John Sandford - Field of Prey

The girls looked at each other, and then Kaylee turned back to Lucas and said, “I dunno. I didn’t see anybody. We were just riding down the street.”

“Sprick drives a Subaru,” Mattsson said to Kaylee. “You said he was driving a truck. What kind of truck? Like a truck like your dad’s, an SUV? Or a pickup, or. .”

“A pickup,” Jane said. “It was dark brown.”

“Black,” said Kaylee.

“I think it was dark brown,” Jane said.

Reggie Scott said, “Whatever. What color’s Sprick’s Subaru?”

Mattsson said, “Silver. Silver and gray. Nothing like black or brown.”

“It was him,” Kaylee said. Her mother gave her a hug and asked Lucas, “Why don’t you believe us? It’s not like Sprick would be stalking her in his own truck.”

Mattsson said, “We do believe her-the girls-that they saw someone. We just know it wasn’t Sprick that they saw.”

“You know, you’d think you guys never heard the phrase ‘Going postal,’” Carol Scott said. “Who knows what they’re cooking up down there.”

“Down where?” Lucas asked. “The post office?”

“We know what our daughter saw,” Carol Scott said again.

Lucas turned to Jane and asked, “When he went by, did you look at him right in the face?”

Her eyes shifted. Lucas glanced at Mattsson, and she’d picked it up. Jane said, “Not exactly. I saw him go by, and Kaylee said, ‘It’s Mr. Sprick,’ and I saw it was him.”

“Did you actually see his face?”

Again, the eye shift. “Well, Kaylee said-”

“Pretend that you were riding the bicycle on your own,” Mattsson said. “Close your eyes and pretend. Did you see his face?”

She didn’t close her eyes, but she said instead, “Kaylee. . I believe Kaylee.”

Jane’s mother said, “Okay. That’s enough. I think we better hit the road.”

Carol Scott said, “Hey, you know what they saw.”

Marge Windrew said, “I’m not exactly sure what Jane saw, but we’ll take some steps to make sure she’s safe.” She nodded to her husband. “Let’s go. I really don’t want Jane to be more traumatized than she is already.”

Mattsson said to the Scotts, “I talked to the sheriff when I was on the way over here. He’s going to put some unmarked cars in the neighbors’ driveways for the next few days, just in case the prowler should come back.”

“When are they going to start?” Carol Scott asked. “How’ll we recognize him? I even hate to answer my door.”

“They’ll come by and introduce themselves, tell you where they’ll be,” Mattsson said. “You and the Windrews will both get a phone number, in case you should be. . disturbed. You call, we’ll have somebody at your door in a half minute. Literally half a minute, maybe less.”

Lucas, Mattsson, and the Windrews left at the same time, walking out to the curb where Lucas and Mattsson had parked. The Windrews lived a block away. Lucas caught up with them and asked, “You seemed a little skeptical about this. I don’t want to cause you any trouble with your neighbors, or with your daughter’s friend, but. . I was wondering why you sounded that way.”

The Windrews looked at each other, and then Lanny Windrew said to his wife, “You better tell them.”

Marge said, “Before the kids left for the pool, I heard them talking, and Kaylee said that if Mr. Sprick came around again, and looked at her, they could both go on television. We don’t care if Jane ever goes on television. The Scotts. . think differently about that.”

Mattsson brushed her hair back and said, “Damnit.” To Jane: “You never actually saw Mr. Sprick at all?”

Jane said, “I saw the truck.”

“But not Mr. Sprick.”

“Not exactly. But it could have been him.”

When the Windrews walked away, Mattsson said, “That’s that. I’ll talk to the sheriff-I think we should have a cop here anyway.”

“That’s up to you and the sheriff,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. Okay. I’m sorry I dragged you over here. What’ve you been up to? Have you been down here all day?”

Lucas told her about talking to Toby, in Owatonna.

“I don’t know the first two guys, but I know Dan Weil,” Mattsson said. “Over-the-top gun nut. He bought a creek bed off a bunch of farmers, brought in a bulldozer and cut a strip right along the creek, more than a mile long, piled up fifty feet of dirt at the end of it. Guys go out there with.50-cals, try to hit targets at a measured mile.”

“He live out there?”

“No, but he doesn’t live far from it,” she said. “You want to run over and talk to him?”

Lucas did. “What else we got to do?”

Weil lived in a neat ranch-style house out in the countryside, with apple and plum trees spotted around the two-acre yard, and a big metal-sided garage/workshop off to one side. Weil was a civil engineer, and worked out of a studio attached to the end of his garage. A tall thin man with round, gold-rimmed military-style glasses, he had cold blue eyes and a prominent nose under a sandy crew cut. He wore an olive drab shirt with epaulets, jeans, and cleated boots. He invited them in, and sat on a drawing-board stool while they took a couple of leather visitor’s chairs. A line of five heavy gun safes sat at one end of the studio.

“All kinds of stuff,” he said, in answer to a question from Lucas. “I got more work than I can handle-driveways, embankments, flowage ditches, surveys for building slabs. Anything you’d use a bulldozer or a Bobcat or a grader for.”

Mattsson asked, “How well did you know Horn?”

“Not well.” He seemed to think about that for a second, then added, “He was out here often enough. He wasn’t one of the big-caliber, long-range guys. He shot small stuff out to five hundred yards or so:.22-250, 223. Biggest I ever saw was a 6mm Remington. Had an old.220 Swift if I remember correctly. Said he used to bark squirrels with it. But he didn’t talk much. He hung around, but not out, if you know what I mean. He wasn’t a hang-out kinda guy.”

“And he was a killer,” Lucas said.

“Oh yeah.” Weil blinked. “That was the thing about him. He liked killing. He liked death. Most of us guys out here, we’re interested in guns, loads, ballistics, technique. We’ve got guys out here who’ve never killed a thing in their whole lives. Engineers, a lot of them. Shooting paper. Horn wanted to kill stuff. Came back and told me one time that he killed a thousand prairie rats out in Wyoming. I said, ‘Well, that’s real good, Mr. Horn.’ But you know. . a thousand? That’s somewhat excessive, if you ask me, and I’m a gun nut.”

Weil hadn’t seen him, or heard of him, since the attack on the woman in Faribault. He wasn’t surprised about the attack: “Of all the guys who’ve come out here, if you’d told me what happened without who it was that did it, I’d have guessed Horn.”

They talked awhile longer, and Weil said, “Wherever he is, he won’t stay away from guns. If I were you, I’d take his picture around to every gun range in the country. Somebody’ll recognize him.”

Lucas: “We can do that. Not a bad idea, either.”

As they were leaving, Weil asked them what they shot. Mattsson said a Glock 9mm, and Lucas said a.45, and Weil said, “A.45, huh? You any good with it?”

Lucas said he was pretty good, and ten minutes later, they were all out at the range, banging away at steel plates with pistols. When they got done, Weil said to Lucas, “You are good, for a cop,” and to Mattsson, “You’re above average. Most cops don’t shoot for shit.”

“What does it mean,” Lucas asked, “barking a squirrel?”

“You get a squirrel way up in a tree, and you’re out there with a.223 or something. You hit a squirrel with that, it’ll blow the meat right off the bones. So what you do is, you shoot the tree bark right under its head. The concussion and the fall kills the squirrel. Supposedly.”