John Sandford - Field of Prey

“Ah, shit.” Mattsson rolled onto her stomach, then pushed up, dripping some blood from her nose as the team leader knelt next to her. Most of the blows had been to the side of her face, which was already going blue. The team leader helped her to her feet and she looked down at Shales and said, “Tell you what, you piece of trash, even if we don’t get you for Harriet, you’ll do a few years for this.”

“Awww. .” Shales said, and then she began to cry, big harsh drunken sobs going huh-huh-huh . She was still facedown, and Lucas prodded her with the toe of his shoe and when she looked up at him, craning her neck, he asked, “You kill Harriet on purpose? Or was it some kind of an accident?”

“I didn’t mean it,” she said, into the dirt. “I never meant to hurt her.”

“So it was an accident?”

“Yeah, it was, it really was.”

All they wanted was confirmation. Shales could explain later how she strangled somebody by accident.

“Get her out of here, and start processing the house,” Mattsson said to one of the cops.

The team leader said, “You need to get somebody to look at your nose.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Lucas, still standing over Shales, prodded her with his toe again and asked, “How old are you, Glenda?”

After another moment of weeping, she mumbled, “Twenty-seven.”

Lucas stepped away and Mattsson asked, “What?”

“Too young to be the Black Hole killer,” he said, his voice quiet. “Besides, the Black Hole guy is a guy.”

“She’s too goddamned dumb, anyway,” Mattsson said.

“You’ve got to get to the hospital and have them take a look at you,” Lucas said. “If nothing else, get some ice on your face, and pretty quick. If you don’t, you’re going to look like a pumpkin.”

“You think I fucked up, there?”

“No. I think you pushed her button, which was a good thing to do,” Lucas said. “We got her for killing the woman, ten seconds after we all witnessed her rights being read to her. You got popped, but you didn’t fuck up.”

“Rough way to get it done, though,” one of the ERU cops said.

“Shut up,” Mattsson said.

Lucas showed a thin smile-couldn’t help himself-and Mattsson snapped, “What? You think it’s funny?”

Lucas made the mistake of trying to go all comradely with her: “You know. . you might have moved just a teeny bit faster. Or stood just a teeny bit further away.”

She looked at him for a moment, then said, “Fuck you. I got her.”

Lucas’s smile went away. “Yeah, you did,” and he walked away. Fuck him?

The team leader touched Mattsson on her shoulder and said, “Come on. I’ll have one of the guys drive you in. Get some ice.”

Lucas was pissed when he got back to his truck, but it quickly wore off. Cops tended to have confrontational personalities, and Catrin Mattsson was an exaggerated version of that. It wasn’t all one way, either.

The BCA teams were probably the best in the state, though both Minneapolis and St. Paul might have an argument with that-but too often, when dealing with sheriff’s departments, the BCA specialists tended to give off more than a whiff of superiority. Lucas himself had once gotten in a fistfight with a sheriff’s deputy, one that he probably could have avoided if it hadn’t been for a certain big-city attitude.

To say nothing of his expensive suits and the big-titted mouthy cop-girlfriend he’d had with him. He smiled a bit as he remembered it.

From the time he spent walking the cemeteries, without finding anything specific, he’d almost concluded that whatever Shaffer had discovered, hadn’t come only from the cemeteries: it’d come from some combination of information from the murder books, plus the cemeteries, or even something that had popped up in a random conversation somewhere. Because Shaffer had gone to the last two cemeteries alone, it was even possible that he’d actually encountered the killer face-to-face, purely by coincidence.

He came to the highway, stopped, got on the phone and called Bea Sawyer, the crime-scene crew chief, and asked if Shaffer’s clothing had been processed for clues as to where he’d been killed.

“Not completely processed, but they’ve been eyeballed,” she said. “We think it was probably indoors-there’s no obvious dirt, twigs, grass, anything that would suggest that he fell on the ground. He was wearing Ecco shoes with a distinct heavy tread on them, and there’s no significant dirt. They’re clean. Of course, it’s been dry, so even walking on streets and across lawns, he wouldn’t pick up much, but they were so clean that I suspect he was last walking on a hard surface. I think, indoors-I didn’t see any concrete dust, no pieces of blacktop, nothing like that. Nothing from a road or driveway. That could change, after we start looking at the fabric with a microscope.”

Something to think about, Lucas thought, after he ended the call. Probably shot indoors. Shaffer had no indoor appointments that Lucas knew of, other than at the funeral homes. The last funeral home he was in was run by a man who’d just arrived two years earlier from Texas, and was distinctly not a suspect. Shaffer had to have gone inside a building again, after that. Where had he gone? And why?

He thought about going back to the Hole, but he had no reason to.

Another thing occurred to him. They’d been looking for similarities between the victims, that might point to the killer, but they hadn’t really thought about dis-similarities , if there was such a word.

The last victim, Mary Lynn Carpenter, somewhat stood out: physically, she fit with the other victims, but she hadn’t been a party girl. She’d lived on the far edge of the circle-or even beyond the far edge-that Shaffer’s investigators had defined as the killer’s territory, and she’d apparently been taken in daylight hours, rather than at night, as the others apparently had been.

She’d come from Durand, Wisconsin, he knew, a good distance east of the Mississippi. The question was, did the killer meet the woman in Durand? If so, what was he doing there? Durand was a small town, and isolated. If you were going someplace other than Durand, and crossing the river at Red Wing, there would be a better way to go to that other place than through Durand.

But Carpenter hadn’t been killed in Durand. She’d been picked up at the tiny town of Diamond Bluff, right on the Mississippi, while cleaning up her grandparents’ graves.

Then he thought, Well, of course. Another cemetery .

Still sitting at the highway stop sign, he called Duncan and asked, “Listen: you know we arrested a woman from down south of Red Wing?”

“Nobody’s said anything to me.”

Lucas filled him in, and Duncan asked, “No possibility that she did the rest of them, then?”

“Almost none. She would have had to start killing when she was about twelve,” Lucas said.

“Shoot. Too bad-it was a possibility, even if it was a thin one. Sorry to hear that Mattsson got hit about nine times. I’d have been happier if it’d been fifteen.”

“Yeah, right. Listen, another thing popped into my head. The last victim, Carpenter, was not like the others.”

“Yeah, we know that, but it hasn’t worked into anything.”

“She was probably picked up in a cemetery, and Shaffer was killed after looking at either three or four cemeteries.”

After a moment of silence, Duncan said, “Jesus. We’ve been so stretched, we didn’t even think of that. That might be something. The guy could be a cemetery worker, or maybe just a weirdo who hangs around them. Either way, we might be able to isolate him.”

“Maybe. I’m going to run over to Durand and talk to Carpenter’s folks and maybe the cops and the mayor. I’ve read all the interviews, but I’m going to come at it from a different angle, not so much the personal stuff about her, as about the town, and what she did there.”