Invisible Prey (35 page)

A current of cold air touched the back of his neck and he shivered; as though somebody had passed in the hallway. He stepped to the door again, looked down the silent hall.

Ghosts. The thought trickled through his mind and he didn’t laugh. He didn’t believe in them, but he didn’t laugh, either, and had never been attracted to the idea of screwing around in a cemetery at night. Two people killed here, their killers not found, blood still drying in the old woodwork…the silence seemed to grow from the hallway walls; except for the soft flowing sound of the air conditioner.

He went back to the paper, feeling his skin crawl. There was nobody else in the house: he knew it, and still…

T
HE PHONE BUZZED,
and almost gave him his second heart attack of the day.

He took it out of his pocket, looked at it: out-of-area. He said, “Hello?”

There was a pause and then a vaguely metallic man’s voice said, “Hi! This is Tom Drake! We’ll be doing some work in your neighborhood next week, sealing driveways. As a homeowner…”

“Fuck you,” Lucas said, slamming the phone shut. Almost killed by a computer voice.

He found a file, two inches thick, of receipts for furniture purchases. Began to go through it, but all the furniture had been bought through decorators, none of them the Widdlers. Still, he was in the right neighborhood, the furniture neighborhood.

The phone took a third shot at his heart: it buzzed again, he jumped again, swore, looked at the screen: out-of-area. He clicked it open: “Hello?”

“Lucas? Ah, Agent Davenport? This is…”

“Sandy. What’s up?” Lucas thought he heard something in the hallway, and peeked out. Nobody but the spirits. He turned back into the room.

Sandy said, “I got your Widdlers. The Toms cousin had a file of purchases, and Mr. Toms, the dead man, bought three paintings from them, over about five years. He spent a total of sixteen thousand dollars. There’s also a check for five thousand dollars that just says ‘appraisals,’ but doesn’t say what was appraised.”

The thrill shook through him. Gotcha. “Okay! Sandy! This is great! That’s exactly what we need—we don’t have to figure out what the appraisals were, all we have to do is show contact. Now, the originals on those papers, can you get them copied?”

“Yes. They have a Xerox machine right here,” she said.

“Copy them,” Lucas said. “Leave the originals with your guy there, tell him that the local cops will come get them tomorrow, or maybe somebody from the DCI.”

“The who?”

“The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation,” Lucas said. “I got a friend down there, he can tell us how to deal with the documents. But bring the copies back with you. When can you get here?”

“Tonight. I can leave in twenty minutes,” she said. “I’d like to get a sandwich or something.”

“Do what you’ve got to,” Lucas said. “Call me when you get back.”

He slapped the phone shut. This was just exactly…

A
MAN SPOKE
from six inches behind his ear. “So what’s up?”

Lucas lurched across the narrow room, nearly falling over the chair, catching himself on the file cabinet with one hand, the other flailing for his gun, his heart trying to bore through his rib cage.

John Smith, smile fading, stood in the doorway, looked at Lucas’s face, and asked, “What?”

“Jesus Christ, I almost shot you,” Lucas rasped.

“Sorry…I heard you talking and came on up,” Smith said. “I thought you might appreciate some help.”

“Yeah.” Lucas ran his hands through his hair, shook himself out. His heart was still rattling off his ribs. “It’s just so damn quiet in here.”

Smith nodded, and looked both ways down the hall: “I spent a couple of evenings by myself. You can hear the ghosts creeping around.”

“Glad I’m not the only one,” Lucas said. He turned back to the file cabinets. “I’ve done two of them, I’m halfway down the third.”

“I’ll take the bottom drawer and work up,” Smith said. He went down the hall, got another chair, pulled open the bottom drawer. “You been here the whole time?”

Lucas glanced at his watch. “Three hours. Did the office, started up here. Went over and talked to Miz Coombs, before I came over. She’s all messed up. Oh, and by the way—we put the Widdlers with Toms.”

Smith, just settling in his chair, looked up, a light on his face, and said, “You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

Smith scratched under an arm. “This might not look good—you know, calling in the killers to appraise the estate. If they’re the killers.”

“I’m not gonna worry about it,” Lucas said. “For one thing, there was no way to know. For another…” He paused.

Smith said, “For another?”

“Well, for another, I didn’t do it.” Lucas smiled. “
You
did.”

“Fuck you,” Smith said. He dipped into the bottom file drawer and pulled out a file, looked at the flap. “Here’s a file that says ‘Antiques.’”

“Bullshit,” Lucas said.

“Man, I’m not kidding you…”

Lucas took the file and looked at the flap: “Antiques.”

Inside, a stack of receipts. There weren’t many of them, not nearly as many as there were in the furniture file. But one of them, a pink carbon copy, said at the top, “Widdler Antiques and Objets d’Art.”

He handed it over to Smith who looked at it, then looked at Lucas, looked at the pink sheet again, and said, “Kiss my rosy red rectum.”

“W
E GOT THEM
with Toms and Bucher, and we know that their good friend actually worked with Donaldson, and they pulled off a fraud. That’s enough for a warrant,” Smith said.

“At the minimum, we get Leslie to lift up his pant legs,” Lucas said. “If he’s got bite holes, we take a DNA and compare it to the blood on Screw. At that point, we’ve got him for attempted kidnapping…”

“And cruelty to animals.”

“I’m not sure Screw actually qualified as an animal. He was more of a beast.”

“Can’t throw a dog out a car window. Might be able to get away with an old lady, but not a dog,” Smith said. “Not in the city of St. Paul.”

Lucas was a half block from his house when Jenkins called from Wisconsin. He fumbled the phone, caught it, said, “Yeah?”

“Got ’em,” Jenkins said.

22

T
HE WHOLE STORY
was so complicated that Jane Widdler almost couldn’t contain it. She wrote down the major points, sitting at her desk while Leslie was upstairs in the shower, singing an ancient Jimmy Buffett song, vaguely audible through the walls.

Jane wrote:

• No way out
  
• Arrested
  
• Disgraced
  
• Attorneys
  
• Prison forever
  

Then she drew a line, and below it wrote:

• Arrested
  
• Disgraced
  
• Attorneys
  
• Time in prison?
  

Then she drew a second line and wrote:

• Save the money
  

The last item held her attention most of the afternoon, but she was working through the other items in the back of her head. Davenport, she thought, was probably unstoppable. It was possible that he wouldn’t get to them, but unlikely. She’d seen him operating.

She nibbled on her bottom lip, looked at the list, then sighed and fed it into the shredder.

If he did get to them, could Davenport convict? Not if Leslie hadn’t been bitten by the dog. But with the dog bites, Leslie was cooked. If she hadn’t taken some kind of preemptive action before then, she’d be cooked with him.

From watching her stepfather work as a cop, and listening to him talk about court cases, she felt the most likely way to save herself was to give the cops another suspect. Build reasonable doubt into the case. As much reasonable doubt as possible.

As for the money…

They had a safe-deposit box in St. Paul where they had more than $160,000 in hundreds, fifties, and twenties. The cash came from stolen antiques, from four dead old women and one dead old man, each in a different state. The Widdlers had worked the cash slowly back through the store, upgrading their stock, an invisible laundry that the mafia would have appreciated.

With Leslie looking at a china collection in Minnetonka, Jane, after talking to Anderson, had gone alone to the bank, retrieved the money, and wrapped it in Ziploc bags. Where to put it? She’d eventually taken it home and buried it in a flower garden, carefully scraping the bark mulch back over it.

A
MITY
A
NDERSON,
Jane knew, was on the edge of cracking. One big fear: that Anderson would crack first, and go to the cops hoping to make a deal. Anderson knew herself well enough to know that she couldn’t tolerate prison. She was too fragile for that. Too much of a free spirit. All she wanted was to go to Italy; look at Cellini and Caravaggio. Amity believed that if she could only get to Italy, somehow, the problems would be left behind.

Magical thinking. Jane Widdler had no such illusions. The victims had been too rich, the money too big, the publicity too great. The cops would be all over them once they had a taste; and Davenport had gotten a taste.

Still, Jane could pull it off, if she had time.

L
ESLIE CALLED,
said he was on the way home. Jane hurried over to the shop, opened the safe in the back, and took out the coin collection and a simple .38-caliber pistol.

The coin collection came from the Toms foray, fifty-eight rare gold coins from the nineteenth century, all carefully sealed in plastic grading containers, all MS66 through MS69—so choice, in fact, that they’d been a little worried about moving the coins. They still had all but two, but if necessary, she could take them to Mexico and move them there.

The coins went deep in a line of lilacs, behind and to one side of the house, halfway to the creek. She dug them six inches down, covered them with sod, dusted her hands. If she didn’t make it back…what a waste.

The pistol went into her purse. She’d never learned not to jerk the trigger, but that wouldn’t matter if you were shooting at a range of half an inch.

S
HE WONDERED
where the jail was. Would it be Hennepin County, or Ramsey? Somehow, she thought it might be Ramsey, since that’s where the murders occurred. And Ramsey, she thought, might be preferable, with a better class of felon. Surely they had separate cells, you were presumed innocent until proven guilty. And if Leslie had passed away, the house would be hers to use as a bond for bail…

She went inside. Leslie was perched on the couch in the den, wearing yellow walking shorts and a loose striped shirt from a San Francisco clothier, pale blue stripes on a champagne background that went well with the shorts and the Zelli crocodile slippers, $695. He said, “Hi. I heard you come in…Where’d you go?”

“I thought I saw the fox out back. I walked around to see. But he was gone.”

“Yeah? I’d like a fox tail for the car.”

“We’ve got to talk,” Jane said. “Something awful happened today.”

W
HEN SHE TOLD
him about Davenport visiting the shop, about his question about a white van, Leslie touched one fat finger to his fat nose and said, “He’s got to go.”

“There’s no time,” Jane said, pouring the anxiety into her voice. “If he was asking about the van this afternoon, he’ll be looking at all the files tomorrow. Once that gets into the system…”

Leslie was digging in a pocket. He came up with a pack of breath mints and popped two. “Listen,” he said, clicking the mints off his lower teeth, “we do it tonight. Just have to figure out how.”

“I looked him up,” Jane volunteered. “He lives on Mississippi River Boulevard in St. Paul. I drove by; a very nice house for a cop. He must be on the take.”

“Maybe
that’s
a possibility,” Leslie suggested. “If he’s crooked…”

“No. Too late, too late…The thing is, have you seen him with that gun? And he’s going to be wary, I’d be afraid to approach him.”

“So what do you think?” Leslie let her do most of the thinking.

“If you think we should do it, I suggest that rifle. God knows it’s powerful enough. You shoot from the backseat, I drive. We’ll ambush him right outside his house. If the opportunity doesn’t present itself, we go back tomorrow morning.”

“If we see him in a window—a .300 Mag won’t even notice a piece of window glass,” Leslie said.

“Whatever.”

“If we’re going to do it, we’ve got things to do,” Leslie said cheerfully. The thought of killing always warmed him up. “I’m gonna take a shower, clean up the gun. Take my car, I’ll sit in the back. We’ll need earplugs, but I’ve got some. What’s the layout?”

“We can’t park on River Boulevard, it’s all no-parking. But there’s a spot on the side street, under a big elm tree. It looks sideways at his garage and front door. If he goes anywhere…”

“Too bad it’s summer,” Leslie said. “We’ll be shooting in daylight.”

“We can’t go too early,” Jane said. “It has to be dark enough that people can’t read out faces.”

“Not before nine-fifteen, then,” Leslie said. “I’ve played golf at nine, but sometime around nine-fifteen or nine-thirty, you can’t see the golf ball anymore.”

“Get there at nine-thirty and hope for the best,” Jane said. “Maybe there’d be some way to lure him out?”

“Like what?”

“Let me think about it.”

H
E WENT UP
to take a shower, and she thought about it: how to get Davenport outside, with enough certainty that Leslie would buy the idea. Then she sat down and made her list, looked at the list, dropped it in the shredder, and thought about it some more.

Leslie was working on “Cheeseburger in Paradise” when she stepped into his office and brought up the computer. She typed two notes, one a fragment, the other one longer, taken from models on the Internet. When she was done, she put them in the Documents file, signed off, pushed the chair back in place, walked up the stairs, and called through the bathroom door, “I’ve got to run out: I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”