John Sandford - Field of Prey

“Mine’s called ‘amethyst blush,’ but yeah. Why?”

“I’m driving over to Eau Claire, to interview this Heather Jorgenson woman, the one who got away from Horn. You want to sit in?”

“Why? I wish I’d been there when Duncan interviewed her, but I never got an invitation,” Mattsson said. “On the other hand, after I read the interview, I couldn’t think of anything else to ask her.”

“I want to go at her from a different direction. I’m bringing an old friend along to help out.”

“All right, I’m in,” she said.

“You’re closer to Eau Claire than I am, but I’m all interstate highway, so. . I told Jorgenson that I’ll be at her house at three o’clock. She’s got to be to work at five.”

“Plenty of time. Give me her address,” Mattsson said.

Lucas gave her the address, then said, “There’s a Red Lobster near the intersection of I-94 and 53, not far from Jorgenson. We’ll get there about two, have a late lunch. If you’ve got time, we could have a pre-interview chat, see where we’re at.”

“See you there. And then.”

In Lucas’s opinion, August was the best month of the year in Minnesota. Under normal circumstances, he’d have spent at least a couple of weeks at his cabin on Lost Land Lake, in northern Wisconsin.

“September can be almost as good,” he told his friend Sister Mary Joseph, as they crossed the St. Croix River bridge into Hudson, Wisconsin. “I can still make it up there, in warm weather, if I can get this guy in the next couple of days.”

When Sister Mary Joseph had been five-year-old Elle Kruger, she and Lucas, with their mothers, had walked together to the first day of kindergarten at the local Catholic elementary school.

“Who’s going to take Letty to Stanford?” Elle asked.

“Well. . everybody. She wants to go out there on her own, of course, preferably in a Greyhound bus. She said she wanted to catch the scent of America-I think she was reading On the Road last week. We told her she could catch an equally valid scent in the back of a Delta MD-90. And the closer she sat to the can, the more valid it would be.”

The nun laughed and said, “So you’re all going?”

“Yup. Drop her off, check the campus for any suspicious-looking young men. .”

“Of which I’m sure there will be many. .”

“Then go back up to San Francisco for a quick vacation. Try to get used to the change.”

Elle said, “I am going to miss that girl. I hope she comes back to the Twin Cities. I’d like to see her grow up.”

Lucas said, “We’re all gonna miss her. Sam cries every night, before he goes to sleep, knowing the day she leaves is one day closer.”

They talked about Letty, and her history, for another few miles, then Elle got a transcript of Duncan’s interview with Jorgenson and started reviewing it. They stopped once, so Lucas could get a Diet Coke at the Menomonic rest stop, and got to the Red Lobster a minute after two o’clock. Lucas spotted Mattsson’s SUV in the parking lot and said, “She’s here. She’s got a mouth on her and shows some signs of intelligence, so. . be aware.”

“I will take care,” Elle said. She looked out at the Red Lobster storefront: “Mmm, mmm, mmm. Seafood on the coast of Eau Claire, Wisconsin.”

Lucas led the way inside, found Mattsson in a booth. She did a quick double take when she realized that Lucas’s friend was a nun. Elle no longer wore the traditional habit, but a tarmac-colored dress and gray stockings, with a little white coif perched atop her head.

Lucas let Elle slide into the booth across from Mattsson and sat beside her, and said, “Elle Kruger, aka Sister Mary Joseph, this is Catrin Mattsson, aka Goodhue County sheriff’s investigator. Catrin-Elle.”

Mattsson nodded and said, “Uh. .”

“She’s a shrink,” Lucas said. “Head of the psychology department at St. Anne’s, up in St. Paul. She’s helped me out, from time to time, on. . delicate matters.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Elle said.

Then Mattsson surprised Lucas with a gently probing series of questions about psychology and police work, drawing Elle out in a way that Lucas hadn’t seen before. He was even more surprised by Elle’s somewhat skeptical attitude toward her ability to help.

“You help me all the time,” Lucas said.

“I’ve never told you this, but when you ask me to help, my primary function is to make you think. To get you off your butt-excuse me-and quit your lazy ways and get to work.” She turned to Mattsson and said, “One thing you have to know about Lucas is, he exploits women. Because he’s good-looking and charming. He picks out smart women and gets them to do his work for him. That includes his wife and daughter. And me. And you.”

“I met his daughter, and even drove around with her for a while,” Mattsson said. “She seemed astonishingly intelligent.”

“Exactly. Lucas has unconscionably, but not unconsciously, exploited her brains from the time she was a middle-school kid. He even got her to shoot a cop.”

“What?”

That took some explaining, and when Lucas was done, Mattsson squinted at him and asked, “Are you exploiting me? Dad?”

Lucas looked around for a waitress and asked, “So. . we’re all for the shrimp platter?”

Heather Jorgenson was living in a pale yellow ranch house with green shingles and a two-car garage, a satellite dish on the roof. A six- or seven-year-old cranberry-colored Cadillac sedan sat in the driveway.

Jorgenson met them at the front door, nervously twisting her hands, and invited them in. A sunburned guy with bleached-white teeth named Rex was lying on the couch watching the Golf Channel. He rolled off the couch when they walked in, and said, “Whelp, I got a lesson in twenty minutes, I better get to work.”

“Work” was a golf course, where he was a teaching pro. When Rex had gone in the Cadillac, Lucas introduced Mattsson and Elle; Jorgenson settled the other two women on the couch, and Lucas in a La-Z-Boy. “I have to tell you that I’m a little upset by all this,” she said. “I never believed that Horn was still out there. I thought he’d crawled off somewhere and died, or was gone to Brazil or something. I mean, I am so scared. I got Rex to put his gun under the bed.”

“I think he’d have a hard time finding you, that you wouldn’t hear about it before he got here,” Lucas said.

“Oh, pish,” she said. “If he knows anything about computers, he could find me in ten minutes. I mean, I looked in the White Pages, and there I was. No way to get it off there, either.”

“I won’t tell you he’s not dangerous,” Lucas said. “I’m sure you’ve heard about the shootings in Holbein.”

“Just awful. And you don’t have to tell me about dangerous. I would’ve been in the Black Hole if I hadn’t had my knife that night. Sometimes I wake up, I just start to cry. . ”

“That’s not uncommon, it’s a form of post-traumatic stress,” Elle said. “Have you talked to your doctor about it?”

“Years ago,” Jorgenson said. “He gave me some pills and they helped. I’ve saved a few, and I’m thinking about going back to them again. Don’t have enough for a week, though.”

“You’ll only need a couple,” Lucas said. “Because I’m going to get him soon.”

She smiled at him, tentatively, and asked, “Why do I believe that?”

Mattsson said, “Because he’s good-looking and charming.”

They chatted for a few minutes. Jorgenson was working at the Beerateria in downtown Eau Claire, a bar that specialized in craft beers. The money was okay, she said, and she and Rex got along okay, and had pooled their money to buy the house they were in. They were talking about getting married, and this time, she thought, Rex was serious.