Invisible prey ld-17

by John Sandford

  If he has to go chasing after Jesse Barth, that'll use a lot of time. All we need is a little time.”

  “So dangerous to go after Jesse Barth,” Jane said. “We almost have to do it tonight.”

  “And we can. She's not the early-to-bed kind. And she walks. She walked over to her boyfriend's yesterday, maybe she'll be walking again.”

  “We should have taken her yesterday,” Jane said.

  “Never had a clear shot at her… and it didn't seem quite so necessary.”

  “Oh, God…” Jane scrubbed at her deadened forehead. “Can't even think.”

  “Be simpler to wait for Davenport outside his house, and shoot him. Who'd figure it out?” Leslie said. “There must be dozens or hundreds of people who hate him. Criminals.

  If he got shot…”

  “Two problems. First, he's not an old lady and he's not a kid and he carries a gun and he's naturally suspicious. If we missed, he'd kill us. Look at all those stories about him,” Jane said. “Second, we only know two cases he's working on. One of them is almost over. If the cops think the Bucher killers went out and killed a cop, especially a cop like Davenport who has been working as long as he has… they'd tear up everything.

  They'd never let go. They'd work on it for years, if they had to.”

  They rode in silence for a while. Then Jane said, “Jesse Barth.” “Only if everything is perfect,” Leslie said. “We only do it if everything is exactly right. We don't have to pull the trigger until the last second, when we actually stop her. Then if we do it, we've got an hour of jeopardy until we can get her underground. They don't have to know she's dead. They can think she ran away. But Davenport'll be working it forever, trying to find her.”

  “Only if everything is perfect,” Jane said. “Only if the stars are right.”

  Lucas was still poring over paper at Bucher's when Sandy called back. “I talked to Clayton Toms. He's the grandson of Jacob Toms-the murdered man,” she said. “He said there were several quilts in the house, but they were used as bedspreads and weren't worth too much. He still has one. None of them were these Armstrong quilts. None of them were hung on walls. He's going to check to see if there's anything that would indicate that he knew Mrs. Bucher or Mrs. Donaldson or Mrs. Coombs.”

  “Thanks,” Lucas said. Maybe quilts weren't the magic bullet.

  Gabriella Coombs decided to put off her research into Grandma's quilts. She had a date, the fifth in a series. She liked the guy all right, and he definitely wanted to get her clothes off, and she was definitely willing to take them off.

  Unfortunately, he wanted them off for the wrong reason. He was a painter. The owner of the High Plains Drifter Bar amp; Grill in Minneapolis wanted a naked-lady painting to hang over his bar, and the painter, whose name was Ron, figured that Gabriella would be perfect as a model, although he suggested she might want to “fill out your tits” a little.

  She didn't even mind that idea, as long as she got laid occasionally. The problem was, he worked from photographs, and Gabriella's very firm sixteenth Rule of Life was Never Take Off Your Clothes Around a Camera.

  Ron had been pleading: “Listen, even if I did put your picture on the Internet, who'd recognize it? Who looks at faces? The facts are, one in every ten women in the United States, and maybe the world, is naked on the Internet. Nobody would look at your face. Besides, I won't put it on the Internet.”

  On that last part, his eyes drifted, and she had the bad feeling that she'd be on the Internet about an hour after he took the picture. And three hours after that, the wife of some friend would call up to tell her that everyone was ordering prints from Pussy-R-Us.

  So the question was, was he going to make a move? Or did he only want her body in a computer file? Coombs was a lighthearted sort, like her mother, and while she carefully chose her clothing for the way it looked on her, she didn't use much in the way of makeup.

  That was trickery, she thought. She did use perfume: scents were primal, she believed, and something musky might get a rise out of the painter. If not, well, then, Ron might be missing out on a great opportunity, she thought.

  She dabbed the perfume on her mastoids, between her breasts, and finally at the top of her thighs. As she did it, her thoughts drifted to Lucas Davenport. The guy was growing on her, even though he was a cop and therefore on the Other Side, but he had a way of talking with women that made her think photography wouldn't be an issue.

  And she could feel little attraction molecules flowing out of him; he liked her looks.

  Of course, he was married, and older. Not that marriage always made a difference.

  And he wasn't that much older.

  “Hmm,” she said to herself.

  Jesse Barth used a Bic lighter to fire up two cigarettes at once, handed one of them to Mike. The evening was soft, the cool humid air lying comfortably on her bare forearms and shoulders. They sat on the front porch, under the yellow bug light, and Screw, the pooch, came over and snuffed at her leg and then plopped down in the dirt and whimpered for a stomach scratch.

  Two blocks away, Jane Widdler, behind the wheel, watched for a moment with the image-stabilizing binoculars, then said, “That's her.”

  “About time,” Leslie said. “Wonder if the kid's gonna walk her home?”

  “If he does, it's off,” Jane said.

  “Yeah,” Leslie said. But he was hot. He had a new pipe, with new tape on the handle, and he wanted to use it.

  Lucas was drinking a caffeine-free Diet Coke out of the bottle, his butt propped against a kitchen counter. He said to Weather, “There's a good possibility that whoever killed Coombs didn't have anything to do with the others. The others fit a certain profile: they were rich, you could steal from them and nobody would know. They were carefully spaced both in time and geography- there was no overlap in police jurisdictions, so there'd be nobody to compare them, to see the similarities. Still: Coombs knew at least two of them. And the way she was killed…”

  Weather was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a raw carrot. She pointed it at him and said, “You might be wasting your time with Coombs. But in the lab, when we're looking at a puzzle, and we get an interesting outlier in an experiment-Coombs would be an outlier-it often cracks the puzzle. There's something going on with it, that gives you a new angle.”

  “You think I might be better focusing on Coombs?”

  “Maybe. What's the granddaughter's name?” Weather asked.

  “Gabriella.”

  “Yes. You say she's looking at all the paper. That's fine, but she doesn't have your eye,” Weather said. “What you should do, is get her to compile it all. Everything she can find. Then you read it. The more links you can find between Coombs and the other victims, the more likely you are to stumble over the solution. You need to pile up the data.”

  A stretch of Hague Avenue west of Lexington was perfect. The Widdlers had gone around the block, well ahead of Jesse, and scouted down Hague, spotted the dark stretch.

  “If she stays on this street…”Jane said.

  They circled back, getting behind her again, never getting closer than two blocks.

  The circling also gave them a chance to spot cop cars. They'd seen one, five minutes earlier, five blocks away, quickly departing, as though it were on its way somewhere.

  That was good.

  They could see Jesse moving between streetlights, walking slowly. Leslie was in the back of the van, looking over the passenger seat with the glasses. He saw the dark stretch coming and said, “Move up, move up. In ten seconds, she'll be right.”

  “Nylons,” Jane said.

  They unrolled dark nylon stockings over their heads. They could see fine, but their faces would be obscured should there be an unexpected witness. Better yet, the dark stockings, seen from any distance, made them look as though they were black.

  “Why is she walking so slow?” Jane asked.

  “I don't know… she keeps stopping,” Leslie said. “But she's getting there…”


  “So dangerous,” Jane said.

  “Do it, goddamnit,” Leslie snarled. “She's there. Put me on her.”

  Jesse heard the sudden acceleration of the van coming up behind her. In this neighborhood, that could be a bad thing. She turned toward it, her face a pale oval in the dark patch. The van was coming fast, and just as quickly lurched to a stop. Now she was worried, and already turning away, to run, when the van's sliding door slammed open, and a big man was coming at her, running, one big arm lifting overhead, and Jesse screamed…

  Leslie hoped to be on her before she could scream, realized somewhere in the calculating part of his brain that they'd done it wrong, that they should have idled up to her, but that was all done now, in the past. He hit the grass verge, running, before the van had even fully stopped, his chin hot from his breath under the nylon stocking, his arm going up, and he heard the girl scream “Shoe,” or “Shoot,” or “Schmoo.”

  Or “Screw”? He was almost there, the girl trying to run, he almost had her when he became aware of something like a soccer ball flying at his hip, he had the pipe back ready to swing, and cocked his head toward whatever it was…

  Then Screw hit him.

  Leslie Widdler hit the ground like a side of beef, a solid thump, thrashing at the dog, the dog's snarls reaching toward a ravening lupine howl, Leslie thrashing at it with the pipe, the dog biting him on the butt, the leg, an upper arm, on the back, Leslie thrashing, finally kicking at the dog, and dog fastening on his ankle. Leslie managed to stagger upright, could hear Jane screaming something, hit the dog hard with the pipe, but the dog held on, ripping, and Leslie hit it again, still snarling, and, its back broken, the dog launched itself with its front paws, getting Leslie's other leg, and Leslie, now picking up Jane's “Get in get in get in…” threw himself into the back of the van.

  The dog came with him, and the van accelerated into a U-turn, the side door still open, almost rolling both Leslie and the dog into the street, and Leslie hit the dog on the skull again, and then again, and the dog finally let go and Leslie, overcome with anger, lurched forward, grabbed it around the body, and threw it out in the street.

  Jane screamed, “Close the door, close the door.”

  Leslie slammed the door and they were around another corner and a few seconds later, accelerating down the ramp onto I-94.

  “I'm hurt,” he groaned. “I'm really hurt.”

  Lucas and Letty were watching Slap Shot when Flowers called. “I'm down in Jackson. Kathy Barth just called me and said that somebody tried to snatch Jesse off the street. About twenty minutes ago.”

  “You gotta be shittin' me.” Lucas was on his feet.

  “Jesse said somebody in a white van, a really big guy, she said, pulled up and tried to grab her. She was walking this dog home from her boyfriend's…”

  “Screw,” Lucas said.

  “What?”

  “That's the dog's name,” Lucas said. “Screw.”

  “Yeah. That yellow dog. Anyway, she said Screw went after the guy, and the guy wound up back in the van with Screw and that's the last she saw of them,” Flowers said. “She said the van did a U-turn and headed back to Lexington and then turned toward the interstate and she never saw them again.

  She ran home and told Kathy. Kathy called nine-one-one and then called me. She's fuckin' hysterical.”

  “Call Kathy, tell her I'm coming over,” Lucas said. “Are the cops looking for a van?”

  “I guess, but the call probably didn't go out for ten minutes after Jesse got jumped,” Flowers said. “She said the guy was big and beefy and mean, like a football player.

  Who do we know like that?”

  “Junior Kline… Can you get back on this?” Lucas asked.

  “I could, but I'm a long way away,” Flowers said.

  “All right, forget it,” Lucas said. “I'll get Jenkins or Shrake to find Junior and shake his ass up.”

  “Jesus, tell them not to beat on the guy unless they know he's guilty,” Flowers said.

  “Those guys can get out of hand.”

  “Tell Barth I'm on the way,” Lucas said.

  The artist was wearing a black T-shirt, black slacks, and a black watch cap on his shaven head, a dramatic but unnecessary touch, since it was probably seventy degrees outside, Coombs thought, as she peered at him over the cafe table.

  There was tension in the air, and it involved who was going to be the first to look at the check. The photographer was saying, “Camera had eight-bit color channels, and I'm asking myself, eight-bit? What the hell is that all about? How're you gonna get any color depth with eight-bit channels? Furthermore, they compress the shit out of the files, which means that the highlights get absolutely blown out, and the blacks fill up with noise…”

  Coombs knew it was a lost cause. Almost without any personal volition, her fingertips crawled across the table toward the check.

  Jane pulled the van into the garage and said, “Let's go look. Can you walk?”

  “Yeah, I can walk,” Leslie said. “Ah, God, bit me up. The fuckin' dog. That's why the kid was walking so slow. She had the dog on a goddamn leash, why didn't you see that? You had the binoculars…”

  “The dog was just too close to the ground, or the leash was too long, or something, but I swear to God, I never had a hint,” Jane said.

  They went inside, Jane leading the way, up to the master bath. Leslie was wearing the anti-DNA coveralls, which were showing patches of blood on the back of his upper right arm, his right hip, and down both legs. He stripped the coveralls off and Jane gaped: “Oh, my God.”

  Probably fifteen tooth-holes, and four quarter-sized chunks of loose flesh. Leslie looked at himself in the mirror: he'd stopped leaking, but the wounds were wet with blood. “No arteries,” he said. “Can't get stitches, the cops will call the hospitals looking for dog bites.”

  “So what do you think?” Jane asked. She didn't want to touch him.

  “I think we use lots of gauze pads and tape and Mycitracin, and you tape everything together and then… When you had that bladder infection, you had some pills left over, the ones that made you sick.”

  “I've still got them,” Jane said. The original antibiotics had given her hives, and she'd switched prescriptions.

  “I'll use those.” He looked at himself in the mirror, and a tear popped out of one eye and ran down his cheek. “It's not just holes, I'm going to have bruises the size of saucers.”

  “Time to go to Paris,” Jane said. “Or Budapest, or anywhere. Antique-scouting. If anybody should take your shirt off in the next month…”

  “But we're not done yet,” Leslie said. “We've got to get that music box back in place, we've got to get the sewing basket.”

  “Leslie…”

  “I've been hurt worse than this, playing ball,” Leslie said. Another tear popped out. “Just get me taped up.”

  A St. Paul COP car was sitting at the curb at Barth's house. Every light in the house was on, and people who might have been neighbors were standing off the stoop, smoking.

  Lucas pulled in behind the cop car, got out, and walked up to the stoop.

  “They're pretty busy in there,” one of the smokers said.

  “I'm a cop,” Lucas said. He knocked once and let himself into the house. Two uniformed cops were standing in the living room, talking with the Barths, who were sitting on the couch. Lucas didn't recognize either of the cops, and when they turned to him, he said, “Lucas Davenport, I'm with the BCA. I worked with the Barths on the grand jury.”

  One of the cops nodded and Lucas said to Jesse, “You all right?”

  “They got Screw,” she said.

  “Bui you're all right.”

  “She's scared shitless, if that's all right,” Kathy snapped.

  “We just got a call from another squad,” one of the cops said. “There's a dead dog on the side of the road, just off Lexington. It's white, sounds like… Screw.”

  “All right,” Lucas said. Back to Jesse. “You think you
could come down with me, look at the dog?”

  She snuffled.

  The cop said, “We called Animal Control, they're gonna pick it up.”

  Lucas to Jesse: “What do you think?”

  “I could look,” she said. “He saved my life.”

  “Tell me exactly what happened…”

  She TOLD the story in an impressionistic fashion-touches of color, touches of panic, not a lot of detail. When the dog hit the big man, she said, she was already running, and she was fast. “I didn't look back for a block and then I saw him jump in the van and Screw was stuck on his leg. Then the van went around in a circle, and that's the last I saw. They turned on Lexington toward the interstate. Then I ran some more until I got home.”

  “So there had to be at least two people,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah. Because one was driving and the other one tried to hit me,” she said.

  “What'd he try to hit you with?” Lucas asked.

  “Like a cane.”

  “A cane?”

  “Yeah, like a cane,” she said.

  “Could it have been a pipe?”

  She thought for a minute, and then said, “Yeah. It could have been a pipe. About this long.” She held her hands three feet apart.

  Lucas turned away for a second, closed his eyes, felt people looking at him. “Jesus.”

  “What?” Kathy Barth was peering at him. “You havin' a stroke?”

  “No, it's just… Never mind.” He thought: the van guys were in the wrong case. To Jesse: “Honey, let's go look at the dog, okay?”

  They found the dog lying in the headlights of a St. Paul squad car. The cop was out talking to passersby and broke away when Lucas pulled up. This cop he knew: “Hey, Jason.”

  “This your dog?” Jason was smiling, shaking his head.

  “It's sorta mine,” Jesse said. She looked so sad that the cop's smile vanished. She got up close and peered down at Screw's body. “That's him. He looks so… dead.”

  The body was important for two major reasons: it confirmed Jesse's story; and one other thing…