John Sandford - Field of Prey

Lucas passed the word to June Shaffer, who was becoming panic-stricken. “Something terrible has happened,” she said.

Lucas said, “It’s too early to think that. I’ll head on down there myself and wake some people up. If he calls, you can get me on my cell phone.”

Lucas’s wife, Weather, was already in bed. She was a surgeon, and would be cutting in the morning. He woke her, said, “I have to go out.” He gave her a quick explanation, and she sat up and said, “God, I hope nothing happened.”

Lucas went back downstairs and called Del. “What are you doing? You in bed?”

“No, I’m up in North Oaks. They got the RV back early and they’re loading up the guns. I’m here with Stuckney from the ATF. What’s up?”

Lucas told him, briefly, and Del said, “I’m sorry, man, but we’re pretty busy around here.”

“That’s okay, stay with it-I was looking for company, more than anything,” Lucas said. He hung up and pulled on a jacket.

Letty had been lingering near his study, and now asked, “Can I go?”

“I might be all night,” Lucas said.

“That’s okay. I’m not doing anything tomorrow. If you get sleepy, I could help drive.”

“Bring a jacket,” he said.

They were on I-35 south of the Cities, coming up to the town of Faribault, when he took a call from a Steele County dispatcher: “Agent Davenport?”

“Yeah. What’s up?” He had the call on the car’s speaker.

“Uh, well, we’ve got some pretty bad news. Your duty officer gave us a general location on Shaffer’s phone. It’s down in Zumbrota, in Goodhue County. We passed the word to a Goodhue deputy. They found the car, and there’s a body inside. The deputy opened the door to make sure the victim was dead, and then stepped back, because he doesn’t want to mess up the scene. The victim was shot to death.”

“Ah, Jesus, ah, goddamnit,” Lucas said. “How do I get there?”

On the way to Zumbrota, which was east of the interstate, a half hour from their I-35 turnoff, Lucas shook Rose Marie Roux out of bed. “You’re sure it’s Shaffer?” she asked.

“No, but it probably is. We’ve got to get somebody going, to notify June Shaffer.” Lucas looked at his nav system, which predicted he’d be in Zumbrota in thirty-six minutes. The nav system didn’t know that he had a siren and lights. “I’ll be there in half an hour. I’ll confirm then.”

“My God, Lucas, did he find the Black Hole killer?”

“Must have. Must have,” Lucas said.

“How?”

“I have no idea,” Lucas said. He told her about the break earlier that day, and also how thin it was.

“Call me when you know for sure it’s him,” Roux said. “I’ll start kicking people out of bed.”

They were running fast through the night, on a rural highway, past balls of gnats swarming over the warm road, past fireflies in the meadows, the highway stripes flicking by, and Lucas glanced once at Letty and saw her tight, eager face willing the road to pass , to get there.

And he thought, Shit, she likes it too much. She’s gonna be a cop, one way or another .

He would have preferred that she do something else. She’d even talked about applying to West Point, and he’d grudgingly agreed that for a person of her. . inclinations. . it wouldn’t be a terrible idea. Now, glancing again at her face, he thought it would be a terrible idea. She needed the same kind of daily rush that he did. She needed a gun on her hip and somebody to hunt.

They followed Highway 52 to Zumbrota, then threaded their way through town, taking directions from a cop by cell phone, turned north on Main, crossed the North Fork of the Zumbro, left on Pearl, then down a long lane guarded on both sides by twenty-five-foot-tall arborvitaes. As soon as they made the turn onto the lane, they saw the gathered flashing lights of a half dozen cop cars, and assorted civilian sedans and SUVs. When they pulled in, the faces of twenty men and a few women turned toward them.

“You know what to do,” Lucas said to Letty.

“Be nice and keep my big fat mouth shut,” she said.

“Couldn’t have put it better,” Lucas said. They got out and a cop stepped over and Lucas held up his ID. “BCA. You got my guy?”

The cop said, “I hope not. C’mon this way.” He glanced at Letty, but said nothing.

They walked between cop cars, killing the conversation that had been going on. The Equinox was on a cemetery road, just to the right of the last tall arborvitae. The cemetery extended on both sides of the street, and in the reflected light from the cluster of cars, they could see the heavy canopies of large trees, and pale tombstones scattered across the neatly trimmed lawn.

A tall blond woman in civilian clothes-Catrin Mattsson, the Goodhue County investigator whom Lucas had met at the Black Hole-was talking to a couple of uniformed cops at the back quarter-panel of the Equinox. Mattsson, in blue jeans and a letter jacket, broke off when Lucas and Letty came up. “Davenport.”

“Yes. He’s in the car?”

Instead of answering, Mattsson swiveled to Letty: “Who’re you?”

“My daughter,” Lucas said. “She’s okay, she’s been before.”

Mattsson nodded: “If you say so, but it’s an unhappy thing to look at.” To Lucas, she said, “It’s him. It’s Bob.”

Lucas and Letty stepped over to the Equinox and looked through a back window, which had been lowered. Shaffer was lying faceup on the backseat. His sport coat was pulled open, revealing a huge bloodstain on his shirt. In the pale illumination of cops’ LED flashlights, his eyes were wide open and dirty gray. He didn’t look surprised: he just looked dead.

Letty said, “Shot once.”

Lucas was still reacting to the sight of the body: not a friend, but a colleague he’d known for years. A prickling sensation ran through his skin, like goose bumps, but a tighter, tenser feeling. After a few seconds, he caught up with Letty’s comment and asked, “You’re sure?”

“Not without a doc saying so, but you can see only one pucker in his shirt, and it’s right in the middle of the bloodstain. Looks like he was shot in the back with a hollow point. I’ve seen a lot of wounds like that,” she said. “Hit him square in the heart. Whoever shot him probably doesn’t know that much about shooting, or he would have hit him at least twice.”

Lucas turned away from the car and rubbed his face. Didn’t want to look back, and didn’t; instead, he spoke sideways to Letty, who was still looking at the body. “Maybe he was trying to keep the noise down,” Lucas said. “You can almost always get away with one shot. With two, somebody might come looking.”

She turned her face to him: “You never told me that.”

“You never needed to know,” Lucas said.

Mattsson was next to Letty: “You said you’d seen a lot of wounds like that. How would you. .?”

“Used to run a trapline up north,” Letty said. “Bang the coons with a head shot, 22 hollow points. Go in small, come out bigger, when they came out at all. Like this. Except this was a bigger slug.” She turned to Lucas and said, “It looks a lot like the holes your.45 makes, when we’re shooting paper.”

Lucas was rubbing his forehead, and he said, “Yeah, yeah.” He wasn’t ready for analysis. He said to Mattsson: “We got a break today. Maybe. I think Shaffer followed it right in to the killer, and this is what he got.”

“He didn’t call me,” Mattsson said.

“He didn’t call anyone,” Lucas said. “I suspect he had a really questionable lead, and it just took him. . to this. He was a smart guy: it could have happened.”

“I know. I talked to him six or seven times in the last month. I’m sorry,” Mattsson said.