Invisible prey ld-17 Page 13

  “I'm going after the mother this afternoon,” Ignace said. “Let's see, it's… Kathy? Is she hot?”

  “Ruffe, you're breaking up really bad. I'm hanging up now, Ruffe.”

  Despite his weaseling, Lucas was pleased. Flowers had done the job, and Ignace would nail Kline to a wall. Further, Ignace wouldn't give up the source, and if the game was played just right, everybody would assume the source was Dakota County.

  He called Rose Marie Roux. He didn't like to lie to her, but sometimes did, if only to protect her; necessity is a mother. “I just talked to Ruffe Ignace. He knows about Kline. He's got Jesse Barth's name, he's going to talk to Kathy Barth. I neither confirmed nor denied and I am not his source. But his source is a good one and it comes one day after we briefed Dakota County. We need to start leaking around that Dakota County was talking to Ignace.”

  “We can do that,” she said, also pleased. “This is working out.” “Tell the governor. Maybe he could do an off-the-record joke with some of the reporters at the Capitol, about Dakota County leaks,” Lucas said. “Maybe get Mitford to put something together.

  A quip. The governor likes quips. And metaphors.”

  “A quip,” she said. “A quip would be good.”

  Lucas called John Smith. Smith was at the Bucher mansion, and would be there for a while. “I'll stop by,” Lucas said.

  The Widdlers were there, finishing the inventory. “There's a lot of good stuff here,” Leslie told Lucas. He was wearing a pink bow tie that looked like an exotic lepidopteran.

  “There's two million, conservatively. I really want to be here when they have the auction.”

  “Nothing missing?”

  He shrugged and his wife picked up the question. “There didn't seem to be any obvious holes in the decor, when you started putting things back together-they trashed the place, but they didn't move things very far.”

  “Did you know a woman named Claire Donaldson, over in Eau Claire?”

  The Widdlers looked at each other, and then Jane said, “Oh my God. Do you think?”

  Lucas said, “There's a possibility, but I'm having trouble figuring out a motive.

  There doesn't seem to be anything missing from the Donaldson place, either.”

  “We were at some of the Donaldson sales,” Leslie Widdler said. “She had some magnificent things, although I will say, her taste wasn't as extraordinary as everybody made out.” To his wife: “Do you remember that awful Italian neoclassical commode?”

  Jane poked a finger at Lucas's chest. “It looked like somebody had been working on it with a wood rasp. And it obviously had been refinished. They sold it as the original finish, but there was no way…”

  The Widdlers went back to work, and Lucas and John Smith stepped aside and watched them scribbling, and Lucas said, “John, I've got some serious shit coming down the road. I'll try to stick with you as much as I can, but this other thing is political, and it could be a distraction.”

  “Big secret?”

  “Not anymore. The goddamn Star Tribune got a sniff of it. I'll try to stay with you…”

  Smith flapped his hands in frustration: “I got jack-shit, Lucas. You think this Donaldson woman might be tied in?”

  “It feels that way. It feels like this one,” Lucas said. “We might want to talk to the FBI, see if they'd take a look.”

  “I hate to do that, as long as we have a chance,” Smith said.

  “So do I.”

  Smith looked glumly at Leslie Widdler, who was peering at the bottom of a silver plant-watering pot. “It'd spread the blame, if we fall on our asses,” he said. “But I want to catch these motherfuckers. Me.”

  On the way out the door, Lucas asked Leslie Widdler, “If we found that there were things missing, how easy would it be to locate them? I mean, in the antiques market?”

  “If you had a good professional photograph and good documentation of any idiosyncrasies-you know, dents, or flaws, or repairs- then it's possible,” Widdler said. “Not likely, but possible. If you don't have that, then you're out of luck.”

  Jane picked it up: “There are literally hundreds of thousands of antiques sold every year, mostly for cash, and a lot of those sales are to dealers who turn them over and over and over. A chair sold here might wind up in a shop in Santa Monica or Palm Beach after going through five different dealers. They may disappear into somebody's house and not come out for another twenty or thirty years.”

  And Leslie: '“Another thing, of course, is that if somebody spends fifty thousand dollars for an armoire, and then finds out it's stolen, are they going to turn it over to the police and lose their money? That's really not how they got rich in the first place… So I wouldn't be too optimistic.”

  “There's always hope,” Jane said. She looked as though she were trying to make a perplexed wrinkle in her forehead. “But to tell you the truth, I'm beginning to think there's nothing missing. We haven't been able to identify a single thing.”

  “The Reckless painting,” Lucas said.

  “If there was one,” she said. “There are a number of Reckless sales every year. If we find no documentation that suggests that Connie owned one, if all we have is the testimony of this one young African-American person… well, Lucas… it's gone.”

  Ruffe Ignace's story wasn't huge, but even with a one-column head, and thirty inches of carefully worded text, it was big enough to do all the political damage that Kline had feared.

  Best of all, it featured an ambush photograph of Dakota County attorney Jim Cole, whose startled eyes made him look like a raccoon caught at night on the highway.

  Kline was now a Dakota County story.

  Ignace had gotten to Kathy Barth. Although she was identified only as a “source close to the investigation,” she spoke from the point of view of a victim, and Ignace was skilled enough to let that bleed through. “… the victim was described as devastated by the experience, and experts have told the family that she may need years of treatment if the allegations are true.

  ” Neil Mitford led Lucas and Rose Marie Roux into the governor's office and closed the door. The governor said, “We're all clear, right? Nobody can get us on leaking the story?” He knew that Lucas had ties with the local media; that Lucas did, in fact, share a daughter with the leading Channel Three editorialist.

  “Ruffe called me yesterday and asked for a comment and I told him I couldn't give him one,” Lucas said, doing his tap dance. “It's pretty obvious that he got a lot of his information from the victim's mother.”

  “Is Kathy Barth still trying to cut a deal with Burt?” Mitford asked Lucas.

  “They want money. That was the whole point of the exercise,” Lucas said. “But now, she's stuck. She can't cut a deal with the grand jury.”

  “And Burt's guilty,” the governor said. “I mean, he did it, right? We're not simply fucking him over?”

  “Yeah, he did it,” Lucas said. “I think he might've been doing the mother, too, but he definitely was doing the kid.”

  Rose Marie: “Screw their negotiations. They can file a civil suit later.”

  “Might be more money for the attorney,” Mitford said. “If he's taking it on contingency.”

  “Lawyers got to eat, too,” the governor said with satisfaction. To Rose Marie and Lucas: “You two will be managing the BCA's testimony before the grand jury? Is that all set?”

  “I talked to Jim Cole, he'll be calling with a schedule,” Rose Marie said. “There's a limited amount of testimony available-the Barths, Agent Flowers, Lucas, the technical people from the lab. Cole wants to move fast. If there's enough evidence to indict, he wants to give Kline a chance to drop out of the election so another Republican can run.”

  “Burt might get stubborn…” the governor suggested.

  “I don't think so,” Rose Marie said, shaking her head. “Cole won't indict unless he can convict. He wants to nail down the mother, the girl, the physical evidence, and then make a decision. With this newspaper story, he's got even mo
re reason to push. If he tells Burt's lawyer that Burt's going down, and shows him the evidence, I think Burt'll quit.”

  The governor nodded: “So. Lucas. Talk to your people. We don't want any bleed-back, we don't want anybody pointing fingers at us, saying there's a political thing going on. We want this straightforward, absolutely professional.

  We regret this kind of thing as much as anybody. It's a tragedy for everybody involved, including Burt Kline.”

  “And especially the child. We have to protect the children from predators,” Mitford said. “Any contacts with the press, we always hit that point.”

  “Of course, absolutely,” the governor said. “The children always come first. Especially when the predators are Republicans.”

  Nobody asked about the Bucher case, which was slipping off the front pages.

  When they were finished, Lucas walked down the hall with Rose Marie, heading for the parking garage. “Wonder why with Republicans, it's usually fucking somebody that gets them in trouble. And with the Democrats, it's usually stealing?”

  “Republicans have money. Most of them don't need more,” she suggested. “But they come from uptight, sexually repressed backgrounds, and sometimes, they just go off.

  Democrats are looser about sex, but half the time, they used to be teachers or government workers, and they're desperate for cash. They see all that money up close, around the government, the lobbyists and the corporate guys, they can smell it, they can taste it, they see the rich guys flying to Paris for the weekend, and eating in all the good restaurants, and buying three-thousand-dollar suits. They just want to reach out and take some.”

  “I see money in this, for my old company,” Lucas said. He'd once started a software company that developed real-time emergency simulations for 911 centers. “We could make simulation software that would teach Republicans how to fuck and Democrats how to steal.”

  “Jeez, I don't know,” Rose Marie said. “Can we trust Republicans with that kind of information?”

  Back at his office, Carol told him that the intern, Sandy, had been up half the night preparing a report on Hewlett-Packard printers and on murders in the Upper Midwest.

  He also had a call from one of Jim Cole's assistant county attorneys.

  Lucas called the attorney, and they agreed that Lucas and Flowers would testify before the grand jury the following day. The assistant wanted to talk to Flowers before the grand-jury presentation, but said it would not be necessary to review testimony with Lucas himself.

  “You'll do the basic bureaucratic outline, confirm the arrival of the initial information, the assignment of Agent Flowers to the case, and Flowers's delivery of the technical evidence to the crime lab. We'll need the usual piece of paper that says the evidence was properly logged in. That's about it.”

  “Excellent,” Lucas said. “I'll call Agent Flowers now and have him get back to you.”

  Lucas called Flowers: “You're gonna have to carry the load, Virgil, so you best memorize every stick of information you put in the files. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody from Kline's circle has been talking to somebody from Cole's circle, if you catch my drift.”

  “After that newspaper story, I don't see how Cole could bail out,” Flowers said.

  “I don't see it, either. But depending on what may have been said behind the chicken house, we gotta be ready,” Lucas said. “Tell them what you got, don't get mousetrapped into trying out any theories.”

  “Gotcha,” Flowers said. “Gonna get my mind tightly wrapped around this one, boss.

  Tightly.”

  Lucas, exasperated, said, “That means you're going fishing, right?”

  “I'll talk to the lab people and make sure the paperwork is right, that we got the semen sample and the pubic hair results, the photos of Kline's nuts. Copies for everyone. And so on, et cetera. I'll polish my boots tonight.”

  “You're not going fishing, Virgil,” Luca said. “This is too fuckin' touchy.”

  “How's the little woman?” Flowers asked.

  “Goddamnit, Virgil…”

  Lucas got his share of the paperwork done, reviewed it, then gave it to Carol, who had a nose for correct form. “Look it over, see if there are any holes. Same deal as the Carson case. I'll be back in five.”

  “Sandy's been sitting down in her cubicle all day, waiting for you…”

  “Yeah, just a few more minutes.”

  While Carol was looking over the paperwork, he walked down to the lab and checked the evidence package, making sure everything was there. Whatever else happened, Lucas didn't want Kline to walk because of a bureaucratic snafu. Back at his office, he sat at his desk, kicked back, tried to think of anything else he might need. But the prosecutor had said it: Lucas was essentially the bureaucrat-in-charge, and would be testifying on chain-of-evidence, rather than the evidence itself.

  Carol came in and said, “I don't see any holes. How many copies do you want? And you want me to call Sandy?”

  “Just give me a minute. I gotta call John Smith.”

  Smith was leaving a conference on the stabbing of a man at Regions Hospital a few weeks earlier. The stabbed man had died, just the day before, of an infection, that might or might not have been the result of the stabbing. The screwdriver-wielding drunk might be guilty of a minor assault, or murder, depending.

  “Depending,” Smith said, “on what eight different doctors say, and they're all trying to tap-dance around a malpractice suit.”

  “Good luck,” Lucas said. “Anything new on Bucher?”

  “Thanks for asking,” Smith said.

  “Look, I'm going to interview this Amity Anderson. I told you about her, she was the secretary to the Wisconsin woman.”

  “Yeah, yeah… Hope something comes out of it.”

  Amity Anderson worked at the Old Northwest Foundation in Minneapolis. Lucas tracked her through a friend at Minnesota Revenue, who took a look at her tax returns. Her voice on the phone was a nasal soprano, with a touch of Manhattan. “I have clients all afternoon. I could talk to you after four o'clock, if it's really urgent,” she said.

  “I live about a half mile from you,” Lucas said. “Maybe I could drop by when you get home? If you're not going out?”

  “I'm going out, but if it won't take too long, you could come at five-fifteen,” she said. “I'd have to leave by six.”

  “See you at five-fifteen.”

  He hung up and saw a blond girl standing by Carol's desk, peeking at him past the edge of his open door. He recognized her from a meet-and-greet with the summer people.

  Sandy.

  “Sandy,” he called. “Come in.”

  She was tall. Worse, she thought she was too tall, and so rolled her shoulders to make herself look shorter. She had a thin nose, delicate cheekbones, foggy blue eyes, and glasses that were too big for her face. She wore a white blouse and a blue skirt, and black shoes that were wrong for the skirt. She was, Lucas thought, somebody who hadn't yet pulled herself together.

  She was maybe twenty years old.

  She hurried in and stood, until he said, “Sit down, how y'doing?”

  “I'm fine.” She was nervous and plucked at the hem of her skirt. She was wearing nylons, he realized, which had to be hot. “I looked up that information you wanted.

  They let me stay late yesterday.”

  “You didn't have to…”

  “No, it was really interesting,” she said, a spot of pink appearing in her cheeks.

  “What, uh…”

  “Okay.” She put one set of papers on the floor by her feet, and fumbled through a second set. “On the Hewlett-Packard printers. The answer is, probably. Probably everybody saw a Hewlett-Packard printer, but nobody knows for sure. The thing is, there are all kinds of printers that get thrown away. Nobody wants an old printer, and there are supposed to be restrictions on how you get rid of them, so people put them in garbage sacks and hide them in their garbage cans, or throw them in somebody else's dumpster. There are dozens of the
m every week.”

  “Shit…” He thought about the word, noticed that she flushed. “Excuse me.”

  “That's okay. The thing is, because so many printers are in garbage sacks, they don't get seen until they're already in the trash flow, and they wind up getting buried at the landfill,” she said.

  “So we're out of luck.”

  “Yes. I believe so. There's no way to tell what printer came from where. Even if we found the right printer, nobody would know what truck it came from, or where it was picked up.”

  “Okay. Forget it,” Lucas said. “I should have known that.”

  She picked up the second pack of papers. “On the unsolved murders, I looked at the five states you asked about, and I also looked at Nebraska, because there are no big cities there. I found one unsolved that looks good. A woman name Claire Donaldson was murdered in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. I told Carol as soon as I found it, but she said I wouldn't have to work anymore on that, because you already knew about it.”

  Lucas nodded. “Okay. Good job. And that was the only one?”

  “That was the only unsolved,” Sandy said. “But I found one solved murder that also matches everything, except the sex of the victim.”

  Lucas frowned. “Solved?”

  She nodded. “In Des Moines. An elderly man, wealthy, living alone, house full of antiques. His name was Jacob Toms. He was well known, he was on a lot of boards.

  An art museum, the Des Moines Symphony, an insurance company, a publishing company.”

  “Jeez, that sounds pretty good. But if it's solved…”

  “I pulled the newspaper accounts off LexisNexis. There was a trial, but there wasn't much of a defense. The killer said he couldn't remember doing it, but wouldn't be surprised if he had. He was high on amphetamines, he'd been doing them for four days, he said he was out of his mind and couldn't remember the whole time he was on it.

  There wasn't much evidence against him-he was from the neighborhood, his parents were well-off, but he got lost on the drugs. Anyway, people had seen him around the neighborhood, and around the Toms house…”

  “Inside?”