Invisible Prey

by John Sandford

  Widdler, in Women’s Clothing, watched for another minute. Nothing moving. She saw Coombs looking at her watch. If Davenport was behind this, Widdler thought, he could have tapped the phone, but they wouldn’t have let Coombs come in her by herself, would they?

  Widdler took the cell phone out of her pocket and dialed. She watched Coombs pick up the pay phone. Coombs said, “Hello,” and Widdler said, “Hang up, and go two phones down. I’ll call you on that one in two seconds.”

  Coombs hung up the phone, moved down two. Stared at the phone—didn’t call anyone, didn’t look at anyone. Widdler punched in the number. Coombs answered and Widdler said, “I don’t have two hundred thousand dollars. I could get eighty thousand now and pay you the rest later, but I want the original of the letter.”

  “Why would you pay me the rest later?” Coombs asked. “If I didn’t have the letter?”

  “Because you could cause me a lot of trouble by talking to the police, even without the original,” Widdler said. “You’d be in trouble yourself, for destroying evidence, but I don’t know how crazy you are. I’d pay you, all right, but I don’t have the cash now.”

  “I don’t know,” Coombs said.

  Widdler: “You don’t have any time to think about it. Say yes or say no, or I’ll hang up.”

  “Ah, God. You’d pay me?”

  Coombs sounded exactly like a stoned-out hippie, hoping against all expectation that something good might happen to her. “Yes. Of course. I’ve already started getting the money together.”

  “All right,” Coombs said. “But I’ll go to the cops if you don’t pay me the rest…”

  “Just tell me what you want to do.”

  “Here’s what I’ve worked out,” Coombs said. “I don’t trust you and I want to look at the money. So I want to do it in a semipublic place where I can scream for help if you try to hurt me, but where we’ll have a little privacy. I’ll scream, I really will.”

  “Where?”

  “There’s a farmers’ market today in St. Paul, downtown, across from Macy’s…”

  “No. That’s too open,” Widdler said. “The ladies’ room at Macy’s, there’d still be people around…”

  “But we couldn’t say a word, I couldn’t look at the money…” Coombs whined.

  “The Macy’s parking ramp in St. Paul?” Widdler suggested.

  “That’s too scary…Do you know where Mears Park is? Where the art studios are?”

  “That’ll be good, that’d be perfect,” Widdler said. “One o’clock?”

  “I’ll scream if you do anything,” Coombs said.

  “Then I go to trial and you won’t get a penny,” Widdler said.

  Another long pause. Then, “Okay.”

  “Bring the originals. I’m not bargaining anymore. Bring the originals or I’m gone,” Jane Widdler said.

  WITH JERROLD in the air, and Flowers, Shrake, and Jenkins on the ground escorting Widdler back to her shop, Lucas and Del helped Coombs out of the muumuu and then out of the ballistic vest and the wire. “Jeez, that thing is hot,” she said. She’d told them about the phone conversation on the way out of the store. “She was behind me?”

  “Yeah. And I was behind her,” Del grunted. “We were cool.”

  “Think she’ll come?” Coombs asked.

  “I hope,” Lucas said.

  “What happened with the phone?” Del asked.

  “We don’t know, but she didn’t use her own and she switched phones inside,” Lucas said. “I think she bought a phone at Best Buy.”

  “She’s no dummy,” Del said.

  “But we sold her,” Lucas said, grinning at the other two. “Lucy, you were great. You could be a cop.”

  She shook her head. “No, I couldn’t. Cops pretend to be friends with people, and then they turn them in. I couldn’t do that.”

  THE KEY, Lucas told Coombs, was to get Widdler on tape acknowledging the quilt fraud, that she knew of the Donaldson killing…anything that would get her into the slipstream of the killings. Once they had her there, circumstantial evidence would do the rest.

  “Get her talking,” Del said. “Get her rolling…”

  MEARS PARK WAS a leafy square, one block on each edge. The buildings on three sides were rehabbed warehouses, combinations of apartments, studios, offices, and retail, including the studio of Ron Stack, the artist that Gabriella had dated. The fourth side was newer, offices, a food court, and apartments in brick-and-glass towers.

  “As soon as she’s in the park, we’ll have you come around the block in the car, since she’s seen the car,” Lucas told Coombs. “Shrake will pull away from the curb, and that’ll leave a parking space open for you.”

  Del pointed at an unmarked cop car, already in the parking slot. Lucas pointed out the route: “Pull in, then walk down the sidewalk over here. Del’s gonna be on the other side of the park, back through the trees, closing in, as soon as we know where she’s at. Flowers and I will be behind the doors in Parkside Lofts. We’ll be invisible, but as long as you’re on the sidewalk, we’ll be right across the street from you. Sit on this bench…” He pointed. “There’s gonna be a guy on the bench eating his lunch.”

  “Pretty obvious,” Coombs said.

  Lucas shook his head: “Not really. When people are suspicious, they look for a bum pushing a shopping cart or a woman with a baby carriage, but a guy in a suit eating a peanut-butter sandwich and talking on a cell phone…Won’t look at him twice. Besides, as soon as you show up, he’s gonna walk away. That gives you the bench. Talk to her on the bench.”

  “What if she doesn’t want to talk there?” Coombs asked.

  “Go with the flow—but as soon as you feel the slightest bit uncomfortable about anything, break it off,” Lucas said. “Anything, I’m serious. If you feel uncomfortable, you’re probably right, something’s screwed up. Get out. Scream, run, whatever. Get away from her.”

  Coombs nodded, and started to tear up. “It’d be a shame if she got all three of us.”

  “Don’t even think that,” Lucas said.

  Del said to Lucas, “Man, I’m getting the shakes. Bringing a civilian in…”

  Lucas looked at Coombs. “What do you think, Lucy? We can call it off, try to get her to talk by phone.”

  Coombs shook her head, wiped her eyes with her knuckles. “I’m a big chicken—if she looks at me cross-eyed, I’m runnin’.”

  JANE WIDDLER GOT to the park at noon, an hour early. She’d parked in the Galtier Plaza parking ramp, had taken the elevator to the Skyway level, had scouted the Skyways and then the approaches to the park, tagged by three female cops borrowed from St. Paul. Finally, she walked all four sides of the park, and walked in and out of the buildings on all four sides.

  “She’s figuring out where she can run,” Flowers said. They were on the second floor of the Parkside Lofts, looking out a window.

  Lucas nodded. “Yup. We haven’t seen her in anything but high heels. Now she’s wearing sneaks.”

  When she’d finished scouting, Widdler walked across the street to Galtier Plaza, went to the Subway in the food court, got a roasted chicken sandwich, and sat in a window looking out at the park.

  Jenkins was at the opposite end of the food court with three slices of pizza and a Diet Coke. “She’s cool,” he told Lucas, talking on his cell phone, sitting sideways to Widdler, watching her with peripheral vision.

  At two minutes to one, Lucas called Del and said, “Put her in.”

  SHRAKE HAD BEEN HIDING in a condo lobby. Now he ambled up to the corner, waited for a car to pass, jaywalked to his car, got in, watched in his rearview mirror until he saw Coombs turn the corner. He pulled out, turned the corner, and was out of sight…

  Coombs saw him leave, pulled up to the parallel-parking spot, and spent three minutes getting straight, carefully plugged the meter, and then started walking around the perimeter of the park, looking down into it.

  Jenkins, on the cell phone, said, “She’s moving.”

  L
ucas and Flowers had moved to the glass doors of the building across the street from the bench. Coombs was walking slowly on the sidewalk, peering into the park. She was still wearing the blue muumuu and was carrying a Macy’s bag, looking fat and slow.

  Widdler stepped out of Galtier into the sunshine, slipping on sunglasses. She was carrying an oversized Coach bag, black leather, big enough to hold eighty thousand. She crossed the street, walking casually. She was forty yards behind Coombs, and closing.

  “Lucy doesn’t see her,” Flowers said.

  “We’re okay, we’re okay,” Lucas said.

  A guy eating his lunch got off the park bench, tossed the brown bag in a trash container, and started across the street, talking on a cell phone, not looking back. A St. Paul vice cop. Del called: “I’m coming in.”

  “We’re in,” Shrake said. He and Jenkins were moving down the east side of the park, where they could cut Widdler off, if she made a run for it.

  From Lucas’s point of view, everything seemed to slow down.

  Coombs plodding toward the bench, sitting down in slow motion, looking tired, the Macy’s bag flapping on the bench…

  Widdler closing in on her, from behind, twenty yards, ten, five, her hand going in her purse, back out.

  LUCAS: “Shit. She’s got a gun.”

  He and Flowers hit the door simultaneously, Flowers screaming, “Lucy, Lucy, watch out, gun…”

  Widdler never heard them or saw them. Her world had narrowed to the target on the bench, the big fat hippie with the bushy hair and the Macy’s bag, and there was nobody around and she was moving in fast, the woman might never see her…

  Widdler had the gun in her hand, a four-inch double-trigger, double-barreled derringer that Leslie had given her to keep in her car. He’d said, “It’s not accurate at more than two feet, so you pretty much got to push it right against the guy…” He’d been talking about a rapist, but there was no reason that Coombs should be any different.

  The gun was coming up and somewhere, in the corner of her mind, she realized that there was a commotion but she was committed and then Coombs was half standing and turning to meet her and the gun was going and she heard somebody shout and then she shot Coombs in the heart. The blast was terrific, and her hand kicked back, and there was a man in the street and car brakes screeching and she never thought, just reacted, and she turned and the gun was still up…

  And suddenly she was swatted on the ankle and a screaming pain arced through her body and she hit the ground and she registered a shot; she got a mouthful of concrete dust and her glasses came off and she rolled and Lucas Davenport was looking down at her…

  LUCAS NEARLY RAN through a car. The car screeched and he was knocked forward and registered the face of a screaming woman behind the windshield, and he saw Coombs get shot and he was rolling and then he heard a shot from behind him, saw Flowers with a gun and saw Widdler go down, then he was up and running and looking down at Widdler.

  Coombs was on her hands and knees, looking up at him, and she said, “I’m okay, I’m okay.”

  And Lucas turned to Flowers, as he straddled Widdler, his heart thumping, Flowers pale as an Irish nun, and Lucas asked, “Why’d you shoot her in the foot?”

  Then Widdler screamed, the pain flooding her, hit in the ankle, her foot half gone. “No, no, no…”

  Lucas said, “Get an ambulance rolling,” and he turned to Coombs, who’d gone back to her hands and knees.

  “You sure you’re…?”

  Coombs was right there with Widdler’s derringer. She pointed the tiny gun at Widdler’s eye from one inch away and pulled both triggers.

  The second blast was as big as the first one, and Widdler’s head rocked back as though she’d been kicked by a horse.

  Lucas dropped on Coombs and twisted the gun out of her hand, but before he got that done, Coombs had just enough time to look into Widdler’s single remaining dead eye and say, “Fuck you.”

  28

  THE ST. PAUL COPS closed off the park and the street where the shooting took place, stringing tape and blocking access with squad cars. Local television stations put cameras in the surrounding condos, and got some brutal shots of Widdler’s dead body, faceup and crumbled like a ball of paper, crime-scene guys in golf shirts standing around like death clerks.

  Coombs went to jail for three days. In the immediate confusion over the shooting, Ramsay County attorney Jack Wentz showed up for the cameras and announced that he would charge Coombs with murder; and that he would further investigate the regrettable actions by state investigative officers, which led to an unnecessary killing on his turf.

  Lucas, talking behind the scenes, argued that the shooting was part of a continuing violent action—that the killing of Widdler was an unfortunate but understandable reaction of a woman who’d been shot and hit, and the fact that she was wearing a ballistic vest did not lessen the shock. The close-range shooting, he said, combined with the real shooting of Widdler by Flowers, the fact that Coombs had seen Lucas knocked down by a car, that people had been screaming at her, that Widdler had been thrashing around on the ground next to her, had so confused Coombs that she’d picked up the loose gun and fired it without understanding the situation.

  Wentz, replying off the record, said Lucas was trying to protect himself and the other incompetents who’d set up the sting.

  THE NEXT DAY, the local newspaper columnists unanimously landed on the county attorney’s back, and the television commentators followed on the noon, evening, and late-night news.

  The Star Tribune columnist said, “Mrs. Coombs’s mother and daughter were killed by this witch, and she’d just been shot in the chest herself—thank God she was wearing a bulletproof vest, or the whole family would have been wiped out by one serial killer. That Wentz would even consider bringing charges suggests that he needs some quiet time in a corner, on a stool, with a pointy hat to focus his thoughts, if he has any…”

  The police federation said it would revisit its endorsement of Wentz for anything, and the governor said off-the-record that the county attorney was full of shit, which was promptly reported, of course, then disavowed by Neil Mitford, but the message had been sent.

  The county attorney said that what he’d really meant to say was that he’d investigate, and the issue would be taken to the grand jury.

  Coombs was released after three days in jail, with her house as bond. She never went back—the election was coming, and the grand jury, which did what Wentz told them to do, decided not to indict.

  ROSE MARIE ROUX told Lucas, “You got lucky. About six ways. If Coombs had wound up dead, you might be looking for a job—this being an election year.”

  “I know. The thought never crossed my mind that Widdler’d yank out a gun and try to shoot her in broad daylight on a main street,” Lucas said. “And you know what? If it’d been real, if it hadn’t been a setup, she’d have gotten away with it. She’d have walked across the street and gone upstairs to the Skyway and then over to Galtier and down in the parking garage, and that would have been it.”

  Mitford, who had come over to listen in, said, to Rose Marie, “We pay him to be lucky. Lucky is even better than good. Everybody is happy.” And to Lucas: “Don’t get unlucky.”

  THE PUBLIC ARGUMENT would have gone on, and could have gotten nastier, except that Ruffe Ignace published an exclusive interview with the teenage victim of Burt Kline’s sexual attentions.

  Ignace did a masterly job of combining jiggle-text with writing-around, and everybody over fourteen understood that Kline had semicolon-shaped freckles where many people wouldn’t have looked, and that the comely teenager had been asked (and agreed) to model white cotton thongs and a half-shell bra in a casino hotel in Mille Lacs. Ignace did not actually say that little pink nipples were peeking out, but you got the idea.

  Coombs moved to page seven.

  AMITY ANDERSON was charged with receiving stolen goods, but in Wentz’s opinion, nothing would hold up. “We don’t have any wit
nesses,” he complained. “They’re all dead.”

  THE DES MOINES prosecutor who had gotten a conviction in the Toms’ case said, “I’m still convinced that Mr. Child was involved in the murder,” but the tide was going out, and the state attorney general said the case would be revisited. Sandy spent a week in Iowa leading a staff attorney through the paper accumulated in Minnesota.

  THE ESTATES of Claire Donaldson, Jacob Toms, and Constance Bucher sued the estates of Leslie and Jane Widdler for recovery of stolen antiques, for wrongful death, and for a laundry list of other offenses that guaranteed that all the Widdler assets would wind up in the hands of the heirs of Donaldson, Toms, and Bucher, et al., and an assortment of lawyers. The Widdler house on Minnehaha Creek was put up for sale, under the supervision of the Hennepin County District Court, as part of the consolidation of Widdler assets.

  LUCAS ASKED Flowers again, “Why in the hell did you shoot her in the foot?”

  Flowers shook his head. “I was aiming for center-of-mass.”

  “Jesus Christ, man, you gotta spend some time on the range,” Lucas said, his temper working up.

  “I don’t want to shoot anyone,” Flowers said. “If you manage things right, you shouldn’t have to.”

  “You believe in management?” Lucas asked, getting hot. “Fuckhead? You believe in management?”

  “I didn’t get my ass run over by a car,” Flowers snapped. “I managed that.”

  Del, who was there, said, “Let’s back this off.”