Invisible prey ld-17

by John Sandford

  “Can you manipulate somebody into something, if he knows that you're manipulating him, and wants to be?” Lucas asked, rolling up on his side.

  “That's a very feminine thought, Lucas. I'm proud of you,” Weather said.

  “Hey,” Lucas said, catching her hand and guiding it. “Feminine this.”

  Another great day, blue sky almost no wind, dew sparkling on the lawn, the neighbor's sprinkler system cutting in. Sam loved the sprinkler system and could mimic its chi-chi-chi-chiiiii sound almost perfectly.

  Lucas got the paper off the porch, pulled it out of the plastic sack, and unrolled it. Nothing in the Star Tribune about Kline. Nothing at all by Ruffe. Had he misfired? Lucas never liked to get up early-though he had no problem staying up until dawn, or longer-but was out of the house at 6:30, nudging out of the driveway just behind Weather. Weather was doing a series of scar revisions on a burn case. The patient was in the hospital overnight to get some sodium numbers fixed, and was being waked as she left the driveway. The patient would be on the table by 7:30, the first of three operations she'd do before noon.

  Lucas, on the other hand, was going fishing. He took the truck north on Cretin to I-94, and turned into the rising sun; and watched it rise higher for a bit more than an hour as he drove past incoming rush-hour traffic, across the St. Croix, past cows and buffalo and small towns getting up. He left the interstate at Wisconsin Exit 52, continuing toward Chippewa, veering around the town and up the Chippewa River into Jim Falls.

  A retired Minneapolis homicide cop had a summer home just below the dam. He was traveling in Wyoming with his wife, but told Lucas where he'd hidden the keys for the boat.

  Lucas was on the river a little after eight, in the cop's eighteen-foot Lund, working the trolling motor with his foot, casting the shoreline with a Billy Bait on a Thorne Brothers custom rod.

  Lucas had always been interested in newspapers-thought he might have been a reporter if he hadn't become a cop-and had gotten to the point where he could sense something wrong with a newspaper story. If a story seemed reticent, somehow; deliberately oblique; if the writer did a little tap dance; then, Lucas could say, “Ah, there's something going on.” The writer knew something he couldn't report, at least, not yet.

  Lucas, and a lot of other cops, developed the same sense about crimes. A solution was obvious, but wasn't right. The story was hinky Of course, cops sometimes had that feeling and it turned out that they were wrong. The obvious was the truth. But usually, when it seemed like something was wrong, something was.

  There'd been a car at the murder scene-if there hadn't been, then somebody had been running down the street with a sixty-pound printer on his back. So there'd been a car. But if there'd been a car, why wasn't a lot of the other small stuff taken? Like the TV in the bedroom, a nice thirty-two-inch flat screen. Could have carried it out under one arm.

  Or those video games.

  On the other hand, if the killers were professionals after cash and easy-to-hock jewelry, why hadn't they found the safe, and at least tried to open it? It wasn't that well hidden… Why had they spent so much time in the house? Why did they steal that fuckin' printer? The printer bothered him. He put the fishing rod down, pulled his cell phone, was amazed to see he actually had a signal, and called back to the office, to Carol.

  “Listen, what's that intern's name? Sandy? Can you get her? Great. Get the call list going: I want to know if anybody in the Metro area found a Hewlett-Packard printer.

  Have her call the garbage haulers, too. We're looking for a Hewlett-Packard printer that was tossed in a dumpster. You can get the exact model number from John Smith.

  And if somebody saw one, ask if there's anything else that might have come from Bucher's place, like a DVD player. Yeah. Yeah, tell everybody it's the Bucher case. Yeah, I know. Get her started, give her some language to explain what we're doing.”

  He'd no more than hung up when he had another thought, fished out the phone, and called Carol again. “Has anyone shown Sandy how to run the computer? Okay. After she does the call list, get her to pull every unsolved murder in the Upper Midwest for the last five years. Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin. Might as well throw in the Dakotas.

  Don't do Illinois, there'd be too much static from Chicago. Have her sift them for characteristics similar to the Bucher case. But don't tell her where I am-don't tell her about Donaldson. I want to see if she catches it. No, I'm not trying to fuck her over, I just want to know how good a job she did of sifting them. Yeah. Goodbye.”

  Feeling as though he'd accomplished something, he floated the best part of a mile down the river, and then, with some regret, motored back up the opposite shore to the cop's house and the dock.

  The river was cool, green, friendly. He could spend a lot of time there, he thought, just floating. Hadn't seen a single muskie; usually didn't-which meant that he didn't smell like fish slime, and wouldn't have to stop at a McDonald's to wash up.

  Despite the interruption of the cell-phone call, he had seen a mink, several ducks, a brooding Canada goose, and a nearly empty Fanta orange bottle, floating down the river. He'd hooked it out, emptied it, and carried it up to the truck. Returned the keys to their hiding spot, put away the rod, wrote a thank-you note to the cop, and left it in the mailbox.

  Not a bad way to start the day, he thought, rumbling up the hill to the main road.

  Took a right and headed into Chippewa.

  The Donaldson mansion was on the hill on the west side of town. There were other big houses scattered around, but the Donaldson was the biggest. Frazier was already there, leaning against an unmarked car that everyone but a blind man would recognize as a cop car, talking on a cell phone. Lucas parked, got out of the truck, locked it, and walked over.

  Frazier was a short man in his fifties, stout, with iron gray hair cut into a flattop.

  He was wearing khaki slacks, a red golf shirt, and a blue sport coat. His nose was red, and spidery red veins webbed his cheekbones. He looked like he should be carrying a bowling bag. He took the phone away from his mouth and asked, “Davenport?”

  Lucas nodded and Frazier said into the phone, “Could be a while, but I don't know how long.” He hung up, grinned at Lucas as they shook hands, and said, “My old lady.

  My first priority is to get the dry cleaning and the cat food. My second priority is to solve the Donaldson killing.”

  “You gotta have your priorities,” Lucas said. He looked up at the mansion. “That's a hell of a house,” Lucas said. “Just like the Bucher house. When are the Booths…?”

  “Probably about seven minutes from now,” Frazier said, looking at his watch. “They always keep me waiting about seven or eight minutes, to make a point, I think. We're the public servants, and they are… I don't know. The Dukes of Earl, or something.”

  “Like that,” Lucas said.

  “Yup.” He handed Lucas a brown-paper portfolio, as thick as a metropolitan phone book. “This is every piece of paper we have on the Donaldson case. Took me two hours to Xerox it. Most of it's bullshit, but I thought you might as well have it all.”

  “Let me put it in the truck,” Lucas said.

  He ran the paper back to the truck, then caught Frazier halfway up the sidewalk to the house. “Isn't a hell of a lot to see, but you might as well see it,” Frazier said.

  Frazier had keys. Inside, the house smelled empty, the odor of dry wallpaper and floor wax. The furniture was sparse and to Lucas's eye, undistinguished, except that it was old. The few paintings on the walls were mostly oil portraits gone dark with age. As they walked around, their footfalls echoed down the hallways; the only other sound was the mechanical whir of an air-conditioner fan.

  “What's going on here is that the house isn't worth all that much,” Frazier said.

  “It'd need a lot of updating before you'd want to take out a mortgage on it. New wiring, new plumbing, new heating system, new roof, new windows, new siding. Basically, it'd cost you a million bucks to get the place into tip-top
shape.”

  “But the woman who lived here was rich?”

  “Very rich. She was also very old,” Frazier said. “Her friends say she didn't want to be annoyed by a lot of renovation when she only had a few years left. So. She didn't do some things, and the house was perfectly fine for the way she used it.

  Went to Palm Beach in the winter, and so on.”

  After Donaldson was murdered, Frazier said, the Booths tried to sell it, but it didn't sell. Then somebody came up with the idea that the Booths could donate the place to the city as a rich-lumber-family museum. That idea limped along and then somebody else suggested it could be a venue for arts programs.

  “Basically, what was going on is, the Booths couldn't sell it, so they were encouraging all this other bullshit. They'd donate the house and a few paintings and old tables to the city at some ridiculous valuation, like two million bucks, which they would then deduct from their income tax,” Frazier said. “That'd save them, what, about eight hundred thousand dollars? If they can't get that done, if the house just sits here and rots… well, what they've got is about two city lots at fifty thousand dollars each, and it'd probably cost them half of that to get the place torn down and carted away. In the meantime, they pay property tax.”

  “Life is tough and then you die,” Lucas said.

  “Wasn't tough for the Booths,” Frazier grunted. “They've been rich forever… You want to see where the murder was?”

  Donaldson had been killed in the kitchen. There was nothing to see but slightly dusty hardwood floors and appliances that had stepped out of 1985. The refrigerator and stove were a shade of tobacco-juice yellow that Lucas remembered from his first house.

  “Very cold,” Frazier said. “I'd talked myself into the idea that it was a traveling killer, passing through, saw a light and wanted money and a sandwich, and went up and killed her with a crappy.22. Stood there and ate the sandwich and looked at the body and never gave a shit. In my brain-movie, he so doesn't give a shit, he doesn't even give a shit if he was caught.”

  “Any proof on the sandwich?” Lucas asked, joking.

  Frazier wasn't joking: “Yeah. There was a bread crumb in the middle of Donaldson's back. Loose. Not stuck on her blouse, or anything. It was like it fell on her, after she hit the floor. Sea-Bird brand sourdough bread. There was a loaf of it on the counter.”

  “Huh.” Lucas scratched his forehead. “Let me tell you about these oatmeal cookies…”

  The Booths arrived ten minutes later, in a black Mercedes-Benz S550. Landford Booth looked like a terrier, as short as Frazier, but thin, with small sharp eyes, a bristly white mustache, and a long nose with oversized pores. He wore a navy blue double-breasted jacket with silver buttons, and gray slacks. Margaret Booth had silvery hair, a face tightened by cosmetic surgery, and pale blue eyes. She wore a cranberry-colored dress and matching shoes, and blinked a lot, as though she were wearing contact lenses.

  Landford was a well-tended seventy-five, Lucas thought. His wife about the same, or possibly a bit older.

  Lucas and Frazier had just come back from the kitchen and found the Booths standing in the open front door, Margaret's hand on Landford's arm, and Landford cleared his throat and said, “Well? Have you discovered anything new?”

  The Booths knew almost nothing-but not quite nothing.

  Lucas asked about missing antiques.

  Margaret said, “Claire was a collector-and a seller. Pieces would come and go, all the time. One day there'd be a sideboard in the front hall, and the next week, there'd be a music cabinet. One week it'd be Regency, the next week Gothic Revival. She claimed she always made a profit on her sales, but I personally doubt that she did. I suspect that what she really wanted was the company-people buying and selling. People to argue with and to talk about antiques with. She considered herself a connoisseur.”

  “Was anything missing, as far as you know?” Lucas asked.

  “Not as far as we know-but we don't know that much. We have an insurance list, and of course we had to make an inventory of her possessions for the IRS,” Landford said.

  “There were items on the insurance list that weren't in the house, but there were things in the house that weren't on the insurance list. The fact is, it's difficult to tell.”

  “How about sales records?”

  “We have a big pile of them, but they're a mess,” Landford said. “I suppose we could go back and check purchases, and what she had when she died, against sales. Might be able to pinpoint something that way,” Landford said.

  “Could you do that?” Lucas asked.

  “We could get our accountant to take a look, she'd be better at it,” Landford said.

  “Might take a couple of weeks. The papers are a mess.”

  The Booths made one claim, and made it to Lucas, ignoring Frazier as though he were an inconvenient stump: “Somebody should look carefully at Amity Anderson. I'm sure she was involved,” Margaret Booth said.

  Landford quivered: “There is no doubt about it. Although our sheriff's department seems to doubt it.”

  Behind their backs, Frazier rolled his eyes. Lucas said to Margaret: “Tell me why she must have been involved.”

  “It's obvious,” she said. “If you go through all the possibilities, you realize, in the end, that the killer-person, whoever he was, was inside the house with Claire.”

  She put the last phrase in vocal italics. “Claire would never let anybody inside, not when she was alone, unless she knew them well.”

  Landford: “The police checked all her friends, and friends-of-friends, and everybody was cleared. There was no sign of forced entry, and Claire always kept the doors locked. Ergo, Amity Anderson gave somebody a key. She had quite the sexual history, Claire used to tell me. I believe Amity gave the house key to one of her boyfriends, told him where Claire kept her cash-she always liked to have some cash on hand-and then went to Chicago as an alibi. It's perfectly clear to me that's what happened.”

  “Exactly,” Margaret said.

  “How much cash?” Lucas asked.

  “A couple of thousand, maybe three or four, depending,” Landford said. “If she'd just gotten back from somewhere, or was about to go, she'd have more on hand. That doesn't sound like much to you and me…” He hesitated, looking at the cops, as though he sensed that he might have insulted them. Then he pushed on, “… but to a person like Amity Anderson, it probably seemed like a fortune.”

  “Where is Anderson now?” Lucas asked.

  Frazier cleared his throat. “Her address is in the file I gave you. But you know where the Ford plant is, the one by the river in St. Paul?”

  “Yes.”

  “She lives maybe… six, seven blocks… straight back away from the river, up that hill. Bunch of older houses. You know where I mean?”

  “It's about a ten-minute walk from my house,” Lucas said, “If you're walking slow.” “How far from Bucher's?” Landford asked.

  “Five minutes, by car,” Lucas said.

  “Holy shit,” Frazier said.

  They talked for another ten minutes, and spent some more time looking around the house with the Booths, but the crime had been back far enough that Lucas could learn nothing by walking through the house. He said goodbye to the Booths, gave them a card, and when they'd left, waited until Frazier had locked up the house.

  “Why isn't Amity Anderson involved?” Lucas asked.

  “I'm not saying it's impossible,” Frazier said. “But Amity Anderson is a mousy little girl who majored in art and couldn't get a job. She wound up being Donaldson's secretary, though really, she was more like a servant. She did a little of everything, and got paid not much. One reason we don't think her boyfriend did it is that there's no evidence that she had a boyfriend.”

  “Ever?”

  “Not when she lived here. Mrs. Donaldson had a live-in maid, and she told us that Amity never went anywhere,” Frazier said. “Couldn't afford it, apparently had no reason to. In any case, she had no social life-didn't
even get personal phone calls.

  Go talk to her. You'll see. You'll walk away with frost on your dick.”

  On the way back to the Cities, Lucas got a call from Ruffe Ignace.

  “I got a tip that you've been investigating Burt Kline for statutory rape,” Ignace said. “Can you tell me when you're gonna bust him?”

  “Man, I don't know what you're talking about,” Lucas said, grinning into the phone.

  “Ah, c'mon. I've talked to six people and they all say you're in it up to your hips,” Ignace said. “Are you going to testify for the Dakota County grand jury?”

  “They've got themselves a grand jury?” Lucas eased the car window down, and held the phone next to the whistling slipstream. “Ruffe, you're breaking up. I can barely hear you.”

  “I'll take that as a 'no comment,'“ Ignace said. “Davenport said, 'No comment, you worthless little newspaper prick,' but confirmed that he has sold all of his stock in Kline's boat-waxing business.”

  “You get laid the other night?” Lucas asked.

  “Yes. Now: will you deny that you're investigating Kline?” Lucas kept his mouth shut, and after ten seconds of silence, Ignace said, “All right, you're not denying it.”

  “Not denying or confirming,” Lucas said. “You can quote me on that.”

  “Good. Because that confirms. Is this chick…” Pause, paper riffling, “… Jesse Barth… Is she really hot?”

  “Ah, fuck.”

  “Thank you,” Ruffe said. “That'd be Jesse with two esses.”

  “Listen, Ruffe, I don't know where you're getting this, but honest to God, you'll never get another word out of me if you stick me with the leak,” Lucas said. “Put it on Dakota County.”

  “I'm not going to put it on anybody,” Ignace said. “It's gonna be like mystery meat-it's gonna come out of nowhere and wind up on the reader's breakfast plate.”

  “That's not good enough, because people are going to draw conclusions,” Lucas argued.

  “If they conclude that I leaked it, I'll be in trouble, and you won't get another word out of me or anybody else in the BCA. Let people think it's Dakota County. Whisper it in their ear. You don't have to say the words.”