John Sandford - Field of Prey

“According to the original reports from Faribault, the victim said she stabbed him several times,” Lucas said. “I am really curious about what happened to him. . how he walked out of there, after being in a bad car wreck and getting himself stabbed.”

“I’m curious about why he’d go to Sauk Centre,” Mattsson said.

“We don’t know that he did,” Lucas said quietly. “I don’t think a guy smart enough to pull off this many killings, and tough enough to walk out of the wreck of his truck, and get away. . I don’t think he’d mail that letter from his hometown. Or type it.”

“Huh,” she said.

Lucas grinned at her: “What? You don’t think a killer would be rotten enough to lie to us?”

“You think he’s still down in Goodhue?”

“I didn’t say that. You couldn’t hide Horn anywhere around Holbein, but you get up north, in tourist country,” Lucas said. “Up north, you could hide him. And it’s possible. .” He scratched his head.

She prompted him, “What?”

“You’ve got to look around Goodhue to see if he had any friends.”

“I’ve already asked about that,” Mattsson said.

“Good. Because I’d think he might have needed help, from someone willing to keep a really ugly secret.”

Henry Sands, the BCA director, and victim of one of the most serious rounds of backbiting in BCA history, post Alaska, said, “All right, folks, let’s get this going. . ”

Duncan took over as soon as Sands finished outlining what everybody knew at that point.

“As everybody knows,” Duncan said, “we’ve finally got a suspect, Jack L. Horn, formerly of Holbein.”

Duncan outlined Horn’s history. When the police raided his house after the kidnapping attempt, they didn’t find much in the way of personal possessions, but they did get a link to his past through his Social Security number. The number had been issued in 1984, but his age at the time of issuance was uncertain. It had been issued so he could take a job at a taco restaurant in Des Moines. Subsequent jobs put him in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Cheyenne job was with an over-the-road trucking company, as a driver.

“Nobody knew him very well at any of his jobs,” Duncan said. “We haven’t been able to track down his parents or any relatives, but we’re still working on that. We’ll be interviewing everyone who knew him around Holbein, so that may come to something.”

Duncan had decided to shift half of his crew to the Sauk Centre area, where the letter had been mailed from. “We have Horn’s photo-Dick, pass those copies around-although they are pretty dated, and not very good. Various licenses and so on. We’ll be plastering the media with them.”

They all looked at the photos, then Sands asked, “Since we know for sure that he was around Sauk Centre, and since we know for pretty sure that he’s not living in the Holbein area. . why are you keeping so many people down south?”

“Because we’ve developed a number of other possibilities,” Duncan said. “We know that he broke into one casket and several sepulchers down there, but Lucas says each one of those things needs a different key. He believes that’s what Shaffer figured out. He thinks Shaffer then used that insight to. . to. .”

“. . figure out who might have all those keys,” Lucas interjected.

“Right,” Duncan said. “He figured something out, or talked to somebody about it, and then, based on what that hypothetical person said, Shaffer found Horn, or vice versa, and was murdered.”

Sands said to Duncan, “You said ‘possibilities.’ The key thing is one. Are there more?”

“Yes. The last woman murdered was kidnapped from a cemetery. Shaffer was killed after visiting four cemeteries. You put that with the cemetery key thing, and we conclude that there’s a tight connection between somebody who works at these cemeteries, or is some kind of cemetery freak, if there is such a thing. That gets noticed by small-town folks, so we’re going down for a whole run of interviews on that point: short, single guy in late thirties or forties, who works in cemeteries or has something to do with them, or has a special interest in them. Maybe collects or makes keys.”

They talked about those possibilities for a while, and then Roux asked, “Lucas-what are you going to do?”

Lucas said, “I don’t know. We’re at the point where anything I could do, Jon and his crew can do better. We need lots of interviews, we need lots of legwork. I’ve got some things I’ve got to catch up on here. Virgil’s working a case down in the southeast corner of the state that I’d like to take a peek at, and Del is in Texas-”

“Screw that,” Roux said. “I need you thinking about this case.”

“As I was going to say, I’ll be thinking about this case,” Lucas said. “One thing befuddles me: Where did Shaffer take his insight about the keys? I’m going to mark every note that he took. . He made some kind of mental leap.”

“Make the fuckin’ leap,” Roux said.

A secretary stuck her head into the room and said, “Excuse me?”

Everybody looked at her. “We have a Sergeant McGraff on the phone from Goodhue County, for Catrin Mattsson. He says they have another letter, to her, that could be from the killer. A typewriter, from Alexandria.”

Duncan said, “Okay. Put him in here on the speakerphone.”

The secretary went away and a moment later, McGraff came up on the speaker and said, “Yeah, Catrin, it looks just like the first one you got. Kathleen was sorting through the mail and spotted it. We haven’t opened it, so everything inside should be clean.”

Duncan identified himself and then said, “Get it up here, in an evidence bag. Like right now. Don’t let anybody else touch it.”

McGraff said he would.

When McGraff had gone, Sands said to Duncan, “You might review your staffing plans. This guy seems to be up in that Alexandria-Sauk Centre area.”

Duncan nodded: “I’ll pull a couple more guys off and get them up there. Today. I’m going to run over to Eau Claire and interview this Heather Jorgenson, see what she has to say about Horn.”

The meeting adjourned, but most of the agents milled around the open bay area, waiting for McGraff to show up. Lucas went back to his office, with Roux. “You’re not just going to sit in your office, are you? You going to Goodhue, or up north?”

“Probably down to Goodhue, not up north. The guys going north might find him, but it’ll be walking door-to-door. I’m not good at that. I’ve got a feeling that these notes are all wrong. He might be trying to divert us away from the real opportunity.”

“Good luck,” she said, and sighed. “If Elmer gets picked for vice president, I was thinking I might run for governor as a law-and-order Democrat. That’s a lot harder, if you’re blamed for not being able to keep law and order.”

“I’d vote for you, anyway,” Lucas said. “Probably. Depending on who the Republicans put up.”

McGraff showed up with the letter in the bag, gave it to a CSI guy called down from the lab, and a few minutes and a couple of changes of bags later, they got the letter and a clump of blond hair tied with a red ribbon.

It said:

Hi, there, Catrin. Got another name for you. Alice Wolfe, from Cannon Falls. Look for her in 2001, went dancing in Minneapolis and never came home. Never got to Minneapolis, either, ha-ha. You won’t find her at the Black Hole. I put her in the other pit. Oh, that’s right, you haven’t found that one yet. No problem, I’m sending some of her hair that I kept as a keepsake. Shake it out of the envelope, have your scientists do the DNA thing. It will keep them busy, anyway.

That was all of it.