Field of Prey

4

Shaffer was on the cusp of solving the Black Hole killings, he thought. The idea came to him as he stood in front of one of the sepulchers at Holy Angels cemetery in Owatonna. He confirmed it by backtracking to the other two. He didn’t want to talk about it, because it sounded… too easy. Possibly even stupid. Should that turn out to be the case, he didn’t need Davenport or Capslock gossiping about it.

He said good-bye to the Murphys and headed north and east to Holbein. He’d just gotten into town, when he saw a young woman loading her kids into a van. He slowed, rolled his window down, and said, “I’m a police officer with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Could you point me to the cemetery?”

“Sure,” she said. She pointed down the street and said, “Take this street down about four blocks, one block past the stoplight, and you’ll see the turnoff for 19. Take that about, oh, a little ways. You’ll go over a bridge on the Zumbro, and the cemetery will be right there on your left.”

“Thank you,” Shaffer said.

The cemetery was on a piece of high ground above the East Fork of the Zumbro, which, at this point, downstream from the dam and fishing hole, wasn’t much more than a creek. The cemetery was smaller than Holy Angels, but bigger than the one at Demont. There were two sepulchers, both of a gray limestone stained with age, both with iron gates, both surrounded by ankle-high grass and weeds. He paused at the first one, and moved on to the second, which was just as old as the first.

They confirmed what he’d seen in Owatonna.

He said, “Huh,” but with a clutch in his stomach. He’d worked a lot of hard cases, and the tightness wasn’t unfamiliar: he was on to something.

On the way out of the cemetery, he took a call from his wife: “Will you be home in time for the game?” she asked.

“Probably not for the first few innings. I’ve got something going here. You better take him, and I’ll try to get up there as soon as I can.”

“You’ve got something going?”

“Maybe. It’s thin, but maybe,” Shaffer said.

He drove back into Holbein, found the funeral home, and talked to the owner, who’d taken over two years before, after half a lifetime in Texas. He was not around at the time of the sepulcher break-ins, and had no idea of who might know about them.

Back in the car, he drove over to the police department, but there was nobody home. Earlier in the investigation, he’d learned that there were usually only two officers working at a time, and they spent most of their time patrolling. When somebody needed to call them, they went through City Hall, but City Hall was already closed. In an emergency, they could be reached through the Goodhue County sheriff’s dispatcher, but this wasn’t exactly an emergency.

Shaffer was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he drove back to Sperry’s, the supermarket, parked, went inside, and after a one-minute look-around, guiltily bought a couple of jelly-filled bismarcks. He took them out of the bag and threw the bag into a trash can outside the door. Back in the truck, he sat eating a bismarck with his left hand, while he made a couple notes in his notebook. He managed to drip a pinhead-sized drop of cherry filling on the page, said a rare bad word—fuck me—licked his little finger, and wiped it off.

When he put the notebook away, he sat in the truck and ate the second bismarck, and at some point, realized he was looking up the hill at a Hardware Hank store.

Another idea. He started the truck, drove up the hill to the store, parked, went to the entrance, and found it locked. He looked at his watch: ten after six. A sign in the window said summer store hours were seven to six. An unusually early closing, for a farm town, he thought. But he was an urban kid, like Lucas, and wasn’t sure about that.

Below the “Closed” sign was another, handwritten one that said, “In case of emergency, contact Roger Axel.” Below that was a phone number and an address. The address included a house number on First Avenue, and Shaffer turned away from the door and walked back to the street. Main Street was down the hill; First Avenue was fifty feet uphill.

He walked up and looked at the closest house number: Axel lived in the next block. Shaffer went that way, shadows now lengthening across the sidewalks. He was feeling the energy of a possible solution: thin, but maybe something.

Roger Axel was having his regular after-work drink with Horn when there was a knock at the door, a metallic rap-rap-rap of the horseshoe knocker. R-A, as the locals called him, paused halfway between the kitchen and the living room, bourbon in hand, and said, “Who in the hell would that be?”

“One good way to find out,” Horn said.

It was well after six o’clock. R-A put the glass down and went to the door, pulled the curtain aside, and peered out at an unfamiliar sandy-haired man. The man said, “Hello?” and seemed pleasant enough, so R-A opened the door and said, “Yeah? Who’re you?”

The man showed him an ID case and said, “My name is Shaffer, I’m an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Could I have a word with you?”

“What’s this about?” R-A asked, stepping through the door and onto the front porch. R-A was a small man, with a soft belly but a bench-lifter’s hard shoulders and arms. He had the red nose of a hard drinker, and slack, grainy skin around protruding eyes. He was balding, a scrim of thin blond hair brushed over a freckled scalp; his fingers were stained with nicotine.

“I’m looking for the answer to a peculiar question, and I thought you might be able to help me,” Shaffer said.

He asked the question, and R-A frowned and said, “Hmm. I’d have to think about that for a moment. C’mon in.”

He left the door open behind him and Shaffer stepped inside. R-A said, “Push that door shut, will you? We got flies. I was just getting a bourbon and ice for myself and Horn. You want one?”

“Oh, no, thank you…” Shaffer stepped into the living room and looked up at the walls: the ceiling was high, eleven or twelve feet, and ringed all around with stuffed heads: deer, antelope, a couple of bears, a mountain sheep, moose antlers minus the moose head.

Shaffer stepped farther into the room and in the back of his head, barely at the conscious level, he thought, Headhunter. Then he noticed the figure in the wheelchair. Horn was looking right at him, and Shaffer blurted, “What the hell?”

R-A had taken a .45 off a bookshelf, where he kept it cocked and locked. He flipped the safety off and shot Shaffer in the back, through the heart. In the small room, the blast was deafening; but with all the walls and shelves between them and the nearest neighbors, R-A was almost sure he’d get away with it.

Shaffer essentially died on his feet, the hollow-point .45 slug clipping his spinal cord and blowing out his heart. He never had another conscious thought, but took a half-step forward and did a slow pirouette and sank to the floor, then went flat.

R-A put the .45 back on the bookshelf, between The L.L. Bean Game & Fish Cookbook and Bill Gardner’s Time on the Water, and looked down at the body, which was still trembling and shaking, as Shaffer’s brain died. R-A was familiar with the phenomenon.

There was blood to be considered. “Goddamn blood’ll get in the floor cracks and smell to high heaven if we don’t clean it quick,” R-A told Horn.

“Plastic garbage bag,” Horn suggested.

R-A hurried into the kitchen, got a bag, laid it flat on the floor, and heaved Shaffer’s body onto it. The body was as loose as a sack of Jell-O; there was a pool of blood under it, which had left a huge blot on Shaffer’s shirt. More blood was seeping into the oak-plank floor, and he hurried back to the kitchen to get paper towels and a spray bottle of Scrubbing Bubbles, and cleaned it up.

“Now what?” he asked, when that was done. Shaffer was staring up at him.

“I wouldn’t put those paper towels in your trash can, that’s for sure,” Horn said. He was a shriveled, dark-complected old man. “Best to burn them.”

“I have to get rid of the body. I could use his car, if I can find it,” Horn said.

“Look at his keys,” Horn said. “If it’s got one of those remote opening things, it’ll beep and blink its lights at you.”

“Good idea,” R-A said. He stooped, as if to look for the keys right then, but Horn snapped: “Stop. You fuckin’ moron. Didn’t you spend about a hundred hours reading about DNA? Use some gloves. And don’t go flashing those car lights with the remote, and then going right over to it. Wait until dark, anyway.”

R-A said, “Right.” He looked out in the street. There were no unfamiliar cars parked in front of the house. But it had to be close by, he thought. Maybe at the store. “What else?”

“The slug probably went through him and hit somewhere over by the fireplace. You might want to find the hole and patch it.”

“Yeah. Keep talking.”

“Town’s too small to leave the body here. I’d move it somewhere. Zumbrota, maybe.”

“Yes, but… how would I get back here? Without somebody noticing?”

“Run? Walk?”

“That’s eight miles,” R-A said.

“You just shot a police officer. You’ll get life for that, without parole, even if they never did connect you to the girls, which they would,” Horn said. “Walking eight miles is out of the question? What would it take you, three hours, maybe?”

“Hmm… I’ll think about it,” R-A said, looking at the body. He was in fair shape, he thought, for a man who smoked and drank too much. Three hours was not impossible — he walked that far, over rougher ground, during deer season. “In the meantime… where’d I leave that drink?”

June Shaffer called Lucas at eleven o’clock and asked, “Have you heard from Bob?”

“No. I haven’t seen him since we left Demont,” Lucas said. He was sitting in his study, reading a book called How Much Is Enough? He’d already determined that he had enough. “Last time I saw him, he was headed over to a cemetery in Owatonna.”

“I’m getting really worried,” she said. “He hasn’t called me. He told me he’d miss supper, but he’d be here for at least part of Todd’s ball game. He didn’t make it and his cell phone is turned off, and sends me to the answering service. I’ve left messages, but he hasn’t called.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Lucas said. “The last time I saw him, he was with a couple of guys from a funeral home. I could give them a call.”

“Could you? This is really not like him, and with him investigating a crazy man. And the last thing he told me was that he might be getting somewhere.”

“Yeah? Okay, let me check.”

Lucas called Joe Murphy, who said he’d last seen Shaffer as he was leaving Holy Angels cemetery. “I don’t know what was up, but he looked at the sepulchers out there, and all of a sudden, he was in a hurry. He looked… intense… about something. I don’t know what.”

“Did he take any phone calls while you were with him?”

“Hmm. He was talking on his cell when we first got to the cemetery, and he got out of his truck. I didn’t hear what he said.”

Murphy didn’t have anything else — Shaffer had looked at all three sepulchers, and had walked back and forth between them, then had enough and went hurrying back to his car.

“Never called or came back,” Murphy said.

“And you don’t know where he was going?”

“No, but he asked about the sepulchers up in Holbein. The break-ins up there. He could have been headed that way.”

When Lucas finished with Murphy, he woke up Bellman, the detective sergeant from Owatonna, and asked if Shaffer had stopped by. He had not. “If he had, I would have seen him — the boss was gone all day up to the Cities, and any investigative inquiries would have come to me. You lose him, or something?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “He’s not a guy to get lost. He’s the last guy in the world who’d ever get lost.”

“What kind of car is he driving? We’ve got a dozen hotels here, I could send a couple cars around to look at parking lots.”

“That’d be good. I think Holbein’s in Goodhue County, maybe you could call them, too?”

“Not a problem.”

“Let me call his wife about the car.” He remembered that Shaffer had been driving a blue SUV, but hadn’t noticed exactly what kind.

He called June Shaffer and she picked up instantly. Shaffer hadn’t called. His car was a Chevy Equinox, a year old, and she found the car registration in a file and gave him the tag number. “Do you know what phone service he was with? AT&T? Verizon?”

“Verizon,” she said. “And he had some kind of lost-phone service.”

“I’ll get back to you,” Lucas said. He called Bellman back and passed along the information about Shaffer’s SUV.

“He having trouble with the old lady?” Bellman asked. “He’s not out on the town?”

“Nope. No, I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “That’s one reason I’m getting worried.”

Lucas’s adopted daughter, Letty, wandered into the study, carrying a bottle of red vitamin water and a book. She was a slender girl, and athletic, and, Lucas had noticed, much admired by the jocks at her high school, whom she admired back. More things to worry about…

She asked, “Did you know that the Davenport family has a crest?”

“Great,” he said.

“What happened?” she asked, picking up a tone.

“Ah… can’t find a guy. He should have been home hours ago,” Lucas said.

“Del?”

“No, no… Shaffer.”

Letty knew most of the people Lucas worked with, including Shaffer. “He’s the lead on the Black Hole case.”

“We maybe got a break on it this afternoon,” Lucas said. “We were down around Owatonna. He never came back.”

“Have you called the cops?”

“Yeah, they’re checking the motels,” he said. “I gotta make a call.”

He called the BCA duty officer, explained about Shaffer, and then said, “He’s carrying an iPhone, and his wife said they’ve got some kind of lost phone function on it. Get in touch with the Apple people, see if they can activate it. While you’re doing it, call Verizon. He’s with them, and maybe they can spot it.”

He gave the duty officer Shaffer’s cell phone number: “Give me a call back the instant you figure out where he is.”

Bellman called back an hour later and said that the Owatonna cops had checked all the motels and bars, and the main streets, and had found a few Chevy Equinoxes, but not Shaffer’s. “I called over to the sheriff’s department and asked them to talk to the patrol guys, tell them to keep an eye out. Goodhue’s doing the same.”

Lucas passed the word to June Shaffer, who was becoming panic-stricken. “Something terrible has happened,” she said.

Lucas said, “It’s too early to think that. I’ll head on down there myself and wake some people up. If he calls, you can get me on my cell phone.”

Lucas’s wife, Weather, was already in bed. She was a surgeon, and would be cutting in the morning. He woke her, said, “I have to go out.” He gave her a quick explanation, and she sat up and said, “God, I hope nothing happened.”

Lucas went back downstairs and called Del. “What are you doing? You in bed?”

“No, I’m up in North Oaks. They got the RV back early and they’re loading up the guns. I’m here with Stuckney from the ATF. What’s up?”

Lucas told him, briefly, and Del said, “I’m sorry, man, but we’re pretty busy around here.”

“That’s okay, stay with it — I was looking for company, more than anything,” Lucas said. He hung up and pulled on a jacket.

Letty had been lingering near his study, and now asked, “Can I go?”

“I might be all night,” Lucas said.

“That’s okay. I’m not doing anything tomorrow. If you get sleepy, I could help drive.”

“Bring a jacket,” he said.

They were on I-35 south of the Cities, coming up to the town of Faribault, when he took a call from a Steele County dispatcher: “Agent Davenport?”

“Yeah. What’s up?” He had the call on the car’s speaker.

“Uh, well, we’ve got some pretty bad news. Your duty officer gave us a general location on Shaffer’s phone. It’s down in Zumbrota, in Goodhue County. We passed the word to a Goodhue deputy. They found the car, and there’s a body inside. The deputy opened the door to make sure the victim was dead, and then stepped back, because he doesn’t want to mess up the scene. The victim was shot to death.”

“Ah, Jesus, ah, goddamnit,” Lucas said. “How do I get there?”

On the way to Zumbrota, which was east of the interstate, a half hour from their I-35 turnoff, Lucas shook Rose Marie Roux out of bed. “You’re sure it’s Shaffer?” she asked.

“No, but it probably is. We’ve got to get somebody going, to notify June Shaffer.” Lucas looked at his nav system, which predicted he’d be in Zumbrota in thirty-six minutes. The nav system didn’t know that he had a siren and lights. “I’ll be there in half an hour. I’ll confirm then.”

“My God, Lucas, did he find the Black Hole killer?”

“Must have. Must have,” Lucas said.

“How?”

“I have no idea,” Lucas said. He told her about the break earlier that day, and also how thin it was.

“Call me when you know for sure it’s him,” Roux said. “I’ll start kicking people out of bed.”

They were running fast through the night, on a rural highway, past balls of gnats swarming over the warm road, past fireflies in the meadows, the highway stripes flicking by, and Lucas glanced once at Letty and saw her tight, eager face willing the road to pass, to get there.

And he thought, Shit, she likes it too much. She’s gonna be a cop, one way or another.

He would have preferred that she do something else. She’d even talked about applying to West Point, and he’d grudgingly agreed that for a person of her… inclinations… it wouldn’t be a terrible idea. Now, glancing again at her face, he thought it would be a terrible idea. She needed the same kind of daily rush that he did. She needed a gun on her hip and somebody to hunt.

They followed Highway 52 to Zumbrota, then threaded their way through town, taking directions from a cop by cell phone, turned north on Main, crossed the North Fork of the Zumbro, left on Pearl, then down a long lane guarded on both sides by twenty-five-foot-tall arborvitaes. As soon as they made the turn onto the lane, they saw the gathered flashing lights of a half dozen cop cars, and assorted civilian sedans and SUVs. When they pulled in, the faces of twenty men and a few women turned toward them.

“You know what to do,” Lucas said to Letty.

“Be nice and keep my big fat mouth shut,” she said.

“Couldn’t have put it better,” Lucas said. They got out and a cop stepped over and Lucas held up his ID. “BCA. You got my guy?”

The cop said, “I hope not. C’mon this way.” He glanced at Letty, but said nothing.

They walked between cop cars, killing the conversation that had been going on. The Equinox was on a cemetery road, just to the right of the last tall arborvitae. The cemetery extended on both sides of the street, and in the reflected light from the cluster of cars, they could see the heavy canopies of large trees, and pale tombstones scattered across the neatly trimmed lawn.

A tall blond woman in civilian clothes — Catrin Mattsson, the Goodhue County investigator whom Lucas had met at the Black Hole — was talking to a couple of uniformed cops at the back quarter-panel of the Equinox. Mattsson, in blue jeans and a letter jacket, broke off when Lucas and Letty came up. “Davenport.”

“Yes. He’s in the car?”

Instead of answering, Mattsson swiveled to Letty: “Who’re you?”

“My daughter,” Lucas said. “She’s okay, she’s been before.”

Mattsson nodded: “If you say so, but it’s an unhappy thing to look at.” To Lucas, she said, “It’s him. It’s Bob.”

Lucas and Letty stepped over to the Equinox and looked through a back window, which had been lowered. Shaffer was lying faceup on the backseat. His sport coat was pulled open, revealing a huge bloodstain on his shirt. In the pale illumination of cops’ LED flashlights, his eyes were wide open and dirty gray. He didn’t look surprised: he just looked dead.

Letty said, “Shot once.”

Lucas was still reacting to the sight of the body: not a friend, but a colleague he’d known for years. A prickling sensation ran through his skin, like goose bumps, but a tighter, tenser feeling. After a few seconds, he caught up with Letty’s comment and asked, “You’re sure?”

“Not without a doc saying so, but you can see only one pucker in his shirt, and it’s right in the middle of the bloodstain. Looks like he was shot in the back with a hollow point. I’ve seen a lot of wounds like that,” she said. “Hit him square in the heart. Whoever shot him probably doesn’t know that much about shooting, or he would have hit him at least twice.”

Lucas turned away from the car and rubbed his face. Didn’t want to look back, and didn’t; instead, he spoke sideways to Letty, who was still looking at the body. “Maybe he was trying to keep the noise down,” Lucas said. “You can almost always get away with one shot. With two, somebody might come looking.”

She turned her face to him: “You never told me that.”

“You never needed to know,” Lucas said.

Mattsson was next to Letty: “You said you’d seen a lot of wounds like that. How would you…?”

“Used to run a trapline up north,” Letty said. “Bang the coons with a head shot,22 hollow points. Go in small, come out bigger, when they came out at all. Like this. Except this was a bigger slug.” She turned to Lucas and said, “It looks a lot like the holes your .45 makes, when we’re shooting paper.”

Lucas was rubbing his forehead, and he said, “Yeah, yeah.” He wasn’t ready for analysis. He said to Mattsson: “We got a break today. Maybe. I think Shaffer followed it right in to the killer, and this is what he got.”

“He didn’t call me,” Mattsson said.

“He didn’t call anyone,” Lucas said. “I suspect he had a really questionable lead, and it just took him… to this. He was a smart guy: it could have happened.”

“I know. I talked to him six or seven times in the last month. I’m sorry,” Mattsson said.

“So am I,” Lucas said. “He was a good cop. He had a nice family, and most of the time, when I was dealing with him, I was an asshole.”

Mattsson said, “Well.” And then, again, “I’m sorry.”

R-A had been home for two hours before Shaffer’s body was found. The initial high from the killing had worn off, and the walk home had cooled him off even more.

Horn was waiting: “How’d it go?”

“Perfect,” R-A said. “I had a lot of time to think. Know what? I don’t want to get caught.”

“We’ll have to work on that,” Horn said.

“I mean, I really don’t want to get caught,” R-A said. “Unless I can think of something smart, I probably will be.”

“Got a couple of ideas…”

“Not tonight. I’m too tired. I need a drink or five,” R-A said.

“I got a question for you. Did killing that cop — that male—did that give you a boner, too?”

“Fuck you,” R-A said.

“Gave me one,” Horn said. “I gotta tell you, I liked watching him die. Not as good as the girls, because it was so quick. But you know, old Horn got boners like nobody got boners.”

“Ah… shut up.” R-A poured a drink.

That night, in bed, a peculiar thought crossed R-A’s mind. Horn was a nasty, cynical remnant of the man he’d once been — but he was a great help, from time to time. Now, he might have become a liability. There was a warrant out for Horn, and there had been for years. Horn, in fact, hadn’t been outside for years, except twice when R-A had gotten extraordinarily drunk and had taken him out for a quick roll in the night.

That was crazy-dangerous. If anyone had ever seen them…

Horn had been a cop, of a kind. He worked out of the police department, and even carried a gun, a .22, that right now was in R-A’s gun safe. He also carried a spray can and a lasso on a pole and drove a truck. He could issue tickets — but only if your dog was running loose, or didn’t have a license.

Horn was the dogcatcher.

And not just a dogcatcher. He was the skunk remover, the coon-catcher, the possum-shoveler, the gopher trapper, the dead-animal remover. You got a squirrel killed on the sidewalk, as the cops said, get on the Horn.

Horn and R-A had met at a rifle range. Horn was interested in death, and R-A was interested in big-game hunting. They were both interested in sex, and both of them had to pay for it. Both were interested in the altered states brought on by alcohol; both were alcoholics. Neither had other friends.

Their friendship was careful, but over some time, mutual interests emerged. R-A was a treasure hunter: he was the one who’d found the cistern at the abandoned farm. He was the one who knew about the diamonds and gold in the Mead coffin — he’d heard about it from a customer at the hardware store.

The raids on the sepulchers started as a joke and a dare. They’d continued until they realized that the risk was too high for the small rewards they were getting.

That’s how it started with the women, too. As a joke and a dare. Not quite believing that they’d ever do it.

Then doing it.

There weren’t twenty-one skulls, as the cops thought. There were twenty-three — but the first two were rotting bone somewhere in the deep woods in Wisconsin, lying under a few inches of dirt and oak leaves.

After the first two, they’d worked out a system for taking the women. They were proud of the system, and it worked perfectly. They sat around at night, watching baseball on TV and working out their strategies.

Everything went well, until the accident.

Until woman number five, Heather Jorgenson, rose up out of the backseat of Horn’s truck with a blade in her hand.

R-A could still see the scars in Horn’s thin, bony neck; could put his fingers in them, if he’d wanted to.

Didn’t do that.

He touched Horn’s shoulder and said, “I’m going to bed. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Got ideas,” Horn said.