John Sandford - Field of Prey

“You ever see his truck?”

“Yeah,” one of the men said. “Every time he comes over. It’s a red Chevy dually, maybe four or five years old.”

Lucas said, “Huh.” And, “Big guy? Tall as me?”

“Almost as tall-and a lot wider.”

Lucas got the Visa number, said, “Thank you,” went back to his truck and phoned the number to Duncan, who was in Zumbrota. “We got to check it, but I got a down feeling about it-he’s a big guy. Our guy isn’t that big, I don’t think.”

“Gotta look,” Duncan said. “We’ll roll on it as soon as I can track the Visa number, and get an address.”

“Stay by your phone, I may have another one coming,” Lucas said.

The book nook was a narrow book-and-magazine store on Main Street, with about as many knickknacks as books; crystals hung in the windows over a sleeping red-and-white tomcat.

Lucas went inside and found Melissa Saferstein, whose candidate was the man who stocked her books from local and small presses-hunting and fishing books that focused on the North Woods, a variety of nature and photographic works of red barns and coyotes stalking field mice; like that.

“Davis Tory. Davis, not David. Not Davy, for sure, he told me that straight-out. There’s something a little off-center about him. He’s a little too tense,” she said. Saferstein was a blonde, pushing hard at middle age, if not yet quite there.

“You ever feel uneasy about him?” Lucas asked. “Like he might come on to you?”

“Oh. . no, I couldn’t really say that. He just seems really tense to me. I always thought it was because he works so hard. Doesn’t take time to schmooze, he just comes flying in the door, runs back and forth with his book boxes, and boom, he’s gone. And his language is atrocious. It’s motherfucker this, and goddamn that, and a few other words that I won’t repeat.”

“Big guy?”

“No, a fairly small guy,” Saferstein said. “Muscular, I guess from carrying all those book boxes around all the time. But, not too big, bald. One thing: he always takes a minute to say hello to the cats. He likes cats, and they like him.”

A black cat was at that moment walking across the counter to Lucas: he held out a knuckle for the cat to sniff, and then gave it a scratch behind the ears.

“Like that,” Saferstein said.

She had both an address and a phone number for Tory. Lucas wrote them down, and called Duncan again. “This guy’s got the right build. He’s from Cannon Falls, which is close, but not exactly the big cigar. We’ve got to look at him, but I’ve got my doubts.”

“Anything’s better than sitting around on our hands,” Duncan said. “You got a third guy?”

“Not yet,” Lucas said. “I’ll go up and talk to the cops, and see what they think.”

He drove through town, then up the hill to the government center. There was nobody in the police department office, and only one officer in the sheriff’s office-the guy who was running the communications.

“They’re all out on the street, trying to make sure we didn’t miss anyone. Going out in the nearby countryside, too,” the deputy said. “If we didn’t get everybody in town, I don’t know who we could have missed. Some people are complaining that they’ve been called eight or ten times. We’ve got about thirty names for you, people from Minnesota, but we’ve been plotting them on Google, and most of them are from up around the Cities. Outside your zone, anyway. The two you got were the only close ones.”

“So you’re slowing down?” Lucas asked.

“Afraid so-nobody else to talk to. Sorry it wasn’t more help.”

“We don’t know it wasn’t, yet,” Lucas said. “If you get anything else that looks good, call me.” He left his number, and walked out to the truck, looked at his watch. Six or seven more hours of daylight, not much more than that. He sat for two minutes, thinking about it, could feel the panic rising in his throat. He was nowhere: nowhere. And he had the sense he’d just wasted half a day. How much time did Catrin Mattsson have? Where was she? What had the killer done to her?

Wherever she was, whatever had been done to her, hadn’t been done in Durand. He got in his truck, and pointed it at the Mississippi River.

Mattsson was beginning to lose contact. She kept trying to wrench her brain back to the reality of her situation, trying to concentrate on what she might do, but then she’d blank out. She had no idea how long she’d been in the room. Sometimes, she thought she’d been in it for a couple of hours. Other times, a couple of days. Other times, more frequently, she thought she was dreaming, and that she’d wake up safe in her bed, covered with sweat from the nightmare.

One of the things she’d done as an investigator was to handle the rape cases, because a lot of victims simply weren’t ready to talk to men after an attack. She’d always bought the argument that rape wasn’t about sex, it was about power. Her faith in that view had been shaken. The killer was about violence, domination, power, whatever you might call it. But he was also all about sex.

Another item of faith that she was dropping behind: when she was dealing with rape as a cop, and as a woman, she’d always thought that rape was about the worst that could happen to you. Maybe it was, in the normal range of attacks on women. . but for her, the rapes were a minor part of her immediate problem.

They hurt her, but wouldn’t kill her.

But this man was killing her, literally killing her, inch by inch. He was beating her to death. When she went down for good, she sensed, there’d be one last rape or two, and then he’d strangle her, and by then, she’d be in no shape to resist.

He’d so far beaten her twice, and raped her five times. He’d make her get to her feet, and then it’d start: he’d take up a boxing pose, and start hitting her, and he’d scream at her, “C’mon, Cat, let’s see it, punch back, goddamnit, let’s see a little fight, this is no fun,” spraying her with saliva as he screamed.

He was bigger than she was-not taller, but probably fifty pounds heavier, with arms like a gorilla, long and muscular. And he was fast. She’d try to block the punches, but he’d hit her as fast and as easily as if he were hitting a speed bag. Just bang-bang-bang and she’d go down and he’d have her by the hair, throwing her around the room, smashing her against the door, letting her get back to her feet and then going again, and when she could no longer resist, he’d rape her.

When he was done, he’d drag the weight bench out of the room and lock her in. After the first beating, she managed to crawl to the door. The lock was a heavy steel box; she could feel the keyhole, but no light came through it. The door fit tight, which was disappointing. She’d once seen a movie where a man locked inside a room had slid a newspaper under the door, then used a pin to push the key out of the lock on the other side. It’d fallen on the paper, and he’d pulled the key under the door. .

That wouldn’t happen here. She didn’t have a newspaper, and she didn’t have a pin. In fact, she had nothing at all, except a green army-style blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

She was in a barren rectangular room with concrete walls. When he was in the room with her, she’d seen joists overhead, with a half dozen lights set behind hard glass panels, between the joists. There was nothing obvious, like a protruding nail she could use, not even a sliver. There was a steel bar, which would have made a weapon, but it was held in place by two heavy steel sockets. After the man finished raping her the last time, he’d done a half dozen pull-ups as she lay on the floor, looking up at him with one eye-the other had been bruised closed-and couldn’t believe it.