John Sandford - Field of Prey

“What are you going to do?” Flowers asked.

“Duncan’s group is tearing Holbein and Zumbrota apart. I think maybe my best shot is to go over to Durand, Wisconsin, and find someone who knows somebody from Holbein or Zumbrota. I don’t know how to do that, but that’s what I’m going to do, if I have to go around and knock on store windows.”

“Let me think about it,” Flowers said. “I’ll get back to you.”

“I’m counting on you,” Lucas said.

Flowers said, “I’ll tell you one thing. Catrin’s got this tough-girl act, but under the act, she really is tough. Smart. I think she could string this guy out for a while. Don’t stop pushing it.”

Lucas made another call, from west of Omaha, over I-80, to Duncan.

“Jon, what’s going on? What can I do?”

“Anything you can think of. We’ve got everybody working it, we know what happened, how he got her, but where she is now. . we got no idea.”

“Then give me what you’ve got.”

Duncan said that when the sheriff’s officers got to the Black Hole, they’d found nothing-and Mattsson hadn’t shown up. They’d tried to contact her and failed, and so they’d gone to her apartment, and found that somebody had broken in through the street door.

“He knew what he was doing-used a glass cutter to cut through the door panel.”

Worried now, the cops had gone into her apartment, where they found her Glock, her cell phone, and a burner-a pay-as-you-go phone, that had been thoroughly wiped. The phone had been used to call Mattsson, a minute before Mattsson had called the Goodhue County duty officer. The phone had been purchased from a Walmart, but they didn’t know which one, and were working with Walmart’s inventory people to see if they could track it down.

“What he did was, he called her at 1:07. She was in bed. They talked for only a minute, and he apparently told her that he’d left another body at the Black Hole site.

“Less than a minute after the call ended, Mattsson called the duty officer at the Goodhue County sheriff’s office and told them to get everything started toward the Black Hole, and why. They did that.

“But he called from Red Wing, not up by the Hole,” Duncan said. “In fact, we think he called from right outside Mattsson’s apartment door. She wears pajamas: they were on the floor next to her bed. We think she got dressed in a big hurry, picked up her weapon and ran out the door, and he punched her out right there. There are chunks of potato in the hallway and on the floor inside the door. We think he used the potato like brass knuckles, see. .”

“I know about that,” Lucas said. “You got any video of the street?”

“Not a thing,” Duncan said. “We’ve gone up and down the streets around there, looking for a camera that might have caught him, but we’ve come up empty so far. We’re still looking.”

“And nothing yet in Holbein.”

“No. People here are getting a little surly: the newspaper editor thinks they’re getting unfairly blamed for harboring this guy.”

“Ah, bullshit.”

“Yes. But that’s what he said.”

Lucas rang off, then called Weather before they dropped the cell signal, told her he was on the way back, and about Del and Mattsson. He made a final call to Duncan as they crossed I-90 in southern Minnesota; nothing had changed.

“I’m going to Durand,” he said. “I think that’s where we’ve got the best shot, short of you guys turning somebody up in Holbein.”

“Stay in touch.”

Fifteen minutes before landing, Lucas went to the plane’s oversized bathroom, gave himself a cold sponge bath, changed into jeans and a vintage RL flannel shirt, and jammed the morning’s clothes back into his overnight bag. They landed in St. Paul in the early afternoon. Lucas’s truck was waiting in the parking lot. He thought about starting straight for Wisconsin, but decided he needed to stop home first, a half-hour detour.

No time , he kept thinking. No time .

He parked in the driveway, went into the garage through a side door and opened the cache he kept under a step that led up to the housekeeper’s apartment over the garage. He’d built the cache himself, and carefully, so that it was essentially invisible. Inside were several cold guns, a silencer, a lock rake, and a few other items that he didn’t really want anyone else to know about.

Among them was a bottle of little gray pills, known in the truck driving trade as little white pills: the best speed he’d ever encountered. He’d gotten them from a line foreman at the Ford plant, when there still was a Ford plant.

He shook four of the pills into his hand, popped one and put the other three in the breast pocket of his sport coat. Weather walked into the garage from the kitchen as he was closing the latch on the cache, and said, “I heard you come in. Anything new?”

“No. I’m on my way to Wisconsin,” Lucas said.

“Space those pills out. The third one can fool you-you’ll feel sharp, but your reflexes start to fall apart. Don’t kill yourself.”

“I won’t.”

“Don’t let anybody else kill you, either.”

He kissed her and gave her a squeeze and said, “I’ll keep the phone plugged in. Call me anytime.”

Durand was an hour out of St. Paul, even at the speeds Lucas was driving. The amphetamine had kicked in: he was clearheaded and focused. He was crossing the St. Croix River when he got a call. Virgil Flowers.

“You still planning to go to Durand?” Flowers asked.

“Yeah. I’m on the way.”

“I’m looking at my Pad,” Flowers said. “The population is about two thousand people. Quite a few of those will be kids.”

“Yeah?”

“So there probably aren’t more than fifteen hundred adults. Get the Durand cops to call everybody they know. All their friends and relatives and everybody else. Ask who knows somebody from Holbein or Zumbrota. Then ask all those people to call everybody they know, and so on. It’s like a tornado-warning phone chain. You’ll get a lot of duplication, but you’ll touch everybody in town-at least, everybody with a phone-inside fifteen or twenty minutes, figuring each call at a minute or so each.”

“Virgil: we need to do that. Right now. You do it, you can explain it better. Call the cops and tell them that. There’s a sheriff’s office in town, along with the cops. . Call them both and get it going.”

“How far out of town are you?” Flowers asked.

“Maybe forty-five minutes.”

“Could have something by the time you get there,” Flowers said.

Lucas was heading down the hill toward the Chippewa River bridge when he took a call from an unknown Wisconsin number. He answered, and was talking to a Durand cop. “We responded to that call from your agent Flowers, and we’ve got a couple of things for you. You need to talk to Shelly Linebarger at Andrew’s Rentals and also to a Melissa Saferstein at the Book Nook.”

Lucas got the locations, and after crossing the bridge, turned north for two blocks and spotted the rental company in a standard concrete-block-and-tin-roof building on the east side of the highway. He hopped out and went inside, where three clerks, two men and a woman, were standing in a cluster behind the service counter, and turned to look at him.

He said, “I’m Lucas Davenport and-”

“We’ve been waiting for you,” the woman said. “I’m Shelly. We’ve got a customer from over in that area. He’s rented towable cement mixers from us a few times.”

The renter’s name was Bob Bonet. They had a Visa card number for him.

“He’s rented here a half dozen times. I asked him once why he comes all the way over here, and he said he could save quite a bit of money over rentals in the St. Paul area, where’s the next closest place he could get these one-and-three-quarter-yard mixers. I don’t know exactly where he lives, but it’s in the countryside by Holbein.”