John Sandford - Field of Prey

“I’ll talk to Virgil.”

“Interesting, that thing about Horn being dead,” Sands said, as he drifted away. “Who woulda thought?”

Lucas called Virgil, who said, without saying hello, “I’m already on the way over.”

“The newspaper guy?”

“Yeah. Not much of a newspaper, and not much of a guy, from what I’m told, but he’s definitely been murdered.”

“Stay in touch,” Lucas said.

HE CHECKED with Jenkins and Shrake. Jenkins said they’d be done in two more days, that they’d be back with Bryan and all the paperwork they’d found in the trunk of his car, since Florida didn’t want him for anything. And that they were tired of Florida. “You know they allow alligators on the golf courses down here?”

“I don’t play golf,” Lucas said. “But I’m guessing that’s what they call a water hazard.”

Del was out of touch.

A little after noon, Lucas went home, taking the updated murder books with him. Weather wasn’t yet home, because she had an afternoon patch job on a guy with skin cancer. Lucas thought an intensive search of Holbein, and perhaps Zumbrota, was likely to turn something up, so he finished reading the last of the murder books, and when he was done, dumped the books on the floor and took a nap.

After the nap, he went for a run, and Weather called as he was going out the door and said she’d be a little later still. After a hard four miles, Lucas stood in the shower for a few minutes, then dressed again and found Letty downstairs with fifty pounds of gear she’d need for Stanford: “What I really need is a new laptop. It’s gonna have to be a heavy-duty one. I don’t want a low-rent Dell.”

His phone vibrated, and Lucas looked at the screen. He said, “Duncan. Maybe something happened,” and clicked “answer.”

“What are you up to?” Duncan asked.

“Just finished scrounging through the murder books again. Why?”

“We’ve taken over the Holbein City Hall lobby down here, and we’ve got people walking all over town, spreading the word that the killer may be here. Well, a woman came in a few minutes ago, name is Barbara Neumann, to tell us that Horn was not friendless, like we’ve been told. There’s a Mayo clinic here, and Horn apparently got himself poisoned with some kind of weed killer-nothing serious, eczema, a rash, painful, I guess, but not much more. Anyway, he had to come back a dozen times, for treatment and tests, make sure he didn’t have any liver problems and so on. The woman said that a social worker named Rachel Cline seemed to have gotten pretty friendly with him. I don’t know what that means, and Neumann doesn’t either, whether the friendliness was personal or professional. But: to make a long story short, Cline is in the Twin Cities now, working at Fairview Southdale.”

“So we’re not assuming that Horn is dead?”

“I’m assuming that,” Duncan said. “What I’m hoping is, Cline knew him well enough to know who another friend of his might be. That fuckin’ Horn is the most impenetrable personality I’ve ever run into. Didn’t do anything but pick up live dogs and dead skunks, shoot guns, and drink. Anyway, I’m sorta looking for somebody to run over to Southdale. Cline is there now, and she knows we want to talk to her.”

“I can leave in one minute,” Lucas said. “Where is she, exactly?”

Cline was a tall honey blonde who wore heavy black-rimmed spectacles that made her look like she wrote book reviews for the Wall Street Journal . She gave Lucas a firm shake and said, “I can assure you, I was not a friend of Horn’s. Any kind of a friend.”

They were sitting in an otherwise empty lounge area outside the office of the Case Management Team.

“But you were friendly with him-professionally, at least.”

“Yeah, but I knew he was a creepoid,” she said, hugging herself. “He tried to be friendly with me, but the only things he could talk about were shooting. . things.”

“Why was he talking to you at all?”

“He couldn’t pay his clinic bill. I mean, he had to be treated, but he had no money. He had this cheap-ass insurance from the city. You had a choice-you either took a high maximum payment with a high deductible, or vice versa, low max, low deduct. He took the high max, high deductible, and he couldn’t make the deductible. We worked out a payment plan with him.”

“So. . you didn’t know who he hung with. If he hung with anybody.”

“I saw him with a guy once, when he was being treated, and I think it was a friend. I don’t know who it was.” She leaned toward Lucas, intent on the memory. “What I remember was, there is a place in Holbein called Arlo’s Finer Meats, and Horn and this other guy were carrying a dead deer-I think it was a deer-into the back. They had a deer-processing thing there. The reason I remember, in particular, is that my ex-husband was a deer hunter, and I’ve seen a lot of dead bucks. This deer had huge horns. Horns like I’d never seen. That’s why I’m not even a hundred percent sure it was a deer-it was just so big. Like an elk. But not that big, maybe.”

“You remember what year this was?”

“Not the year, but I can tell you it was probably a year before he attacked that woman.”

They talked for another ten minutes, but she had nothing else. Lucas thanked her, went to his car, and called Duncan.

“Big deer,” Duncan said. “Huge deer. I’m heading over to Arlo’s. I wonder if they might have shot it at a game farm? That’s where you get the biggest bucks.”

“It’s a possibility,” Lucas said.

“Lucas: thank you.”

Lucas went home and found Letty waiting to talk to him. “I’ve been reading the murder books again,” she said. “I’ve got a question about the ropes. There were fourteen ropes found down in the Black Hole. Seven of them were quarter-inch nylon, three were quarter-inch polypropylene, two were three-eighths-inch nylon, and two were three-eighths-inch polypro. All of them were within a couple of inches of thirty inches long, and they all had knots tied at both ends.”

“So his hands wouldn’t slip when he was strangling the women with them,” Lucas said.

“But here’s the thing-even though they were extremely similar, they didn’t all come from the same length of rope. It wasn’t one rope he was cutting to get seven lengths of nylon. The lab says there are subtle differences in chemical composition and even in weave, by different manufacturers. So, the killer got them at some place with a lot of rope.”

“Or a lot of different places with a lot of different ropes,” Lucas said. “They’ve checked the hardware stores everywhere, got no good information-even checked the marinas, because nylon’s used by boaters.”

“There’s gotta be something weird about going someplace and buying a two-and-a-half-foot rope,” Letty said. “What could you use it for, besides strangling people?”

“Lawn mower starter cords, boat tie-downs, I dunno.” Lucas thought about it for a few seconds, then said, “Think it over. There might be something in there.”

Weather came in and said, “You guys are on television again. That Mattsson is a very attractive young woman.”

Lucas tried to think of a reply, but nothing came to mind. So he said, “What are we on television about?”

“About Horn being dead. About looking for another guy. At least, that’s what the promo said.”

“ What? Jon wasn’t going to release that yet.”

Letty, who’d worked at Channel Three for several years, as a student intern, said, “If you’ve got agents running all over Holbein and Zumbrota, how long did you think it’d stay confidential?”

Lucas settled back in his chair. “All right. Not long, I guess.”