Invisible prey ld-17 Read online

  “Jesse's dog,” Lucas said.

  “Naw, that's Mike's dog,” McGuire said. “Sometimes Jesse walks home with it. Dog likes her better than Mike.”

  Again, they stepped carefully. The dog barked twice and snarled, but knew where the end of the chain was. And a good thing, Lucas thought. All he needed this afternoon was a pitbull-wannabe hanging on his ass.

  Mike's house had a low shaky porch, with soft floorboards going to rot. The aluminum storm door was canted a bit, and didn't close completely. Lucas rang the doorbell, then knocked on the door. He heard a thump from inside, and a minute later, saw the curtain move in a window on the left side of the porch.

  He felt the tension unwind a notch. He banged on the door, pissed off now. “Jesse.

  Goddamnit, Jesse, answer the door. Jesse…”

  There was a moment's silence, then Lucas said to McGuire, “If she comes to the door, yell for me.”

  He stepped off the porch, circled the dog, and hurried around to the back of the house: five seconds later, Jesse Barth came sneaking out the back door, carrying a backpack.

  “Goddamnit, Jesse,” he said.

  Startled, she jerked around, saw him at the corner of the house. Gave up: “Oh, shit.

  I'm sorry.”

  “Come on-I've got to call your mom,” Lucas said. “She's freaked out, half the cops in St. Paul are out looking for you. People thought you were kidnapped.”

  “I was just scared,” Jesse said as he led her through the ankle-deep grass back around the house. “What if I make a mistake?” Her lip trembled. “I don't want to make a mistake and go to jail.”

  “Did Conoway say she was going to put you in jail?” Lucas asked. “Who said they were gonna put you in jail?”

  “Well, you did, for one.”

  “That's if you tried to sell your testimony,” Lucas said. “If you just go down and tell the truth, you're fine. You're the victim here.”

  “But if I make a mistake…”

  “There's a difference between lying and making a mistake,” Lucas told her. “They're not gonna put you in jail for making a mistake. You have to deliberately lie, and know you're lying, and it's gotta be an important lie. You talked to Conoway about what you're going to say. Just say that, and you're fine.”

  They cleared the front of the house and found McGuire on the porch, talking to a tall, bespectacled kid wearing a Seal T-shirt and jeans: Mike. McGuire said: “Jesse, they were afraid you were kidnapped. I'm sorry, I was so worried, you know, you see on the news all the time…”

  “That's okay,” Jesse said. “I'm just fucked up.”

  Lucas called Kathy Barth: “I got her. She was hiding out with a friend. You've still got time to get down to Dakota County.”

  “I've got to talk to Jesse,” Barth said.

  “She's willing to go. You're holding up a lot of people here,” Lucas said.

  “Oh, God.” Long silence, as though she were catching her breath. “Well, I've got to change…”

  Lucas called Flowers, who was just crossing the Mississippi bridge into South St.

  Paul. He was ten minutes away: “Man, I thought she was gone,” Flowers said. “I was thinking all this shit about the Klines and finding her body under a bridge…”

  “Can you pick her up? That'd be best: I'm here with the Porsche and I got a rider.”

  “Fast as I can get there. If we turn right around, we'll just about be on time.”

  He told Flowers how to find the house, then called the St. Paul cops and canceled the alert: “Yeah, yeah, so I'll go kill myself,” he told a cop who was inclined to pull his weenie.

  The three younger people sat on the porch, waiting for Flowers, and Lucas gave Jesse a psychological massage, telling her of various screw-ups with grand juries, and explained the difference between grand juries and trial juries. Jesse unsnapped the dog, whose name, it turned out, was Screw. She put it on a walking leash and the dog rolled over in the dirt and panted and licked its jaws and whimpered when Jesse scratched its stomach. “You're gonna make him come,” Mike said.

  “No…” Jesse was embarrassed.

  Lucas moved and the dog twitched. “I don't think he likes me.”

  “Bit a paperboy once,” Mike said. “They were gonna sue us, but Mom said, 'For what?' so they didn't.”

  “That's great,” Lucas said.

  Flowers arrived, towing a boat. He got out of his car, ambled over, shaking his head, and said to Jesse, “I ought to turn you over my knee.”

  “Oo. Do me, do me,” McGuire said.

  In the car, McGuire said she might as well go home, since her class would be ending.

  “Hope the neighbors see me coming home in a Porsche. They'll think I'm having a fling.”

  “Maybe I oughta put a bag over my head,” Lucas said.

  “That'd be no fun,” she said. “I want people to see it's a big tough old guy.”

  Lucas was still cranked from Flowers's original call, and, in the back of his head, couldn't believe that they'd found Jesse so quickly. He dropped McGuire off at her home in Highland. She waved goodbye going up the walk, and he thought she was a pretty good kid. He looked at his watch. If he took a little time, rolled down Ford Parkway with his arm out the window, enjoying the day and the leafy street, and maybe blowing the doors off the Corvette that had just turned onto the parkway in front of him, he'd just about make dinner with the wife and kids.

  He was done with Kline and the Barths.

  Now he had a motherfucker who was killing old people, and he was going to run him down like a skunk on a highway.

  Dinner with the kids was fine; in the evening, he read a Chuck Logan thriller novel.

  Late at night, Flowers called: “We got an indictment. They're going to process the paper tomorrow, talk to Kline's attorney, set up a surrender late tomorrow afternoon, and then make the announcement day after tomorrow. Cole's set it up so they can arrest and book him before the press finds out, he'll make bail, then go hide out. Then the announcement.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Lucas said. “You headed back south?” “I'm here tonight, I'm heading back tomorrow at the crack of dawn.”

  In the morning, after a few phone calls, Lucas took a meeting at Bucher's house.

  He'd asked Gabriella Coombs to come over, to sit in.

  The Widdlers had almost finished the appraisals of the contents of the house, with negative results. “In other words,” Smith said, “there's nothing missing.”

  “There are a few things missing, John,” Lucas said. “The Reckless painting, for one.

  A couple of chairs.”

  “According to a kid, who admitted that he hadn't been up there for a while, and that maybe Bucher got rid of them herself,” Smith said.

  “The whole thing smells. And we've now got a couple of other deals…”

  “Lucas, I'm not saying you're wrong,” Smith said. “What I'm saying is, you've got a killing years ago in Eau Claire where a woman was shot and nothing was taken but some money. An old man was strangled in Des Moines and the case was cleared. Another woman probably fell, according to the medical examiner, with all respect to Miss Coombs here. We've got nothing to work with. It's been a while since you worked at the city level, but I'll tell you what, it has gotten worse.

  I'm up to my ass in open investigations, and until we get more to go on…”

  “That's not right,” Coombs said. “My grandmother was murdered and her house was robbed.”

  “That's not what…” Smith shook his head.

  Leslie Widdler came in, carrying a white paper bag. He said, “We've got a bunch of sticky buns from Frenchy's. Who wants one?”

  Lucas held up his hand and Leslie handed him the sack. Lucas took out a sticky bun and passed the bag to Smith, who took one and passed it to Coombs, who took one, and then they all sat chewing and swallowing and Lucas said, “Thanks, Les… John tells me you haven't found a single goddamn stick of furniture missing. Is that right?”

  “W
e've gone through the photographs one at a time, and we've found two pieces that are not actually here,” Widdler said. “We've accounted for both of them. Both were given away.”

  “What about the swoopy chairs that the Lash kid was talking about?”

  Widdler shrugged. “Can't put our finger on them. 'Swoopy' isn't a good enough description.

  He can't even tell us the color of the upholstery, or whether the seats were leather or fabric. All he ever looked at were the legs.”

  “Well… if he's right, how much would they be worth?”

  “I can't tell you that, either,” Widdler said. “Everything depends on what they were, and condition. A pristine swoopy chair, of a certain kind, might be worth a thousand dollars. The same chair, in bad shape, might be worth fifty. Or, it might be a knockoff, which is very common, and be worth zero. So-I don't know. What I do know is, there's a lot of furniture here that's worth good money, and they didn't take it. There are some old, old oriental carpets, especially one up in Mrs. Bucher's bedroom, that would pull fifty thousand dollars on the open market. There are some other carpets rolled up on the third floor. If these people were really sophisticated, they could have brought one of those carpets down and unrolled it in Mrs. Bucher's bedroom, taken the good one, and who would have known? Really?”

  They chewed some more, and Smith said, “One more bun. Who wants it? I'm all done…”

  Widdler said, “Me.” Smith passed him the sack and Widdler retrieved the bun, took a bite, and said, “The other thing is, we know for sure that Mrs. Bucher gave things away from time to time. There may have been some swoopy chairs and a Reckless painting.

  Has anybody talked to her accountants about deductions the last couple of years?”

  “Yeah, we did,” Smith said. “No swoopy chairs or Reckless anything.”

  “Well…” Widdler said. And he pressed the rest of the bun into his face as though he were starving.

  “Not right,” Coombs said again, turning away from Widdler and the sticky bun.

  Lucas sighed, and said, “I'll tell you what. I want you to go over every piece of paper you can find in your grandma's house. Anything that could tie her to Bucher or Donaldson or Toms. I'll do the same thing here, and I'll get Donaldson's sister working on it from her end.”

  “The St. Paul cops won't let me into the house yet,” Coombs said. “They let me clean up the open food, but that's it.”

  “I'll call them,” Lucas said. “You could get in tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Coombs said.

  “Hope you come up with something, because from my point of view, this thing is drifting away to never-never land,” Smith said. “We need a major break.”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said. “I hear you.”

  “How much time can you put into it?” Smith asked.

  “Not much,” Lucas said. “I've got some time in the next two weeks, but with this election coming up, any sheriff with a problem case is gonna try to shift it onto us-make it look like something is getting done. The closer we get to the election, the busier we'll be. “ “Not right,” said Coombs. “I want Grandma's killer found.”

  “We're giving it what we can,” Lucas said. “I'll keep it active, but John and I know… we've been cops a long time… it's gonna be tough.”

  “Bucher's gonna be tough,” Smith said. “With your grandma and the others… hell, we don't even know that they're tied together. At all. And Donaldson and Toms are colder than ice.” He finished the sticky bun and licked the tips of his fingers.

  “Man, that was good, Les.”

  “The French aren't all bad,” Widdler said, using his tongue to pry a little sticky bun out of his radically fashionable clear-plastic braces.

  Lucas walked Coombs out to her car. “You can't give up,” she said.

  Lucas shook his head. “It's not like we're giving up-it's that right now, we don't have any way forward. We'll keep pushing all the small stuff, and maybe something will crack.”

  She turned at the car and stepped closer and patted him twice on the chest with an open hand. “Maybe I'm obsessive-compulsive; I don't think I can get on with life until this is settled. I can't stop thinking about it. I need to get something done.

  I spent all those years screwing around, lost. Now I've finally got my feet on the ground, I've got some ideas about what I might want to do, I'm getting some friends… it's like I'm just getting started with real life. Then… this. I'm spinning my wheels again.”

  “You got a lot of time, you're young,” Lucas said. “When I was your age, everything seemed to move too slow. But this will get done. I'll keep working on Grandma, St.

  Paul will keep working. We'll get somebody, sooner or later.”

  “You promise?” She had a really nice smile, Lucas thought, soft, and sadly sexy.

  Made you want to protect her, to take her someplace safe… like a bed.

  “I promise,” he said.

  The St. Paul cops had gone through the papers in the Bucher house on-site, and not too closely, because so much of it was clearly irrelevant to the murders.

  With Coombs agreeing to comb through her grandmother's papers, Lucas established himself in the Bucher house-office and began going through the paper files. Later, he'd move on to the computer files, but a St. Paul cop had told him that Bucher rarely used the computer-she'd learned to call up and use Microsoft Word for letter-writing, but nothing more-and Peebles never used it.

  Lucas had no idea what he was looking for: something, anything, that would reach outside the house, and link with Donaldson, Toms, or Coombs. He'd been working on it for an hour when it occurred to him that he hadn't seen any paper involving quilts.

  There was an “art” file, an inventory for insurance, but nothing mentioned the quilts that hung on the walls on the second floor. And quilts ran through all three murders that he knew of. He picked up the phone, dialed his office, got Carol: “Is Sandy still free?”

  “If you want her to be.”

  “Tell her to call me,” Lucas said.

  He walked out in the hall where the Widdlers seemed to be packing up. “All done?”

  “Until the auction,” Jane Widdler said. She rubbed her hands. “We'll do well off this, thanks to you police officers.”

  “We now know every piece in the house,” Leslie Widdler explained. “We'll work as stand-ins for out-of-state dealers who can't make it.”

  “And take a commission,” Jane Widdler said. “The family wants to have the auction pretty quickly, after they each take a couple of pieces out… This will be fun.”

  “Hmm,” Lucas said. “My wife is interested in antiques.”

  “She works for the state as well?” Leslie Widdler asked.

  Lucas realized that Widdler was asking about income. “No. She's a plastic and microsurgeon over at Hennepin General.”

  “Well, for pete's sake, Lucas, we're always trying to track down people like that.

  Give her our card,” Jane Widdler said, and dug a card out of her purse and passed it over. “We'll talk to her anytime. Antiques can be great investments.”

  “Thanks.” Lucas slipped the card in his shirt pocket. “Listen, did you see any paper at all on the quilts upstairs? Receipts, descriptions, anything? All these places… I don't know about Toms…”

  His cell phone rang and he said, “Excuse me…” and stepped away. Sandy. “Listen, Sandy, I want you to track down the Toms relatives, whoever inherited, and ask them if Toms had any quilts in the place. Especially, collector quilts. Okay? Okay.”

  He hung up and went back to the Widdlers. “These murders I'm looking at, there seems to be a quilt thread… Is that a joke?… Anyway, there seems to be a quilt thing running through them.”

  Leslie Widdler was shaking his head. “We didn't see anything like that. Receipts.

  And those quilts upstairs, they're not exactly collector quilts… I mean, they're collected, but they're not antiques. They're worth six hundred to a thousand dollars each. If you see a pla
ce that says “Amish Shop,' you can get a quilt just like them. Traditional designs, but modern, and machine-pieced and quilted.”

  “Huh. So those aren't too valuable.”

  Leslie Widdler shook his head. “There's a jug in the china cabinet in the music room that's worth ten times all the quilts put together.”

  Lucas nodded. “All right. Listen. Thanks for your help, guys. And thanks for those sticky buns, Les. Sorta made my morning.”

  Out of the house, Leslie Widdler said, “We've got to take him out of it.”

  “God, we may have overstepped,” Jane said. “If we could only go back.”

  “Can't go back,” Leslie said.

  “If they look into the Armstrong quilts, they'll find receipts, they'll find people who remember stuff… I don't know if they can do it, but they might find out that Coombs didn't get all the money she should have. Once they get on that trail-it'd be hard, but they might trace it on to us.”

  “It's been a long time,” Leslie said.

  “Paperwork sticks around. And not only paperwork-there's that sewing basket. If Jackson White still has a receipt, or a memory, he could put us in prison.” Jackson White sold them the sewing basket. “I should have looked for the sewing basket instead of that damn music box. That music box has screwed us.”

  “What if we went back to Coombs's place, put the music box someplace that wasn't obvious, and took the basket? That'd solve that thing,” Leslie said.

  “What about Davenport?”

  “There's Jesse Barth,” Leslie said. “Amity might have been right.”

  “So dangerous,” Jane said. “So dangerous.”

  “Have to get the van, have to steal another plate.”

  “That's no problem. That's fifteen seconds, stealing the plate,” Jane said. She was thinking about it.

  “Davenport said he has a week or two to work on it-if we can push him through another week, we could be good,” Leslie said. “He's the dangerous one. Smith already wants to move on. It's Davenport who's lingering…”

  “He could come back to it,” Jane said. “He smells the connection.”

  “Yes, but the older things get, and the fuzzier… Maybe Jackson White could have a fire,” Leslie said. “If they find the music box, that might erase the Coombs connections.