Invisible Prey

by John Sandford

  They went off again, running, stooping, watching the building. They were down the side of it when they heard the garage door going up, and they eased back in the cornfield, squatting next to each other, watching.

  Anderson came out of the building. She’d taken off the long-sleeve shirt, and was now wearing a green T-shirt; she was carrying two paintings.

  “Got her,” he muttered to Flowers.

  “So now what?”

  “Well, we can watch her, and see what she does with the stuff, or we can go ahead and bust her,” Lucas said.

  “Make the call,” Flowers said.

  “She’s probably moving it somewhere out-of-state. Dumping it. Cashing it in. Getting ready to run.” He sat thinking about it for another thirty seconds, then said, “Fuck it. Let’s bust her.”

  ANDERSON HAD GONE back inside the garage and they eased down right next to it, heard her rattling around inside, then stepped around the corner of the open door, inside. The place was half full of furniture, arranged more or less in a U, down the sides and along the back of the building. The middle of the U was taken up by an old white Chevy van, which had been backed in, and was pointing out toward the door.

  Lucas felt something snap when he saw it, a little surge of pleasure: Anderson had her back to them and he said, “How you doing, Amity?”

  She literally jumped, turned, took them in, then took three or four running steps toward them and screamed “No,” and dashed down the far side of the van.

  Flowers yelled, “Cut her off,” and went around the back of the van, while Lucas ran around the nose. Anderson was fifteen feet away and coming fast when Lucas crossed the front of the van and she screamed, “No,” again, and then he saw something in her hand and she was throwing it, and he almost had time to get out of the way before the hand-grenade-sized vase whacked him in the forehead and dropped him like a sack of kitty litter.

  He groped at her as she swerved around him out into the sunlight, then Flowers jumped over him. Lucas struggled back to his feet and saw her first run toward her car, and then, as Flowers closed in, swerve into the shack, the door slamming behind her.

  Lucas was moving again, forehead burning like fire—the woman had an arm like A-Rod.

  Flowers yelled, “Back door,” as he kicked in the front, and Lucas ran down the side of the house in time to see Anderson burst onto the deck on the river side of the house. She saw him, looked back once, then ran, arms flapping wildly, down toward the river. Lucas shouted, “Don’t!”

  He was five steps away when she hurled herself in.

  FLOWERS RAN DOWN to the bank, stopped beside Lucas, and said, “Jesus. She’s gonna stink.”

  The river was narrow, murky, and, in front of the shack, shallow. Anderson had thrown herself into four inches of water and a foot of muck, and sat up, groaning, covered with mud. “You got boots on,” Lucas said to Flowers. “Reach in there and get her.”

  “You got longer arms,” Flowers said.

  “You’re up for a step increase and I’m your boss,” Lucas said.

  “Goddamnit, I was hoping for a little drama,” Flowers said. Anderson had turned over now, on her hands and knees. Flowers stepped one foot into the muck, caught one of her hands, and pried her out of the stuff.

  Lucas said to her, “Amity, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent…”

  FLOWERS SAID, “Cuffs?” Lucas said, “Hell, yes, she’s probably killed about six people. Or helped, anyway.”

  “I did not,” Anderson wailed. “I didn’t…”

  Lucas ignored her, walked up the bank toward the steel building, turned the radio back up and called Jenkins and Shrake. “Come on in. We grabbed her; and we got a building full of loot.”

  Flowers checked Anderson for obvious weapons, removed a switchblade from her side pocket, put her on the ground at the front of the car, and cuffed her to the bumper. She started to cry, and didn’t stop.

  LUCAS PUT the switchblade on top of Flowers’s car, where they wouldn’t forget it, and walked around to the trunk. Inside were three plastic-wrapped paintings and an elaborate china clock. Small, high-value stuff, he thought. He looked at the backs of all three paintings, found one old label from Greener Gallery, Chicago, and nothing else.

  Flowers had gone inside the steel building, and Lucas followed. “Hell of a lot of furniture,” Flowers said. “I could use a couple pieces for my apartment.”

  “Couple pieces would probably buy you a house,” Lucas said. “See any more paintings? Or swoopy chairs?”

  “There’re a couple of swoopy chairs…”

  Sure enough: there was no other way to describe them. They were looking at the chairs when Shrake and Jenkins came in, and Flowers waved at them, and Lucas saw a wooden rack with more plastic-wrapped paintings. He pulled them down, one-two-three, and ripped loose the plastic on the back. One and three were bare.

  The back of two had a single word, written in oil paint with a painter’s brush, a long time ago: Reckless.

  26

  AMITY ANDERSON WENT to jail in St. Paul, held without bail on suspicion of first-degree murder in the deaths of Constance Bucher and Sugar-Rayette Peebles. Flowers said she cried uncontrollably all the way back and tried to shift the blame to Jane Widdler.

  Everybody thought about that, and on the afternoon of Anderson’s arrest, two officers and a technician went to Widdler’s store with a search warrant, and, after she’d spoken to her attorney, spent some time using sterile Q-tips to scrub cells from the lining of her cheeks.

  DNA samples were also taken from Anderson, and from the body of Leslie Widdler, and were packed off to the lab. At the same time, five crime-scene techs from the BSA and the St. Paul Police Department began working over the white van, the steel building, and the shack.

  Ownership of the land, shack, and building was held by the Lorna C. Widdler Trust. Lorna was Leslie’s mother, who’d died fourteen years earlier; Leslie was the surviving trustee. No mention of Jane. The land surrounding the shack, the cornfield, was owned by a town-farmer in Dundas, who said he’d seen Leslie—“A big guy? Dresses like a fairy?”—only twice in ten years. He’d had a woman with him, the farmer said, but he couldn’t say for certain whether it was Jane Widdler or Amity Anderson. They paid the farmer $225 for damage to his cornfield.

  Smith called Lucas the evening of the arrest and said, “We found a pill bottle under the front seat of the van. It’s a prescription for Amity Anderson.”

  “There you go,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, and we got some hair, long brown hair. Doesn’t look like Widdler’s. It does look like Anderson’s.”

  “Anything on Leslie?”

  “Well, there’s some discoloration on the back of the passenger seat, might be blood. One of the techs says it is, so we’ve got some DNA work to do.”

  “If it’s either a dog or Leslie…”

  “Then we’re good.”

  THE RECKLESS PAINTING and the swoopy chairs were confirmed by the Lash kid, a painting was found on an old inventory list held by the Toms family in Des Moines, and two pieces of furniture were found on purchase receipts in Donaldson’s files.

  St. Paul police, making phone checks, found a call from Leslie Widdler’s phone to Anderson’s house on the night Widdler killed himself.

  The quilts were defended by their museum owners as genuine.

  SO THE REPORTERS came and went, and the attorneys; the day after the arrest, Lucas was chatting with Del when Smith came by. Smith had been spending time with Anderson and her court-appointed attorney. They shuffled chairs around Lucas’s office and Carol brought a coffee for Smith, and Smith sighed and said, “Gotta tell you, Lucas. I think there’s an outside possibility that we got the wrong woman.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “The hair’s gonna be Anderson’s—or maybe, somebody we just don’t know. But I looked at her hair really close, and it’s the same. I mean, the same. Color, texture, split ends…We gotta wait for the DNA, but it�
��s hers.”

  “What does she say?” Lucas asked.

  “She says she was never in the van,” Smith said.

  “Well, shit, you caught her right there,” Del said. “What more do you want?”

  “We asked her about the phone call from Leslie, the night Leslie killed himself. Know what she says?”

  “Is this gonna hurt?” Lucas asked.

  Smith nodded. “She says that Jane Widdler called her, not Leslie. She said that Jane told her that her car had broken down, and since Anderson was only a few blocks away, asked her to come over and pick her up, give her a ride home. Anderson said she did. She said Widdler told her she had to pee, so they stopped at Anderson’s house, and Widdler went in the bathroom. That’s when Widdler picked up the prescription bottle and the hair, Anderson says.”

  “She’s saying that Jane Widdler murdered Leslie,” Lucas said.

  “Yep.”

  “Anderson never saw a body?”

  “She never saw the car, she says,” Smith said. “She says Widdler told her that she was afraid to wait in a dark area, and walked out to Cretin. She said she picked up Widdler on Cretin, took her back to her house to pee, and then took her home.”

  “How long was the phone call?” Lucas asked.

  “About twenty-three seconds.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a call between a guy about to commit suicide, and his lover,” Lucas said to Del.

  “I don’t know,” Del said. “Never having been in the position.”

  “SHE’S GOT THIS STORY, and she admits it sounds stupid, but she’s sticking to it. And she does it like…” Smith hesitated, then said it: “…like she’s innocent. You know those people who never stop screaming, and then it turns out they didn’t do it? Like that.”

  “Hmm,” Lucas said.

  “Another thing,” Del said. “Even if we find some proof that Widdler was involved, how do we ever convict? A defense attorney would put Anderson on trial and shred the case.”

  “So you’re saying we ought to convict Anderson because we can?” Lucas asked.

  “No,” Del said. “Though it’s tempting.”

  “You oughta go over and talk to her—Anderson,” Smith said to Lucas.

  “Maybe I will,” Lucas said. “All right if I take a noncop with me?”

  “Who’d that be?”

  “A bartender,” Lucas said.

  AMITY ANDERSON had never been big, and now she looked like a Manga cartoon character when the crime boss fetches her out of the dungeon. She’d lost any sparkle she’d ever had; her hair hung lank, her nails were chewed to her fingertips.

  “This is all off the record,” Lucas said.

  Anderson’s lawyer nodded. “For your information: no court use, no matter what is said.”

  Lucas introduced Sloan, who’d put on his best brown suit for the occasion. “Mr. Sloan is an old friend and a former police officer who has always had a special facility in…conversations with persons suspected of crimes,” Lucas said carefully. “I asked him to come along as a consultant.”

  Everybody nodded and Anderson said, “I didn’t know about any killings. But I knew Leslie and Jane, and when Mrs. Donaldson was killed, I worried. But that’s all. I didn’t have any proof, I didn’t have any knowledge. With Mrs. Bucher, it never crossed my mind…then, when I read about Marilyn Coombs being killed, I thought about it again. But I pushed it away. Just away—I didn’t want to think about it.”

  Sloan took her back through the whole thing, with a gentle voice and thin teacher’s smile, working more like a therapist than a cop, listening to the history: about how Anderson and the Widdlers had become involved in college, and then drifted apart. How the surprise call came years later, about the quilts. About her move to the Cities, occasional contacts with the Widdlers, including a sporadic sexual relationship with Jane Widdler.

  “And then you drove down to a barn full of stolen antiques and began stealing them a second time—with a key you had in your pocket,” Lucas said.

  “That’s because Jane set me up,” Anderson said through her teeth, showing the first bit of steel in the interrogation. “I couldn’t believe it—I couldn’t believe how she must have worked it. She knew I was friends with Don Harvey. He’s a very prominent museum person from Chicago, he used to be here. She said he was coming to town, and if he authenticated some paintings for them, that they would give me fifteen percent of the sale price, above their purchase price. She thought I had some influence with Don because we’d dated once, and were friends. If he okayed the paintings—I mean, if he’d okayed that Reckless painting, I could have gotten seventy-five thousand dollars in fees for that one painting.”

  She shook her head again, a disbelieving smile flickering across her face: “She gave me a key and said she’d send me a map in the mail. I got it out of my mailbox when you were watching me.”

  Lucas nodded. They’d seen her get home, go straight to the mailbox, and then out to the car.

  “John Smith found the map…” Anderson began.

  “He said it was a really old map, Xeroxed, with your fingerprints all over it.”

  “And the envelope…” Anderson said.

  “Just an envelope…”

  “Well, can’t you do some science stuff that shows the key was inside? Or the map? I see all this stuff on Nova, where is it?”

  “On Nova,” Lucas said.

  Her eyes drifted away: “My God, she completely tangled me up…”

  THEY TALKED TO her for another half hour, Sloan watching her face, backtracking, poking her with apparently nonrelevant questions that knitted back toward possible conflicts in what she was saying.

  When he was done, he nodded to Lucas, and Lucas said, “It’s been fun. We’ll get back to you.”

  “Do you believe me?” she asked Lucas.

  “I believe evidence,” Lucas said. “I don’t know about Sloan.”

  Sloan said, “I gotta think about it.”

  As they were leaving, Anderson said, with a wan, humorless smile, “You know the last mean thing that Botox bitch did? She stole my alprazolam to put in the van, just when I needed it most. I could really use some stress meds right now.”

  OUT IN the hallway, Sloan looked at Lucas. Lucas was leaning against the concrete-block wall, rubbing his temples, and Sloan said, “What?”

  Lucas pushed away from the wall and asked, “What do you think?”

  “She was bullshitting us some, but not entirely,” Sloan said. “I’d probably convict her if I were on a jury, based on the evidence, but I don’t think she killed anyone.”

  “Okay.”

  “What happened with you?” Sloan asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  LUCAS CALLED the evidence guys at St. Paul, then the supervisor of the crime-scene crew who’d gone over Anderson’s house. Then he went down to Del’s desk and said, “Let’s take a walk around the block.”

  Outside, summer day, hot again, puffy white fair-weather clouds; flower beds showing a little wilt from the lack of rain. Del asked, “What’s happening?”

  “Remember all that shit Smith said? About the evidence coming in?”

  “Yeah.” Del nodded.

  “So one of the clinchers was an amber plastic prescription bottle,” Lucas said. “You know the kind, with the click-off white tops?”

  “Uh-huh. I know about the bottle.”

  “When I was looking into Anderson, when I first tripped over her, I didn’t have anything to go on,” Lucas continued. “I thought I might take an uninvited look around her house.”

  “Ah.” They’d both done it before, breaking-and-entering, a dozen times between the two of them. Life in the big city.

  “In the bathroom, I found a bottle of alprazolam and a bottle of Ambien,” Lucas said. “I noticed them because I use them myself. The thing is, there wasn’t any alprazolam in Anderson’s house when St. Paul went through the place last night. And the stuff in the van was only three weeks old—it was a new presc
ription. Unless they used the van some other time, that we don’t know about, and that seems unlikely, because they’d had some problems the last two times out…how did the alprazolam get in the van?”

  “That’s awkward,” Del said.

  “No shit.”

  “Hey. Don’t get all honorable about it,” Del said. “I can think of ways that bottle got there—like maybe she went down to take some other pictures out, or maybe she went down to clean out the van, and lost the bottle. Won’t do any good for you to start issuing affidavits about breaking-and-entering.”

  Lucas grinned. “I wasn’t going to do that. But…”

  “We need to think about this,” Del said.

  THEY FINISHED WALKING down the block, and back, and nothing had occurred to them. At the door, as they were going back in the BCA building, Del asked, “Did anybody ever ask Anderson about Gabriella?”

  “No…Gabriella. She’s just gone.”

  BUT THAT EVENING, sitting in the den listening to the soundtrack from Everything Is Illuminated, Lucas began to think about Gabriella, and where she might have gone. Assuming that she’d been killed by Leslie Widdler, where would he put her? Because of the “Don’t Mow Ditches” campaign, it was possible that he’d just heaved her out the van door, the way he’d heaved Screw, and she was lying in two feet of weeds off some back highway. On the other hand, he had, not far away, an obscure wooded tract where he had to take the van anyway, assuming he’d used the van when he killed Gabriella. And if he had a body in it…