John Sandford - Field of Prey

Lucas said, “You know, I could still get you into St. Thomas.” St. Thomas University was only a couple miles from their house.

“Fuck a bunch of Tommies,” she said.

“Uh. .”

“Sorry,” she said, without being sorry. “To get back on topic, I don’t see anything in the missing heads.”

“Wonder if the killer’s some kind of spooky creep? Is that redundant? Spooky creep? Anyway, if he is, people would know,” Lucas said. “Maybe we could leak that to Ruffe, or to Channel Three. People tend to know about personalities like that.”

“Are you going down there again today?”

Lucas yawned and said, “No. I’m gonna hang out with you guys, and do some reading, go shopping, maybe watch a ball game, and try to think. I’d like to go up north and do some fishing. No time for that, though.”

“It’s crazy,” Letty said. “It’s like a huge crisis, and there’s not much to do.”

“There’s a lot to do: we’ve got several thousand pages to read, though most of it seems like junk.”

For the rest of the Sunday, Lucas basically screwed off; went shopping for new running shoes, watched a ball game, ditched the kids to eat with Weather and friends at the Town and Country Club.

That night, he started reading again.

Duncan amp; Co. had tracked down every registered sex offender in Goodhue County and every bordering county (Dakota, Rice, Steele, Dodge, Olmstead, and Wabasha), and had done modus operandi checks on every registered sex offender in Minnesota and Wisconsin. They’d posted notices in every Minnesota prison with rewards for any inmate who could point them at a credible suspect. They’d found, now, a dozen serious treasure hunters and were working through the treasure-hunter chain to find any they’d missed.

They had DNA studies of all the victims. Sprick’s life history had been taken back to his teenage years; they’d reviewed every police report of missing women for twenty-five years. They’d gotten lists of all the people known to have detasseled corn at the James farm, and run them against sex offender lists. They’d found two, but both were currently living out of state, one in the Nevada State Prison.

One of the detasseling contractors refused to speak to cops, and had demanded a public defender to represent him. That had stirred some interest, until it turned out that he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party who’d been in New York the week that Carpenter was killed. He’d demanded a lawyer because, he said, he was sure the Black Hole case was a government setup to crush the workers and forerunners of the coming anticapitalist revolution.

Whatever.

Shaffer had traced the phone records of all the Black Hole women who’d been identified. The result had caused some argument: the most recent victims had last been registered at cell towers between Rochester and the Twin Cities, but there was a cluster around the University of Minnesota. Some of the agents argued that they might be looking for an ex-student; others argued that the bars around the university were simply the best hunting grounds for somebody looking for young blond women. That brought up a subsidiary argument: if he came from the south to the university area, but mostly took women who also came from the south. . did he scout them as high school students, or children? Could he be a teacher, or somebody who dealt with young women? A coach, perhaps, who’d see young women from a variety of different schools?

And a bewildering variety of other information, facts and theories and speculation and rumor, everything that ten or twelve hardworking cops could dig up in almost a month of relentless work, and every bit of it reported upon.

Lucas went to bed with his mind churning.

The next morning, with Weather already gone to work, he was debating whether to go back south, or to spend the time reading, when his cell phone rang: Hopping Crow, from the crime-scene crew. “Yeah? What’s up, Larry?”

“You know that Black Hole site?” Hopping Crow asked.

“You mean the one west of Red Wing? Where they found all those skulls?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Bea and I just got here, with Rick Johnson from the U. Shaffer wanted us to do some GPR surveys, see if any other bodies popped up.” GPR-Ground Penetrating Radar.

“Yeah? Did some?”

“No, but there’s a dead woman lying on top of the place where the cistern was. She’s been strangled.”

“Larry. .”

“I’m not joking, Lucas. I’ve already called Duncan and the team’s on the way. And I mean. . Jesus Christ, Lucas. .” Hopping Crow was freaking out.

LUCAS was out of the house in five minutes, and on the phone to Catrin Mattsson, who was at home, eating breakfast, as Lucas had been. “The crime-scene crew just pulled into the Black Hole site, and say they’ve found the body of a young woman there, apparently strangled.”

“What!” Mattsson was screaming. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

“We are telling you, right now,” Lucas said. “They just got there, I just found out, and you’re the first person I called. I’m on my way, I’ll see you there.”

“Wait, wait. . Any ID on the body?”

“Catrin, we called you so fast, we don’t know shit about anything,” Lucas said. “You can find out everything we know by going over there.”

“I’m going,” she said.

“Those are crime-scene people there-you probably ought to get some more deputies out there, to control the site. Don’t let them trample over everything.”

“Right, right, right, I’m on the way.”

Lucas let his navigation system take him to the Black Hole, running fast down the welter of highways south of the Twin Cities. On the way south, he talked to Duncan, who was running a few minutes behind Lucas, because he was coming down from a northern suburb.

“I’ve been talking to Bea,” Duncan said. “She says they’ve taped off the scene, but they may have run over some stuff going in, before they found the new body. Anyway, what do you think?”

“I’ve got to look at it,” Lucas said. “The guy has been so quiet for so long, it’s hard to believe that he’s come out of the woodwork to taunt us.”

“Maybe he figures that since everybody’s looking for him anyway, and since he nailed Shaffer, he might as well. And he is nuts.”

“Yes, he is. I’ve dealt with a couple of crazies who were talking directly to us, so all that’s possible,” Lucas said. “I’ve been reading the paper again. One of the newer bones that they took out of the hole, left radius nine, had a break that preceded the killing, and was healing badly, which means the victim hadn’t been to a hospital. The docs said that healing had just begun, had been under way for no more than a couple of days at most. Shaffer thought that meant the killer was holding the women for a while before strangling them, and that he was probably raping and torturing them. Most of them were apparently nude, since the clothing remnants turned up don’t contain bones. This new victim is clothed. So that’s out of kilter. If this woman hasn’t been raped. .”

“That’s good and bad. Good for her, I guess, but if she’s been raped, there’ll be some DNA. Bea told me the body didn’t look like it had been washed, what they can see of it. They can see a bra strap. Can’t tell about rape, because they haven’t moved the body yet. From what I’m hearing from Bea, the body seems to have been treated with some respect. Placed neatly on the ground. I gotta say, that doesn’t sound like somebody who’d throw a body down the hole.”

“Okay. I’m thirty miles out. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

The day was another good one, with a few fair-weather clouds floating overhead, and warm and humid. Here and there, in the ditches, the sumac was showing orange leaves, and the dust from gravel roads hung in the air for a while, as it does on the windless, humid days; a good day not to be dead.