John Sandford - Field of Prey

“We’re hoping it’s something,” Lucas said. They’d told Bellman about the grave and missing skull in Demont. “We were kinda hoping we could hook the three sepulchers down here to the grave up there.”

Bellman kicked back in his chair, his forehead wrinkling. “Mead,” he said. “There are a few of them around, but I don’t know if they’re related to your Mrs. Mead. The people in these sepulchers died a long time before Mrs. Mead, though. I think probably the link was the valuables. Maybe they scored when they dug up Mrs. Mead, but didn’t want to do all the work, and the sepulchers looked like easy targets. If that’s it. . the link wouldn’t go anywhere.”

“Except that the robbers would have to know who was well-off enough to bury valuables,” Del said. “You’d have to be local to know that.”

“Or well-off enough to have sepulchers,” Lucas said. “Those things can’t be cheap. At least not compared to just sticking somebody in the ground. And you could figure that out by driving by the cemetery.”

Del said, “Okay. But they had to know about Mrs. Mead, and the rings in her hand. Wonder what Shaffer’s getting?”

Shaffer was on the cusp of solving the Black Hole killings, he thought. The idea came to him as he stood in front of one of the sepulchers at Holy Angels cemetery in Owatonna. He confirmed it by backtracking to the other two. He didn’t want to talk about it, because it sounded. . too easy. Possibly even stupid. Should that turn out to be the case, he didn’t need Davenport or Capslock gossiping about it.

He said good-bye to the Murphys and headed north and east to Holbein. He’d just gotten into town, when he saw a young woman loading her kids into a van. He slowed, rolled his window down, and said, “I’m a police officer with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Could you point me to the cemetery?”

“Sure,” she said. She pointed down the street and said, “Take this street down about four blocks, one block past the stoplight, and you’ll see the turnoff for 19. Take that about, oh, a little ways. You’ll go over a bridge on the Zumbro, and the cemetery will be right there on your left.”

“Thank you,” Shaffer said.

The cemetery was on a piece of high ground above the East Fork of the Zumbro, which, at this point, downstream from the dam and fishing hole, wasn’t much more than a creek. The cemetery was smaller than Holy Angels, but bigger than the one at Demont. There were two sepulchers, both of a gray limestone stained with age, both with iron gates, both surrounded by ankle-high grass and weeds. He paused at the first one, and moved on to the second, which was just as old as the first.

They confirmed what he’d seen in Owatonna.

He said, “Huh,” but with a clutch in his stomach. He’d worked a lot of hard cases, and the tightness wasn’t unfamiliar: he was on to something.

On the way out of the cemetery, he took a call from his wife: “Will you be home in time for the game?” she asked.

“Probably not for the first few innings. I’ve got something going here. You better take him, and I’ll try to get up there as soon as I can.”

“You’ve got something going?”

“Maybe. It’s thin, but maybe,” Shaffer said.

He drove back into Holbein, found the funeral home, and talked to the owner, who’d taken over two years before, after half a lifetime in Texas. He was not around at the time of the sepulcher break-ins, and had no idea of who might know about them.

Back in the car, he drove over to the police department, but there was nobody home. Earlier in the investigation, he’d learned that there were usually only two officers working at a time, and they spent most of their time patrolling. When somebody needed to call them, they went through City Hall, but City Hall was already closed. In an emergency, they could be reached through the Goodhue County sheriff’s dispatcher, but this wasn’t exactly an emergency.

Shaffer was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he drove back to Sperry’s, the supermarket, parked, went inside, and after a one-minute look-around, guiltily bought a couple of jelly-filled bismarcks. He took them out of the bag and threw the bag into a trash can outside the door. Back in the truck, he sat eating a bismarck with his left hand, while he made a couple notes in his notebook. He managed to drip a pinhead-sized drop of cherry filling on the page, said a rare bad word- fuck me -licked his little finger, and wiped it off.

When he put the notebook away, he sat in the truck and ate the second bismarck, and at some point, realized he was looking up the hill at a Hardware Hank store.

Another idea. He started the truck, drove up the hill to the store, parked, went to the entrance, and found it locked. He looked at his watch: ten after six. A sign in the window said summer store hours were seven to six. An unusually early closing, for a farm town, he thought. But he was an urban kid, like Lucas, and wasn’t sure about that.

Below the “Closed” sign was another, handwritten one that said, “In case of emergency, contact Roger Axel.” Below that was a phone number and an address. The address included a house number on First Avenue, and Shaffer turned away from the door and walked back to the street. Main Street was down the hill; First Avenue was fifty feet uphill.

He walked up and looked at the closest house number: Axel lived in the next block. Shaffer went that way, shadows now lengthening across the sidewalks. He was feeling the energy of a possible solution: thin, but maybe something.

Roger Axel was having his regular after-work drink with Horn when there was a knock at the door, a metallic rap-rap-rap of the horseshoe knocker. R-A, as the locals called him, paused halfway between the kitchen and the living room, bourbon in hand, and said, “Who in the hell would that be?”

“One good way to find out,” Horn said.

It was well after six o’clock. R-A put the glass down and went to the door, pulled the curtain aside, and peered out at an unfamiliar sandy-haired man. The man said, “Hello?” and seemed pleasant enough, so R-A opened the door and said, “Yeah? Who’re you?”

The man showed him an ID case and said, “My name is Shaffer, I’m an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Could I have a word with you?”

“What’s this about?” R-A asked, stepping through the door and onto the front porch. R-A was a small man, with a soft belly but a bench-lifter’s hard shoulders and arms. He had the red nose of a hard drinker, and slack, grainy skin around protruding eyes. He was balding, a scrim of thin blond hair brushed over a freckled scalp; his fingers were stained with nicotine.

“I’m looking for the answer to a peculiar question, and I thought you might be able to help me,” Shaffer said.

He asked the question, and R-A frowned and said, “Hmm. I’d have to think about that for a moment. C’mon in.”

He left the door open behind him and Shaffer stepped inside. R-A said, “Push that door shut, will you? We got flies. I was just getting a bourbon and ice for myself and Horn. You want one?”

“Oh, no, thank you. .” Shaffer stepped into the living room and looked up at the walls: the ceiling was high, eleven or twelve feet, and ringed all around with stuffed heads: deer, antelope, a couple of bears, a mountain sheep, moose antlers minus the moose head.

Shaffer stepped farther into the room and in the back of his head, barely at the conscious level, he thought, Headhunter . Then he noticed the figure in the wheelchair. Horn was looking right at him, and Shaffer blurted, “What the hell?”

R-A had taken a.45 off a bookshelf, where he kept it cocked and locked. He flipped the safety off and shot Shaffer in the back, through the heart. In the small room, the blast was deafening; but with all the walls and shelves between them and the nearest neighbors, R-A was almost sure he’d get away with it.