Invisible Prey

by John Sandford

  LESLIE LOOKED OUT the window and thought, We’re fucked. It was getting away from them, and he knew it. And with the bites on his legs, he was a sitting duck. He could run. They had a good bit of cash stashed, and if he loaded the van with all the highest-value stuff, drove out to L.A., and was very, very careful, he could walk off with a million and a half in cash.

  It’d take some time; but he could buy an ID, grow a beard, lose some weight. Move to Mexico, or Costa Rica.

  Jane was a problem, he thought. She required certain living standards. She’d run with him, all right, but then she’d get them caught. She’d talk about art, she’d talk about antiques, she’d show off…and she’d fuck them. Leslie, on the other hand, had grown up on a dairy farm and had shoveled his share of shit. He wouldn’t want to do that again, but he’d be perfectly content with a little beach cantina, selling cocktails with umbrellas, maybe killing the occasional tourist…

  He sighed and glanced at Jane. She had such a thin, delicate neck…

  AT THE HOUSE, Jane went around and rounded up the equipment and they both changed into coveralls. She was being calm. “Should we move the girl into the van?”

  Leslie shook his head: “No point. The police might be looking for a van, after the thing with the kid. Better just to go like we are. You follow in the car, I take the van, if I get stopped…keep going.”

  BUT THERE was no problem. There were a million white vans. The cops weren’t even trying. They rolled down south through the countryside and never saw a patrol car of any kind. Saw a lot of white vans, though.

  THE FARM WAS a patch of forty scraggly acres beside the Cannon River, with a falling-down house and a steel building in back. When they inherited it, they’d had some idea of cleaning it up, someday, tearing down the house, putting in a cabin, idling away summer days waving at canoeists going down the river. They’d have a vegetable garden, eat natural food…Andwaterfront was always good, right?

  Nothing ever came of it. The house continued to rot, everything inside was damp and smelled like mice; it was little better than a place to use the bathroom and take a shower, and even the shower smelled funny, like sulfur. Something wrong with the well.

  But the farm was well off the main highways, down a dirt road, tucked away in a hollow. Invisible. The steel building had a good concrete floor, a powerful lock on the only door, and was absolutely dry.

  The contractor who put in the building said, “Quite the hideout.”

  “Got that right,” Leslie had said.

  THEY PUT the van in the building, then got a flashlight, and Jane carried the shovel and Leslie put the girl in a garden cart and they dragged her up the hill away from the river; got fifty yards with Leslie cursing the cart and unseen branches and holes in the dark, and finally he said, “Fuck this,” and picked up the body, still wrapped in garbage bags, and said, “I’ll carry her.”

  DIGGING THE HOLE was no treat: there were dozens of roots and rocks the size of skulls, and Leslie got angrier and angrier and angrier, flailing away in the dark. An hour after they started, taking turns on the shovel, they had a hole four feet deep.

  When Leslie was in the hole, digging, Jane touched her pocket. There was a pistol in her pocket, their house gun, a snub-nosed .38. A clean gun, bought informally at a gun show in North Dakota. She could take it out, shoot Leslie in the head. Pack him into the hole under the girl. Go to the police: “Where’s my husband…? What happened to Leslie?”

  But there were complications to all that. She hadn’t thought about it long enough. This was the perfect opportunity, but she just couldn’t see far enough ahead…

  She relaxed. Not yet.

  THEY PACKED the body in, and Leslie started shoveling the dirt back.

  “Stay here overnight,” Leslie said. “Tomorrow, we can come up and spread some leaves around. Drag that stump over it…Don’t want some hunter falling in the hole. Or seeing the dirt.”

  “Leslie…” She wanted to say it, wanted to say, “This won’t work,” but she held back.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I hate to stay here. It smells funny,” she said.

  “Gotta do it,” he grunted. He was trampling down the dirt. “Nothing has been working, you know? Nothing.”

  THE BED they slept in was broken down; tended to sag in the middle. Neither could sleep much; and Leslie woke in the middle of the night, his eyes springing open.

  Two people in the world knew about him and the killings. One was Amity Anderson, who wanted money. They’d promised her a cut, as soon as they could move the furniture, which was out in the steel building.

  The other one was Jane.

  A tear dribbled down his face; good old Jane. He unconsciously scratched at a dog bite. He could pull Anderson in with the promise of money—come on out to the house, we’ve got it. Kill her, bring her out here.

  And Jane…Another tear.

  14

  JENKINS WAS ASLEEP in the visitor’s chair when Lucas arrived at his office the next morning. Carol said, “He was asleep when I got here,” and nodded toward the office. Lucas eased the door open and said, quietly, “Time to work, bright eyes.”

  Jenkins was wearing a gray suit, a yellow shirt, and black shoes with thick soles, and, knowing Jenkins’s penchant for kicking suspects, the shoes probably had steel toes. He’d taken off his necktie and gun and placed them under his chair.

  He didn’t move when Lucas spoke, but Lucas could tell he was alive because his head was tipped back and he was snoring. He was tempted to slam the door, give him a little gunshot action, but Jenkins might return fire before Lucas could slow him down. So he said, louder this time: “Hey! Jenkins! Wake up.”

  Jenkins’s eyes popped open and he stirred and said, “Ah, my back…This is really a fucked-up chair, you know that?” He stood up and slowly bent over and touched his toes, then stood up again, rolled his head and his hips, smacked his lips. “My mouth tastes like mud.”

  “How long you been here?” Lucas asked.

  “Ahhh…Since six? I found the Kline kid last night, then I went out with Shrake and had a few.”

  “Until six?”

  “No, no. Five-thirty, maybe,” Jenkins said. “Farmer’s market was open, I ate a tomato. And one of those long green things, they look like a dildo…”

  “A cucumber?” Lucas ventured.

  “Yeah. One of those,” Jenkins said.

  “What about the kid?”

  “Ah, whoever was in the truck, it wasn’t Kline,” Jenkins said. He yawned, scratched his head with both hands. “He was out with some of his business-school buddies. They’re not the kind to lie to the cops. Stuffy little cocksuckers. They agree that he was with them from eight o’clock, or so, to midnight.”

  “That would have been too easy, anyway.” Jenkins yawned again, and that made Lucas yawn.

  “Girl have any kind of description?” Jenkins asked.

  “The guy had a nylon on his head,” Lucas said. “She was too scared to look for a tag number. All we got is the dead dog and a white van, and we don’t know where the van is.”

  “Well, the dog’s something. I bet they’re doing high-fives over at the ME’s office,” Jenkins said. He yawned and shuffled toward the door. “Maybe I’ll go out for a run. Wake myself up.”

  “Call nine-one-one before you start,” Lucas said. Jenkins was not a runner. The healthiest thing he did was sometimes smoke less than two packs a day.

  “Yeah.” He coughed and went out. “See ya.”

  “Eat another tomato,” Lucas called after him.

  LUCAS COULDN’T THINK of what to do next, so he phoned John Smith at the St. Paul cops: “You going up to Bucher’s?”

  “Yeah, eventually, but I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Smith said.

  “Anybody up there?”

  “Barker, the niece with the small nose, an accountant, and a real estate appraiser. They’re doing an inventory of contents for the IRS—everything, not just what the Widdlers did. W
iddlers are finished. School got out, and the Lash kid called to see if he could go over and pick up his games. He’ll be up there sometime…probably some people in and out all day, if you want to go over. If there’s nobody there when you get there, there’s a lockbox on the door. Number is two-four-six-eight.”

  “All right. I’m gonna go up and look at paper,” Lucas said.

  “I understand there’ll be some excitement in Dakota County this morning, and you were involved,” Smith said.

  “Oh, yeah. Almost forgot,” Lucas said. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Pioneer Press reporter,” Smith said. “He was on his way out to Dakota County. Politicians don’t do good in Stillwater.”

  “Shouldn’t fuck children,” Lucas said.

  HE CHECKED OUT of the office and headed over to Bucher’s, took a cell-phone call from Flowers on the way. Flowers wanted the details on Jesse Barth: “Yeah, it happened, and no, it wasn’t the Kline kid,” Lucas said. He explained, and then asked about the girl’s body on the riverbank. Flowers was pushing it. “Keep in touch,” Lucas said.

  IN HIS MIND’S EYE, Lucas could see the attack of the night before. A big man with a pipe—or maybe a cane—in a white van, going after Jesse. A man with a pipe, or a cane, killed Bucher. But as far as he knew, there hadn’t been a van.

  A van had figured into the Toms case, but Toms had been strangled.

  Coombs’s head had hit a wooden ball, which St. Paul actually had locked up in the lab—and it had a dent, and hair, and blood, and even smudged handprints, but the handprints were probably from people coming down the stairs. But then, Coombs probably had nothing to do with it anyway…except for all those damn quilts. And the missing music box. He hadn’t heard from Gabriella Coombs, and made a mental note to call her.

  There was a good possibility that the van was a coincidence. He remembered that years before, during a long series of sniper attacks in Washington, D.C., everybody had been looking for a white van, and after every attack, somebody remembered seeing one. But the shooters hadn’t been in a white van. They’d been shooting through a hole in the trunk of a sedan, if he remembered correctly. The fact is, there were millions of white vans out there, half the plumbers and electricians and carpenters and roofers and lawn services were working out of white vans.

  BARKER AND THE ACCOUNTANT and the real estate appraiser had set up in the main dining room. Lucas said hello, and Barker showed him some restored pots, roughly glued together by the wife of a St. Paul cop who’d taken pottery lessons: “Just pots,” she said. “Nothing great.”

  “Huh.”

  “Does that mean something?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  In the office, he started flipping through paper, his heart not in it. He really didn’t feel like reading more, because he hadn’t yet found anything, and he’d looked through most of the high-probability stuff. Weather had said that he needed to pile up more data; but he was running out of data to pile up.

  The pots. No high-value pots had been smashed, but the cabinet had been full of them. Maybe not super-high value, but anything from fifty to a couple of hundred bucks each.

  The pots on the floor were worth nothing, as if only the cheaper pots had been broken. If a knowledgeable pot enthusiast had robbed the place, is that what he’d do? Take the most valuable, put the somewhat valuable back—perhaps out of some aesthetic impulse—and then break only the cheap ones as a cover-up? Or was he, as Kathy Barth suggested the night before, simply having a stroke?

  THE WIDDLERS CAME IN, Leslie cheerful in his blue seersucker suit and, this time, with a blue bow tie with white stars; Jane was dressed in shades of gold.

  “Bringing the lists to Mrs. Barker,” Jane called, and they went on through. Five minutes later, they went by the office on the way out. Lucas watched them down the front walk, toward their Lexus. Ronnie Lash rode up on a bike as they got to the street, and they looked each other over, and then Lash turned up the driveway toward the portico.

  Lash walked in, stuck his head in the office door, and said, “Hi, Officer Davenport.”

  “Hey, Ronnie.”

  Lash stepped in the door. “Figured anything out yet?”

  “Not yet. How about you?” Lucas asked.

  “You know when we discovered that whoever did it, had to have a car?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Detective Smith said they’d check the security camera at the Hill House to see what cars were on it. Did he do it?” Lash asked.

  “Yup. But the cameras operate on a motion detector that cover the grounds,” Lucas said. “They didn’t have anything in the time frame we needed.”

  “Huh. How about that halfway house?”

  Lucas said, “They’re mostly drunks. We’ve been looking at their histories…”

  “I mean the camera,” Lash said. “They’ve got a camera on their porch roof pointing out at the street.”

  Lucas scratched his chin: “Really?”

  “Yeah. I just came by there,” Lash said.

  “I’ll call John Smith. Ask him to look into it. Thanks, Ronnie.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  LUCAS CALLED SMITH. Smith said he would check it right away. “If it’s there, what I’m interested in would be a van,” Lucas said.

  “Probably won’t be anything,” Smith said. “Nothing goes longer than about forty-eight hours, you know, those tapes. But I’ll give them a call.”

  RONNIE CAME BACK THROUGH, carrying a shopping bag full of video games. “I talked to Mrs. Barker, and she showed me those vases. Those pots, the ones that got glued back together.”

  “You recognize them?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah. Last time I saw them, they were upstairs. On a table upstairs. They were never in that glass cabinet.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure,” Lash said. “They were in a corner, in a jog of the hallway, on a little table. I dusted them off myself, when I was helping Aunt Sugar.”

  LUCAS PACED AROUND the office, impatient with himself for not getting anywhere. He watched Lash go down the walk, get on his bike, and wobble off, the games bag dangling from one hand. There had been a robbery. He didn’t give a shit what the Widdlers said.

  His cell phone rang, and he glanced at the screen: Smith.

  “Yeah?”

  “We got a break—they archive the tapes for a month, in case they’ve got to see who was with who. I’m gonna run over there and take a look.”

  “Van,” Lucas said.

  His shut the phone, but before he could put it in his pocket, it rang again: Carol, from the office. He flipped it open. “Yeah?”

  “You need to make a phone call. A Mrs. Coombs…”

  “Gabriella. I’ve been meaning to call her.”

  “This is Lucy Coombs. The mother. She’s calling about Gabriella. Lucy says Gabriella’s disappeared, and she’s afraid something happened to her.”

  LUCY COOMBS WAS at her mother’s house. She was tall, thin, and blond, like her daughter, with the same clear oval face, but threaded with fine wrinkles; a good-looking woman, probably now in her late fifties, Lucas thought. She met him on the front lawn, twisting a key ring in her hands.

  “I called you because Gabriella said she was working with you,” she said. “I can’t find her. I’ve been looking all over, I called the man she was dating, and he said he dropped her off at her apartment last night and that she planned to come over here to look at papers and so I came over here and I…”

  She paused to take a breath and Lucas said, “Slow down, slow down. Have you been inside?”

  “Yes, there’s no sign of anything. But there’s a broken window on the back door, right by the latch. And I found these by the back porch.” She held up the key ring. “They’re her keys.”

  Lucas thought, Oh, shit. Out loud, he said, “Let’s go look around. Does she have a cell phone?”

  “No, we don’t believe in cell phones,” Coombs said. “Because of EMI.”<
br />
  “Okay…Has she done this before? Wandered off?”

  “Not lately. I mean she did when she was younger, but she’s been settling down,” Coombs said. “She’s been in touch every day since my mom died. I mean, I found her keys.” She was no fool; the keys were a problem, and there was fear in her eyes.

  They went around the house and through the back door, Coombs showing Lucas where she’d found the keys, off the back steps, as if they’d been dropped or thrown. “Maybe she dropped them in the dark and couldn’t find them,” Lucas suggested. “Did you look for her car?”

  “No, I didn’t think to. I wonder…sometimes she parked in the alley, behind the fence.” They walked out through the backyard, to a six-foot-high woven-board privacy fence that separated Marilyn Coombs’s house from the alley. The gate was hanging open, and as soon as Lucas pushed through, he saw Gabriella’s rusty Cavalier.

  “Oh, God,” Lucy Coombs said. She hurried past Lucas and then almost tiptoed up to the car, as if she were afraid to look in the windows. But the car was empty, except for some empty herbal tea bottles on the floor of the backseat. The car wasn’t locked; but then, Lucas thought, why would it be? There was nothing in it, and who would steal it?

  “Back to the house,” he said.

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “She’s probably just off somewhere. Maybe I oughta go talk to her boyfriend.”

  “I think you should,” Lucy Coombs said. “I know it wasn’t going very well. I think Gabriella was about to break it off.”

  “Let’s check the house and then I’ll go talk to the guy,” Lucas said. “Do you have any relatives or know any girlfriends or other boyfriends…?”

  THEY WALKED through the house: nobody there. Lucas looked at the broken window. He’d never actually seen it done, but he’d read about it in detective novels—burglars making a small break in a window, usually by pushing the point of a screwdriver against the glass, to get a single pressure crack. Then they’d work the glass out, open the door with a wire, then put the pane back in place and Scotch-tape it. With any luck, the owners didn’t notice the break for a while—sometimes a long while—and that would obscure the date and time of the break-in…