Invisible Prey

by John Sandford

  “Why is she walking so slow?” Jane asked.

  “I don’t know…she keeps stopping,” Leslie said. “But she’s getting there…”

  “So dangerous,” Jane said.

  “Do it, goddamnit,” Leslie snarled. “She’s there. Put me on her.”

  JESSE HEARD the sudden acceleration of the van coming up behind her. In this neighborhood, that could be a bad thing. She turned toward it, her face a pale oval in the dark patch. The van was coming fast, and just as quickly lurched to a stop. Now she was worried, and already turning away, to run, when the van’s sliding door slammed open, and a big man was coming at her, running, one big arm lifting overhead, and Jesse screamed…

  LESLIE HOPED to be on her before she could scream, realized somewhere in the calculating part of his brain that they’d done it wrong, that they should have idled up to her, but that was all done now, in the past. He hit the grass verge, running, before the van had even fully stopped, his chin hot from his breath under the nylon stocking, his arm going up, and he heard the girl scream “Shoe,” or “Shoot,” or “Schmoo.”

  Or “Screw”?

  He was almost there, the girl trying to run, he almost had her when he became aware of something like a soccer ball flying at his hip, he had the pipe back ready to swing, and cocked his head toward whatever it was…

  Then Screw hit him.

  Leslie Widdler hit the ground like a side of beef, a solid thump, thrashing at the dog, the dog’s snarls reaching toward a ravening lupine howl, Leslie thrashing at it with the pipe, the dog biting him on the butt, the leg, an upper arm, on the back, Leslie thrashing, finally kicking at the dog, and dog fastening on his ankle. Leslie managed to stagger upright, could hear Jane screaming something, hit the dog hard with the pipe, but the dog held on, ripping, and Leslie hit it again, still snarling, and, its back broken, the dog launched itself with its front paws, getting Leslie’s other leg, and Leslie, now picking up Jane’s “Get in get in get in…” threw himself into the back of the van.

  The dog came with him, and the van accelerated into a U-turn, the side door still open, almost rolling both Leslie and the dog into the street, and Leslie hit the dog on the skull again, and then again, and the dog finally let go and Leslie, overcome with anger, lurched forward, grabbed it around the body, and threw it out in the street.

  Jane screamed, “Close the door, close the door.”

  Leslie slammed the door and they were around another corner and a few seconds later, accelerating down the ramp onto I-94.

  “I’m hurt,” he groaned. “I’m really hurt.”

  LUCAS AND LETTY were watching Slap Shot when Flowers called. “I’m down in Jackson. Kathy Barth just called me and said that somebody tried to snatch Jesse off the street. About twenty minutes ago.”

  “You gotta be shittin’ me.” Lucas was on his feet.

  “Jesse said somebody in a white van, a really big guy, she said, pulled up and tried to grab her. She was walking this dog home from her boyfriend’s…”

  “Screw,” Lucas said.

  “What?”

  “That’s the dog’s name,” Lucas said. “Screw.”

  “Yeah. That yellow dog. Anyway, she said Screw went after the guy, and the guy wound up back in the van with Screw and that’s the last she saw of them,” Flowers said. “She said the van did a U-turn and headed back to Lexington and then turned toward the interstate and she never saw them again. She ran home and told Kathy. Kathy called nine-one-one and then called me. She’s fuckin’ hysterical.”

  “Call Kathy, tell her I’m coming over,” Lucas said. “Are the cops looking for a van?”

  “I guess, but the call probably didn’t go out for ten minutes after Jesse got jumped,” Flowers said. “She said the guy was big and beefy and mean, like a football player. Who do we know like that?”

  “Junior Kline…Can you get back on this?” Lucas asked.

  “I could, but I’m a long way away,” Flowers said.

  “All right, forget it,” Lucas said. “I’ll get Jenkins or Shrake to find Junior and shake his ass up.”

  “Jesus, tell them not to beat on the guy unless they know he’s guilty,” Flowers said. “Those guys can get out of hand.”

  “Tell Barth I’m on the way,” Lucas said.

  THE ARTIST was wearing a black T-shirt, black slacks, and a black watch cap on his shaven head, a dramatic but unnecessary touch, since it was probably seventy degrees outside, Coombs thought, as she peered at him over the café table.

  There was tension in the air, and it involved who was going to be the first to look at the check. The photographer was saying, “Camera had eight-bit color channels, and I’m asking myself, eight-bit? What the hell is that all about? How’re you gonna get any color depth with eight-bit channels? Furthermore, they compress the shit out of the files, which means that the highlights get absolutely blown out, and the blacks fill up with noise…”

  Coombs knew it was a lost cause. Almost without any personal volition, her fingertips crawled across the table toward the check.

  JANE PULLED THE VAN into the garage and said, “Let’s go look. Can you walk?”

  “Yeah, I can walk,” Leslie said. “Ah, God, bit me up. The fuckin’ dog. That’s why the kid was walking so slow. She had the dog on a goddamn leash, why didn’t you see that? You had the binoculars…”

  “The dog was just too close to the ground, or the leash was too long, or something, but I swear to God, I never had a hint,” Jane said.

  They went inside, Jane leading the way, up to the master bath. Leslie was wearing the anti-DNA coveralls, which were showing patches of blood on the back of his upper right arm, his right hip, and down both legs. He stripped the coveralls off and Jane gaped: “Oh, my God.”

  Probably fifteen tooth-holes, and four quarter-sized chunks of loose flesh. Leslie looked at himself in the mirror: he’d stopped leaking, but the wounds were wet with blood. “No arteries,” he said. “Can’t get stitches, the cops will call the hospitals looking for dog bites.”

  “So what do you think?” Jane asked. She didn’t want to touch him.

  “I think we use lots of gauze pads and tape and Mycitracin, and you tape everything together and then…When you had that bladder infection, you had some pills left over, the ones that made you sick.”

  “I’ve still got them,” Jane said. The original antibiotics had given her hives, and she’d switched prescriptions.

  “I’ll use those.” He looked at himself in the mirror, and a tear popped out of one eye and ran down his cheek. “It’s not just holes, I’m going to have bruises the size of saucers.”

  “Time to go to Paris,” Jane said. “Or Budapest, or anywhere. Antique-scouting. If anybody should take your shirt off in the next month…”

  “But we’re not done yet,” Leslie said. “We’ve got to get that music box back in place, we’ve got to get the sewing basket.”

  “Leslie…”

  “I’ve been hurt worse than this, playing ball,” Leslie said. Another tear popped out. “Just get me taped up.”

  A ST. PAUL COP CAR was sitting at the curb at Barth’s house. Every light in the house was on, and people who might have been neighbors were standing off the stoop, smoking. Lucas pulled in behind the cop car, got out, and walked up to the stoop.

  “They’re pretty busy in there,” one of the smokers said.

  “I’m a cop,” Lucas said. He knocked once and let himself into the house. Two uniformed cops were standing in the living room, talking with the Barths, who were sitting on the couch. Lucas didn’t recognize either of the cops, and when they turned to him, he said, “Lucas Davenport, I’m with the BCA. I worked with the Barths on the grand jury.”

  One of the cops nodded and Lucas said to Jesse, “You all right?”

  “They got Screw,” she said.

  “But you’re all right.”

  “She’s scared shitless, if that’s all right,” Kathy snapped.

  “We just got a call fro
m another squad,” one of the cops said. “There’s a dead dog on the side of the road, just off Lexington. It’s white, sounds like…Screw.”

  “All right,” Lucas said. Back to Jesse. “You think you could come down with me, look at the dog?”

  She snuffled.

  The cop said, “We called Animal Control, they’re gonna pick it up.”

  Lucas to Jesse: “What do you think?”

  “I could look,” she said. “He saved my life.”

  “Tell me exactly what happened…”

  SHE TOLD the story in an impressionistic fashion—touches of color, touches of panic, not a lot of detail. When the dog hit the big man, she said, she was already running, and she was fast. “I didn’t look back for a block and then I saw him jump in the van and Screw was stuck on his leg. Then the van went around in a circle, and that’s the last I saw. They turned on Lexington toward the interstate. Then I ran some more until I got home.”

  “So there had to be at least two people,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah. Because one was driving and the other one tried to hit me,” she said.

  “What’d he try to hit you with?” Lucas asked.

  “Like a cane.”

  “A cane?”

  “Yeah, like a cane,” she said.

  “Could it have been a pipe?”

  She thought for a minute, and then said, “Yeah. It could have been a pipe. About this long.” She held her hands three feet apart.

  Lucas turned away for a second, closed his eyes, felt people looking at him. “Jesus.”

  “What?” Kathy Barth was peering at him. “You havin’ a stroke?”

  “No, it’s just…Never mind.” He thought: the van guys were in the wrong case. To Jesse: “Honey, let’s go look at the dog, okay?”

  THEY FOUND the dog lying in the headlights of a St. Paul squad car. The cop was out talking to passersby, and broke away when Lucas pulled up. This cop he knew: “Hey, Jason.”

  “This your dog?” Jason was smiling, shaking his head.

  “It’s sorta mine,” Jesse said. She looked so sad that the cop’s smile vanished. She got up close and peered down at Screw’s body. “That’s him. He looks so…dead.”

  The body was important for two major reasons: it confirmed Jesse’s story; and one other thing…

  Lucas squatted next to it: the dog was twisted and scuffed, but also, it seemed, broken. Better though: its muzzle was stained with blood.

  Lucas stood up and said to the cop, “Somebody said Animal Control was coming?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know how to do this, exactly, but I want an autopsy done,” Lucas said. “I’d like to have it done by the Ramsey medical examiner, if they’ll do it.”

  “An autopsy?” Jason looked doubtfully at the dead dog.

  “Yeah. I want to know how he was killed. Specifically, if it might have been a pipe,” Lucas said. “I want the nose, there, the mouth, checked for human blood. If there is human blood, I want DNA.”

  “Who’d he bite?” the cop asked.

  “We don’t know. But this is seriously important. When I find this guy, I’m gonna hang him up by his…I’m gonna hang him up,” Lucas said.

  “By his balls,” said Jesse.

  GABRIELLA DIDN’T NOTICE the broken window in the back door until she actually pushed the door open and was reaching for the kitchen light switch. The back door had nine small windows in it, and the broken one was bottom left, above the knob. The glass was still there, held together by transparent Scotch tape, but she could see the cracks when the light snapped on. She frowned and took a step into the kitchen and the other woman was right there.

  JANE WIDDLER had just come down the stairs, carrying the sewing basket. She turned and walked down the hall into the kitchen, quiet in running shoes, Leslie twenty feet behind, when she heard the key in the back door lock and the door popped open and the light went on and a woman stepped into the kitchen and there they were.

  The woman froze and blurted, “What?” and then a light of recognition flared in her eyes.

  Jane recognized her from the meeting at Bucher’s. The woman shrank back and looked as though she were about to scream or run, or scream and run, and Jane knew that a running fight in a crowded neighborhood just wouldn’t work, not with the dog bites in Leslie’s legs, and Leslie was still too far away, so she dropped the basket and launched herself at Coombs, windmilling at her, fingernails flying, mouth open, smothering a war shriek.

  Coombs put up a hand and tried to backpedal and Jane hit her in the face and the two women bounced off the doorjamb and went down and rolled across the floor, Coombs pounding at Jane’s midriff and legs, then Leslie was there, trying to get behind Coombs, and they rolled over into the kitchen table, and then back, and then Leslie plumped down on both of them and got an arm around Coombs and pulled her off of Jane like a mouse being pulled off flypaper.

  Coombs tried to scream, her mouth open, her eyes bulging as Leslie choked her, and she was looking right in Jane’s eyes when her spine cracked, and her eyes rolled up and her body went limp.

  Jane pushed the body away and Leslie said, “Motherfucker,” and backed up to the door, then turned around and closed it.

  Jane was on her hands and knees, used the table to push herself up. “Is she dead?”

  “Yeah.” Leslie’s voice was hoarse. He’d been angry with the world ever since the dog. His arms, ass, and legs burned like fire, and his heart was pounding from the surprise and murder of Coombs.

  Coombs lay like a crumpled rag in the nearly nonexistent light on the kitchen floor; a shadow, a shape in a black-and-white photograph. “We can’t leave her,” Leslie said. “She’s got to disappear. She’s one too many dead people.”

  “They’ll know,” Jane said, near panic. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “We’ve got to take her with us. We’ll go back to the house, get the van, we’ve got to move the van anyway. We’ll take her down to the farm, like we were gonna do with the kid,” Leslie said.

  “Then what? Then what?”

  “Then tomorrow, we go to see John Smith at Bucher’s, give him some papers of some kind, tell him we forgot something,” Leslie said “We let him see us: see that I’m not all bitten up. I can fake that. We tell him we’re thinking of a scouting trip…and then we take off.”

  “Oh, God, Leslie, I’m frightened. I think…” Jane looked at the shadow on the floor. What she thought was, This won’t work. But better not to tell Les. Not in the mood he was in. “Maybe. Maybe that’s the best plan. I don’t know if we should go away, though. Going away won’t help us if they decide to start looking for us…”

  “We can talk about that later. Get your flashlight, see if there’re some garbage bags here. We gotta bag this bitch up and get rid of her. And we’ve gotta pick up this sewing shit…What’d you do, you dumbshit, throw it at her?”

  “Don’t be vulgar. Not now. Please.”

  THEY SCRABBLED AROUND in the dark, afraid to let the light of the flash play against the walls or windows. They got the sewing basket back together, hurriedly, and found garbage bags in a cleaning closet next to the refrigerator. They stuffed the lower half of Coombs’s limp body into a garbage bag, then pulled another over the top of her body.

  Leslie squatted on the floor and sprayed around some Scrubbing Bubbles cleaner, then wiped it up with paper towels and put the towels in the bags with the body. He did most of the kitchen floor that way, waddling backward away from the wet parts until he’d done most of the kitchen floor.

  “Should be good,” he muttered. Then: “Get the car. Pull it through the alley. I’ll meet you by the fence.”

  She didn’t say a word, but went out the back door, carrying the wicker sewing basket. And she thought, Won’t work. Won’t work. She moved slowly around the house, in the dark, then down the front lawn and up the street to the car. She got in, thinking, Won’t work. Some kind of dark, disturbing mantra. She had to break out of it, had to thi
nk. Leslie didn’t see it yet, but he would.

  Had to think.

  THE ALLEY WAS a line of battered garages, with one or two new ones, and a broken up, rolling street surface. She moved through it slowly and carefully, around an old battered car, maybe Coombs’s, paused by the back gate to Coombs’s house, popped the trunk: felt the weight when the body went in the trunk. Then Leslie was in the car and said, “Move it.”

  She had to think. “We need supplies. We need to get the coveralls. If we’re going to dig…we need some boots we can leave behind. In the ground. We need gloves. We need a shovel.”

  Leslie looked out the window, at the houses passing on Lexington Avenue, staring, sullen: he got like that after he’d killed someone. “We’ve got to go away,” he said, finally. “Someplace…far away. For a couple of months. Even then…these goddamn holes in me, they’re pinning us down. We don’t dare get in a situation where somebody wants to look at my legs. They don’t even have to suspect us—if they start looking at antique dealers, looking in general, asking about dog bites, want to look at my legs…We’re fucked.”

  Maybe you, Jane thought. “We can’t just go rushing off. There’s no sign that they’ll be looking at you right away, so we’ll tell Mary Belle and Kathy that we’re going on a driving loop, that we’ll be gone at least three weeks. Then, we can stretch it, once we’re out there. Talk to the girls tomorrow, get it going…and then leave. End of the week.”

  “Just fuckin’ itch like crazy,” Leslie said. “Just want to pull the bandages off and scratch myself.”

  “Leslie, could you please…watch the language? Please? I know this is upsetting, but you know how upset I get…”