs.

Bryan had a son going to Yale, and when they checked on him, found that his tuition had been paid in advance — way in advance — and during the school year, he lived in a small house in New Haven, Connecticut, that his father had bought for him. That seemed to suggest that Bryan didn’t think he’d be around to pay the bills on a monthly basis. Asked about it, the kid shrugged: “I guess Father knew he was in trouble, and made arrangements in advance, expecting to go to prison. I don’t think he expected to be killed.”

He didn’t seem to be all that broken up by his old man’s possible demise, Shrake said.

Del suggested that the names of all the money-losing investors be typed into a computer program and run against an FBI database of known associates. That had taken a secretary the best part of a week, and she’d moaned and complained the whole week. When they pushed the button on the computer program, nothing happened.

Like… nothing.

Lucas had two other, non-related cases hanging out there.

Del was watching two elderly couples named Case and Waters, from Sartell, Minnesota, who traveled together in an oversized RV, towing a Jeep Wrangler. According to sources on Lucas’s Asshole Database (ADB), they financed their travels — indeed, their entire retirement lifestyle — by buying high-end black rifles on the northern plains, between the Rockies and the Great Lakes, where the cops were few and far between and the weapons were abundant. Once they had a hundred rifles or so, they’d transport them in the RV to the Texas border, where they sold them to a selection of underground dealers, both American and Mexican.

Lucas’s sources said they’d unload batches of twenty or thirty rifles at a time, making anywhere from $400 to $800 each, depending on brand and condition, in profit. If you wanted to pay cash, that was great. If you wanted to pay in cocaine, that was even greater, since the two couples had a tight connection to the Washington Avenue Set of the Black River Lords of Chicago. On cocaine deals, the profit went to $1,500 per rifle. They’d make five or six trips a year.

“That’s getting up to a half-million dollars a year, not counting their Social Security checks,” Del said. Del was coordinating with both the ATF and the DEA on tracking the senior citizens. “Don’t tell anybody I said this, but I think they might be doing some wife-swapping, too. The right spouses don’t always go home together. And sometimes they have sleepovers, where nobody goes home….”

“Yeah, Jesus, I don’t want to hear about it,” Lucas said.

In addition to the gun peddlers, Lucas was dealing with a… peculiarity. A week after the Black Hole discovery, Lucas got an arrest warrant for Emmanuel (Manny) Kent, the brother of a serial bank robber named Doyle Kent.

Doyle Kent had been tentatively identified by Jenkins, after consultation with the ADB, and loosely tracked by the BCA and a variety of metro-area police departments for four months.

When he’d begun to focus on a bank in suburban Woodbury, the tracking got tighter. On a misty day in July, he’d gone into a Wells Fargo branch, wearing a fedora, one leg of a pair of sheer nylon panty hose over his face, carrying a bag for the money and a Colt .45. He’d been killed by the Woodbury cops when he came out of the bank shooting.

In the subsequent round of self-congratulation, Jenkins and Lucas had been credited with the identification of Doyle Kent, while the Woodbury cops got credit for taking him down.

The week after the shoot-out, the Minneapolis cops began picking up talk that Emmanuel Kent was telling his street friends that he was going to kill Lucas and Jenkins as soon as he could get a gun. If he couldn’t get a gun, he was going to stab them to death, with a knife that he already had.

Lucas and Jenkins did some research on him and found that Emmanuel Kent was a thirty-two-year-old schizophrenic with four convictions for assault, and twenty-two arrests over sixteen years for possession of small amounts of marijuana.

Nobody had been badly injured in the assaults, which actually appeared to be street fights, rather than straightforward attacks. Several doctors had also testified on Kent’s behalf in the drug cases, telling the courts that his use of marijuana was an attempt at self-medication, because the use of antipsychotics made his thinking so fuzzy that he couldn’t care for himself.

As one doc put it, “He’d rather be crazy than helpless, and the weed makes him less crazy.”

In any case, Lucas and Jenkins found enough people to testify about Emmanuel Kent’s threats that they were able to get a warrant and have him picked up for another psychiatric evaluation, to determine how serious the threats might be.

The Minneapolis cops were familiar with Kent and his habits, and where he usually slept, and so picked him up immediately. He was held at the Hennepin County Jail, and evaluated by a contract psychiatrist named Betty Calvin, who returned a report that said Kent was basically a gentle individual who spent his days collecting recyclable cans, and donations of dog and cat food, which he distributed to stray dogs and cats during the evenings.

When pressed, Kent told Calvin that he really didn’t intend to stab anybody.

But, she said, he was also prone to acting out, and in a specific set of circumstances, might be a threat. She did not think he was capable of planning an attack, but if he should encounter Lucas or Jenkins at random, might be capable of some level of violence.

His animus toward Lucas and Jenkins was based on a news story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that noted that Lucas had been involved in another fatal bank-robbery shoot-out, which had been controversial at the time, at least among progressive legal theorists.

Two female bank robbers had been gunned down after robbing a bank and shooting one of the customers. Lucas and his team had trailed them for quite a while, being morally certain that the women had been involved in other robberies and shootings, but without evidence to arrest them.

Lucas had then allowed the women to go into the bank, and their killings outside the bank had been only thinly disguised summary executions, even though the two women had opened fire first. The surveillance without supporting evidence had been a violation of the women’s civil rights… according to the theorists.

Not much was said about the customers and bank employees who’d been shot during the two-state robbery spree.

Emmanuel Kent, who might be crazy, but who was not illiterate, read the article and picked up on the concepts of “summary execution” and “civil rights.”

Lucas, he said, had done it again, this time, to his brother.

Doyle had been Manny’s only source of financial support during his life on the street. He used the money to feed himself and the cats and dogs, and to buy the weed he used to self-medicate.

Lucas and Jenkins, he said, had gotten his hero brother killed in cold blood.

“Not too worried,” Jenkins had said, after reading the shrink’s report.

“Not about being stabbed,” Lucas said. “But Jesus, we sort of fucked him, didn’t we? What’s he gonna eat?”

“There are five hundred people out there tonight who are worried about that, Lucas, and none of them are threatening to stab us to death,” Jenkins said. “If we want to worry about somebody, let’s worry about them first.”

But, Lucas thought, he didn’t personally fuck the other five hundred. While he didn’t worry obsessively about Kent, the guy remained like a small dark cloud that occasionally passed over Lucas’s consciousness, bringing rain.

On the night of August 1, with Lucas still occasionally brooding about Emmanuel Kent, they finally got a definitive indication that Bryan, the Ponzi guy, was still alive, even if not kicking.

He stopped kicking when Inga (Bloomie) Bryan, the ex-wife, shot Bryan in the groin in the living room of her not-quite-oceanfront house in Palm Beach, tearfully explaining to cops that he’d entered the place in the night, without telling her that he was coming, and she’d mistaken him for an intruder.

Well, not really mistaken him — he was an intruder.

“Two shots,” Jenkins told Lucas the next morning. “I’m told the surgeons were unable to make the necessary repairs, and went to amputation.”

Lucas winced, and Shrake added, “Our current theory is, Bryan and his ex were not cooperating.”

An hour after that, Rose Marie Roux called and said, “I hear Bryan is… mmm… available for questioning.”

“Yeah, as long as he isn’t talking with his dick,” Lucas said.

“I heard that,” she said.

“Yup. Shot with a very efficient double-tap, a .410 shot-shell followed by a .45 Colt, from a gun called the Governor, on the less expensive of two Persian carpets in his wife’s living room, according to the Palm Beach police,” Lucas said. “They know all about Persian carpets down there.”

“Probably the one that held the room together,” Roux said.

“Dude.”

“Okay. You’re done with that, you can let somebody else do the follow-up, getting Bryan back here, and all of that,” Roux said. “I want you on the Black Hole. Starting tomorrow. Or this afternoon. Shaffer’s moving too slowly and people are getting pissed.”

“Man, that case is dead in the water,” Lucas said.

“If that was a deliberate pun, you’re fired,” Roux said.

“Sorry,” Lucas said. “It wasn’t deliberate. But it’s Friday, I can think about it over the weekend—”

“No. I want you on the case right now. You know: before noon.”

“How bad is it?” Lucas asked. “All the bullshit? I haven’t been paying that much attention.”

“Bad,” she said. “We’ve got people from Fox and CNN renting apartments in Minneapolis. Old friends are getting nervous about talking to me. I think Henry… that asshole, that fishing trip was a disaster… I think Henry’s put out some résumés.”

“How about the governor?”

“We talk every day. The thing is, Minnesota’s supposed to be squeaky clean, and the closer we get to the next presidential primaries, the less he wants people talking about all those boxes full of skulls. He doesn’t want it to be a thing, if you know what I mean.”

The Minnesota governor wanted the vice presidential nomination, and was in fairly good shape to get it. He had a lot of money, which could be used in a primary campaign, pulling in the national recognition; and he was far enough left to balance out a more centrist Democrat.

“I know what you mean,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. When he leaves the job, I’m gone. When I leave, you’re gone. Probably. But if he makes it as vice president, we get taken care of, one way or another. Life could be very interesting, if we can pull that off.”

Lucas passed off the Bryan follow-up.

Jenkins and Shrake talked with the Palm Beach cops, who said they’d found several hundred files in the trunk of a rental car that Bryan had been driving, along with a couple thousand dollars in cash, two ounces of cocaine, and three fake IDs, including a Honduran passport under the name of Rolando Smoke.

Jenkins suggested that both he and Shrake would be needed to question Bryan about the whereabouts of any remaining money, and to review all that paper.

Lucas got them authorization, and that afternoon, as he and Del began a methodical rereading of all the crime-scene and investigative reports on the Black Hole, they watched, from Lucas’s office window, as the two agents loaded their golf clubs into Shrake’s truck for the ride out to the airport.

“Gonna be a high-quality investigation down in Palm Beach, you betcha,” Del said.

Lucas didn’t care; Bryan was disappearing in the rearview mirror. He turned back to the pile of paper in front of him.

“Twenty-one skulls now,” he said. “Twenty-one girls, before the well went dry.”

“You know, if we take this on, the media will find out, and we’re gonna have media shit raining down on us, too,” Del said.

“We don’t have a choice,” Lucas said. “But let’s try to sneak into it quietly.”

Shaffer’s group had identified seven of the victims, which left fourteen unknown. Of the seven, two had been identified through dental work, two through credit cards found in the Hole among a layer of rotting cotton and polyester, one through a driver’s license, and two through DNA samples matched to worried parents or siblings of missing women, who’d volunteered to supply cell samples.

The bodies that had been identified through dental work, credit cards, and the driver’s license had been confirmed through additional DNA comparisons.

All of the identified women came from Minnesota, except the most recent one, and from a roughly trapezoidal area ranging as far north as the southern suburbs of St. Paul, and as far south as Rochester, as far east as the Mississippi River, and as far west as I-35—an area roughly sixty miles long and forty wide. The one exception, Mary Lynn Carpenter, from Wisconsin, had apparently been taken from the banks of the Mississippi across from the Minnesota town of Red Wing. All victims’ homes had been spotted on a map included with Shaffer’s paper.

The earliest known victim had disappeared ten years earlier, but with fourteen yet to be identified, and with the other seven spaced a minimum of a year apart, Shaffer’s team thought it likely that they hadn’t yet found the earliest victim.

“All seven of the women disappeared in mid-summer, ranging from June twenty-second to August eighteenth,” Shaffer had told Lucas, two weeks into the investigation. They were in Lucas’s office: Shaffer had come by to chat, to see if Lucas had been thinking outside the box. He had not been. Shaffer was looking beat-up, though in a tidy way. His clothes were ironed and his shoes were polished, but the dark loops under his eyes were the size of bicycle tires.

“None of them disappeared in the same year,” he said. “Our statistician says that’s probably not a coincidence although it could be — we have a weak theory that he kills every summer, and only once. If that’s true, and he’s killed this year, then the first murder was twenty years ago. That’s not a sure thing — he might have killed more frequently in the early years. If the theory’s right, he’s probably in his late thirties or early forties, and lives somewhere in that trapezoid between Minneapolis and Rochester. I suspect it’s close to the center of it. If he’s smart enough to get away with all these killings, then he’s smart enough not to make long-distance trips with a body in his car.”

“What about the detasseling thing? Or the treasure hunting?”

Shaffer shook his head. “Nothing. We located and talked to a half dozen treasure hunters, pretty much ruled them out. They call themselves ‘detectorists.’ The detasseling information is so fragmented that we can’t say much one way or another, but the ones we’ve been able to check, haven’t panned out. But that’s well under half of the potential detasseling suspects.”

“What about technique? Does the killer scout the girls?” Lucas asked.

“Can’t tell yet. Three of them, at least, seem to be opportunity-based. Women out partying, maybe drunk, alone, at night. He might have scouted them, but he didn’t have to — they were ripe for the picking. When their disappearances were investigated, nobody remembered seeing anyone with the women.”

“Observant and careful,” Lucas said.

“And bold,” Shaffer added. “Maybe with a backup excuse, if somebody should question him.”

“Like what?”

“We’ve been picking around the idea that it could be a cop,” Shaffer said. “We haven’t found anything that would make us think we’re right.”

“Hope not,” Lucas said.

“We all do,” Shaffer said. “But we’re having trouble picking up patterns, which makes it seem more likely that he was killing spontaneously — no pattern except opportunity, which is the next thing to random.”

“All blondes,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, and not dishwater — mostly all pale blond. That’s a pattern, but it doesn’t mean much in Minnesota, in terms of prediction.”

“Anything on the ropes?” Lucas asked. They’d found more than a dozen ropes in the cistern, dumped with the bodies.

“Not much. A variety of brands, a variety of materials. Could be… this is weak… from marinas. Half of them are nylon, which you don’t see that much of, outside marinas. The rest are polypro, which is everywhere.”

“Plenty of marinas around Red Wing,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, and we’ve been in all of them,” Shaffer said.

They talked about some miscellaneous possibilities, all thin, and then Lucas asked, “How much trouble are you having with the TV people?”

Shaffer grimaced. “Ah, you know: they’re waiting outside every morning. I’ve actually had them follow me around town.”

“Be cool,” Lucas said.

“Oh, yeah — but you know, if you could just count on the newsies being as competent as we are, things would be a lot easier.”

That had been the last extended conversation they had about the case, although the rumor mill said Shaffer was choking. Lucas doubted that: it had seemed from the beginning that, barring a fantastic piece of good luck, the investigation would be a long one. Shaffer was patient.

The news media, on the other hand, wasn’t. They were looking for a hero, not an accountant.

After the departure of the golfing twosome, Lucas and Del continued plowing through the Black Hole paper, looking for something they could get their fingernails beneath, something that might suggest a trail.

“Gotta be something in common with the girls,” Del said. “They’re all under twenty-five. Most of them were known to party….”

“They weren’t known to go to the same clubs, or even the same parts of town… any town,” Lucas said. “They weren’t known to hang out with the kinds of guys who’d intersect. None of them went to the same school. Ever. They don’t have any relatives in common. Their jobs weren’t similar, so it wasn’t like a UPS man was picking them out. One of them had a night job, and was probably picked up in the early morning… so it’s not a cable guy, snatching them out of their apartments.”

They were still at it when Hopping Crow stuck his head in the door. He was vibrating. “We have a developing anomaly in the DNA tests.”

“Is an anomaly the same thing as a break?” Del asked.

“Could be.”

“Since you’re standing in my door, it must be interesting,” Lucas said, leaning back in his chair.

“Not so much interesting, as batshit crazy,” Hopping Crow said. “Getting clean DNA has been a problem. With those water-soaked bones and all the meat that came off them, it was like a DNA stew down that cistern. We’re mostly getting the clean stuff out of teeth, and even then, we haven’t had much to match it to. Three hours ago, we got a cold hit from the criminal database.”

“Really,” Del said.

“Yeah, really — the skull came from a woman named Doris Mead, the mother of Roger Douglas Mead, who was convicted of first-degree sexual assault four years back.”

Lucas’s chair came upright with a bang: “I’d call that some kind of break.”

“Eh, it’s more complicated than that. For one thing, he obviously couldn’t have killed Carpenter or Fisher, because he was locked up when they disappeared. And he has no history of violence. He was a high school social studies teacher, and the girl was sixteen, and cooperative. Anyway, he’s in Stillwater, and Buford talked to him. He says his mom is definitely dead. She died thirteen years ago, of a stroke. She was buried in a cemetery at Demont, which is over by Owatonna. When she went in the ground, her head was still attached.”

Lucas and Del both stared at him for a second, then Del said, “Her skull was… grave-robbed?”

“Looks like it,” Hopping Crow said. “The good thing about it is, apparently not all the skulls belong to people who were murdered. The bad thing is, we don’t know yet which is which. That’s going to take some more lab work.”

“Who’s going down to the cemetery?” Lucas asked.

“Shaffer. Got in his car and took off like a big-assed bird. Shaffer told me to tell you about it, in case you wanted to go down yourself — everybody’s heard you’re done with Bryan.”

“How’s he doing?” Del asked Hopping Crow. “Shaffer?”

Hopping Crow said, “He seems to be calm. Unnaturally calm. Especially for a guy who has about fifteen people screaming at him, from the governor on down.”

Del said to Lucas, “Probably why we got the invite. All those screaming people.”

Lucas said to Del, “I’m going. You want to come along? What’s happening with the old folks and the rifles?”

“They’re buying. Betty Case bought two mint Bushmasters from a guy up in Anoka yesterday. They’re pretty close to a full load. Her old man took the RV in for servicing yesterday, probably won’t get it back before tomorrow. So, today… I could go.”

“Then let’s.”

Shaffer was fifteen minutes ahead of them. Lucas called him and Shaffer said, “It’s the Valley View cemetery, just west of I-35 at Demont. You don’t go into town, you take a left on the first street you come to, after the exit. That’s Twelfth Street. The cemetery borders the street, about a half-mile down.”

“Are you pulling the coffin?”

“That’s the plan,” Shaffer said. “Buford got authorization from her son — Doris Mead’s husband took off for the Florida Keys after she died, and Roger doesn’t know how to get in touch with him. So, we’re good on that. I talked to the guy at the funeral home down there, they should be digging now.”

“We’re right behind you,” Lucas said.

The drive to the Demont exit took forty-five minutes, and another five down to the cemetery, which was between the town and the freeway, on a flat square of ground with cornfields on three sides, and the approach road on the fourth.

Shaffer’s blue Chevy Equinox sat with a couple of sedans on the left side of the square, where an orange Kubota tractor/backhoe sat motionless next to a pile of yellow dirt. Lucas pulled up and he and Del got out, and found Shaffer and two middle-aged men in sober blue suits watching a third man, in coveralls, who was down in the grave, using a spade to scrape dirt off a coffin.

When Lucas came up, Shaffer turned and said, “We’re not going to pull it yet — we’re just going to open it and see what’s inside.” He gestured at the two men in suits: “This is Joe and Leon Murphy, they run Murphy’s Funeral Home in Owatonna. They arranged Mrs. Mead’s funeral.”

“Any idea of what happened?” Lucas asked.

Shaffer said, “Two theories: one, the killer is weird…”

“Good call,” Del said.

“… and two, he was literally grave-robbing. Roger Mead told Buford that at the funeral, his father put their wedding rings and Mrs. Mead’s engagement ring into her hand, to be buried with her. They were gold. He thinks the engagement ring might have been worth a couple of thousand dollars, and whatever gold is worth in the wedding rings.”

“Not more than a couple of hundred,” Del said.

Shaffer said, “Yes, but: treasure hunters. We’ve been looking at treasure hunters, and the guy who dug this up, in the middle of the night, looking for diamonds and gold… what’s that, if it’s not a treasure hunter?”

The funeral home operators were brothers, and looked alike, with nearly identical comb-overs, except that one was thin and the other was fat. The fat one, Leon, said, “You don’t often see that — putting valuables in the coffin. A lot of times, with a cremation, for example, the relatives will ask for the gold that comes out of the loved-one’s teeth. Most people are pretty practical: they don’t bury money.”

“If the grave was robbed, the robbers must’ve known about the jewelry,” Lucas said.

“Had to,” Joe Murphy said. “It might be possible to rob one grave out here with nobody noticing, but you couldn’t go around digging up a whole bunch of them. They had a specific grave in mind.” They all looked around the flat, windswept cemetery. There were only two other graves showing raw dirt; extensive digging would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

The guy in the hole, who hadn’t been introduced, said, “Hand me the key,” and Joe Murphy passed him a slender crank, a long metal handle with a right-angle stem. Murphy said, “Four latches…”

“Got ’em,” the guy said. In digging up the grave, he’d cut out a small platform to one side, where he could stand while he opened the coffin lid. He undid the latches with the coffin key, and Lucas looked away when he pulled open the lid: the whole procedure, messing with buried bodies, disturbed him.

He looked back when Shaffer said, “Well, there you go.”

The body remained in the coffin, still preserved, though shrunken. The head was missing, and the hands, which had apparently been crossed over the woman’s midriff, had been turned over. Her hands were empty.

“Took the jewelry and the head,” said Shaffer. “Both a robber and weird.”

“Possible that she had gold fillings,” Leon said.

Lucas looked at the brothers and asked, “Do you know about any other grave robberies around here?”

Joe said, “Years ago… not long after Mrs. Mead was buried, so it could be the same bunch. There were some sepulchers over in Holy Angels that were broken into, some body parts were taken.”

“One or two over in Holbein about the same time,” Leon said.

Shaffer asked, “Where’s Holy Angels? How many years? Skulls?”

“It’s in Owatonna. Yes, skulls, I think. Maybe fingers. This must’ve been”—he looked at his brother—“around the turn of the century?”

His brother shook his head. “After that. Remember, we saw that one break-in when we had that boy back from Iraq. First one back, must have been near the beginning of the war.”

Joe snapped his fingers and said, “Ah, right. You’re right.”

“Any suspects?” Del asked.

“Not as far as I ever heard,” Leon said. “And I would have heard. Nobody was ever caught. There were several break-ins, all about the same time, and then they stopped, and there weren’t any more. It’s possible that the robbers found out that the risk wasn’t worth the rewards they were getting.”

“What about the other ones?” Shaffer asked. “The Holbein ones.”

Leon shrugged. “Don’t know about those. Just heard about them. Probably ought to ask at Doncaster’s, up in Holbein.”

“That’s the Holbein funeral home?”

“Yes.” Leon nodded.

“Okay.” Shaffer looked into the grave and said, “We’ll have to pull the coffin. We’ll want to close it and lock it to protect it, and then get it out so the crime-scene people can work it over. There may still be fingerprints inside, so you gotta be careful. Can you guys handle that?”

Leon Murphy nodded. “We can.”

“All really odd,” Joe said.

Shaffer said, “I need somebody to take me to those other… what do you call them? Sepulchers? Those are the things that look like little stone cabins, right?”

“Right,” Leon said.

“I’ll want to look inside… want to get a feel for them.”

“We can take you there. You want to go right now?”

“I do,” Shaffer said. “I’ll want to look at everything you’ve still got on the Mead funeral… names, people who paid for stuff, flowers, whatever. I want to know who was there.”

“We can look up that at the office, we’ll still have some of it,” Joe said. “They were Catholics, and it was a Catholic funeral, if I recall…”

“It was,” Leon said.

“… so you could probably find the officiating priest, he might be some help.”

“I need it all,” Shaffer said.

Shaffer was almost trembling with excitement. On the way back to the cars, he said to Lucas, “This is our first solid lead. The killer knew the Meads. Had to. Probably was at the funeral. We’ll go back to Roger Mead, try to contact Mrs. Mead’s husband. I’ll start working the funeral angle right now. You got any ideas?”

“Those sound like the best ones,” Lucas said. “Some cop had to work those earlier grave robberies. Maybe they had some ideas about suspects, even if they never arrested anyone. Del and I could talk to whoever it was.”

“Do that. Be sure to update us,” Shaffer said. “Bless me, this is something.”

Back on the road, Del said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Shaffer that wound up.”

“He’s got a sniff of the guy, after a hard month,” Lucas said. “That’s always good.”

“Gettin’ the sniff,” Del said. “Yeah, it is.”

Lucas called from the car, and was passed from the Steele County sheriff’s office to the Owatonna police department, where they talked to a detective sergeant named Ralph Bellman.

“I remember that, those break-ins. Pretty darn creepy,” Bellman said. “Let me see…” They could hear him tapping on computer keys, and then he said, “Okay, I got it. Never made any arrests. Talked to some kids, we thought maybe it was some kind of, you know, Harry Potter thing. I don’t think the kids we talked to knew anything about it, so… we came up empty. We’ve got a bunch of reports, you’re welcome to them, but they don’t say much.”

“Like to take a look anyway,” Lucas said. “We’ll be there in ten minutes or so.”

Bellman was right: there wasn’t much. Three sepulchers had been broken into, and the heads were stolen from the female bodies interred inside — four heads, total. Two of the female bodies were missing ring fingers. Three of the four male bodies had not been touched; the fourth was missing a ring finger.

“Two of these places were really old — went back a hundred years,” Bellman said. He was a husky, cheerful man, balding with a long pale face. “The other one was from the forties. We think probably the missing fingers meant the bodies were buried with some jewelry, which was stolen. That made us think it wasn’t kids, but the missing heads made us think it might be. You know, midnight rituals and all of that.”

“There were only three?” Lucas asked. “Only three of these things, and they broke into all of them?”

“Right. I guess they’re not used much anymore,” Bellman said. “More of an old-timey thing.”

“Could we get printouts of the reports?” Del asked.

“Coming right up,” Bellman said. Then, hushed, “You think whoever did this is the Black Hole killer?”

“We’re hoping it’s something,” Lucas said. They’d told Bellman about the grave and missing skull in Demont. “We were kinda hoping we could hook the three sepulchers down here to the grave up there.”

Bellman kicked back in his chair, his forehead wrinkling. “Mead,” he said. “There are a few of them around, but I don’t know if they’re related to your Mrs. Mead. The people in these sepulchers died a long time before Mrs. Mead, though. I think probably the link was the valuables. Maybe they scored when they dug up Mrs. Mead, but didn’t want to do all the work, and the sepulchers looked like easy targets. If that’s it… the link wouldn’t go anywhere.”

“Except that the robbers would have to know who was well-off enough to bury valuables,” Del said. “You’d have to be local to know that.”

“Or well-off enough to have sepulchers,” Lucas said. “Those things can’t be cheap. At least not compared to just sticking somebody in the ground. And you could figure that out by driving by the cemetery.”

Del said, “Okay. But they had to know about Mrs. Mead, and the rings in her hand. Wonder what Shaffer’s getting?”