John Sandford - Field of Prey

Lucas took the number as they crossed the Zumbro bridge into Zumbrota. Five minutes later, they were parked outside Sprick’s house behind a Channel Three van. The lights were on in the house, but all the shades were pulled.

When Lucas and Mattsson got out of their trucks, a reporter hopped out of the van and said, “Officer Mattsson. . Agent Davenport. What’s up?”

“Mr. Sprick invited us over to play canasta,” Lucas said, and he continued up the sidewalk.

Mattsson, trailing behind, asked the reporter, “Are you still doing that story on Kaylee?”

The reporter looked at his watch: “Should be running in ten minutes.”

The cameraman had come around from the driver’s seat with a camera on his shoulder. The reporter, stopping short of Sprick’s property, called, “Is it true that you were hospitalized after the fight with Glenda Shales this morning?”

Lucas turned to Mattsson as she came up behind him. “If you talk to these guys, they’ll bite you in the ass. I promise you.”

“I kinda like it,” she said.

“Yeah. Until they bite you. They’re like crocodiles. They will bite, sooner or later,” he said.

Sprick came to the door, peered out, then opened it. “What?”

Lucas said, “We need to talk to you, but that camera’s running out there, and the microphone could probably pick up an ant walking across the sidewalk.”

Sprick stared at them for a moment. He was haggard, and maybe a little drunk. Lucas could smell the beer from the porch. Sprick looked past Lucas to the TV truck, then said, “Come on in.”

He shut the door behind them, and pointed to the living room, where the chairs were. “I still didn’t do it.”

“I’ve only got one question for you,” Lucas said. “How often do you go to Durand, Wisconsin?”

“Durand? Wisconsin? I’ve heard of it, I’ve seen it on addresses on envelopes, but I don’t know exactly where it is,” Sprick said. “I’ve never been there.”

“Never?”

“Never. You find another body?”

“No, but a woman there said she recognized you as having been in her store, a few times every year.”

Sprick rolled his head back in exasperation. “I’ve never been there. . never in my life.”

Mattsson said, “We’ve got two people identifying you as being associated with crime scenes. If we believe you. . have you ever seen anybody around here that could be mistaken for you? Do you have a brother, or a cousin, or somebody like that?”

Sprick was shaking his head. “I’ve got two sisters, and they don’t look like me. I’ve got a couple of cousins, but they live over by Milwaukee, and they don’t look any more like me than anybody else does.”

“You don’t know anybody that looks like you? From right around here?” Lucas asked.

“No. I know about every single person in town, and I don’t think anyone looks enough like me that Kaylee would make that mistake.”

“The Kaylee interview is going on the air tonight,” Lucas said.

“I know, they’ve been promoting it all afternoon,” Sprick said. “That fuckin’ Little Kaylee , that’s what they’re calling her, is gonna hang me up by my nuts. I can’t even go outside.”

Lucas went home after the interview with Sprick. He was tired. He’d gone running out that morning to look at a dead body, and hadn’t stopped since. On the way north, he looked at the number that Ignace had texted him, the woman who was doing the story on Emmanuel Kent. He punched it into his phone, listened to it ring three times, and was about to hang up, when she answered: “Janet Frost.”

“This is Lucas Davenport, with the BCA. I understand you’ve been trying to get in touch.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you for calling back,” she said. She had a nice sexy voice, with a suppressed giggle in it. “You know about Emmanuel Kent? He’s on a hunger strike, outside City Hall. He says he’s on it because you set up an ambush to kill his brother.”

“I wasn’t even there,” Lucas said.

“No, but you were obviously behind it-the smart guy behind it,” Frost said. “The Woodbury police told us that you or this other agent, Agent Jenkins, were passing on surveillance to them that led up to the shoot-out.”

“That’s partly true,” Lucas said. “But we weren’t doing the surveillance-that was all done by the local police forces, and as Kent moved around the Twin Cities, they kept an eye on him, and let us know what he was up to. All we did was keep everyone informed. Then, he started cruising the bank out in Woodbury, and we notified the Woodbury force that he appeared to be coming their way.”

“Instead of killing him, why didn’t you just stop him? Warn him?” Frost asked.

“Because he would have laughed us off. We had word that he was the guy doing this, but we had no proof at all,” Lucas said. “Remember, he’d robbed five banks-he was a very efficient robber, very skilled at it. But sooner or later, he was going to run into a problem, and he was going to kill some innocent person trying to get out of it. He went into the banks with a gun, and sooner or later, he’d pull the trigger. That was our belief. He certainly seemed prepared to do so. When he was confronted by Woodbury officers, he pulled the trigger first.”

“He was shot seven times by Woodbury officers. The officers admit that they fired at least twenty bullets.”

“Yes. I thought they showed great restraint,” Lucas said.

“Restraint? Shot seven times?”

“Sure. Have you ever fired a semiautomatic pistol?”

“No, I-”

“The feds say a novice shooter can fire three times in a second-and a trained man can fire twice that many,” Lucas said. “With four trained officers there, all shooting, twenty rounds total, they probably were firing for a second or so. Not as much as two seconds.”

Frost was silent for a moment-taking notes, Lucas hoped-then said, “Somehow, though, it doesn’t seem fair, four policemen, behind their cars. .”

Lucas hesitated, then said, “Well, Janet, it wasn’t supposed to be fair. This wasn’t High Noon . The Woodbury officers were attempting to stop an armed bank robber who opened fire on them. This is not a video game where you get a do-over. When Kent opened fire, somebody was going to get shot, and the police officers involved were desperately anxious that it not be them. Go look at a gunshot wound sometime, and you’ll see why.”

“You know what Doyle was using the money for? He was supporting his brother on the street-”

“That’s not exactly the whole story,” Lucas said. “When he hit the bank in Golden Valley, he took out twelve thousand dollars, and he apparently spent it all during the month before he hit the Woodbury bank. As close as I can tell, from the psychiatrist’s report on Emmanuel Kent, Doyle Kent might have given his brother two hundred dollars during that month. So he wasn’t exactly supporting him in style. That’s two percent of his take.”

“And yet we have this result: a street person starving in front of City Hall,” Frost said.

“I can’t solve that problem,” Lucas said. “That’s somebody else’s job. My job is to try to keep the assholes from robbing banks and killing innocent people.”

“You don’t feel sorry at all for Manny?”

“Of course I do,” Lucas said. “I’ve known a lot of those folks, ever since the beginning of my career. If somebody could figure out a way to help them, that they’d go along with, I’d say, ‘Go ahead, bump up my taxes, take care of them.’ But it’s a complex problem, and so far, nobody’s come up with a solution.”

They talked for a few more minutes, and then Frost, apparently satisfied, thanked him for his help and rang off. He’d done all right, Lucas thought, although he probably shouldn’t have used the word “assholes.”