Field of Prey

  Flowers didn’t say anything for a moment, then, “I’ll be goddamned. Calling me up at the crack of dawn to find out—”

  “It was not the crack of dawn I was asking about,” Lucas said. “Virgil, you are such a slut.”

  “I am not,” Flowers said. “Unlike some people I could think of, I’m just a friendly guy.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WAS SO SLEEPY when he got home that he said, “Good morning,” to the housekeeper and fell into bed. He slept soundly until eleven-thirty, woke up with a tiresome idea at the back of his head, made a couple of phone calls, then a third one to Mattsson.

  “This is your dad,” he said.

  She laughed. “I knew that’d piss you off.”

  “What’re you up to?”

  “I’m sitting at my desk bouncing a ball of Thinking Putty off a whiteboard,” she said.

  “That’s the stretchy blue stuff?”

  “Mine’s called ‘amethyst blush,’ but yeah. Why?”

  “I’m driving over to Eau Claire, to interview this Heather Jorgenson woman, the one who got away from Horn. You want to sit in?”

  “Why? I wish I’d been there when Duncan interviewed her, but I never got an invitation,” Mattsson said. “On the other hand, after I read the interview, I couldn’t think of anything else to ask her.”

  “I want to go at her from a different direction. I’m bringing an old friend along to help out.”

  “All right, I’m in,” she said.

  “You’re closer to Eau Claire than I am, but I’m all interstate highway, so . . . I told Jorgenson that I’ll be at her house at three o’clock. She’s got to be to work at five.”

  “Plenty of time. Give me her address,” Mattsson said.

  Lucas gave her the address, then said, “There’s a Red Lobster near the intersection of I-94 and 53, not far from Jorgenson. We’ll get there about two, have a late lunch. If you’ve got time, we could have a pre-interview chat, see where we’re at.”

  “See you there. And then.”

  • • •

  IN LUCAS’S OPINION, August was the best month of the year in Minnesota. Under normal circumstances, he’d have spent at least a couple of weeks at his cabin on Lost Land Lake, in northern Wisconsin.

  “September can be almost as good,” he told his friend Sister Mary Joseph, as they crossed the St. Croix River bridge into Hudson, Wisconsin. “I can still make it up there, in warm weather, if I can get this guy in the next couple of days.”

  When Sister Mary Joseph had been five-year-old Elle Kruger, she and Lucas, with their mothers, had walked together to the first day of kindergarten at the local Catholic elementary school.

  “Who’s going to take Letty to Stanford?” Elle asked.

  “Well . . . everybody. She wants to go out there on her own, of course, preferably in a Greyhound bus. She said she wanted to catch the scent of America—I think she was reading On the Road last week. We told her she could catch an equally valid scent in the back of a Delta MD-90. And the closer she sat to the can, the more valid it would be.”

  The nun laughed and said, “So you’re all going?”

  “Yup. Drop her off, check the campus for any suspicious-looking young men . . .”

  “Of which I’m sure there will be many . . .”

  “Then go back up to San Francisco for a quick vacation. Try to get used to the change.”

  Elle said, “I am going to miss that girl. I hope she comes back to the Twin Cities. I’d like to see her grow up.”

  Lucas said, “We’re all gonna miss her. Sam cries every night, before he goes to sleep, knowing the day she leaves is one day closer.”

  They talked about Letty, and her history, for another few miles, then Elle got a transcript of Duncan’s interview with Jorgenson and started reviewing it. They stopped once, so Lucas could get a Diet Coke at the Menomonic rest stop, and got to the Red Lobster a minute after two o’clock. Lucas spotted Mattsson’s SUV in the parking lot and said, “She’s here. She’s got a mouth on her and shows some signs of intelligence, so . . . be aware.”

  “I will take care,” Elle said. She looked out at the Red Lobster storefront: “Mmm, mmm, mmm. Seafood on the coast of Eau Claire, Wisconsin.”

  • • •

  LUCAS LED THE WAY INSIDE, found Mattsson in a booth. She did a quick double take when she realized that Lucas’s friend was a nun. Elle no longer wore the traditional habit, but a tarmac-colored dress and gray stockings, with a little white coif perched atop her head.

  Lucas let Elle slide into the booth across from Mattsson and sat beside her, and said, “Elle Kruger, aka Sister Mary Joseph, this is Catrin Mattsson, aka Goodhue County sheriff’s investigator. Catrin—Elle.”

  Mattsson nodded and said, “Uh . . .”

  “She’s a shrink,” Lucas said. “Head of the psychology department at St. Anne’s, up in St. Paul. She’s helped me out, from time to time, on . . . delicate matters.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Elle said.

  Then Mattsson surprised Lucas with a gently probing series of questions about psychology and police work, drawing Elle out in a way that Lucas hadn’t seen before. He was even more surprised by Elle’s somewhat skeptical attitude toward her ability to help.

  “You help me all the time,” Lucas said.

  “I’ve never told you this, but when you ask me to help, my primary function is to make you think. To get you off your butt—excuse me—and quit your lazy ways and get to work.” She turned to Mattsson and said, “One thing you have to know about Lucas is, he exploits women. Because he’s good-looking and charming. He picks out smart women and gets them to do his work for him. That includes his wife and daughter. And me. And you.”

  “I met his daughter, and even drove around with her for a while,” Mattsson said. “She seemed astonishingly intelligent.”

  “Exactly. Lucas has unconscionably, but not unconsciously, exploited her brains from the time she was a middle-school kid. He even got her to shoot a cop.”

  “What?”

  That took some explaining, and when Lucas was done, Mattsson squinted at him and asked, “Are you exploiting me? Dad?”

  Lucas looked around for a waitress and asked, “So . . . we’re all for the shrimp platter?”

  • • •

  HEATHER JORGENSON was living in a pale yellow ranch house with green shingles and a two-car garage, a satellite dish on the roof. A six- or seven-year-old cranberry-colored Cadillac sedan sat in the driveway.

  Jorgenson met them at the front door, nervously twisting her hands, and invited them in. A sunburned guy with bleached-white teeth named Rex was lying on the couch watching the Golf Channel. He rolled off the couch when they walked in, and said, “Whelp, I got a lesson in twenty minutes, I better get to work.”

  “Work” was a golf course, where he was a teaching pro. When Rex had gone in the Cadillac, Lucas introduced Mattsson and Elle; Jorgenson settled the other two women on the couch, and Lucas in a La-Z-Boy. “I have to tell you that I’m a little upset by all this,” she said. “I never believed that Horn was still out there. I thought he’d crawled off somewhere and died, or was gone to Brazil or something. I mean, I am so scared. I got Rex to put his gun under the bed.”

  “I think he’d have a hard time finding you, that you wouldn’t hear about it before he got here,” Lucas said.

  “Oh, pish,” she said. “If he knows anything about computers, he could find me in ten minutes. I mean, I looked in the White Pages, and there I was. No way to get it off there, either.”

  “I won’t tell you he’s not dangerous,” Lucas said. “I’m sure you’ve heard about the shootings in Holbein.”

  “Just awful. And you don’t have to tell me about dangerous. I would’ve been in the Black Hole if I hadn’t had my knife that night. Sometimes I wake up, I just start to cry. . . .”

  “That’s not uncommon, it’s a form of post-traumatic stress,” Elle said. “Have you talked to your doctor about it?”
r />   “Years ago,” Jorgenson said. “He gave me some pills and they helped. I’ve saved a few, and I’m thinking about going back to them again. Don’t have enough for a week, though.”

  “You’ll only need a couple,” Lucas said. “Because I’m going to get him soon.”

  She smiled at him, tentatively, and asked, “Why do I believe that?”

  Mattsson said, “Because he’s good-looking and charming.”

  • • •

  THEY CHATTED for a few minutes. Jorgenson was working at the Beerateria in downtown Eau Claire, a bar that specialized in craft beers. The money was okay, she said, and she and Rex got along okay, and had pooled their money to buy the house they were in. They were talking about getting married, and this time, she thought, Rex was serious.

  Elle said, “When you talked with Agent Duncan, he asked you about the sequence of events that night. We’ve all read through that. We’d like to do something a little different, but I have to warn you, it won’t make you feel any better.”

  “Well . . .” She looked from Elle to Davenport to Mattsson. “What?”

  “We want to get you very, very relaxed, with your eyes closed, on the couch here, and then we want to take you back through the whole sequence,” Elle said. “We want you to try to visualize it, rather than think about it. Like you’re dreaming it.”

  “You mean, like, have a nightmare about it?”

  “Not exactly,” Elle said. “Because you’ll be in control. Once we get you relaxed, we’d like you to stay in the dream as long as you can.”

  “Okay. If you think it’ll help.”

  • • •

  ELLE MOVED JORGENSON to the couch, pulled the drapes over the picture window, brought another chair from the kitchen, so she could sit close to Jorgenson’s head. She started by asking about Jorgenson’s relationship to Rex, got her laughing a bit, then about her parents, who were both still alive, and living in the house where Jorgenson had grown up. “My oldest friend still lives there . . . beside my parents, she’s the only one in town who knows exactly where I am.”

  Elle took her through her school years, then a couple of years at a community college, where she trained in food service management. When she took the job at Auntie’s, she’d thought she might eventually wind up as the manager, or even, in due time, the owner.

  “That didn’t happen, because of what happened with Horn,” she said.

  She started talking about the moment she was kidnapped—of her fear of dying, of the panic-stricken thrashing inside the heavy canvas postal bag. Elle slowed her down: “You’re going way too fast. Tell me, what was that night like, at Auntie’s? A lot of people there that night? Was it hot or cold outside? Could you see the stars when you went out?”

  Elle asked a lot of safe questions that elicited brief, easy answers. They could feel Jorgenson slipping into the dream. Her words came more slowly, and her voice dropped a half-octave. Then, “There were about six bags of garbage when I finished, and one of them, with the grease pit stuff, really smelled. I took that out first because I wanted to get it out of the place.”

  The dumpster was high, and she had to stand on tiptoe to flip the cover back. “Had to keep the cover down because, if we didn’t, people would come at night and throw their garbage in it. When I started closing the cover at night, I saved the store fifty dollars a month in garbage bills.”

  She threw in the first bag, walked back to the diner and got two more bags and threw them in . . . and the canvas bag came down over her head.

  She began moving on the couch as she talked about it, her sentences growing choppy, and Elle patted her on the arm and said, “Easy, easy, we’re on your couch, right at home. . . .”

  The bag was rough and thick and dark and she really didn’t understand what had happened. She couldn’t see and could hardly breathe inside the bag, and then she was knocked to the ground, and the rope around the edges of the bag was tightened, binding her legs together above the knees. She began screaming and fighting against the bag. Her legs were free below the bag, and she tried to kick the kidnapper. But he picked her up, threw her in the back of his truck, and wrapped her ankles and legs with silver duct tape—she knew it was silver duct tape because some of it was still on her legs when the cops got to her.

  Then he’d slammed the truck door, had jumped into the driver’s seat, and she’d felt the truck accelerate out of the parking lot, missing the exit curb-cut and bumping over the curb. “That was easy to do, I did it myself,” she said.

  She knew she was on the backseat of a cab-and-a-half, because the seat on which she was lying was flat and narrow, and she could feel herself jammed between the back of the seat and the back side of the driver’s seat. Inside the bag, she’d nearly panicked. But not quite. She’d been fighting the bag and screaming when her hand hit the knife in her uniform pocket.

  The knife.

  A Leatherman with a long serrated blade. She fumbled it out, opened the blade, cut the rope edge on the bag, “like cutting butter,” then pushed her hand down to her ankles and cut through the tape.

  She’d stopped struggling as she did that, but as soon as she’d cut her legs loose, she screamed some more, and struggled against the bag, hoping to fool the driver, keep him from looking back at her, as she hitched the bag up and slipped out of it.

  When she was out, she’d pushed herself up with her left hand, her bottom hand, and found herself directly behind the driver. She hadn’t hesitated. She’d stuck him in the back and neck repeatedly. . . .

  “I was so angry. I was insane. I wanted to kill him.” She was reliving it, her arms jerking as, in her mind, she stuck the driver again and again.

  The truck had rolled, she’d gotten out, she’d run to a house not far up the road . . . the cops had come . . . the truck had belonged to Horn.

  Horn was never seen again.

  • • •

  WHEN SHE FINISHED, she exhaled, and some tension, which had been building up in her body, visibly eased. Elle looked at Lucas, and he said, quietly, slowly, “Heather, I have a couple more questions. Just a couple more. You said he threw you on the ground and tied the bag around your legs, then threw you in the truck, taped your ankles and lower legs, and then slammed the door and the truck took off. . . . The way you were talking, that sounds like it was really quick. I mean, really quick.”

  “It was,” she said. “I mean, he picked me up and threw me in and slammed the door.”

  “You said you came up directly behind the driver. So your feet were on the passenger side?”

  “Mm-hmm. I came up right behind him. My feet were on the passenger side. I didn’t hardly have any room to move.”

  “When he picked you up and threw you in the truck, did he pick you up around the waist?”

  “Uh . . . I uh . . . I was trying to kick, he was holding my feet. He picked me up by my feet . . .”

  “And he threw you into the truck . . .”

  “Let me see, I . . . yes, in the truck.”

  “When you took the garbage out to the dumpster, did you see the truck? You didn’t mention that.”

  “No . . . I never saw it.”

  “How far did he carry you before he threw you in the truck?”

  “Oh, not far. He picked me up by, he . . .” She sat up, her eyes flying open, and said, “Oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph. There were two of them.”

  Lucas: “I thought there might be.”

  • • •

  MATTSSON STARED AT HIM, and Elle saw it, and spread her hands in a gesture that meant, “Like I told you . . .”

  • • •

  LUCAS PUSHED A LITTLE FURTHER: “When you stabbed this man, you told Jon Duncan that you stabbed him several times. When you stabbed him, did you really stick him? Or did you slash him, you know, like cutting a sandwich?”

  “Oh, no, I stuck him. In and out,” she said. She was sitting up now, with her feet on the floor, eyes wide, and she mimed the stabbing, hard, overhand strokes, into Horn’s neck, b
ack, and arm. “There was lots of blood . . . the knife got all slippery . . . I remember that, the blood on the knife. I stuck him and stuck him and stuck him . . .”

  “Did you see any other trucks? After you got out?”

  “No. After the truck rolled over, I got out and I ran into the cornfield, and I thought I heard him coming after me, so I freaked out and ran away and fell down a couple times, and then I got to some woods and I hid in there, but all I wanted to do was get away from there. I saw some lights, I was trying to get there, but I didn’t see a truck. . . . I went down in this dry crick and crawled and crawled a long way, my legs were all cut, and then I was in another field, and then I stood up and ran. I had to cross the road to get to the Marshalls’ house—the Marshalls were the lights up the road. I saw the taillights in the ditch where the truck was . . .”

  “You think there could have been another truck? Another vehicle?”

  “If it had been right behind Horn’s . . . maybe. I was in that field for five or ten minutes, I guess. . . . Heck, I might have been in there for fifteen minutes, I don’t really know. If the other truck had been right behind Horn’s, I wouldn’t have seen it. Especially when I was down in that crick.”

  • • •

  LUCAS HAD no more questions; neither did Mattsson. Elle shooed them out, said, “Go sit in the cars. I want to sit here and talk with Heather for a while.”

  • • •

  OUTSIDE, MATTSSON SAID, “Whoa. That was something. That was like a movie. The hair was standing up on my neck when she was talking about stabbing him, and then realized there’d been a second guy. . . .”

  “I believe her,” Lucas said. “I think she stabbed him in the back of the neck, in and out, maybe five or six times and maybe more. I’m pretty sure they would have been deep, penetrating wounds—when you think of the way she was sitting in the truck, it would have been easy to stab him, and a lot harder to slice him. Easy to go up and down, a lot harder to pull back and forth.”

  “How did you get to the idea that there were two people?”