John Sandford - Field of Prey

“You don’t think I had anything to do with it?”

“We don’t think anything in particular,” Lucas said. “We’re just getting started.”

“How many do they have now? It was sixteen this morning,” she said.

“Seventeen, now,” Del said. “There are more to come.”

“My lord, my lord. Ah, come on in. We can sit in the kitchen.”

The house was cool, a relief from the day’s heat. The kitchen smelled like bread and cooked carrots, with an undertone of cabbage and pork chop. James fired up a coffeepot, and passed around thick china cups, and they drank coffee and talked about it.

James started by sketching out a history of the place: the previous owner had sold his land to James’s father, but nobody wanted the house or outbuildings. Eventually, title to the land was taken by the county for back taxes. “The county tries to sell it every once in a while, but nobody wants it. Four acres in the middle of nowhere, old septic tanks in the ground, that cistern, old foundations. . it’d probably take twenty grand to clean it up. So, it sits.”

“Kids park there, to make out,” Lucas said.

“From time to time, in the summer,” James said. “We’ve had Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts do overnighters there. And corn detasselers, like the kid who found the bodies.”

“Does everybody around here know about the cistern?” Lucas asked.

“No way,” she said. “I didn’t know about it. That cistern probably hasn’t been used for sixty, seventy years.”

“Then how would the killer find out about it?” Del asked.

“That’s a puzzle, and I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “There are these guys, treasure hunters, they go around to these abandoned farm sites with metal detectors and such, looking for old junkyards and buried treasure. Somebody like that could have found it. When this all came up, a deputy took me down there to look at it. I’d been in there a hundred times, and it never occurred to me that the cistern was still there. You couldn’t see it, all covered up with sod. Nobody found it by accident.”

“This is good stuff,” Lucas told her. “From what you’ve told us, the killer has to be somebody who’s familiar with the place, and there aren’t many.”

“Well. .” There was doubt in her voice. “You know, this boy who found it, knew about the place because he was a detasseler.”

Lucas smiled at her and said, “I was a city kid. I don’t totally understand detasseling. I’ve heard of it.”

James explained that corn plants have both male and female parts, and are self-fertilizing. “When you’re hybridizing corn-crossbreeding it-two varieties of corn will be planted in alternating strips. Because the corn is to be crossbred, you don’t want one strip of the corn self-fertilizing. Instead, you want it to be fertilized only by the second variety. To do that, the tassels from the target variety are removed from the cornstalks, by hand, by pulling them out of the top of the stalk.”

“Like castrating the corn,” Del said.

“Exactly,” she said.

The work was short-term, hot, tedious, and low-paid, usually done by high school kids sitting on detasseling machines that are driven up and down the rows of corn.

“Me and my dad have always contracted out part of the farm to grow hybrid seed, so there are detasseling crews taking breaks in that old Clemens place, eating lunch, every summer. That could be twenty or thirty people at a time, mostly boys. Over the years, there have been hundreds of them-hardly anybody does detasseling for more than a year or two.”

“Would the hybrid company have a list of employees?” Del asked.

“Mmm, probably not,” she said. “The way it works is, you need a lot of kids for a real short time, and the work is nasty. So, the seed companies recruit people who can recruit kids-and that usually means teachers. A teacher might contract to detassel, say, a hundred and twenty acres. Then he’ll recruit a bunch of kids from his school, the company supplies the machine, and when the tassels start to pop, they go in and start pulling.”

“Would the teachers have a list?” Lucas asked.

“Maybe. . and it’s the same teacher every year, usually. I’m sure the hybrid company would have that list, of the teachers. It’s Marks’s Best Seed Corn, over in Red Wing.”

“Okay. That’s a place to start,” Lucas said.

“What good would it do you? You’re going to investigate hundreds of people?”

“With this many dead, we might,” Lucas said. “What you hope is, you punch the names into a computer, push a button, and your database kicks out names of sex offenders who match the names you put in.”

“Ah,” she said. “Of course. Computers.”

That was all she had: scouts, lovers, treasure hunters, and detasselers. “Or teachers, I suppose. I’d go with the treasure hunters, myself. You get these bottle hunters, they love to find old outhouse pits. They’ll get in there with a shovel and dig them right out. They can get a hundred bottles out of a good one, and they’re worth some money.”

“That happen over there?”

She shook her head: “Not that I’ve ever seen. But you know, those people can be sneaky. They find a good spot, get a friend to drop them off early in the morning, and they can dig out a whole pit in a day. Fill it back in, I might never know. I doubt that I’m in there twice a year, mostly during detasseling season. If somebody dug in there during the fall, I probably wouldn’t go back in there until the next summer. It could be completely grown over.”

“So. . treasure hunters,” Lucas said.

“Yup. Or a detasseler.”

They pushed her a bit more, but she couldn’t think of anyone else who’d be familiar with the place. She’d had a boyfriend for fifteen years, she said, but he lived in Holbein and rarely came out to the farm. “He’s a city boy, like you. When we do an overnight, I’ve got to go to him . He doesn’t like the quiet out here. I’ll tell you, though, he wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

“I’d like to get his name,” Lucas said. “For the record, you know?”

Out in the car, Del said, “He’s a city boy like you. Likes to hear them cars.”

“Hey. She’s right.”

“Holbein, if I’m not mistaken, is about the size of my dick,” Del said. “There’s probably only one car.”

“Let’s go look,” Lucas said. “It’s not exactly on the way home, but it sort of is, and we’re not wasting our time backtracking.”

Holbein was larger than Del’s dick, unless Del had been hiding his light. It was an older place, once a milling town on the East Fork of the Zumbro River, population now 5,706, according to a sign just outside of town. Driving through to the business district, the place seemed. . usual.

Radically usual.

White- and blue-pastel clapboard houses on small lawns, most of the houses built sometime not long after the turn of the twentieth century. As they drove through the older neighborhoods around the business district, they saw only a handful of houses, obviously infills, that might have been built after World War II.

The East Fork of the Zumbro twisted along one edge of town, piling up in a small lake, behind what had probably been a miller’s dam a century and a half earlier. The dam was not original, and was now a heavy, inelegant chunk of mossy concrete. The lake was surrounded by the city park, with an unoccupied kids’ play area and a band shell, and a thumb-like protrusion of dirt and grass that stuck out into the lake, with a sign that said, “Ol’ Fishin’ Hole.”

“I could live here,” Del said.

“No, you couldn’t. You’d turn into a coot and hang out at the general store, with your fly down,” Lucas said. “You’d be known for goosing middle-aged women. You’d be the town embarrassment.”