R-A also carried a leather-wrapped, shot-filled sap, in case something went wrong with the bag. The rope could be cinched tight with a heavy metal clasp. The bags, forty-eight inches long and more than two feet in diameter, had eyelets around the mouth, with a rope running through the eyelets. He was carrying an old canvas postal bag, of the kind once used to carry heavy loads of mail in cross-country trucks.

R-A waited for her there, hidden behind the dumpster. She was out there alone, sweating in the summer heat, sickened by the odor from the dumpster, with no light except what came through the diner’s open rear door and two pole lights in the front lot. When the fifth woman finished her cleanup, at midnight, she’d haul garbage bags to a dumpster out back. The blacktop parking lot was wide and deep in front, shallow and pitted in back, which meant that nobody parked there. The diner had excellent qualities for a kidnapping. The fifth woman was a blond waitress who enhanced her income by staying late to do kitchen cleanup at Auntie’s, a diner in Faribault, a small city on Interstate 35 south of the Twin Cities. He is the author of the Prey novels, the Kidd novels, the Virgil Flowers novels, The Night Crew, and Dead Watch. #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford is the pseudonym of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John Camp.

Field of prey book