John Sandford - Field of Prey

“What do you think?” Layton asked.

“Might be an old cistern here, or an old well,” Lipsky said. “You see that line in the grass?”

“Maybe. .”

Lipsky took the fence post from Layton and began probing the patch of grass. He’d done it four times when, on the fifth, there was a hollow thunk .

“There it is,” Lipsky said. “Should have been filled in, doesn’t sound like it was.”

He scraped around with the fence post and found the edge of the cistern cover, which was a circular piece of concrete. A whole pad of fescue lifted off it, in one piece, and Lipsky said, “Just between you and me, I don’t think we’re the first ones to do this.”

“Maybe we ought to call the cops,” Layton said. Lipsky gave him a look, and Layton said, “You know what I mean. More cops.”

“Let’s just take a look,” Lipsky said.

They pulled the grass off, and Lipsky said, “Check this out.”

One edge of the concrete cover showed what seemed to be recent scrapes, perhaps made with a pick, or a crowbar; and all around the edges, older scrapes. Lots of them. Lipsky found a place where he could get the good end of the fence post under the rim of the cistern cover, and pried. There was a pop when it came loose, and the gas hit them and they both reeled away, gagging, vomiting into the grass away from the cistern.

When they’d vomited everything in their stomachs-Lipsky had gone to his hands and knees-they went back and looked into the cistern, but all they saw was darkness.

“Let me get a flash,” Lipsky said. “Don’t fall in.” He spit into the weeds as he went, and then spit again, and Layton spit a couple times himself, his mouth sour from the vomit.

Lipsky got the flashlight and walked back to where Layton was standing, his forearm bent over his nose.

They looked into the hole and Lipsky turned on the six-cell Maglite, and they first saw the two white ovals.

“Is that. .?” Layton asked.

“What?” Lipsky looked like he didn’t want to hear it.

“Feet? It looks like the bottoms of somebody’s feet,” Layton said.

Lipsky turned back toward the squad car.

“Where’re you going?” Layton asked.

“To call the cops,” Lipsky said. “ More cops. Lotsa cops.”

The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is housed in a modern redbrick-and-glass building in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lucas Davenport had once explained the somewhat odd name to an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation this way: “In Minnesota, see, we actually apprehend the assholes, instead of just investigating them.”

The fed said, “Really? Doesn’t that get you in trouble? I’d think the paperwork would be a nightmare.”

Lucas parked his Porsche 911 in the lot below his office window, where he could keep an eye on it. The last time he’d parked it out of eyesight, somebody had stuck a vegan bumper sticker on it that said: “Beef: It’s What’s Rotting In Your Colon.”

He hadn’t found it until he pulled off the interstate, wondering why other drivers were honking at him: A tire problem? Something about to fall off? When he saw the sticker, he crawled home in shame, through the back streets, and then spent a half hour peeling it off, cursing the rotten bastard who’d stuck it there.

Today, he would park within pistol range.

HIS office was on the second floor, in a corner, and when he got there. . there was nobody home. He walked back out to a conference room, where the door was open. One of his agents, Del Capslock, was sitting at the conference table, looking solemn, part of a crowd of solemn agents. Lucas was sure he hadn’t missed a scheduled meeting, so. .

Del looked out through the door, saw Lucas, and crooked a finger at him.

Lucas had been out of the office since the previous afternoon. Before leaving, he’d heard that the BCA crime-scene crew was leaving for a murder site west of Red Wing, a small Mississippi River town something less than an hour south of St. Paul, famous for boots and country crocks and the state reform school: “If you don’t eat your Cap’n Crunch, the cops will send you to Red Wing.”

Something about a cistern, with a body in it.

Lucas slipped into the conference room. All the chairs were full, so he propped himself in a corner. Henry Sands, a bald man of limited emotional dimension, sat at the head of the table, the flats of his hands pressed to his temples, as though he were trying to hold his head together. Not a good sign, since Sands was the director of the BCA.

Rose Marie Roux, the commissioner of public safety, and Sands’s boss, whose office was in a different building entirely, was sitting at one corner of the table, rubbing her forehead with the tips of her fingers. Another bad sign.

Almost everyone else-a dozen people, ten male, two female-were staring at them, waiting, or looking at a variety of yellow legal pads, laptops, and iPads. When nobody else spoke, Lucas did. “How bad is it?”

Roux looked up and said, “Lucas. Good morning. They’ve got fifteen skulls. They don’t have them all, yet. They’re not even sure that they’ve got most of them. We just had Beatrice Sawyer on the phone, and she said it’s like excavating ten feet of cold bean soup. She says there might be four feet of bones at the bottom.”

“Holy shit.”

“That’s the prevailing sentiment,” Roux said. She was a heavyset woman with a notorious smoking habit and hair of an ever-changing color. A politician and former prosecutor, Minneapolis police chief, and, briefly, a street cop, she was one of Lucas’s oldest friends and a longtime ally.

“Have they identified anyone?” Lucas asked.

Sands said, “Mary Lynn Carpenter. She disappeared from Durand, Wisconsin, two weeks ago. They found her car at the Diamond Bluff cemetery, across the river from Red Wing. She’d go there every once in a while to clean up her grandparents’ graves. The cemetery’s on the Mississippi, above a slough. They’d been looking for her body in the river.”

“Who else?” Lucas asked.

Sands shook his head. “Don’t know, but Beatrice said that judging from the skulls, they’re all women. Carpenter had been strangled with a piece of nylon rope. It’s still around her neck. What’s left of her neck. She’s probably been in the well for two weeks.”

“Cistern,” somebody said.

“Can’t they pump it out?” Lucas asked.

“They’re trying, but the bottom of the cistern is cracked and the crack’s below the water table,” Sands said. “Water seeps back in almost as fast as they can pump it out. They can’t pump too fast, because they don’t want to lose any of the. . material.”

“What towns are down there? Besides Red Wing?” Roux asked.

One of the agents was looking at a laptop and said, “Not much-closest town, besides Red Wing, is Diamond Bluff, across the river in Wisconsin, less than five hundred people. That’s where Carpenter was when she disappeared. Ellsworth is fourteen miles away, also in Wisconsin, three thousand people. In Minnesota, there’s Lake City, seventeen miles south of Red Wing, Holbein, fourteen miles southwest, Zumbrota, eight miles past Holbein, Hastings, more or less twenty-five miles north, and Cannon Falls, twenty miles west. The cistern is eight miles from Red Wing, nine miles from Holbein, eleven from Lake City, quite a bit further from Cannon Falls and Hastings.”

“Are we talking to the Wisconsin DCI?” Lucas asked.

“We are,” Sands said. “They already had an agent involved, on the Carpenter disappearance. He’s down at the scene now.”

Another agent, a woman, jumped in: “On a sheer numbers basis, the killer’s probably from Red Wing. Next most likely is that he’s from here in the Cities-we’re fifty miles from the cistern. But if you were originally from that area, and knew about the cistern, and you were living up here and needed a body dump. .”