John Sandford - Field of Prey

“. . and two, he was literally grave-robbing. Roger Mead told Buford that at the funeral, his father put their wedding rings and Mrs. Mead’s engagement ring into her hand, to be buried with her. They were gold. He thinks the engagement ring might have been worth a couple of thousand dollars, and whatever gold is worth in the wedding rings.”

“Not more than a couple of hundred,” Del said.

Shaffer said, “Yes, but: treasure hunters. We’ve been looking at treasure hunters, and the guy who dug this up, in the middle of the night, looking for diamonds and gold. . what’s that, if it’s not a treasure hunter?”

The funeral home operators were brothers, and looked alike, with nearly identical comb-overs, except that one was thin and the other was fat. The fat one, Leon, said, “You don’t often see that-putting valuables in the coffin. A lot of times, with a cremation, for example, the relatives will ask for the gold that comes out of the loved-one’s teeth. Most people are pretty practical: they don’t bury money.”

“If the grave was robbed, the robbers must’ve known about the jewelry,” Lucas said.

“Had to,” Joe Murphy said. “It might be possible to rob one grave out here with nobody noticing, but you couldn’t go around digging up a whole bunch of them. They had a specific grave in mind.” They all looked around the flat, windswept cemetery. There were only two other graves showing raw dirt; extensive digging would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

The guy in the hole, who hadn’t been introduced, said, “Hand me the key,” and Joe Murphy passed him a slender crank, a long metal handle with a right-angle stem. Murphy said, “Four latches. .”

“Got ’em,” the guy said. In digging up the grave, he’d cut out a small platform to one side, where he could stand while he opened the coffin lid. He undid the latches with the coffin key, and Lucas looked away when he pulled open the lid: the whole procedure, messing with buried bodies, disturbed him.

He looked back when Shaffer said, “Well, there you go.”

The body remained in the coffin, still preserved, though shrunken. The head was missing, and the hands, which had apparently been crossed over the woman’s midriff, had been turned over. Her hands were empty.

“Took the jewelry and the head,” said Shaffer. “Both a robber and weird.”

“Possible that she had gold fillings,” Leon said.

Lucas looked at the brothers and asked, “Do you know about any other grave robberies around here?”

Joe said, “Years ago. . not long after Mrs. Mead was buried, so it could be the same bunch. There were some sepulchers over in Holy Angels that were broken into, some body parts were taken.”

“One or two over in Holbein about the same time,” Leon said.

Shaffer asked, “Where’s Holy Angels? How many years? Skulls?”

“It’s in Owatonna. Yes, skulls, I think. Maybe fingers. This must’ve been”-he looked at his brother-“around the turn of the century?”

His brother shook his head. “After that. Remember, we saw that one break-in when we had that boy back from Iraq. First one back, must have been near the beginning of the war.”

Joe snapped his fingers and said, “Ah, right. You’re right.”

“Any suspects?” Del asked.

“Not as far as I ever heard,” Leon said. “And I would have heard. Nobody was ever caught. There were several break-ins, all about the same time, and then they stopped, and there weren’t any more. It’s possible that the robbers found out that the risk wasn’t worth the rewards they were getting.”

“What about the other ones?” Shaffer asked. “The Holbein ones.”

Leon shrugged. “Don’t know about those. Just heard about them. Probably ought to ask at Doncaster’s, up in Holbein.”

“That’s the Holbein funeral home?”

“Yes.” Leon nodded.

“Okay.” Shaffer looked into the grave and said, “We’ll have to pull the coffin. We’ll want to close it and lock it to protect it, and then get it out so the crime-scene people can work it over. There may still be fingerprints inside, so you gotta be careful. Can you guys handle that?”

Leon Murphy nodded. “We can.”

“All really odd,” Joe said.

Shaffer said, “I need somebody to take me to those other. . what do you call them? Sepulchers? Those are the things that look like little stone cabins, right?”

“Right,” Leon said.

“I’ll want to look inside. . want to get a feel for them.”

“We can take you there. You want to go right now?”

“I do,” Shaffer said. “I’ll want to look at everything you’ve still got on the Mead funeral. . names, people who paid for stuff, flowers, whatever. I want to know who was there.”

“We can look up that at the office, we’ll still have some of it,” Joe said. “They were Catholics, and it was a Catholic funeral, if I recall. .”

“It was,” Leon said.

“. . so you could probably find the officiating priest, he might be some help.”

“I need it all,” Shaffer said.

Shaffer was almost trembling with excitement. On the way back to the cars, he said to Lucas, “This is our first solid lead. The killer knew the Meads. Had to. Probably was at the funeral. We’ll go back to Roger Mead, try to contact Mrs. Mead’s husband. I’ll start working the funeral angle right now. You got any ideas?”

“Those sound like the best ones,” Lucas said. “Some cop had to work those earlier grave robberies. Maybe they had some ideas about suspects, even if they never arrested anyone. Del and I could talk to whoever it was.”

“Do that. Be sure to update us,” Shaffer said. “Bless me, this is something.”

Back on the road, Del said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Shaffer that wound up.”

“He’s got a sniff of the guy, after a hard month,” Lucas said. “That’s always good.”

“Gettin’ the sniff,” Del said. “Yeah, it is.”

Lucas called from the car, and was passed from the Steele County sheriff’s office to the Owatonna police department, where they talked to a detective sergeant named Ralph Bellman.

“I remember that, those break-ins. Pretty darn creepy,” Bellman said. “Let me see. .” They could hear him tapping on computer keys, and then he said, “Okay, I got it. Never made any arrests. Talked to some kids, we thought maybe it was some kind of, you know, Harry Potter thing. I don’t think the kids we talked to knew anything about it, so. . we came up empty. We’ve got a bunch of reports, you’re welcome to them, but they don’t say much.”

“Like to take a look anyway,” Lucas said. “We’ll be there in ten minutes or so.”

Bellman was right: there wasn’t much. Three sepulchers had been broken into, and the heads were stolen from the female bodies interred inside-four heads, total. Two of the female bodies were missing ring fingers. Three of the four male bodies had not been touched; the fourth was missing a ring finger.

“Two of these places were really old-went back a hundred years,” Bellman said. He was a husky, cheerful man, balding with a long pale face. “The other one was from the forties. We think probably the missing fingers meant the bodies were buried with some jewelry, which was stolen. That made us think it wasn’t kids, but the missing heads made us think it might be. You know, midnight rituals and all of that.”

“There were only three?” Lucas asked. “Only three of these things, and they broke into all of them?”

“Right. I guess they’re not used much anymore,” Bellman said. “More of an old-timey thing.”

“Could we get printouts of the reports?” Del asked.

“Coming right up,” Bellman said. Then, hushed, “You think whoever did this is the Black Hole killer?”