John Sandford - Field of Prey

Lucas remembered something one of the other funeral directors had said about the funeral home in Holbein, and said to Mattsson, “I’m not sure, but I think this guy works as the funeral director over there.”

Mattsson called over her shoulder to one of the deputies and told him to check the name.

“Is that blood?” Letty asked.

They looked at a pinkish smear at the bottom of the Holbein page. There hadn’t been blood anywhere else on the notebook.

“Could be. Have to check,” Lucas said. He closed the book gently, to preserve the stain, and handed it back to the crime-scene guy. “Careful with it,” he said. “We need to get it into our lab as quick as we can. If that’s not Shaffer’s blood. .”

A deputy came over to Mattsson and said, “That guy, Gibbons-he’s the Holbein funeral director, like you thought.”

“Let’s figure out what we’re doing here, and then we oughta run up and talk to this guy,” Lucas said. Mattsson nodded.

A Goodhue County deputy named Mackey lived in Zumbrota, just around the block. He and Mattsson and a couple other senior deputies, and the Zumbrota chief of police, with Lucas and Letty, went over to Mackey’s house. They were the last car in the caravan over, and Letty couldn’t stop talking about the murder until Lucas said, “You want to shut up for a while? I’m having a hard time over here.”

She said, “Okay,” and shut up.

Mackey’s wife made them coffee and took some hot cross buns out of a refrigerated tube and put them in the oven, and the whole bunch of cops, and Letty, sat around the kitchen table and talked about the murder.

They agreed that unless something very strange had happened, Shaffer had found the killer.

“Had to be dark by the time he got to that cemetery,” Mattsson said.

“Maybe,” Letty said. “He wasn’t killed there, though. Somebody drove him there.”

You could almost hear the eyebrows go up. Letty continued: “He was shot once in the heart, from the back, and was lying there faceup. He wasn’t shot in the truck-didn’t look like there was enough blood anywhere. Somebody had to put him there. I suppose he could have been shot outside the truck, in the cemetery, but then, why bother to carry a heavy dead guy to the truck, and get blood all over yourself, and leave your own DNA behind? It would have been easier and safer to put him in some weeds, or drag him behind a tree, or walk away. He was shot somewhere else, and driven to the cemetery.”

The convocation of cops looked at her, without saying anything, and then the deputy’s wife chirped, “Makes perfectly good sense to me.”

Letty said, “Thank you.”

Lucas: “You might be right. But you might be wrong, too. A lot of things that happen at crime scenes don’t have good reasons: killers get scared, freaked out, like anyone else. They do things in a panic. I’ll tell you one thing: the guy’s not a traveler. He’s not somebody from the Cities or Red Wing, come down to get rid of the bodies. Whether he drove Shaffer down here, or came separately and killed him here, he’s from somewhere close by. Shaffer found him in Owatonna, or in Holbein, or here in Zumbrota, or somewhere in between. Shaffer was in at least four cemeteries, and left at least two of them alive. How Shaffer got here, I don’t know. But the killer is close by.”

The cops all looked at each other, nervously: biggest serial killer at large in America, right now, and right here.

“Something else,” Lucas said. “If Letty’s right, and somebody drove him here, that means he knew what Shaffer was doing today-that he was looking at cemeteries. They had to talk, and the killer had to know what Shaffer was thinking, and that it was worth killing him about. Somehow. Some way. They had to talk.”

There was a knock on the screen door, and a young cop stepped into the kitchen. He looked at Mattsson: “I ran around to those houses, like you said, and nobody heard any shots tonight. It’s cool enough so that people aren’t running their air-conditioning, but two of them had windows open. No shots.”

Mattsson nodded and said, “Thanks, Terry. Go all the way up the road, hit the rest of them.” The cop backed out the door and Mattsson said to Letty, “You’re looking better.”

One of the deputies asked Lucas, “What’re we doing tonight? Other than covering the scene?”

“That’s about it,” Lucas said. “Stay away from the car, keep people away from the area until the crime-scene crew gets here. We need to talk to people who might have seen a car coming and going, and ask who they think it might have been.”

Another of the deputies said, “Something just occurred to me-I need to talk to Jeff. Excuse me.”

He went out on the back porch, and they could hear him on his cell phone as they worked through other possibilities. A couple minutes later he stepped back in and said, “The guy’s from here. Zumbrota.”

“Why?” Lucas asked. The cop sounded so sure that it felt like a break.

“I was thinking about what Letty just said, about the guy driving him here. Assuming there’s only one guy involved, and if he drove the body here, how’d he get away? Where’d he go? The answer is, he’d have to walk. On the other hand, if they met here-if the killer had his own car-and Shaffer was killed here, he could have been pretty much from anywhere.”

Lucas: “And?”

“I called Jeff, our crime-scene guy, and told him to look at the steering wheel on Shaffer’s car. It’s plastic-and it’s been wiped. The front seats are leather, and they’ve been wiped, too. Everything in the front of the car has been wiped. He can tell just by looking at them with a flashlight. If he’d never been in the car, why wipe it? Didn’t wipe the backseat.”

They all considered that for a moment, and Letty said, “He drove Shaffer’s car with the body in it, and then had to walk away. . unless he has an accomplice.”

“That’s happened with a couple of serial killers,” Lucas said. “The Hillside Strangler in L.A. was actually two guys, related somehow, I’m not sure how. But it’s rare.”

Mattsson said, “He was driving Shaffer’s SUV, so he could have had a bicycle in the back, or even a small motor scooter.”

“Didn’t wipe the back,” the other deputy said.

“Could have, but it doesn’t feel quite right to me,” Lucas answered. “Can’t sneak on a bike or a motor scooter, you have to go on roads. People would remember seeing a stranger on a bike, after dark. He was probably on foot.”

“He’s not only from around here, like Lucas said,” the deputy said, knocking on the kitchen table. “He’s from right here-from Zumbrota.”

Mattsson asked, “Who in Zumbrota could be a serial killer? Couldn’t be too many possibilities. . single male, probably in his late thirties or early forties, if his killing goes back as far as the grave robberies.”

“ Probably single,” Lucas said. “There have been a few married killers, even happily married. But probably single.”

The Zumbrota chief said, “Boy, I’d have to think about that. I know everybody in town, just about, all the long-timers, anyway. There are a few single guys. . not anybody I’d suspect of this.”

“Get a list going,” Mattsson said. “Think about it more. If we get some DNA out of the car, it could be important.”

Mattsson asked Lucas, “How are we going to coordinate this? It’s our jurisdiction, too.”

“Our crime-scene crew will do the science,” Lucas said. He paused as the deputy’s wife started a tray full of hot cross buns around the table. He took one and passed the tray on. “But I guess what we really need tonight is exactly what you’re doing: talking to as many people as you can, asking about unusual sightings. Guys walking or running on their own. We need every speck of information we can find. We’ll take rumors, even. Anything we can hook onto. I won’t be running the operation, they’ll appoint a new team leader first thing tomorrow.”