John Sandford - Field of Prey

“You think there could have been another truck? Another vehicle?”

“If it had been right behind Horn’s. . maybe. I was in that field for five or ten minutes, I guess. . Heck, I might have been in there for fifteen minutes, I don’t really know. If the other truck had been right behind Horn’s, I wouldn’t have seen it. Especially when I was down in that crick.”

Lucas had no more questions; neither did Mattsson. Elle shooed them out, said, “Go sit in the cars. I want to sit here and talk with Heather for a while.”

Outside, Mattsson said, “Whoa. That was something . That was like a movie. The hair was standing up on my neck when she was talking about stabbing him, and then realized there’d been a second guy. . ”

“I believe her,” Lucas said. “I think she stabbed him in the back of the neck, in and out, maybe five or six times and maybe more. I’m pretty sure they would have been deep, penetrating wounds-when you think of the way she was sitting in the truck, it would have been easy to stab him, and a lot harder to slice him. Easy to go up and down, a lot harder to pull back and forth.”

“How did you get to the idea that there were two people?”

“First, because we can’t find Horn anywhere, and nobody ever saw him after he attacked Heather. That’s fairly improbable. From her description of the attack, in Duncan’s interview, which sounded real to me, I’d say he either had to get to a hospital, or die. Three-inch wounds down the neck and spine? I’m sorry, but that’s big trouble. He didn’t get to a hospital. We know that for sure.”

“So. . he’s dead?”

“That’s what I think. If he didn’t die immediately, the second guy probably killed him and ditched his body somewhere. I think the second guy still lives in Holbein, and he’s the guy that Shaffer ran into.”

Mattsson smiled as she realized what Lucas was thinking. “That’s why Horn’s name was written in Shaffer’s book,” Mattsson said. “The second guy had the notebook, and wrote it in there, so we’d all be looking for Horn. We’d be looking for a dead guy.”

“That’s what I think,” Lucas said.

“You said, ‘First, because we can’t find Horn.’ Was there something else?”

“You ever try to get a grip on a big strong angry woman?”

“Not since I was on patrol. I let the guys do that now. But I see what you mean. It’s sorta not a one-man job.”

“Heather’s driver’s license, when she was kidnapped, said she weighed one thirty-five,” Lucas said. “In my experience, the weight on a woman’s driver’s license is what she’d like it to be. In reality, you could add about twenty pounds to that.”

“That’s a little sexist,” she said.

“Lemme see your license.”

“No way.”

“See?”

“I’m not twenty pounds heavier than my license says,” Mattsson said. “But I’ll give you the argument.”

“The pictures of Horn show a tall, thin guy. His driver’s license says he was six feet tall, and one seventy. I’m saying that a lone hundred-and-seventy-pound man would have a hard time throwing a struggling hundred-and-fifty-pound woman into a truck, without help.”

“And the truck,” Mattsson said. “She didn’t see the truck in the parking lot.”

“That’s right. He sure as hell didn’t carry a struggling hundred-and-fifty-pound woman around to the front of the diner and throw her in the truck, even if her sense of time was off. She said it was quick, and I think it was, because I think the other guy drove the truck back there to get her.”

“I buy it all. Horn’s dead, we’re looking for a partner,” Mattsson said.

“Yes, we are.”

“Jesus: tall, good-looking, charming, and smart. It must be a burden.”

“I try to carry it gracefully,” Lucas said.

Elle talked to Heather for another fifteen minutes, and when she came out, Lucas asked, “What do you think?”

“She’ll be all right,” Elle said. “I told her to get down in a crowd of people tonight, and maybe have a few beers in the back room. Laugh-make herself laugh.”

Mattsson: “That’s what I would do.”

“No guarantees,” Elle said. “She could jump off a bridge tomorrow morning. I have a friend here at Luther Hospital, in the psych department. I’ll ask her to check on Heather tomorrow, see if she wants to talk some more.”

Lucas nodded, and then said, “We had to talk to her.”

“I agree. The truth had to come out. Two of them,” Elle said. “Interesting. If everything breaks just right, I could get a paper out of this.”

Lucas laughed, and Mattsson smiled, and then Lucas said, “Give me one more minute. I need to talk to Jorgenson again. Just a minute.”

He went back and knocked on the door, and when Jorgenson answered, he said, “I thought I ought to tell you-I’m not positive about this, but I’m almost sure that Horn is dead. I don’t think you have to worry about him. Officer Mattsson and I have been talking about it, and we think that maybe the other man, the real Black Hole killer, the current one, probably killed him after you wounded him.”

“You think? I want to believe that.”

“That’s what we think. You still be careful, but. . you’re okay.”

Lucas and Elle didn’t get back to the Twin Cities until after seven o’clock. Mattsson said she was going to look at the path of Jorgenson’s flight through the cornfield, to see if she could estimate how long it took between the truck wreck and the arrival of the cops. She’d see him in the morning.

Lucas told Weather what they’d learned: “If Horn’s dead, you guys have wasted a lot of time,” she said.

“It was something we needed to know,” Lucas said. “Something critical.”

Mattsson showed up the next morning for the daily case conference, came straight into Lucas’s office: “Did you tell them that Horn’s dead?”

“Not yet. I’m just about to, at the meeting,” he said. “It’s not like we’re competing against them.”

“How about if I told them?”

Lucas looked at her for a moment, then pointed at his visitor’s chair and she sat down. “You remember what I said about how it gets kinda political around here? Jon Duncan is eventually going to be an important guy. He’s got that command presence, and, though he really seems to be a good guy, he’s never been around an important ass that he didn’t kiss.”

“I see that in him,” Mattsson said.

Lucas said, “The problem is, we went over and interviewed Jorgenson after he did, and we got something critical that he didn’t. Might not make him look so good. I don’t have to worry about that, but you’d like to find a spot up here.”

“I understand that,” Mattsson said. “But let me break the news-I want to try out those political chops.”

Lucas leaned back in his chair and said, “You got about one minute to get it together.”

She said, “I’ve been thinking about it all night.”

Lucas looked at his watch: “Let’s go.”

Duncan called the meeting to order, summarized in thirty seconds the investigations of his crew in the Sauk Centre area-not much there.

“The phone trace began in Sauk Centre, wound up way south of Highway 52, looked to be heading back to Zumbrota or Holbein. Now, from what the crime-scene crew says, it appears that Horn killed the O’Neills earlier in the evening, drove to Sauk Centre to make the phone call, and then drove back. We now think that he actually lives south, and all that stuff about Sauk Centre and Alexandria was an attempt to pull us up north.”

“We don’t even know for sure that Horn killed the O’Neills,” one of the agents said. “I admit it’d be a weird coincidence. .”