Invisible prey ld-17 Read online

  Bad idea, Jane thought: but she yearned for the money.

  Three hours later, the Widdlers were rolling again.

  “There is,” Leslie said, his hands at ten o'clock and four on the wood-rimmed wheel of his Lexus, “a substantial element of insanity in this. No coveralls, no gloves, no hairnets. We are shedding DNA every step we take.”

  “But it's eighty percent that we won't have to do anything,” Jane said. “Doing nothing would be best. We pooh-pooh the newspaper clipping, we scare her with the police, with the idea of a trial. Then, when we get past the lumpy parts, we might come back to her. We could do that in our own good time. Or maybe she'll just drop dead. She's old enough.”

  They were on Lexington Avenue in St. Paul, headed toward Como Park, a half hour past sunset. The summer afternoon lingered, stretching toward ten o'clock. Though it was one of the major north-south streets, Lexington was quiet at night, a few people along the sidewalks, light traffic. Marilyn Coombs's house was off the park, on Iowa, a narrower, darker street. They'd park a block away, and walk; it was a neighborhood for walking.

  “Remember about the DNA,” Leslie said. “Just in case. No sudden moves. They can find individual hairs. Think about gliding in there. Let's not walk all over the house. Try not to touch anything. Don't pick anything up.”

  “I have as much riding on this as you do,” Jane said, cool air in her voice. “Focus on what we're doing. Watch the windows. Let me do most of the talking.”

  “The DNA…”

  “Forget about the DNA. Think about anything else.”

  There was a bit of a snarl in her voice. Leslie glanced at her, in the little snaps of light coming in from the street, and thought about what a delicate neck she had…

  They were coming up on the house. They'd been in it a half-dozen times with the quilt-study group. “What about the trigger?” Leslie asked.

  “Same one. Touch your nose. If I agree, I'll touch my nose,” Jane said.

  “I'll have to be behind her. Whatever I do, I'll have to be behind her.”

  “If that finial is loose…” The finial was a six-inch oak ball on the bottom post of Coombs's stairway banister. The stairway came down in the hallway, to the right of the inner porch door. “If it's just plugged in there, the way most of them are…”

  “Can't count on it,” Leslie said. “I'm not sure that a competent medical examiner would buy it anyway.”

  “Old lady, dead at the bottom of the stairs, forehead fracture that fits the finial, hair on the finial… What's there to argue about?” Jane asked.

  “I'll see when I go in,” he said. “We might get away with it. They sure as shit won't believe she fell on a kitchen knife.”

  “Watch the language, darling. Remember, we're trying.” Trying for elegance. That was their watchword for the year, written at the top of every page of their Kliban Cat Calendar: Elegance! Better business through Elegance! Jane added, “Two things I don't like about the knife idea. First, it's not instantaneous. She could still scream…”

  “Not if her throat was cut,” Leslie said. Leslie liked the knife idea; the idea made him hot.

  “Second,” Jane continued, “She could be spraying blood all over the place. If we track it, or get some on our clothes… it could be a mess. With the finial, it's boom.

  She goes down. We won't even have to move her, if we do it right.”

  “On the way out.”

  “On the way out. We're calm, cool, and collected while we're there,” Jane said. She could see it. “We talk. If it doesn't work, we make nice, and we get her to take us to the door.”

  “I walk behind her, get the glove on.”

  “Yes. If the finial comes loose, you either have to hit her on the back of her skull, low, or right on her forehead. Maybe… I'm thinking of how people fall. Maybe we'll have to break a finger or something. A couple of fingers. Like she caught them on the railing on the way down.”

  Leslie nodded, touched the brakes for a cyclist in the street. “I could pick her up, and we could scratch her fingernails on the railing, maybe put some carpet fiber in the other hand. She's small, I could probably lift her close enough, all we need to do is get some varnish under a fingernail…”

  “It's a plan,” Jane said. “If the finial comes loose.”

  “Still, the knife has a certain appeal,” Leslie said, after a moment of silence.

  “Two older women, their skulls crushed, three days apart. Somebody is going to think it's a pretty heavy coincidence. The knife is a different MO and it looks stupid. Another little junkie thing. And if nothing is taken…”

  “Probably be better to take something, if we do it with the knife,” Jane said. “I mean, then there'll be no doubt that it's murder. Why kill her? To rob her. We don't want a mystery. We want a clear story. Kill her, take her purse. Get out. With the finial, if they figure out it was murder, there'll be a huge mystery.”

  “And they'll see it as smart. They'll know it wasn't some little junkie.”

  Jane balanced the two. “I think, the finial,” Jane said. “If the finial works, we walk away clear. Nobody even suspects. With the knife, they'll be looking for something, chasing down connections.”

  Then, for about the fifteenth time since they left home, Leslie said, “If the finial comes out…”

  “Probably won't do it anyway,” Jane said. “We'll scare the bejesus out of the old bat.”

  Marilyn Coombs lived in a nice postwar home, the kind with a big picture window and two-car garage in back, once unattached, now attached with a breezeway that was probably built in the '60s. The siding was newer plastic, with heated plastic gutters at the eaves. The front yard was narrow, decorative, and steep. Five concrete steps got you up on the platform, and another five to the outer porch door. The backyard, meant for boomers when they were babies, was larger and fenced.

  They climbed the steps in the yard, up to the porch door, through the porch door; in these houses, the doorbell was inside the porch. On the way up, Leslie pulled a cotton gardening glove over his right hand, and pushed the doorbell with a glove finger, then slipped the hand into his jacket pocket.

  Coombs was eighty, Jane thought, or even eighty-five. Her hair had a pearly white quality, nearly liquid, fine as cashmere, as she walked under the living room lights.

  She was thin, and had to tug the door open with both hands, and smiled at them: “How are you? Jane, Leslie. Long time no see.”

  “Marilyn…”

  “I have cookies in the kitchen. Oatmeal. I made them this afternoon.” Coombs squinted past Leslie at the sidewalk. “You didn't see any gooks out there, did you?”

  “No.” Leslie looked at Jane and shrugged, and they both looked out at the empty sidewalk.

  “Gooks are moving in. They get their money from heroin,” Coombs said, pushing the door shut. “I'm thinking about getting an alarm. All the neighbors have them now.”

  She turned toward the kitchen. As they passed the bottom of the stairs, Leslie reached out with the gloved hand, slipped it around the bottom of the finial, and lifted.

  It came free. It was the size of a slo-pitch softball, but much heavier. Jane, who'd turned her head, nodded, and Leslie let it drop back into place.

  A platter of oatmeal cookies waited on a table in the breakfast nook. They sat down, Coombs passed the dish, and Jane and Leslie both took one, and Leslie bolted his and mumbled, “Good.”

  “So, Marilyn,” Jane said. “This newspaper clipping.”

  “Yes, yes, it's right here.” Coombs was wearing a housecoat. She fumbled in the pocket, extracted a wad of Kleenex, a bottle of Aleve, and finally, a clipping. She passed it to Jane, her hand shaking a bit. Leslie took another cookie.

  A noted Chippewa Falls art collector and heir to the Thune brewing fortune was found shot to death in her home Wednesday morning by relatives…

  “They never caught anybody. They didn't have any leads,” Coombs said. She ticked off the points on her fingers: “She came from a rich
family, just like Connie. She was involved in quilting, just like Connie.

  She collected antiques, just like Connie. She lived with a maid, like Connie, but Claire's maid wasn't there that night, thank goodness for her.”

  “She was shot,” Jane said. “Connie was killed with a pipe or a baseball bat or something.”

  “I know, I know, but maybe they had to be quieter,” Coombs said. “Or maybe they wanted to change it, so nobody would suspect.”

  “We really worry about getting involved with the police,” Jane said. “If they talk to you, and then to us, because of the quilt connection, and they say, 'Look, here's some people who know all of the murdered people… then they'll begin to suspect.

  Even though we're innocent. And then they might take a closer look at the Armstrong quilts. We really don't want that.” Coombs's eyes flicked away. “I'd feel so guilty if somebody else got hurt. Or if these people got away scot-free because of me,” she said.

  “So would I,” Jane said. “But…”

  And Coombs said, “But…”

  They talked about it for a while, trying to work the old woman around, and while she was deferential, she was also stubborn. Finally, Jane looked at Leslie and touched her nose. Leslie nodded, rubbed the side of his nose, and said to Coombs, “I have to say, you've talked me around. We've got to be really, really careful, though.

  They've got some smart police officers working on this.”

  He stopped and stuffed another oatmeal cookie in his mouth, mumbling around the crumbs.

  “We need to keep the quilts out of it. Maybe I could send an anonymous note mentioning the antique connection, and leave the quilts out of it.”

  Coombs brightened. She liked that idea. Jane smiled and shook her head and said, “Leslie's always liked you too much. I think we should stay away from the police, but if you're both for it…”

  Coombs shuffled OUT to the front door as they left, leading the way. In the rear, Leslie pulled on the cotton gloves, and at the door, Jane stepped past Coombs as Leslie pulled the finial out of the banister post. He said, “Hey, Marilyn?”

  When she turned, he hit her on the forehead with the finial ball. Hit her hard. She bounced off Jane and landed at the foot of the stairs. They both looked at her for a moment. Her feet made a quivering run, almost as though dog-paddling, then stopped.

  “She dead?” Jane asked.

  Leslie said, “Gotta be. I swatted her like a fuckin' fly with a fuckin' bowling ball.”

  “Elegance!” Jane snapped.

  “Fuck that…” Leslie was breathing hard. He squatted, watching the old lady, watching her, seeing never a breath. After a long two minutes, he looked up and said, “She's gone.”

  “Pretty good. Never made a sound,” Jane said. She noticed that Leslie's bald spot was spreading.

  “Yeah.” Leslie could see hair, a bit of skin and possibly a speck of blood on the wood of the finial ball. He stood up, turned it just so, and slipped it back on the mounting down in the banister post, and tapped it down tight. The hair and skin were on the inside of the ball, where Coombs might have struck her head if she'd fallen.

  “Fingers?” he asked. “Break the fingers?”

  “I don't think we should touch her,” Jane said. “She fell perfectly… What we could do…” She pulled off one of Coombs's slippers and tossed it on the bottom stair.

  “Like she tripped on the toe.”

  “I'll buy that,” Leslie said.

  “So…”

  “Give me a minute to look around,” Jane said. “Just a minute.”

  “Lord, Jane…”

  “She was an old lady,” Jane said. “She might have had something good.”

  Out in the car, they drove fifty yards, turned onto Lexington, went half a mile, then Leslie pulled into a side street, continued to a dark spot, killed the engine.

  “What?” Jane asked, though she suspected. They weren't talking Elegance here.

  Leslie unsnapped his seat belt, pushed himself up to loosen his pants, unzipped his fly. “Gimme a little hand, here. Gimme a little hand.”

  “God, Leslie.”

  “Come on, goddamnit, I'm really hurtin',” he said.

  “I won't do it if you continue to use that kind of language,” Jane said.

  “Just do it,” he said.

  Jane unsnapped her own seat belt, reached across, then said, “What did you do with that package of Kleenex? It must be there in the side pocket…”

  “Fuck the Kleenex,” Leslie groaned.

  The next two days were brutal. Kline was hot, and Lucas had no time for the Bucher case. He talked to Smith both days, getting updates, but there wasn't much movement.

  The papers were getting bad tempered about it and Smith was getting defensive.

  Reports came in from the insurance companies and from the Department of Corrections; the halfway house was looking like a bad bet. The St. Paul cops did multiple interviews with relatives, who were arriving for the funeral and to discuss the division of the Bucher goodies. There were rumors of interfamilial lawsuits.

  Despite the onset of bad feelings, none of the relatives had accused any of the others of being near St. Paul at the time of the murder. They'd been more or less evenly divided between Santa Barbara and Palm Beach, with one weirdo at his apartment in Paris.

  All of them had money, Smith said. While Aunt Connie's inheritance would be a nice maraschino cherry on the sundae, they already had the ice cream.

  Lucas had three long interviews over the two days, and twice as many meetings.

  The first interview went badly.

  Kathy Barth had both tits and ass: and perhaps a bit too much of each, as she slipped toward forty. Her daughter, Jesse, had gotten her momma's genes, but at sixteen, everything was tight, and when she walked, she quivered like a bowl of cold Jell-O.

  While she talked like a teenager, and walked like a teenager, and went around plugged into an iPod, Jesse had the face of a bar-worn thirty-year-old: too grainy, too used, with a narrow down-turned sullen mouth and eyes that looked like she was afraid that somebody might hit her.

  At the first interview, she and Kathy Barth sat behind the shoulder of their lawyer, who was running through a bunch of mumbo-jumbo: “… conferring to see if we can decide exactly what happened and when, and if it really makes any sense to continue this investigation…”

  Virgil Flowers, a lean, tanned blond man dressed in jeans, a blue cotton shirt with little yellow flowers embroidered on it, and scuffed black cowboy boots, said, “We've already got her on tape, Jimbo.”

  “That would be James' to you, Officer,” the lawyer said, pretending to be offended.

  Flowers looked at Lucas, “The old Jimster here is trying to put the screws to Kline.”

  He looked back at the lawyer. “What'd you find? He's got some kind of asset we didn't know about?” His eyes came back to Lucas: “I say we take a research guy, pull every tax record we can find, run down every asset Kline has got, and attach it. Do a real estate search, put Kline on the wall…”

  “Why do you want to steal the rightful compensation from this young woman?” the lawyer demanded. “It's not going to do her any good if Burt Kline goes to jail and that's it. She may need years of treatment-years!-if it's true that Mr. Kline had sexual contact with her. Which, of course, we're still trying to determine.”

  “Motherfucker,” Flowers said.

  The lawyer, shocked-shocked-turned to Jesse and said, “Put your hands over your ears.”

  Jesse just looked at Flowers, twisted a lock of her hair between her fingers, and stuck a long pink tongue out at him. Flowers grinned back.

  “She's hot,” Flowers said when they left the house. They had to step carefully, because a yellow-white dog with bent-over ears, big teeth, and a bad attitude was chained to a stake in the center of the yard.

  “She's sixteen years old,” Lucas said, watching the dog.

  “Us Jews bat mitzvah our women when they're fourteen, and after
that, they're up for grabs,” Flowers said. “Sixteen's no big thing, in the right cultural context.”

  “You're a fuckin' Presbyterian, Virgil, and you live in Minnesota.”

  “Oh, yeah. Ya got me there, boss,” Flowers said. “What do we do next?”

  The second interview was worse, if you didn't like to see old men cry.

  Burt Kline sat in his heavy leather chair, all the political photos on the walls behind him, all the plaques, the keys, the letters from presidents, and put his face in his hands, rocked back and forth, and wept. Nothing faked about it. His son, a porky twenty-three-year-old and heir apparent, kept smacking one meaty fist into the palm of the other hand. He'd been a football player at St. Johns, and wore a St. Johns T-shirt, ball cap, and oversized belt buckle.

  Burt Kline, blubbering: “She's just a girl, how could you think…”

  Flowers yawned and looked out the window. Lucas said, “Senator Kline…”

  “I-I-l d-d-didn't do it,” Kline sobbing. “I swear to God, I never touched the girl.

  This is all a lie…”

  “It's a fuckin' lie, he didn't do it, those bitches are trying to blackmail us,” Burt Jr. shouted.

  “There's that whole thing about the semen and the DNA,” Flowers said.

  The blubbering intensified and Kline swiveled his chair toward his desk and dropped his head on it, with a thump like a pumpkin hitting a storm door. “That's got to be some kind of mistake,” he wailed.

  “You're trying to frame us,” Burt Jr. said. “You and that whole fuckin' bunch of tree-hugging motherfuckers. That so-called lab guy is probably some left-wing nut…”

  “Here's the thing, Senator Kline,” Lucas said, ignoring the kid. “You know we've got no choice. We've got to send it to a grand jury. Now we can send it to a grand jury here in Ramsey County, and you know what that little skunk will do with it.”

  “Oh, God…”

  “Just not right,” Burt Jr. said, smacking his fist into his palm. His face was so red that Lucas wondered about his blood pressure. Lucas kept talking to the old man: “Or, Jesse Barth said you once took her on a shopping trip to the Burnsville Mall and bought her some underwear and push-up bras…”