Invisible prey ld-17 Page 7

  He glanced at his watch: Kidd's apartment was down by the river. He could drop by after he talked with Neil Mitford. Mitford was the governor's hatchet man; he tried to cut out at least one gizzard every morning before going out for a double latte grande.

  Lucas finished his coffee and headed up the stairs to suit up; and once outside, it was another great day, puffy fair-weather clouds under a pale blue sky, just enough wind to ruffle the stars 'n' stripes outside an elementary school. He motored along Summit Avenue toward the Capitol, elbow out, counting women on cell phones making illegal turns.

  Mitford had a modest office down the hall from the governor's, in what he said had been a janitor's closet when the building was first put up. With just enough room for a desk, a TV, a computer, a thousand books, and a pile of paper the size of a cartoon doghouse, it might have been.

  Mitford himself was short and burly, his dark hair thinning at the crown. He'd been trying to dress better lately, but in Lucas's opinion, had failed. This morning he was wearing pleated khaki slacks with permanent ironed-in wrinkles, a striped short-sleeved dress shirt, featureless black brogans with dusty toes, a chromed watch large enough to be a cell phone, and two actual cell phones, which were clipped to his belt like cicadas on a tree trunk.

  Altogether, five or six separate and simultaneous fashion faux pas, in Lucas's view, depending on how you counted the cell phones.

  “Lucas.” Mitford didn't bother to smile. “How are we going to handle this?”

  “That seems to be a problem,” Lucas said, settling in a crappy chair across the desk from Mitford. “Everybody's doing a tap dance.”

  “You know, Burt backed us on the school-aid bill,” Mitford said tentatively.

  “Fuck a bunch of school-aid bill,” Lucas said. “School aid is gonna be a bad joke if the word gets out that he'd been banging a ninth-grader.”

  Mitford winced. “Tenth-grader.”

  “Yeah, now,” Lucas said. “But not when they started, if she's telling the truth.”

  “So…”

  “I've got one possibility that nobody has suggested yet, and it's thin,” Lucas said.

  “Roll it out,” Mitford said.

  “The girl says Kline once took her to the Burnsville Mall and bought her clothes-a couple of blouses, skirts, some white cotton underpants, and a couple of push-up bras. She said he liked to have a little underwear-and-push-up-bra parade at night.

  Anyway, he got so turned on that they did a little necking and groping in the parking lot. She said she, quote, cooled him off, unquote.”

  “All right. So… the push-up bra?”

  “She said he bought her gifts in return for the sex.”

  Mitford digressed: “He really said, 'Oh God, lick my balls, lick my balls'?”

  “According to Virgil Flowers, Kline admits he might have said it, but he would've said it to Mom, not the daughter,” Lucas said.

  “Ah, Jesus,” Mitford said. “This is dreadful.”

  “Kline said his old lady never…”

  “Hey, hey-forget it.” Mitford rubbed his face, and shuddered. “I know his old lady.

  Anyway, he took the kid to the Burnsville Mall and groped her and she cooled him off… Is that a big deal?”

  “That'd be up to you,” Lucas said. “We can make an argument that he was buying the clothes in return for sex, because of the kid's testimony. And then there was the touching in the car, what you call your basic manual stimulation. So one element of the crime happened at the mall.”

  “So what?”

  “The mall is in Burnsville,” Lucas said, “which happens to be in Dakota County. Dakota County, in its wisdom, elected itself a Republican as county attorney.”

  Mitford instantly brightened. “Holy shit! I knew there was a reason we hired you.”

  “That doesn't mean…” Lucas began.

  Mitford was on his feet, circling his desk, shaking a finger at Lucas. “Yes, it does.

  One way or the other, it does. If we can get a Republican to indict this cocksucker…”

  “Actually, he wasn't the…”

  “… then we're in the clear. Our hands are clean. There is no Democratic involvement in the process, no goddamn little intransigent Democratic cockroach publicity-seeking motherfucking horsefly Ramsey County attorney to drag us all down. It's a Republican problem. Yes, it is.”

  “Virgil is coming up here today to brief some people on the details,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah. I'll be going. I've been hearing some odd things about Flowers,” Mitford said.

  “Somebody said he once whistled at a guy in an interrogation cell until the guy cracked and confessed.”

  “Well, yeah, you have to understand the circumstances, the guy belonged to a cult…”

  Mitford didn't care about Flowers and whistling. “Goddamn! Lucas! A Republican county attorney! You my daddy!”

  Lucas was feeling okay when he took the hill down into the St. Paul loop. He zigzagged southeast until he got to a chunky red-brick building that had once been a warehouse, then a loft association, and was now a recently trendy condominium.

  One of the good things about the Bucher and Kline cases was that the major crime sites were so close to his house-maybe ten minutes on residential streets; and they were even closer to his office. He knew all the top cops in both cases, and even most of the uniformed guys. In the past couple of years he'd covered cases all over the southern half of Minnesota, on the Iron Range in the north, and in the Red River Valley, which was even farther north and west. Minnesota is a tall state, and driving it can wear a guy out.

  Not these two cases. These were practically on his lawn.

  He was whistling as he walked into the condo. An elderly lady was coming through the inner doors with a shopping bag full of old clothes. He held it for her, she twinkled at him, and he went on inside, skipping past the apartment buzzers.

  Kidd came to the door looking tired and slightly dazed. He had a wrinkled red baby, about the size of a loaf of Healthy Choice bread, draped over one shoulder, on a towel. He was patting the baby's back.

  “Hey…” He seemed slightly taken aback. Every time Lucas had seen him, he'd seemed slightly taken aback.

  “Didn't know you had children,” Lucas said.

  “First one,” Kidd said. “Trying to get a burp. You want to take him?”

  “No, thanks,” Lucas said hastily. “I've got a two-year-old, I just got done with that.”

  “Uh… come on in,” Kidd said, stepping back from the door. Over his shoulder he called, “Lauren? Put on some pants. We've got company. It's the cops.”

  Kidd led the way into the living room. He was a couple inches shorter than Lucas, but broader through the shoulders, and going gray. He'd been a scholarship wrestler at the university when Lucas played hockey. He still looked like he could pull your arms off.

  He also had, Lucas thought, the best apartment in St. Paul, a huge sprawling place put together from two condos, bought when condos were cheap. Now the place was worth a million, if you could get it for that. The balcony looked out over the Mississippi, and windows were open and the faint smell of riverbank carp mixed with the closer odor of spoiled milk, the odor that hangs around babies; and maybe a touch of oil paint, or turpentine.

  “Ah, God,” Kidd called. “Lauren, we're gonna need a change here. He's really wet.

  Ah… shit.”

  “Just a minute…” Lauren was a slender, dark-haired, small-hipped woman with a wide mouth and shower-wet hair down to her shoulders. She was barefoot, wearing a black blouse and faded boot-cut jeans. She came out of the back, buttoning the jeans.

  “You could do it, you ain't crippled,” she said to Kidd.

  Kidd said, “Yeah, yeah. This is Detective Davenport… He's probably got an art problem?”

  This last was phrased as a question, and they both looked at Lucas as Lauren took the baby.

  Lucas nodded. “You heard about the killings up on Summit?”

  “Yea
h. Fuckin' maniacs,” Kidd said.

  “We're wondering if it might not be a cover for a crime…” Lucas explained about the murders, about the china cabinet swept of pots, and his theory that real art experts wouldn't have broken the good stuff, and about getting restorers and antique experts. “But there's this kid, the nephew of one of the dead women, who said he thinks a couple of old paintings are missing from the attic. All he knows is that they're old, and one of them had the word 'reckless' written on the back. Actually, he said it was painted on the back. I wonder if that might mean something to you? You know of any paintings called Recklesst Or databases that might list it? Or anything?”

  Kidd's eyes narrowed, then he said, “Capital r in 'reckless'?”

  “I don't know,” Lucas said. “Should there be?”

  “There was an American painter, first half of the twentieth century named Reckless.

  I might have something on him…”

  Lucas followed him through a studio, into a library, a narrow, darker space, four walls jammed with art books, Lauren and the baby trailing behind. Kidd took down a huge book, flipped through it… “Alphabetical,” he muttered to himself, and he turned more pages, and finally, “Here we go. Stanley Reckless. Sort of funky impressionism.

  Not bad, but not quite the best.”

  He showed Lucas a color illustration, a riverside scene. Next to them, the baby made a bad smell and seemed pleased. Lucas asked, “How much would a painting like that be worth?”

  Kidd shook his head: “We'll have to go to the computer for that… I subscribe to an auction survey service.”

  “I want to hear this,” Lauren said. “Bring the laptop into the baby's room while I change the diaper.” To the baby: “Did you just poop? Did you just poop, you little man? Did you just…”

  Kidd had a black Lenovo laptop in the living room, and they followed Lauren to the baby's room, a bright little cube with its own view of the river. Kidd had painted cheerful, dancing children all around the lemon-colored walls.

  “Really nice,” Lucas said, looking around.

  “Uh.” Kidd brought up the laptop and Lauren began wiping the baby's butt with high-end baby-butt cleaner that Lucas recognized from his own changing table. Then Kidd started typing, and a moment later he said, “Says his paintings are rare. Auction record is four hundred fifteen thousand dollars, that was two years ago, and prices are up since then. He had a relatively small oeuvre. The range is down to thirty-two thousand dollars… but that was for a watercolor.”

  “Four hundred fifteen thousand dollars,” Lucas repeated.

  “Yup.”

  “That seems like a lot for one painting, but then, my wife tells me that I'm out of touch,” Lucas said.

  “Shoot, Kidd makes that much,” Lauren said. “He's not even dead.”

  “Not for one painting,” Kidd said.

  “Not yet…”

  “Jeez, I was gonna ask you how much you'd charge to paint my kid's bedroom,” Lucas said, waving at the walls of the room. “Sorta be out of my range, huh?”

  “Maybe,” Kidd said. “From what I've read, your range is pretty big.”

  Lucas wrote Stanley Reckless and $415,00in his notebook as they drifted out toward the door. “You know,” Lauren said, squinting at him. “I think I met you once, a long time ago, out at the track. You gave me a tip on a horse. This must have been… what? Seven or eight years ago?”

  Lucas studied her face for a minute, then said, “You were wearing cowboy boots?”

  “Yes! I went off to place the bet, and when I got back, you were gone,” Lauren said.

  She touched his arm. “I never got to thank you.”

  “Well…”

  “Enough of that,” Kidd said, and they all laughed.

  “You know, these killings… they might be art pros, but they aren't professional thieves,” Lauren said. “A pro would have gone in there, taken what he wanted, maybe trashed the place to cover up. But he wouldn't have killed anybody. You guys would have sent some new detective over there to write everything down, and he would have come back with a notebook that said, 'Maybe pots stolen,' and nobody would care.”

  Lucas shrugged.

  “Come on. Tell the truth. Would they care? Would anybody really care if some old bat got her pots stolen, and nobody got hurt? Especially if she didn't even know which pots they were?”

  “Probably not,” Lucas said.

  “So they might be art pros, but they weren't professional burglars,” Lauren said.

  “If you kill an old lady, everybody gets excited. Though, I suppose, it could be a couple of goofy little amateur crackheads. Or maybe acquaintances or relatives, who had to kill them.”

  Lucas's forehead wrinkled. “What do you do, Lauren? You weren't a cop?”

  “No, no,” she said. “I'm trying to be a writer.”

  “Novels?”

  “No. I don't have a fictive imagination. Is that a word? Fictive?”

  “I don't know,” Lucas said.

  She bounced the baby a couple of times; stronger than she looked, Lucas thought.

  “No,” she said. “If I can get something published, it'll probably be more on the order of true crime.”

  When Lucas left, Lauren and Kidd came to the door with the baby, and Lauren took the baby's hand and said, “Wave goodbye to the man, wave goodbye…”

  Lucas thought, hmm. A rivulet of testosterone had run into his bloodstream. She was the kind of skinny, cowgirl-looking woman who could make you breathe a little harder; and she did. Something about the tilt of her eyes, as well as her name, reminded him of Lauren Hutton, the best-looking woman in the world. And finally, she made him think about the killers. Her argument was made from common sense, but then, like most writers, she probably knew jack-shit about burglars.

  There were a half-dozen cops at Bucher's, mostly doing clerical work-checking out phone books and answering-machine logs, looking at checks and credit cards, trying to put together a picture of Bucher's financial and social life.

  Lucas found Smith in the music room. He was talking to a woman dressed from head to toe in black, and a large man in a blue seersucker suit with a too-small bow tie under his round chin.

  Smith introduced them, Leslie and Jane Little Widdler, antique experts who ran a shop in Edina. They all shook hands; Leslie was six-seven and fleshy, with fat hands and transparent braces on his teeth. Jane was small, had a short, tight haircut, bony cold hands, and a strangely stolid expression.

  “Figure anything out yet?” Lucas asked.

  'Just getting started,” Jane Widdler said. “There are some very nice things here.

  These damn vandals… they surely don't realize the damage they've done.”

  “To say nothing of the killings,” Lucas said.

  “Oh, well,” Jane said, and waved a hand. She somehow mirrored Lucas's guilty attitude: old ladies came and went, but a Louis XVI gilt-bronze commode went on forever.

  Lucas asked Smith, “Get the insurance papers?”

  “Yeah.” Smith dipped into his briefcase and handed Lucas a sheaf of papers. “Your copy.”

  Lucas told him about Kidd's take on Stanley Reckless. “Between the jewelry and this one painting, we're talking big money, John. We don't even know what else is missing.

  I'm thinking, man, this is way out of Nate Brown's league.”

  Smith said, “Ah, Brown didn't do it. I don't think he's bright enough to resist the way he has been. And I don't think he's mean enough to kill old ladies. He's sort of an old hangout guy.”

  “What's the Reckless painting?” Leslie Widdler asked, frowning. “It's not on the insurance list.”

  “Should it be?”

  “Certainly. A genuine Stanley Reckless painting would be extremely valuable. Where was it hung? Did they take the frame, or…”

  “Wasn't hung,” Lucas said. “It would have been in storage.”

  “In storage? You're sure?”

  “That's what we've been told,” Lucas s
aid. “Why?”

  Widdler pursed his lips around his braces. “The thing is, some of these paintings here, I mean… frankly, there's a lot of crap. I'm sure Mrs. Bucher had them hung for sentimental reasons.”

  “Which are purely legitimate and understandable,” Jane Widdler said, while managing to imply that they weren't.

  “… but a genuine Reckless shouldn't have been in storage. My goodness…” Widdler looked at the high ceiling, his lips moving, then down at Lucas: “A good Reckless painting, today, could be worth a half-million dollars.”

  Smith to Lucas: “It's piling up, isn't it? A pro job.”

  “I think so,” Lucas said. “Professional, but maybe a little nuts. No fight, no struggle, no sounds, no signs of panic. Whack. They're dead. Then the killers take their time going through the house.”

  “Pretty goddamned cold.”

  “Pretty goddamned big money,” Lucas said. “We both know people who've killed somebody for thirty bucks and for no reason at all. But this…”

  Smith nodded. “That Ignace guy from the Star Tribune really nailed us. We've got calls coming in from all over.”

  “New York Times?”

  “Not yet, but I'm waiting,” Smith said.

  “Best find the killer, John,” Lucas said.

  “I know.” Smith wasn't happy: still didn't have anything to work with, and the case was getting old. “By the way, Carol Ann Barker's upstairs, checking out Bucher's stuff.”

  “Barker?” Lucas didn't remember the name.

  “The niece, from L.A.,” Smith said. “She's the executor of the will. She's, uh, an actress.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Character actress, I think. She's got a funny nose.” He glanced at the Widdlers.

  “I didn't actually mean that…”

  “That's all right,” Jane Widdler said, with a wooden smile. “Her nose is quite small.”

  Lucas wanted to talk to Barker. On the way up the stairs, he thumbed through the insurance papers, which, in addition to the standard boilerplate, included a ten-page inventory of household items. Ten pages weren't enough. He noticed that none of the furniture or paintings was valued at less than $10,000, which meant that a lot of stuff had been left off.