John Sandford - Field of Prey

Del nodded. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

They did a loop through the business district, which covered maybe a dozen square blocks. As Lucas had noticed before in small-town Minnesota, there seemed to be one of everything. Not many choices, but one of everything: one car dealer, one farm implement dealer, one hardware store, one lumberyard, an off-brand cell phone store, a computer repair shop, a fern restaurant, one diner, a VFW for the Lutherans, a Knights of Columbus for the Catholics, and for those who preferred getting hammered in secular surroundings, a bar. Sometimes more than one bar, even in towns no bigger than Del’s dick.

“Remember when Flowers did that survey in a small town, to see who they all thought might be the bomber?” Del said, as they cruised. “Maybe we could do something like that.”

“It’s a thought. Virgil will be back in three weeks, and if Shaffer doesn’t have anything by then, we could ask him to set it up. The problem is, the killer probably isn’t from here.” Lucas looked out the window at the small, innocent houses. “He’s probably from Red Wing. Red Wing has a lot bigger population, is closer to the cistern. A lot more of the detasseler kids would come from there, than from here.”

“We gotta call the people at this Marks’s Seed Corn, see who’s who,” Del said.

Lucas shook his head: “No. That’s not us. That’s Shaffer, and I’d bet he’s already all over it. He’s got the clerks to handle it.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Think about it, mostly. See what Shaffer gets, read the reports. What we really need to know is who the victims are. Where they came from, what’s the earliest killing. The earliest killing is going to be close to the killer’s home ground. It’ll also give us some idea of how old he is now. He probably started as a young man, late teens, early twenties. If there are twenty dead, and he’s doing four a year, then he’s probably in his mid- to late-twenties. If he’s doing one a year, he’d probably be in his forties, or close to it.”

“He’s not dumb, he’s been getting away with this for a long time, with nobody suspecting,” Del said. “I think that means he probably wasn’t a teenager when he started. He’s not reckless, he’s thought about it. And if he was doing four a year, and they’re all local, we would have noticed.”

“So move the ages a little, make him a little older. . We’ll know, when we start putting names on the victims.”

“A lot of names, man.”

“Yeah.” They’d made a circle through some of the back neighborhoods, with newer houses, then turned back onto Main Street and rolled down the hill toward the business district. “You seen enough?”

“Mostly. And one of the things I’ve seen is that supermarket. I bet they got donuts. All these small-town markets got bakeries.”

“Aw, for Christ’s sakes,” Lucas said. He went on for a block, down a gentle hill, and turned into the supermarket parking lot. “Two cherry-filled, if they’ve got them. Or raspberry.”

“Right.”

“Don’t let them know you’re a cop,” Lucas said. “It’s embarrassing.”

Del disappeared into the store, came back out with a white paper bag, and they sat in the parking lot for five minutes, eating the donuts, looking up the hill at the hardware store, and the lumberyard, and Sally’s Paws and Claws, “For All Your Kitty and Doggy Needs.”

Del said thoughtfully, “I’d like a little pussy.”

Lucas chewed and swallowed and said, “Yeah? Have you talked to Cheryl about it?”

Lucas and Del were back in St. Paul by mid-afternoon. Other than reading some of the incoming reports from the crime-scene team and Shaffer’s group, and talking to Shaffer’s crew, they did nothing more about the Black Hole for three weeks.

Three weeks of an odd, edgy summer.

The cops all wanted to get the killer, of course, but it seemed at first that they’d never get any work done. Everybody wanted updates. The FBI sent around a profiler, and the profile was leaked, and the populations of all the small towns south of the Twin Cities began speculating about how well their neighbors fit the profile. That led to a couple of bar fights, screaming front-lawn confrontations, and unnecessary investigations prodded by round-the-clock media coverage.

Media reporting led to further problems. Both Fox and CNBC put investigation teams on the story, and both came up with lists of sexual offenders who fit “serial killer profiles” invented by the news teams with the help of experts from the West and East Coasts.

Disclosure of the lists led to disclosure of specific names, and the kind of conspiratorial “he could have done it” stories that had the cops jumping through their butts just knocking down the stories.

Three weeks in, Shaffer’s crew had turned up almost nothing that they hadn’t known about after the second day. The media, running out of easy stories, began sniffing around for those responsible for what was obviously an incompetent investigation. Rose Marie Roux took the brunt of the attacks. Henry Sands, without saying much about it, took off for a week-long Alaskan fishing trip right in the middle of it. Smart, some people said. Chicken-shit, said others.

All the attention, and the lack of progress, began to have an impact on morale: agents working off the clock, arguing, scratching their fingernails on blackboards of futility.

Lucas’s group wasn’t working the Hole, and so were out of the line of fire. Instead, they focused on finding Bryan, the Ponzi guy.

They’d had a minor breakthrough earlier in the investigation when Lucas read through a long list of Bryan’s American Express card purchases from the year before, and on that list he found. . suits from Gieves amp; Hawkes, a dozen neckties from Ermenegildo Zegna, a dozen more from Hermès, and boots from John Lobb.

He’d been through Bryan’s house, including his walk-in closet, after Bryan disappeared. Lucas knew his clothes-and he hadn’t seen anything that’d really rung his bell, as those labels would.

To make sure, he and Shrake went back, and Lucas sifted through the clothes hangers, jacket by jacket. Nice threads-Ralph Lauren Purple Label, etc., but nothing from Gieves amp; Hawkes, no boots from John Lobb.

Lucas had interviewed Carrie Lee Pitt, Bryan’s last-known lover, the night he got back from the Black Hole.

Carrie Lee was an unnatural blonde with a Missouri accent. She was almost, but apparently not quite, hot enough to be a rich guy’s trophy wife. She was taking on-camera lessons in hopes of becoming a sideline interviewer for NFL broadcasts, trying to pick up the all-important hooker vibe.

“Y’all come right in,” she’d said at the door of her condo in downtown Minneapolis. Her red lipstick was slightly smeared, as by a cocktail glass, and she smelled of Chanel 5. “I want to cooperate in every way possible.”

She left the pink tip of her tongue parked outside of her upper lip, which made Lucas think of oral sex, as it was supposed to.

“What I really need to do is look at Mr. Bryan’s clothes,” Lucas said.

“You’re welcome to it. I don’t think he’ll be needing them.”

“We’ll see,” Lucas said.

They went back to the shuttered double closet, and he went through the labels. Carrie Lee helped him look, one breast pressing comfortably against the back of his arm. The missing clothing was still missing; Lucas went home and jumped the old lady.

“That sonofabitch is alive,” Lucas said the next day. “He’s not hiding out in a jungle. More like Paris.”

Shrake and Jenkins developed a theory: Bryan had among his conquests, somewhere, a nurse. The nurse had taken a pint of blood out of Bryan’s body, just like she would a blood donor, and he’d smeared it around the inside of his car and then snuck away.