Field of Prey

6

R-A was having his early-evening drink, one of five or six he would have after work, and watching television with Horn, when he saw Catrin Mattsson on the evening news. She was talking to a TV reporter about the murder of Bob Shaffer.

“Hoochy-coo,” R-A said. “Take a look at this one.”

Mattsson was saying, “We are talking to everybody in the community who… who monitors the life of the community, looking for factors that might point us at the killer. Mr. Sprick, as the mail carrier, is one of those people.”

The reporters didn’t believe her. They’d had it from the locals that Sprick might be the Black Hole guy. Mattsson tap-danced: she did not consider Mr. Sprick a suspect, she said, although, “to be plain, we don’t rule anyone out. It’s my feeling, and this is just a personal feeling, that we are very close to the killer — close physically, I mean. He’s close by, right now.”

The cameraman zoomed in on a window in Sprick’s small house and caught the crinkle in the venetian blind, where Sprick was peering out. You couldn’t see anything but a black spot that might have been an eye — and of course it felt like a killer’s eye.

“What about the witness? How much credibility are you giving her?” the reporter asked.

“We haven’t identified the witness as a woman—” Mattsson began.

The reporter interrupted: “Every person here knows who the witness is. We haven’t identified her because of her… demographics, so to speak. Given those demographics, how reliable do you think she is?”

“I really can’t address that question…”

“Demographics? What the fuck is she talking about?” R-A said to the TV. “Nobody from Zumbrota saw me. Demographics? Does that mean she’s from somewhere else? Or maybe she’s a hooker or something?”

“Don’t know,” Horn said. “They’re being weird about it.”

“Maybe just jerking my chain,” R-A said. “They probably figure I’m watching.”

On the TV, somebody asked a semi-witty question, and Mattsson grinned at the reporter, a girlie grin. When she turned half-away from the camera, you could see her figure.

R-A rattled the ice through his bourbon and took a nip and said to Horn, “Look at this woman, Horn. Look at those tits. Look at that uniform. That’s primo boner material right there. Isn’t she something?”

After a long silence, Horn said, “Roger, you can’t do that. You can’t go killing this woman. You’d be a hell of a lot better off figuring out who this witness is, and what you might do about her. Figure out how she identified this Sprick guy. And who the fuck is Sprick, and why do they think he’s you?”

R-A said, “I just, uh, I just…” He slumped back in his chair, and Horn recognized the attitude. R-A couldn’t think about the witness, not right now: he was purely fantasizing about what he’d do to Catrin Mattsson, down in the basement.

“They’re going to get you, Roger, if you don’t pay attention,” Horn said. “You don’t have much more time, now. I thought that a month ago, when they lifted the lid off the cistern. They’ll get some of that DNA stuff and they’ll start checking everybody. God knows you put enough of it in those girls. They’ll ask every man in town for his DNA, and if anybody says ‘no’… They’ll get your name, and they’ll come through those doors with guns, and they’ll kill you, because you killed one of theirs. Won’t be a trial.”

“Oh, bullshit…” R-A tried to think seriously about that, but he couldn’t, as long as Mattsson was on the screen. R-A had a certain model woman that he went for: a kind of tight-looking blonde. Not all of them had been natural blondes, because he was careful, and sometimes he had to take what he could safely get… but he’d take a blonde anytime. And Mattsson certainly was blond.

“Wonder if she shaves?” he said to Horn. “Remember when we pulled the underpants off what’s-her-name? Barbara? You remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” Horn said. “I do remember that.”

The TV interview ended, and R-A picked up the remote and clicked around the other major channels and she popped up again and he groaned: “Look at this woman, Horn. Just think what she’d be like, bent over that ottoman, screaming her lungs out. It’s just, just…”

Just that blondes, without their clothes on, looked so naked. R-A excused himself, went back to the bedroom, and left Horn staring at the TV. He was back ten minutes later, and sat back down, and Horn asked, “Feel better now?”

“I know, it’s disgusting, for a grown man,” R-A said. He finished the now-watery bourbon in one gulp, and sucked on the slim remnants of the ice cubes.

“Everybody jacks off once in a while,” Horn said. “Well, except me. But three or four times a day? You’re going to break it off, you’re not careful.”

“You know what’s going on,” R-A said. “I need…”

The weatherman came on, smiling out at them as he talked about continuing hot and dry, and the meteor showers that were coming up and how, if the weather held, they’d have a good view of them.

They waited in silence until he finished — weather was a big deal in Minnesota, even for insane serial killers in the middle of the summer — and then picked up again: “I know what you need, but that’s even crazier than it usually is,” Horn said. “What I don’t like, is you’re putting both of us at risk.”

“Yeah, what do you have to lose? You haven’t done anything in years, you haven’t done anything since we broke that head off old Gunter’s neck.”

R-A laughed at the thought. Gunter had been one of the early sepulcher residents. Twisting off old Gunter’s head had been messy; he sometimes still dreamed about the neck tendons popping like a bunch of cornstalks, and then that dusty, nasty smell. “I’m going down the basement,” he said. “Gonna look around.”

The basement door came off the kitchen, and the basement itself was down a narrow twisting set of steps. R-A’s house had been built in 1882, in a style called Carpenter Gothic. The original foundation had been made of local stone, but in the 1960s, R-A’s grandfather had the house jacked up, rolled onto the back half of the lot, and he’d dug a new, deeper basement, with a foundation of concrete block.

As a Carpenter Gothic, the exterior form of the house had been determined by whim as much as anything, and the foundation necessarily followed it. That meant that it had been possible to build a long, narrow room not obvious to the eye, entered through a steel door around a sharp corner, and behind a rack of Ball jars filled with canned fruit and vegetables.

R-A’s grandfather had designed it as a bomb shelter, for the day when the Russkies dropped the Big One. The neighbors didn’t know about it, because after the bombs fell, they’d be out there with guns, looking for food.

R-A was as meticulous about home care as his grandfather and father had been, and the basement remained dry, clean, and orderly, divided into separate spaces for a home shop, a mechanical room for plumbing and heating fixtures, and a large and orderly storage area.

The bomb shelter had become a cell, where he beat, raped, and murdered his victims.

Now, dropping down into the basement, R-A pushed the rack of jars aside — the rack didn’t look like it, but it was quite sturdy, with casters on the legs. He pushed open the steel door and looked around.

He quite liked it down in the bomb shelter, because it was so quiet. He kept a stack of pornographic bondage magazines on a cot, and now he sat down and picked one of them up. The bound victims in the magazines were usually blond, his personal preference, and he spent some time paging through them, revisiting old favorites. He’d actually duplicated some of the scenes portrayed in the magazines, but his memories weren’t as sharp as the magazine pictures.

Now he found a tough-looking blonde, nude, bent over a bench in the photo, her hands tied behind her, her face turned toward the men disciplining her… R-A closed his eyes and visualized Catrin Mattsson in the same position.

Closed his eyes and saw it all, and groaned, slipped one hand into his jeans. Deep in his heart he thought Horn might be right, that it was all coming to an end. The cops would never quit. But if he could have Mattsson first…

He knew nothing about her, where she lived, what she did when she wasn’t working. He’d have to figure out a way to ambush her, or perhaps to draw her in. If she came to the door as Shaffer had, unaware, tracking a lead, he could take her right there in the hallway.

But how to bring her in, without bringing in a troop of cops behind her?

How would he do that?

A steel bar ran from one side of the concrete wall to the other, a little more than seven feet off the floor. It had nothing to do with the bomb shelter — R-A had put it there, because he’d fantasized about hanging the girls up there, the better to whip them. He’d done it a few times, too, but it never worked out as well as he’d hoped it would — they usually fainted, and they’d bleed all over the place.

He wasn’t a big fan of actual blood. He wanted submission, and sex, and… admiration? Well, fear, anyway. Respect.

He went over and stood under the bar, and did five pull-ups. Stood under the bar, waiting for the burn to subside, and then did three more. Not bad: most American men his age couldn’t even do two.

If he could get Mattsson down here… He looked around.

You know what? What he’d do, he thought, was fight her. Get everything out of here, so she couldn’t build a weapon somehow, strip her buck naked, then get naked himself, and lock the door, and tell her what he was going to do to her.

Tell her to fight for the key.

Fight her.

That’s what he’d do, he thought. He was handling himself now, the urge growing again. Before his mind went completely blank, he made two resolutions. He would figure out a way to beat the cops; and he’d have Catrin Mattsson.