Invisible Prey

by John Sandford

  “That’s TV,” Lucas said.

  “But you have to admit that cops are prejudiced against us,” she said.

  “Hey,” Lucas said. “I know a guy who walks around in hundred-degree heat in a black hoodie because he’s always freezing because he smokes crack all day, supports himself with burglary, and at night he spray-paints glow-in-the-dark archangels on boxcars so he can send Christ’s good news to the world. He’s an edgy counterculture person. You’re a hippie.”

  She clouded up, her lip trembling. “That’s a cruel thing to say,” she said. “Why’d you have to say that?”

  “Ah, man,” Lucas said. “Look, I’m sorry…”

  She smiled, pleased with herself and the trembling lip: “Relax. I’m just toyin’ with you.”

  ON THE WAY out of the house, they walked around the blood spot, and Coombs asked, “What’s a doornail?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh.” Disappointed. “I would have thought you’d have heard it a lot, and looked it up. You know, dead as a doornail, and you being a cop.”

  He got her out of the house, into the Porsche, fired it up, rolled six feet, then stopped, frowned at Coombs, and shut it down again.

  “Two things: If your grandma’s name was Coombs, and your mother is her daughter, how come your name…?”

  “I’m a bastard,” Coombs said.

  “Huh?”

  “My mom was a hippie. I’m second-generation hippie. Anyway, she slept around a little, and when the bundle of joy finally showed up, none of the prospective fathers did.” She flopped her hands in the air. “So. I’m a bastard. What was the second thing?”

  “Mmm.” He shook his head, and fished his cell phone out of his pocket. “I’m going to call somebody and ask an unpleasant question about your grandmother. If you want, you could get out and walk around the yard for a minute.”

  She shook her head. “That’s okay. I’d be interested in hearing the question.”

  Lucas dialed, identified himself, and asked for the medical examiner who’d done the postmortem on Coombs. Got her and asked, “What you take out of her stomach. Uh-huh? Uh-huh? Very much? Okay…okay.”

  He hung up and Coombs again asked, “What?”

  “Her stomach was empty. If she fell when she was by herself, I wonder who ate nine oatmeal cookies?” Lucas asked.

  BACK AT BCA headquarters, he briefed Shrake, put Coombs in a room with him, and told them both that he needed every detail. Five minutes later he was on the line with an investigator with the Chippewa County Sheriff’s Office, named Carl Frazier, who’d worked the Donaldson murder.

  “I saw the story in the paper and was going to call somebody, but I needed to talk to the sheriff about it. He’s out of town, back this afternoon,” Frazier said. “Donaldson’s a very touchy subject around here. But since you called me…”

  “It feels the same,” Lucas said. “Donaldson and Bucher.”

  “Yeah, it does,” Frazier said. “What seems most alike is that there was never a single lead. Nothing. We tore up the town, and Eau Claire, we beat on every asshole we knew about, and there never was a thing. I’ve gotten the impression that the St. Paul cops are beating their heads against the same wall.”

  “You nail down anything as stolen?”

  “Nope. That was another mystery,” Frazier said. “As far as we could tell, nothing was touched. I guess the prevailing theory among the big thinkers here was that it was somebody she knew, they got in an argument…”

  “And the guy pulled out a gun and shot her? Why’d he have a gun?”

  “That’s a weak point,” Frazier admitted. “Would have worked better if she’d been killed like Bucher—you know, somebody picked up a frying pan and swatted her. That would have looked a little more spontaneous.”

  “This looked planned?”

  “Like D-Day. She was shot three times in the back of the head. But what for? A few hundred dollars? Nobody who inherited the money needed it. There hadn’t been any family fights or neighborhood feuds or anything else. The second big-thinker theory was that it was some psycho. Came in the back door, maybe for food or booze, killed her.”

  “Man…”

  “I know,” Frazier said. “But that’s what we couldn’t figure out: What for? If you can’t figure out what for, it’s harder than hell to figure out who.”

  “She’s got these relatives, a sister and brother-in-law, the Booths,” Lucas said. “They still around?”

  “Oh, yeah. The sheriff hears from them regularly.”

  “Okay. Then, I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna go talk to them,” Lucas said. “Maybe I could stop by and look at your files?”

  “Absolutely,” Frazier said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to ride along when you do the interview. Or, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we meet at the Donaldson house? The Booths still own it, and it’s empty. You could take a look at it.”

  “How soon can you do it?”

  “Tomorrow? I’ll call the Booths to make sure they’ll be around,” Frazier said.

  WEATHER AND LUCAS spent some time that night fooling around, and when the first round was done, Lucas rolled over on his back, his chest slick with sweat, and Weather said, “That wasn’t so terrible.”

  “Yeah. I was fantasizing about Jesse Barth,” he joked. She swatted him on the stomach, not too hard, but he bounced and complained, “Ouch! You almost exploded one of my balls.”

  “You have an extra,” she said. “All we need is one.” She was trying for a second kid, worried that she might be too old, at forty-one.

  “Yeah, well, I’d like to keep both of them,” Lucas said, rubbing his stomach. “I think you left a mark.”

  She made a rude noise. “Crybaby.” Then, “Did you hear what Sam said today…?”

  AND LATER, she asked, “What happened with Jesse Barth, anyway?”

  “It’s going to the grand jury. Virgil’s handling most of it.”

  “Mmm. Virgil,” Weather said, with a tone in her voice.

  “What about him?”

  “If I was going to fantasize during sex, which I’m not saying I’d do, Virgil would be a candidate,” she said.

  “Virgil? Flowers?”

  “He has a way about him,” Weather said. “And that little tiny butt.”

  Lucas was shocked. “He never…I mean, made a move or anything…”

  “On me?” she asked. “No, of course not. But…mmm.”

  “What?”

  “I wonder why? He never made a move? He doesn’t even flirt with me,” she said.

  “Probably because I carry a gun,” Lucas said.

  “Probably because I’m too old,” Weather said.

  “You’re not too old, believe me,” Lucas said. “I get the strange feeling that Virgil would fuck a snake, if he could get somebody to hold its head.”

  “Sort of reminds me of you, when you were his age,” she said.

  “You didn’t know me when I was his age.”

  “You can always pick out the guys who’d fuck a snake, whatever age they are,” Weather said.

  “That’s unfair.”

  “Mmm.”

  A MINUTE LATER, Lucas said, “Virgil thinks that going to Dakota County was a little…iffy.”

  “Politically corrupt, you mean,” Weather said.

  “Maybe,” Lucas admitted.

  “It is,” Weather said.

  “I mentioned to Virgil that I occasionally talked to Ruffe over at the Star Tribune.”

  She propped herself up on one arm. “You suggested that he call Ruffe?”

  “Not at all. That’d be improper,” Lucas said.

  “So what are the chances he’ll call?”

  “Knowing that fuckin’ Flowers, about ninety-six percent.”

  She dropped onto her back. “So you manipulated him into making the call, so the guy in Dakota County can’t bury the case.”

  “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.”

  8

  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.”