“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “He’s not a guy to get lost. He’s the last guy in the world who’d ever get lost.”
“What kind of car is he driving? We’ve got a dozen hotels here, I could send a couple cars around to look at parking lots.”
“That’d be good. I think Holbein’s in Goodhue County, maybe you could call them, too?”
“Not a problem.”
“Let me call his wife about the car.” He remembered that Shaffer had been driving a blue SUV, but hadn’t noticed exactly what kind.
He called June Shaffer and she picked up instantly. Shaffer hadn’t called. His car was a Chevy Equinox, a year old, and she found the car registration in a file and gave him the tag number. “Do you know what phone service he was with? AT&T? Verizon?”
“Verizon,” she said. “And he had some kind of lost-phone service.”
“I’ll get back to you,” Lucas said. He called Bellman back and passed along the information about Shaffer’s SUV.
“He having trouble with the old lady?” Bellman asked. “He’s not out on the town?”
“Nope. No, I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “That’s one reason I’m getting worried.”
• • •
LUCAS’S ADOPTED DAUGHTER, Letty, wandered into the study, carrying a bottle of red vitamin water and a book. She was a slender girl, and athletic, and, Lucas had noticed, much admired by the jocks at her high school, whom she admired back. More things to worry about . . .
She asked, “Did you know that the Davenport family has a crest?”
“Great,” he said.
“What happened?” she asked, picking up a tone.
“Ah . . . can’t find a guy. He should have been home hours ago,” Lucas said.
“Del?”
“No, no . . . Shaffer.”
Letty knew most of the people Lucas worked with, including Shaffer. “He’s the lead on the Black Hole case.”
“We maybe got a break on it this afternoon,” Lucas said. “We were down around Owatonna. He never came back.”
“Have you called the cops?”
“Yeah, they’re checking the motels,” he said. “I gotta make a call.”
He called the BCA duty officer, explained about Shaffer, and then said, “He’s carrying an iPhone, and his wife said they’ve got some kind of lost phone function on it. Get in touch with the Apple people, see if they can activate it. While you’re doing it, call Verizon. He’s with them, and maybe they can spot it.”
He gave the duty officer Shaffer’s cell phone number: “Give me a call back the instant you figure out where he is.”
• • •
BELLMAN CALLED BACK an hour later and said that the Owatonna cops had checked all the motels and bars, and the main streets, and had found a few Chevy Equinoxes, but not Shaffer’s. “I called over to the sheriff’s department and asked them to talk to the patrol guys, tell them to keep an eye out. Goodhue’s doing the same.”
Lucas passed the word to June Shaffer, who was becoming panic-stricken. “Something terrible has happened,” she said.
Lucas said, “It’s too early to think that. I’ll head on down there myself and wake some people up. If he calls, you can get me on my cell phone.”
• • •
LUCAS’S WIFE, Weather, was already in bed. She was a surgeon, and would be cutting in the morning. He woke her, said, “I have to go out.” He gave her a quick explanation, and she sat up and said, “God, I hope nothing happened.”
Lucas went back downstairs and called Del. “What are you doing? You in bed?”
“No, I’m up in North Oaks. They got the RV back early and they’re loading up the guns. I’m here with Stuckney from the ATF. What’s up?”
Lucas told him, briefly, and Del said, “I’m sorry, man, but we’re pretty busy around here.”
“That’s okay, stay with it—I was looking for company, more than anything,” Lucas said. He hung up and pulled on a jacket.
Letty had been lingering near his study, and now asked, “Can I go?”
“I might be all night,” Lucas said.
“That’s okay. I’m not doing anything tomorrow. If you get sleepy, I could help drive.”
“Bring a jacket,” he said.
• • •
THEY WERE ON I-35 south of the Cities, coming up to the town of Faribault, when he took a call from a Steele County dispatcher: “Agent Davenport?”
“Yeah. What’s up?” He had the call on the car’s speaker.
“Uh, well, we’ve got some pretty bad news. Your duty officer gave us a general location on Shaffer’s phone. It’s down in Zumbrota, in Goodhue County. We passed the word to a Goodhue deputy. They found the car, and there’s a body inside. The deputy opened the door to make sure the victim was dead, and then stepped back, because he doesn’t want to mess up the scene. The victim was shot to death.”
“Ah, Jesus, ah, goddamnit,” Lucas said. “How do I get there?”
• • •
ON THE WAY to Zumbrota, which was east of the interstate, a half hour from their I-35 turnoff, Lucas shook Rose Marie Roux out of bed. “You’re sure it’s Shaffer?” she asked.
“No, but it probably is. We’ve got to get somebody going, to notify June Shaffer.” Lucas looked at his nav system, which predicted he’d be in Zumbrota in thirty-six minutes. The nav system didn’t know that he had a siren and lights. “I’ll be there in half an hour. I’ll confirm then.”
“My God, Lucas, did he find the Black Hole killer?”
“Must have. Must have,” Lucas said.
“How?”
“I have no idea,” Lucas said. He told her about the break earlier that day, and also how thin it was.
“Call me when you know for sure it’s him,” Roux said. “I’ll start kicking people out of bed.”
• • •
THEY WERE RUNNING fast through the night, on a rural highway, past balls of gnats swarming over the warm road, past fireflies in the meadows, the highway stripes flicking by, and Lucas glanced once at Letty and saw her tight, eager face willing the road to pass, to get there.
And he thought, Shit, she likes it too much. She’s gonna be a cop, one way or another.
He would have preferred that she do something else. She’d even talked about applying to West Point, and he’d grudgingly agreed that for a person of her . . . inclinations . . . it wouldn’t be a terrible idea. Now, glancing again at her face, he thought it would be a terrible idea. She needed the same kind of daily rush that he did. She needed a gun on her hip and somebody to hunt.
• • •
THEY FOLLOWED Highway 52 to Zumbrota, then threaded their way through town, taking directions from a cop by cell phone, turned north on Main, crossed the North Fork of the Zumbro, left on Pearl, then down a long lane guarded on both sides by twenty-five-foot-tall arborvitaes. As soon as they made the turn onto the lane, they saw the gathered flashing lights of a half dozen cop cars, and assorted civilian sedans and SUVs. When they pulled in, the faces of twenty men and a few women turned toward them.
“You know what to do,” Lucas said to Letty.
“Be nice and keep my big fat mouth shut,” she said.
“Couldn’t have put it better,” Lucas said. They got out and a cop stepped over and Lucas held up his ID. “BCA. You got my guy?”
The cop said, “I hope not. C’mon this way.” He glanced at Letty, but said nothing.
They walked between cop cars, killing the conversation that had been going on. The Equinox was on a cemetery road, just to the right of the last tall arborvitae. The cemetery extended on both sides of the street, and in the reflected light from the cluster of cars, they could see the heavy canopies of large trees, and pale tombstones scattered across the neatly trimmed lawn.
A tall blond woman in civilian clothes—Catrin Mattsson, the Goodhue County investigator whom Lucas had met at the Black Hole—was talking to a couple of uniformed cops at the back quarter-panel of the Equinox. Mattss
on, in blue jeans and a letter jacket, broke off when Lucas and Letty came up. “Davenport.”
“Yes. He’s in the car?”
Instead of answering, Mattsson swiveled to Letty: “Who’re you?”
“My daughter,” Lucas said. “She’s okay, she’s been before.”
Mattsson nodded: “If you say so, but it’s an unhappy thing to look at.” To Lucas, she said, “It’s him. It’s Bob.”
• • •
LUCAS AND LETTY stepped over to the Equinox and looked through a back window, which had been lowered. Shaffer was lying faceup on the backseat. His sport coat was pulled open, revealing a huge bloodstain on his shirt. In the pale illumination of cops’ LED flashlights, his eyes were wide open and dirty gray. He didn’t look surprised: he just looked dead.
Letty said, “Shot once.”
Lucas was still reacting to the sight of the body: not a friend, but a colleague he’d known for years. A prickling sensation ran through his skin, like goose bumps, but a tighter, tenser feeling. After a few seconds, he caught up with Letty’s comment and asked, “You’re sure?”
“Not without a doc saying so, but you can see only one pucker in his shirt, and it’s right in the middle of the bloodstain. Looks like he was shot in the back with a hollow point. I’ve seen a lot of wounds like that,” she said. “Hit him square in the heart. Whoever shot him probably doesn’t know that much about shooting, or he would have hit him at least twice.”
Lucas turned away from the car and rubbed his face. Didn’t want to look back, and didn’t; instead, he spoke sideways to Letty, who was still looking at the body. “Maybe he was trying to keep the noise down,” Lucas said. “You can almost always get away with one shot. With two, somebody might come looking.”
She turned her face to him: “You never told me that.”
“You never needed to know,” Lucas said.
Mattsson was next to Letty: “You said you’d seen a lot of wounds like that. How would you . . . ?”
“Used to run a trapline up north,” Letty said. “Bang the coons with a head shot, .22 hollow points. Go in small, come out bigger, when they came out at all. Like this. Except this was a bigger slug.” She turned to Lucas and said, “It looks a lot like the holes your .45 makes, when we’re shooting paper.”
Lucas was rubbing his forehead, and he said, “Yeah, yeah.” He wasn’t ready for analysis. He said to Mattsson: “We got a break today. Maybe. I think Shaffer followed it right in to the killer, and this is what he got.”
“He didn’t call me,” Mattsson said.
“He didn’t call anyone,” Lucas said. “I suspect he had a really questionable lead, and it just took him . . . to this. He was a smart guy: it could have happened.”
“I know. I talked to him six or seven times in the last month. I’m sorry,” Mattsson said.
“So am I,” Lucas said. “He was a good cop. He had a nice family, and most of the time, when I was dealing with him, I was an asshole.”
Mattsson said, “Well.” And then, again, “I’m sorry.”
• • •
R-A HAD BEEN HOME for two hours before Shaffer’s body was found. The initial high from the killing had worn off, and the walk home had cooled him off even more.
Horn was waiting: “How’d it go?”
“Perfect,” R-A said. “I had a lot of time to think. Know what? I don’t want to get caught.”
“We’ll have to work on that,” Horn said.
“I mean, I really don’t want to get caught,” R-A said. “Unless I can think of something smart, I probably will be.”
“Got a couple of ideas . . .”
“Not tonight. I’m too tired. I need a drink or five,” R-A said.
“I got a question for you. Did killing that cop—that male—did that give you a boner, too?”
“Fuck you,” R-A said.
“Gave me one,” Horn said. “I gotta tell you, I liked watching him die. Not as good as the girls, because it was so quick. But you know, old Horn got boners like nobody got boners.”
“Ah . . . shut up.” R-A poured a drink.
That night, in bed, a peculiar thought crossed R-A’s mind. Horn was a nasty, cynical remnant of the man he’d once been—but he was a great help, from time to time. Now, he might have become a liability. There was a warrant out for Horn, and there had been for years. Horn, in fact, hadn’t been outside for years, except twice when R-A had gotten extraordinarily drunk and had taken him out for a quick roll in the night.
That was crazy-dangerous. If anyone had ever seen them . . .
Horn had been a cop, of a kind. He worked out of the police department, and even carried a gun, a .22, that right now was in R-A’s gun safe. He also carried a spray can and a lasso on a pole and drove a truck. He could issue tickets—but only if your dog was running loose, or didn’t have a license.
Horn was the dogcatcher.
And not just a dogcatcher. He was the skunk remover, the coon-catcher, the possum-shoveler, the gopher trapper, the dead-animal remover. You got a squirrel killed on the sidewalk, as the cops said, get on the Horn.
Horn and R-A had met at a rifle range. Horn was interested in death, and R-A was interested in big-game hunting. They were both interested in sex, and both of them had to pay for it. Both were interested in the altered states brought on by alcohol; both were alcoholics. Neither had other friends.
Their friendship was careful, but over some time, mutual interests emerged. R-A was a treasure hunter: he was the one who’d found the cistern at the abandoned farm. He was the one who knew about the diamonds and gold in the Mead coffin—he’d heard about it from a customer at the hardware store.
The raids on the sepulchers started as a joke and a dare. They’d continued until they realized that the risk was too high for the small rewards they were getting.
That’s how it started with the women, too. As a joke and a dare. Not quite believing that they’d ever do it.
Then doing it.
There weren’t twenty-one skulls, as the cops thought. There were twenty-three—but the first two were rotting bone somewhere in the deep woods in Wisconsin, lying under a few inches of dirt and oak leaves.
After the first two, they’d worked out a system for taking the women. They were proud of the system, and it worked perfectly. They sat around at night, watching baseball on TV and working out their strategies.
Everything went well, until the accident.
Until woman number five, Heather Jorgenson, rose up out of the backseat of Horn’s truck with a blade in her hand.
R-A could still see the scars in Horn’s thin, bony neck; could put his fingers in them, if he’d wanted to.
Didn’t do that.
He touched Horn’s shoulder and said, “I’m going to bed. We’ll talk in the morning.”
“Got ideas,” Horn said.
5
With a murdered cop, a lot of stuff had to happen, but after identifying the body, not much of it was Lucas’s job.
He was shaken by Shaffer’s murder, more than he would have thought. He wandered away from the group at the truck, sat down for a minute on a tombstone. He couldn’t shake from his mind the first sight of Shaffer: a yellowed-out vision like the photo of a dead man on an old postcard. Would somebody be looking at him like that, sometime in the future?
He sat like that for a moment, the heels of his hands braced on his thighs, then sighed and pulled his cell phone from his pocket and called Roux. Shaffer lived north of the Twin Cities, and it would take a while to get the notification done.
“Lucas, you need to take this over,” Roux said, after he gave her the news about Shaffer.
“No, I don’t. I need to catch this guy, but I’m not good at organizing a big crew like Shaffer’s,” Lucas said. “Get somebody else to run the crew, but I’ll find the guy. I promise you.”
After a few seconds of silence, she said, “Okay. That’s the deal, then. Somebody else takes the crew, but you find him. In the meantime, we
got the preacher on his way up to Shaffer’s house.”
The preacher was a BCA agent who was also an ordained minister; a hard-nosed cop and a soft-nosed minister, for a Baptist, anyway.
• • •
AFTER TALKING TO ROUX, Lucas heaved himself off the tombstone and walked back to Mattsson and Letty and the other cops. He said, “Shaffer’s wife will be notified pretty quick.”
Mattsson nodded and said, “We thought we better leave this to your crime-scene people. Our guy is here, but with the possible link to the Black Hole killer . . .”
“I’ll get them down here. Bob should have a notebook in his jacket pocket,” Lucas said. He’d seen Shaffer take it out any number of times. “You think your guy could go in there and slip it out, without messing anything up?”
Mattsson turned to one of the deputies, who nodded and said, “Let me get my stuff.”
As the cop went to get his crime-scene kit, Lucas called the duty officer and ordered up the crime-scene team.
“What a fuckin’ disaster,” the duty officer said.
“Yeah.”
• • •
THE COPS ALL STOOD AROUND and watched as the crime-scene deputy slipped on surgical gloves and, after looking at the handle on the back door with a flashlight, popped the door. They all looked inside, but there was nothing on the floor or the seat near Shaffer’s body.
Lucas said, “Left side.”
Moving as carefully as he could, the deputy slipped his fingers under the lapel of Shaffer’s jacket, lifted it, and with his other hand, slipped the orange-covered notebook out of Shaffer’s inside pocket. “I’ll bag it. We can look at it through the bag,” he said.
As he carried the notebook back to his car, Lucas’s cell phone buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen: Shaffer’s wife was calling. She hadn’t yet been notified.
Lucas flashed the screen at Letty, who blurted, “Don’t answer it.”
“I think I gotta,” Lucas said.
“No, no, let it go, let it go . . .”