John Sandford - Field of Prey

“So.” R-A sat on the bench, dropped the dumbbells. He’d just lifted a total of two thousand pounds with each arm; both his arms and legs burned with acid buildup. “Everybody is up there looking. . and Miss Big-Tit Goodhue County Sheriff’s Deputy is out of the action. Then we feed her something that’ll get her out in the open. . and she comes in. What do we feed her?”

“Don’t have that yet,” Horn said. “I’ll think of something.”

R-A thought about it all morning, working around the store, and sitting in his office, figuring out inventory and bills. One of the bills, for nine hundred dollars, covered the wholesale cost of six aluminum Wave-Busters, used by boaters when back-trolling. He bought twelve a year, and reliably sold them. Still had four left. When he sold three of them, he’d run over to Greg’s Machine, five miles north of Durand, and get six more. Probably wouldn’t have to do that until February, he thought.

Wouldn’t have to stop at the candy store. . although. . Mary Lynn’s assistant had been cute, if he remembered her right. A little flat-chested, but a possibility.

He punched the “pay” button on his computer-books program, and the printer spit out a check for nine hundred bucks.

Mary Lynn had been a disappointment. She’d given up too quick.

But this deputy, this Mattsson. . she looked like a fighter.

He walked home at noon, and wrote the note, using his dead mom’s old Royal typewriter. The ribbon was crappy and dry, but the words were clear enough. He called Roy, at the store, said he was feeling a little rocky, and was taking the afternoon off.

“You going to Sauk Centre?” Horn asked, when R-A got back home.

“Worth a try,” he said.

“Rolling the bones,” Horn said. “It’s getting interesting, now.”

R-A got in the car just about the time Lucas crossed the Mississippi on his way to Durand. Sauk Centre was two and a half hours away. If he dropped the letter as soon as he got there, Mattsson could get it as early as the next day.

Lucas didn’t want to tell Mattsson about Cindy Tucker’s identification of Sprick on the telephone: face-to-face would be better, he thought. He called her, said something interesting had turned up, and where was she, anyway?

Sitting at home, she said, with a Blue Ice pack freezing her face.

Mattsson had an apartment in downtown Red Wing, the only apartment on the second floor of a brown-brick building, above Bunny’s Nail Parlor. If you stood in just the right place at a back bathroom window, and pushed a curtain aside, and looked at just the right angle, you could see a tree on the far side of the Mississippi.

Lucas came out of the bathroom after washing his hands and said, “You can almost see the river from the bathroom.”

“Yeah. When I rented it, it was called a ‘view apartment,’” Mattsson said. “I told the landlady if she planned to charge me extra for the view, I’d bust her for fraud.”

Mattsson was sitting on a plaster banco in the kitchen, which smelled pleasantly of a peppery tomato soup. The Blue Ice bags were back in the freezer, getting cold again; the bruise on Mattsson’s face was the size of Lucas’s hand. He pulled out a chair at the kitchen table, sat down across from her, and said, “You always want to have a good start with a new landlady.”

“Ah, she wanted me in here,” Mattsson said. “Reliable job, so she gets paid, and it’s always good to have a cop around, keeping an eye on the place. I wanted it because it’s got space. So. . you figured something out?”

“What happened with Shales?”

“She spilled her guts. She’s a sad case. She said Harriet Card was the only person who ever loved her. Last night, Card told her that it wasn’t working out. They started fighting, and Shales choked her. Won’t be a trial-she’ll eventually plead out, probably take ten.”

“Good when that happens, cuts all the crap out,” Lucas said. “So listen. . I showed your photo of Sprick to the candy store girl. She says it’s six-out-of-ten Sprick was over there three or four times a year.”

Mattsson sat bolt upright: “What?”

“Yeah. She sorta half-ass identified him.”

“Jesus! Davenport!”

“Calm down. I don’t think he’s the guy,” Lucas said. “The question is, why did Kaylee identify him from the ditch, and why did Cindy Tucker identify him as a guy who was in her store several times a year?”

“I could think of one really good reason,” Mattsson said. “It’s him.”

“But it’s not him. For one thing, Cindy said he’s on the short side. Distinctly on the short side. Sprick must be six feet tall. I mean, we should go over there and talk to him, but I’ll bet he’s as confused as we are. So we want to ask, does he have male relatives of the same age? A brother? Somebody who could be mistaken for him? Somebody shorter?”

“Let’s do that,” she said. “Let me get my Blue Ice and some gloves: I can hold it on my face driving over.”

They did that.

Lucas followed her over, a half hour from downtown Red Wing. Ten minutes out, he took a call from Rose Marie Roux. “Where are you?”

“Down by Red Wing,” Lucas said.

“How’s the hunt?”

“We’re getting some movement-I’m keeping Duncan up to date,” Lucas said. “You probably already know this, but the body found at the Hole this morning doesn’t have anything to do with the guy we’re looking for.”

“I heard. The thing is, the media were saying at noon that we probably had caught the killer,” Roux said. “Now they’re having to say that we haven’t caught the killer, and you know how annoyed they get when they’re wrong. They start looking for somebody to blame that’s not them.”

“Yeah, well, fuck ’em.”

“Yeah. Sometimes I wish I could run into Channel Three with a dynamite belt and blow the whole place to kingdom come,” Roux said.

Lucas: “Did something happen?”

“Three has out an editorial. They’re saying the investigation has been incompetent, that this killer is going to kill more people,” Rose Marie said. “They say I should fire Sands. If I don’t, the governor should step in and fire both of us. They say we’re an embarrassment to law enforcement.”

“Oh, boy. Why don’t they blame the FBI? They had that profiler guy talking to Shaffer every day.”

“Because they’re not going to get the FBI fired,” Roux said. “Me, they could bag.”

“Is it serious?”

“It’s getting that way,” Roux said. “If we don’t get this guy soon. .”

“But you and the governor are asshole buddies,” Lucas said.

“He won’t fire me-but I’ll have to go.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Lucas said. “I bet Mary Lynn Carpenter’s father a thousand dollars that I’ll have the guy in two weeks. Can you hold on that long?”

“Maybe. Can I tell the governor you said that? He trusts you.”

“Go ahead. Tell him two weeks, not more,” Lucas said.

“Could he say it on television? Two weeks?” Roux asked.

Lucas had to laugh: “Jesus, it’s that bad?”

Just before they got to Zumbrota, where Sprick lived, he took another call, this time from Ignace, the Star-Tribune reporter: “Janet Frost is trying to get you, for that story on the crazy hunger-strike guy, but she hasn’t been able to get your phone number. I told her I didn’t have it, but I’d call around the BCA and try to get it. Can I give it to her?”

“Ah, jeez, I don’t want to talk to her.”

“Well, her next move is to come over to your house tonight and pound on the door. So. . She’s going to get you one way or another.”

“Give me her number, and I’ll call her .”