Invisible prey ld-17

by John Sandford

  “Oh, God…”

  “If you did that for sex, or if we feel we can claim that you did, then that aspect of the crime would have taken place in Dakota County. Jim Cole is the county attorney there, and runs the grand jury.”

  The sobbing diminished, and Kline, damp faced, looked up, a line of calculation back in his eyes. “That's Dave Cole's boy.”

  “I wouldn't know,” Lucas said. “But if you actually took Jesse over to Burnsville…”

  “I never had sex with her,” Kline said. “But I might've taken her to Burnsville once.

  She needed back-to-school clothes.”

  “They wear push-up bras to high school?” Lucas asked.

  “Shit, yes. And thongs,” Flowers said. “Don't even need Viagra with that kind of teenybopper quiff running around, huh, Burt?”

  “You motherfucker, I ought to throw you out the fuckin' window,” Burt Jr. snarled at Flowers.

  “You said something like that last time,” Flowers said. He didn't move, but his eyes had gone flat and gray like stones. “So why don't you do it? Come on, fat boy, let's see what you got.”

  The kid balled his fists and opened and shut his mouth a couple of times, and then Kline said to him, “Shut up and sit down,” then asked Lucas, “What do I gotta do?”

  “Agree that you took her to Burnsville. Agent Flowers will put that in his report and we will make a recommendation to the county attorney.”

  “Dave Cole's boy…”

  “I guess,” Lucas said. “Neil Mitford would like to talk to you. Just on the phone.”

  “I bet he would,” Kline said.

  On the street, Flowers said, “I don't like the smell of this, Lucas.”

  Lucas sighed. “Neither do I, Virgil. But there's a big load of crap coming down the line, no matter what we do, and there's no point in our people getting hurt, if we can confine the damage to Kline.'' “And the Republicans.”

  “Well, Kline's a Republican,” Lucas said.

  “Fuck me,” Flowers said.

  Lucas said, “Look, I've got loyalties. People have helped me out, have given me a job chasing crooks. I like it. But every once in a while, we catch one of these.

  If you can tell me who we ought to put in jail here-Burt Kline or Kathy Barth-then I'll look into it. But honest to God, they're a couple of dirtbags and nobody else ought to get hurt for it.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Flowers was pissed.

  Lucas continued rambling. “There's a guy I talk to over at the Star Tribune.

  Ruffe Ignace. He's a guy who can sit on a secret, sit on a source. I'd never talk to Ruffe about something like this-I've got those loyalties-but we go out for a sandwich, now and then, and we always argue about it: Who has the right to know what? And when? And what about the people who get hurt? Is it going to help Jesse to get her ass dragged through the courts?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Flowers said again.

  “So I gotta go talk to this Cole guy, down in Dakota County,” Lucas said.

  “Sounds like another in a long line of assholes,” Flowers said.

  “Probably,” Lucas said.

  They walked along for a while and then Flowers grinned, clapped Lucas on the shoulder, and said, “Thanks, boss. I needed the talk.”

  The third interview was better, but not much, and Lucas left it feeling a little more grime on his soul.

  Jim Cole was a stiff; a guy who'd get out of the shower to pee. He said, “That all sounds a little thin, Agent Davenport, on the elements, but I'll assign my best person to it.” Behind him, on the wall, among the political pictures, plaques, and a couple of gilt tennis trophies, was a photo-painting that said, “Dave Cole-A Man for the Ages.”

  Lucas thought the elder Cole looked like a woodpecker, but, that was neither here nor there. Dave's boy, Jim, bought the case.

  “I would assume there's been a lot of concern about this,” Cole said. “It seems like a touchy affair.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Why don't you ask Neil Mitford to give me a call-I'd like to discuss it. Purely off the record, of course.”

  “Sure,” Lucas said.

  All of that took two days. On the third day, Lucas made a quick call to Smith about the Bucher case. She was still dead.

  “I'm gonna get eaten alive if something doesn't break,” Smith said. “Why don't you do some of that special-agent shit?”

  “I'll think about it,” Lucas said.

  He did, and couldn't think of anything.

  He had his feet on his top desk drawer, and was reading Strike! Catch Your River Muskie!, a how-to book, when his secretary came into the office and shut the door behind her.

  “There's a hippie chick here to see you,” she said. The secretary was a young woman named Carol, with auburn hair and blue eyes. She had been overweight, but recently had gone on a no-fat diet, which made her touchy. Despite her youth, she was famous in the BCA for her Machiavellian ruthlessness. “About the Bucher case, and about her grandmother, who fell down the stairs and died.”

  Lucas was confused, his mind still stuck in how to fish the upstream side of a wing dam without losing your lower unit; something, in his opinion, that all men should know. “A hippie? Her grandmother died?”

  She shrugged. “What can I tell you? But I know you're attracted to fucky blondes, especially the kind with small but firm breasts…”

  “Be quiet,” Lucas said. He peered through the door window past the secretary's desk into the waiting area. He couldn't see anybody. “Is she nuts?”

  “Probably,” Carol said. “But she made enough sense that I thought you should talk to her.”

  “Why doesn't she talk to Smith?” Lucas asked.

  “I don't know. I didn't ask her.”

  “Ah, for Christ's sakes…”

  “I'll send her in,” Carol said.

  Gabriella Coombs had an oval face and blue-sky eyes and blond hair that fell to her small but firm breasts. Lucas couldn't tell for sure-she was wearing a shapeless shift of either gingham or calico, he could never remember which one was the print, with tiny yellow coneflowers, black-eyed Susans-but from the way her body rattled around in the shift, he suspected she could, as his subordinate Jenkins had once observed of another slender blond hippie chick, “crack walnuts between the cheeks of her ass.”

  She had a string of penny-colored South American nuts around her neck, and silver rings pierced both the lobes and rims of her ears, and probably other parts of her body, unseen, but not unsuspected.

  Given her dress and carriage, her face would normally be as unclouded as a drink of water, Lucas thought, her wa smooth and round and uninflected by daily trials. Today she carried two horizontal worry lines on her forehead, and another vertically between her guileless eyes. She sat down, perched on the edge of Lucas's visitor's chair, and said, “Captain Davenport?”

  “Uh, no,” Lucas said. “I'm more like a special agent; but you can call me Lucas.”

  She looked at him for a moment, then said, “Could I call you mister? You're quite a bit older than I am.”

  “Whatever you want,” Lucas said, trying not to grit his teeth.

  She picked up on that. “I want us both to be comfortable and I think appropriate concepts of life status contribute to comfort,” she said.

  “What can I do for you? You are…?”

  “Gabriella Coombs. Ruffe Ignace at the Star Tribune said I should talk to you; he's the one who told me that you're a captain. He said that you were into the higher levels of strategy on the Bucher case, and that you provide intellectual guidance for the city police.”

  “I try,” Lucas said modestly, picked up a pen and scrawled, Get Ruffe, on a notepad.

  “So…”

  “My mother, Lucy Coombs, two fifty-seven…” She stopped, looked around the room, as if to spot the TV cameras. Then, “Do you want to record this?”

  “Maybe later,” Lucas said. “Just give me the gist of it now.”

  “My mom didn't hear from Grandma
the night before last. Grandma had a little stroke a few months ago and they talk every night,” Coombs said. “So anyway, she stopped by Grandma's place the morning before last, to see what was up, and found her at the bottom of the stairs. Dead as a doornail. The cops say it looks like she fell down the stairs and hit her head on one of those big balls on the banister post.

  You know the kind I mean?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, I don't believe it. She was murdered.”

  Lucas had a theory about intelligence: there was critical intelligence, and there was silly intelligence. Most people tended toward one or the other, although everybody carried at least a little of both. Einstein was a critical intelligence in physics; with women, it was silly.

  Cops ran into silly intelligences all the time-true believers without facts, who looked at a cocaine bust and saw fascism, or, when somebody got killed in a back-alley gunfight, reflexively referred to the cops as murderers. It wasn't that they were stupid-they were often wise in the ways of public relations. They were simply silly. Gabriella Coombs…

  “I think the medical examiner could probably tell us one way or the other, Miss Coombs,” Lucas said.

  “No, probably not,” Coombs said, genially contradicting him. “Everybody, including the medical examiner, is influenced by environmental and social factors. The medical examiner's version of science, and figuring out what happened, is mostly a social construct, which is why all the crime-scene television shows are such a load of crap.”

  “Anyway.” He was being patient, and let it show.

  “Anyway the police tell the medical examiner that it looks like a fall,” she said.

  “The medical examiner doesn't find anything that says it wasn't a fall, so he rules it a fall. That's the end of the case. Nobody's curious about it.”

  Lucas doodled a fly line with a hook, with little pencil scratches for the fly's body, around the Get Ruffe.

  “You know, a person like yourself,” he said. “… have you studied psychology at all?”

  She nodded. “I majored in it for three quarters.”

  He was not surprised. “You know what Freud said about cigars?”

  “That sometimes they're just cigars? Frankly, Mr. Davenport, your point is so simple that it's moronic.”

  He thought, Hmm, she's got teeth.

  She asked, “Are you going to listen to what I have to say, or are you going to perform amateur psychoanalysis?”

  “Say it,” Lucas said.

  She did: “My grandmother was killed by a blow to the head that fractured her skull. Last Friday or Saturday, Constance Bucher and Sugar-Rayette Peebles died the same way. Grandma and Connie were friends. They were in the same quilt group; or, at least, they had been. A story in the Star Tribune said that Mrs. Bucher's murder might have been a cover-up for a robbery. When Grandma died, I was supposed to inherit a valuable music box that her grandmother-my great-great-grandmother-brought over from the Old Country. From Switzerland.”

  “It's missing?” Lucas asked, sitting up, listening now.

  “We couldn't find it,” Coombs said. “It used to be in a built-in bookshelf with glass doors. The police wouldn't let us look everywhere, and she could have moved it, but it's been in that bookcase since she bought the house. Everything else seems to be there, but the music box is gone.”

  “Do you have a description?” Lucas asked. “Was it insured?”

  “Wait a minute, I'm not done,” Coombs said, holding up an index finger. Lucas noticed that all her fingers, including her thumbs, had rings, and some had two or three.

  “There was another woman, also rich, and old, in Chippewa Falls. That's in Wisconsin.”

  “I know,” Lucas said. “I've been there.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “To drink beer, I bet.”

  “No. It was for a police function,” Lucas lied. He'd gone on a brewery tour.

  She was suspicious, but continued: “Sometimes Grandma and Connie Bucher would go over to this other lady's house for quilt group. They weren't in the same quilt groups, but the two groups intersected. Anyway, this other woman-her name was Donaldson- was shot to death in her kitchen. She was an antique collector. Grandma said the killers were never caught. This was four years ago.”

  Lucas stared at her for a moment, then asked, “Is your grandma's house open? Have the St. Paul police finished with it?”

  “No. We're not allowed in yet. They took us through to see if there was anything unusual, or disturbed, other than the blood spot on the carpet. But see, the deal always was, when Grandma died, her son and daughter would divide up everything equally, but since I was the only granddaughter, I got the music box. It was like, a woman-thing.

  I looked for it when the police took us through, and it was missing.”

  Lucas did a drum tap with his pencil. “How'd you get down here?”

  She blinked a couple of times, and then said, “I may look edgy to you, Mr. Davenport, but I do own a car.”

  “All right.” Lucas picked up the phone, said to Carol, “Get me the number of the guy who's investigating the death of a woman named Coombs, which is spelled…”

  He looked at Coombs and she nodded and said, “C-O-O-M-B-S.”

  “… In St. Paul. I'll be on my cell.” He dropped the phone on the hook, took his new Italian leather shoulder rig out of a desk drawer, put it on, took his jacket off the file cabinet, slipped into it. “You can meet me at your grandma's house or you can ride with me. If you ride with me, you can give me some more detail.”

  “I'll ride with you,” she said. “That'll also save gasoline.”

  As they headed out of the office, Carol called after them, “Hey, wait. I've got Jerry Wilson on his cell phone.”

  Lucas went back and took the phone. “I'd like to take a look at the Coombs place, if you're done with it. I've got her granddaughter over here, she thinks maybe something else is going on… uh-huh. Just a minute.” He looked at Coombs. “Have you got a key?”

  She nodded.

  Back to the phone: “She's got a key. Yeah, yeah, I'll call you.”

  He hung up and said, “We're in.”

  Coombs had parked on the street. She got a bag and a bottle of Summer Sunrise Herbal Tea from her salt-rotted Chevy Cavalier and carried it over to the Porsche. The Porsche, she said, as she buckled in, was a “nice little car,” and asked if he'd ever driven a Corolla, “which is sorta like this. My girlfriend has one.”

  “That's great,” Lucas said, as they eased into traffic.

  She nodded. “It's nice when people drive small cars. It's ecologically sensitive.”

  Lucas accelerated hard enough to snap her neck, but she didn't seem to notice. Instead, she looked around, fiddling with her bottle of tea. “Where're the cup holders?”

  “They left them off,” Lucas said, not moving his jaw.

  Halfway to Grandma's house, she said, “I drove a stick shift in Nepal.”

  “Nepal?”

  “Yeah. A Kia. Have you ever driven a Kia?”

  Being a detective, Lucas began to suspect that Gabriella Coombs, guileless as her cornflower eyes might have been, was fucking with him.

  The streets were quiet, the lawns were green and neat, the houses were older but well kept. Lucas might have been in a thousand houses like Marilyn Coombs's, as a uniformed cop, trying to keep the peace, or to find a window peeper, or to take a break-in report, or figure out who stole the lawn mower. They left the car on the street at the bottom of the front lawn, and climbed up to the porch.

  “Not a bad place,” Lucas said. “I could see living my life around here.”

  “She got very lucky,” Coombs said. The comment struck Lucas as odd, but as Coombs was pushing through the front door, he let it go.

  They started with a fast tour, something Lucas did mostly to make sure there was nobody else around. Marilyn Coombs's house was tidy without being psychotic about it, smelled of cooked potatoes and cauliflower and eggplant and pine-scent spray, and old w
ood and insulation. There were creaking wooden floors with imitation oriental carpets, and vinyl in the kitchen; brown walls; doilies; three now-dried-out oatmeal cookies sitting on a plate on the kitchen table.

  An old electric organ was covered with gilt-framed photographs of people staring at the camera, wearing clothes from the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s. The earliest were small, and black-and-white. Then a decade or so later, color arrived, and now was fading. The organ looked as though it probably hadn't been played since 1956, and sat under a framed painting of St. Christopher carrying the Christ Child across the river.

  There was a blood spot, about the size of a saucer, on the floor next to the bottom of the stairway.

  “They took the ball,” Coombs said, pointing to the bottom post on the stairway. The post had a hole in it, where a mounting pin would fit. “They supposedly found hair and blood on it.”

  “Huh.”

  He looked up the stairs, and could see it. Had seen it, once or twice, an older woman either killing or hurting herself in a fall down the stairs. The stairs were wooden, with a runner. The runner had become worn at the edges of the treads, and Coombs might have been hurrying down to the phone and had caught her foot on a worn spot…

  “Could have been a fall,” Lucas said.

  “Except for the missing music box,”Coombs said. “And her relationships with the other mysteriously murdered women.”

  “Let's look for the box.”

  They looked and didn't find it. The box, Coombs said, was a distinctive black-lacquered rectangle about the size of a ream of paper, and about three reams thick. On top of the box, a mother-of-pearl inlaid decoration showed a peasant girl, a peasant boy, and some sheep. “Like the boy was making a choice between them,” Coombs said, still with the guileless voice.

  When you opened the box, she said, four painted wooden figures, a boy, a girl, and two sheep, popped up, and then shuttled around in a circle, one after the other, as music played from beneath them.

  “Is the boy following the girl, or the sheep?” Lucas asked.

  “The girl,” Coombs said, showing the faintest of smiles.