Invisible Prey

by John Sandford

  “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.”

  “I’m going after the mother this afternoon,” Ignace said. “Let’s see, it’s…Kathy? Is she hot?”

  “Ruffe, you’re breaking up really bad. I’m hanging up now, Ruffe.”

  DESPITE HIS WEASELING, Lucas was pleased. Flowers had done the job, and Ignace would nail Kline to a wall. Further, Ignace wouldn’t give up the source, and if the game was played just right, everybody would assume the source was Dakota County.

  He called Rose Marie Roux. He didn’t like to lie to her, but sometimes did, if only to protect her; necessity is a mother. “I just talked to Ruffe Ignace. He knows about Kline. He’s got Jesse Barth’s name, he’s going to talk to Kathy Barth. I neither confirmed nor denied and I am not his source. But his source is a good one and it comes one day after we briefed Dakota County. We need to start leaking around that Dakota County was talking to Ignace.”

  “We can do that,” she said, also pleased. “This is working out.”

  “Tell the governor. Maybe he could do an off-the-record joke with some of the reporters at the Capitol, about Dakota County leaks,” Lucas said. “Maybe get Mitford to put something together. A quip. The governor likes quips. And metaphors.”

  “A quip,” she said. “A quip would be good.”

  LUCAS CALLED John Smith. Smith was at the Bucher mansion, and would be there for a while. “I’ll stop by,” Lucas said.

  THE WIDDLERS were there, finishing the inventory. “There’s a lot of good stuff here,” Leslie told Lucas. He was wearing a pink bow tie that looked like an exotic lepidopteran. “There’s two million, conservatively. I really want to be here when they have the auction.”

  “Nothing missing?”

  He shrugged and his wife picked up the question. “There didn’t seem to be any obvious holes in the decor, when you started putting things back together—they trashed the place, but they didn’t move things very far.”

  “Did you know a woman named Claire Donaldson, over in Eau Claire?”

  The Widdlers looked at each other, and then Jane said, “Oh my God. Do you think?”

  Lucas said, “There’s a possibility, but I’m having trouble figuring out a motive. There doesn’t seem to be anything missing from the Donaldson place, either.”

  “We were at some of the Donaldson sales,” Leslie Widdler said. “She had some magnificent things, although I will say, her taste wasn’t as extraordinary as everybody made out.” To his wife: “Do you remember that awful Italian neoclassical commode?”

  Jane poked a finger at Lucas’s chest. “It looked like somebody had been working on it with a wood rasp. And it obviously had been refinished. They sold it as the original finish, but there was no way…”

  THE WIDDLERS went back to work, and Lucas and John Smith stepped aside and watched them scribbling, and Lucas said, “John, I’ve got some serious shit coming down the road. I’ll try to stick with you as much as I can, but this other thing is political, and it could be a distraction.”

  “Big secret?”

  “Not anymore. The goddamn Star Tribune got a sniff of it. I’ll try to stay with you…”

  Smith flapped his hands in frustration: “I got jack-shit, Lucas. You think this Donaldson woman might be tied in?”

  “It feels that way. It feels like this one,” Lucas said. “We might want to talk to the FBI, see if they’d take a look.”

  “I hate to do that, as long as we have a chance,” Smith said.

  “So do I.”

  Smith looked glumly at Leslie Widdler, who was peering at the bottom of a silver plant-watering pot. “It’d spread the blame, if we fall on our asses,” he said. “But I want to catch these motherfuckers. Me.”

  ON THE WAY out the door, Lucas asked Leslie Widdler, “If we found that there were things missing, how easy would it be to locate them? I mean, in the antiques market?”

  “If you had a good professional photograph and good documentation of any idiosyncrasies—you know, dents, or flaws, or repairs—then it’s possible,” Widdler said. “Not likely, but possible. If you don’t have that, then you’re out of luck.”

  Jane picked it up: “There are literally hundreds of thousands of antiques sold every year, mostly for cash, and a lot of those sales are to dealers who turn them over and over and over. A chair sold here might wind up in a shop in Santa Monica or Palm Beach after going through five different dealers. They may disappear into somebody’s house and not come out for another twenty or thirty years.”

  And Leslie: “Another thing, of course, is that if somebody spends fifty thousand dollars for an armoire, and then finds out it’s stolen, are they going to turn it over to the police and lose their money? That’s really not how they got rich in the first place…So I wouldn’t be too optimistic.”

  “There’s always hope,” Jane said. She looked as though she were trying to make a perplexed wrinkle in her forehead. “But to tell you the truth, I’m beginning to think there’s nothing missing. We haven’t been able to identify a single thing.”

  “The Reckless painting,” Lucas said.

  “If there was one,” she said. “There are a number of Reckless sales every year. If we find no documentation that suggests that Connie owned one, if all we have is the testimony of this one young African-American person…well, Lucas…it’s gone.”

  9

  RUFFE IGNACE’S STORY wasn’t huge, but even with a one-column head, and thirty inches of carefully worded text, it was big enough to do all the political damage that Kline had feared.

  Best of all, it featured an ambush photograph of Dakota County attorney Jim Cole, whose startled eyes made him look like a raccoon caught at night on the highway. Kline was now a Dakota County story.

  Ignace had gotten to Kathy Barth. Although she was identified only as a “source close to the investigation,” she spoke from the point of view of a victim, and Ignace was skilled enough to let that bleed through. “…the victim was described as devastated by the experience, and experts have told the family that she may need years of treatment if the allegations are true.”

  NEIL MITFORD LED Lucas and Rose Marie Roux into the governor’s office and closed the door. The governor said, “We’re all clear, right? Nobody can get us on leaking the story?” He knew that Lucas had ties with the local media; that Lucas did, in fact, share a daughter with the leading Channel Three editorialist.

  “Ruffe called me yesterday and asked for a comment and I told him I couldn’t give him one,” Lucas said, doing his tap dance. “It’s pretty obvious that he got a lot of his information from the victim’s mother.”

  “Is Kathy Barth still trying to cut a deal with Burt?” Mitford asked Lucas.

  “They want money. That was the whole point of the exercise,” Lucas said. “But now, she’s stuck. She can’t cut a deal with the grand jury.”

  “And Burt’s guilty,” the governor said. “I mean, he did it, right? We’re not simply fucking him over?”

  “Yeah, he did it,” Lucas said. “I think he might’ve been doing the mother, too, but he definitely was doing the kid.”

  Rose Marie: “Screw their negotiations. They can file a civil suit later.”

  “Might be more money for the attorney,” Mitford said. “If he’s taking it on contingency.”

  “Lawyers got to eat, too,” the governor said with satisfaction. To Rose Marie and Lucas: “You two will be managing the BCA’s testimony before the grand jury? Is that all set?”

  “I talked to Jim Cole, he’ll be calling with a schedule,” Rose Marie said. “There’s a limited amount of testimony available—the Barths, Agent Flowers, Lucas, the technical people from the lab. Cole wants to move fast. If there’s enough evidence to indict, he wants to give Kline a chance to drop out of the election so another Republican can run.”

  “Burt might ge
t stubborn…” the governor suggested.

  “I don’t think so,” Rose Marie said, shaking her head. “Cole won’t indict unless he can convict. He wants to nail down the mother, the girl, the physical evidence, and then make a decision. With this newspaper story, he’s got even more reason to push. If he tells Burt’s lawyer that Burt’s going down, and shows him the evidence, I think Burt’ll quit.”

  The governor nodded: “So. Lucas. Talk to your people. We don’t want any bleed-back, we don’t want anybody pointing fingers at us, saying there’s a political thing going on. We want this straightforward, absolutely professional. We regret this kind of thing as much as anybody. It’s a tragedy for everybody involved, including Burt Kline.”

  “And especially the child. We have to protect the children from predators,” Mitford said. “Any contacts with the press, we always hit that point.”

  “Of course, absolutely,” the governor said. “The children always come first. Especially when the predators are Republicans.”

  Nobody asked about the Bucher case, which was slipping off the front pages.

  WHEN THEY were finished, Lucas walked down the hall with Rose Marie, heading for the parking garage. “Wonder why with Republicans, it’s usually fucking somebody that gets them in trouble. And with the Democrats, it’s usually stealing?”

  “Republicans have money. Most of them don’t need more,” she suggested. “But they come from uptight, sexually repressed backgrounds, and sometimes, they just go off. Democrats are looser about sex, but half the time, they used to be teachers or government workers, and they’re desperate for cash. They see all that money up close, around the government, the lobbyists and the corporate guys, they can smell it, they can taste it, they see the rich guys flying to Paris for the weekend, and eating in all the good restaurants, and buying three-thousand-dollar suits. They just want to reach out and take some.”