John Sandford - Field of Prey

But, Lucas thought, he didn’t personally fuck the other five hundred. While he didn’t worry obsessively about Kent, the guy remained like a small dark cloud that occasionally passed over Lucas’s consciousness, bringing rain.

On the night of August 1, with Lucas still occasionally brooding about Emmanuel Kent, they finally got a definitive indication that Bryan, the Ponzi guy, was still alive, even if not kicking.

He stopped kicking when Inga (Bloomie) Bryan, the ex-wife, shot Bryan in the groin in the living room of her not-quite-oceanfront house in Palm Beach, tearfully explaining to cops that he’d entered the place in the night, without telling her that he was coming, and she’d mistaken him for an intruder.

Well, not really mistaken him-he was an intruder.

“Two shots,” Jenkins told Lucas the next morning. “I’m told the surgeons were unable to make the necessary repairs, and went to amputation.”

Lucas winced, and Shrake added, “Our current theory is, Bryan and his ex were not cooperating.”

An hour after that, Rose Marie Roux called and said, “I hear Bryan is. . mmm. . available for questioning.”

“Yeah, as long as he isn’t talking with his dick,” Lucas said.

“I heard that,” she said.

“Yup. Shot with a very efficient double-tap, a.410 shot-shell followed by a.45 Colt, from a gun called the Governor, on the less expensive of two Persian carpets in his wife’s living room, according to the Palm Beach police,” Lucas said. “They know all about Persian carpets down there.”

“Probably the one that held the room together,” Roux said.

“Dude.”

“Okay. You’re done with that, you can let somebody else do the follow-up, getting Bryan back here, and all of that,” Roux said. “I want you on the Black Hole. Starting tomorrow. Or this afternoon. Shaffer’s moving too slowly and people are getting pissed.”

“Man, that case is dead in the water,” Lucas said.

“If that was a deliberate pun, you’re fired,” Roux said.

“Sorry,” Lucas said. “It wasn’t deliberate. But it’s Friday, I can think about it over the weekend-”

“No. I want you on the case right now. You know: before noon.”

“How bad is it?” Lucas asked. “All the bullshit? I haven’t been paying that much attention.”

“Bad,” she said. “We’ve got people from Fox and CNN renting apartments in Minneapolis. Old friends are getting nervous about talking to me. I think Henry. . that asshole, that fishing trip was a disaster. . I think Henry’s put out some résumés.”

“How about the governor?”

“We talk every day. The thing is, Minnesota’s supposed to be squeaky clean, and the closer we get to the next presidential primaries, the less he wants people talking about all those boxes full of skulls. He doesn’t want it to be a thing , if you know what I mean.”

The Minnesota governor wanted the vice presidential nomination, and was in fairly good shape to get it. He had a lot of money, which could be used in a primary campaign, pulling in the national recognition; and he was far enough left to balance out a more centrist Democrat.

“I know what you mean,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. When he leaves the job, I’m gone. When I leave, you’re gone. Probably. But if he makes it as vice president, we get taken care of, one way or another. Life could be very interesting, if we can pull that off.”

Lucas passed off the Bryan follow-up.

Jenkins and Shrake talked with the Palm Beach cops, who said they’d found several hundred files in the trunk of a rental car that Bryan had been driving, along with a couple thousand dollars in cash, two ounces of cocaine, and three fake IDs, including a Honduran passport under the name of Rolando Smoke.

Jenkins suggested that both he and Shrake would be needed to question Bryan about the whereabouts of any remaining money, and to review all that paper.

Lucas got them authorization, and that afternoon, as he and Del began a methodical rereading of all the crime-scene and investigative reports on the Black Hole, they watched, from Lucas’s office window, as the two agents loaded their golf clubs into Shrake’s truck for the ride out to the airport.

“Gonna be a high-quality investigation down in Palm Beach, you betcha,” Del said.

Lucas didn’t care; Bryan was disappearing in the rearview mirror. He turned back to the pile of paper in front of him.

“Twenty-one skulls now,” he said. “Twenty-one girls, before the well went dry.”

“You know, if we take this on, the media will find out, and we’re gonna have media shit raining down on us, too,” Del said.

“We don’t have a choice,” Lucas said. “But let’s try to sneak into it quietly.”

Shaffer’s group had identified seven of the victims, which left fourteen unknown. Of the seven, two had been identified through dental work, two through credit cards found in the Hole among a layer of rotting cotton and polyester, one through a driver’s license, and two through DNA samples matched to worried parents or siblings of missing women, who’d volunteered to supply cell samples.

The bodies that had been identified through dental work, credit cards, and the driver’s license had been confirmed through additional DNA comparisons.

All of the identified women came from Minnesota, except the most recent one, and from a roughly trapezoidal area ranging as far north as the southern suburbs of St. Paul, and as far south as Rochester, as far east as the Mississippi River, and as far west as I-35-an area roughly sixty miles long and forty wide. The one exception, Mary Lynn Carpenter, from Wisconsin, had apparently been taken from the banks of the Mississippi across from the Minnesota town of Red Wing. All victims’ homes had been spotted on a map included with Shaffer’s paper.

The earliest known victim had disappeared ten years earlier, but with fourteen yet to be identified, and with the other seven spaced a minimum of a year apart, Shaffer’s team thought it likely that they hadn’t yet found the earliest victim.

“All seven of the women disappeared in mid-summer, ranging from June twenty-second to August eighteenth,” Shaffer had told Lucas, two weeks into the investigation. They were in Lucas’s office: Shaffer had come by to chat, to see if Lucas had been thinking outside the box. He had not been. Shaffer was looking beat-up, though in a tidy way. His clothes were ironed and his shoes were polished, but the dark loops under his eyes were the size of bicycle tires.

“None of them disappeared in the same year,” he said. “Our statistician says that’s probably not a coincidence although it could be-we have a weak theory that he kills every summer, and only once. If that’s true, and he’s killed this year, then the first murder was twenty years ago. That’s not a sure thing-he might have killed more frequently in the early years. If the theory’s right, he’s probably in his late thirties or early forties, and lives somewhere in that trapezoid between Minneapolis and Rochester. I suspect it’s close to the center of it. If he’s smart enough to get away with all these killings, then he’s smart enough not to make long-distance trips with a body in his car.”

“What about the detasseling thing? Or the treasure hunting?”

Shaffer shook his head. “Nothing. We located and talked to a half dozen treasure hunters, pretty much ruled them out. They call themselves ‘detectorists.’ The detasseling information is so fragmented that we can’t say much one way or another, but the ones we’ve been able to check, haven’t panned out. But that’s well under half of the potential detasseling suspects.”

“What about technique? Does the killer scout the girls?” Lucas asked.