Stolen Prey

rape, torture, and murder. That happened, a few times a year, most often in California or on the East Coast; not in Minnesota, though.
    Another problem with that scenario was that the crime-scene people in Wayzata were positing at least three killers, and maybe four. House invasions of the crazy, murderous kind usually involved one or two people: three or four crazy people would be unusual.
    Of course, there was always Charlie Manson to worry about….
    Yet he didn’t like the Manson scenario, even with the bloody “were coming” written on the wall. The murders didn’t seem crazy enough for crazy people. They’d taken too long, there was that apparent progression, and there wasn’t the level of frenzy that you’d expect.
    H E WAS HALFWAY back to the office when a phone call came in. The identifying tag said “City of Northfield.” He answered and a man asked, “Is this Lucas Davenport?”
    “It is.”
    “This is Chuck Waites at Northfield PD. I’m calling about your flyer. You said you’d be interested in ATM robberies, man and a woman, knocking down the victim.”
    “Yeah, I sure am,” Lucas said. “You bust them?”
    “No, no. They picked out one of our college kids taking cash out of a street ATM, robbed him with a gun, knocked him down, and ran off. This happened last night. Kid’s got a broken arm and he’s out eighty bucks.”
    “Man and a woman?”
    “Yeah, it’s like that flyer said: skinny guy, big woman,” Waites said. “Have no idea who they are, but we’ve got a
clue
for you.”
    “I don’t like the way you said ‘clue,’” Lucas said.
    The other cop laughed. “Well, it might be an identifier.”
    “What is it?”
    “The kid said they smelled like horse shit. Horse shit, specifically. We asked him if he was sure it wasn’t cow shit or sheep shit, but he said, ‘No, sir, it’s horse shit.’ He grew up on a dairy farm, and they ran a couple of riding horses and a few other animals. Sheep, chickens,” Waites said. “He said anybody who grew up on that kind of a place could tell the difference between cow shit, horse shit, sheep shit, and chicken shit. He said they had all those animals, and the people who robbed him smelled like horse shit. Like they’d been shoveling out a stable.”
    “You know any meth addicts who run a riding stable?”
    “Not me personally, but there’re a lot of meth cookers out in the countryside,” Waites said. “If these people are far gone on meth, like your flyer says, I don’t think they could be running a commercial stable. That’s pretty heavy work andtakes some ability to concentrate…. If it really was horse shit on them, I’d have to believe that they’re farmhands somewhere.”
    “Huh. That’s interesting,” Lucas said. “It’s weird, but it narrows it down, and shoveling shit is about what I’d expect of those two. You know of any kind of organization that would have a list of stables?”
    “Somebody in the state would, probably—they got a list of everything else,” Waites said. “If I were you, I’d just call the county agents. They’d know all the farms in their county, and maybe who works on them.”
    “Thanks. If this works out, you’ll get the reward,” Lucas said.
    “Really? What is it?”
    “I go around and tell people that Chuck Waites is alert.”
    Waites laughed and said, “And America needs more lerts.”
    L UCAS SPENT the rest of the day at his office, making phone calls and scratching his left arm, under the cast, with the end of a coat hanger. He’d been told not to do that—scratch with a coat hanger—and he’d thought there was some good medical reason for the advice until Weather told him that it was to keep him from cutting himself and infecting the wounds.
    That, Lucas thought, was advice for children. He wasn’t going to cut himself with the coat hanger, and besides, he’d rather cut himself than itch to death.
    So he sat scratching and calling, making trips to the candy machine, interspersed with spasms of note-taking on yellow legal pads.
    M OST OF IT involved the tweekers. The horse shit, he told himself, was actually a pretty interesting clue. Most people—he thought, but didn’t know—would clean up immediately if they’d come in contact with horse shit. But people who were in contact with it all the time might not even know that they smelled. He believed the kid, and his identification of the odor. He himself could tell the difference between the odor of fish slime