John Sandford - Field of Prey

Lucas said, “Okay. Now we need a story.”

Mattsson fell down, landed on Axel’s body and rolled away from him, and Lucas tried to pick her up but she said, “Leave me, make the call.”

Mattsson looked up at him, and he crouched next to her and said, “After a fight, I dragged him down here. I let you out, and I was focused on you, when you came out, I was holding you up, and he suddenly stood up and picked up that bar, and you saw it and wrenched it free and swung it.”

“That should do,” she said, and fainted.

Lucas looked around, spotted a mover’s pad on one of the well-ordered shelves, unfolded it, spread it on the floor, picked Mattsson up, placed her on the pad, and wrapped it around her.

She started to come around while he was doing that, and said, “I hurt bad. He hurt me bad.”

He sat on the floor next to her, looked at his phone, pushed the button for Duncan.

Duncan came up instantly and shouted, “What? What?”

Lucas said, “I got her. I got Catrin. She’s hurt bad. This guy, this hardware store guy, is dead. Gonna need some medics in a hurry, for Catrin.”

“Jesus! Lucas! You got him, oh, Jesus.” He was shouting again. “We’re coming, we got an ambulance on the way. . but where are you exactly?”

“I know that,” Lucas said. He found the paper with the address on it and read the address to Duncan.

“Ambulance will be there in four or five minutes, cops will be there in two minutes. We’re coming fast as we can.” Duncan had calmed down just a bit. “What happened. . did he. . hurt her?”

He meant raped. Lucas said, “Yeah, I guess. She’s pretty out of it. She’s hurt. He beat the hell out of her, along with everything else.” And he said, “Ah, jeez, I’m getting blood all over everything.”

“We’re coming. . How did this guy get killed? You shoot him?”

“No. I had him on the floor, down in his basement workshop. I turned my back to help Catrin, he came up, she saw him coming, grabbed a crowbar off a workbench and smacked him with it. Right in the middle of the head.”

“Aw, boy. . we’re coming, man.”

Lucas clicked off and looked down at Mattsson; wrapped in the mover’s pad, she began shaking uncontrollably as she looked up at him. But her eyes were focused and she said, “Picked up the crowbar. .”

“That’s right.”

“I should be unconscious when the ambulance guys get here. . then I can tell that story when I come back.”

Lucas half-laughed: “Yeah, not a good idea to mix it up. You don’t have to be too clear, because, you know. .” He touched his palm to his face, and came away with a blood-smeared palm. “. . it was all crazy and confusing and we were hurt.”

“Davenport! Davenport!” A male voice from the first floor.

Lucas shouted, “Down here,” and stepped over to the stairs.

Two cops came down, the chief and another guy, the chief with his gun in his hand, both looking frightened. The chief looked at Lucas and said, “God, you okay?” and then, without waiting for an answer, he knelt beside Mattsson and asked, “Is she. .?”

“She’s breathing, and her eyes were open a minute ago,” Lucas said. “But we’ve got to get her going.”

The second cop was looking at Axel: “Don’t need an ambulance over here. R-A is. . well, he’s dead.”

The chief glanced at Axel, put his gun away and said, “Piece of shit: I should have thought of him.” He stood, took a phone out of his pocket, got on it and shouted, “Where the hell are they? Well, tell them to drive faster, we need them here right fuckin’ now. What? All right.”

He hung up and said, “They’re outside. I’ll go get them.” He looked at the stairs and said, “Don’t believe they’ll get a gurney up that. Too narrow.”

The paramedics took the cushions off a gurney, nestled Mattsson in them, then carried her up the stairs in the lengthwise curl of the mattress. One of them said to Lucas, “Her heart’s strong, her blood pressure’s a little low. . she’s in shock.”

At the top of the stairs, they strapped her into the gurney and ran her outside to the ambulance. “You coming?” one of the paramedics asked Lucas.

“No. But if you’ve got some gauze pads in there, I could use them.”

“We got media,” said the cop who’d come down with the chief. A TV van had stopped down the street, and a photographer hit the ground running, the camera on Mattsson as they loaded her into the ambulance, then panning to Lucas.

The paramedic handed Lucas a bundle of gauze pads. Lucas took them, and saw Duncan’s truck swing wide around a corner, flashers burning out into the evening, and Lucas told the ambulance driver, “Hold on, one second.”

Duncan piled up close behind the ambulance and jumped out, breathless, and said, “She in there?”

“Yeah. Take a quick look, and we’ll send her off.”

Duncan climbed into the ambulance and looked at Mattsson and said, “Ah, man. Ah, man, she’s hurt. That fuckin’ animal, I wanna cry.”

Mattsson’s eyes fluttered, and she looked up and focused on Duncan. She smiled, showing a line of blood-crusted, broken teeth, and said in a voice that sounded like a rusty gate, “Jon. I know it’s my turn, but you’re gonna have to handle the media.”

“Ah, Jesus, Catrin. .” He took her hand.

When Mattsson was gone-the paramedics thought her vitals were strong enough that they should skip the local clinic and take her straight to the Mayo at Rochester-Lucas went inside and washed his face, pinched his nose off with the gauze pads, and walked Duncan through the fight with Axel.

Duncan recorded it, and then sealed the scene until the state crime-scene crew could get there, and the medical examiner’s investigators.

“You need to get to the clinic, big guy,” Duncan said, when they were done. “Your nose is gonna be the size of a yam by morning.”

“Worth it. I got her back,” Lucas said.

Duncan slapped him on the back and laughed aloud and said, “Yes, you did. You got her back alive.”

Duncan wouldn’t allow Lucas to drive himself to the Zumbrota clinic, but assigned a BCA guy to drive, and, after the docs were done with him, to take him home. At the clinic, the docs found nothing broken except a couple of blood vessels. They pushed a bunch of ointment up his nose, along with some cotton wads that looked like pencil stumps. That stopped the bleeding.

“But your nose is gonna look like. .”

“A yam. I’ve already heard,” Lucas said.

“I wasn’t going to say yam,” the doc said. “But yam is better than what I was going to say.”

The other agent, whose name was Jim, and who was going on his thirty-sixth hour without sleep, drove him home. As they left Zumbrota, Lucas called Letty.

“How is Del doing?”

“Good. And I can tell by your voice, you got her. How bad is she?”

“She’s down at the Mayo. She was pretty beat up, raped, teeth broken, probably some broken bones.”

“Better than dead,” Letty said. “Who was the killer?”

“Guy who ran the hardware store. .”

He told her the whole story, sliding around the details in the death of Axel, and she filled him in on Del. “He’s stable. He’ll be back in Minnesota in a couple weeks. Cheryl is going to stay here to take care of him, but I’m going to head back as soon as I can get a ticket.”

“I’ll pick you up at the airport,” Lucas said. “Look for a guy with a yam on his face.”

He called Rose Marie Roux. “We got him. And we got Mattsson. He’s dead, and she’s alive.”

“Perfect,” Roux said. “I’ll call the governor. He wanted to hear. He’s going to make a statement.”

Lucas took the next day off, but picked up Letty at the airport that night. The day after that, Shaffer was buried; the funeral had been delayed by the various processes and evidentiary needs of the medical examiner. Lucas and Weather drove up to the Iron Range town of Eveleth for the funeral, with two dozen BCA agents and their wives and husbands, and about a thousand other cops from around the state. At the funeral, June Shaffer gave him a wordless hug, and went on to sit by the coffin with her children.