John Sandford - Field of Prey

Duncan shook his head: “Nothing definitive, nothing good. They’re working the front seat for DNA. We’re going to flood Zumbrota this afternoon, start talking to as many people as seems reasonable. Start checking off the single guys. But, a woman named”-he flipped a page in a notebook-“Cathy Irwin called here an hour ago and said she saw Shaffer’s picture on TV this morning, and she spoke to him for a couple of seconds in Holbein. He asked her for directions to the cemetery, and she told him where it was, and he drove away. That was about ten minutes to five. You already talked to Gibbons, the funeral director. We talked to him again from here, and he told us the same thing he told you: he had the impression that Shaffer was on to something. He even asked, but Shaffer brushed him off. But, he got that impression. We do know he was alive and operating then, a little before six o’clock.”

Lucas took out his notebook and made a note of Cathy Irwin’s name. “I’ll talk to her,” he said. “Nothing from the Goodhue sheriff’s people?”

“Nothing,” Duncan said. “By the way, we can’t find Bob’s main notebook. That little one was mostly names and numbers, but he had a big one, too. One of those leather folders with a yellow legal pad in it. You didn’t see anything like that?”

“No. Sounds like something we need,” Lucas said. “I’ll call Catrin Mattsson at Goodhue and have her run some people around to the places we know he stopped.”

Lucas told them about Mattsson: that she was thorny, but seemed bright, and suggested that Duncan treat her with care.

“I will do that,” Duncan said. “I met her last month, and we talked some.”

“Then I’m outa here,” Lucas said. He turned at the door and said, “There was some blood on Bob’s notebook. We weren’t sure if it was his.”

Duncan waved him off. “We checked it first thing, wanted to get some DNA going. Wasn’t blood at all. It was jelly.”

“Jelly.”

“Yeah. No DNA. No break,” Duncan said.

Lucas took another step and turned back again: “I don’t know if you guys got it, but one of the funeral guys from Owatonna told me that Shaffer made a call just as he was arriving at the cemetery there.”

Duncan said, “He was calling here, checking on the crew.”

Back in his office, Lucas called Del: “I’m going down to the Hole. What’s happening with the old folks? Are you free?”

“Ah, man, Shaffer,” Del said. “I mean, Jesus Christ. He had kids, I mean. . I really need to go with you, but I can’t. I was up all night, I’m dying, but they’re getting ready to roll. Me and Artie are watching them load up. The guns are all on board, now it’s food and water and talking with the lady who feeds the cats, and all the stuff you can do in the daylight.”

Artie Martinez was another agent with the ATF.

“All right. Talk to you when you get back,” Lucas said. “Take care.”

“And you. Cocked and locked,” Del said.

The day was a good one, with puffy dry clouds, the countryside beginning to show color as they got into August. Lucas had been tempted to take his Porsche for the run south, but wound up in the Mercedes again, with the feeling that he could be banging around on some back country roads: the 911 didn’t like gravel, or, for that matter, any bump or divot more than two inches high or deep.

He’d planned to go through the cemeteries in the same order as Shaffer had, but found himself curious about the woman Shaffer had talked to. Instead of stopping at Demont and Owatonna, he went straight through to Holbein, calling ahead to the woman, Cathy Irwin. She was waiting when he arrived at her big white two-story home a block off Main Street.

She was a pretty woman, and smart, and Lucas learned nothing from her. She was eager to help, but she’d spoken to Shaffer for only a few seconds, and had never seen him again.

“Did he seem like he was in a hurry? Like he was excited?” Lucas asked.

“No. He was just sort of. . friendly. He seemed like an ordinary guy. He was polite, seemed perfectly relaxed, and thanked me, and went off toward the cemetery.”

“Where’s that?” Lucas asked.

“Down by the East Fork.”

Lucas didn’t care for cemeteries, but Holbein’s was a pleasant-enough place, as cemeteries went, and if somebody had told him that he’d be buried there, after a life of, say, a hundred forty years and much more sex and barbecue, he would have been content with the prospect.

The land lay above the narrow river, fenced off from the surrounding fields by ordinary barbed wire. The grass looked like it was probably cut every couple of weeks, and was now a little shaggy. Clumps of wild black-eyed barbecue and purple coneflowers grew here and there along the fence line. Bobbing their heads in the light breeze.

Most of the graves were modest, with low tombstones, and the two sepulchers stood out as grim monuments to death: they were gray and age-stained-limestone, he thought, something Poe might have written about-with rusty iron gates. He walked around them, scratching for any kind of insight they may have inspired in Shaffer. He was still doing that when his phone rang.

He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen: Mattsson, the Goodhue County investigator.

“Yes,” he said. “This is Davenport.”

“You better get down here, to Zumbrota,” Mattsson said. “We might have a witness. We might even have a suspect.”

“I’m in Holbein,” he said. “I’ll be down as quick as I can.”

“That’d be seven or eight minutes,” she said. “Unless you hurry.”

Lucas hurried. Mattsson gave him directions, but as he accelerated out of Holbein, he had the uneasy feeling that he’d just made a mistake, or had missed something important. He didn’t know what it was, and the feeling was fleeting, gone before he got to Zumbrota.

The witness lived in what Mattsson called the Sugarloaf neighborhood north of town, in a stone-and-clapboard ranch-style house with a front-yard flower garden lining the walk between the garage and the front door. Mattsson was there with another deputy named Tom Greenhouse, and the witness, and the witness’s parents: the witness was eight years old.

“It’s something,” Mattsson said. She met Lucas in the driveway. “It’s a kid, but there’s no reason to think she’s not reliable. She brought it up on her own, and her parents confirmed that she saw the guy last night.”

“Let’s talk to her,” Lucas said.

The witness, Kaylee Scott, was waiting in the living room with her parents, Reggie and Carol Scott, all three of them honey-blonds, all a little portly, more than a little anxious. The first thing Reggie asked Lucas was, “Do you think we should get out of town? Can you put us up?”

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Lucas said. “I’m not really up to speed on this.”

The story was short and sweet: the night before, the Scotts had been returning from Red Wing, late, after visiting Carol Scott’s sister’s family. They’d driven down Highway 58 from Red Wing, then cut cross-country north of Zumbrota to County 6, and down County 6 to Sugarloaf Parkway. Just before they got to the parkway, they all agreed, Kaylee, who’d been sitting in the backseat, had blurted, “There’s Mr. Sprick!”

Reggie, who was driving, said he hadn’t seen anything, and Carol was dozing.

“I was looking right, where I was turning,” Reggie Scott explained. “He was in the left ditch-the east ditch.”

When Kaylee said, “There’s Mr. Sprick!” Reggie had turned and asked, “What?”

Kaylee said, “Mr. Sprick was down in the ditch.”

“What?”

“Mr. Sprick was walking in the ditch.” She said she’d seen him just as her father started to turn.