Invisible Prey

by John Sandford

  “‘Clip her money,’” Lucas repeated.

  “Trade talk,” she said.

  LUCAS’S CELL PHONE RANG.

  He dug it out of his pocket, looked at the screen, and said to Anderson, “Excuse me. I have to take this…”

  He stepped away from her, toward the front door, turning a shoulder in the unconscious pretend-privacy that cell-phone users adopt. In his ear, Flowers said, “I’m at the Barths with Susan Conoway—have you talked to her, she’s from Dakota County?”

  “No. I talked to somebody. Lyle Pender?”

  “Okay, that’s somebody else. Anyway, Susan was assigned to prep the Barths, but Kathy’s heard that she can take the Fifth, if she thinks she might have committed a crime. Or might be accused of one. So now she says she doesn’t want to talk to Susan, and Susan’s got a date that she doesn’t want to miss. The whole fuckin’ thing is about to go up in smoke. I could use some weight over here.”

  “Damnit. What does Barth’s lawyer say?”

  “He’s not here. Kathy’s nervous—I don’t think this is coming from her lawyer,” Flowers said. “It might be coming from somewhere else.”

  “I’m sure Kline wouldn’t have…Ah, Jesus. You think Burt Jr. might have talked to her?”

  “Maybe. The thought occurred to me, that fat fuck,” Flowers said. “If he has, I’ll put his ass in jail. I told Kathy that the grand jury could give her immunity and that she’d have to testify, or go to jail. Nobody told her that. But if she decides to take the Fifth, it’s gonna mess up the schedule and it could create some complications. If Cole started getting cold feet, or Kline’s buddies in the legislature got involved…We need to get this done.”

  “Why doesn’t Conoway talk to her?” Lucas asked.

  “Says she can’t. Says the Barths have an attorney, and without the other attorney here, she’s not comfortable examining a reluctant witness. That’s not exactly what she said, but that’s what she means.”

  “Listen: It’ll take me at least ten or fifteen minutes to get there. I have to walk home, I’m six or seven minutes away from my car,” Lucas said. “What is Jesse saying? Is she letting Kathy do the talking, or can you split them, or what?”

  “They were both sitting on the couch. It’s all about the money, man.”

  Lucas groaned. “I don’t know why the Klines are holding on like this. You’d think they’d try to deal. Suborning a witness…they’d have to be crazy. How could they think they’d get away with it?”

  Flowers said, “Burt’s a fuckin’ state legislator, Lucas.”

  “I know, but I’m always the optimist.”

  “Right,” Flowers said. “Ten minutes?”

  Lucas glanced at Anderson, who at that moment tipped her wrist to look at her watch. “I need a minute or two to finish here, then walk home, so…give me fifteen.”

  HE RANG OFF and stepped back into the living room, took a card from his pocket, and handed it to Anderson. “I’ve got to run. Thanks for your time. If you think of anything… About Donaldson, about Bucher, about possible ties between them, I’d like to hear it.”

  She took the card, said, “I’ll call. I’ve got what we call a grip-and-grin, trying to soak up some money. So I’ve got to hurry myself.”

  “Seems like everything is about money,” Lucas said.

  “More and more,” Anderson said. “To tell you the truth, I find it more and more distasteful.”

  LUCAS HURRIED HOME, waved at a neighbor, stuck his head into the kitchen, blurted, “Got something going, I’ll tell you when I get back,” to Weather, and took off; Weather called after him, “When?” He shouted back, “Half an hour. If it’s longer, I’ll call.”

  There was some traffic, but the Barths lived only three miles away, and he knew every street and alley. By chopping off a little traffic, and taking some garbage-can routes, he made it in the fifteen minutes he’d promised Flowers.

  FLOWERS WAS LEANING in a doorway, chatting with a solid dishwater-blond woman with a big leather bag hanging from her shoulder: Conoway. Lucas had never met her, but when he saw her, he remembered her, from a lecture she gave at a child-abuse convention sponsored by the BCA.

  A small-town cop, working with volunteer help and some sheriff’s deputies who lived in the area, and a freelance social therapist, had busted a day-care center’s owner, her son, and two care providers and charged them with crimes ranging from rape to blasphemy.

  Conoway, assigned as a prosecutor, had shredded the case. She’d demonstrated that the day-care center operators were innocent, and had shown that if the children had been victimized by anyone, it had been the cops and the therapist, who were involved in what amounted to an anti-pederasty cult. She hadn’t endeared herself to the locals, but she had her admirers, including Lucas.

  Lucas came up the walk, noticed that the yellow-white dog was gone, the stake sitting at an angle in the yard. He wondered if the dog had broken loose.

  Conoway looked tired; like she needed to wash her hair. She saw Lucas coming, through the screen door, cocked an eyebrow, said something to Flowers, and Flowers stepped over and pushed open the door.

  “You know Susan Conoway…”

  Conoway smiled and shook hands, and Lucas said, “We haven’t met, but I admired your work in the Rake Town case.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “The admiration isn’t universal.”

  Lucas looked at Flowers: “What do you need?”

  Flowers said, “We just need you—somebody—to talk to the Barths in a polite, nonlegal way, that would convince them to cooperate fully with Ms. Conoway, who has a hot date tonight with somebody who couldn’t possibly deserve her attentions.”

  Lucas said, “Huh.”

  Conoway said, “Actually, he does deserve my attentions. If they’re not going to talk, I’m outa here.”

  “Give me a minute,” Lucas said. “I’ve got to work myself into a temper tantrum.”

  KATHY AND JESSE BARTH were perched side by side on a green corduroy sofa, Kathy with a Miller Lite and a cigarette and Jesse with Diet Pepsi. Lucas stepped into the room, closed the door, and said, “Kathy, if Ms. Conoway leaves, and this thing doesn’t go down tomorrow, you’ll have messed up your life. Big-time. You’ll wind up in the women’s prison and your daughter will wind up in a juvie home. It pisses me off, because I hate to see that happen to a kid. Especially when her mom does it to her.”

  Kathy Barth was cool: “We’ve got a lawyer.”

  Lucas jabbed a finger at her, put on his hardest face: “Every asshole in Stillwater had a lawyer. Every single fuckin’ one of them.” She opened her mouth to say something, but Lucas waved her down, bullying her. “Have you talked to your lawyer about this?”

  “Doesn’t answer his cell. But we figured, what difference do a few hours make?”

  “I’ll tell you what difference it makes—it means somebody either got to you, or tried to get to you,” Lucas said. “You can’t sell your testimony, Kathy. That’s a felony. That’s mandatory jail time.”

  Jesse shifted on her seat, and Kathy glanced at her, then looked back at Lucas. “Burt owes us.” She didn’t whine, she just said it.

  “So sue him,” Lucas said. “Kline broke a state law and he has to pay for it. Pay the state. If you interfere with the state getting justice, then you’re committing a crime. Judges don’t fool around with people who mess with witnesses, or witnesses who sell their testimony. They get the max, and they don’t get time off for good behavior. You don’t fuck with the courts, Kathy, and that’s what you’re doing.”

  Jesse said, “Mom, I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “He’s bullshitting us, hon,” Kathy said, looking at Lucas with skepticism; but unsure of herself.

  Lucas turned to Jesse and shook his head. “If your mom goes down this road, you’ve got to take care of yourself. I can’t even explain how stupid and dangerous this is. You won’t get any money and you’ll be in jail. If your lawyer were here, he’d tell you that. But if Conoway lea
ves—she’s got a date tonight—she’s going to pull the plug on your testimony tomorrow, then she’s going to turn off her cell phone, and then you are truly fucked. You’ve got about one minute to decide. Then she’s gonna walk.”

  “She can’t do that…” Kathy said.

  “Horseshit,” Lucas said. “She’s already after-hours, working on her own time. She’s got a right to a life. This isn’t the biggest deal of her career, it’s not even the biggest deal of her week. She doesn’t have to put up with some crap where somebody is trying sell her daughter’s ass to a pederast. She’s gonna walk.”

  “I’m not trying to sell anybody…” Kathy said.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Jesse blurted. To her mother: “I’m gonna talk to her, Mom. I don’t care if we don’t get any money from Burt. I’m not going to jail.”

  “Smart girl,” Lucas said.

  BACK IN THE HALLWAY, Lucas said to Conoway, “Give them a minute.”

  “What’re they doing,” Flowers asked, “sopping up the blood?”

  “Jesse’s telling Kathy what’s what,” Lucas said. “I think we’re okay.”

  A moment later Jesse stuck her head into the hall, looked at Conoway. Kathy was a step behind her. “We’ll talk to you,” Jesse said.

  Conoway sighed, said, “I thought I was outa here. Okay, let’s go, girls…” And to Lucas: “Thanks. You must throw a good tantrum.”

  10

  AMITY ANDERSON WAS ANNOYED: with life, with art, with rich people, with Lucas Davenport. So annoyed that she had to suppress a little hop of anger and frustration as she drifted past the Viking warrior. The warrior was seven feet tall, made of plaster, carried an ax with a head the size of a manhole cover, and wore a blond wig. He was dressed in a furry yellow skin, possibly from a puma, if puma hides are made of Rayon, and his carefully draped loins showed a bulge of Scandinavian humor.

  Anderson wasn’t amused. The reception was continuing. If she ate even one more oat cracker with goat cheese, she’d die of heart congestion. If she had one more glass of the Arctic Circle Red Wine, her taste buds would commit suicide.

  She moved slowly through the exhibit, clutching the half-empty wineglass, smiling and nodding at the patrons, while avoiding eye contact, and trying, as much as she could, to avoid looking at the art itself. Scandinavian minimalism. It had, like all minimalism, she thought, come to the museum straight from a junkyard, with a minimal amount of interference from an artist.

  An offense to a person of good taste. If somebody had pointed a gun at her head and told her that she had to take a piece, she’d have asked for the Viking warrior, which was not part of the show.

  Anderson had changed into her professional evening dress: a soft black velvet blouse, falling over black velvet pants, which hid the practical black shoes. The Oslo room was built from beige stone with polished stone floors. The stone look good, but killed your legs, if you had to stand on it too long. Thank God foundation staffers weren’t expected to wear high heels. Heels would have been the end of her.

  THE VIKING WARRIOR guarded the entrance. The art exhibit itself, mostly sculpture with a few paintings, spread down the long walls. The end wall was occupied by a fifteen-foot model of a Viking ship, which appeared to have been built of scrap wood by stupid unskilled teenagers. The best thing about the ship was that the stern concealed a door. The door led onto the patio, and once every fifteen minutes or so, Anderson could slip outside and light up.

  So the art sucked. The people who were looking at the art also sucked. They were rich, but not rich enough. Millionaires, for sure, but a million wasn’t that much anymore. A million dollars well invested, taking inflation and taxes into account, would generate an income about like a top-end Social Security check.

  That was nothing. That was chicken feed. You couldn’t lease a BMW for that; you’d be lucky to get a Chrysler minivan. You needed ten million; or twenty million. And if you were one of these guys, you sure as shit weren’t going to give a million of it to some unknown gay chick at an exhibit of bent-up car fenders, or whatever this was.

  Anderson knew all that, but her bosses wanted somebody at the show. Somebody to smile and nod and eat goat-cheese oat crackers. No skin off their butt. She wasn’t getting paid for the time. This was a required voluntary after-hours function; most small foundations had work rules that would have appalled the owners of a Saigon sweatshop.

  She looked at her watch. She’d given it fifty-four minutes. Not nearly enough. She idled toward the Viking ship, turned and checked the crowd, and when she judged that no one was looking at her, stepped backward and went out the door.

  The evening air was like a kiss, after the refrigerated air of the gallery. Night was coming on. The patio looked over a maple-studded lawn toward the evening lights of downtown Minneapolis, a pretty sight, lights like diamonds on a tic-tac-toe grid. She fumbled the Winstons out of her purse, lit one, blew smoke, trying to keep it away from her hair, and thought about Davenport and Claire Donaldson and Constance Bucher and Marilyn Coombs.

  Goddamn money. It all came down to money. The wrong people had it—heirs, car dealers, insurance men, corporate suits who went through life without a single aesthetic impulse, who thought a duck on a pond at sunset was art.

  Or these people, who bought a coffee-table book on minimalism, because they thought it put them out on the cutting edge. Made them mini-Applers. But they were still the same bunch of parvenu buck-lickers, the men with their washing-machine-sized Rolexes and the women with the “forever” solitaire hanging between their tits, not yet figuring out that “forever” meant until something fifteen years younger, with bigger tits, came along.

  Damn, she was tired of this.

  THE DOOR popped open and she flinched. A red-haired woman, about Anderson’s age, stepped outside, and said, “I thought I saw you disappear.” She took a pack of Salems out of her purse. “I was just about to start screaming.”

  “I saw you talking to the Redmonds,” Anderson said. “Do any good?”

  “Not much. I’m working on the wife,” the redhead said. A match flared, the woman inhaled, and exhaling, said, “I’ll get five thousand a year if I’m lucky.”

  “I’d take that,” Anderson said. “We could get a new TV for the employee lounge.”

  “Well, I’ll take it. It’s just that…” She waved her hand, a gesture of futility.

  “I know,” Anderson said. “I was pitching Carrie Sue Thorson. She had her DNA analyzed. She’s ninety percent pure Nazi. The other ten percent is some Russian who must’ve snuck in the back door. I was over there going, ‘It’s so fascinating to know that our ancestors reach back to the European Ice Age.’ Like, ‘Thank Christ they didn’t come from Africa in the last hundred generations or so.’”

  “Get anything?” the redhead asked.

  “Not unless you count a pat on the ass from her husband,” Anderson said.

  “You might work that into something.”

  “Yeah. A whole-life policy,” Anderson said.

  The redhead laughed, blew smoke and screeched, “Run away, run away.”

  ANDERSON WOUND UP staying for almost two hours and failed to raise a single penny—but she scored in one way. An hour and forty-five minutes into the reception, she took a cell-phone call from her supervisor, who “just wanted to check how things were going.”

  “I’ve eaten too much cheese,” Anderson said, sweetly. She understood her dedication was being tested and she’d aced the test. “But the art’s okay. Carrie Sue is right over here, isn’t she a friend of yours?”

  “No, no, not really,” her supervisor said hastily. “I’d hate to bother her. Good going, Amity. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Five minutes later, she was out of there. She drove a Mazda, cut southwest across town, down toward Edina. Time for a gutsy move. She knew the truth, and now was the time to use it.

  AND SHE didn’t want much.

  A couple of years in France, or maybe a year in France and another Italy. She c
ould rent her own house, bank the money, come back in a couple of years with the right languages, she could talk about Florence and Venice and Aix and Arles. With a little polish, with the background, she could move up in the foundation world. She could get an executive spot, she could take a shortcut up the ladder, she wouldn’t have to go to any more Arctic Circle Red receptions.

  Worth the risk. Of course, she needed to be prepared. As she turned the corner at the top of the last block, she reached under the car seat, found the switchblade, and slipped it into the pocket of her velvet pants.

  THE WIDDLER HOUSE was an older two-story, with cedar shingles and casement windows, built on a grassy lot, with the creek behind. She glanced at her watch: ten-fifteen. There was a light in an upstairs bedroom and another in the back of the house. An early night for the Widdlers, she thought.

  She parked in the drive, went to the front door, and rang the bell. Nothing. She rang it again, and then felt the inaudible vibrations of a heavy man coming down a flight of steps. Leslie Widdler turned on a light in the hallway, then the porch light, squinted at her through the triple-paned, armed-response-alarmed front door. Widdler was wearing a paisley-patterned silk robe. As fucked up and crazy as the Widdlers might be, there was nothing inhibited about their sex life, Anderson thought.

  Widdler opened the inner door, unlocked and pushed open the screen door, and said, “Well, well. Look what washed up on our doorstep. Nice to see you.”

  Anderson walked past him and Widdler looked outside, as though he might see somebody else sneaking along behind. Nobody. He shut the door and locked it, turned to Anderson, pushed her against the wall, slipped one big hand up under her blouse, pulled her brassiere down, and squeezed her breast until the pain flared through her chest. “How have you been?” he asked, his face so close that she could smell the cinnamon toothpaste.