John Sandford - Field of Prey

“Hello, Catrin. .”

She sat up: not a voice she recognized, and she had a good ear and a good memory. “Who is this?”

“Well, this is Jack Horn. I understand you’ve been looking for me.”

“Is this a joke?”

“No joke, Catrin. You’ve got a pencil?”

She fumbled the bedside lamp on and found a pencil and a slip of paper: “Yes.”

“Marsha Wells. Picked her up outside the He’s Not Here bar on Hennepin Avenue. You don’t have her on your identified list yet, but she was in there. In the hole. You want to know what I didn’t like about her?”

Mattsson was crawling across the bed to her hardwired phone, while punching up the contact list on her cell. She found Davenport’s cell number and began punching it into the hardwired phone as she said, “I’m scared to ask.”

Horn laughed. “What I didn’t like was, she gave up too easy. I mean, I took her and. . I took her and beat on her a little, to soften her up, but when I started fuckin’ her, she was like a rag. She just gave up. See, what I did was. .”

The phone went off on Lucas’s bedside table and he groaned, and fumbled for it: didn’t recognize the number. He punched “answer,” and said, “Yeah?”

Mattsson had the earpiece of the hardwired phone clamped to her ear, hoping Horn wouldn’t hear Davenport answer. As soon as she heard Davenport say, “Yeah?” she interrupted Horn’s rambling description of his rape of Marsha Wells. She said, maybe too loud, “Yeah, Mr. Horn, this is all pretty awful, but how do I know you’re really Mr. Horn? I mean you say you killed what’s-her-name, Marsha Wells, is that right?”

She moved the mouthpiece of the wired phone close to the speaker on her cell phone, so Davenport could hear Horn.

“Yeah, that’s right. Marsha Wells. Grabbed her, fucked her good, got me a piece of rope and put it around her neck, and was strangling her while I fucked her that last time. You know what happens when you’re fuckin’ some chick while you’re strangling her. .”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, but how do I know that you’re not down in some bar someplace with Dick Wolfe or Bobbie McCauley and you’re not pulling my leg? If you’re really Horn, how’d you get this number?”

“You can find anything on the Internet, if you look long enough,” Horn said. “What I did was. .”

Lucas hung up and when Weather asked, “What?” he said, “Holy shit, Catrin Mattsson’s talking to Horn.” He called the duty officer and said, “This is Davenport. A Goodhue deputy named Catrin Mattsson, lives in Red Wing, I got her number here, she’s talking to the Black Hole killer right now, right this minute, she’s keeping him on the line, we need to know where he’s calling from.”

“You know what carrier. .?”

“No, no, I don’t know a fuckin’ thing. Just find it, find where he’s calling from, what the number is. . Here’s her number. .”

“Get back to you.” And the duty officer was gone.

Horn finished with his pornographic description of the final attack on Marsha Wells, then said, “I saw you on TV. I really like your looks, Catrin. Bet you wouldn’t give up, would you?”

“I’d tear your fuckin’ heart out,” Mattsson said. Davenport had hung up, and she was hoping against hope that he was tracing the call. “If you’re really Horn.”

“I’m really Horn,” he insisted.

“If you’re really Horn, what were you doing in that ditch when Little Kaylee saw you?”

After a moment of silence, Horn laughed and said, “Little Kaylee. I won’t tell you what I was doing, but I had a good reason for being in there. And I’ll tell you what, I was never one of those peter-whatever-you-call-’ems, peterists?”

“Pederasts,” Mattsson said.

“Yeah, I was never one of those. But Little Kaylee, she could get me in that habit, you know what I mean. That long blond hair and all.”

“You touch her, I’ll kill you.”

Horn laughed again. “Just kiddin’ you. I like a little tit on my girls. Listen, I don’t think you can trace this call, because I took precautions, but I better go anyway. I just wanted to chat. I’ll tell you what, Catrin: I really do like your looks.”

Her phone burped: a message coming in.

Horn asked, “What was that?”

“What was what?” She thumbed the message tab; a note from Davenport that said, “Keep him talking.”

“That noise?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was you. But don’t go, give me one little clue, one hint here: not about you, about this Wells woman. We need to track her, see if we can get dental records. Was she from the Twin Cities? Where would we find that?”

“Come on, I know you got computers. .”

“You’d be surprised what isn’t in the computers. .”

“Ah, shit, you bitch, you’re keeping me on the line. Fuck you.”

He was gone.

She sat looking at the phone for a minute, then went back to the hardwired phone and keyed in Davenport’s number. When he answered, she blurted, “You get him?”

“He was calling from Sauk Centre,” Lucas said. “He was calling on Mary Lynn Carpenter’s cell phone-so he was real. I yanked the Sauk Centre chief out of bed, he said he’d put every guy he had on the road, take down every tag that they see. But Horn could have been out on I-94 by the time they started looking-and we’d have no idea which way he was traveling.”

“Goddamnit. .” Mattsson was so cranked that she found herself standing on her bed, without knowing exactly why. She sat down and said, “Now what?”

“We’re hoping he doesn’t pull the battery on the phone. We’re hoping that we can call him on that phone in about two hours. . and that he doesn’t answer. If we can do that, we can get pretty close to where he’s calling from. If we can call him a second time, we’ll get even closer.”

“He’s gotta be from down here. He can’t be from up north,” Mattsson said.

R-A had been out on I-94 when he called, because like everybody else on the Internet, he knew that the cops could find the cell phone tower that the call had come from. He clicked off, and tossed the phone on the passenger seat.

He’d had a few beers, and now really didn’t want to get stopped, so he took it slow going back south, around the Cities. Stopped once at a truck stop to pee and buy a pack of cigarettes.

He was most of the way home when the cell phone rang. That froze him. He didn’t answer, but he thought, What if all they had to do was call? And if the phone company could find out where the phone was, to forward the call, couldn’t the cops do that, too? Now he was scared.

He looked for a side road-the phone had stopped ringing-but no side roads came up for a long minute, then another minute. The phone didn’t ring again, but R-A didn’t think he could wait: Were they coming for him right now?

Then a turnoff came up, and he went down a blacktop road for a quarter-mile, did a U-turn, jumped out of the truck, the phone in his hand, and got into the toolbox in back. After carefully wiping the phone down, he laid it on the blacktop in front of his headlights, and beat it to death with a ball-peen hammer.

Nobody came after him.

He made it home in fifteen minutes. Didn’t talk to Horn.

Crawled in bed and pulled the covers over his head.

Nobody came. .

He couldn’t sleep, but lay there, his mind racing, tracing what he’d done that night. He hadn’t gotten a blonde, but hadn’t gotten caught, either.

As he finally drifted toward sleep, he was thinking about the girl on the bar stool, and how perfect she was, and then thought about Mattsson, and how perfect she’d be, and then thought about the feeling of satisfaction that came from beating the phone to death.