John Sandford - Field of Prey

Shaffer essentially died on his feet, the hollow-point.45 slug clipping his spinal cord and blowing out his heart. He never had another conscious thought, but took a half-step forward and did a slow pirouette and sank to the floor, then went flat.

R-A put the.45 back on the bookshelf, between The L.L. Bean Game amp; Fish Cookbook and Bill Gardner’s Time on the Water , and looked down at the body, which was still trembling and shaking, as Shaffer’s brain died. R-A was familiar with the phenomenon.

There was blood to be considered. “Goddamn blood’ll get in the floor cracks and smell to high heaven if we don’t clean it quick,” R-A told Horn.

“Plastic garbage bag,” Horn suggested.

R-A hurried into the kitchen, got a bag, laid it flat on the floor, and heaved Shaffer’s body onto it. The body was as loose as a sack of Jell-O; there was a pool of blood under it, which had left a huge blot on Shaffer’s shirt. More blood was seeping into the oak-plank floor, and he hurried back to the kitchen to get paper towels and a spray bottle of Scrubbing Bubbles, and cleaned it up.

“Now what?” he asked, when that was done. Shaffer was staring up at him.

“I wouldn’t put those paper towels in your trash can, that’s for sure,” Horn said. He was a shriveled, dark-complected old man. “Best to burn them.”

“I have to get rid of the body. I could use his car, if I can find it,” Horn said.

“Look at his keys,” Horn said. “If it’s got one of those remote opening things, it’ll beep and blink its lights at you.”

“Good idea,” R-A said. He stooped, as if to look for the keys right then, but Horn snapped: “Stop. You fuckin’ moron. Didn’t you spend about a hundred hours reading about DNA? Use some gloves. And don’t go flashing those car lights with the remote, and then going right over to it. Wait until dark, anyway.”

R-A said, “Right.” He looked out in the street. There were no unfamiliar cars parked in front of the house. But it had to be close by, he thought. Maybe at the store. “What else?”

“The slug probably went through him and hit somewhere over by the fireplace. You might want to find the hole and patch it.”

“Yeah. Keep talking.”

“Town’s too small to leave the body here. I’d move it somewhere. Zumbrota, maybe.”

“Yes, but. . how would I get back here? Without somebody noticing?”

“Run? Walk?”

“That’s eight miles,” R-A said.

“You just shot a police officer. You’ll get life for that, without parole, even if they never did connect you to the girls, which they would,” Horn said. “Walking eight miles is out of the question? What would it take you, three hours, maybe?”

“Hmm. . I’ll think about it,” R-A said, looking at the body. He was in fair shape, he thought, for a man who smoked and drank too much. Three hours was not impossible-he walked that far, over rougher ground, during deer season. “In the meantime. . where’d I leave that drink?”

June Shaffer called Lucas at eleven o’clock and asked, “Have you heard from Bob?”

“No. I haven’t seen him since we left Demont,” Lucas said. He was sitting in his study, reading a book called How Much Is Enough? He’d already determined that he had enough. “Last time I saw him, he was headed over to a cemetery in Owatonna.”

“I’m getting really worried,” she said. “He hasn’t called me. He told me he’d miss supper, but he’d be here for at least part of Todd’s ball game. He didn’t make it and his cell phone is turned off, and sends me to the answering service. I’ve left messages, but he hasn’t called.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Lucas said. “The last time I saw him, he was with a couple of guys from a funeral home. I could give them a call.”

“Could you? This is really not like him, and with him investigating a crazy man. And the last thing he told me was that he might be getting somewhere.”

“Yeah? Okay, let me check.”

Lucas called Joe Murphy, who said he’d last seen Shaffer as he was leaving Holy Angels cemetery. “I don’t know what was up, but he looked at the sepulchers out there, and all of a sudden, he was in a hurry. He looked. . intense. . about something. I don’t know what.”

“Did he take any phone calls while you were with him?”

“Hmm. He was talking on his cell when we first got to the cemetery, and he got out of his truck. I didn’t hear what he said.”

Murphy didn’t have anything else-Shaffer had looked at all three sepulchers, and had walked back and forth between them, then had enough and went hurrying back to his car.

“Never called or came back,” Murphy said.

“And you don’t know where he was going?”

“No, but he asked about the sepulchers up in Holbein. The break-ins up there. He could have been headed that way.”

When Lucas finished with Murphy, he woke up Bellman, the detective sergeant from Owatonna, and asked if Shaffer had stopped by. He had not. “If he had, I would have seen him-the boss was gone all day up to the Cities, and any investigative inquiries would have come to me. You lose him, or something?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “He’s not a guy to get lost. He’s the last guy in the world who’d ever get lost.”

“What kind of car is he driving? We’ve got a dozen hotels here, I could send a couple cars around to look at parking lots.”

“That’d be good. I think Holbein’s in Goodhue County, maybe you could call them, too?”

“Not a problem.”

“Let me call his wife about the car.” He remembered that Shaffer had been driving a blue SUV, but hadn’t noticed exactly what kind.

He called June Shaffer and she picked up instantly. Shaffer hadn’t called. His car was a Chevy Equinox, a year old, and she found the car registration in a file and gave him the tag number. “Do you know what phone service he was with? AT amp;T? Verizon?”

“Verizon,” she said. “And he had some kind of lost-phone service.”

“I’ll get back to you,” Lucas said. He called Bellman back and passed along the information about Shaffer’s SUV.

“He having trouble with the old lady?” Bellman asked. “He’s not out on the town?”

“Nope. No, I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “That’s one reason I’m getting worried.”

Lucas’s adopted daughter, Letty, wandered into the study, carrying a bottle of red vitamin water and a book. She was a slender girl, and athletic, and, Lucas had noticed, much admired by the jocks at her high school, whom she admired back. More things to worry about. .

She asked, “Did you know that the Davenport family has a crest?”

“Great,” he said.

“What happened?” she asked, picking up a tone .

“Ah. . can’t find a guy. He should have been home hours ago,” Lucas said.

“Del?”

“No, no. . Shaffer.”

Letty knew most of the people Lucas worked with, including Shaffer. “He’s the lead on the Black Hole case.”

“We maybe got a break on it this afternoon,” Lucas said. “We were down around Owatonna. He never came back.”

“Have you called the cops?”

“Yeah, they’re checking the motels,” he said. “I gotta make a call.”

He called the BCA duty officer, explained about Shaffer, and then said, “He’s carrying an iPhone, and his wife said they’ve got some kind of lost phone function on it. Get in touch with the Apple people, see if they can activate it. While you’re doing it, call Verizon. He’s with them, and maybe they can spot it.”

He gave the duty officer Shaffer’s cell phone number: “Give me a call back the instant you figure out where he is.”

Bellman called back an hour later and said that the Owatonna cops had checked all the motels and bars, and the main streets, and had found a few Chevy Equinoxes, but not Shaffer’s. “I called over to the sheriff’s department and asked them to talk to the patrol guys, tell them to keep an eye out. Goodhue’s doing the same.”