Invisible Prey

by John Sandford

  “Jeez, you crazy art people,” Lucas said.

  He said goodbye and went down to the car, rolled out of the ramp. A white van was just passing the exit; he cut after it, caught the Minnesota plates—wrong state—and then a sign on the side that said “DeWalt Tools.”

  Getting psycho, he thought.

  WITH NOBODY behind him, he paused at the intersection, fished through his notebook, and found a number for Landford and Margaret Booth, the Donaldson brother-in-law and sister. He dialed and got Margaret: “I need to know the details of how your sister acquired one of the Armstrong quilts, which she donated to the Milwaukee Art Museum.”

  “Do you think it’s something?” she asked.

  “It could be.”

  “I bet Amity Anderson is involved,” she said.

  “No, no,” Lucas said. “This thing is branching off in an odd direction. If you could look through your sister’s tax records, though, and let me know how she acquired it, and when she donated it, I’d appreciate it.”

  “I will do that this evening; but we are going out, so could I call you back in the morning?”

  “That’d be fine,” Lucas said.

  HE LOOKED at his watch. Five o’clock. He called Lucy Coombs, and from the way the phone was snatched up after a partial ring, knew that Gabriella had not been found: “Any word at all?” he asked.

  “Nothing. We don’t have anybody else to call,” Lucy Coombs sobbed. “Where is she? Oh, my God, where is she?”

  SMITH COULDN’T tell him. He did say the St. Paul cops were going door-to-door around Marilyn Coombs’s neighborhood, looking for anything or anybody who could give them a hint. “And what about the van? Still no thoughts?”

  “Not a thing, John. Honest to God, it’s driving me nuts.”

  HE THOUGHT about going over to Bucher’s, and looking at her tax records. But he knew the valuation and the date of the donation, and couldn’t think of what else he might find there. With a sense of guilt, he went home. Home to dinner, wondering where Gabriella Coombs might be; or her body.

  AFTER DINNER, Weather said, “You’re really messed up.”

  “I know,” Lucas said. He was in the den, staring at a TV, but the TV was turned off. “Gabriella Coombs is out there. I’m sitting here doing nothing.”

  “That thread,” Weather said. Lucas had told her about the spool of thread at Marilyn Coombs’s house, and the thread in the quilt. “If that’s the same thread, you’re suggesting that something is wrong with the quilts?”

  “Yeah, but they all wound up in museums, and the woman who benefited is dead,” Lucas said. “It seems like some of the money is missing. She didn’t get enough money. Maybe. It’s all so long ago. Maybe the Sotheby’s guy could tell me about it tomorrow, but Gabriella’s out there now…And what about the van?”

  “You’re going crazy sitting here,” Weather said. “Why don’t you go over to Bucher’s place, and see if she has anything on the quilt she donated to the Walker? You’ll need to look sooner or later. Why not now? You’d be doing something…”

  “Because it feels like the wrong thing to do. I feel like I ought to be out driving down alleys, looking for Gabriella.”

  “You’re not going to find her driving up and down alleys, Lucas.”

  He stood up. “I’m going to eat some cheese and crackers.”

  “Why don’t you take them with you?”

  HE DID, a bowl of sliced cheese and water crackers on the passenger seat of the Porsche, munching through them as he wheeled down to Bucher’s house. The mansion was brightly lit. Inside, he found the Bucher heirs, six people, four women and two men, dividing up the goodies.

  Carol Ann Barker, the woman with the tiny nose, came to greet him. “The St. Paul people said we could begin some preliminary marking of the property,” she explained. “People are getting ready to go back home, and we wanted to take this moment with the larger pieces.”

  Lucas said, “Okay—I’ll be in the office, looking at paper. Have you seen check registers anywhere? Stuff going back a few years? Or tax returns…? Anything to do with the buying and donation of the Armstrong quilt?”

  “The Armstrong quilt?”

  She didn’t know what it was, and when Lucas explained, pursed her lips, and said, “She had an annual giving program. There are some records in her office, we looked to see if we could find anything about the Reckless painting. We didn’t find anything, but there are documents on donations. Check registers are filed on the third floor, there’s a room with several old wooden file cabinets…I don’t know what years.”

  Barker showed him the file: it was an inch thick, and while Barker went back to marking furniture, he thumbed through it, looking for the quilt donation. Not there. Looked through it again. Still found nothing.

  He had the date of the quilt donation, and found donations of smaller items on dates on either side of it. Scratched his head. Rummaged through the files, looking for more on art, or donations. Finally, gave up and climbed the stairs to the third floor.

  The file room was small and narrow and smelled of crumbling plaster; dust and small bits of plaster littered the tops of the eight file cabinets. The room was lit by a row of bare bulbs on the ceiling. Lucas began opening drawers, and in the end cabinets, the last ones he looked at, found a neat arrangement of check registers, filed by date. There was nothing of interest that he could see around the time of the quilt donation; but as he worked backward from the donation, he eventually found a check for $5,000 made out to Marilyn Coombs.

  For the quilt? Or for something else Coombs had found? He looked in his notebooks for the date of the quilt auction in New York. The check to Coombs had been issued seven months earlier. Maybe not related; but why hadn’t there been any other check to Coombs? In fact, the only large check he’d seen had been to a car dealer.

  He was still stuck. Stuck in a small room, dust filtering down on his neck. He ought to be out looking for Gabriella…

  THE HEIRS were finishing up when Lucas came back down the stairs. Barker asked, “Find anything?”

  “No. Listen, have you ever heard of a woman named Marilyn Coombs?”

  Barker shook her head: “No…should I have?”

  “She was an acquaintance of your aunt’s, the person who originally found the Armstrong quilts,” Lucas said. “She was killed a few days ago…If you find anything with the name ‘Coombs’ on it, could you call me?”

  “Sure. Right away. You don’t think there’s a danger to us?” The other heirs had stopped looking at furniture, and turned toward him.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “We’ve got a complicated and confusing problem, we may have had a couple of murders and maybe a kidnapping. I just don’t know.”

  There was a babble of questions then, and he outlined the known deaths. One man asked anxiously, “Do you think it’s just random? Or is there a purpose behind the killings? Other than money?”

  “I don’t know that, either,” Lucas said. “Part of this may be coincidence, but I’m starting to think not. If these killings are connected somehow, I would think it would have to do with some special knowledge that would give away the killers. In addition to the money angle, the robbery aspect.”

  The man exhaled: “Then I’m good. I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”

  DISCOURAGED, Lucas went back to the car, making a mental list of things to do in the morning, calls to make. He didn’t want to call Lucy Coombs, because he didn’t want to talk to her again. Instead, he called John Smith, who was home watching television. “Not a thing,” Smith said. “I’ll get a call as soon as anybody finds anything. Finds a shoelace. So far, we haven’t found a thing.”

  Heading toward home, a fire truck, siren blasting away, went by on a cross street. He could hear more sirens to the south, not far away, and halfway home, with the windows in the car run down, he could smell the distinctive odor of a burning house. He’d never figured out what it was, exactly—insulation, or plaster, or old wood, or some
combination—but he’d encountered it a dozen times in his career, and it never smelled good.

  Back at home, he found Weather in the kitchen, sitting at the counter with a notepad. She asked, “You have time to run to the store?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said. Ought to be doing something.

  “I’m making a list…”

  He was waiting for the list when his cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID: Flowers.

  “Yeah?”

  “I just got a call from Kathy Barth,” Flowers said. “Somebody just firebombed her house.”

  17

  THE FIRE WAS OUT by the time Lucas got back. He’d driven right past it on the way home, but a block north, hadn’t seen the smoke against the night sky, and the flames had been confined to the back side of the house.

  Kathy and Jesse Barth were standing in the front yard talking to firemen when Lucas walked across the fire line. Jesse Barth saw him coming and pointed him out to her mother, who snapped something at her daughter, and then started toward Lucas.

  “My house is burned down because of you assholes,” she shouted.

  Lucas thought she was going to hit him, and put his hands up, palms out. “Wait, wait, wait…I just heard. Tell me what happened.”

  “Somebody threw a firebomb through my back window, right in the kitchen, right through the window, everything’s burned and screwed up and there’s water…”

  She suddenly went to her knees on the dirty wet grass, weeping. Jesse walked up to stand next to her, put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Virgil said nothing would happen,” the kid said. “Virgil said you’d look out for us.”

  Lucas shook his head: “We don’t know what’s going on here,” he said. “We can’t find anybody who might have tried to pull you off the street, who killed Screw…”

  “It’s those fuckin’ Klines, you fuckin’ moron,” Kathy Barth shouted, trying to get back on her feet. The fireman caught her under one arm, and helped her get up.

  Lucas said, “Ah, Jesus, I’m sorry about this…”

  “It’s all my pictures, all of Jesse’s things from when she was a kid, all of her school papers, my wedding dress…” She took a step toward the house, and the fireman said, “Whoa. Not yet.”

  Lucas asked him, “How bad is it?”

  “The kitchen’s a mess. Miz Barth used a fire extinguisher on it, which was pretty brave, and that held it down some, and we got here pretty quick,” the fireman said. “The actual fire damage is confined to the kitchen, but there’s smoke damage, and foam. Some of the structure under the back of the house could be in trouble.”

  Lucas asked Kathy Barth, “Do you have insurance?”

  “Yes. Part of the mortgage.”

  “Then you’ll get it fixed. Better than it was,” Lucas said. “A new kitchen. If it’s only smoke, you can save a lot of your stuff, but as soon as the fire guys let you, you’ve got to get in, and get your photo stuff out.”

  She came back at him: “Why can’t you stop those guys? They’re crazy.” And to Jesse: “We should never have gotten involved with them. We should never have gone to the cops. Now our house…Oh, jeez, our house…”

  “Tell me what happened,” Lucas said.

  “We were watching television, and there was a crash in the kitchen—” Jesse began.

  Kathy interrupted: “One minute before that I was in the kitchen getting Cheez-Its. I would have been exploded and burned up.”

  Jesse, continuing: “—and we heard this window crash, this glass, and boom, there was fire all over the kitchen and I was screaming—”

  “I ran and got the fire extinguisher from the closet—” Kathy said.

  Jesse: “I called nine-one-one and got the fire department to come—”

  “I squirted the fire extinguisher but there was fire all over, I could smell the gasoline and it wouldn’t go out, the whole kitchen was full of fire and we had to run,” Kathy said. She was looking anxiously at the house.

  Jesse: “The fire department took forever to get here…”

  “Six minutes from when the call came in,” the fireman said. “Fire was out in seven.”

  LUCAS FOUND the fireman in charge in the backyard. He was talking with another fireman, pointing up at the roof, broke off when Lucas came up. Lucas flashed his ID: “These folks were part of an investigation we did at the BCA.”

  “The Klines—they told us,” the fireman said.

  “Yeah. They say it was a bomb, came in through the window. What do you think?” Lucas asked.

  “Our arson guy’ll look it over when he gets here, but it could have been. There was a big flash all over the kitchen, all at once. You can still smell the propellant if you get close. Gas and oil.”

  “A Molotov cocktail?”

  “Something on that order,” the fireman said. “Maybe like a gallon cider jug.”

  “Be pretty heavy to throw,” Lucas said.

  The fireman nodded. “You ever in the Army?”

  “No.”

  “Well, in the Army they’ve got this thing in Basic Training where you try to throw a dummy grenade through a window from twenty or thirty feet. Most guys can’t do it, even with three chances. You got grenades bouncing all over the place,” the fireman said. “Most guys couldn’t throw a bottle any better. I’d say somebody ran up to the window, and dunked it, like a basketball.” He hesitated, then added, “If it was an outsider who did it.”

  “The alternative would be…?”

  The fireman shrugged. “The owner wants a vacant lot. This is a nice piece of property, and it might even be worth more if the house wasn’t here. The house isn’t so hot. You take the insurance, you sell the lot…you move to Minnetonka.”

  Lucas looked back at the house. He could see Kathy Barth on the front lawn, arms wrapped tight around herself.

  “Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “She was worried about their pictures being burned, Jesse’s school stuff, her wedding dress.”

  “Well, that’s something,” the fireman agreed. “You don’t see people burning up that kind of thing, not unless it’s a revenge trip. They don’t burn up their own stuff that much.”

  The second fireman chipped in: “There was a lot of damage right over the kitchen sink. There are dishes in the sink, and we haven’t gone through it yet, but I betcha that bottle landed in the sink, and a lot of the gas wound up in the sink, instead of shooting all over the place. That helped confine it; the arson guys’ll know better.”

  “So who’s your arson guy?”

  Lucas took down the name of the head arson investigator, and thanked them for their time. Back in the front yard, he asked Kathy, “You got a credit card?”

  “Why?”

  “Gonna have to stay in a motel tonight,” Lucas said. “Probably for a few nights.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Got some cash, got an ATM card?”

  She nodded again. “We’re okay. We’re just…we just…”

  “We’re just really scared,” Jesse finished.

  LUCAS CALLED the Radisson in downtown St. Paul, got them a room. Told them not to tell anyone else where they were staying. A fireman said he would take them inside to get what they could out of the house. A neighbor volunteered space in her garage, where they temporarily could store whatever they could get out of the house.

  The fireman suggested a couple of cleaning companies that could clean up the part of the house that wasn’t damaged. “If you guys hadn’t been home, if it’d taken another five minutes before somebody reported it, if you hadn’t used that fire extinguisher to slow it down, you’d be looking at a hole in the ground. You get it cleaned up, you could be living in it again in a week,” he said. “I see it all the time.”

  LUCAS CALLED Jenkins and Shrake. They were at the White Bear Yacht Club, having a few drinks after a round of golf, part of what they said was an investigation into gambling on golf courses. “Get your asses out of the country club, and get onto the Klines. Jack those fuck
ers up. My gut feeling is that they’re not involved, but I want you to prove it,” Lucas told Jenkins.

  “Can’t prove a negative,” Jenkins said.

  “Not before this,” Lucas said. “You guys are gonna do it, though, or we’re gonna do a gay prostitution sting, and your ass will be on the corner.”

  “We get to wear nylons?” Jenkins asked. He didn’t threaten well.

  Lucas’s voice went dark: “I’m not fuckin’ around here, man. We had an attempted kidnapping, we got a dead dog, now we got a firebomb.”

  “We’ll jack them up, no shit,” Jenkins promised. “We’re on the case.”

  “Flowers is coming up. He’ll get in touch.”

  OFF THE PHONE, Lucas started walking around the neighborhood, checking the houses on each side of the Barths’ house, then across the alley in back, and so on, up and down both streets and the houses on the alley. Four houses up from the Barths, and across the alley, he found an elderly man named Stevens.

  “I was cooking some Weight Watchers in the microwave, and I saw a car go through the alley,” Stevens said. He was tall, and too thin, balding, with a dark scab at the crest of his head, as if he’d walked into something. They were in the kitchen, and he pointed a trembling hand at the window over the sink, the same arrangement as in the Barths’. “Then, maybe, ten minutes later I was just finished eating, and I took the dish to the trash, and saw more lights in the alley. I didn’t see the car, but I think it was the same one. They both had blue headlights.”

  “Blue?”

  “Not blue-blue, but bluish. Like on German cars. You know, when you look in your rearview mirror on the interstate, and you see a whole bunch of yellow lights, and then, mixed in, some that look blue?”