John Sandford - Field of Prey

“We’re throwing Bryan out the window?” Shrake blurted.

“No, Shaffer’s doing the work,” Lucas said. “We’ll be mostly talking.”

“I hate to see that officious prick get all the glory,” Jenkins said. “He’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t give you a six-inch putt.”

“He does good records,” Del said.

“He’s also exactly the right guy to run this case,” Lucas said. “It’s gonna be all sorting bones and extracting DNA and running the spreadsheets.”

“Still wouldn’t give you a putt,” Jenkins said.

“Probably because he’s not fuckin’ stupid enough to play golf,” Lucas said. “Anyway, if Shaffer doesn’t find this killer in a hurry, they’ll be sniffing around our asses, looking for help. Let’s close out Bryan.”

Bryan.

Bryan had run a St. Paul investment company that turned out to be a Ponzi scheme, a scheme that had eventually come up a couple of Ponzis short. He’d been arrested and the state attorney general’s office was trying to get back the thirty-one million dollars that had been entrusted to him by 1,691 small investors, most of them elderly. Bryan said the money was gone-spent on fast Italian cars, slow Kentucky horses, and hot Russian women, along with a $250,000 RV, which lost half its value when he turned the key on it, and an unprofitable ostrich ranch in Wyoming. Rumor said that a good deal more of the cash had gone up his nose.

There were doubters.

Bryan had divorced three years earlier, and his ex-wife, Bloomie, now lived in a house very near, but not quite on, the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach. According to the local conspiracy theorists, Bryan had seen the trouble coming, had given an overly generous divorce settlement to his wife, who would support him when the problems became public and the company went broke. There was also talk that he owned a Cabo San Lucas estate under a Mexican corporate shadow.

That may have been true, but apparently had become irrelevant when Bryan’s court-ordered ankle monitor went dead, and his BMW M6 convertible had been found parked near the St. Croix gorge at Taylors Falls with the front seat soaked in his blood. No body had been found. There were, at latest count, 1,691 suspects in Bryan’s disappearance.

“Well, we’ve already interviewed twelve of them, so that only leaves one thousand six hundred and seventy-nine to go. We should have that done by 2020,” Jenkins said.

“Start with the ones young enough to move a body,” Lucas suggested. “That’ll cut the workload by ninety-eight percent.”

“Are you gonna help?” Shrake asked.

“First, I’m gonna go down and take a look at this cistern, this well, where they found all the bodies,” Lucas said. “Then this evening, I’ll be talking to the beautiful Carrie Lee Pitt, about Bryan’s missing clothes. I’m hoping she’ll let me peek in her closet.”

“How come we’re not talking to Carrie Lee Pitt?” Jenkins asked.

“Because that will take some savoir faire , which you don’t got any of,” Lucas said.

Jenkins looked offended, lifted an arm and sniffed his armpit, and said, “Yes, I do.”

Jenkins and Shrake left, and Lucas turned to Del, who had taken Lucas’s visitor’s chair and put his feet up on a file cabinet.

Del was a thin man, with a sun-darkened face of knobs and wrinkled plains, a little more than average height: a dusty guy in his mid-fifties, who looked like he lived on the street. He was wearing a long-sleeved turquoise cowboy shirt and faded jeans over hiking boots. “We’re going down to the well?”

“Cistern,” Lucas said. “Yeah, I guess we better. But Jesus, that shirt makes me want to pluck my eyeballs out. You been hanging out at Goodwill again?”

“From what I hear, if we’re going down to the well-the cistern-we’re gonna want to burn the clothes afterwards,” Del said. “I’d rather burn a polyester shirt than a two-thousand-dollar Italian suit. Or three-thousand-dollar Romanian shoes.”

“British shoes. And when you’re right, you’re right.” Lucas pushed himself out of his chair. “We’ll stop at my place on the way out. You ready?”

“As ever.”

“Fifteen skulls so far,” Lucas said, as he turned off the office lights. “And there are more down the well.”

“Somebody’s been a bad, bad boy,” Del said.

On the way out of the building, they ran into Sands, the BCA director. He was looking harried, and said, as they walked down the stairs to the first floor, “This can come to no good end. Remember I said that.”

“It already did, for at least fifteen women,” Del said. “But we’ll get him.”

“Not soon enough,” Sands said. He breathed in Lucas’s direction, and Lucas had to fight an impulse to step back: Sands’s breath was notorious. “It’s already not soon enough. Charlie’s already getting calls from the Today show.”

Charlie handled the BCA’s media relations.

At home, Lucas changed into worn Levi’s 505s and a blue chambray work shirt from Façonnable; he let the shirt hang loose to cover the.45 in his beltline.

He and Del loaded an Igloo cooler into the back of his black Mercedes SUV, and Lucas threw a nylon daypack on top of the cooler. On the way out of town, they stopped at a BP station for gas, and picked up ice, bottled water, Coke and Diet Coke, and headed south across the Mississippi.

“I have a psychological observation,” Del said, as they crossed the water.

“Nobody’s more qualified to make one,” Lucas said.

“It’s just this. You say, ‘fifteen skulls,’ and I say, ‘Somebody’s been a bad, bad boy.’ If an outsider had heard that, they’d think we had no feelings at all. I’d have sounded like an asshole.”

A Prius passed Lucas, doing ninety, and then cut in front of him and slowed. Lucas tapped the brakes and said, “Blow me.” And to Del, “Not you, the Prius. And what you say is true. Not a new experience, for you, though.”

“Or you. We sit around and bullshit about this stuff, like we’re reading a bus ticket, but when we start finding out about the victims, we’re gonna get pissed,” Del said. “We’re not pissed now, but we will be. We’ll find out about their lives, about what they wanted to do, and all the misery this killer caused, we’ll start brooding about it, and we’ll get pissed.”

“Get to the point. I want to put on my Pink album.”

“The point is this-Henry and Rose Marie are already pissed. They’re pissed because the politics might hurt them. They’re not pissed about fifteen women down the well, they’re pissed about how they’re going to look on TV. You know, the big-shot cops who let this happen right here in River City.”

“In the interest of your continuing employment,” Lucas said, “let’s keep this psychological observation between you and me.”

“You know what I’m saying,” Del said.

“I do,” Lucas said. “It’s the way of the world, man. There are the worker bees, and the manager bees. The worker bees take care of the work, the manager bees take care of themselves.”

They were headed out on a good summer day, but hot, down Highway 52, through Cannon Falls, and on south. The cistern site was in rolling farm country west of the Mississippi River Valley, on a gravel road off Goodhue County 1. They spent a few minutes wandering around, after an off-map shortcut didn’t work out, and so took an hour to find the site.

The road was blocked by two cop cars five hundred yards out, and a half dozen TV vans were parked on the shoulder of the road, reporters and photographers clustered on the shady sides of the vans.

“Lot of TV,” Del said. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen this much.”

“Gonna be rough,” Lucas said. “Shaffer’s gonna be hip-deep in bullshit before he’s through.”