Field of Prey

13

Lucas didn’t operate well on four hours of sleep, but as Weather left for work, he propped himself up in bed and turned on the reading light behind his head. The story in the center of the front page, by the feature writer Janet Frost, was what the crime reporter Ruffe Ignace called “a weeper.” It began with scene setting-Emmanuel Kent’s cardboard-box shelter that he set up every night beneath an overhang on the steps of a local Lutheran Church.

The church no longer let him come inside for the night, because he tended to wreck the place. Before locking up at nine o’clock, they let him fill his empty two-liter plastic Pepsi bottles with water, and in the morning, they let him in to wash and use the toilet in a basement restroom.

Sitting in the stygian darkness beneath the concrete overhang, partly concealed by the ivy, he carefully removes his boots before he goes to bed, and washes his feet with a rag he left to dry on the railing. “During the Great War, you could be shot on the spot if you got trench foot,” Manny said in his high-pitched, yet gravelly voice. “That’s a big danger for those of us forced to live outside. If you don’t take good care of your feet, you could get gangrene. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that, it’s endemic among the street population.”

Guy sounded like he graduated from Harvard, Lucas thought, except that he had no idea about trench foot and World War I. And he thought, Janet Frost wouldn’t know a stygian darkness if one jumped up and bit her on the ass.

The story recounted the beginning of the hunger strike, and the shooting that preceded it.

Doyle could be impetuous, but he was not a dangerous man. Everybody liked him, Manny said. “The Woodbury police executed him. I’ll ask you this: What is the penalty for bank robbery in this state? Is it execution without a trial? No, it’s not-but that’s what was done to my brother. He was executed, shot down in cold blood.”

The Woodbury police claimed that Doyle Kent fired a shot when he emerged from the bank, but no bullet was found.

Lucas thought, Uh-oh.

Down further in the story, Manny rolled a marijuana cigarette, which he uses to self-medicate. He lit it with a pink Bic lighter, and then, dry and warm, he said, “I’m definitely feeling weaker. I haven’t had anything but fruit juice since Saturday, but I’ll never quit until I get justice, or die,” he said. He added, “I went so far as to buy a gallon of gasoline, and I hid it. If I ever get the feeling that the police are about to remove me, or put me in jail, I will get my gas can, and I will immolate myself on the steps of City Hall. Won’t that make the mayor proud?”

Then,

Lucas Davenport, the senior BCA agent involved in the tracking of Doyle Kent, admitted that he had “no proof at all” that Kent had done the earlier bank robberies, and though the Woodbury police admitted firing twenty shots at Kent, striking him seven times, including three shots in the chest, three more in the shoulders and neck, and one in the stomach, Davenport joked that “I thought they showed great restraint.”

Davenport was involved in a similar incident in which two women were shot down outside a bank. .

Lucas said it aloud: “Ah, shit.”

The story ended with a protracted scene in which Emmanuel Kent hunkered down under his blankets and looked up at the stars, and visualized a better life for himself, after he’d gotten his justice. Frost concluded with a statement that “a number of prominent attorneys” were considering filing a suit against Woodbury and the BCA, on Kent’s behalf, for excessive violence.

Lucas tried to go back to sleep, but failed. He had decent relationships with most of the media, and earlier in his career, had had a child with a prominent female reporter for Channel Three, although they hadn’t married. He’d always been suspicious of television, because of the ways news got compressed to comic-strip chunks, but he’d been less suspicious of newspapers, because they seemed more professional; he hadn’t often felt deliberately victimized.

Janet Frost had deliberately screwed him. She attributed a few partial quotes to him, and he couldn’t really disavow them, because they were correct, as far as he remembered-they just weren’t in context. And she’d left out critical bits of information, such as the fact that the women shot down outside the bank, in the earlier case, had shot a man inside the bank and had killed another victim in Wisconsin.

At eight o’clock, groggy and annoyed, he got up, spent some time in the bathroom, looked at a suit and tie, then said, “Fuck it,” and put on jeans, a golf shirt, and a black sport coat.

Downstairs, Letty said, “I read the story. I mean, Wow. Not even Channel Six would do that to somebody. You think it has anything to do with the Black Hole thing?”

Lucas considered: “Maybe. It does feel like open season on the cops.”

“You talk to Ruffe about it?”

“He’s the guy who asked me to talk to her,” Lucas said.

“That fucker.”

“Hey! Language!”

“Live with it,” she said.

Ruffe Ignace called precisely at nine o’clock: “I would have called earlier, but I know you don’t get up early.”

“Fuck you.”

“Man, I’m really sorry,” Ignace said.

“That makes me feel a lot better,” Lucas said. “I’ll tell you something, Ruffe: she’s a loose cannon. Sooner or later, she’s gonna screw the paper. She said I was joking when I said Woodbury showed great restraint, but she didn’t put in the explanation. She didn’t tell people that we had good reason to track Kent, and she didn’t say that Candy and Georgie LaChaise murdered that poor sonofabitch in Rice Lake and shot another one here in the Cities-”

“I know, I know, I know. Listen, you’re pissed, and I don’t blame you,” Ruffe said. “I’m going to file a complaint with the ombudsman, so expect a call from him. In the meantime, I’m going to write a piece about how your guys are going to recover money from Bryan’s account down in the islands and how you’re hunting down the Black Hole guy now. Honest to God, Lucas.”

Lucas was quiet for a minute, then said, “Ruffe, I appreciate it.”

“It was a fuckin’ hatchet job,” Ruffe said. “I can’t stand it when people do that shit. I took this fuckin’ job because. . fuck it, never mind. They’ll put my piece on the front page tomorrow, or I’m gonna fuckin’ quit. And believe me, they don’t want me to fuckin’ quit.”

Ruffe slammed the phone down.

Letty was looking at Lucas and said, “He was screaming. I could hear it from here.”

Lucas grinned his coyote grin, the one that showed just a rim of white teeth: “Yeah. He’s almost a friend.”

Letty asked, “You’ve been running around in circles. What’re you going to do?”

Lucas said, “I don’t know. I’ve got an idea, but I don’t want to do it. It’s to look at the ADB, see who knows what.”

“What would any of the assholes know? The guy has to be a deep dark secret-because if he wasn’t, the word would have gotten around, and even the assholes would have ratted him out.”

“I’m afraid you’re right, but what else have I got?”

The ADB-The Assholes Database.

Lucas had taken two years to put it together, and was still working on it. It contained more than eleven hundred names, with addresses and phone numbers, of Minnesota assholes, along with several dozen more from Wisconsin and Iowa, and a couple from the Dakotas and Canada. Most came from the Twin Cities, but there were at least a few from every county in Minnesota.

A number of people knew about it, outside his own circle, but he was careful about sharing anything. The problem was, it wasn’t just a list of assholes, it was a list of people who’d deal with Lucas, but expected, with limitations, to get some payback, if they needed it.

Quite a few of them needed it. Payback came in the form of testimony to judges: even though this particular dickweed did, in fact, loot the local Walmart, he has been a reliable source for Minnesota law enforcement, so instead of three years, how about one year plus time served?

Lucas made a call before he left home, setting up a face-to-face talk. At noon, he was in Owatonna, talking to a guy named Toby in the back of Antoine’s bar and grill.

Toby dealt in illegal python skins and black-bear gallbladders and paws. He paid a dozen farmers across the state to run snake barns. The skins went to Europe. A dozen bow hunters in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin kept the gallbladders flowing; shooting bears is not a problem in parts of the North Woods. Toby once told Lucas that he could get $1,500 for a really good dried gallbladder-they’d sell for up to $3,000 in China-and handled four to five hundred a year, shipped by UPS to a Chinese connection in San Francisco.

He was staring into a glass of beer when Lucas came in. Lucas got a Coke at the bar and carried it back.

Toby wore an old Army ball cap and a short-sleeved camo shirt over jeans. He would have a pistol strapped to his ankle, Lucas knew. He was a short, thick-set man with a three-day beard and a watery blue walleye. When Lucas sat down, Toby leaned forward and asked, in a low voice, “What do you hear about Maxine?”

“She called me three weeks ago,” Lucas said. “I told her you were dealing out of Madison.”

Toby bobbed his head. “Madison. That’s good. Maybe she’ll kill a couple of fuckin’ hippies and the Madison cops will put her in prison.”

“Not gonna happen, Toby,” Lucas said. “There’s only one guy on her list right now, and she knows what you look like.”

Maxine Knowles was a radical animal-rights activist pledged to kill Toby. She’d been warned off, but she continued to look for him. She owned a Remington Mountain Rifle in.243, and was reportedly an excellent shot.

“Fuckin’ crackpot,” Toby said. Then, “What’s up?”

“It’s this Black Hole killer. We’re looking for a guy named Jack Horn.”

Toby nodded: “Seen it on TV.” He pointed his beer bottle at a TV in the corner. “They have been talking about it all morning. First thing up, every time.”

“People who knew him said he was a serious hunter,” Lucas said. “I wondered if he ever hunted with you.”

Toby shook his head: “Never worked with him. Heard about him, talking to guys this morning. Supposedly a pretty good shot, a reloader, used to go out to Wyoming two or three times a year, to shoot prairie dogs.”

“Right: So who would have shot with him, around Holbein? Or Zumbrota?” Lucas asked.

“Oh, boy: none of this gets back to me, right?”

“Right.”

Toby scratched his head. “Blair Tucker would be number one. He’s a well driller, got a place just outside of Holbein. He’s big on reloading and prairie dogs. Roger Axel would be another possibility, runs the hardware store in Holbein, though he’s mostly into head-hunting: you know, a one-of-everything guy. But he’s mostly into big game, so he might not have had much to do with Horn. Dan Weil is another one. Dan has a private two-thousand-yard range out of Holbein towards Red Wing. Horn used to shoot there.”

“This range is up toward the Black Hole?”

“Well, yeah. More or less. Not real close, but that direction,” Toby said.

Lucas wrote the names down, and asked if there was anything he could do for Toby, who said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What happened?” Lucas asked.

“You heard of the Raleigh Duane Cornwall case, up in Canada?”

Lucas looked around the bar, then leaned closer to Toby and said, “Am I wearing a Mountie hat? Look around, Toby. We’re not in Canada. My jurisdiction stops at the border.”

“Yeah, but if somebody could put in a word. . Raleigh’s one of my best boys, and what happened to him isn’t fair.”

The story was about as stupid as any Lucas had ever heard. According to Toby, Cornwall had known the location of an extremely large, extremely old black bear-the best kind for gallbladders. The bear lived on an island in the Rainy River, which was the border between the U.S. and Canada. Cornwall paddled out to the island in a car-topped canoe, set up a lightweight tree stand, spread around a can of bear bait, which consisted of stale donuts and a quart of bacon grease, and climbed up in the tree stand with his bow, to wait.

The bear showed up ten minutes later, moving fast. Cornwall drew on it, but as he was about to let the arrow fly, the bear sensed him, and stopped quick. Cornwall reacted by yanking the bow off his lead, and let the arrow go. He’d reacted too much-the arrow hit the bear in the ass. The bear let out a yelp, spotted Cornwall in his tree, trotted over, and started climbing.

Cornwall had just the instrument for such an occasion: a.357 Magnum. The bear got halfway up the tree to the stand, Cornwall shot him twice, and the bear dropped like a rock.

“The thing is,” Toby said, “the island turned out to be in Canada. I mean, just across the line. Who was to know? There aren’t any markers. And there was a goddamn provincial game warden who heard the shots, and come up on Raleigh from behind.”

He caught Raleigh standing there with a gallbladder in his hand, a pistol in his holster, and a twist of cocaine in his shirt pocket.

“They got him for illegal entry, importation and possession of an illegal firearm, importation and possession of illegal drugs, and shooting a bear out of season. He could be looking at fifteen years.”

Lucas said, “Toby, man, I’d like to help. But I gotta say, with a guy like that. . the rest of us are probably better off without him walking around loose.”

Lucas left Toby looking morosely at his beer, and headed toward Holbein.

The first guy on the list, Blair Tucker, was sitting in his office, which was surrounded by flatbed trucks loaded with pieces of well-drilling equipment. He was counting twenty-dollar bills, when Lucas stuck his head in.

“Yeah, I’m Blair,” Tucker said, sliding the stack of bills into his desk drawer. “What can I do for you?” He had an environmental likeness to Toby, the spare dry face of a man who spent his time working outdoors.

Lucas showed him his ID. “I’m looking for a guy named Horn.”

“I figured somebody’d be coming around,” Tucker said. He’d known Horn, but said he hadn’t hung with him. “I knew he was some kinda fruitcake. The thing is, he didn’t get off on the shooting, he got off on the killing. The guy would kill a hummingbird if he had a chance. With a hammer. Knew another fellow who went squirrel hunting with him, said old Horn shot a heron, walking along a pond. Just to see the feathers fly. Then didn’t even pick them up. The feathers.”

Tucker didn’t know anything good, but confirmed Lucas’s picture of Horn as a killer. When Lucas left Tucker’s place, driving into town, he thought about Horn’s disappearing act: not many people could simply walk away from their house, and never again use an ID or a credit card or a cell phone, and set up again in a new town, and start a new life all over.

Though it had been done. . the mob guy from Boston had done it.

He was on the outskirts of Holbein when Mattsson called: “Where are you?”

“Holbein.”

“Good. I just got a call from Reggie Scott, Kaylee’s father. Kaylee was out riding her bike with a girlfriend, and says she saw Mr. Sprick staring at her from his car. Said he drove by really slow, staring at her. She said he looked at her in a really mean way, and scared her.”

“Have you talked to Sprick?”

“On the way. I’ll be there in a half hour,” Mattsson said.

“I’ll be there in eight minutes,” Lucas said. “Exactly when did she see him?”

“Five minutes ago.”

Lucas looked at his watch, noted the time, and said, “I’m on the way.”

Kaylee or Sprick? Sprick first, Lucas decided. He had Sprick’s cell phone number and as he drove into Zumbrota, called him. “Where are you?”

“At the office. They pulled me off my route, they got me subbing, sorting mail. What happened?”

“Where’s the post office?”

Lucas parked at the Shell station across the street and walked over to the post office and found Sprick sitting in the back, not doing much of anything. “Now what?” Sprick asked.

“Where were you fifteen minutes ago?” Lucas asked.

“Right here.”

“A half hour ago?”

“Right here,” Sprick said. “I’ve been here since six o’clock this morning. I had a break at ten and walked up to the Shell station and got some coffee. That took five minutes. Then I came back and I’ve been here ever since. Three guys here with me.”

One of the three other guys, who’d been listening while trying to look like he wasn’t, glanced at Lucas and Lucas asked, “Was he?”

“Right here,” the guy said. “And he’s a guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“What happened fifteen minutes ago?” Sprick asked.

“Kaylee said she saw you, in your car. Said you were stalking her.”

“Aw, for Christ’s sakes. What’d I do to deserve this? What the heck did I do?” He threw his hands up.

From his car, Lucas called Mattsson: “Sprick was at the post office, sorting mail, since six o’clock this morning. He has three witnesses, and they don’t look like a criminal conspiracy.”

“Meet me at the Scotts’ house,” Mattsson said. “I’m getting tired of this.”

“I’m way past tired of it,” Lucas said.

“I saw that story in the paper this morning,” Mattsson said. “You sound like quite the fashionable gunslinger.”

“Hey, Catrin? Stick a sock in it.”

“In what?”

“See you at the Scotts’.”

Kaylee Scott insisted that she’d seen Mr. Sprick. She had a witness. “We were riding our bikes over to the swimming pool,” Kaylee said. “He went by in his truck real slow. He looked out the window at me, a really mean look. It was him.”

Another little girl, with a bobbed blond hairdo, her bangs right down to her eyebrows, nodded solemnly as she said, “He did. Look mean at us.”

Her name was Jane Windrew, and she was sitting between her parents, Marge and Lanny. Mattsson asked Jane, “Do you know Mr. Sprick?”

“Mr. Sprick. Yes. We’d see him in his truck, every day, until he scared Kaylee.”

Reggie Scott said, “I’m telling you, the guy’s a maniac.”

Lucas said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that talk to yourself. Sprick has three witnesses who say he never left the post office today, except for five minutes at ten o’clock, to walk across the street to the Shell station.”

“We prefer to believe our daughter,” Carol Scott said.

Mattsson asked, “Who else was around there, on the street? Just you two, or were there more girls?”

“It was just us,” Jane said.

“Were there any other adults around? If you’d yelled or screamed, would anybody have heard you?” Lucas asked.

The girls looked at each other, and then Kaylee turned back to Lucas and said, “I dunno. I didn’t see anybody. We were just riding down the street.”

“Sprick drives a Subaru,” Mattsson said to Kaylee. “You said he was driving a truck. What kind of truck? Like a truck like your dad’s, an SUV? Or a pickup, or. .”

“A pickup,” Jane said. “It was dark brown.”

“Black,” said Kaylee.

“I think it was dark brown,” Jane said.

Reggie Scott said, “Whatever. What color’s Sprick’s Subaru?”

Mattsson said, “Silver. Silver and gray. Nothing like black or brown.”

“It was him,” Kaylee said. Her mother gave her a hug and asked Lucas, “Why don’t you believe us? It’s not like Sprick would be stalking her in his own truck.”

Mattsson said, “We do believe her-the girls-that they saw someone. We just know it wasn’t Sprick that they saw.”

“You know, you’d think you guys never heard the phrase ‘Going postal,’” Carol Scott said. “Who knows what they’re cooking up down there.”

“Down where?” Lucas asked. “The post office?”

“We know what our daughter saw,” Carol Scott said again.

Lucas turned to Jane and asked, “When he went by, did you look at him right in the face?”

Her eyes shifted. Lucas glanced at Mattsson, and she’d picked it up. Jane said, “Not exactly. I saw him go by, and Kaylee said, ‘It’s Mr. Sprick,’ and I saw it was him.”

“Did you actually see his face?”

Again, the eye shift. “Well, Kaylee said-”

“Pretend that you were riding the bicycle on your own,” Mattsson said. “Close your eyes and pretend. Did you see his face?”

She didn’t close her eyes, but she said instead, “Kaylee. . I believe Kaylee.”

Jane’s mother said, “Okay. That’s enough. I think we better hit the road.”

Carol Scott said, “Hey, you know what they saw.”

Marge Windrew said, “I’m not exactly sure what Jane saw, but we’ll take some steps to make sure she’s safe.” She nodded to her husband. “Let’s go. I really don’t want Jane to be more traumatized than she is already.”

Mattsson said to the Scotts, “I talked to the sheriff when I was on the way over here. He’s going to put some unmarked cars in the neighbors’ driveways for the next few days, just in case the prowler should come back.”

“When are they going to start?” Carol Scott asked. “How’ll we recognize him? I even hate to answer my door.”

“They’ll come by and introduce themselves, tell you where they’ll be,” Mattsson said. “You and the Windrews will both get a phone number, in case you should be. . disturbed. You call, we’ll have somebody at your door in a half minute. Literally half a minute, maybe less.”

Lucas, Mattsson, and the Windrews left at the same time, walking out to the curb where Lucas and Mattsson had parked. The Windrews lived a block away. Lucas caught up with them and asked, “You seemed a little skeptical about this. I don’t want to cause you any trouble with your neighbors, or with your daughter’s friend, but. . I was wondering why you sounded that way.”

The Windrews looked at each other, and then Lanny Windrew said to his wife, “You better tell them.”

Marge said, “Before the kids left for the pool, I heard them talking, and Kaylee said that if Mr. Sprick came around again, and looked at her, they could both go on television. We don’t care if Jane ever goes on television. The Scotts. . think differently about that.”

Mattsson brushed her hair back and said, “Damnit.” To Jane: “You never actually saw Mr. Sprick at all?”

Jane said, “I saw the truck.”

“But not Mr. Sprick.”

“Not exactly. But it could have been him.”

When the Windrews walked away, Mattsson said, “That’s that. I’ll talk to the sheriff-I think we should have a cop here anyway.”

“That’s up to you and the sheriff,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. Okay. I’m sorry I dragged you over here. What’ve you been up to? Have you been down here all day?”

Lucas told her about talking to Toby, in Owatonna.

“I don’t know the first two guys, but I know Dan Weil,” Mattsson said. “Over-the-top gun nut. He bought a creek bed off a bunch of farmers, brought in a bulldozer and cut a strip right along the creek, more than a mile long, piled up fifty feet of dirt at the end of it. Guys go out there with.50-cals, try to hit targets at a measured mile.”

“He live out there?”

“No, but he doesn’t live far from it,” she said. “You want to run over and talk to him?”

Lucas did. “What else we got to do?”

Weil lived in a neat ranch-style house out in the countryside, with apple and plum trees spotted around the two-acre yard, and a big metal-sided garage/workshop off to one side. Weil was a civil engineer, and worked out of a studio attached to the end of his garage. A tall thin man with round, gold-rimmed military-style glasses, he had cold blue eyes and a prominent nose under a sandy crew cut. He wore an olive drab shirt with epaulets, jeans, and cleated boots. He invited them in, and sat on a drawing-board stool while they took a couple of leather visitor’s chairs. A line of five heavy gun safes sat at one end of the studio.

“All kinds of stuff,” he said, in answer to a question from Lucas. “I got more work than I can handle-driveways, embankments, flowage ditches, surveys for building slabs. Anything you’d use a bulldozer or a Bobcat or a grader for.”

Mattsson asked, “How well did you know Horn?”

“Not well.” He seemed to think about that for a second, then added, “He was out here often enough. He wasn’t one of the big-caliber, long-range guys. He shot small stuff out to five hundred yards or so:.22-250, 223. Biggest I ever saw was a 6mm Remington. Had an old.220 Swift if I remember correctly. Said he used to bark squirrels with it. But he didn’t talk much. He hung around, but not out, if you know what I mean. He wasn’t a hang-out kinda guy.”

“And he was a killer,” Lucas said.

“Oh yeah.” Weil blinked. “That was the thing about him. He liked killing. He liked death. Most of us guys out here, we’re interested in guns, loads, ballistics, technique. We’ve got guys out here who’ve never killed a thing in their whole lives. Engineers, a lot of them. Shooting paper. Horn wanted to kill stuff. Came back and told me one time that he killed a thousand prairie rats out in Wyoming. I said, ‘Well, that’s real good, Mr. Horn.’ But you know. . a thousand? That’s somewhat excessive, if you ask me, and I’m a gun nut.”

Weil hadn’t seen him, or heard of him, since the attack on the woman in Faribault. He wasn’t surprised about the attack: “Of all the guys who’ve come out here, if you’d told me what happened without who it was that did it, I’d have guessed Horn.”

They talked awhile longer, and Weil said, “Wherever he is, he won’t stay away from guns. If I were you, I’d take his picture around to every gun range in the country. Somebody’ll recognize him.”

Lucas: “We can do that. Not a bad idea, either.”

As they were leaving, Weil asked them what they shot. Mattsson said a Glock 9mm, and Lucas said a.45, and Weil said, “A.45, huh? You any good with it?”

Lucas said he was pretty good, and ten minutes later, they were all out at the range, banging away at steel plates with pistols. When they got done, Weil said to Lucas, “You are good, for a cop,” and to Mattsson, “You’re above average. Most cops don’t shoot for shit.”

“What does it mean,” Lucas asked, “barking a squirrel?”

“You get a squirrel way up in a tree, and you’re out there with a.223 or something. You hit a squirrel with that, it’ll blow the meat right off the bones. So what you do is, you shoot the tree bark right under its head. The concussion and the fall kills the squirrel. Supposedly.”

“That’d take a good shot.”

“It’d take an okay shot,” Weil said. “Not great.”

When they left Weil, Mattsson said, “Well, that was fun. What’s next?”

Lucas ran a hand through his hair: he smelled like burnt gunpowder. “You know, I’m running around in circles. All of us BCA guys are running around in circles. What I really need is what I told my boss I was going to do, which is go home and think about it some more. Not talk to anyone, not mow the grass, but sit in a quiet spot and think about it.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I keep trying to do it, and keep getting interrupted,” Lucas said.

“I’ll call you first thing, if anything happens tonight.”

“Yeah, well. .”

She leaned back against the door of her truck. “You think it’s a fool’s errand?”

“Probably,” Lucas said. “The thing is, I could be completely wrong. Having a cop there could keep the Scott family from being murdered. So. . tell your guy to stay awake.”

She nodded. “If you think of something, call me.”

Lucas went home to think.