John Sandford - Field of Prey

Reggie and Carol had blown off the claim, thinking that Kaylee was sleepy and must have been imagining things. They went home and they all went to bed.

Then, the next morning, they’d seen stories about Shaffer’s murder, and about police officers going through town, looking for someone who might have been seen late, in the area of the Zumbrota cemetery. The cemetery was only a few hundred yards north of the Sugarloaf area, and Highway 6 went directly past the turnoff to the cemetery.

“Who’s Mr. Sprick?” Lucas asked.

Kaylee said, “Mr. Sprick, the mailman.”

“Mark Sprick, the letter carrier for the neighborhood,” Mattsson said. “I’ve got a guy keeping an eye on him, on his truck. He’s down south right now. We’ve been putting together a file, but there’s not much. Never been arrested as far as I can tell. He’s been married, he’s divorced now. Apparently threatened violence to his ex-wife but wasn’t arrested.”

“How old?” Lucas asked.

“Forty-one: right in the age slot.”

Reggie Scott said, “We’re gonna need protection.”

Lucas looked at the kid, who was sitting on a red velveteen couch, and asked, “Honey, how sure are you that you saw Mr. Sprick?”

“I saw him,” she said positively. “I said so right away. I saw his face looking at me.”

“We need to talk,” Mattsson said to Lucas.

Mattsson, Lucas, and Greenhouse talked on the front lawn. Mattsson said, “I think we pick him up, and squeeze.”

“Is there any way to figure out who his friends are, if he has any?” Lucas asked. “Maybe touch them first, or at the same time? See what they have to say?”

Greenhouse said, “After I found the girl, I talked to Catrin and then I called the chief of police. He knows Sprick, says as far as he knows, he’s an okay guy. He came here in high school, his parents still live here. He rents a house on the south side of town, apparently got in a loud argument with his ex once, when they were in the process of getting divorced. He was warned to stay away from her, but nothing official was ever done.”

“Pure negligence,” Mattsson said. Greenhouse looked a bit uneasy, and she snapped, “What?”

“The chief said his ex was a hell of a lot meaner than Sprick, and Sprick denied doing anything violent or that he threatened anyone,” Greenhouse said. “The chief said he thought Miz Sprick might have made some of it up.”

Lucas said to Mattsson, “Better talk to the ex-wife, if she’s around.”

“The chief says she’s in Faribault, works at a florist over there,” Greenhouse said.

“I hate to leave Sprick running around loose,” Mattsson said. “If he gets a whiff of a witness. .”

“But it’d be best if we had something to hit him with, before he knows we’re coming,” Lucas said.

“We could keep an eye on him, if you want to run over to Faribault,” Mattsson said.

Lucas said, “Well. . I could do that.”

“You think it’s something?” Greenhouse asked.

“It’s something. The girl saw somebody,” Lucas said.

“And she sees Sprick all the time,” Mattsson said.

“If it was Sprick, and he lives south of here, why was he north of the cemetery?” Lucas asked. “What’s out there that would have had him walking in the ditch?”

They all looked north: they couldn’t see it, but beyond the heavily treed neighborhood, there wasn’t much but the cemetery, a couple of farm equipment dealers, a fairground, and then a lot of farm fields, stretching out for miles.

“I don’t know,” Mattsson said. “Maybe he ditched a car up there? I do believe Kaylee.”

Mattsson called the Faribault cops and had one cruise by Busch’s Florist Shoppe. Andi Sprick was working. Lucas talked to Kaylee for a couple more minutes, and then to her parents, and left fairly sure that somebody had been in the ditch the night before. He suggested that Mattsson call her crime-scene deputy and have the Scotts show him where Kaylee had seen the man in the ditch.

While they did that, he would go to Faribault, a fast run straight west. He got an address for the flower shop from the Faribault cops and punched it into the car’s nav system.

On the way, Lucas found himself losing faith in the sighting. He couldn’t have explained exactly why, except that the suspect, Sprick, was simply in the wrong place. Why would he have been in a ditch more than a quarter-mile north of the road to the cemetery, when, if anything, he should have been walking south? Lucas could make up any number of reasons why that might have happened, but they would be just that: made up. Didn’t feel right. Then there was the question of how Sprick could have run into Shaffer. Shaffer had been nowhere near Zumbrota, as far as they knew from his notes in the little notebook. Again, he could make up a reason that they collided. .

It was all very foggy.

Busch’s Florist Shoppe was in a yellow-brick building on the edge of Faribault’s business district. The nav system put him at the front curb thirty-eight minutes after he left Zumbrota. He climbed out of the truck and went inside.

Andi Sprick was a tall, thin, dark-haired woman who was not happy to see him. “I don’t have anything to do with Mark anymore,” she said, her voice shrill with resentment. “I’m having my name changed back to Shroeder.”

“We’re not implying that this has anything to do with you,” Lucas said. They were in the back room of the flower shop, which smelled like a funeral. “We’re trying to get an idea of what your ex-husband was like.”

“He’s a lazy, self-centered jerk without a single ounce of ambition,” she said. “He’d rather sit home and play video games than go outside and. . and. . have the wind blow on him. He doesn’t do anything .”

“You didn’t see a violent streak in him?” Lucas asked.

“Well, when we were getting divorced, he screamed at me. .”

“Miz Sprick. .”

“Shroeder. .”

“Miz Shroeder, we’re looking for somebody who might have strangled twenty young women.”

She snorted. “You’re wasting your time with Mark. He wouldn’t make the effort. He. .” She paused, then backed away from it. “I’m not being fair. Mark is everything I’ve said. He is snarky, lazy, unambitious. He once played an online space game for thirty-six straight hours, right through our second wedding anniversary.”

“Ouch,” Lucas said.

“But I’ve been in the car when he stopped to get out and carry a turtle across the road,” she said. “He’d never hurt anybody, or anything, not on purpose.”

“You think you’ve seen deep enough into his. . psychology. . to say that for sure?”

“His psychology is about ankle-deep,” Shroeder said. “And no, he didn’t do it. Even thinking he might. . it’s just ridiculous.”

They talked for a few more minutes, then Lucas said good-bye: and she’d convinced him.

Back in the car, he called Mattsson: “I talked to Sprick’s ex-wife, and she said that there’s no way that Sprick’s involved. I believe her.”

“Well, I’m talking to Sprick himself about that,” she said. “We decided we couldn’t wait. I’m at his house now.”

“Oh, boy. .” Lucas said.

“That make you nervous?”

“Makes me want to stay away from Zumbrota for a while,” Lucas said. “With a small town like that, everybody knows everything. Believe me, there are already five people on their phones to the TV stations. You’ll be up to your knees in media in an hour.”

“I can handle that,” she said.

“I hope so. If Sprick’s innocent, they could give you a hard time.”

“I really do believe Kaylee,” Mattsson said. “I’m sure she saw something, and she says it’s Sprick.”