John Sandford - Field of Prey

The dentist’s shot was in color, but the X-ray was in black and white, and sharp and clear, the girl’s fillings standing out like white icebergs in a dark sea. Duncan printed it, and they hurried upstairs to the lab, where one of the techs had a digital file of all the jawbones taken from the Hole.

Five or six investigators gathered around the tech’s chair, peering over his shoulder. They found a match in two minutes.

“Okay, okay. He’s real, he’s live,” Duncan said, and everybody started talking at once, what to do, where to go, what it all meant. Duncan looked at Lucas and Mattsson: “Where does this get us?”

“If there’s anything on the paper or the envelope. .” Mattsson began.

Duncan shook his head. “The lab people aren’t optimistic. The envelope has fingerprints, but it’s probably just mailmen. . and yours. One set looks like a woman’s.”

“How do they know the prints aren’t his?” Mattsson asked.

“He used a self-stick envelope and there are no prints, even smeared, where you’d normally find prints. It looks like he sealed it under another piece of paper or maybe used gloves. If he was that careful when he sealed it, he was probably careful whenever he handled it.”

“Shoot. No DNA from spit. How about the stamp?” Mattsson asked.

“Stamps are all self-stick now-and this one is.”

“Which makes me worry even more about the typewriter business,” Lucas said. “There’s something going on there.”

“What?” asked Mattsson. “What could he be doing?”

Nobody could suggest an answer to that.

Mattsson wanted to hang out with the team for a while, to speculate on the motives of the killer. Lucas said good-bye and headed south again. Something, he thought, was getting away from him. He’d spoken to everybody that Shaffer was known to have interviewed. When he’d left Shaffer, the day he was killed, Lucas had gone off to a police station where he’d learned nothing. Shaffer had gone to an Owatonna cemetery. The funeral home guys said he left there in a hurry, like he might have figured something out.

From there he’d gone to the cemetery in Holbein, and maybe Zumbrota. . Why was that? What was he searching for in cemeteries? He’d professed himself excited by the discovery of the grave robbery, as a possible break, but that hadn’t worked out. . had it?

Lucas had started to walk the cemeteries, but had gotten diverted and hadn’t walked those at Demont and Owatonna. But Shaffer had figured something out by doing the cemeteries in a certain order. .

So Lucas would.

An hour later, he stood by himself next to the raw earth of Mead’s violated grave at Demont. The cemetery was small and barren, and Lucas looked down at the now filled-in grave, and then around at the other graves, and nothing occurred to him. What had they done that day, the day of the exhumation? He closed his eyes, swayed a bit in the wind, and rewound the tape of his memory. They’d watched the coffin being opened, and Lucas had turned away, and then they’d all looked at the headless body. .

Still nothing. He tried to find something in that experience, but failed, and walked back to his truck. As he fired it up, something began pecking at the back of his mind, and he remembered a similar experience a few days before, when he was leaving the cemetery at Holbein.

He had seen something, down in that grave. What was it?

He moved on to Holy Angels in Owatonna, and again, spent some time looking around. He hadn’t been there with Shaffer, so there was no memory there to lean on. He walked around the sepulchers, looking for anything that might bring up Shaffer’s vision.

Felt the pecking again. What was he seeing, but not recognizing?

On to Holbein.

Alone in the cemetery, he stood back and looked at the sepulchers and said, aloud, “What the fuck is it? What happened here? We have an asshole breaking into the sepulchers and. .”

The tumblers snapped into place.

Keys.

“Kiss my ass,” Lucas said aloud.

The gravedigger at Demont had to do some gymnastics to get the grave open; and he’d had to use a special key to open the casket. The casket had been undamaged, which meant the robbers had a key. Where would some random asshole get that key? How would he even know about it?

And out here, they’d kept saying that the grave robbers had broken into the sepulchers, but when he’d looked at them. .

Not quite sure of himself, he hustled over to one sepulcher, and then the other. They both had old-style wrought iron doors with old locks. One lock was integral to the door, the other was locked shut with a chain, the links the thickness of his middle finger, the padlock the size of his hand. They looked like they’d been there since the nineteenth century, but nothing was broken.

Keys.

That’s what Shaffer had seen. The locks on all the sepulchers were different, and different still from the casket keys-somebody had to have access to a whole wide variety of keys, including casket keys.

They’d thought the killer was a cemetery worker, but a cemetery worker wouldn’t have access to all those keys. So-a locksmith?

Lucas got on the phone to Duncan, but Duncan was out of touch: “He’ll be right back,” the group secretary said, when Lucas checked with her. “I could hear his phone ringing on his desk. He has a Waylon Jennings ringtone.”

“I might have something on the Hole. Tell him to call me as soon as he can.”

LUCAS had been focusing on his phone, and felt something like a chill wind blowing down his shirt. His hand went to his gun, and he looked around. Still all alone, standing next to the grave of Baby Boy Wilson.

That chilled him even more, and he hurried off to his truck; and called Mattsson.

“I got something,” he said. “I need to talk to somebody who knows everybody in Goodhue County.”

“Tell me.”

He told her, and when he’d finished, she said, “Coffin keys. Who’d have coffin keys? We’re back at cemetery workers? Where are you?”

“In my truck, just backing out of the cemetery at Holbein,” Lucas said. “I was thinking locksmiths.”

“I’m on my way back to the office, but I can cut over there. I’ll meet you.”

“I’ll meet you in Red Wing,” Lucas said. “The Bobcat Cafe. I need to get lunch, anyway. And I want to go over Diamond Bluff. See if anybody has anything to say about cemetery workers.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she said.

She took a little longer than that, but not much. She had a thin stack of printer paper in her hands as she slid into the booth across from him and said, “Something occurred to me.”

“What?” He was swirling ice cubes around in a half-empty glass of Diet Coke.

“If the killer took Carpenter at the cemetery, just because he could, and because he was due. . how does this fit with the candy shop girl identifying Sprick or a Sprick look-alike, that Little Kaylee also saw in the ditch after Shaffer was killed?”

Lucas: “Because he’s a cemetery worker who looks like Sprick? But I don’t know how that fits with him going over to Durand.”

“I’ll tell you-it doesn’t,” she said. “I suppose he could have seen her in the cemetery sometime earlier, and found out she was from Durand, and then checked back from time to time to find out when she was going to the cemetery. He’d know that it was isolated down there. . I mean, if he was a scouter kind of guy.”

Lucas said, “That’s. . pretty complicated.”

Mattsson eyed him for a minute, said, “You mean, unlikely.”

“Not impossible.”

“Okay.” She looked at the menu and asked, “You got any recommendations? For lunch?”

“Yeah. I’d recommend that you stay away from the open-face roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes, brown gravy, and string beans. I was here yesterday, and my wife almost made me sleep outside last night.”