Invisible Prey

by John Sandford

  “What about the swoopy chairs that the Lash kid was talking about?”

  Widdler shrugged. “Can’t put our finger on them. ‘Swoopy’ isn’t a good enough description. He can’t even tell us the color of the upholstery, or whether the seats were leather or fabric. All he ever looked at were the legs.”

  “Well…if he’s right, how much would they be worth?”

  “I can’t tell you that, either,” Widdler said. “Everything depends on what they were, and condition. A pristine swoopy chair, of a certain kind, might be worth a thousand dollars. The same chair, in bad shape, might be worth fifty. Or, it might be a knockoff, which is very common, and be worth zero. So—I don’t know. What I do know is, there’s a lot of furniture here that’s worth good money, and they didn’t take it. There are some old, old oriental carpets, especially one up in Mrs. Bucher’s bedroom, that would pull fifty thousand dollars on the open market. There are some other carpets rolled up on the third floor. If these people were really sophisticated, they could have brought one of those carpets down and unrolled it in Mrs. Bucher’s bedroom, taken the good one, and who would have known? Really?”

  They chewed some more, and Smith said, “One more bun. Who wants it? I’m all done…”

  Widdler said, “Me.” Smith passed him the sack and Widdler retrieved the bun, took a bite, and said, “The other thing is, we know for sure that Mrs. Bucher gave things away from time to time. There may have been some swoopy chairs and a Reckless painting. Has anybody talked to her accountants about deductions the last couple of years?”

  “Yeah, we did,” Smith said. “No swoopy chairs or Reckless anything.”

  “Well…” Widdler said. And he pressed the rest of the bun into his face as though he were starving.

  “Not right,” Coombs said again, turning away from Widdler and the sticky bun.

  Lucas sighed, and said, “I’ll tell you what. I want you to go over every piece of paper you can find in your grandma’s house. Anything that could tie her to Bucher or Donaldson or Toms. I’ll do the same thing here, and I’ll get Donaldson’s sister working on it from her end.”

  “The St. Paul cops won’t let me into the house yet,” Coombs said. “They let me clean up the open food, but that’s it.”

  “I’ll call them,” Lucas said. “You could get in tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Coombs said.

  “Hope you come up with something, because from my point of view, this thing is drifting away to never-never land,” Smith said. “We need a major break.”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said. “I hear you.”

  “How much time can you put into it?” Smith asked.

  “Not much,” Lucas said. “I’ve got some time in the next two weeks, but with this election coming up, any sheriff with a problem case is gonna try to shift it onto us—make it look like something is getting done. The closer we get to the election, the busier we’ll be.”

  “Not right,” said Coombs. “I want Grandma’s killer found.”

  “We’re giving it what we can,” Lucas said. “I’ll keep it active, but John and I know…we’ve been cops a long time…it’s gonna be tough.”

  “Bucher’s gonna be tough,” Smith said. “With your grandma and the others…hell, we don’t even know that they’re tied together. At all. And Donaldson and Toms are colder than ice.” He finished the sticky bun and licked the tips of his fingers. “Man, that was good, Les.”

  “The French aren’t all bad,” Widdler said, using his tongue to pry a little sticky bun out of his radically fashionable clear-plastic braces.

  LUCAS WALKED COOMBS out to her car. “You can’t give up,” she said.

  Lucas shook his head. “It’s not like we’re giving up—it’s that right now, we don’t have any way forward. We’ll keep pushing all the small stuff, and maybe something will crack.”

  She turned at the car and stepped closer and patted him twice on the chest with an open hand. “Maybe I’m obsessive-compulsive; I don’t think I can get on with life until this is settled. I can’t stop thinking about it. I need to get something done. I spent all those years screwing around, lost. Now I’ve finally got my feet on the ground, I’ve got some ideas about what I might want to do, I’m getting some friends…it’s like I’m just getting started with real life. Then…this. I’m spinning my wheels again.”

  “You got a lot of time, you’re young,” Lucas said. “When I was your age, everything seemed to move too slow. But this will get done. I’ll keep working on Grandma, St. Paul will keep working. We’ll get somebody, sooner or later.”

  “You promise?” She had a really nice smile, Lucas thought, soft, and sadly sexy. Made you want to protect her, to take her someplace safe…like a bed.

  “I promise,” he said.

  THE ST. PAUL COPS had gone through the papers in the Bucher house on-site, and not too closely, because so much of it was clearly irrelevant to the murders.

  With Coombs agreeing to comb through her grandmother’s papers, Lucas established himself in the Bucher house-office and began going through the paper files. Later, he’d move on to the computer files, but a St. Paul cop had told him that Bucher rarely used the computer—she’d learned to call up and use Microsoft Word for letter-writing, but nothing more—and Peebles never used it.

  Lucas had no idea what he was looking for: something, anything, that would reach outside the house, and link with Donaldson, Toms, or Coombs. He’d been working on it for an hour when it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen any paper involving quilts.

  There was an “art” file, an inventory for insurance, but nothing mentioned the quilts that hung on the walls on the second floor. And quilts ran through all three murders that he knew of. He picked up the phone, dialed his office, got Carol: “Is Sandy still free?”

  “If you want her to be.”

  “Tell her to call me,” Lucas said.

  He walked out in the hall where the Widdlers seemed to be packing up. “All done?”

  “Until the auction,” Jane Widdler said. She rubbed her hands. “We’ll do well off this, thanks to you police officers.”

  “We now know every piece in the house,” Leslie Widdler explained. “We’ll work as stand-ins for out-of-state dealers who can’t make it.”

  “And take a commission,” Jane Widdler said. “The family wants to have the auction pretty quickly, after they each take a couple of pieces out…This will be fun.”

  “Hmm,” Lucas said. “My wife is interested in antiques.”

  “She works for the state as well?” Leslie Widdler asked.

  Lucas realized that Widdler was asking about income. “No. She’s a plastic and microsurgeon over at Hennepin General.”

  “Well, for pete’s sake, Lucas, we’re always trying to track down people like that. Give her our card,” Jane Widdler said, and dug a card out of her purse and passed it over. “We’ll talk to her anytime. Antiques can be great investments.”

  “Thanks.” Lucas slipped the card in his shirt pocket. “Listen, did you see any paper at all on the quilts upstairs? Receipts, descriptions, anything? All these places…I don’t know about Toms…”

  His cell phone rang and he said, “Excuse me…” and stepped away. Sandy. “Listen, Sandy, I want you to track down the Toms relatives, whoever inherited, and ask them if Toms had any quilts in the place. Especially, collector quilts. Okay? Okay.”

  He hung up and went back to the Widdlers. “These murders I’m looking at, there seems to be a quilt thread…Is that a joke?…Anyway, there seems to be a quilt thing running through them.”

  Leslie Widdler was shaking his head. “We didn’t see anything like that. Receipts. And those quilts upstairs, they’re not exactly collector quilts…I mean, they’re collected, but they’re not antiques. They’re worth six hundred to a thousand dollars each. If you see a place that says ‘Amish Shop,’ you can get a quilt just like them. Traditional designs, but modern, and machine-pieced and quilted.”

  “Huh. So those aren’
t too valuable.”

  Leslie Widdler shook his head. “There’s a jug in the china cabinet in the music room that’s worth ten times all the quilts put together.”

  Lucas nodded. “All right. Listen. Thanks for your help, guys. And thanks for those sticky buns, Les. Sorta made my morning.”

  OUT OF THE HOUSE, Leslie Widdler said, “We’ve got to take him out of it.”

  “God, we may have overstepped,” Jane said. “If we could only go back.”

  “Can’t go back,” Leslie said.

  “If they look into the Armstrong quilts, they’ll find receipts, they’ll find people who remember stuff…I don’t know if they can do it, but they might find out that Coombs didn’t get all the money she should have. Once they get on that trail—it’d be hard, but they might trace it on to us.”

  “It’s been a long time,” Leslie said.

  “Paperwork sticks around. And not only paperwork—there’s that sewing basket. If Jackson White still has a receipt, or a memory, he could put us in prison.” Jackson White sold them the sewing basket. “I should have looked for the sewing basket instead of that damn music box. That music box has screwed us.”

  “What if we went back to Coombs’s place, put the music box someplace that wasn’t obvious, and took the basket? That’d solve that thing,” Leslie said.

  “What about Davenport?”

  “There’s Jesse Barth,” Leslie said. “Amity might have been right.”

  “So dangerous,” Jane said. “So dangerous.”

  “Have to get the van, have to steal another plate.”

  “That’s no problem. That’s fifteen seconds, stealing the plate,” Jane said. She was thinking about it.

  “Davenport said he has a week or two to work on it—if we can push him through another week, we could be good,” Leslie said. “He’s the dangerous one. Smith already wants to move on. It’s Davenport who’s lingering…”

  “He could come back to it,” Jane said. “He smells the connection.”

  “Yes, but the older things get, and the fuzzier…Maybe Jackson White could have a fire,” Leslie said. “If they find the music box, that might erase the Coombs connections. If he has to go chasing after Jesse Barth, that’ll use a lot of time. All we need is a little time.”

  “So dangerous to go after Jesse Barth,” Jane said. “We almost have to do it tonight.”

  “And we can. She’s not the early-to-bed kind. And she walks. She walked over to her boyfriend’s yesterday, maybe she’ll be walking again.”

  “We should have taken her yesterday,” Jane said.

  “Never had a clear shot at her…and it didn’t seem quite so necessary.”

  “Oh, God…” Jane scrubbed at her deadened forehead. “Can’t even think.”

  “Be simpler to wait for Davenport outside his house, and shoot him. Who’d figure it out?” Leslie said. “There must be dozens or hundreds of people who hate him. Criminals. If he got shot…”

  “Two problems. First, he’s not an old lady and he’s not a kid and he carries a gun and he’s naturally suspicious. If we missed, he’d kill us. Look at all those stories about him,” Jane said. “Second, we only know two cases he’s working on. One of them is almost over. If the cops think the Bucher killers went out and killed a cop, especially a cop like Davenport who has been working as long as he has…they’d tear up everything. They’d never let go. They’d work on it for years, if they had to.”

  THEY RODE in silence for a while. Then Jane said, “Jesse Barth.”

  “Only if everything is perfect,” Leslie said. “We only do it if everything is exactly right. We don’t have to pull the trigger until the last second, when we actually stop her. Then if we do it, we’ve got an hour of jeopardy until we can get her underground. They don’t have to know she’s dead. They can think she ran away. But Davenport’ll be working it forever, trying to find her.”

  “Only if everything is perfect,” Jane said. “Only if the stars are right.”

  13

  LUCAS WAS STILL PORING over paper at Bucher’s when Sandy called back. “I talked to Clayton Toms. He’s the grandson of Jacob Toms—the murdered man,” she said. “He said there were several quilts in the house, but they were used as bedspreads and weren’t worth too much. He still has one. None of them were these Armstrong quilts. None of them were hung on walls. He’s going to check to see if there’s anything that would indicate that he knew Mrs. Bucher or Mrs. Donaldson or Mrs. Coombs.”

  “Thanks,” Lucas said. Maybe quilts weren’t the magic bullet.

  GABRIELLA COOMBS DECIDED to put off her research into Grandma’s quilts. She had a date, the fifth in a series. She liked the guy all right, and he definitely wanted to get her clothes off, and she was definitely willing to take them off.

  Unfortunately, he wanted them off for the wrong reason. He was a painter. The owner of the High Plains Drifter Bar & Grill in Minneapolis wanted a naked-lady painting to hang over his bar, and the painter, whose name was Ron, figured that Gabriella would be perfect as a model, although he suggested she might want to “fill out your tits” a little.

  She didn’t even mind that idea, as long as she got laid occasionally. The problem was, he worked from photographs, and Gabriella’s very firm sixteenth Rule of Life was Never Take Off Your Clothes Around a Camera.

  Ron had been pleading: “Listen, even if I did put your picture on the Internet, who’d recognize it? Who looks at faces? The facts are, one in every ten women in the United States, and maybe the world, is naked on the Internet. Nobody would look at your face. Besides, I won’t put it on the Internet.”

  On that last part, his eyes drifted, and she had the bad feeling that she’d be on the Internet about an hour after he took the picture. And three hours after that, the wife of some friend would call up to tell her that everyone was ordering prints from Pussy-R-Us.

  So the question was, was he going to make a move? Or did he only want her body in a computer file?

  Coombs was a lighthearted sort, like her mother, and while she carefully chose her clothing for the way it looked on her, she didn’t use much in the way of makeup. That was trickery, she thought. She did use perfume: scents were primal, she believed, and something musky might get a rise out of the painter. If not, well, then, Ron might be missing out on a great opportunity, she thought.

  She dabbed the perfume on her mastoids, between her breasts, and finally at the top of her thighs. As she did it, her thoughts drifted to Lucas Davenport. The guy was growing on her, even though he was a cop and therefore on the Other Side, but he had a way of talking with women that made her think photography wouldn’t be an issue. And she could feel little attraction molecules flowing out of him; he liked her looks. Of course, he was married, and older. Not that marriage always made a difference. And he wasn’t that much older.

  “Hmm,” she said to herself.

  JESSE BARTH USED a Bic lighter to fire up two cigarettes at once, handed one of them to Mike. The evening was soft, the cool humid air lying comfortably on her bare forearms and shoulders. They sat on the front porch, under the yellow bug light, and Screw, the pooch, came over and snuffed at her leg and then plopped down in the dirt and whimpered for a stomach scratch.

  Two blocks away, Jane Widdler, behind the wheel, watched for a moment with the image-stabilizing binoculars, then said, “That’s her.”

  “About time,” Leslie said. “Wonder if the kid’s gonna walk her home?”

  “If he does, it’s off,” Jane said.

  “Yeah,” Leslie said. But he was hot. He had a new pipe, with new tape on the handle, and he wanted to use it.

  LUCAS WAS DRINKING a caffeine-free Diet Coke out of the bottle, his butt propped against a kitchen counter. He said to Weather, “There’s a good possibility that whoever killed Coombs didn’t have anything to do with the others. The others fit a certain profile: they were rich, you could steal from them and nobody would know. They were carefully spaced both in time and geography—there was no o
verlap in police jurisdictions, so there’d be nobody to compare them, to see the similarities. Still: Coombs knew at least two of them. And the way she was killed…”

  Weather was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a raw carrot. She pointed it at him and said, “You might be wasting your time with Coombs. But in the lab, when we’re looking at a puzzle, and we get an interesting outlier in an experiment—Coombs would be an outlier—it often cracks the puzzle. There’s something going on with it, that gives you a new angle.”

  “You think I might be better focusing on Coombs?”

  “Maybe. What’s the granddaughter’s name?” Weather asked.

  “Gabriella.”

  “Yes. You say she’s looking at all the paper. That’s fine, but she doesn’t have your eye,” Weather said. “What you should do, is get her to compile it all. Everything she can find. Then you read it. The more links you can find between Coombs and the other victims, the more likely you are to stumble over the solution. You need to pile up the data.”

  A STRETCH of Hague Avenue west of Lexington was perfect. The Widdlers had gone around the block, well ahead of Jesse, and scouted down Hague, spotted the dark stretch.

  “If she stays on this street…” Jane said.

  They circled back, getting behind her again, never getting closer than two blocks. The circling also gave them a chance to spot cop cars. They’d seen one, five minutes earlier, five blocks away, quickly departing, as though it were on its way somewhere.

  That was good.

  They could see Jesse moving between streetlights, walking slowly. Leslie was in the back of the van, looking over the passenger seat with the glasses. He saw the dark stretch coming and said, “Move up, move up. In ten seconds, she’ll be right.”

  “Nylons,” Jane said.

  They unrolled dark nylon stockings over their heads. They could see fine, but their faces would be obscured should there be an unexpected witness. Better yet, the dark stockings, seen from any distance, made them look as though they were black.