John Sandford - Field of Prey

“Good move,” Del said.

“It’s thin, but it’s what we got,” Bole said. “All the tire tracks were probably made by trucks, all-weather tires, four different patterns, four different brands. I gave a list to Buford, he was here.”

“Saw him down on the road. .”

Shaffer showed up, spotted them, lifted a hand, talked to Sawyer for a moment, then walked over. “Isn’t this something?”

“It is,” Del said.

“Get anything at all?” Lucas asked.

Shaffer’s crew had interviewed the owner of the farm that surrounded the site, a woman named James, and from her had gotten a number of ideas that might help locate the people who’d known about the hidden cistern. Shaffer himself had interviewed the two kids who’d first smelled the decomposing body down the cistern, and the deputy who’d pried the lid off the hole.

“You can’t see it now, but the whole site was covered with grass, with sod. The cistern was invisible: had to know it was here before you could put somebody into it, and not many people knew about it.”

“That could help,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. I hope. Have you seen. . There they are. Gotta go talk to these guys.”

He walked away, toward two guys who had a laptop propped against a tree trunk, entering. . data.

They’d drifted away from the hole as they talked, mostly to get away from the stink. A squabble started at the hole, and they turned around to see Sawyer, in the hazmat suit, still holding the Diet Coke, faced off with a woman in a Goodhue County deputy’s uniform. The deputy was tall and pretty enough, but rangy like a basketball or volleyball player, with wide shoulders and a small butt. She looked like she’d been in a few fights; her nose wasn’t quite on straight. She had one hand resting on her pistol, like she might have to shoot her way out of the farm site.

Sawyer was saying, “. . everything goes through our office, and if you want reports, you’ll have to get them there. We can’t get them out to every Tom, Dick, and Harry-”

“I’m not every Tom, Dick, and Harry-this is my jurisdiction and my job,” the deputy snarled. She’d come primed for a fight, Lucas thought, or perhaps spent her life angry. She was red-faced and angry now. “I want copies of everything, and I want them as soon as they come out.”

Lucas stepped toward her and said, mildly enough, “Everything has to go through one system, or we’ll all get confused. If you’re authorized to get the reports, it’s not a problem: we just make an extra set of copies.”

“Who’re you?” she asked, looking him up and down.

“I’m a BCA agent,” Lucas said. “I’ve been assigned-”

“And we’re second-class citizens?”

“Hey-you’ll get the crime-scene stuff as fast as I do,” Lucas said. “You need to talk to Bob Shaffer to get on the distribution list. He’ll be the agent in charge. He’s around, I just talked to him.”

“Bob Shaffer?” She took out a notebook. “How do you spell that?”

Lucas said, slowly, “B-o-b. .”

Her eyes snapped at him and he’d had the sense that she’d almost smiled. Instead, she rasped, “Are you giving me a hard time?”

“S-h-a-f-f-e-r,” Lucas said. “He’ll be happy to hear from you.”

He backed away, to where Del and Bole were standing. She watched him go, then folded the notebook and stalked off across the farmyard, toward the cars.

“Wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley,” Del said.

“Ah. . Catrin Mattsson. She’s okay. Well, some of the time,” Bole said.

“You know her?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, I run into her occasionally,” Bole said. “She’s the lead investigator for Goodhue. Pretty much known for her attitude. Not dumb, though. Good investigator. She just doesn’t have a smooth, Del-like personality.”

“It’s a tragedy,” Del said, as they watched her go.

“Yeah, well. . her looks somewhat make up for it,” Bole said. “The thing is, you BCA guys have a teensy-weensy tendency to throw your weight around on a deal like this. Busy, busy, busy. Don’t have a lot of time for the local-yokels.”

Lucas: “Really?”

“Well, like I said, it’s teensy-weensy.”

All cases like the Black Hole murders start slow. The investigators needed to know what they had, before they could start working patterns, asking questions, figuring out who might be a person of interest.

Figuring out what they had was up to the crime-scene people and the medical examiners. That would not happen on the first day. Lucas and Del hung around the hole for a while, watching, passing out Cokes, then walked across the old farm site, getting a feel for cover and dimensions and views.

The place was a perfect square, with the road at the south end. The other three sides were guarded by the remnants of a barbed-wire fence and a few old steel fence posts. The north side was covered with the remnants of a wood lot, and dozens of trees were scattered around the rest of the plot, apparently having grown up since the farm was abandoned. Everything else, except a thin clearing in the middle, was covered with a variety of brush and weeds.

A single track, probably along the old driveway, crossed the ditch over a rusting culvert. The spear-like tops of a few old irises grew along the edge of the ditch, and a line of ancient lilac bushes lay along the line of what had been the driveway.

There were probably a thousand identical plots in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

When they were done walking it, Del said, “You couldn’t have invented a better place to get rid of bodies. Back country road, invisible cistern, nearest farmhouse a half-mile away. Roll in here at night, knowing where you’re going, pop the lid, drop the body, put the lid back down, and roll on out. Knowing it ahead of time, you could be in and out in five minutes, with never a trace of what you’d been doing.”

“But you’d have random kids coming up here to park, like the kids who found it,” Lucas said. “It looks a little used, anyway. It’s possible the killer ran into somebody up here, one time or another.”

“If he did, he’d just back out. . drive around, wait until they were gone.”

“Yeah. Probably not much there,” Lucas said. “If there’s anything, Shaffer’ll find it.”

Del asked, “What do you want to do?”

“Go home,” Lucas said. “But first, let’s go talk to the farm lady.”

Del took a last look around: “The asshole really did fuck up a great place to park. Did I ever tell you about the time Cheryl and me-”

“Jesus. . noooo. . ”

The land around the Black Hole plot belonged to a farmer named Sally James, who’d inherited it from her father twelve years earlier. James was in her mid-fifties, a stout red-faced woman whose blue eyes carried the glazed look of someone who’d been whacked in the forehead with a board.

Lucas and Del found her at her own farmstead, a half-mile away, visiting with a couple of reddish-brown horses in a corral next to her barn. “I think they’re called sorrels, but I’m not sure I’m pronouncing it right,” Del muttered, as they walked up to her.

When Lucas introduced himself and Del, James said, “I’ve already been interviewed three times by the police. As soon as they take the roadblocks down, there’ll be fifteen TV stations in here, knocking on the door. I don’t know what more I can say.”

Lucas explained that there were two teams of BCA agents working the case, as well as the sheriff’s office and the Wisconsin DCI. Since the crimes had gone interstate, he expected that the FBI might take a look. “We like to talk to people in person, because something they say may ring a bell with something else that we find, later on,” Lucas said.