John Sandford - Field of Prey

They hadn’t heard a thing.

“Our front door was open, but I didn’t hear anything like a shot. Not even a backfire,” Randy Carson said. The two boys, sitting on the couch with their mother, nodded: Bob, the younger boy, maybe fourteen, said, “I was upstairs on my bed, reading a comic, and I thought I heard something, but not a shot. I thought maybe Dad or Don were doing something out in the garage.”

“What time was that?” Mattsson asked.

The boy pressed a finger against the side of his nose, thinking. “It was dark, but I don’t know the exact time.” He looked at his brother and said, “You came up. I was still reading the comic, and you were talking to Nina.”

“Who’s Nina?” Lucas asked.

“His girlfriend,” Bob said.

“Sorta my girlfriend,” Don said. He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and said, “She called me at nine-oh-three, and I came up to my bedroom to talk to her.”

“I heard the noise just a few minutes before that,” Bob said.

Mattsson: “So around nine o’clock, give or take.”

“I guess so,” Bob said. “But it wasn’t any shots. We all go hunting, and I know what shots sound like.”

When they were done with the Carsons, they went to the next three closest houses. Nobody had heard anything.

“That’s not right,” Lucas said, as they left the last of the interviews.

“Could have been a silenced pistol,” Mattsson suggested.

“Where would he get it?” Lucas asked. “You don’t get a silencer down at the hardware store.”

She shrugged: “I don’t know. I’ve never dealt with a silencer. Never even seen one, except on television. What else could it be?”

Lucas rubbed an ear, then took out his cell phone and made a call. There was no answer, so he called it again, and this time a man answered. “What?”

“This is Davenport,” Lucas said.

“Oh, shit. What happened?”

“We got a triple, down in Holbein. I’m trying to figure something out. The killer shot a man in an open doorway, at least two shots. He shot a girl in an open window, at least four more. The people in the nearest house, maybe”-he looked at the Carsons’ house-“maybe a hundred fifty feet away. Their door was open, they didn’t hear anything like shots. Quiet night, right around nine o’clock, no traffic nearby.”

“You know what caliber?”

“Looks like a.22,” Lucas said.

“Is this the Black Hole guy? What’s his name? Horn? The dogcatcher? Shooting with an auto, you found some brass on the floor?”

“Yeah, we did find some brass. We think it’s Horn. Why do you think it’s Horn?”

“Because Ruger made a sound-suppressed.22 auto pistol, the Mark II, for pest control officers. It’s a Class II weapon, so it has to be registered with the ATF. You might want to check with them.”

“Wayne: thank you.”

“Also: the Mark III, that’s the current model, some versions have a threaded barrel for suppressors or compensators, so that’d be another possibility.”

Lucas rang off and Mattsson said, “What?”

“There’s a pretty common pistol that was sold with a silencer, to pest control officers.”

She looked down at her shoes, then back up, and turned in a full circle, looking at the neighbors and the houses up and down the silent street. “Horn. Where in the hell is he hiding? He can’t be hiding in this town.”

“What could the O’Neills have known, that they wouldn’t call in?” Lucas asked. “Could they have been hiding Horn? That seems crazy.”

“When Crime Scene gets here, you gotta have them tear the place apart. But I don’t believe they were hiding him,” Mattsson said. “I don’t believe it. I think one of the O’Neills saw the same thing Shaffer did, and he knew it, and he had to shut them up.”

The next three hours were busy. Jon Duncan showed up with two other BCA agents and the crime-scene crew, again. Bea Sawyer said to Lucas and Mattsson, “We gotta stop meeting like this.”

“It’s pretty goddamn bad,” Lucas said. “There’s a dead girl up there, reminds me of Letty.”

Sawyer patted him on the arm and said, “Aw, boy. But you’ll get the guy, okay? You’ll get him.”

“Won’t get the girl back,” Lucas said. “Listen: one thing we need to know right away: Were the O’Neills hiding Horn? If they were, you should be able to figure that out.”

“We will.”

Duncan said, “We were wondering what he was doing here at nine o’clock, up in Sauk Centre at one, and then down here at three? Just trying to decoy us up north?”

Mattsson nodded. “I gotta believe it was.”

Horn was close by, but where? Mattsson was almost certainly right, Lucas thought-he couldn’t hide in Holbein, or any of the other nearby towns. Everybody they talked to said he hadn’t had any real friends, and even if he had one, how could he have hidden for all those years?

Not right.

When the scene at the O’Neill house was running smoothly, Lucas told Mattsson he was going home: “We’ll have a bunch of guys down here, we’ll keep pinging that phone, in case it comes back online. . If you think of anything, let me know. When we get a time of death, get your people and the city cops to knock on every door for six blocks in every direction and ask who they saw driving around.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Take a nap, first thing. Then go back to the books. There’s gotta be something.”

He pulled out, and he held up a hand to her as he went. Smart, good-looking woman: maybe a little rough around the edges, but he was starting to get a vibration from her. Old enough to be her dad? I don’t think so. He didn’t know anything about her personal life, but there was that vibration. . and if he hadn’t been so happily married, he’d have happily gotten her ankles up around her ears.

He’d just thought that, when a name popped into his head. Flowers. That fuckin’ Flowers was a friend of hers. Few tall, well-built single blondes who were friends of Flowers had gotten away with their honor intact.

He punched the phone button to bring up the car’s cell connection, then used the hockey puck to select Flowers’s name, and called him. Flowers answered on the second ring. “Where are you?” Lucas asked.

“Down in Le Crescent. Not in the boat. Working.”

“On your mystery case.”

“Lucas, if you want to know about it. . but I promise you, you’re better off not knowing.”

“All right. I’m up in Goodhue County, in Holbein,” Lucas said.

“Early for you,” Flowers said.

“We got a triple.”

“Uh-oh! That’s gotta be a first for Holbein.”

“It’s the Black Hole killer. I’m working it with Catrin Mattsson,” Lucas said. “Your name has come up, a time or two. Got me curious: You work any night shifts with that girl?”

Flowers didn’t say anything for a moment, then, “I’ll be goddamned. Calling me up at the crack of dawn to find out-”

“It was not the crack of dawn I was asking about,” Lucas said. “Virgil, you are such a slut.”

“I am not,” Flowers said. “Unlike some people I could think of, I’m just a friendly guy.”

Lucas was so sleepy when he got home that he said, “Good morning,” to the housekeeper and fell into bed. He slept soundly until eleven-thirty, woke up with a tiresome idea at the back of his head, made a couple of phone calls, then a third one to Mattsson.

“This is your dad,” he said.

She laughed. “I knew that’d piss you off.”

“What’re you up to?”

“I’m sitting at my desk bouncing a ball of Thinking Putty off a whiteboard,” she said.

“That’s the stretchy blue stuff?”