Invisible Prey (15 page)

Mrs. Donaldson’s secretary, Amity Anderson, who lives in an apartment in Mrs. Donaldson’s home, was in Chicago on business for

Mrs. Donaldson, police said. When she was unable to reach Mrs. Donaldson by telephone on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, Anderson called the Booths, who went to Donaldson’s home and found her body.

Police said they have several leads in the case.

“Claire Donaldson was brilliant and kind, and that this should happen to her is a tragedy for all of Chippewa Falls,” said the Rev. Carl Hoffer, pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Chippewa Falls, and a longtime friend of Mrs. Donaldson…

Lucas read through the clip, which was long on history and short on crime detail; no matter, he could get the details from the Chippewa cops. But, he thought, if you changed the name and the murder weapon, the news story of Claire Donaldson’s death could just as easily have been the story of Constance Bucher’s murder.

“W
HEN WE
get back to the office, I’ll want a complete statement,” he told Coombs. “I’ll get a guy to take it from you. We’ll need a detailed description of that music box. This could get complicated.”

“God. I wasn’t sure you were going to believe me,” Coombs said. “About Grandma being murdered.”

“She probably wasn’t—but there’s a chance that she was,” Lucas said. “The idea that somebody hit her with that ball…That would take some thought, some knowledge of the house.”

“And a serious psychosis,” Coombs said.

“And that. But it’s possible.”

“On the TV shows, the cops never believe the edgy counterculture person the first time she tells them something,” Coombs said. “Two or three people usually have to get killed first.”

“That’s TV,” Lucas said.

“But you have to admit that cops are prejudiced against us,” she said.

“Hey,” Lucas said. “I know a guy who walks around in hundred-degree heat in a black hoodie because he’s always freezing because he smokes crack all day, supports himself with burglary, and at night he spray-paints glow-in-the-dark archangels on boxcars so he can send Christ’s good news to the world. He’s an edgy counterculture person. You’re a hippie.”

She clouded up, her lip trembling. “That’s a cruel thing to say,” she said. “Why’d you have to say that?”

“Ah, man,” Lucas said. “Look, I’m sorry…”

She smiled, pleased with herself and the trembling lip: “Relax. I’m just toyin’ with you.”

O
N THE WAY
out of the house, they walked around the blood spot, and Coombs asked, “What’s a doornail?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh.” Disappointed. “I would have thought you’d have heard it a lot, and looked it up. You know, dead as a doornail, and you being a cop.”

He got her out of the house, into the Porsche, fired it up, rolled six feet, then stopped, frowned at Coombs, and shut it down again.

“Two things: If your grandma’s name was Coombs, and your mother is her daughter, how come your name…?”

“I’m a bastard,” Coombs said.

“Huh?”

“My mom was a hippie. I’m second-generation hippie. Anyway, she slept around a little, and when the bundle of joy finally showed up, none of the prospective fathers did.” She flopped her hands in the air. “So. I’m a bastard. What was the second thing?”

“Mmm.” He shook his head, and fished his cell phone out of his pocket. “I’m going to call somebody and ask an unpleasant question about your grandmother. If you want, you could get out and walk around the yard for a minute.”

She shook her head. “That’s okay. I’d be interested in hearing the question.”

Lucas dialed, identified himself, and asked for the medical examiner who’d done the postmortem on Coombs. Got her and asked, “What you take out of her stomach. Uh-huh? Uh-huh? Very much? Okay…okay.”

He hung up and Coombs again asked, “What?”

“Her stomach was empty. If she fell when she was by herself, I wonder who ate nine oatmeal cookies?” Lucas asked.

B
ACK AT
BCA headquarters, he briefed Shrake, put Coombs in a room with him, and told them both that he needed every detail. Five minutes later he was on the line with an investigator with the Chippewa County Sheriff’s Office, named Carl Frazier, who’d worked the Donaldson murder.

“I saw the story in the paper and was going to call somebody, but I needed to talk to the sheriff about it. He’s out of town, back this afternoon,” Frazier said. “Donaldson’s a very touchy subject around here. But since you called
me…”

“It feels the same,” Lucas said. “Donaldson and Bucher.”

“Yeah, it does,” Frazier said. “What seems most alike is that there was never a single lead. Nothing. We tore up the town, and Eau Claire, we beat on every asshole we knew about, and there never was a thing. I’ve gotten the impression that the St. Paul cops are beating their heads against the same wall.”

“You nail down anything as stolen?”

“Nope. That was another mystery,” Frazier said. “As far as we could tell, nothing was touched. I guess the prevailing theory among the big thinkers here was that it was somebody she knew, they got in an argument…”

“And the guy pulled out a gun and shot her? Why’d he have a gun?”

“That’s a weak point,” Frazier admitted. “Would have worked better if she’d been killed like Bucher—you know, somebody picked up a frying pan and swatted her. That would have looked a little more spontaneous.”

“This looked planned?”

“Like D-Day. She was shot three times in the back of the head. But what for? A few hundred dollars? Nobody who inherited the money needed it. There hadn’t been any family fights or neighborhood feuds or anything else. The second big-thinker theory was that it was some psycho. Came in the back door, maybe for food or booze, killed her.”

“Man…”

“I know,” Frazier said. “But that’s what we couldn’t figure out:
What for?
If you can’t figure out
what for,
it’s harder than hell to figure out
who.
”

“She’s got these relatives, a sister and brother-in-law, the Booths,” Lucas said. “They still around?”

“Oh, yeah. The sheriff hears from them regularly.”

“Okay. Then, I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna go talk to them,” Lucas said. “Maybe I could stop by and look at your files?”

“Absolutely,” Frazier said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to ride along when you do the interview. Or, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we meet at the Donaldson house? The Booths still own it, and it’s empty. You could take a look at it.”

“How soon can you do it?”

“Tomorrow? I’ll call the Booths to make sure they’ll be around,” Frazier said.

W
EATHER AND
L
UCAS
spent some time that night fooling around, and when the first round was done, Lucas rolled over on his back, his chest slick with sweat, and Weather said, “That wasn’t so terrible.”

“Yeah. I was fantasizing about Jesse Barth,” he joked. She swatted him on the stomach, not too hard, but he bounced and complained, “Ouch! You almost exploded one of my balls.”

“You have an extra,” she said. “All we need is one.” She was trying for a second kid, worried that she might be too old, at forty-one.

“Yeah, well, I’d like to keep both of them,” Lucas said, rubbing his stomach. “I think you left a mark.”

She made a rude noise. “Crybaby.” Then, “Did you hear what Sam said today…?”

A
ND LATER,
she asked, “What happened with Jesse Barth, anyway?”

“It’s going to the grand jury. Virgil’s handling most of it.”

“Mmm. Virgil,” Weather said, with a
tone
in her voice.

“What about him?”

“If I was going to fantasize during sex, which I’m not saying I’d do, Virgil would be a candidate,” she said.

“Virgil? Flowers?”

“He has a way about him,” Weather said. “And that little tiny butt.”

Lucas was shocked. “He never…I mean, made a
move
or anything…”

“On me?” she asked. “No, of course not. But…mmm.”

“What?”

“I wonder why? He never made a move? He doesn’t even flirt with me,” she said.

“Probably because I carry a gun,” Lucas said.

“Probably because I’m too old,” Weather said.

“You’re not too old, believe me,” Lucas said. “I get the strange feeling that Virgil would fuck a snake, if he could get somebody to hold its head.”

“Sort of reminds me of you, when you were his age,” she said.

“You didn’t know me when I was his age.”

“You can always pick out the guys who’d fuck a snake, whatever age they are,” Weather said.

“That’s unfair.”

“Mmm.”

A
MINUTE LATER,
Lucas said, “Virgil thinks that going to Dakota County was a little…iffy.”

“Politically corrupt, you mean,” Weather said.

“Maybe,” Lucas admitted.

“It is,” Weather said.

“I mentioned to Virgil that I occasionally talked to Ruffe over at the
Star Tribune.”

She propped herself up on one arm. “You suggested that he call Ruffe?”

“Not at all. That’d be improper,” Lucas said.

“So what are the chances he’ll call?”

“Knowing that fuckin’ Flowers, about ninety-six percent.”

She dropped onto her back. “So you manipulated him into making the call, so the guy in Dakota County can’t bury the case.”

“Can you manipulate somebody into something, if he knows that you’re manipulating him, and wants to be?” Lucas asked, rolling up on his side.

“That’s a very feminine thought, Lucas. I’m proud of you,” Weather said.

“Hey,” Lucas said, catching her hand and guiding it. “Feminine
this.”

8

A
NOTHER GREAT DAY,
blue sky, almost no wind, dew sparkling on the lawn, the neighbor’s sprinkler system cutting in. Sam loved the sprinkler system and could mimic its
chi-chi-chi-chiiiii
sound almost perfectly.

Lucas got the paper off the porch, pulled it out of the plastic sack, and unrolled it. Nothing in the
Star Tribune
about Kline. Nothing at all by Ruffe. Had he misfired?

L
UCAS NEVER LIKED
to get up early—though he had no problem staying up until dawn, or longer—but was out of the house at 6:30, nudging out of the driveway just behind Weather. Weather was doing a series of scar revisions on a burn case. The patient was in the hospital overnight to get some sodium numbers fixed, and was being waked as she left the driveway. The patient would be on the table by 7:30, the first of three operations she’d do before noon.

Lucas, on the other hand, was going fishing. He took the truck north on Cretin to I-94, and turned into the rising sun; and watched it rise higher for a bit more than an hour as he drove past incoming rush-hour traffic, across the St. Croix, past cows and buffalo and small towns getting up. He left the interstate at Wisconsin Exit 52, continuing toward Chippewa, veering around the town and up the Chippewa River into Jim Falls.

A retired Minneapolis homicide cop had a summer home just below the dam. He was traveling in Wyoming with his wife, but told Lucas where he’d hidden the keys for the boat. Lucas was on the river a little after eight, in the cop’s eighteen-foot Lund, working the trolling motor with his foot, casting the shoreline with a Billy Bait on a Thorne Brothers custom rod.

L
UCAS HAD
always been interested in newspapers—thought he might have been a reporter if he hadn’t become a cop—and had gotten to the point where he could sense something wrong with a newspaper story. If a story seemed reticent, somehow; deliberately oblique; if the writer did a little tap dance; then, Lucas could say, “Ah, there’s something going on.” The writer knew something he couldn’t report, at least, not yet.

Lucas, and a lot of other cops, developed the same sense about crimes. A solution was obvious, but wasn’t right. The story was hinky. Of course, cops sometimes had that feeling and it turned out that they were wrong. The obvious
was
the truth. But usually, when it seemed like something was wrong, something was.

There’d been a car at the murder scene—if there hadn’t been, then somebody had been running down the street with a sixty-pound printer on his back. So there’d been a car. But if there’d been a car, why wasn’t a lot of the other small stuff taken? Like the TV in the bedroom, a nice thirty-two-inch flat screen. Could have carried it out under one arm.

Or those video games.

On the other hand, if the killers were professionals after cash and easy-to-hock jewelry, why hadn’t they found the safe, and at least tried to open it? It wasn’t that well hidden…Why had they spent so much time in the house? Why did they steal that fuckin’ printer?

The printer bothered him. He put the fishing rod down, pulled his cell phone, was amazed to see he actually had a signal, and called back to the office, to Carol.

“Listen, what’s that intern’s name? Sandy? Can you get her? Great. Get the call list going: I want to know if anybody in the Metro area found a Hewlett-Packard printer. Have her call the garbage haulers, too. We’re looking for a Hewlett-Packard printer that was tossed in a dumpster. You can get the exact model number from John Smith. And if somebody saw one, ask if there’s anything else that might have come from Bucher’s place, like a DVD player. Yeah. Yeah, tell everybody it’s the Bucher case. Yeah, I know. Get her started, give her some language to explain what we’re doing.”

H
E’D NO MORE THAN
hung up when he had another thought, fished out the phone, and called Carol again. “Has anyone shown Sandy how to run the computer? Okay. After she does the call list, get her to pull every unsolved murder in the Upper Midwest for the last five years. Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin. Might as well throw in the Dakotas. Don’t do Illinois, there’d be too much static from Chicago. Have her sift them for characteristics similar to the Bucher case. But don’t tell her where I am—don’t tell her about Donaldson. I want to see if she catches it. No, I’m not trying to fuck her over, I just want to know how good a job she did of sifting them. Yeah. Goodbye.”