John Sandford - Field of Prey

“Well, get up. Let’s go watch,” Letty said.

They all went traipsing into the family room, where Sam was playing with Legos in front of the TV, and Gabrielle was watching him work. They sat through an advertisement for Hyundai automobiles that were being blown out at record low prices while the boss was on vacation in Canada.

Then the anchorman came up and said, “Breaking right now! An exclusive from Channel Three’s crime team! We’re switching you to Holbein, where. .”

They switched to an excited reporter in Holbein who said, “Greg, we’ve confirmed from a number of sources that the agents of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension are literally swarming through the towns of Holbein and Zumbrota, looking for a mystery ‘second man’ in the Black Hole case. And get this, Greg! The BCA now believes that Jack Horn is dead!”

There followed shots of agents and cops coming and going from the Holbein police headquarters, and a shot of Duncan, in plain clothes, consulting with Mattsson, in her deputy’s uniform. “Those two are getting pretty friendly,” Lucas said, genuinely amused. “A few days ago, they were screaming at each other.”

The reporter tried to interview Mattsson, but she brushed him off: “You need to talk to Jon Duncan. Everything goes through him.”

“But are you closing in? Do you have somebody in your sights?”

Mattsson smiled and shook her head, but the smile said, “Yes.”

Duncan did say a few words, and Letty said, “He has nice hair and a good smile.”

“Good hair is important,” Lucas said.

“That’s all you got?” Letty asked. “They’re closing in, and all you got is, ‘Good hair is important’?”

“This killer is not a dumb guy,” Lucas said. “I’m not sure they’re as close as they think they are.”

Lucas was drifting away from the TV when the anchor said, in the same excited voice, “The C-Team also has an exclusive interview with Little Kaylee Scott, who may have seen the Black Hole killer again, and this time he was stalking her in her own neighborhood.”

“Ah, shit.”

“That could be a big deal,” Letty said.

“It’s not,” Lucas said. He took one minute to explain.

Weather said, “TV. It’s like if you’re not on it, you don’t exist. The single most pernicious idea in our culture.”

R-A and Horn were watching the news at the same time as Lucas. R-A was down four half-glasses of bourbon, and feeling a little wobbly.

“Those fuckers are all over town,” he said. “They’re not exactly going door-to-door, but it’s pretty close. They’ll be knocking here anytime.”

“Well, don’t let them in,” Horn said. “They get a look at me, and it really is all over.”

“Can’t take a chance of that, no way,” R-A said. He stepped toward Horn, and then Mattsson was on the TV screen, and R-A said, “Ohhhhh. . Jesus.”

“Run back to the bathroom, stroke boy,” Horn said. “Run-run-run-run.”

“Shut up.”

“You still think you’re gonna get her? Looks like she’s hanging out with the state cops now.”

“I’ll get her,” R-A said. “Too bad you won’t be here to see it.”

“C’mon, R-A, are you-”

He stopped talking because R-A stepped behind him and snapped his head off.

Nobody came to the door the first night of the big Holbein-Zumbrota hunt. R-A was keeping his pickup in the garage for the time being, and was getting around in his ten-year-old Suburban. After pulling on some plastic kitchen gloves, he loaded Horn’s mummified corpse into the back of the Suburban, on a plastic sheet, tossed the head on top of the pile, and tied up the bundle. Horn was still wearing the clothes he’d been killed in, though you couldn’t see much blood after fifteen years of rot.

Horn’s wheelchair, which had once belonged to R-A’s father, he carefully washed, out behind the garage, with the Scrubbing Bubbles. When it was clean and dry, he folded and put it in the garage’s storage loft.

At nine-thirty, he drove out of town, heading east. He thought about dropping the bundle on top of the Black Hole, which would be funny, but too risky. After driving around for a while, down narrow and narrower country roads, watching for headlights and nearby farm lights, he said screw it, spotted some tall weeds in a ditch, and threw the bundle into the ditch and the head after it.

He didn’t particularly try to hide it. He was familiar with the countryside, and the way isolated neighbors watched out for each other. The thing that would create the most suspicion was a car parked on a road for a while, without good reason. He really didn’t need somebody wondering whose car that was, and what was going on.

And he didn’t really care if Horn was found: what he really needed to do was get him out of the house.

With Horn in the ditch, and no lights in sight, R-A turned around and headed back into town. Instead of going home, he drove a loop through it, a block over from the police station. There were all kinds of lights on, and a half dozen cars in the parking lot. Cops were still at it.

He stopped at the K-Bar, run by a former marine who’d never gotten over it, had a couple of margaritas, and listened to the other guys at the bar talk: all of it was about the cops in town, and speculation about who they were after, and that the same guy had killed the O’Neill family.

“Tell you what,” said one of the local blowhards, “if the town gets ahold of the guy before the cops do, I wouldn’t be surprised we had our first lynching. If they catch the sonofabitch, and if they don’t kill him on the spot, and if he gets convicted and doesn’t pull some technical shit on the court, then he’ll get life. He’ll be living better than a lot of the street people you see up in the Cities. Way better. Good medical care-”

“Wouldn’t want to spend all my days locked up,” said another guy.

“Either would I, but that’d be better than going to the chair,” said the blowhard. “But he’s gonna wind up in one of our country-club prisons, when what he should get is about four feet of rope up in a tree.”

A couple guys nodded, but a couple more said, “Don’t know about that,” so it wasn’t entirely unanimous.

R-A finished his second drink and left. Nobody said good-bye, because R-A was not especially well liked.

Back home, he found Horn sitting in the living room, in the wheelchair. He no longer had the duct tape around his neck, which had held his head upright for the past decade and a half. R-A was not especially surprised.

“You didn’t think you’d get rid of me that easy, did you?” Horn asked.

“No, I really didn’t,” R-A said.

“So what are we doing?”

R-A said, “Mattsson.”

All during dinner, with Letty chattering away, more and more excited about going out to California, and Sam fretting about it and Gabrielle throwing mashed squash at him, and all during that, and the subsequent cleanup, Weather would catch Lucas’s eyes with a little smile, and Lucas knew precisely what that meant, and it was fine with him.

They’d go to bed a little early, he’d be a little tired, and instead of staying up to read, he’d just tell everybody that he (yawn) really needed some sleep.

As he passed Weather in the kitchen, he muttered, “Brace yourself, Bridget.”

“I got all the bracing you can handle, big guy.”

They both laughed because it was so stupid.

At nine o’clock, still bouncing off each other a bit, with Letty in the second hour of a phone call with her best friend, who was also going off to school, Lucas and Weather both drifted away to their computers to answer any late e-mails before they actually got it on. Lucas had nothing interesting, dropped the lid on his laptop, and climbed the stairs to stick his head into Weather’s office, when his phone rang.