John Sandford - Field of Prey

“Years ago, jeez, must’ve been ten or eleven years, a woman was attacked over in Faribault, by a guy named Jack Horn. From Holbein. He was the dogcatcher over there, I believe.”

“He was,” said one of the mourners.

The chief went on: “Anyway, he attacked this waitress. Can’t remember her name, off the top of my head. It was at night, he threw a bag over her head, I think a postal bag, it was, and tied up the bag and threw her into his truck. She had a knife with her, and she cut her way out, and then she stabbed him while he was driving. Maybe several times. He crashed the truck, and she managed to get out and ran away. Got to a house and called for help. When the Faribault police got there, they found the truck upside down in the ditch, and lots of blood, nobody there. They went to his house, but Horn was never seen again. Never tried to get to any of his stuff. A lot of people thought he’d crawled away from the truck and gone off somewhere and died in a hole. Never found a body, though. Everybody for a hundred miles around was looking for him, including us. Hell, not a hundred miles-all over the state, and down in Iowa.”

“This woman, the waitress?” Mattsson asked. “Do you remember anything about her?”

“A couple things,” the chief said. “You’re gonna have to check me on this, but she was attacked in the summer, I believe, and she was young and blond.”

Lucas took his phone out and stepped away.

Mattsson: “You calling in the team?”

“Yes.”

Before Lucas could call, the chief said, “I’ll tell you something else. The seat cover was taken out of the truck, and the Faribault cops put it somewhere, as evidence. I don’t think they did DNA at the time, but I remember hearing from somebody that they compared the blood from the truck with some, mmm, stains they found on his bedsheets, and it was the right guy. The blood came from Horn. Then, a few years ago I heard that you guys, you BCA guys, came down and took samples of his blood to do the DNA thing, and put it in your database.”

A tall, elderly man cleared his throat and said, “Jorgenson. Heather Jorgenson.”

Mattsson: “Excuse me?”

“The woman who got away from the killer was named Heather Jorgenson. She was a relation of Luther Jorgenson, who used to live here in town, but he moved up to the Twin Cities years ago. Luther came over to my house to service the water softener, and we talked all about it. Biggest thing that ever happened to their family.”

The chief said, “I think John’s right. Now that I think about it, I talked to Luther about it myself. Jorgenson.”

Lucas said to Mattsson, “Why don’t you call the Faribault police, see what they’ve got. We can go on over there when we’re done here.”

The chief said, “If Horn’s still out there, hiding out after all these years, that kinda scares the shit out of me. There’s a lot of us around that he don’t like.”

R-A had been parked near the fairgrounds when the white-haired guy picked up the wallet, and a moment later, showed it to the rest of the people in the funeral party. R-A should have left then, but he couldn’t: he had to see how it came out.

Now the cops would have two hard pieces of evidence: a name associated with an earlier sex crime that fit the precise pattern of the Black Hole killer, and a letter mailed from Sauk Centre, which was a hundred miles away, to the northwest. Horn hadn’t cared about being identified, because if he was ever seen, the jig was up anyway. The important thing was to move the cops away from Holbein. With any luck at all, the BCA would shift the center of its investigation up there, looking for a man they wouldn’t find.

They’d go because they’d know for sure that Horn couldn’t be in Goodhue County, where he’d be known and chased on sight. .

Horn had suggested another step: killing a woman from the Alexandria area, still farther to the northwest. That would really pull the investigators away from Holbein. . but any killing was a risk. Risk was interesting, but now he had another goal in life.

Mattsson.

Sheer foolishness, Horn had said. He was right, but Mattsson had entered R-A’s thoughts and dreams, and she wouldn’t get out. When the BCA investigators left for Sauk Centre, she’d be almost alone, working the case.

He watched the funeral party as they all moved over to the tree where the white-haired man had found the wallet, and as one of the men got on his cell phone. A few minutes later a Zumbrota cop car rolled into the cemetery.

Still, he waited, watching through a pair of image-stabilized hunting binoculars as the rest of the troops arrived.

Including Mattsson. She got out of her SUV, waited for a tall, well-dressed guy to catch up with her, from another truck. After that, he couldn’t see much, as Mattsson and the cops were surrounded and obscured by the funeral party.

Mattsson. Yum.

Duncan’s team met at nine o’clock the next morning. Lucas arrived at eight-thirty, and made some calls: Jenkins and Shrake, still in Florida, said that the papers they’d found in the truck of Bryan’s car would hang him for fraud, no question about it. They’d also found an account from the Cayman Islands, and had talked to a fed about it.

“He’s stashed better than fifteen million in the bank, and the feds have got a hold on it,” Jenkins said.

“I thought those offshore guys wouldn’t talk to us,” Lucas said.

“They won’t tell you anything new, but the feds say if they have the proof, the bank’ll give it up-they’re scared to death that the islands will go on an embargo list. So, if you’ve got the facts and figures, and put a gun to their head, they’ll cooperate. We put a gun to their head. All it took was a call to the IRS.”

“Good move,” Lucas said. “How’s the golf weather?”

Flowers was working down on the Iowa line: “I’ll have something for you in the next couple of days. Alert the media.”

Del was in Texas: “They’ve off-loaded a few guns, we got them in Technicolor. The big meeting is probably two or three days away yet, down near El Paso. The ATF is recording everything going in and out of their cell phones. As soon as the deal goes down, we’re gonna throw a net over them.”

“You buy a cowboy hat yet?”

Long silence, then, “It’s really hot and sunny down here.”

“Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said. “How about the boots? You buy the boots?”

Another long silence.

Rose Marie Roux leaned in his office doorway: “You haven’t got him yet.”

“I was there when we opened Shaffer’s notebook,” Lucas said.

“That wasn’t really you,” she said. “That could have been anybody.”

Lucas said, “Yeah, but it wasn’t.”

Roux said, “Lucas, I don’t give a wide shit about who got where first. I want the guy. Now. And I’ll tell you something else-you might have your own media problem. I talked to this Janet Frost from the Strib , and she seems to have a problem with you, involving this shooting in Woodbury and the hunger-strike guy.”

“Aw, for Christ’s sakes,” Lucas said. “I tried to help her out.”

“Don’t feel sorry for yourself, feel sorry for me. I mean, what could I do that I haven’t, to get the Black Hole guy? It’s not like I didn’t drive the squad car fast enough.”

“Yeah, but you politician assholes swim in the media sea-you love it, when it’s on your side,” Lucas said. “I might get whacked for doing the right thing.”

“You could still solve both problems if you caught this guy in the next day or two. You’d be the big hero, and I’d still be your boss.”

The meeting went off precisely at nine o’clock. Mattsson showed up and took a chair next to Lucas, leaned toward him and said, “I talked to every cop shop in the county. Nobody’s ever had a hint of Horn. A lot of cops knew him personally, and so did everybody in Holbein, but nobody’s had even a sniff of him, after that night in the truck.”