Invisible Prey Read online

  “Okay.”

  An orange ceramic jar, molded to look like a pumpkin, with the word “Cookies” on the side, sat against a wall on the kitchen counter. Lash reached for it but Lucas caught his arm. “Don’t touch,” he said. He got a paper towel from a rack, put his hand behind the jar, and pushed it toward the edge of the countertop. When it was close enough to look into, he took the lid off, gripping the lid by its edges. “Fingerprints.”

  Lash peered inside. “Nope. Cleaned it out. There was usually a couple of hundred bucks in here. Sometimes more and sometimes less.”

  “Slush fund.”

  “Yes. For errands and when deliverymen came,” Lash said. “Mostly twenties, and some smaller bills and change. Though…I wonder what happened to the change barrel?”

  “What’s that?” Lucas asked.

  “It’s upstairs. I’ll show you.”

  Lucas called a crime-scene tech, who’d stretch warning tape around the kitchen counter. Then they walked through the house, and Lash mentioned a half-dozen items: a laptop computer was missing, mostly used by the housekeeping couple, but also by Lash for his schoolwork. A Dell, Lash said, and he pointed to a file drawer with the warranty papers.

  Lucas copied down the relevant information and the serial number. Also missing: a computer printer, binoculars, an old Nikon spotting scope that Bucher had once used for birding, two older film cameras, a compact stereo. “Stamps,” Lash said. “There was a big roll of stamps in the desk drawer…”

  The drawer had been dumped.

  “How big was the printer?” Lucas asked.

  “An HP LaserJet, about so big,” Lash said, gesturing with his hands, indicating a two-foot square.

  “Heavy?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t put it in. But pretty heavy, I think,” Lash said. “It looked heavy. It was more like a business machine, than like a home printer.”

  “Huh.”

  “What means ‘huh’?” Lash asked.

  Lucas said, “You think they put all this stuff in a bag and went running down the street?”

  Lash looked at him for a minute, then said, “They had a car.” He looked toward the back of the house, his fingers tapping his lower lip. “But Detective Smith said they probably came in through the back, up the hill.”

  “Well?”

  Lash shrugged: “He was wrong.”

  IN THE upstairs hallway, a brass vase—or something like a vase, but four feet tall—lay on its side. Lucas had noticed it among the other litter on his first trip through the house, but had just seen it as another random piece of vandalism.

  Lash lifted it by the lip: “Got it,” he said. To Lucas: “Every night, Mrs. B put the change she got in here. Everything but pennies. She said someday, she was going to call the Salvation Army at Christmas, and have them send a bell ringer around, and she’d give, like, the whole vase full of coins.”

  “How much was in there?”

  Lash shook his head: “Who knows? It was too heavy to move. I couldn’t even tip it.”

  “So hundreds of dollars.”

  “I don’t know. It was all nickels, dimes, and quarters, so, quite a bit,” Lash said. “Maybe thousands, when you think about it.”

  On the rest of the floor, Lash couldn’t pick out anything that Lucas didn’t already suspect: the jewelry, the drugs. Maybe something hidden in the dressers, but Lash had never looked inside of them, he said, so he didn’t know what might be missing.

  On the third floor, they had a moment: Lash had spent some time on the third floor, sorting and straightening under Bucher’s direction. “Sugar said Mrs. B was getting ready to die,” Lash said.

  They’d looked into a half-dozen rooms, when Lash said, suddenly, “Wait a minute.” He walked back to the room they’d just left, which had been stacked with furniture and a number of cardboard boxes; a broken lamp stuck out of one of them. Lash said, “Where’re the chairs?”

  “The chairs?”

  “Yeah. There were two old chairs in here. One was turned upside down on the other one, like in a restaurant when it’s closing. At least…” He touched his chin. “Maybe they were in the next one.”

  They stepped down to the next room. Several chairs, but not, Lash said, the two he was thinking of. They went back to the first room. “They were right here.”

  “When did you last see them?”

  Lash put a finger in his ear, rolled it for a moment, thinking, then said, “Well, it’s been a while. I was cleaning this room out…gosh, Christmas vacation. Six months.”

  “Two old chairs,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe Mrs. Bucher got rid of them?”

  Lash shrugged. “I suppose. She never said anything. I don’t think she thought about them.”

  “Really old, like French antiques or something?” Lucas asked.

  “No, no,” Lash said. “More like my mom’s age. Or maybe your age.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they were like…swoopy. Like one big swoop was the back and the other swoop was the seat. They were like, you know, what’d you see on old TV—Star Trek, like that. Or maybe chairs at the Goodwill store.”

  “Huh. So you couldn’t mistake them,” Lucas said.

  “No. They’re not here.”

  AS THEY WENT through the last few rooms, Lash said, finally, “You know, I’m not sure, but it seems like somebody’s been poking around up here. Things are not quite like it was. It seems like stuff has been moved.”

  “Like what?”

  Lash pointed across the room, to a battered wooden rocking chair with a torn soft seat. Behind the rocker, four framed paintings were stacked against the wall. “Like somebody moved that rocker. When the old lady wanted something moved, she usually got me to do it.”

  “Was there something back there?”

  Lash had to think about it for a moment, then went and looked in another room, and came back and looked at the old rocker and said, “There might have been more pictures than that. Behind the rocker.”

  “How many?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t know, but the stack was thicker. Maybe six? Maybe five. Or maybe seven. But the stack was thicker. One of the frames was gold colored, but all covered with dust. I don’t see that one. Let me see, one said ‘reckless’ on the back…”

  “Reckless?”

  “Yeah, somebody had painted ‘reckless’ on it,” Lash said. “Just that one word. On the back of the painting, not the picture side. In dark gray paint. Big letters.”

  “Portrait, landscape…?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t look at the front, I just remember that word on the back. There are a couple of paintings gone. At least two.”

  “There were some pictures down the hall in that third room, the one with the ironing boards,” Lucas said.

  “No, no, I know about those,” Lash said. “These up here had frames that were, like, carved with flowers and grapes and stuff. And the gold one. Those other ones are just plain.”

  “Chairs that weren’t very old, and maybe some paintings,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah.” They stood in silence for a moment, then Lash added, “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Davenport, Weldon Godfrey didn’t steal any chairs and paintings. Or maybe he’d take the chairs, because his house never had much furniture. But Weldon wouldn’t give you a dollar for any painting I can think of. Unless it was like a blond woman with big boobs.”

  They tramped back through the house, and on the way, Lash’s pocket started to play a rock version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He took a cell phone out of his pocket, looked at it, pushed a button, and stuck it back in his pocket.

  “You’ve got a cell phone,” Lucas said.

  “Everybody’s got a cell phone. Mom’n me, we don’t have a regular phone anymore.”

  BACK ON the first floor, they ran into Smith again. Smith’s left eyebrow went up, a question.

  “Maybe something,” Lucas said. “Ronnie thinks a few t
hings may have been taken. Can’t nail it down, but stuff looks like it’s been moved on the third floor. Couple of chairs may be missing, maybe a painting or two.”

  “Tell him about the car,” Lash said.

  “Oh yeah,” Lucas said. “They used a car to move the stuff. Or a van or a truck.”

  Lucas explained and Smith said, “The Hill House has a security system with cameras looking out at the street. Maybe we’ll see something on the tapes.”

  “If they took those chairs, it’d have to be pretty good-sized,” Lash said. “Not a car. A truck.”

  “Maybe they’ll turn up on Antiques Roadshow?” Smith said.

  “Maybe. But we’re not sure what’s missing,” Lucas said. “Ronnie’s not even sure that Bucher didn’t get rid of the chairs herself.”

  Mrs. Lash was sitting in the foyer, waiting for her son. When Lucas brought him back, she asked Ronnie, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. But just wait here for one minute, I want to look at something. I noticed it when the police brought us in…” He went back down the hall and into the music room, his feet cracking through bits and pieces of broken glass.

  “He’s been a big help,” Lucas said to Mrs. Lash. “We appreciate it.”

  “I’m sure,” she said. Then, “I’ve seen you at Hennepin General. I used to work over there.”

  “My wife’s a surgeon, she’s on staff at Hennepin,” Lucas said. “I’d hang out sometimes.”

  “What’s her name?” Lash asked.

  “Weather Karkinnen.”

  Lash brightened: “Oh, I know Dr. Karkinnen. She’s really good.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He touched a scar at his throat, made by Weather with a jackknife. Ronnie came back, gestured toward the music room with his thumb.

  “There’s a cabinet in there with a glass front. It used to be full of old vases and dishes and bowls. One of them had Chinese coins in it. I’m not sure, because some of it’s broken, but I don’t think there are as many pieces as there used to be. It looks too…loose.”

  “Could you identify any of it? If we came up with some stuff?”

  Lash shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t know anything about it. I never really looked at it, except, one time when Mrs. Bucher showed me the coins. It just looks too loose. It used to be jammed with vases and bowls. Coins are all over the floor now, so they didn’t take those.”

  “Okay…Any other last thoughts?”

  Ronnie said to Lucas, “‘The love of money is the root of all evils.’ Timothy, six-ten.”

  The little asshole was getting on top of him.

  Lucas said, “‘Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.’ Woody Allen.”

  His mother cracked a smile, but Ronnie said, “I’ll go with Timothy.”

  4

  AS THE LASHES LEFT, Smith and another cop came rolling down the hall, picking up their feet, in a jacket-flapping, gun-flashing hurry.

  “Got a break,” Smith said, coming up to Lucas. “Let’s go.”

  Lucas started walking. “What happened?”

  “Guy showed up at Rhodes’s with some jewelry in a jewelry box. Jewelry was cheap but the box was terrific. Our guys turned it over, it’s inscribed ‘Bucher’ on the back.”

  Rhodes’s was a pawnshop. Lucas asked, “Do they know who brought it in?”

  “That’s the weird thing,” Smith said. “They do.”

  “Where’re we going?” Lucas asked.

  “Six-twelve Hay. It’s off Payne, nine blocks north of Seventh. SWAT is setting up in the parking lot behind the Minnesota Music Café.”

  “See you there.”

  PAYNE AVENUE WAS one of the signature drags across St. Paul’s east side, once the Archie Bunker bastion of the city’s white working class. The neighborhood had been in transition for decades, reliable old employers leaving, a new mix of Southeast Asians and blacks moving in. Lucas dropped past the cathedral, onto I-94 in a minute or so, up the hill to Mounds Boulevard, left and left again.

  The café was an old hangout of his, at the corner of East Seventh and Payne, with a graveled parking lot in back, and inside, the best music in town. A dozen cars were in the lot, cops pulling on body armor. A half-dozen civilians were watching from the street. Smith arrived ten seconds after Lucas, and they walked over to Andy Landis, the SWAT squad commander.

  “What you got?” Smith asked.

  “We’re in the house behind him and on both sides,” Landis said. “Name is Nathan Brown. Don’t have anything local on him, but the people in the house behind him say he moved here from Chicago four or five years ago. There’re about fifty Nathan and Nate Browns with files down in Chicago, so we don’t know who he is.”

  “Got the warrant?” Smith asked.

  “On the way. Two minutes,” Landis said.

  “Love this shit,” Smith said to Lucas.

  “You ever been on the SWAT squad?”

  “Ten years, until the old lady nagged me out of it,” Smith said. “Turned my crank.”

  “Wasn’t it called something else? They called you the ‘breath mint’?”

  “CIRT,” Smith said. “Critical Incident Response Team.”

  “SWAT’s better,” Lucas said.

  THE WARRANT ARRIVED and the SWAT squad moved out in three groups. Lucas and Smith tagged behind.

  “The couple who found the bodies…did they notice anything missing around the house?” Lucas asked.

  Smith shook his head. “Not that they mentioned. But they weren’t housekeepers—the wife does the cooking, the husband did maintenance and gardening and the lawn. And with shit thrown all over the place like it was…The niece is on the way from California. She’ll probably know something.”

  THE SWAT TEAM came in three groups: a blocking group at the back door, and two at the front of the house, one from each side. They came across the neighboring lawns, armored, face shields, carrying long arms. Moved diagonally across the lawn of the target house, quietly swarming the porch, doing a peek at the window, then kicking the front door in.

  Nathan Brown, as it happened, was asleep in a downstairs bedroom. His girlfriend was feeding her kids grilled-cheese sandwiches in the kitchen, and began screaming when the cops came through, had the phone in her hand screaming “Nine-one-one, nine-one-one,” and the kids were screaming, and then the cops were in the bedroom on top of Brown.

  Brown was yelling, “Hey…hey…hey,” like a stuck record.

  Lucas came in as they rolled him and cuffed him; his room smelled of old wallpaper, sweat, and booze. Brown was shirtless, dazed, wearing boxer shorts. He’d left a damp sweat stain on the sheet of the queen-sized bed.

  After some thrashing around, the freaked-out girlfriend sat in a corner sobbing, her two children crying with her. The cops found a plastic baggie with an assortment of earrings on the floor by Brown’s pants. Asked where he got them, Brown roused himself to semicoherence, and said, “I shoulda known, there ain’t no fuckin’ toot’ fairy.”

  “Where’d you get them?

  He shook his head, not in refusal, but knowing the reaction he’d get: “I got them off a bus bench.”

  That was stupid enough that it stopped everybody. “Off a bus bench?” Smith said.

  “Off a bus bunch. Up at…up at Dale. Dale and Grand,” Brown said. His eyes tended to wander in his head. “Friday night. Midnight. Lookin’ for a bus so I don’t got to walk downtown. The box was sittin’ right there, like the toot’ fairy left it.”

  “Full of jewelry,” said one of the cops.

  “Not full. Only a little in there.” He craned his neck toward the door. He could hear the children, still screaming, and their mother now trying to calm them down. Cops were starting to prop themselves in the doorway, to listen to what Brown was saying. “Did you knock the door down?” Brown asked. “Why the kids crying? Are the kids okay?”

  “The kids are okay…” The air was going out of the SWAT guys.

  “Is the house hurt?” There was a plea
ding note in Brown’s voice.

  Smith stepped away, put a radio to his face. Lucas asked, “Anybody see you pick this box up?”

  Brown said, “Not that I seen. I just seen the box, thought somebody left it, opened it up, didn’t see no name.”

  “There was a name on the bottom of the box.”

  “Didn’t look on the bottom of the box,” Brown said helplessly.

  Lucas didn’t take long to make up his mind. Smith was uncertain, but after talking to Brown, and then to Brown’s girlfriend, Lucas was pretty sure that Brown was telling the truth about the jewelry box.

  Smith served the search warrant on the woman, who owned the house, and the cops started tearing it apart.

  LUCAS WENT BACK to his car alone, rolled down Payne to the café, got a notebook from behind the car seat, took a table on the sidewalk out in front of the place, bought a beer, and started doodling his way through the killings.

  The murders of Bucher and Peebles looked like a gang-related home invasion. Two or three assholes would bust a house, tape up the occupants—most often older people, scouted in advance—and then take their time cleaning the house out. Easier, safer, and often more lucrative than going into liquor or convenience stores, which had hardened themselves with cameras, safes, and even bulletproof screens.

  But with Bucher and Peebles, the robbers had not taken credit cards or ATM cards. In most house invasions, those would be the first targets, because they’d yield cash. Bucher and Peebles appeared to have been killed quickly, before they could resist. Most home invaders, even if they were planning to kill the victims, would keep them alive long enough to squeeze out the PIN numbers for the ATM cards.

  ATMs had cameras, but it was easy enough to put a rag over your face. They might not have intended to kill. Say they came onto Peebles, somebody got excited and swatted her with a pipe. Then they’d have to kill Bucher just to clean up.

  But there was no sign that Peebles resisted…

  The halfway house was becoming more interesting. Lucas made up a scenario and played it through his head: suppose you had a couple of real hard guys in the halfway house, looking out the second-floor windows, watching the housekeepers come and go, the two old ladies in the garden during the day, the one or two bedroom lights at night, one light going out, then the other.