Field of Prey

5

With a murdered cop, a lot of stuff had to happen, but after identifying the body, not much of it was Lucas’s job.

He was shaken by Shaffer’s murder, more than he would have thought. He wandered away from the group at the truck, sat down for a minute on a tombstone. He couldn’t shake from his mind the first sight of Shaffer: a yellowed-out vision like the photo of a dead man on an old postcard. Would somebody be looking at him like that, sometime in the future?

He sat like that for a moment, the heels of his hands braced on his thighs, then sighed and pulled his cell phone from his pocket and called Roux. Shaffer lived north of the Twin Cities, and it would take a while to get the notification done.

“Lucas, you need to take this over,” Roux said, after he gave her the news about Shaffer.

“No, I don’t. I need to catch this guy, but I’m not good at organizing a big crew like Shaffer’s,” Lucas said. “Get somebody else to run the crew, but I’ll find the guy. I promise you.”

After a few seconds of silence, she said, “Okay. That’s the deal, then. Somebody else takes the crew, but you find him. In the meantime, we got the preacher on his way up to Shaffer’s house.”

The preacher was a BCA agent who was also an ordained minister; a hard-nosed cop and a soft-nosed minister, for a Baptist, anyway.

After talking to Roux, Lucas heaved himself off the tombstone and walked back to Mattsson and Letty and the other cops. He said, “Shaffer’s wife will be notified pretty quick.”

Mattsson nodded and said, “We thought we better leave this to your crime-scene people. Our guy is here, but with the possible link to the Black Hole killer…”

“I’ll get them down here. Bob should have a notebook in his jacket pocket,” Lucas said. He’d seen Shaffer take it out any number of times. “You think your guy could go in there and slip it out, without messing anything up?”

Mattsson turned to one of the deputies, who nodded and said, “Let me get my stuff.”

As the cop went to get his crime-scene kit, Lucas called the duty officer and ordered up the crime-scene team.

“What a fuckin’ disaster,” the duty officer said.

“Yeah.”

The cops all stood around and watched as the crime-scene deputy slipped on surgical gloves and, after looking at the handle on the back door with a flashlight, popped the door. They all looked inside, but there was nothing on the floor or the seat near Shaffer’s body.

Lucas said, “Left side.”

Moving as carefully as he could, the deputy slipped his fingers under the lapel of Shaffer’s jacket, lifted it, and with his other hand, slipped the orange-covered notebook out of Shaffer’s inside pocket. “I’ll bag it. We can look at it through the bag,” he said.

As he carried the notebook back to his car, Lucas’s cell phone buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen: Shaffer’s wife was calling. She hadn’t yet been notified.

Lucas flashed the screen at Letty, who blurted, “Don’t answer it.”

“I think I gotta,” Lucas said.

“No, no, let it go, let it go…”

He let it go; he could call back. When the phone stopped ringing, he asked, “Why?”

“Because we know there’s nobody there with her, except her kids. She shouldn’t hear he’s dead on the telephone, from somebody who’s a hundred miles away.”

“When I don’t answer…”

“There could be a lot of reasons you don’t answer,” Letty said. “You might have left the phone in the car… Dad, somebody should be there with her. Believe me.”

He thought about it for a minute, then said, “Okay,” and put the phone away.

The crime-scene deputy had the notebook sealed inside a transparent plastic bag, and Lucas and Mattsson put it on a car hood and bent over it, and the other cops shone a half dozen flashlights on it. Lucas turned the pages, awkwardly because of the bag, but got it done. There were brief notes on the grave opening at Demont, and the interview with the funeral directors in Owatonna. Then Shaffer had gone to a new page and had written Holbein at the top of it, and underlined the name. Beneath that were brief, unhelpful notes from an interview with a man named Robert Gibbons. Lucas didn’t immediately recognize the name, but Gibbons had told Shaffer that he hadn’t been in Holbein long enough to know about the break-ins at the local cemetery’s sepulchers.

Lucas remembered something one of the other funeral directors had said about the funeral home in Holbein, and said to Mattsson, “I’m not sure, but I think this guy works as the funeral director over there.”

Mattsson called over her shoulder to one of the deputies and told him to check the name.

“Is that blood?” Letty asked.

They looked at a pinkish smear at the bottom of the Holbein page. There hadn’t been blood anywhere else on the notebook.

“Could be. Have to check,” Lucas said. He closed the book gently, to preserve the stain, and handed it back to the crime-scene guy. “Careful with it,” he said. “We need to get it into our lab as quick as we can. If that’s not Shaffer’s blood…”

A deputy came over to Mattsson and said, “That guy, Gibbons — he’s the Holbein funeral director, like you thought.”

“Let’s figure out what we’re doing here, and then we oughta run up and talk to this guy,” Lucas said. Mattsson nodded.

A Goodhue County deputy named Mackey lived in Zumbrota, just around the block. He and Mattsson and a couple other senior deputies, and the Zumbrota chief of police, with Lucas and Letty, went over to Mackey’s house. They were the last car in the caravan over, and Letty couldn’t stop talking about the murder until Lucas said, “You want to shut up for a while? I’m having a hard time over here.”

She said, “Okay,” and shut up.

Mackey’s wife made them coffee and took some hot cross buns out of a refrigerated tube and put them in the oven, and the whole bunch of cops, and Letty, sat around the kitchen table and talked about the murder.

They agreed that unless something very strange had happened, Shaffer had found the killer.

“Had to be dark by the time he got to that cemetery,” Mattsson said.

“Maybe,” Letty said. “He wasn’t killed there, though. Somebody drove him there.”

You could almost hear the eyebrows go up. Letty continued: “He was shot once in the heart, from the back, and was lying there faceup. He wasn’t shot in the truck — didn’t look like there was enough blood anywhere. Somebody had to put him there. I suppose he could have been shot outside the truck, in the cemetery, but then, why bother to carry a heavy dead guy to the truck, and get blood all over yourself, and leave your own DNA behind? It would have been easier and safer to put him in some weeds, or drag him behind a tree, or walk away. He was shot somewhere else, and driven to the cemetery.”

The convocation of cops looked at her, without saying anything, and then the deputy’s wife chirped, “Makes perfectly good sense to me.”

Letty said, “Thank you.”

Lucas: “You might be right. But you might be wrong, too. A lot of things that happen at crime scenes don’t have good reasons: killers get scared, freaked out, like anyone else. They do things in a panic. I’ll tell you one thing: the guy’s not a traveler. He’s not somebody from the Cities or Red Wing, come down to get rid of the bodies. Whether he drove Shaffer down here, or came separately and killed him here, he’s from somewhere close by. Shaffer found him in Owatonna, or in Holbein, or here in Zumbrota, or somewhere in between. Shaffer was in at least four cemeteries, and left at least two of them alive. How Shaffer got here, I don’t know. But the killer is close by.”

The cops all looked at each other, nervously: biggest serial killer at large in America, right now, and right here.

“Something else,” Lucas said. “If Letty’s right, and somebody drove him here, that means he knew what Shaffer was doing today — that he was looking at cemeteries. They had to talk, and the killer had to know what Shaffer was thinking, and that it was worth killing him about. Somehow. Some way. They had to talk.”

There was a knock on the screen door, and a young cop stepped into the kitchen. He looked at Mattsson: “I ran around to those houses, like you said, and nobody heard any shots tonight. It’s cool enough so that people aren’t running their air-conditioning, but two of them had windows open. No shots.”

Mattsson nodded and said, “Thanks, Terry. Go all the way up the road, hit the rest of them.” The cop backed out the door and Mattsson said to Letty, “You’re looking better.”

One of the deputies asked Lucas, “What’re we doing tonight? Other than covering the scene?”

“That’s about it,” Lucas said. “Stay away from the car, keep people away from the area until the crime-scene crew gets here. We need to talk to people who might have seen a car coming and going, and ask who they think it might have been.”

Another of the deputies said, “Something just occurred to me — I need to talk to Jeff. Excuse me.”

He went out on the back porch, and they could hear him on his cell phone as they worked through other possibilities. A couple minutes later he stepped back in and said, “The guy’s from here. Zumbrota.”

“Why?” Lucas asked. The cop sounded so sure that it felt like a break.

“I was thinking about what Letty just said, about the guy driving him here. Assuming there’s only one guy involved, and if he drove the body here, how’d he get away? Where’d he go? The answer is, he’d have to walk. On the other hand, if they met here — if the killer had his own car — and Shaffer was killed here, he could have been pretty much from anywhere.”

Lucas: “And?”

“I called Jeff, our crime-scene guy, and told him to look at the steering wheel on Shaffer’s car. It’s plastic — and it’s been wiped. The front seats are leather, and they’ve been wiped, too. Everything in the front of the car has been wiped. He can tell just by looking at them with a flashlight. If he’d never been in the car, why wipe it? Didn’t wipe the backseat.”

They all considered that for a moment, and Letty said, “He drove Shaffer’s car with the body in it, and then had to walk away… unless he has an accomplice.”

“That’s happened with a couple of serial killers,” Lucas said. “The Hillside Strangler in L.A. was actually two guys, related somehow, I’m not sure how. But it’s rare.”

Mattsson said, “He was driving Shaffer’s SUV, so he could have had a bicycle in the back, or even a small motor scooter.”

“Didn’t wipe the back,” the other deputy said.

“Could have, but it doesn’t feel quite right to me,” Lucas answered. “Can’t sneak on a bike or a motor scooter, you have to go on roads. People would remember seeing a stranger on a bike, after dark. He was probably on foot.”

“He’s not only from around here, like Lucas said,” the deputy said, knocking on the kitchen table. “He’s from right here — from Zumbrota.”

Mattsson asked, “Who in Zumbrota could be a serial killer? Couldn’t be too many possibilities… single male, probably in his late thirties or early forties, if his killing goes back as far as the grave robberies.”

“Probably single,” Lucas said. “There have been a few married killers, even happily married. But probably single.”

The Zumbrota chief said, “Boy, I’d have to think about that. I know everybody in town, just about, all the long-timers, anyway. There are a few single guys… not anybody I’d suspect of this.”

“Get a list going,” Mattsson said. “Think about it more. If we get some DNA out of the car, it could be important.”

Mattsson asked Lucas, “How are we going to coordinate this? It’s our jurisdiction, too.”

“Our crime-scene crew will do the science,” Lucas said. He paused as the deputy’s wife started a tray full of hot cross buns around the table. He took one and passed the tray on. “But I guess what we really need tonight is exactly what you’re doing: talking to as many people as you can, asking about unusual sightings. Guys walking or running on their own. We need every speck of information we can find. We’ll take rumors, even. Anything we can hook onto. I won’t be running the operation, they’ll appoint a new team leader first thing tomorrow.”

“It is tomorrow, Dad,” Letty said.

They talked about other immediate needs — Lucas would tell the new crew leader to pull all of Shaffer’s cell phone records, and take his phone apart. He had an iPhone, so it probably had a file of his phone-call locations. “That might tell us where he was, and when, and who he was talking to. I’ll tell them to get that information to you as fast as we can pull it out. We need everybody pulling together to limit the confusion.”

“We can do that,” Mattsson said. “I gotta tell you, I’m a little pissed about not being included in that exhumation at Demont. You BCA guys aren’t paying a hell of a lot of attention to what us folks are doing. I’ve been running my ass off all over the county, talking to people, and Shaffer acted like I was some loony on the sidewalk.”

“He was… focused,” Lucas said. “He did what he did.”

“I’m sorry he’s dead, but I didn’t like the way he handled things,” Mattsson said.

“Well, I’m sorry,” Lucas said. “When the new guy takes over, I’ll tell him to work with you. To pay some attention to what you’re thinking.”

“If you’re not important enough to run it, why would they pay any attention when you tell them to work with me?” Mattsson asked.

Lucas shrugged: “That’s the way it is.”

Mattsson looked at him, without saying anything, then Letty reached out and touched her hand and said, “Dad’s good friends with the governor and with Rose Marie Roux. The BCA people pay attention to him.”

Mattsson looked at him for another moment, weighing him, then glanced at Letty and said, “All right.”

Lucas said, “Listen, for your guys out here, the ones who’ll be doing the walking. Make sure they go in pairs. Nobody out there alone. This guy… well, you know.”

“Yeah. But you — what’re you going to do?”

“I’m going up to Holbein and talk to the funeral home guy. You might want to come along.”

She nodded again.

“If we get anything, we’ll follow it up. You might want to keep some guys handy, in case that happens. If there’s nothing there, I’ll head on home, get some sleep,” Lucas said. “Then tomorrow, I’m going to look at everything everybody got, then I’m going back to Demont and Owatonna and Holbein, walk the same ground Shaffer did, talk to the same people in the same places, and see if I can figure out what Shaffer found that got him to the killer.”

“Careful,” one of the deputies said. “Like you said, you don’t want to come up on him, without knowing it.”

They went to Holbein in three cars, Lucas in his SUV, another deputy chosen by Mattsson in a second car, and then Letty and Mattsson in Mattsson’s car. When Letty asked if she could ride with her, Mattsson shrugged and said, “Sure, if you want to.”

“Tired of me?” Lucas asked.

“I talk to you all the time,” Letty said. “I’d like to get another viewpoint.”

They didn’t call ahead: in an excess of caution, they decided they wanted to talk to the funeral home director without his knowing they were coming.

“Though I can’t see that he did it,” Letty said, as they walked out to the cars. “Looked like Shaffer’s notes on him were finished.”

Mattsson nodded: “Yup. But then, there was that smear of blood, right after he finished writing. Maybe the funeral guy was right there.”

The drive to Holbein took ten minutes, and another couple of minutes to find the funeral director’s home. They knocked and rang the bell, and Gibbons’s wife showed up first, and then Gibbons, wearing blue flannel pajamas with little rocket ships on them. “He was murdered?” Lucas had seen the phrase “his jaw dropped,” usually in not-very-good novels, but he saw it now in both Gibbons and his wife. Their jaws dropped, and Letty looked at Lucas, and Lucas nodded: the funeral director was out of it.

“We didn’t talk for very long, and he was perfectly okay when he left — I don’t think he was much interested in talking to me when he found out that I moved up from Texas only a couple years ago,” Gibbons said. “He seemed to be kinda in a hurry about something. He wanted to know if Neil Parsons — he was the former owner here — had told me anything about the sepulchers out at the cemetery, but Neil never did.”

“Where’s Parsons now?” Mattsson asked.

Gibbons tipped his head to the south. “In the cemetery.”

He recapitulated the whole interview with Shaffer, and after twenty minutes, Lucas, Letty, Mattsson, and the other deputy were back out on the sidewalk. “I got nothing out of that,” Mattsson admitted. “Didn’t even scratch up an idea.”

“Me neither,” Letty said.

Lucas said, “All right. We’re heading home. I’ll be back tomorrow morning. We’re close to the guy, whoever he is. That’s new. Here’s something to sleep on: Shaffer saw something, and it took him straight to the guy. What did he see?”

Mattsson: “Did he know what he was seeing?”

On the way home, Lucas took a text from June Shaffer that said, “Find him and kill him.”

He passed the phone to Letty: “June Shaffer’s been notified.”

“Ah, jeez,” she said. “If I ever get to be a cop, I’ll never be a notifier.”

Lucas usually slept late. He and Letty hadn’t gotten back home until four in the morning, but he was up at nine, not rested but alert. Weather had taken the two small children, Sam and Gabrielle, to the park, but had left a note: call me when you get up. He called her and told her about Shaffer.

“Oh my God. That poor June. How many kids did they have? Two, I think? Both in school?”

“I think so,” Lucas said. “From what we could see, there were no defensive wounds, no struggle, and Shaffer was in shape, and did that aikido stuff — whoever did it shot him down in cold blood. I suspect he never saw it coming. Had to have been indoors, I think. He had to have gone somewhere, pretty much on impulse. He’s such a compulsive record-keeper that if he’d developed a serious clue, he would have made a note of it, or called someone. Anyway, I’m going back down there. I might be late getting back.”

“Do not — DO NOT — take Letty.”

“I’m not planning to, though I suspect she’s already sitting in the truck,” Lucas said.

“Don’t take her,” she said. “Just find this guy.”

Lucas finished cleaning up, and before he left the bathroom, saw on his shaving-TV a photo of Shaffer, with the report of his murder. The news report was light: they didn’t know much yet. He turned off the TV, got dressed, including a .45 that he carried in a belt rig, and went downstairs.

Letty was sitting in an easy chair, legs casually crossed, pretending to read a magazine, and he said, “No.”

She dropped the magazine. “Why not?”

“Because you’re a kid. Besides, your mom made me swear I wouldn’t take you. Otherwise, I might.”

“Listen, Dad—”

“I don’t have time for an argument,” Lucas said. “I’ll be back tonight. Ask me again, when I get back. Though I’m not the one you have to convince. You need to work on your mom.”

With Letty watching from the garage door, Lucas backed out of the driveway and headed across town to BCA headquarters.

The place was crawling with agents; he had to thread his way through a crowd listening at the conference room door. Henry Sands, the director, just back from Alaska, had already appointed an agent named Jon Duncan to run Shaffer’s crew, and Duncan was briefing the crew on Shaffer’s murder. When he saw Lucas, he waved him in and asked, “What do you know?”

Lucas told them about the scene the night before, what he thought had happened. “I’m going down there now, and I’ll go over the same ground that we know that Shaffer covered. Do we have anything from the crime-scene crew yet?”

Duncan shook his head: “Nothing definitive, nothing good. They’re working the front seat for DNA. We’re going to flood Zumbrota this afternoon, start talking to as many people as seems reasonable. Start checking off the single guys. But, a woman named”—he flipped a page in a notebook—“Cathy Irwin called here an hour ago and said she saw Shaffer’s picture on TV this morning, and she spoke to him for a couple of seconds in Holbein. He asked her for directions to the cemetery, and she told him where it was, and he drove away. That was about ten minutes to five. You already talked to Gibbons, the funeral director. We talked to him again from here, and he told us the same thing he told you: he had the impression that Shaffer was on to something. He even asked, but Shaffer brushed him off. But, he got that impression. We do know he was alive and operating then, a little before six o’clock.”

Lucas took out his notebook and made a note of Cathy Irwin’s name. “I’ll talk to her,” he said. “Nothing from the Goodhue sheriff’s people?”

“Nothing,” Duncan said. “By the way, we can’t find Bob’s main notebook. That little one was mostly names and numbers, but he had a big one, too. One of those leather folders with a yellow legal pad in it. You didn’t see anything like that?”

“No. Sounds like something we need,” Lucas said. “I’ll call Catrin Mattsson at Goodhue and have her run some people around to the places we know he stopped.”

Lucas told them about Mattsson: that she was thorny, but seemed bright, and suggested that Duncan treat her with care.

“I will do that,” Duncan said. “I met her last month, and we talked some.”

“Then I’m outa here,” Lucas said. He turned at the door and said, “There was some blood on Bob’s notebook. We weren’t sure if it was his.”

Duncan waved him off. “We checked it first thing, wanted to get some DNA going. Wasn’t blood at all. It was jelly.”

“Jelly.”

“Yeah. No DNA. No break,” Duncan said.

Lucas took another step and turned back again: “I don’t know if you guys got it, but one of the funeral guys from Owatonna told me that Shaffer made a call just as he was arriving at the cemetery there.”

Duncan said, “He was calling here, checking on the crew.”

Back in his office, Lucas called Del: “I’m going down to the Hole. What’s happening with the old folks? Are you free?”

“Ah, man, Shaffer,” Del said. “I mean, Jesus Christ. He had kids, I mean… I really need to go with you, but I can’t. I was up all night, I’m dying, but they’re getting ready to roll. Me and Artie are watching them load up. The guns are all on board, now it’s food and water and talking with the lady who feeds the cats, and all the stuff you can do in the daylight.”

Artie Martinez was another agent with the ATF.

“All right. Talk to you when you get back,” Lucas said. “Take care.”

“And you. Cocked and locked,” Del said.

The day was a good one, with puffy dry clouds, the countryside beginning to show color as they got into August. Lucas had been tempted to take his Porsche for the run south, but wound up in the Mercedes again, with the feeling that he could be banging around on some back country roads: the 911 didn’t like gravel, or, for that matter, any bump or divot more than two inches high or deep.

He’d planned to go through the cemeteries in the same order as Shaffer had, but found himself curious about the woman Shaffer had talked to. Instead of stopping at Demont and Owatonna, he went straight through to Holbein, calling ahead to the woman, Cathy Irwin. She was waiting when he arrived at her big white two-story home a block off Main Street.

She was a pretty woman, and smart, and Lucas learned nothing from her. She was eager to help, but she’d spoken to Shaffer for only a few seconds, and had never seen him again.

“Did he seem like he was in a hurry? Like he was excited?” Lucas asked.

“No. He was just sort of… friendly. He seemed like an ordinary guy. He was polite, seemed perfectly relaxed, and thanked me, and went off toward the cemetery.”

“Where’s that?” Lucas asked.

“Down by the East Fork.”

Lucas didn’t care for cemeteries, but Holbein’s was a pleasant-enough place, as cemeteries went, and if somebody had told him that he’d be buried there, after a life of, say, a hundred forty years and much more sex and barbecue, he would have been content with the prospect.

The land lay above the narrow river, fenced off from the surrounding fields by ordinary barbed wire. The grass looked like it was probably cut every couple of weeks, and was now a little shaggy. Clumps of wild black-eyed barbecue and purple coneflowers grew here and there along the fence line. Bobbing their heads in the light breeze.

Most of the graves were modest, with low tombstones, and the two sepulchers stood out as grim monuments to death: they were gray and age-stained — limestone, he thought, something Poe might have written about — with rusty iron gates. He walked around them, scratching for any kind of insight they may have inspired in Shaffer. He was still doing that when his phone rang.

He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen: Mattsson, the Goodhue County investigator.

“Yes,” he said. “This is Davenport.”

“You better get down here, to Zumbrota,” Mattsson said. “We might have a witness. We might even have a suspect.”

“I’m in Holbein,” he said. “I’ll be down as quick as I can.”

“That’d be seven or eight minutes,” she said. “Unless you hurry.”

Lucas hurried. Mattsson gave him directions, but as he accelerated out of Holbein, he had the uneasy feeling that he’d just made a mistake, or had missed something important. He didn’t know what it was, and the feeling was fleeting, gone before he got to Zumbrota.

The witness lived in what Mattsson called the Sugarloaf neighborhood north of town, in a stone-and-clapboard ranch-style house with a front-yard flower garden lining the walk between the garage and the front door. Mattsson was there with another deputy named Tom Greenhouse, and the witness, and the witness’s parents: the witness was eight years old.

“It’s something,” Mattsson said. She met Lucas in the driveway. “It’s a kid, but there’s no reason to think she’s not reliable. She brought it up on her own, and her parents confirmed that she saw the guy last night.”

“Let’s talk to her,” Lucas said.

The witness, Kaylee Scott, was waiting in the living room with her parents, Reggie and Carol Scott, all three of them honey-blonds, all a little portly, more than a little anxious. The first thing Reggie asked Lucas was, “Do you think we should get out of town? Can you put us up?”

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Lucas said. “I’m not really up to speed on this.”

The story was short and sweet: the night before, the Scotts had been returning from Red Wing, late, after visiting Carol Scott’s sister’s family. They’d driven down Highway 58 from Red Wing, then cut cross-country north of Zumbrota to County 6, and down County 6 to Sugarloaf Parkway. Just before they got to the parkway, they all agreed, Kaylee, who’d been sitting in the backseat, had blurted, “There’s Mr. Sprick!”

Reggie, who was driving, said he hadn’t seen anything, and Carol was dozing.

“I was looking right, where I was turning,” Reggie Scott explained. “He was in the left ditch — the east ditch.”

When Kaylee said, “There’s Mr. Sprick!” Reggie had turned and asked, “What?”

Kaylee said, “Mr. Sprick was down in the ditch.”

“What?”

“Mr. Sprick was walking in the ditch.” She said she’d seen him just as her father started to turn.

Reggie and Carol had blown off the claim, thinking that Kaylee was sleepy and must have been imagining things. They went home and they all went to bed.

Then, the next morning, they’d seen stories about Shaffer’s murder, and about police officers going through town, looking for someone who might have been seen late, in the area of the Zumbrota cemetery. The cemetery was only a few hundred yards north of the Sugarloaf area, and Highway 6 went directly past the turnoff to the cemetery.

“Who’s Mr. Sprick?” Lucas asked.

Kaylee said, “Mr. Sprick, the mailman.”

“Mark Sprick, the letter carrier for the neighborhood,” Mattsson said. “I’ve got a guy keeping an eye on him, on his truck. He’s down south right now. We’ve been putting together a file, but there’s not much. Never been arrested as far as I can tell. He’s been married, he’s divorced now. Apparently threatened violence to his ex-wife but wasn’t arrested.”

“How old?” Lucas asked.

“Forty-one: right in the age slot.”

Reggie Scott said, “We’re gonna need protection.”

Lucas looked at the kid, who was sitting on a red velveteen couch, and asked, “Honey, how sure are you that you saw Mr. Sprick?”

“I saw him,” she said positively. “I said so right away. I saw his face looking at me.”

“We need to talk,” Mattsson said to Lucas.

Mattsson, Lucas, and Greenhouse talked on the front lawn. Mattsson said, “I think we pick him up, and squeeze.”

“Is there any way to figure out who his friends are, if he has any?” Lucas asked. “Maybe touch them first, or at the same time? See what they have to say?”

Greenhouse said, “After I found the girl, I talked to Catrin and then I called the chief of police. He knows Sprick, says as far as he knows, he’s an okay guy. He came here in high school, his parents still live here. He rents a house on the south side of town, apparently got in a loud argument with his ex once, when they were in the process of getting divorced. He was warned to stay away from her, but nothing official was ever done.”

“Pure negligence,” Mattsson said. Greenhouse looked a bit uneasy, and she snapped, “What?”

“The chief said his ex was a hell of a lot meaner than Sprick, and Sprick denied doing anything violent or that he threatened anyone,” Greenhouse said. “The chief said he thought Miz Sprick might have made some of it up.”

Lucas said to Mattsson, “Better talk to the ex-wife, if she’s around.”

“The chief says she’s in Faribault, works at a florist over there,” Greenhouse said.

“I hate to leave Sprick running around loose,” Mattsson said. “If he gets a whiff of a witness…”

“But it’d be best if we had something to hit him with, before he knows we’re coming,” Lucas said.

“We could keep an eye on him, if you want to run over to Faribault,” Mattsson said.

Lucas said, “Well… I could do that.”

“You think it’s something?” Greenhouse asked.

“It’s something. The girl saw somebody,” Lucas said.

“And she sees Sprick all the time,” Mattsson said.

“If it was Sprick, and he lives south of here, why was he north of the cemetery?” Lucas asked. “What’s out there that would have had him walking in the ditch?”

They all looked north: they couldn’t see it, but beyond the heavily treed neighborhood, there wasn’t much but the cemetery, a couple of farm equipment dealers, a fairground, and then a lot of farm fields, stretching out for miles.

“I don’t know,” Mattsson said. “Maybe he ditched a car up there? I do believe Kaylee.”

Mattsson called the Faribault cops and had one cruise by Busch’s Florist Shoppe. Andi Sprick was working. Lucas talked to Kaylee for a couple more minutes, and then to her parents, and left fairly sure that somebody had been in the ditch the night before. He suggested that Mattsson call her crime-scene deputy and have the Scotts show him where Kaylee had seen the man in the ditch.

While they did that, he would go to Faribault, a fast run straight west. He got an address for the flower shop from the Faribault cops and punched it into the car’s nav system.

On the way, Lucas found himself losing faith in the sighting. He couldn’t have explained exactly why, except that the suspect, Sprick, was simply in the wrong place. Why would he have been in a ditch more than a quarter-mile north of the road to the cemetery, when, if anything, he should have been walking south? Lucas could make up any number of reasons why that might have happened, but they would be just that: made up. Didn’t feel right. Then there was the question of how Sprick could have run into Shaffer. Shaffer had been nowhere near Zumbrota, as far as they knew from his notes in the little notebook. Again, he could make up a reason that they collided…

It was all very foggy.

Busch’s Florist Shoppe was in a yellow-brick building on the edge of Faribault’s business district. The nav system put him at the front curb thirty-eight minutes after he left Zumbrota. He climbed out of the truck and went inside.

Andi Sprick was a tall, thin, dark-haired woman who was not happy to see him. “I don’t have anything to do with Mark anymore,” she said, her voice shrill with resentment. “I’m having my name changed back to Shroeder.”

“We’re not implying that this has anything to do with you,” Lucas said. They were in the back room of the flower shop, which smelled like a funeral. “We’re trying to get an idea of what your ex-husband was like.”

“He’s a lazy, self-centered jerk without a single ounce of ambition,” she said. “He’d rather sit home and play video games than go outside and… and… have the wind blow on him. He doesn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t see a violent streak in him?” Lucas asked.

“Well, when we were getting divorced, he screamed at me…”

“Miz Sprick…”

“Shroeder…”

“Miz Shroeder, we’re looking for somebody who might have strangled twenty young women.”

She snorted. “You’re wasting your time with Mark. He wouldn’t make the effort. He…” She paused, then backed away from it. “I’m not being fair. Mark is everything I’ve said. He is snarky, lazy, unambitious. He once played an online space game for thirty-six straight hours, right through our second wedding anniversary.”

“Ouch,” Lucas said.

“But I’ve been in the car when he stopped to get out and carry a turtle across the road,” she said. “He’d never hurt anybody, or anything, not on purpose.”

“You think you’ve seen deep enough into his… psychology… to say that for sure?”

“His psychology is about ankle-deep,” Shroeder said. “And no, he didn’t do it. Even thinking he might… it’s just ridiculous.”

They talked for a few more minutes, then Lucas said good-bye: and she’d convinced him.

Back in the car, he called Mattsson: “I talked to Sprick’s ex-wife, and she said that there’s no way that Sprick’s involved. I believe her.”

“Well, I’m talking to Sprick himself about that,” she said. “We decided we couldn’t wait. I’m at his house now.”

“Oh, boy…” Lucas said.

“That make you nervous?”

“Makes me want to stay away from Zumbrota for a while,” Lucas said. “With a small town like that, everybody knows everything. Believe me, there are already five people on their phones to the TV stations. You’ll be up to your knees in media in an hour.”

“I can handle that,” she said.

“I hope so. If Sprick’s innocent, they could give you a hard time.”

“I really do believe Kaylee,” Mattsson said. “I’m sure she saw something, and she says it’s Sprick.”

Lucas was less sure. Eyewitnesses were often useless — or even worse than useless, because they could point you in the wrong direction. Kaylee had seen something, but it was impossible to know what. The man in the ditch might have been wearing the kind of hat Sprick wore, or might have walked the way Sprick walked, or carried a shoulder bag, if Sprick carried one of those… almost anything might have triggered off a pre-programmed Sprick response in the little girl’s brain.

“Go easy,” he said. “You want me there? Or do you want to take it?”

“We can take it. Not a problem. If you want to sit in, that’s okay, too.”

“I’ll stop by,” Lucas said. “Just to hear his voice.”

On the way back to Zumbrota, Lucas took a call from the Star-Tribune’s lead crime reporter, Ruffe Ignace. “So… you down in Owatonna?” Ignace asked.

“No,” Lucas said.

“Let me rephrase that,” Ignace said. “Are you somewhere down south of the Twin Cities, investigating the Black Hole case and the murder of Robert Shaffer?”

“Maybe.”

“That sounds like a big ‘yes.’ Anything new?”

“Yeah, but don’t feel like telling you what it is,” Lucas said.

“Thanks. Another thing. I’m sure you’ve heard of Emmanuel Kent, who’s threatening to kill you and Jenkins. Or maybe Shrake. I get those guys confused.”

Lucas smothered a groan. “Yes, what about him? He’s probably harmless.”

“Yeah, well, he might not be physically dangerous, but he might be, media-wise. He’s sitting outside City Hall, on a rug. He’s gone on a hunger strike, and says he won’t eat anything until you and Jenkins are fired. He’s got a big sign around his neck. He will drink water and a variety of donated fruit juices, to drag it out. His death.”

“Aw, for Christ’s sakes,” Lucas said. “And you’re gonna blow this up into a crisis?”

“No, not me, but we’ve got a feature writer working it — Janet Frost. She did that story on the guy who got stuck in the chimney last winter. She could jerk a tear out of a brass monkey. And a photographer, of course. I’m told Emmanuel’s quite articulate, not to say picturesque.”

“What’s she gonna say?” Lucas asked. “We should have given a free pass to a bank robber, so the crazy guy can get a cheese sandwich once a week?”

“I don’t know what she’s doing, but I thought I’d warn you, so that you’d owe me one. She’ll be calling you. I would counsel you not to use the phrase ‘the crazy guy.’ It reeks of the incorrect. Possibly even the Republican.”

“All right, I owe you one.”

“So what’s new?” Ignace asked.

Lucas thought for a moment, about the fact that all the TV stations probably knew about it: “Off the record. Didn’t come from me.”

“Sure.”

“The Goodhue County sheriff’s investigator is questioning a Zumbrota man about his possible involvement in Shaffer’s murder.”

“Stop the fuckin’ presses,” Ignace said. He said it in a way that wouldn’t stop any presses. “I’m thinking you sound skeptical.”

“Maybe. That’s all I’m saying.”

“But you think it’s bullshit.”

“I’m sure the Goodhue County sheriff’s department has good reason to question the gentleman in question.”

“Okay, I won’t put quotes on you thinking it’s bullshit,” Ignace said. “When Janet calls, remember: you’re a liberal, she’s a liberal. These are complicated issues, and though Kent’s story is a tragic one, and mental health care is certainly an issue deserving of additional serious funding by both the federal and state governments, his brother, in robbing those banks, was putting in danger the lives of many innocent people, including rug rats and chicks, maybe even hot chicks with serious boobies.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Lucas said, and clicked off.

Fuckin’ media.

Sprick’s house was a small white clapboard place on the south side of town. A Zumbrota cop car was parked outside, with two Goodhue County cars. Lucas left his truck at the curb and went up the walk and knocked on the door. A Goodhue deputy came to the door, said, “We’re almost done,” and pushed the door open.

Sprick and the cops were in Sprick’s living room.

Sprick was six feet tall, blond and slender, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a frightened expression. He was sitting on a broken-down love seat. The only other furniture in the living room was a giant stereo system, with two five-foot-tall speakers and three smaller ones, a fifty-inch television, and an array of boxes with blinking lights. The cops were sitting on folding chairs, and Lucas, looking into the kitchen, saw a folding card table, apparently used as a dining table, that matched the chairs; and there were no other chairs in the kitchen.

Post-divorce clean-out, Lucas thought.

Mattsson said, “Mr. Sprick says he was home asleep last night.”

“I was,” Sprick said. “I gotta get up at six o’clock. I got mail to sort, you can ask anyone.”

Lucas said to Mattsson, “Let’s talk out front for a minute.”

They went back through the front door, and Lucas asked: “What do you think?”

“Well, he’s got an unbreakable alibi — he was home asleep — and he’s sticking to it. Won’t move at all.”

“But what do you think?” He emphasized the think.

“I don’t know,” she said. She looked back through the screen at the clutch of deputies. “We just can’t move him off the spot. Didn’t get up to pee, didn’t get up for a drink. He drank some beer last night, watched the last part of the Twins game — he got the score right, and what happened in the last couple of innings — then he went to bed, and didn’t move until the alarm went off at six. Period. End of story. His story. But Kaylee…”

“You ask him to give up some DNA?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. He says he’ll do it. Or fingerprints. Whatever we want,” Mattsson said.

“Not a good sign,” Lucas said.

“But Kaylee…”

“… Saw something,” Lucas said. “You’re right there. I gotta tell you, though, you don’t have an arrest. Not that I see. Not unless he blurts something out.”

She bit her lip, glanced sideways at the screen door, and the sound of Sprick’s voice, then nodded. “You’re right.”

“And you’ve got trouble,” Lucas said, looking past her.

She turned, and saw the mobile broadcast truck rolling down the street toward them. “Ah, boy.”

“Tell them the truth — that you’re talking to a lot of people around town, and Sprick was one of them. Don’t commit to anything, don’t say Sprick’s a suspect. You’re doing the routine.”

“I can do that,” she said, hitching up her gun belt as she looked down the street at the approaching van. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m gonna run for it,” Lucas said.

Sprick lacked the intensity of the Black Hole killer. He was a mistake, now trailing away in Lucas’s rearview mirror. In the same rearview mirror, he saw the TV van stop next to Sprick’s house, and Mattsson walking out to meet it.

What next?

He decided to start over, to do what he’d planned to do when he left St. Paul. Visit each of the four cemeteries, and talk to the Owatonna funeral home brothers, to see if Shaffer had left any clues behind, if they’d said anything to point Shaffer in a particular direction.

He turned a corner and headed out to the main drag; another TV van turned the corner and rolled past him.

Mattsson said she could handle it. Maybe she could. Maybe not.

Not his problem.