Invisible Prey

by John Sandford

  “No-no-no,” Anderson said. “Look, my relationship with Leslie…continued…to some extent.”

  “To some extent?” Smith asked. “What does that mean?”

  “I was…” She bit her lip, looked away from them, then said, “I was actually more interested in Jane.”

  “In Jane? Did you have a physical relationship with Jane?” Lucas asked.

  “Well…yes. Why would I want to fuck a great big huge fat guy?”

  Lucas had no answer for that; but he had more questions for Jane Widdler.

  HE TURNED to the quilts, taking notes as Anderson answered the questions. She believed the quilts were genuine. They’d been spotted by Marilyn Coombs, she said, who took them to the Widdlers for confirmation and evaluation.

  The Widdlers, in turn, had sent them away for laboratory tests, and confirmed with the tests, and other biographical information about Armstrong, that the quilts were genuine. The Widdlers then put together an investment package in which the quilts would be sold to private investors who would donate them to museums, getting both a tax write-off and a reputation for generosity.

  “We have reason to believe that the quilts are faked—that the curses were, in any case. That the primary buyers paid only a fraction of what they said they paid, and took an illegal tax write-off after the donations,” Lucas said.

  “I don’t know about any of that,” Anderson said. “I was the contact between the Widdlers and Mrs. Donaldson. I brought her attention to the quilts, but she made her own decisions and her own deals. I never handled money.”

  “You told me that you didn’t know Mrs. Bucher,” Lucas said.

  She shrugged. “I didn’t. I knew who she was, but I didn’t know her.”

  “And you still…maintain that position?”

  “It’s the truth,” she said.

  “You didn’t go there with Leslie Widdler and kill Mrs. Bucher and her maid?”

  “Of course not! That’s crazy!”

  He asked her about Toms: never heard of him, she said. She’d never been to Des Moines in her life, not even passing through.

  “Were you with Leslie Widdler last night?” Smith asked.

  “No. I was out until about eight, then I was here,” she said.

  “You didn’t speak to him, didn’t ride around with him…”

  “No. No. I didn’t speak to him or see him or anything.”

  THEY PUSHED ALL the other points, but Anderson wouldn’t budge. She hadn’t dealt in antiques with either Leslie or Jane Widdler. She had no knowledge of what happened with the Armstrong quilts, after Donaldson, other than the usual art-world reports, gossip, and hearsay. She could prove, she thought, that on the Friday night that the Buchers were killed, she’d been out late with three other women friends, at a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, where she’d not only drunk a little too much, but remembered that there’d been a birthday party in an upper loft area of the restaurant that had turned raucous, and that she was sure people would remember.

  WHEN THEY were done, Anderson said, “Now I have a question. I have the feeling that Jane Widdler has been telling you things that aren’t true. I mean, if Jane and Leslie were killing these people, I don’t know why Jane would try to drag me into it. Is she trying to do that?”

  “Maybe,” Lucas said.

  “Do you think they could kill people?” Smith asked.

  Anderson turned her face down, thinking, glanced sideways at Ramford, then said, “You know, Jane…has always struck me as greedy. Not really a bad person, but terribly greedy. She wants all this stuff. Diamonds, watches, cars, Hermès this and Tiffany that and Manolo Blahnik something else. She might kill for money—it’d have to be money—but…I don’t know.”

  Her mouth moved some more, without words, and they all sat and waited, and she went on:

  “Leslie, I think Leslie might kill. For the pleasure in it. And money. In college, we had this small-college football team. Football didn’t mean anything, really. You’d go and wave your little pennant or wear your mum and nobody cared if you won or lost. A lot of people made fun of football players…but Leslie liked to hurt people. He’d talk about stepping on people’s hands with his cleats. Like, if one of the runner-guys did too well, they’d get him down and then Leslie would ‘accidentally’ step on his hand and break it. He claimed he did it several times. Word got around that he could be dangerous.”

  Smith said, “Huh,” and Lucas asked, “Anything heavier than that? That you heard of? Did you get any bad vibrations from Leslie when Mrs. Donaldson was killed?”

  She shook her head, looking spooked: “No. Not at all. But now that you mention it…I mean, jeez, their store really came up out of nowhere.” She looked at Lucas, Smith, and Ramford. “You know what I mean? Most antique people wind up in these little holes-in-the-wall, and the Widdlers are suddenly rich.”

  “Makes you think,” Smith said, looking up at Lucas.

  There was more, but the returns were diminishing. Lucas finally stood up, sighed, said to Ramford, “You might want to give her a couple of names, just in case,” and he and Smith took off.

  “LET’S DRIVE AROUND for a while, before you drop me off. Get Ramford out of there,” Lucas said to Smith. “I don’t know where she parked, I wouldn’t want her to pick me up.” He got on his radio and called Flowers as they walked to the car.

  “I’m looking right at you,” Flowers said.

  “There should be a lawyer coming out in a few minutes. Stay out of sight, and call when she’s gone.”

  Smith drove them up to Grand Avenue, and they both got double-dip ice cream cones, and leaned on the hood of Smith’s car and watched the college girls go by; blondes and short shirts and remarkably little laughter, intense brooding looks, like they’d been bit on the ass by Sartre or Derrida or some other Frenchman.

  Lucas was getting down to cone level on his chocolate pecan fudge when his radio beeped. Flowers said, “The lawyer is getting in her car.”

  “I’ll be in place in five minutes,” Lucas said.

  SURVEILLANCE COULD be exciting, but hardly ever was. This night was one of the hardly-evers, four long hours of nothing. Couldn’t even read, sitting in the dark. He talked to Flowers twice on the radio, had a long phone chat with Weather—God bless cell phones—and at midnight, Jenkins eased up behind him.

  “You good?” Lucas asked, on the radio.

  “Got my video game, got my iPod. Got two sacks of pork rinds and a pound of barbeque ribs, and a quart of Diet Coke for propellant. All set.”

  “Glad I’m not in the car with you,” Lucas said. “Those goddamn pork rinds.”

  “Ah, you open the door every half hour or so, and you’re fine,” Jenkins said. “You might not want to light a cigarette.”

  WEATHER WAS CUTTING again in the morning, and was asleep when Lucas tiptoed into the bedroom at twelve-fifteen. He took an Ambien to knock himself down, a Xanax to smooth out the ride, thought about a martini, decided against it, set the alarm clock, and slipped into bed.

  The alarm went off exactly seven hours and forty minutes later. Weather was gone; that happened when he was working hard on a case, staying up late. They missed each other, though they were lying side by side…

  He cleaned up quickly, looking at his watch, got a Ziploc bag with four pieces of cornbread from the housekeeper, a couple of Diet Cokes from the refrigerator, the newspaper off the front porch, and was on his way. Hated to be late on a stakeout; they were so boring that being even a minute late was considered bad form.

  As it was, he pulled up on the side street at two minutes to eight, got the hand-off from Jerrold, called Del, who’d just been pushed by Flowers, and who said that a light had come on ten minutes earlier. “She’s up, but she’s boring,” Del said.

  The newspapers had the Widdler story, and tied it to Bucher, Donaldson, and Toms. Rose Marie said that more arrests were imminent, but the Star Tribune reporter spelled it “eminent” and the Pioneer Press guy went with “immanent.” />
  You should never, Lucas thought, trust a spell-checker.

  ANDERSON STEPPED OUT of her house at 8:10, picked up the newspaper, and went back inside. At 8:20, carrying a bag and the newspaper, she walked down to the bus stop, apparently a daily routine, because the bus arrived two minutes later.

  They tagged her downtown and to her office, parked their cars in no-parking zones, with police IDs on the dashes, and Lucas took the Skyway exit while Flowers took the street. There was a back stairs, but Lucas didn’t think the risk was enough to worry about…

  As he waited, doing nothing, he had the feeling he might be wrong about that, and worried about it, but not too much: he always had that feeling on stakeouts. A few years earlier, he’d had a killer slip away from a stakeout, planning to use the stakeout itself as his alibi for another murder…

  A few minutes before noon, Shrake showed up for the next shift, and Lucas passed off to him, and walked away, headed back to the office. He’d gone fifty feet when his cell phone rang: Shrake. “She’s moving,” and he was gone. Lucas looked back. Shrake was ambling along the Skyway, away from Lucas, on the phone. Talking to somebody else on the cell, probably to Jenkins, probably afraid to use the radio because he was too close to the target; she had practically walked over him.

  Seventy-five feet ahead of Shrake, Lucas could see the narrow figure of Amity Anderson speed-walking through the crowd.

  Going to lunch? His radio chirped: Flowers. “You want to hang in, until we figure out where she’s going?”

  “Yeah.”

  Shrake took her to a coffee shop, where she bought a cup of coffee to go, and an orange scone, and then headed down to the street, where Jenkins picked her up. “Catching a bus,” Jenkins said.

  They took her all the way back to her house. Off the bus, she paused to throw the coffee-shop sack into a corner trash barrel, then headed up to her house, walking quickly, in a hurry. She went straight to the mailbox and took out a few letters, shuffled them quickly, picked one, tore the end off as she went through the door.

  “What do you think?” Flowers asked, on the radio.

  “Let’s give her an hour,” Lucas said.

  “That’s what I think,” Flowers said. Shrake and Jenkins agreed.

  Half an hour later, Anderson walked out of her house wearing a long-sleeved shirt and jeans and what looked like practical shoes or hiking boots. She had a one-car detached garage, with a manual lift. She pushed the door up, backed carefully out, pulled the door down again, pointed the car up the hill, and took off.

  “We’re rolling,” Jenkins said. “We’re gone.”

  25

  LUCAS GOT ON THE RADIO: “This could be something, guys. Stack it up behind her, and take turns cutting off, but don’t lose her.”

  Shrake: “Probably going to the grocery store.”

  Lucas: “She turned the wrong way. There’s one just down the hill.”

  They had four cars tagging her, but no air. As long as they stayed in the city, they were good—they’d each tag her for a couple of blocks, then turn away, while the next one in line caught up. They tracked her easily along Ford to Snelling, where she took a right, down the bluff toward Seventh. Snelling was a chute; if she stopped there, they’d all be sacked right on top of her. Flowers followed her down while Lucas, Jenkins, and Shrake waited at the top of the hill.

  “I got her,” Flowers said. “She took a left on Seventh, come on through.”

  They moved fast down the hill, through the intersection, Flowers peeling away as Lucas came up behind him. They got caught at a stoplight just before I-35, and Lucas hooked away, into a store parking lot, afraid she’d pick up his face if he got bumper-to-bumper. “Jenkins?”

  “Got her. Heading south on Thirty-five E.”

  Lucas pulled out of the parking lot, now last in line, and followed the others down the ramp onto I-35. Lucas got on the radio, looking for a highway-patrol plane, but was told that with one thing or another, nobody could get airborne for probably an hour. “Well, get him going, for Christ’s sake. This chick may be headed for Des Moines, or something.”

  The problem with a four-car tag was that Anderson wasn’t a fast driver, and they had to hold back, which meant they’d either loom in her rearview mirror, or they’d have to hold so far back that they might lose her to a sudden move. If she hooked into a shopping center, and several were coming up, they’d be out of luck.

  “Jenkins, move up on her slow,” Lucas said. “Get off at Yankee Doodle, even if she doesn’t.”

  “Got it.”

  She didn’t get off; Jenkins went up the off-ramp, ran the lights at the top, and came down the on-ramp, falling in behind Lucas.

  They played with her down the interstate, the speed picking up. She didn’t get off at the Burnsville Mall, a regional shopping center that Lucas had thought would be a possibility. Instead, she pushed out of the metro area, heading south into the countryside.

  Lucas could see the possible off-ramps coming on his nav system, and called them out; one of them would fall off at each, then reenter. She didn’t get off, but stayed resolutely in the slow lane, poking along at the speed limit.

  South, and more south, thirty miles gone before she clicked on her turn signal and carefully rolled up the ramp at Rice County 1, two cars behind Flowers. Flowers had to guess, and Lucas shouted into the radio, “She went to Carleton. Go left. Go east.”

  Flowers turned left, the next car went right, and Anderson turned left behind Flowers. Carleton was off to the east in Northfield, but they’d already gone past the Northfield exit; still, she might be familiar with the countryside around it, Lucas thought, and that had been a better bet than the open countryside to the west.

  Now they had a close tag on her, but from the front. Flowers slowly pulled away, leading her into the small town of Dundas; but just before the town, she turned south on County 8, and Flowers was yelling, “I’m coming back around,” and Shrake said, “I got her, I got her.”

  Well back, now. Not many cars out, and all but Lucas had been close to her, and she might pick one of them out. They kept south, onto smaller and narrower roads, Shrake breaking away, Jenkins moving up, until she disappeared into a cornfield.

  “Whoa. Man, she turned,” Jenkins said. “She’s, uh, off the road, hang back guys, I’m gonna go on past…”

  Hadn’t rained in a few days, and when Jenkins went past the point where she’d disappeared, he looked down a dirt track, weeds growing up in the middle, and called back, “She looks like she’s going into a field. I don’t know, man…you can probably track her by the dust coming up.”

  “That’s not a road,” Lucas said, peering at his atlas. “Doesn’t even show up here; I think it must go down to the river.”

  “Maybe she’s going canoeing,” Flowers said. “This is a big canoe river.”

  Lucas said into a live radio, “Ah, holy shit.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the Cannon River, man.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The money that got laundered in Las Vegas, on the quilts—it went to Cannon, Inc., or Cannon Associates, or something like that.”

  Shrake came back: “Dust cloud stopped. I think she’s out of her car; or lost. What do you want to do?”

  “Watch for a minute,” Lucas said. “Flowers, you’re wearing boots?”

  “Yup.”

  “I got my gators,” Shrake said. “I didn’t think we were gonna be creeping around in a cornfield.”

  “Gators for me,” Jenkins said.

  “You guys get a truckload deal?” Flowers asked.

  “Shut up,” Lucas said. “Okay, Flowers and I are gonna walk in there. Jenkins and Shrake get down the opposite ends of the road. If she comes out, you’ll be tracking her.”

  “How do we hide the cars?” Flowers asked.

  “Follow me,” Lucas said. He went on south, a hundred yards, a hundred and fifty, found an access point, and plowed thirty feet into the cornfield. The corn didn’t quite
hide the truck, but it wouldn’t be obvious what kind it was, unless you rode right up to it. Flowers followed him in and got out of his state car shaking his head. “Gonna be one pissed-off farmer.”

  “Bullshit. He’ll get about a hundred dollars a bushel from us,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”

  Flowers said, “I got two bottles of water in the car.”

  “Get them. And get your gun,” Lucas said.

  “The gun? You think?”

  “No. I just like to see you wearing the fuckin’ gun for a change,” Lucas said. “C’mon, let’s get moving.”

  HOT DAY. Flowers pulled his shoulder rig on as they jogged along the rows of shoulder-high corn, ready to take a dive if Anderson suddenly turned up in the car.

  “Looks like she’s down by the water,” Flowers said. They could see only the crowns of the box elders and scrub cedar along the river, so she was lower than they were, and they should be able to get close. At the track, they turned toward the river, panting a bit now, hot, big men in suits carrying guns and a pound of water each, no hats; the track was probably 440 yards long, Lucas thought, one chunk of a forty-acre plot; but since it was adjacent to the river, there might be some variance.

  “Sand burrs,” Flowers grunted. Their feet were kicking up little puffs of dust.

  THEY RAN the four-forty in about four minutes, Lucas thought, and at the end of it, he decided he needed to start jogging again; the rowing machine wasn’t cutting it. When the field started to look thin, and the terrain started to drop, they cut left into the cornfield and slowed to a walk, then a stooped-over creep. The corn smelled sweet and hot and dusty, and Lucas knew he’d have a couple of sweaty corn cuts on his neck before he got out of it.

  AT THE EDGE of the field, they looked down a slope at a muddy stream lined on both sides with scrubby trees, and a patch of trees surrounding a shack and a much newer steel building. The access door on the front of the building was standing open; the garage door was down. Anderson’s car was backed up to the garage door. The building had no windows at all, and Lucas said, “Cut around back.”