John Sandford - Field of Prey

Lucas’s nose looked like a yam for three or four days, but was nearly back to normal when the family delivered Letty to Stanford. Everybody but Lucas cried when they said good-bye. Lucas didn’t cry because he just didn’t, but he couldn’t speak for a while, and he called her eight or nine times over the next two days.

Mattsson.

Mattsson was damaged, but out of the hospital in a week. Dental repairs would take a while, her ribs would knit in six weeks, a broken wristbone a while longer. Weather fixed her nose.

She began visiting with Elle Kruger-Sister Mary Joseph-once or twice a week. Her problem involved neither the rapes nor the beatings, as much as the fact that she’d spent too many dark hours looking into the blank hollow eyes of death. She remained on the roster with the Goodhue County sheriff’s department for reasons having to do with health insurance, but had been told that a job was waiting at the BCA if she wanted it. She told everybody that she’d want it. . in a while. Once a week or so, she’d come over and sit on Lucas’s back porch and drink a beer, not with Lucas, but with Weather. Talking about life.

TWENTY-ONE SKULLS were found in the Black Hole. Four were confirmed as taken after death in cemetery thefts. The other seventeen were murders. Nine were matched to missing women during the main investigation, five more afterward. Three were never identified. The BCA sent out 470 DNA kits to families worried that one of the bodies belonged to a relative who’d disappeared.

Most of the skulls, after being released, were cremated by each individual victim’s family. The undifferentiated “material”-human remains taken from the Black Hole-was also cremated, after a ruling by the state attorney general about proper disposition.

Two weeks after the sensational windup of the case, Janet Frost, the Star-Tribune feature writer, wrote a semi-investigative feature noting apparent discrepancies in Lucas’s and Mattsson’s stories of what had happened in R-A’s basement. She also pointed out that Lucas had entered R-A’s house without a search warrant.

Mattsson rebutted the story on public television’s Almanac show. She was ferociously angry, and brutally candid about what had happened in Axel’s basement. Her story of the multiple rapes and beatings, along with the still-obvious bruising on her face and body, the splints on her arm, the broken nose and teeth, the file shots of Lucas’s blood-covered face, and video documentation of the murdered women’s skulls coming out of the Black Hole, were so appalling that the Star-Tribune was overwhelmed with complaints, subscription cancellations, and a few death threats. The paper stood by the story, but shoveled dirt on it as quickly as the editors could do it; there were no follow-ups.

Frost had also done a long, sentimental first-person follow-up story on Emmanuel Kent and his pledge to starve to death if Lucas, Jenkins, and the Woodbury cops were not brought to justice.

Ruffe Ignace was so pissed off at Frost that he followed Kent after he left his City Hall protest site one night and watched him send another homeless man into a Burger King, to bring back a BK Triple Stacker, a large fries, and a vanilla shake. The next night he was back with a photographer to document it.

The story crushed Kent’s protest. Two days later, he picked up his rug and left City Hall, and resumed his can-collecting and his dog- and cat-feeding routine.

For reasons he couldn’t explain, Ignace’s story about Emmanuel Kent made Lucas feel worse about Kent’s situation than he already had. Pure liberal guilt, Weather claimed-a mentally ill man they knew about who went hungry sometimes, and had no shelter, and still spent money on stray dogs and cats; and here they were, by contrast, rich and comfortable and planning a trip to Paris, where the hotel they’d stay at would cost five hundred euros a night. But that was the way of the world, she said, and they gave away a lot of money to organizations that did good work. .

Which didn’t make Lucas feel a lot better. He was chatting with Jenkins about it, within earshot of a young woman named Sandy, who worked part-time for the BCA as a research assistant. Sandy was a latter-day flower child who took Lucas aside and explained that he and Kent were attached by a karmic thread, and it was stress on this thread that was causing Lucas’s uneasiness.

She concluded by saying, “I know you think this is crazy, Lucas, but ask Virgil about what I just told you. He’ll tell you, I’m right.”

Virgil Flowers. The murder case he was working on had spiraled out of control, as his cases tended to do; but he took ten seconds to tell Lucas, “Sandy’s never wrong about this kind of thing. She has a strong insight into the karmic realities, so I would consider very carefully what she said.”

“I’m a Catholic, for Christ’s sakes,” Lucas said.

“Karma doesn’t care, Lucas. Karma just is,” Flowers said.

A few days after that, Lucas used his connections in the Minneapolis police department to find out where Emmanuel Kent might be, which turned out to be lying under a tree in the circle of grass outside the Hennepin County Government Center. Several other homeless men hung out there. Lucas dropped by, and recognized Kent from newspaper photos.

Kent was a tall man, radically thin by first-world standards. He had the dry, burned face of a man who’d spent too many years outside. He’d shaved recently, not more than three or four days earlier, but hadn’t had a haircut in months. A backpack with a bedroll sat on the grass next to him, a pair of shoes sat next to his head. A plastic garbage bag was by his feet, with a couple of Coke cans spilling out of the open mouth of the bag.

He was talking with himself, while paging through a copy of Forbes. Lucas walked up, hands in his pockets, still uncertain about what he was going to do. But since he was a cop, he wasn’t shy about stopping to stare at Kent, who gradually became aware of the attention.

Kent took him in, said, “You got a five?” Gave him another second’s worth of appraisal, and amended, “Or maybe a ten?”

Lucas said, “I’m Lucas Davenport.”

Kent took a second to sort through his mental stock of known names, and then said, “Aw, fuck you, man.”

They looked at each other for ten seconds or so, without speaking. Lucas, who was wearing a summer-weight black-and-blue-checked wool suit by H. Huntsman, with a dusty red Brioni necktie, and who thought he might possibly have overdressed for the occasion, finally said, “I’ve been told that we’re tied together by a karmic thread.”

“That sounds like crazy hippie New Age bullshit, man,” Kent said. He got slowly to his bare feet.

“That’s something we agree on,” Lucas said. “But I kinda started worrying about you. For one thing, why don’t you go somewhere else? Like Santa Monica, or Pasadena, or Tucson, or something? Where it’s warm all year?”

Kent looked around, up at all the glass and steel towers and said, “Well, this is my home, man.”

“Gotta freeze your ass off in winter,” Lucas said.

“No, I’m mostly okay,” Kent said. “Got places I can go on the really cold nights. They don’t make you pray to stay anymore.”

“Huh,” Lucas said. Then, “Your brother helped you out with a few bucks, huh?”

“Yeah. But that’s not the reason that you pissed me off. It’s because you never gave him a chance.”

“I don’t want to argue with you about that, Manny,” Lucas said. “Your brother went around with a gun and scared the shit out of a lot of innocent clerks, and when we tried to stop him, he tried to kill some cops.”

“That’s just your opinion, man.”

“No, that’s the facts, Manny,” Lucas said. “But like I said, I don’t want to argue. I thought we might figure out something we could do about your situation.”