Invisible Prey

by John Sandford

  Leslie’s eyebrows went up: “You mean to rub it in? Mmmm. You are such a bitch sometimes. I like it.” He moved up to her, slipped his hand inside her morning slacks, which were actually the bottoms of a well-washed Shotokan karate gi, down through her pubic hair.

  She widened her stance a bit, put her butt back against the counter, bit her lip, made a look, the best she could, considering the Botox, of semi-ecstasy. “Rub it in, big guy,” she whispered, the smoothie almost forgotten.

  BUT AS LESLIE was inclined to say, the Lord giveth, and the Lord is damn well likely to taketh it away in the next breath. They spent the morning at the shop, calling customers and other dealers, dealing with bills, arguing with the State Farm agent about their umbrella policy. At noon, they stopped at a sandwich shop for Asiago roast-beef sandwiches on sourdough bread, then headed for St. Paul.

  They were driving east on I-494 in Jane’s Audi A4, which she now referred to as “that piece of junk,” when another unwelcome call came in. Jane fumbled her cell phone out and looked at the screen. The caller ID said Marilyn Coombs.

  “Marilyn Coombs,” she said to Leslie.

  “It’s that damned story,” Leslie said.

  Jane punched the answer button, said, “Hello?”

  MARILYN COOMBS WAS an old lady, who, in Jane’s opinion, should have been dead a long time ago. Her voice was weak and thready: she said, “Jane? Have you heard about Connie Bucher?”

  “Just read it in the paper this morning,” Jane said. “We were shocked.”

  “It’s the same thing that happened to Claire Donaldson,” Coombs whimpered. “Don’t you think we should call the police?”

  “Well, gosh, I’d hate to get involved with the police,” Jane said. “We’d probably have to wind up hiring lawyers, and we wouldn’t want…you know.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t say anything about that,” Coombs said. “But I got my clipping of when Claire was killed, and Jane, they’re just alike.”

  “I thought Claire was shot,” Jane said. “That’s what I heard.”

  “Well, except for that, they’re the same,” Coombs said. Jane rolled her eyes.

  “You know, I didn’t know Claire that well,” Jane said.

  “I thought you were friends…”

  “No, no, we knew who she was, through the quilt-study group, but we didn’t really know her. Anyway, I’d like to see the clipping. I could probably tell you better about the police, if I could see the clipping.”

  “I’ve got it right here,” Coombs said.

  “Well. Why don’t we stop by this evening,” Jane suggested. “It’ll probably be late, we’re out on an appointment right now. Let me take a look at it.”

  “If you think that’d be right,” Coombs said.

  “Well, we don’t want to make a mistake.”

  “Okay, then,” Coombs said. “After dinner.”

  “It’ll be later than that, I’m afraid. We’re on our way to Eau Claire. What time do you go to bed?”

  “Not until after the TV news.”

  “Okay. We’ll be back before then. Probably…about dark.”

  THAT GAVE THEM something to talk about. “Is it all falling apart, Leslie? Is it all falling apart?” Jane asked. She’d been in drama club, and was a former vice president of the Edina Little Theater.

  “Of course not,” Leslie said. “We just need to do some cleanup.”

  Jane sighed. Then she said, “Do you think the Hermès is too much?” She was wearing an Hermès scarf with ducks on it, and the ducks had little red collars and were squawking at each other.

  “No, no. I think it looks quite good on you.”

  “I hope it’s not falling apart on us,” Jane said.

  “Most cops are dumber than a bowl of spaghetti,” Leslie said. “Not to worry, sweet.”

  Still, Jane, with her delicate elbow on the leather bolster below the Audi’s window, her fingers along her cheek, couldn’t help think, if it were all coming to an end, if there might not be some way she could shift all the blame to Leslie.

  Perhaps even…She glanced at him, speculatively, at his temple, and thought, No. That’s way premature.

  Then they met the cops. And talked about missing antiques, including a painting by Stanley Reckless.

  ON THE WAY out of Oak Walk, Jane said, “That Davenport person is not dumber than a bowl of spaghetti.”

  “No, he’s not,” Leslie said. He held the car door for her, tucked her in, leaned forward and said, “We’ve got to talk about the Reckless.”

  “We’ve got to get rid of it. Burn it,” Jane said.

  “I’m not going to give up a half-million-dollar painting,” Leslie said. “But we have to do something.”

  They talked it over on the way home. The solution, Jane argued, was to destroy it. There was no statute of limitations on murder, and, sometime, in the future, if the call of the money was too strong, they might be tempted to sell it—and get caught.

  “A new, fresh Reckless—that’s going to attract some attention,” she said.

  “Private sale,” Leslie said.

  “I don’t know,” Jane said.

  “Half-million dollars,” Leslie said, and when he said it, Jane knew that she wanted the money.

  They went home, and after dinner, Leslie stood on a stool and got the Reckless out of the double-secret storage area in the rafters of the attic.

  “Gorgeous piece?” he said. He flipped it over, looked at the name slashed across the back of the canvas. Though Leslie ran to fat, he was still strong. Gripping the frame tightly, he torqued it, wiggled the sides, then the top and bottom, and the frame began to spread. When it was loose enough, he lifted the canvas, still on stretchers, out of the frame, and put it under a good light on the dining room table.

  “Got a strong signature,” he said. Reckless had carefully signed the front of the painting at the lower right, with a nice red signature over a grassy green background. “Don’t need the one on the back.”

  “Take it off?”

  “If we took it off, then it couldn’t be identified as the Bucher painting,” Leslie said.

  “There’d always be some…remnants.”

  “Not if you don’t want to see it,” Leslie said. He looked at the painting for a moment, then said. “Here’s what we do. We stash it at the farm for now. Wrap it up nice and tight. Burn the frame. When I get time, I’ll take the ‘Reckless’ off the back—it’ll take me a couple of weeks, at least. We get some old period paint—we should be able to get some from Dick Calendar—and paint over the area where the ‘Reckless’ was. Then we take it to Omaha, or Kansas City, or even Vegas, rent a safe-deposit box, and stick it away for five years. In five years, it’s good as gold.”

  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 n
ot 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 un-attached, 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 no
se, 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?”