John Sandford - Field of Prey

Duncan waved him down: “We know now. It was Horn. The crew was working all day and most of the night on the O’Neill scene, you’ll all have summaries in your paperwork. As you all know, we picked up a lot of.22 brass from the floor of the O’Neill house. About fifteen minutes ago, Don Abernathy confirmed that we had several partial fingerprints, mostly thumbprints, on the brass, and they match the prints that Horn had with the feds. He was fingerprinted in Holbein when he was hired on at the police department. So. Where is he?”

There was a flurry of conversation about that and Mattsson looked at Lucas, eyebrows up. Lucas held up a finger and asked, “Is Don still upstairs?”

Duncan said, “I’m sure he is.”

“Let’s give him a ring,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a question about the prints.”

“Which is?”

“I want to know how old they are.”

Duncan stuck a finger in an ear and rattled it around for a second, then said, “Sure,” and reached for the speakerphone and punched in a number. Abernathy was on the line a minute later.

“Don, we have a question for you,” Duncan said. “Do you have any idea how old those prints were?”

Abernathy cleared his throat and said, “They are somewhat old-can’t really tell how old, but they’re not real new. What we’re seeing is not the oil or perspiration from the friction ridges, like you see on fresh prints. We’re seeing some faint corrosion in the brass, caused by finger oil or perspiration, that follow the pattern of the friction ridges. There’s no doubt that they belong to Horn, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Lucas asked, “Could they be ten years old?”

Abernathy said, “Yeah, once they’re etched onto the shells like that, they’re pretty permanent. They could be fifty years old.”

Duncan asked Lucas, “That everything?” and Lucas nodded and Duncan said, “Hey, Don, thanks,” and then rang off. He looked at Lucas and asked, “All right. What’s up?”

Lucas pointed a finger at Mattsson.

“Lucas and I were reading your interview with Heather Jorgenson,” Mattsson said, speaking directly to Duncan. “We got to talking about it when we were out there yesterday morning on that phone-tracing business, and then the O’Neill murders. We thought there was a lot of good stuff in there, but we wondered if we could drill deeper if we had Jorgenson talk to a psychiatrist or psychologist.

“Lucas has a good friend who is the head of the Department of Psychology at St. Anne’s,” she continued. “We went over to Jorgenson’s late yesterday afternoon, with the psychologist, Elle Kruger. Kruger put Jorgenson into, mmm, what I guess you’d call a state of regression. She didn’t exactly hypnotize her, but it was over in that direction.

“After interviewing her in this state, in which she more or less relived the attack at the diner, and then her attack on Horn, a couple of things became evident.”

Duncan was twiddling a yellow pencil and he stopped and crossed his legs and said, “I gotta tell you, the suspense is killing me. Just tell us.”

Mattsson smiled at him and said, “First off, she realized, and we agree, that there wasn’t one attacker, but two.”

Somebody said, “Whoa.”

Duncan was chewing on his lower lip. “I could buy that. Tell us why. Give us the scenario.”

Mattsson outlined it: a woman who they believed might have weighed as much as a hundred fifty pounds, or more, being bodily lifted and thrown in the back of the truck by a man who probably wasn’t twenty pounds heavier. The mysterious appearance of the truck within seconds of the attack. The even more mysterious disappearance of Horn.

“There were theories that he ran off somewhere and died. We think he was picked up, by an accomplice in a trailing car or truck. Kruger took Jorgenson on a minute-by-minute reconstruction of her flight after the truck went in the ditch. She wouldn’t necessarily have been aware of a second vehicle. Quite a bit of her run was down in a dry creek bed. She couldn’t have seen another truck from there. I went over there last night and walked up the same creek bed-she couldn’t have seen anything until she recrossed the road to the house where she called the police from.”

Duncan: “You said, ‘First off.’ Is there anything else?”

Mattsson nodded. “Kruger got Jorgenson to relive the stabbing. She had a razor-sharp, serrated blade with a nasty point, three inches long. I got the name and model from her-it was the first model of a Leatherman Super Tool-looked it up, and it’s a serious weapon. In the reenactment, she seemed to think she stuck him at least five times in the neck and spine.”

Duncan twitched the yellow pencil at her. “The reason that Lucas asked about the fingerprints, and how old they are, is because you think. .”

“Horn is dead,” Mattsson said. “We think he’s been dead for years. We think the real Black Hole killer has been dragging him out in front of us because he wants us looking for Horn. Horn’s probably been in a hole out in the woods ever since he attacked Jorgenson.”

A long silence, and then everybody started talking at once. Lucas jumped in. “Little Kaylee said she saw this postal clerk, Sprick, in the ditch near where Shaffer’s body was found. We have another woman who’s identified Sprick as having been in her shop, the one Mary Lynn Carpenter ran, several times a year. He doesn’t look anything at all like Horn. And you know why Kaylee saw him in the ditch? I suspect it was because he was walking back to Holbein. He drove Shaffer down to Zumbrota to throw us off. It’s a good hike back, but half of us in here are runners, and we run distances that approach that. It’s an easy walk, really, if you’ve got a couple hours. He had all night. Everything here points to Holbein: the last cemetery that we know for sure that Shaffer was in. . the O’Neill murders.”

More silence, then Duncan asked, “Show of hands. How many people think Horn is probably dead?”

All the hands went up, including Duncan’s.

“Okay,” he said, “we gotta turn this train around.” To Mattsson, with one last poke of the pencil: “Nice piece of work.”

Lucas went back to his office, trailed by Mattsson. Lucas said, “You done good. You didn’t embarrass him, left him in charge.”

Mattsson: “Now what?”

“Now there’s going to be some more grinding. We have a real shot at him now. We’re not chasing a ghost,” Lucas said. “We’re going to throw a net over Holbein, the whole town, and sieve it out.”

“Goddamnit: I’d like a gunfight,” Mattsson said.

“Innocent people get killed in gunfights,” Lucas said.

“Okay. I want a gunfight where no innocent people get killed. Only the Black Hole guy.”

“Careful of what you wish for,” Lucas said. “In the meantime. . I gotta catch up with my guys.”

Mattsson left and Lucas went looking for his secretary, and found Sands, the director, instead. “I found you,” Sands said. “What’s that fuckin’ Flowers doing?”

“Working a semi-low-priority case down south.”

“Excellent. He’s right on the spot,” Sands said. “We got a call from the Winona County sheriff’s office that some drunk reporter from a shopper newspaper down there was found dead in a ditch.”

“Dead from drinking?” Lucas asked.

“From what I’m told, he might’ve been, except for the bullet holes in his back.”

“All right. Who’s handling the crime scene?”

“The sheriff’s office has got a competent guy, I’m told. He’s on top of it. There’s not much of a crime scene-the guy was shot and thrown in the ditch, off a blacktop road, not found for at least a couple days. But they want us to take a look, Virgil particularly,” Sands said.