John Sandford - Field of Prey

“Better him than us,” Del said.

The cops at the roadblock, both sweating furiously in their long-sleeved uniforms, looked at Lucas’s ID. Lucas said, “I got ice-cold Coke, Diet Coke, and water in the back.”

“Cokes,” the cops said simultaneously, and Del dug them out of the cooler and passed them to Lucas, who handed them through the window to the cops and asked, “Who doesn’t get speeding tickets in Goodhue County?”

“You’re good up to ag assault, far as I’m concerned,” the cop said, and they went on through.

“Too many people,” Del said, as Lucas pulled onto the shoulder of the dusty road, fifty yards short of the site. The shoulder was filled with cop cars, civilian cars and trucks and vans, and an empty heavy-equipment trailer.

“Everybody’s gonna want to be here, just to say they were,” Lucas said.

They got out of the truck, into the hot midday air smelling of roadside weeds. Lucas stuffed Cokes and bottles of water into the daypack, and they ambled along the gravel road toward the farm turnoff. Halfway to the cistern site, they ran into a BCA agent named Don Buford, who saw them coming and said, “I don’t suppose you got a beer in there?”

“Got a Coke or a Diet Coke,” Lucas said. “Or a bottle of water.”

“I’ll give you ten dollars for a Diet Coke.”

Lucas gave him the Coke and Buford looked around and said, “Ain’t this a great day? Hot, sunny, no wind. Tell you what, when you get up there, you’ll be praying for cold, wind, and rain. The smell. . half the guys up there have been pukin’ their guts out.”

“What’s there to see?” Lucas asked.

Buford shrugged: “Just the site. They’re calling it the Black Hole of Goodhue. You know, like. .”

“. . the Black Hole of Calcutta. We get it,” Del said.

“The whole crime-scene crew is up there,” Buford said, rolling the cold Coke bottle across his forehead. “It’s a nightmare. Got boxes of skulls. Nothing for me, though. I’d eat a sandwich, if I could keep it down.”

“We’re wasting our time?” Lucas asked.

“Oh. . no. You gotta go look, and look around,” Buford said. “Maybe tell you something about the guy who did this. Got to be some kind of crazy farmer. Somebody who butchers his own meat, or something. Some kinda. .” Buford shuddered. “. . monster.”

They left Buford in the road and walked up a slight rise to the turnoff, showed their IDs to another cop, and walked up the grassy track into the heart of the old farmstead. There they found four people in hazmat suits peering into a hole in a concrete slab, and a dozen cops scattered through the trees and brush, watching.

A yellow front-end loader’s lift bucket dangled over the hole, with a steel cable dropping into the hole itself. Off to one side was a stack of semi-transparent plastic tubs, the kind you can buy at Target, with paper stickers on the top-covers: human remains. A skull grinned out of one of them. A hundred feet from the hole, an air compressor was working, and in the other direction, a Honda generator. Power and air lines led to the hole. As they got closer, the stink hit them, and Lucas turned away.

“Buford was right,” Del said. He dug into his pack and came up with a jar of Vicks VapoRub, opened it, and offered it to Lucas, who took out a bit on the end of a finger and rubbed under his nose. Del did the same, and they walked up to the hole, and a woman standing next to it in a dark blue hazmat suit with the hood down. Beatrice Sawyer, head of the crime-scene crew.

Lucas said, “Hey, Bea.”

She turned and said, “Lucas, Del. Nice day, huh?”

Breathing through his mouth, Lucas peered into the cistern, which was illuminated with LED work lights. He could see another person in a hazmat suit, ten feet down, suspended on a wooden platform over a murky gray liquid that could hardly be called water. The suit was sealed, with air lines leading into the helmet.

“You’ve been down there?” he asked.

“Yeah. That’s Hopping Crow down there now. We’re trying to find a way to get the water out, without disturbing the remains too much,” Sawyer said. “Larry’s placing pump lines with filters that we got from a septic-supply place in Red Wing. We’re improvising. Don’t know if it’ll work.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, we could get the water out with any pump that’s large enough,” she said. “Everything else would come, too. We need to gently remove it, with a flow fast enough to replace the inflow of groundwater. This cistern is essentially sitting on a spring.”

“Hmm.” Lucas didn’t know about farm stuff.

“How’s the skull count?” Del asked.

“Seventeen, now,” Sawyer said. “There are more. We can feel them, but we can’t see them, and we don’t want to damage them. We need to see the dental work.”

Del said, “Bobbing for Satan’s apples.”

“Pretty fuckin’ poetic, Del,” Sawyer said.

“Any more IDs?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. One. A probable, anyway. When we were using another pump, it got jammed up, and when we pulled it, we found it had sucked up a plastic Visa card, still readable, issued to a Janice Williams. A Janice Williams from Cannon Falls disappeared eight years ago. She was a student at Dakota technical college. Her friends thought she might have gone to Miami-she knew some guy down there, and she’d talked about going down. Her parents thought she’d been kidnapped, and she’s never been back in touch. That’s all I know at this point, but I think it’s likely her, down there.”

“Will we screw anything up. .” Lucas paused when a man a few feet away suddenly bent over, then rapidly walked away, still bent, and began retching against a tree. They looked away and Lucas started again: “Will we screw anything up if we walk around here? To look the place over?”

“Possibly, but I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said. “There have been five hundred people here today, and if there’s anything that hasn’t been stepped on, I don’t know what it would be.”

Del asked, “Can you get DNA out of vomit?”

Sawyer nodded. “Sure.”

“If the killer popped the top off this thing two weeks ago, when this last woman disappeared, is it possible that he puked into the dirt, right where we’re standing?”

They all looked at their feet and Sawyer said, “I wish you’d asked that question yesterday afternoon.”

Sawyer had been sweating heavily in the hazmat suit, and she greedily sucked down one of Lucas’s Diet Cokes. A man stepped up behind them and said, “Hey, Lucas, Del. You guys got another Coke?”

Lucas turned: “Hey, Jimmy. We were told there was a Wisconsin guy here. Didn’t know it was you.”

“Yeah, I’d been poking around the Carpenter disappearance, over at Diamond Bluff.” James Bole was an agent with Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation, an earnest, square-shouldered, stocky man with strawberry blond hair and a neat strawberry blond mustache. He was familiar enough around the Minnesota BCA, working cross-river cases. He took one of Lucas’s Cokes and said, “Don’t have much. We didn’t know whether she’d been kidnapped or had gone down to the river and fallen in. Now she. .” He gestured at the hole.

“We heard,” Lucas said. “You take her car apart?”

“Yeah, but there was no sign that anything happened to her inside the car. Didn’t find anybody’s prints but hers and her mother’s-nothing was wiped-so she probably drove it down there herself. One thing: when she was reported missing, her car was spotted by a Pierce County deputy. It’d rained not long before she disappeared, and when he found her car, he noticed that her tires had made tracks in the mud, and they were still pretty clear. He figured if she had been kidnapped, the kidnapper must’ve had a vehicle down there in the cemetery. . otherwise, he would have had to carry her up a bluff, or down to a boat. There weren’t that many other tracks around, so he had casts made of all the different tire tracks.”