John Sandford - Field of Prey

Lucas said, “The killer we’re looking for chose a particular kind of person to prey upon. .”

“I know. Blondes.”

“Not just blondes. Young blond women who liked nightlife. Liked bars. The thing about Mary Lynn, and the reason she interests me, is that she doesn’t fit that model. The other women who were killed were probably out drinking when they were picked up. He got to Mary Lynn some other way. Why would he go there, at that moment, when she was there? It is possible that it was an outlandish coincidence, and he acted on it. But if you’re going to kidnap someone, which is a lot more complicated than simply killing them, you’ve got to be ready. You’ve got to have some way to intimidate them, to keep them quiet, you’ve got to handcuff them or tie them up, you have to transport them.”

“So. . what? You think he saw her in the shop?” She looked around, with a shadow of fear in her eyes: she was pretty and blond.

“I thought it was a good possibility, when I started over here today,” Lucas said. “I think it’s even a better possibility now that I see what her job was-she was in your little store, and all the time, I understand. It’s an attractive place, for anybody who wants a quick cheap sugar hit-fudge, chocolate peanut bars, candy apples.”

“We do have a lot of regulars.”

“The guy could have been in and out any number of times, checking her out,” Lucas said. “Even making friends. I don’t think he’s from here, in Durand. I think he’s from Minnesota, from Zumbrota, or Holbein, or Red Wing. . in that area. So-did you or Mary Lynn know anybody like that? A Minnesotan, probably in his thirties to mid-forties, who came over here from time to time? Maybe some kind of job thing, who’d stop and talk to you? Buy a candy apple and talk to Mary Lynn?”

She bit her lower lip, turned and looked out the front window, her eyes unfocused, and after a minute she said, “Oh, God, there must be people like that! I can’t think of any right off the top of my head, but there must be.”

He let her think another minute, then said, “I’m going to give you a card. If you could ask anyone who knew Mary Lynn. . I know she’d broken up with her boyfriend, so maybe she mentioned somebody who’d come on to her a bit? Just ask around.”

Then she said, “I just thought of one guy from Minnesota who’s here every week, and he comes to our store almost every time. Doesn’t seem like the killer type, but then, what do I know?”

“Who is it?”

She tapped Lucas’s Diet Coke. “The Coke guy.”

The coke guy.

Lucas thought, Of course .

And the Pepsi guy, and the bread guy, and the meat guy and the beer guy. Durand was a small town, and anything that came into the stores would be delivered by truck. With perishable stuff, probably on a weekly or even daily basis.

“You think the Coke guy in particular?” Lucas asked.

“No, it’s just that he usually comes in, when he’s in town. He didn’t really come on to us, he’s always paid more attention to the candy case than he does to us. He’s heavyset: he likes his candy. He buys it and leaves, but sometimes, he takes a while to make a choice.”

“Know his name?”

“It’s Andy, something. He works for a distributor in South St. Paul, and he has a route through the towns around here.”

“All right. See, this is something,” Lucas said. “We can check the regular distributors through here. That’s good. Anybody else you can think of? Anybody?”

“Not right now. Let me talk to people, I can probably find a few.”

“Good. Here’s my card: call me as soon as you think of somebody. If you can point me at the police station, I’ll go have a talk with the people over there. But I’m really kind of leaning on you. You know how serious this is.”

She shivered, and clutched her arms, her eyes welling up. “Yes. My God, when you think about what happened to Mary Lynn. She was just always. . so. . lively.”

He left her at the store after getting directions to the police department. She said it’d be quicker to drive over, than to walk.

When he walked back to the car, he found a tall unbent elderly man looking at it. Lucas said, “How ya doin’?” and the old man nodded at him.

“What kind of truck is that?” he asked.

“Mercedes-Benz.”

The man said, “Huh.”

“Let me ask you something,” Lucas said. “When you come into town from the west, across the bridge, almost the whole town is built south of the bridge, and only on this side of the river. Why is that? Most towns, they’re on both sides of the river.”

The old man looked up toward the bridge, which wasn’t visible from where they were, and then back at Lucas. “’Cause they moved the bridge. Used to be right in the middle of town, but when they built the new one, they put it up there.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” Lucas asked.

“I dunno,” the old man said. And, “Pretty fancy, that Mercedes.”

The river ran down a V-shaped valley and the police department was in a long tan county government building on top of the east valley wall, across from the golf course. The chief, whose name was Carr, was walking out the door when Lucas was walking in-Lucas spotted him because his badge said “Chief”-and when Lucas identified himself, and said what he wanted, Carr suggested that they go back inside.

They walked past a sheriff’s department window with nobody behind it, down the hall to the city police department office. A cop named Lucy was fiddling around with some paperwork. The chief called her over, and they all found chairs around the chief’s desk. Lucas told the same story that he’d told Cindy Tucker. “To sum it up,” Carr said when he finished, “you think the Black Hole guy might visit here from Minnesota, and go to the candy store often enough to get friendly with Mary Lynn. He’s probably in his late thirties or forties.”

“That’s about it,” Lucas said.

The Durand cops looked at each other, then Lucy said, “I don’t see that many Minnesota plates here. Every time we see one, we could just call it in and get a list going. We could ask the people in town here to chip in names. There might be quite a few, though.”

“We can handle that,” Lucas said. “It’s not the length of the list that kills us, it’s not having the information.”

“So let’s do that,” Carr said. “We can bring it up to the city council, and the Optimists and so on, and get everybody to spread the word around town, and call in to us. We could probably hand you a pretty good list in a couple of days.”

“That would be excellent,” Lucas said.

Lucas had turned his phone off while talking to Cindy Tucker and hadn’t turned it back on before he left the police department. When he did, in the truck, he found a couple of calls from Catrin Mattsson.

He called her back and she said, “I might have been a little grumpy this morning.”

“You’re apologizing?”

“You were sort of smirking about me getting hit, so I’ll apologize if you will,” she said.

“I’ll have to think it over,” Lucas said. “You started it.”

“Ah, Jesus.”

“All right, I apologize for that, and everything else I might have done, or will do, in the future.”

“Okay,” she said. “I apologize for being grumpy.”

“How’s the face?”

“I look like somebody hit me six times,” she said.

“That can’t be a first,” Lucas said.

“It wasn’t. Anyway-where’d you go? Back to the Hole?”

“No, I’m over in Wisconsin, in Durand, looking into Mary Lynn Carpenter.” He told her the story, and she said, “That could be something. We’ve got too many somethings, though, that keep coming up nothings.”