Invisible Prey

by John Sandford

He got on the phone to Del, then to Flowers: “Can you come back up here?”

  “I’m not doing much good here,” Flowers said. He’d gone back south, still pecking away at the case of the girl found on the riverbank. “My suspect’s about to join the Navy to see the world. Which means he won’t be around to talk to.”

  “All right. Listen, meet Del and me tomorrow at the Widdlers’ shack. Wear old clothes.”

  THEY HOOKED UP at eleven o’clock in the morning, out at the Widdlers’ place, the highway in throwing up heat mirages, the cornfield rustling in the spare dry wind, the sun pounding down. They unloaded in front of the shack, which had been sealed by the crime-scene crew. Flowers was towing a boat, and inside the boat, had a cooler full of Diet Coke and bottles of water.

  Lucas and Del were in Lucas’s truck, and unloaded three rods of round quarter-inch steel, six feet long; Lucas had ground the tips to sharp points.

  He pointed downstream. “We’ll start down there. It’s thicker. Look at any space big enough to be a grave. Just poke it; it hasn’t rained, so if it’s been turned over, you should be able to tell.”

  Flowers was wearing a straw cowboy hat and aviator glasses. He looked downstream and said, “It’s gonna be back in the woods, I think. Probably on the slope down toward the river. If he thought about it, he wouldn’t want to put her anyplace that might be farmed someday.”

  “But not too close to the river,” Lucas said. “He wouldn’t want it to wash out.”

  They were probing, complaining to each other about the stupidity of it, for an hour, and were a hundred yards south of the house when Flowers said, “Hey.” He was just under the edge of the crown of a box elder, thirty feet from the river.

  “Find something?”

  “Something,” Flowers said. They gathered around with their rods, probing. The earth beneath them had been disturbed at some time—squatting, they could see a depression a couple of feet across, maybe four feet long. The feel of the dirt changed across the line. But there was also an aspen tree, with a trunk the size of a man’s ankle, just off the depression, with one visible root growing across it.

  “I don’t know. The tree…”

  “But feel this…” Flowers gave his rod to Lucas. “You can feel how easy it went down, how it got softer the lower you go…and then, doesn’t that feel like a plastic sack or something? You can feel it…”

  “Feel something,” Lucas admitted.

  They passed the rod to Del, who said he could feel it, too. Lucas wiped his lower lip with the back of his hand: sweaty and getting dirty. “What do you think? Get crime scene down here, or go get a shovel?”

  They all looked up at the shack, and the cars, and then Del said, “Would you feel like a bigger asshole if you got a crew down here and there was nothing? Or if you dug a hole yourself and it was something?”

  Lucas and Flowers looked at each other and they shrugged simultaneously and Flowers said, “I’ll get the shovel.”

  While Flowers went for the shovel, Del probed some more with the rod, scratched it with the tip of a pocketknife, pulled it out and looked at the scratch. “Three feet,” he said. “Or damn close to it.”

  They decided to cut a narrow hole, straight down, one shovel wide, two feet long. The ground was soft all the way, river-bottom silt; grass roots, one tree root, then sandy stuff, and at the bottom of the hole, a glimpse of green.

  “Garbage bag,” Flowers grunted. He lay down, reached in the hole and began pulling dirt out with one hand. When they’d cleared a six-inch square of plastic, Del handed him his knife, and Flowers cut the plastic. Didn’t smell much of anything; Flowers pulled the sliced plastic apart, then said to Lucas, “You’re standing in the light, man.”

  Lucas moved to the other side of the hole, still peering in, and Flowers got farther down into the hole, poked for a moment, then pushed himself out and rolled onto his butt, dusting his hands. “I can see some jeans,” he said.

  THE CRIME-SCENE SUPERVISOR gave them an endless amount of shit about digging out the hole, until Lucas told him to go fuck himself and didn’t smile.

  The guy was about to try for the last word when Flowers, his shirt still soaked with sweat and grime, added, “If you’d done the crime-scene work right, we wouldn’t have had to come down and do it for you, dick-weed.”

  “Hey. You didn’t say anything about a fuckin’ graveyard.”

  “It’s all a crime scene,” Flowers said. He wasn’t smiling, either. “You shoulda found it.”

  THEY TOOK two hours getting the bag out of the hole. Lucas didn’t want to look at it. He and Flowers and Del gathered around the back of Flowers’s boat and drank Diet Cokes and Flowers pulled out a fishing rod and reel and rigged a slip sinker on it, talking about going down to the river and trying for some catfish.

  “Got a shovel, we’ll find some worms somewhere…”

  The crime-scene guy came over and said, “It’s out. Whoever it is had a short black haircut and wore thirty-six/thirty-four Wrangler jeans, Jockey shorts, and size-eleven Adidas.”

  Lucas was bewildered. “Size eleven? Jockey shorts?”

  AND, one of the crime-scene guys said a few minutes later, whoever it was still carried his wallet. Inside the wallet was an Illinois driver’s license issued eight years earlier in the name of Theodore Lane.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” Del asked.

  THE CRIME-SCENE guy called for a bigger crew with ground-penetrating radar and a gas sniffer. Two dozen people milled around, talking about secret graveyards, but there was no real graveyard.

  At three o’clock they found the only other grave that they would find. It was fifty yards south of the first one, in an area that Lucas, Del, and Flowers had walked right over. The top of the grave was occupied by a driftwood stump, which was why they missed it. The bottom was occupied by Gabriella Coombs, curled into a knot in a green plastic garbage bag, wasted and shot through with maggots, almost gone now…

  AT HOME THAT NIGHT, after taking a twenty-minute shower, trying to get the stink of death off him, Lucas went down to dinner and grumped at everyone. Coombs was going to haunt him for a while; chip a chunk off the granite of his ass.

  The other thing that bothered him a bit was that he knew, from experience, that he’d forget her, that in a year or so, he’d have put her away, and would hardly think of her again.

  He’d gotten down a beer and was watching a Cubs game, when Weather came with the phone, and handed it to him. The medical examiner said, “I took a look and can tell you only one thing: it’s gonna be tough. Nothing obvious on the body, nothing under her fingernails. We’ll process anything we find, but if there wasn’t much to start with, and it’s been days since she went into the ground…”

  “Goddamnit,” Lucas said. “There’s gotta be something.”

  There was; but it took him a while to think of it.

  27

  LUCY COOMBS CAME to the door barefoot and when she saw Lucas standing there, hands in his pockets, asked through the screen door, “Why didn’t you come and tell me?”

  Coombs had gone to look at her daughter at the medical examiner’s. Lucas had avoided all of it: had sent Jerry Wilson, the original St. Paul investigator in the Marilyn Coombs murder, to tell Lucy that her daughter’s body had been found.

  Now, standing on her porch, he said, “I couldn’t bear to do it.”

  She looked at him for a few seconds, then pushed the screen door open. “You better come in.”

  SHE HAD a plastic jug of iced tea in the refrigerator and they went out back and sat on the patio, and she told him how she, a man that she thought may have been Gabriella’s father, and another couple, had traveled around the Canadian Rockies in a converted old Molson’s beer truck, smoking dope and listening to all the furthest-out rock tapes, going to summer festivals and living in provincial parks…and nailing a couple of other good-looking guys along the way. “I always had this thing for hot-looking blond guys, no offense.”

  “None
taken.”

  “Summer of my life. Good time, good dope, good friends, and knocked up big-time,” she said, sitting sideways on a redwood picnic-table bench. “God, I loved the kid. But I wasn’t a good mother. We used to fight…we started fighting when she was twelve and didn’t quit until she was twenty-two. I think we both had to grow up.”

  She rambled on for a while, and then asked the question that had been out there, in the papers and everywhere else. “Are you sure Amity Anderson did it?”

  “No,” Lucas said. “In fact, I don’t think she did. She might have, but there are some problems…”

  HE’D GONE BACK to Eau Claire, he told her, and talked to Frazier, the sheriff’s deputy, and all the other investigators they could reach. Amity Anderson had no boyfriend, they said. Just didn’t have one. They accounted for her nights, they looked at phone records, at gasoline credit-card receipts, they checked her mail. She had no boyfriend…

  And she had that alibi for the night Donaldson was killed. The alibi was solid. Would Leslie Widdler have gone into the house on his own? Wouldn’t he have wanted a backup? The night Gabriella disappeared, there were two phone calls from Anderson’s house, one early, one fairly late. The recipients of the phone calls agreed that they’d spoken to her.

  “That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have done it, but it’s pretty thin,” Lucas said.

  “You think Widdler’s wife, I saw her name in the newspaper…”

  “Jane.”

  “You think she was involved?” Coombs asked.

  “I think so,” Lucas said. “Anderson insists that she was—and to some of us, she sounds like she’s telling the truth.”

  “So it would be Jane Widdler who killed Gabriella.”

  “Probably helped her husband,” Lucas said. “Yes. They worked as a team.”

  Coombs took a sip of lemonade, sucked on an ice cube for a moment. “Are you going to get her?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “I see a possibility—but we’d need your help.”

  “My help?”

  “Yes. Because of your mother, and the Armstrong quilts, you’re in…sort of a unique position to help us,” Lucas said.

  She looked him over for a minute, sucking on the ice cube, then let it slip back into the glass, and leaned toward him. “I’ll help, if I can. But you know what I’d really like? Because of Mom and Gabriella?”

  “What?”

  Her voice came out as a snarl: “I’d like a nice cold slice of revenge. That’s what I’d like.”

  JANE WIDDLER was sitting on the floor in a pool of light, working the books and boxes and shipping tape. The cops had photographed everything, with measurement scales, and were looking at lists of stolen antiques. But Widdler knew that the store stock was all legitimate; she had receipts for it all.

  Leslie’s suicide and implication in the Bucher, Donaldson, and Toms murders had flashed out over the Internet antique forums, so everybody who was anybody knew about it. She’d had tentative calls from other dealers, sniffing around for deals.

  At first, she’d been angry about it, the goddamn vultures. Then she realized she could move quite a bit of stuff, at cost or even a small profit, and pile up some serious dollars. She was doing that—took Visa, MasterCard, or American Express, shipping the next day…

  Her clerk had walked out. Left a note saying that she couldn’t deal with the pressure, asked that her last paycheck be mailed to her apartment. Good luck on that, Widdler thought, pouring plastic peanuts around a bubble-wrapped nineteenth-century Tiffany-style French-made china clock, set in a shipping box. Eight hundred dollars, four hundred less than the in-store price, but cash was cash.

  There was a knock on the front door, on the glass. The CLOSED sign was on the door, and she ignored it. Knock again, louder this time. Maybe the police? Or the lawyer?

  She made a frown look and got to her feet, spanked her hands together to get rid of the Styrofoam dust, and walked to the door. Outside, a woman with huge bushy blond hair, dressed in a shapeless green muumuu and sandals, had cupped her hands around her eyes and was peering through the window in the door.

  Irritated, Widdler walked toward the door, shaking her head, jabbing her finger at the CLOSED sign. The woman held up a file folder, then pressed it to the glass and jabbed her own finger at it. Making an even deeper frown look, Widdler put her nose next to the glass and peered at the tab on the file folder. It said, in a spidery hand, “Armstrong quilts.”

  The woman on the other side shouted, loud enough to be heard through the door, “I’m Lucy Coombs. I’m Marilyn Coombs’s daughter. Open the door.”

  Widdler thought, “Shit,” then thought, “Elegance.” What is this? She threw the lock, opened the door a crack.

  “I’m closed.”

  “Are you Jane Widdler?”

  Widdler thought about it for a second, then nodded. “Yes.”

  The words came tumbling out of the woman’s mouth, a rehearsed spiel: “My mother’s house has been attached by the Walker and now by the Milwaukee museum. They say the Armstrong quilts are fakes and they want their money back and that it was all a big tax fraud. I have her file. There’s a letter in it and there’s a note that says you and your husband were Cannon Associates and that you got most of the money. Mom’s house was worth two hundred thousand dollars and I’m supposed to be the heir and now I’m not going to get anything. I’ll sell you the original file for two hundred thousand dollars, or I’m going to take it to the police. The museums can get the money back from you, not from me.”

  The woman sounded crazy-angry, but the part about Cannon and the Armstrongs wasn’t crazy.

  “Wait-wait-wait,” said Widdler, opening the door another inch.

  “I’m not going to talk to you here. I’m afraid of you and I’m afraid the police are tapping your telephones. They tap everything now, everything, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the FBI. I brought this copy of the file and the letter and inside there’s a telephone number where you can call me at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. It’s at a Wal-Mart and if you don’t call me, you won’t be able to find me and I’ll go to the police.”

  The woman thrust the file through the door and Widdler took it, as much to keep it from falling to the floor, as anything, and Widdler said, “Wait-wait-wait” but the woman went running off through the parking lot, vaulted into the junkiest car that had ever been parked at the store, a battered Chevy that looked as though it had been painted yellow with a brush, with rust holes in the back fender. The woman started it, a throaty rumble, and sped away.

  Jane looked at the file. “What?”

  AT TEN O’CLOCK the next morning, Jane Widdler got self-consciously into her Audi and drove slowly away from her house, watching everything. Looking for other cars, for the same cars, for cars that were driving too slow, for parked cars with men in them. She would be headed, eventually, for the Wal-Mart.

  The night before, given the phone number by Coombs, she’d found the Wal-Mart in a cross-reference website. She’d also found Coombs’s address. She’d sat and thought about it for a while, and then she’d driven slowly, carefully, watchfully out to scout the Wal-Mart, where she found a block of three pay phones on the wall inside the entrance. One showed the number given her by Coombs. She’d noted the number of all three, then had driven another circuitous route out to the interstate, and then across town to Coombs’s house.

  She considered the possibility of shooting the woman at her own door; but then, what about the file? Would she have time to find it? Were there other people in the house?

  Too much uncertainty. She’d gone home—the police had finished their search—and had drunk most of a bottle of wine.

  In the morning, at ten o’clock, she started out, a feeling of climax sitting on her shoulders.

  She drove six blocks, watching her back, then hooked into the jumble of narrow streets to the north, on backstreets, long narrow lanes, into dead ends, where she turned and came back out, looking at her ta
il. In ten minutes, she’d seen precisely nothing…

  LUCAS WAS in his car three blocks away, Flowers bringing up the rear, Jenkins and Shrake on the flanks. Overhead—way overhead—Jerrod was in a Highway Patrol helicopter, tracking Widdler with glasses. Del was with Coombs.

  They tracked her for a half mile, out to the interstate, away from the Wal-Mart, into a Best Buy. She disappeared into the store.

  “What do we do?” Flowers called.

  “Shrake? Jenkins?” Lucas called. “Can one of you go in?”

  “Got it,” Shrake said.

  BUT SHRAKE had been a block away and almost got clipped by a cell-phone user when he tried to make an illegal turn. The parking lot was jammed and he didn’t want to dump the car at the door; she might spot it. By the time he got parked, and got out and crossed the lot without running, and got through the front door, he was too late. She was walking directly toward him, toward the exit. He continued toward the new-release movie rack, and when she’d gone out, he called, “She’s out, she’s out…”

  “Got her,” Lucas said, watching from across the street. “What’d she do in there?”

  “Don’t know. Want me to ask around?”

  Lucas thought, then said, “Ah…fuck it. Catch up with us. She’s back in her car.”

  “She’s heading for the Wal-Mart,” Jerrold called five minutes later. “Tell Del to put Coombs in the store.”

  LUCAS AND HIS GROUP tracked her right into the Wal-Mart parking lot, past the main entrance, to the Garden Shop. “She’s going in the back side, through the Garden Shop,” Lucas called to Del.

  “I’m heading that way…I’m heading that way,” Del called back. Then “I got her,” and “Lucy is headed for the phones.”

  WIDDLER WATCHED COOMBS from halfway across the store. Watched her for three or four minutes, looking for anybody who might be a cop. Coombs was wearing another muumuu, a blue one this time. She was a heavy woman, big gut, chunky around the hips, a potato-eating prole, a leftover hippie. She stood just inside the entrance, looking at the bank of three yellow pay phones.