John Sandford - Field of Prey

“I’ll tell you all something,” Duncan said. “We’ll get DNA out of this hair, and we’ll match it to Wolfe’s relatives, and if it doesn’t match any of the DNA from the cistern and if Alice Wolfe is blond and did disappear, in 2001, that means, there is another pit.”

“Another pit,” Roux said. “It’s a fuckin’ nightmare.”

Lucas hung around the office for a while, flipping through the murder books. He tried to call Flowers, but Flowers didn’t answer his cell phone. He left a message for a callback. He called Del, who answered but said he had nothing new to report, except that women in Texas had big hair.

“I knew that,” Lucas said.

He finally told his secretary that he was heading south, to listen to people who’d known Horn. He got a list from one of Duncan’s crew, and took off.

He spent the rest of the afternoon either driving or talking-four cops, and a half dozen other people in town who had a variety of relationships with Horn: two landlords, the owner of the liquor store, and the owner of Croakers, a bar and grill where Horn would go to drink.

Horn, he knew, was a tall man and thin, and everyone remembered him that way. He had odd-colored hair; that was mentioned by a couple of people. It was gray, but not old-gray-rather, slate-colored, tending almost to blue.

He was a solitary character, like a gunfighter in a movie, a former landlady said, and had suspicious black eyes. Never saw him with a woman. She had been in his rented house a few times, when he wasn’t there, and had taken a look around. He had about a million comic books, but she’d never seen anything like porn, or anything else that might suggest he was obsessed with sex. He wore jeans and work shirts and boots, but always with a black sport coat, as though he were covering up a gun.

“Was he?” Lucas asked.

“Don’t know-never saw him with his coat off,” she said. “He had a metal safe in his bedroom. A gun safe, I’m pretty sure.”

One of the cops said, “I don’t believe he had any close friends. I don’t think he had any friends, period. For one thing, he smelled like a skunk half the time. The other thing was, he was an asshole. Just fuckin’ mean. To animals. Dogs. I’ll tell you what, you didn’t want your dog to get loose in Holbein, because Horn would flat break its neck, or soak it down in that dog-spray stuff. He even shot a couple.”

The owner of the liquor store said that Horn had been a regular customer: “We don’t like to see anyone going alcoholic, but Horn would put away two or three fifths of vodka a week; plus, he’d be drinking over at Croakers. Weren’t many nights he’d go home sober-but with his job, can’t say I’d blame him. Picking up dead animals all day.”

The owner/bartender at Croakers said that he always sat by himself at the bar, by choice, and drank slowly, but thoroughly. “I felt kinda sorry for him, at the time, but every time I tried to chat with him, he’d kinda cut me off. After a while, I figured that was just the way he was, and let it go.”

If told that Horn was a killer, they all agreed that they wouldn’t be particularly surprised.

When Lucas talked to Letty that night, he said, “It was a curious thing-of all the assholes I’ve known in my life, I’ve never met anyone that someone didn’t have a good word for. Out of simple charity. Because they were nice people, and wouldn’t say a bad word about anybody. Not with Horn. Nobody liked him. Not one single person.”

“Can you trust that? Maybe they liked him before he attacked that woman.”

“That’s a point,” Lucas said.

“It seems like he does have some kind of interest in sex,” she said. “There’s a tone in his notes. Like, I hate to say it, playful. Or kind of weird-flirty.”

Lucas shook his head. “If you have somebody interested enough in sex that they’re kidnapping women, and they have the Internet, they’re gonna have some porn around.”

“But we know he was kidnapping women,” Letty said. “That is absolutely nailed down. The truck, the blood, the fact that he disappeared. Maybe he was a kind of super-secret guy, or knew that the landlady was a snoop, so he kept the porn hidden.”

“You make a good case, and it’s completely wrong,” Lucas said.

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

Lucas went to bed at two o’clock. Weather got up early, as usual, to go in to the hospital. He was sleeping soundly when she sat on the corner of the bed and rubbed the back of his neck.

That woke him, and he rolled halfway over.

“Good morning,” she said.

Too early: he was confused. “Morning?”

She dropped a newspaper on his chest. “Guess what? You made the Star-Tribune .”

Lucas didn’t operate well on four hours of sleep, but as Weather left for work, he propped himself up in bed and turned on the reading light behind his head. The story in the center of the front page, by the feature writer Janet Frost, was what the crime reporter Ruffe Ignace called “a weeper.” It began with scene setting-Emmanuel Kent’s cardboard-box shelter that he set up every night beneath an overhang on the steps of a local Lutheran Church.

The church no longer let him come inside for the night, because he tended to wreck the place. Before locking up at nine o’clock, they let him fill his empty two-liter plastic Pepsi bottles with water, and in the morning, they let him in to wash and use the toilet in a basement restroom.

Sitting in the stygian darkness beneath the concrete overhang, partly concealed by the ivy, he carefully removes his boots before he goes to bed, and washes his feet with a rag he left to dry on the railing. “During the Great War, you could be shot on the spot if you got trench foot,” Manny said in his high-pitched, yet gravelly voice. “That’s a big danger for those of us forced to live outside. If you don’t take good care of your feet, you could get gangrene. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that, it’s endemic among the street population.”

Guy sounded like he graduated from Harvard, Lucas thought, except that he had no idea about trench foot and World War I. And he thought, Janet Frost wouldn’t know a stygian darkness if one jumped up and bit her on the ass.

The story recounted the beginning of the hunger strike, and the shooting that preceded it.

Doyle could be impetuous, but he was not a dangerous man. Everybody liked him, Manny said. “The Woodbury police executed him. I’ll ask you this: What is the penalty for bank robbery in this state? Is it execution without a trial? No, it’s not-but that’s what was done to my brother. He was executed, shot down in cold blood.”

The Woodbury police claimed that Doyle Kent fired a shot when he emerged from the bank, but no bullet was found.

Lucas thought, Uh-oh .

Down further in the story, Manny rolled a marijuana cigarette, which he uses to self-medicate. He lit it with a pink Bic lighter, and then, dry and warm, he said, “I’m definitely feeling weaker. I haven’t had anything but fruit juice since Saturday, but I’ll never quit until I get justice, or die,” he said. He added, “I went so far as to buy a gallon of gasoline, and I hid it. If I ever get the feeling that the police are about to remove me, or put me in jail, I will get my gas can, and I will immolate myself on the steps of City Hall. Won’t that make the mayor proud?”

Then,

Lucas Davenport, the senior BCA agent involved in the tracking of Doyle Kent, admitted that he had “no proof at all” that Kent had done the earlier bank robberies, and though the Woodbury police admitted firing twenty shots at Kent, striking him seven times, including three shots in the chest, three more in the shoulders and neck, and one in the stomach, Davenport joked that “I thought they showed great restraint.”