John Sandford - Field of Prey

“So am I,” Lucas said. “He was a good cop. He had a nice family, and most of the time, when I was dealing with him, I was an asshole.”

Mattsson said, “Well.” And then, again, “I’m sorry.”

R-A had been home for two hours before Shaffer’s body was found. The initial high from the killing had worn off, and the walk home had cooled him off even more.

Horn was waiting: “How’d it go?”

“Perfect,” R-A said. “I had a lot of time to think. Know what? I don’t want to get caught.”

“We’ll have to work on that,” Horn said.

“I mean, I really don’t want to get caught,” R-A said. “Unless I can think of something smart, I probably will be.”

“Got a couple of ideas. .”

“Not tonight. I’m too tired. I need a drink or five,” R-A said.

“I got a question for you. Did killing that cop-that male -did that give you a boner, too?”

“Fuck you,” R-A said.

“Gave me one,” Horn said. “I gotta tell you, I liked watching him die. Not as good as the girls, because it was so quick. But you know, old Horn got boners like nobody got boners.”

“Ah. . shut up.” R-A poured a drink.

That night, in bed, a peculiar thought crossed R-A’s mind. Horn was a nasty, cynical remnant of the man he’d once been-but he was a great help, from time to time. Now, he might have become a liability. There was a warrant out for Horn, and there had been for years. Horn, in fact, hadn’t been outside for years, except twice when R-A had gotten extraordinarily drunk and had taken him out for a quick roll in the night.

That was crazy-dangerous. If anyone had ever seen them. .

Horn had been a cop, of a kind. He worked out of the police department, and even carried a gun, a.22, that right now was in R-A’s gun safe. He also carried a spray can and a lasso on a pole and drove a truck. He could issue tickets-but only if your dog was running loose, or didn’t have a license.

Horn was the dogcatcher.

And not just a dogcatcher. He was the skunk remover, the coon-catcher, the possum-shoveler, the gopher trapper, the dead-animal remover. You got a squirrel killed on the sidewalk, as the cops said, get on the Horn.

Horn and R-A had met at a rifle range. Horn was interested in death, and R-A was interested in big-game hunting. They were both interested in sex, and both of them had to pay for it. Both were interested in the altered states brought on by alcohol; both were alcoholics. Neither had other friends.

Their friendship was careful, but over some time, mutual interests emerged. R-A was a treasure hunter: he was the one who’d found the cistern at the abandoned farm. He was the one who knew about the diamonds and gold in the Mead coffin-he’d heard about it from a customer at the hardware store.

The raids on the sepulchers started as a joke and a dare. They’d continued until they realized that the risk was too high for the small rewards they were getting.

That’s how it started with the women, too. As a joke and a dare. Not quite believing that they’d ever do it.

Then doing it.

There weren’t twenty-one skulls, as the cops thought. There were twenty-three-but the first two were rotting bone somewhere in the deep woods in Wisconsin, lying under a few inches of dirt and oak leaves.

After the first two, they’d worked out a system for taking the women. They were proud of the system, and it worked perfectly. They sat around at night, watching baseball on TV and working out their strategies.

Everything went well, until the accident.

Until woman number five, Heather Jorgenson, rose up out of the backseat of Horn’s truck with a blade in her hand.

R-A could still see the scars in Horn’s thin, bony neck; could put his fingers in them, if he’d wanted to.

Didn’t do that.

He touched Horn’s shoulder and said, “I’m going to bed. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Got ideas,” Horn said.

With a murdered cop, a lot of stuff had to happen, but after identifying the body, not much of it was Lucas’s job.

He was shaken by Shaffer’s murder, more than he would have thought. He wandered away from the group at the truck, sat down for a minute on a tombstone. He couldn’t shake from his mind the first sight of Shaffer: a yellowed-out vision like the photo of a dead man on an old postcard. Would somebody be looking at him like that, sometime in the future?

He sat like that for a moment, the heels of his hands braced on his thighs, then sighed and pulled his cell phone from his pocket and called Roux. Shaffer lived north of the Twin Cities, and it would take a while to get the notification done.

“Lucas, you need to take this over,” Roux said, after he gave her the news about Shaffer.

“No, I don’t. I need to catch this guy, but I’m not good at organizing a big crew like Shaffer’s,” Lucas said. “Get somebody else to run the crew, but I’ll find the guy. I promise you.”

After a few seconds of silence, she said, “Okay. That’s the deal, then. Somebody else takes the crew, but you find him. In the meantime, we got the preacher on his way up to Shaffer’s house.”

The preacher was a BCA agent who was also an ordained minister; a hard-nosed cop and a soft-nosed minister, for a Baptist, anyway.

After talking to Roux, Lucas heaved himself off the tombstone and walked back to Mattsson and Letty and the other cops. He said, “Shaffer’s wife will be notified pretty quick.”

Mattsson nodded and said, “We thought we better leave this to your crime-scene people. Our guy is here, but with the possible link to the Black Hole killer. .”

“I’ll get them down here. Bob should have a notebook in his jacket pocket,” Lucas said. He’d seen Shaffer take it out any number of times. “You think your guy could go in there and slip it out, without messing anything up?”

Mattsson turned to one of the deputies, who nodded and said, “Let me get my stuff.”

As the cop went to get his crime-scene kit, Lucas called the duty officer and ordered up the crime-scene team.

“What a fuckin’ disaster,” the duty officer said.

“Yeah.”

The cops all stood around and watched as the crime-scene deputy slipped on surgical gloves and, after looking at the handle on the back door with a flashlight, popped the door. They all looked inside, but there was nothing on the floor or the seat near Shaffer’s body.

Lucas said, “Left side.”

Moving as carefully as he could, the deputy slipped his fingers under the lapel of Shaffer’s jacket, lifted it, and with his other hand, slipped the orange-covered notebook out of Shaffer’s inside pocket. “I’ll bag it. We can look at it through the bag,” he said.

As he carried the notebook back to his car, Lucas’s cell phone buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen: Shaffer’s wife was calling. She hadn’t yet been notified.

Lucas flashed the screen at Letty, who blurted, “Don’t answer it.”

“I think I gotta,” Lucas said.

“No, no, let it go, let it go. .”

He let it go; he could call back. When the phone stopped ringing, he asked, “Why?”

“Because we know there’s nobody there with her, except her kids. She shouldn’t hear he’s dead on the telephone, from somebody who’s a hundred miles away.”

“When I don’t answer. .”

“There could be a lot of reasons you don’t answer,” Letty said. “You might have left the phone in the car. . Dad, somebody should be there with her. Believe me.”

He thought about it for a minute, then said, “Okay,” and put the phone away.

The crime-scene deputy had the notebook sealed inside a transparent plastic bag, and Lucas and Mattsson put it on a car hood and bent over it, and the other cops shone a half dozen flashlights on it. Lucas turned the pages, awkwardly because of the bag, but got it done. There were brief notes on the grave opening at Demont, and the interview with the funeral directors in Owatonna. Then Shaffer had gone to a new page and had written Holbein at the top of it, and underlined the name. Beneath that were brief, unhelpful notes from an interview with a man named Robert Gibbons. Lucas didn’t immediately recognize the name, but Gibbons had told Shaffer that he hadn’t been in Holbein long enough to know about the break-ins at the local cemetery’s sepulchers.