Field of Prey

17

Lucas and Elle didn’t get back to the Twin Cities until after seven o’clock. Mattsson said she was going to look at the path of Jorgenson’s flight through the cornfield, to see if she could estimate how long it took between the truck wreck and the arrival of the cops. She’d see him in the morning.

Lucas told Weather what they’d learned: “If Horn’s dead, you guys have wasted a lot of time,” she said.

“It was something we needed to know,” Lucas said. “Something critical.”

Mattsson showed up the next morning for the daily case conference, came straight into Lucas’s office: “Did you tell them that Horn’s dead?”

“Not yet. I’m just about to, at the meeting,” he said. “It’s not like we’re competing against them.”

“How about if I told them?”

Lucas looked at her for a moment, then pointed at his visitor’s chair and she sat down. “You remember what I said about how it gets kinda political around here? Jon Duncan is eventually going to be an important guy. He’s got that command presence, and, though he really seems to be a good guy, he’s never been around an important ass that he didn’t kiss.”

“I see that in him,” Mattsson said.

Lucas said, “The problem is, we went over and interviewed Jorgenson after he did, and we got something critical that he didn’t. Might not make him look so good. I don’t have to worry about that, but you’d like to find a spot up here.”

“I understand that,” Mattsson said. “But let me break the news-I want to try out those political chops.”

Lucas leaned back in his chair and said, “You got about one minute to get it together.”

She said, “I’ve been thinking about it all night.”

Lucas looked at his watch: “Let’s go.”

Duncan called the meeting to order, summarized in thirty seconds the investigations of his crew in the Sauk Centre area-not much there.

“The phone trace began in Sauk Centre, wound up way south of Highway 52, looked to be heading back to Zumbrota or Holbein. Now, from what the crime-scene crew says, it appears that Horn killed the O’Neills earlier in the evening, drove to Sauk Centre to make the phone call, and then drove back. We now think that he actually lives south, and all that stuff about Sauk Centre and Alexandria was an attempt to pull us up north.”

“We don’t even know for sure that Horn killed the O’Neills,” one of the agents said. “I admit it’d be a weird coincidence. .”

Duncan waved him down: “We know now. It was Horn. The crew was working all day and most of the night on the O’Neill scene, you’ll all have summaries in your paperwork. As you all know, we picked up a lot of.22 brass from the floor of the O’Neill house. About fifteen minutes ago, Don Abernathy confirmed that we had several partial fingerprints, mostly thumbprints, on the brass, and they match the prints that Horn had with the feds. He was fingerprinted in Holbein when he was hired on at the police department. So. Where is he?”

There was a flurry of conversation about that and Mattsson looked at Lucas, eyebrows up. Lucas held up a finger and asked, “Is Don still upstairs?”

Duncan said, “I’m sure he is.”

“Let’s give him a ring,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a question about the prints.”

“Which is?”

“I want to know how old they are.”

Duncan stuck a finger in an ear and rattled it around for a second, then said, “Sure,” and reached for the speakerphone and punched in a number. Abernathy was on the line a minute later.

“Don, we have a question for you,” Duncan said. “Do you have any idea how old those prints were?”

Abernathy cleared his throat and said, “They are somewhat old-can’t really tell how old, but they’re not real new. What we’re seeing is not the oil or perspiration from the friction ridges, like you see on fresh prints. We’re seeing some faint corrosion in the brass, caused by finger oil or perspiration, that follow the pattern of the friction ridges. There’s no doubt that they belong to Horn, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Lucas asked, “Could they be ten years old?”

Abernathy said, “Yeah, once they’re etched onto the shells like that, they’re pretty permanent. They could be fifty years old.”

Duncan asked Lucas, “That everything?” and Lucas nodded and Duncan said, “Hey, Don, thanks,” and then rang off. He looked at Lucas and asked, “All right. What’s up?”

Lucas pointed a finger at Mattsson.

“Lucas and I were reading your interview with Heather Jorgenson,” Mattsson said, speaking directly to Duncan. “We got to talking about it when we were out there yesterday morning on that phone-tracing business, and then the O’Neill murders. We thought there was a lot of good stuff in there, but we wondered if we could drill deeper if we had Jorgenson talk to a psychiatrist or psychologist.

“Lucas has a good friend who is the head of the Department of Psychology at St. Anne’s,” she continued. “We went over to Jorgenson’s late yesterday afternoon, with the psychologist, Elle Kruger. Kruger put Jorgenson into, mmm, what I guess you’d call a state of regression. She didn’t exactly hypnotize her, but it was over in that direction.

“After interviewing her in this state, in which she more or less relived the attack at the diner, and then her attack on Horn, a couple of things became evident.”

Duncan was twiddling a yellow pencil and he stopped and crossed his legs and said, “I gotta tell you, the suspense is killing me. Just tell us.”

Mattsson smiled at him and said, “First off, she realized, and we agree, that there wasn’t one attacker, but two.”

Somebody said, “Whoa.”

Duncan was chewing on his lower lip. “I could buy that. Tell us why. Give us the scenario.”

Mattsson outlined it: a woman who they believed might have weighed as much as a hundred fifty pounds, or more, being bodily lifted and thrown in the back of the truck by a man who probably wasn’t twenty pounds heavier. The mysterious appearance of the truck within seconds of the attack. The even more mysterious disappearance of Horn.

“There were theories that he ran off somewhere and died. We think he was picked up, by an accomplice in a trailing car or truck. Kruger took Jorgenson on a minute-by-minute reconstruction of her flight after the truck went in the ditch. She wouldn’t necessarily have been aware of a second vehicle. Quite a bit of her run was down in a dry creek bed. She couldn’t have seen another truck from there. I went over there last night and walked up the same creek bed-she couldn’t have seen anything until she recrossed the road to the house where she called the police from.”

Duncan: “You said, ‘First off.’ Is there anything else?”

Mattsson nodded. “Kruger got Jorgenson to relive the stabbing. She had a razor-sharp, serrated blade with a nasty point, three inches long. I got the name and model from her-it was the first model of a Leatherman Super Tool-looked it up, and it’s a serious weapon. In the reenactment, she seemed to think she stuck him at least five times in the neck and spine.”

Duncan twitched the yellow pencil at her. “The reason that Lucas asked about the fingerprints, and how old they are, is because you think. .”

“Horn is dead,” Mattsson said. “We think he’s been dead for years. We think the real Black Hole killer has been dragging him out in front of us because he wants us looking for Horn. Horn’s probably been in a hole out in the woods ever since he attacked Jorgenson.”

A long silence, and then everybody started talking at once. Lucas jumped in. “Little Kaylee said she saw this postal clerk, Sprick, in the ditch near where Shaffer’s body was found. We have another woman who’s identified Sprick as having been in her shop, the one Mary Lynn Carpenter ran, several times a year. He doesn’t look anything at all like Horn. And you know why Kaylee saw him in the ditch? I suspect it was because he was walking back to Holbein. He drove Shaffer down to Zumbrota to throw us off. It’s a good hike back, but half of us in here are runners, and we run distances that approach that. It’s an easy walk, really, if you’ve got a couple hours. He had all night. Everything here points to Holbein: the last cemetery that we know for sure that Shaffer was in. . the O’Neill murders.”

More silence, then Duncan asked, “Show of hands. How many people think Horn is probably dead?”

All the hands went up, including Duncan’s.

“Okay,” he said, “we gotta turn this train around.” To Mattsson, with one last poke of the pencil: “Nice piece of work.”

Lucas went back to his office, trailed by Mattsson. Lucas said, “You done good. You didn’t embarrass him, left him in charge.”

Mattsson: “Now what?”

“Now there’s going to be some more grinding. We have a real shot at him now. We’re not chasing a ghost,” Lucas said. “We’re going to throw a net over Holbein, the whole town, and sieve it out.”

“Goddamnit: I’d like a gunfight,” Mattsson said.

“Innocent people get killed in gunfights,” Lucas said.

“Okay. I want a gunfight where no innocent people get killed. Only the Black Hole guy.”

“Careful of what you wish for,” Lucas said. “In the meantime. . I gotta catch up with my guys.”

Mattsson left and Lucas went looking for his secretary, and found Sands, the director, instead. “I found you,” Sands said. “What’s that fuckin’ Flowers doing?”

“Working a semi-low-priority case down south.”

“Excellent. He’s right on the spot,” Sands said. “We got a call from the Winona County sheriff’s office that some drunk reporter from a shopper newspaper down there was found dead in a ditch.”

“Dead from drinking?” Lucas asked.

“From what I’m told, he might’ve been, except for the bullet holes in his back.”

“All right. Who’s handling the crime scene?”

“The sheriff’s office has got a competent guy, I’m told. He’s on top of it. There’s not much of a crime scene-the guy was shot and thrown in the ditch, off a blacktop road, not found for at least a couple days. But they want us to take a look, Virgil particularly,” Sands said.

“I’ll talk to Virgil.”

“Interesting, that thing about Horn being dead,” Sands said, as he drifted away. “Who woulda thought?”

Lucas called Virgil, who said, without saying hello, “I’m already on the way over.”

“The newspaper guy?”

“Yeah. Not much of a newspaper, and not much of a guy, from what I’m told, but he’s definitely been murdered.”

“Stay in touch,” Lucas said.

HE CHECKED with Jenkins and Shrake. Jenkins said they’d be done in two more days, that they’d be back with Bryan and all the paperwork they’d found in the trunk of his car, since Florida didn’t want him for anything. And that they were tired of Florida. “You know they allow alligators on the golf courses down here?”

“I don’t play golf,” Lucas said. “But I’m guessing that’s what they call a water hazard.”

Del was out of touch.

A little after noon, Lucas went home, taking the updated murder books with him. Weather wasn’t yet home, because she had an afternoon patch job on a guy with skin cancer. Lucas thought an intensive search of Holbein, and perhaps Zumbrota, was likely to turn something up, so he finished reading the last of the murder books, and when he was done, dumped the books on the floor and took a nap.

After the nap, he went for a run, and Weather called as he was going out the door and said she’d be a little later still. After a hard four miles, Lucas stood in the shower for a few minutes, then dressed again and found Letty downstairs with fifty pounds of gear she’d need for Stanford: “What I really need is a new laptop. It’s gonna have to be a heavy-duty one. I don’t want a low-rent Dell.”

His phone vibrated, and Lucas looked at the screen. He said, “Duncan. Maybe something happened,” and clicked “answer.”

“What are you up to?” Duncan asked.

“Just finished scrounging through the murder books again. Why?”

“We’ve taken over the Holbein City Hall lobby down here, and we’ve got people walking all over town, spreading the word that the killer may be here. Well, a woman came in a few minutes ago, name is Barbara Neumann, to tell us that Horn was not friendless, like we’ve been told. There’s a Mayo clinic here, and Horn apparently got himself poisoned with some kind of weed killer-nothing serious, eczema, a rash, painful, I guess, but not much more. Anyway, he had to come back a dozen times, for treatment and tests, make sure he didn’t have any liver problems and so on. The woman said that a social worker named Rachel Cline seemed to have gotten pretty friendly with him. I don’t know what that means, and Neumann doesn’t either, whether the friendliness was personal or professional. But: to make a long story short, Cline is in the Twin Cities now, working at Fairview Southdale.”

“So we’re not assuming that Horn is dead?”

“I’m assuming that,” Duncan said. “What I’m hoping is, Cline knew him well enough to know who another friend of his might be. That fuckin’ Horn is the most impenetrable personality I’ve ever run into. Didn’t do anything but pick up live dogs and dead skunks, shoot guns, and drink. Anyway, I’m sorta looking for somebody to run over to Southdale. Cline is there now, and she knows we want to talk to her.”

“I can leave in one minute,” Lucas said. “Where is she, exactly?”

Cline was a tall honey blonde who wore heavy black-rimmed spectacles that made her look like she wrote book reviews for the Wall Street Journal. She gave Lucas a firm shake and said, “I can assure you, I was not a friend of Horn’s. Any kind of a friend.”

They were sitting in an otherwise empty lounge area outside the office of the Case Management Team.

“But you were friendly with him-professionally, at least.”

“Yeah, but I knew he was a creepoid,” she said, hugging herself. “He tried to be friendly with me, but the only things he could talk about were shooting. . things.”

“Why was he talking to you at all?”

“He couldn’t pay his clinic bill. I mean, he had to be treated, but he had no money. He had this cheap-ass insurance from the city. You had a choice-you either took a high maximum payment with a high deductible, or vice versa, low max, low deduct. He took the high max, high deductible, and he couldn’t make the deductible. We worked out a payment plan with him.”

“So. . you didn’t know who he hung with. If he hung with anybody.”

“I saw him with a guy once, when he was being treated, and I think it was a friend. I don’t know who it was.” She leaned toward Lucas, intent on the memory. “What I remember was, there is a place in Holbein called Arlo’s Finer Meats, and Horn and this other guy were carrying a dead deer-I think it was a deer-into the back. They had a deer-processing thing there. The reason I remember, in particular, is that my ex-husband was a deer hunter, and I’ve seen a lot of dead bucks. This deer had huge horns. Horns like I’d never seen. That’s why I’m not even a hundred percent sure it was a deer-it was just so big. Like an elk. But not that big, maybe.”

“You remember what year this was?”

“Not the year, but I can tell you it was probably a year before he attacked that woman.”

They talked for another ten minutes, but she had nothing else. Lucas thanked her, went to his car, and called Duncan.

“Big deer,” Duncan said. “Huge deer. I’m heading over to Arlo’s. I wonder if they might have shot it at a game farm? That’s where you get the biggest bucks.”

“It’s a possibility,” Lucas said.

“Lucas: thank you.”

Lucas went home and found Letty waiting to talk to him. “I’ve been reading the murder books again,” she said. “I’ve got a question about the ropes. There were fourteen ropes found down in the Black Hole. Seven of them were quarter-inch nylon, three were quarter-inch polypropylene, two were three-eighths-inch nylon, and two were three-eighths-inch polypro. All of them were within a couple of inches of thirty inches long, and they all had knots tied at both ends.”

“So his hands wouldn’t slip when he was strangling the women with them,” Lucas said.

“But here’s the thing-even though they were extremely similar, they didn’t all come from the same length of rope. It wasn’t one rope he was cutting to get seven lengths of nylon. The lab says there are subtle differences in chemical composition and even in weave, by different manufacturers. So, the killer got them at some place with a lot of rope.”

“Or a lot of different places with a lot of different ropes,” Lucas said. “They’ve checked the hardware stores everywhere, got no good information-even checked the marinas, because nylon’s used by boaters.”

“There’s gotta be something weird about going someplace and buying a two-and-a-half-foot rope,” Letty said. “What could you use it for, besides strangling people?”

“Lawn mower starter cords, boat tie-downs, I dunno.” Lucas thought about it for a few seconds, then said, “Think it over. There might be something in there.”

Weather came in and said, “You guys are on television again. That Mattsson is a very attractive young woman.”

Lucas tried to think of a reply, but nothing came to mind. So he said, “What are we on television about?”

“About Horn being dead. About looking for another guy. At least, that’s what the promo said.”

“What? Jon wasn’t going to release that yet.”

Letty, who’d worked at Channel Three for several years, as a student intern, said, “If you’ve got agents running all over Holbein and Zumbrota, how long did you think it’d stay confidential?”

Lucas settled back in his chair. “All right. Not long, I guess.”

“Well, get up. Let’s go watch,” Letty said.

They all went traipsing into the family room, where Sam was playing with Legos in front of the TV, and Gabrielle was watching him work. They sat through an advertisement for Hyundai automobiles that were being blown out at record low prices while the boss was on vacation in Canada.

Then the anchorman came up and said, “Breaking right now! An exclusive from Channel Three’s crime team! We’re switching you to Holbein, where. .”

They switched to an excited reporter in Holbein who said, “Greg, we’ve confirmed from a number of sources that the agents of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension are literally swarming through the towns of Holbein and Zumbrota, looking for a mystery ‘second man’ in the Black Hole case. And get this, Greg! The BCA now believes that Jack Horn is dead!”

There followed shots of agents and cops coming and going from the Holbein police headquarters, and a shot of Duncan, in plain clothes, consulting with Mattsson, in her deputy’s uniform. “Those two are getting pretty friendly,” Lucas said, genuinely amused. “A few days ago, they were screaming at each other.”

The reporter tried to interview Mattsson, but she brushed him off: “You need to talk to Jon Duncan. Everything goes through him.”

“But are you closing in? Do you have somebody in your sights?”

Mattsson smiled and shook her head, but the smile said, “Yes.”

Duncan did say a few words, and Letty said, “He has nice hair and a good smile.”

“Good hair is important,” Lucas said.

“That’s all you got?” Letty asked. “They’re closing in, and all you got is, ‘Good hair is important’?”

“This killer is not a dumb guy,” Lucas said. “I’m not sure they’re as close as they think they are.”

Lucas was drifting away from the TV when the anchor said, in the same excited voice, “The C-Team also has an exclusive interview with Little Kaylee Scott, who may have seen the Black Hole killer again, and this time he was stalking her in her own neighborhood.”

“Ah, shit.”

“That could be a big deal,” Letty said.

“It’s not,” Lucas said. He took one minute to explain.

Weather said, “TV. It’s like if you’re not on it, you don’t exist. The single most pernicious idea in our culture.”