Invisible Prey (18 page)

“See you at five-fifteen.”

H
E HUNG UP
and saw a blond girl standing by Carol’s desk, peeking at him past the edge of his open door. He recognized her from a meet-and-greet with the summer people. Sandy.

“Sandy,” he called. “Come in.”

She was tall. Worse, she thought she was
too
tall, and so rolled her shoulders to make herself look shorter. She had a thin nose, delicate cheekbones, foggy blue eyes, and glasses that were too big for her face. She wore a white blouse and a blue skirt, and black shoes that were wrong for the skirt. She was, Lucas thought, somebody who hadn’t yet pulled herself together. She was maybe twenty years old.

She hurried in and stood, until he said, “Sit down, how y’doing?”

“I’m fine.” She was nervous and plucked at the hem of her skirt. She was wearing nylons, he realized, which had to be hot. “I looked up that information you wanted. They let me stay late yesterday.”

“You didn’t have to…”

“No, it was really interesting,” she said, a spot of pink appearing in her cheeks.

“What, uh…”

“Okay.” She put one set of papers on the floor by her feet, and fumbled through a second set. “On the Hewlett-Packard printers. The answer is, probably. Probably everybody saw a Hewlett-Packard printer, but nobody knows for sure. The thing is, there are all kinds of printers that get thrown away. Nobody wants an old printer, and there are supposed to be restrictions on how you get rid of them, so people put them in garbage sacks and hide them in their garbage cans, or throw them in somebody else’s dumpster. There are dozens of them every week.”

“Shit…” He thought about the word, noticed that she flushed. “Excuse me.”

“That’s okay. The thing is, because so many printers are in garbage sacks, they don’t get seen until they’re already in the trash flow, and they wind up getting buried at the landfill,” she said.

“So we’re out of luck.”

“Yes. I believe so. There’s no way to tell what printer came from where. Even if we found the right printer, nobody would know what truck it came from, or where it was picked up.”

“Okay. Forget it,” Lucas said. “I should have known that.”

S
HE PICKED UP
the second pack of papers. “On the unsolved murders, I looked at the five states you asked about, and I also looked at Nebraska, because there are no big cities there. I found one unsolved that looks good. A woman name Claire Donaldson was murdered in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. I told Carol as soon as I found it, but she said I wouldn’t have to work anymore on that, because you already knew about it.”

Lucas nodded. “Okay. Good job. And that was the only one?”

“That was the only unsolved,” Sandy said. “But I found one solved murder that also matches everything, except the sex of the victim.”

Lucas frowned. “Solved?”

She nodded. “In Des Moines. An elderly man, wealthy, living alone, house full of antiques. His name was Jacob Toms. He was well known, he was on a lot of boards. An art museum, the Des Moines Symphony, an insurance company, a publishing company.”

“Jeez, that sounds pretty good. But if it’s solved…”

“I pulled the newspaper accounts off LexisNexis. There was a trial, but there wasn’t much of a defense. The killer said he couldn’t remember doing it, but wouldn’t be surprised if he had. He was high on amphetamines, he’d been doing them for four days, he said he was out of his mind and couldn’t remember the whole time he was on it. There wasn’t much evidence against him—he was from the neighborhood, his parents were well-off, but he got lost on the drugs. Anyway, people had seen him around the neighborhood, and around the Toms house…”

“Inside?”

“No, outside, but he knew Toms because he’d cut Toms’s lawn when he was a teenager. Toms had a big garden and he didn’t like the way the lawn services cut it, because they weren’t careful enough, so he hired this guy when he was a teenager. So the guy knew the house.”

“There had to be more than that.”

“Well, the guy admitted that he might have done it. He had cuts on his face that might have been from Toms defending himself…” She leaned forward, her eyes narrowing: “But the interesting thing is, the stuff that was stolen was all stuff that could be sold on the street, including some jewelry and some electronics, but none of it was ever found.”

“Huh.”

“An investigator for the public defender’s office told the
Register
that the case was fabricated by the police because they were under pressure to get somebody, and here was this guy,” Sandy said.

“Maybe he did it,” Lucas said.

“And maybe he didn’t,” Sandy said.

Lucas sat back in his chair and stared at her for a moment, until she flinched, and he realized that he was making her even more nervous. “Okay. This is good stuff, Sandy. Now. Do you have a driver’s license?”

“Of course. My car is sorta iffy.”

“I’ll get you a state car. Could you run down to Des Moines today and Xerox the trial file? I don’t think the cops would be too happy about our looking at the raw stuff, but we can get the trial file. If you have to, you could bag out in a Des Moines hotel. I’ll get Carol to get you a state credit card.”

“I could do that,” she said. She scooched forward on the chair, her eyes brightening. “God, do you think this man might have gone to prison for something he didn’t do?”

“It happens—and this sounds pretty good,” Lucas said. “This sounds like Bucher and Donaldson and Coombs…”

“Who?”

“Ah, a lady named Coombs, here in the Cities. Anyway. Let’s go talk to Carol. Man, looking at
solved
cases. That was
terrific
. That was a terrific idea.”

L
ATER,
as Lucas left the office, Carol said, “You really got Sandy wound up. She’d jump out of an airplane for you.”

“It’ll wear off,” Lucas said.

“Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t,” Carol said.

A
MITY
A
NDERSON
probably would not have jumped out of an airplane for him, Lucas decided after meeting her, but she might be willing to push him.

He saw her unlocking the front door of her house, carrying a purse and what looked like a shopping bag, as he walked up the hill toward her. She looked down the hill at him, a glance, and disappeared inside.

S
HE LIVED
in a cheerful postwar Cape Cod–style house, with yellow-painted clapboard siding, white trim, and a brick chimney in the middle of the roof. The yard was small, but intensely cultivated, with perennials pushing out of flower beds along the fences at the side of the house, and bright annuals in two beds on either side of the narrow concrete walk that led to the front door. A lopsided one-car garage sat off to the side, and back.

Lucas knocked, and a moment later, she answered. She was a mid-sized woman, probably five-six, Lucas thought, and in her early to middle thirties. Her dark hair was tied in a severe, schoolmarmish bun, without style; she wore a dark brown jacket over a beige blouse, with a tweedy skirt and practical brown shoes. Olive-complected, she had dark brown eyes, overgrown eyebrows, and three small frown wrinkles that ran vertically toward her forehead from the bridge of her short nose. She looked at him through the screen door; her face had a sullen aspect, but a full lower lip hinted at a concealed sensuality. “Do you have any identification?”

He showed her his ID. She let him in, and said, “I have to go back to the bathroom. I’ll be just a minute.”

The inside of the house was as cheery as the outside, with rugs and quilts and fabric hangings on the brightly painted plaster walls and the spotless hardwood floors. A bag sat on the floor, next to her purse. Not a shopping bag, but a gym bag, with three sets of handball gloves tied to the outside, stiff with dried sweat. A serious, sweating handball player…

A toilet flushed, distantly, down a back hallway, and a moment later Anderson came out, tugging down the back of her skirt. “What can I do for you, Mr. Davenport?”

“You worked for Claire Donaldson when she was killed,” Lucas said. “The most specific thing I need to know is, was anything taken from the house? Aside from the obvious? Any high-value antiques, jewelry, paintings, that sort of thing?”

She pointed him at a sofa, then perched on an overstuffed chair, her knees primly tight. “That was a long time ago. Has something new come up?”

Lucas had no reason not to tell her: “I’m looking at connections between the Donaldson murder and the murder of Constance Bucher and her maid. You may have read about it or seen it on television…”

Anderson’s hand went to her cheek. “Of course. They’re very similar, aren’t they? In some ways? Do you think they’re connected?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “We can’t seem to find a common motive, other than the obvious one of robbery.”

“Oh. Robbery. Well, I’m sure the police told you she usually had some money around,” Anderson said. “But not enough to kill somebody for. I mean, unless you were a crazy junkie or something, and this was in Chippewa Falls.”

“I was thinking of antiques, paintings…”

She shook her head. “Nothing like that was taken. I was in charge of keeping inventory. I gave a list of everything to the police and to Claire’s sister and brother-in-law.”

“I’ve seen that,” Lucas said. “So you don’t know of anything specific that seemed to be missing, and was valuable.”

“No, I don’t. I assume the Booths told you that I was probably involved, that I gave a key to one of my many boyfriends, that I went to Chicago as an alibi, and the boyfriend then came over and killed Claire?”

“They…” He shrugged.

“I know,” she said, waving a hand dismissively.

“So you would categorize that as ‘Not true,’” Lucas suggested with a grin.

She laughed, more of an unhappy bark: “Of course it’s not true. Those people…But I will tell you, the Booths didn’t have as much money as people think. I know that, from talking to Claire. I mean, they had enough to go to the country club and pay their bills, and go to Palm Springs in the winter, but I happen to know that they rented in Palm Springs. A condo. They were very tight with money and they were
very
happy to get Claire’s—and they got all of it. She had no other living relatives.”

“You sound unhappy about that,” Lucas said. “Were you expecting something?”

“No. Claire and I had a businesslike arrangement. I was a secretary and I helped with the antiques, which was my main interest. We were friendly, but we had no real emotional connection. She was the boss, I was the employee. She didn’t pay much, and I was always looking for another job.”

They looked at each other for a moment, then Lucas said, “I suppose you’ve been pretty well worked over by the sheriff’s investigators. They found no boyfriends, no missing keys…”

“Officer Davenport. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m gay.”

“Ah.” He hadn’t gotten that vibe. Getting old.

“At that moment, I had no personal friend. Chippewa is not a garden spot for lesbians. And I wasn’t even sure I was gay.”

“Okay.” He slapped his knees, ready to get up. “Does the name Jacob Toms mean anything to you? Ever heard of him? From Des Moines?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ve never been to Des Moines. Is he another…?”

“We don’t know,” Lucas said. “How about a woman named Marilyn Coombs. From here in St. Paul?”

Her eyes narrowed. “God. I’ve heard of the name. Recently.”

“She was killed a couple of days ago,” Lucas said.

Anderson’s mouth actually dropped: “Oh…You mean there are three? Or four? I must’ve heard Coombs’s name on television. Four people?”

“Five, maybe, including Mrs. Bucher’s maid,” Lucas said.

“That’s…crazy,” Anderson said. “Insane. For what?”

“We’re trying to figure that out,” Lucas said. “About the Booths. Do you think
they
were capable of killing Mrs. Donaldson? Or of planning it?”

“Margaret was genuinely horrified. I don’t doubt that,” Anderson said, her eyes lifting toward the ceiling, as she thought about it. “Glad to get the money, but horrified by what happened. Landford wasn’t horrified. He was just glad to get the money.”

Then she smiled for the first time and looked back at Lucas. “Thinking that Landford…no. He wouldn’t do it himself, because he might get blood on his sleeve. Thinking that he might know somebody who’d do it for him, you know, a killer—that’s even more ridiculous. You have to know them. Deep in their hearts, way down in their souls, the Booths are twits.”

He smiled back at her and stood up. She was right about the twits.

“One last question, just popped into my head. Did you know Connie Bucher? At all? Through antiques, or whatever?”

“No.” She shook her head. “One of my jobs at the foundation is roping in potential donors, especially those who are old and infirm and have buckets of cash, but she was well tended by other people. She was surrounded, really. I bet she got twenty calls a week from ‘friends,’ who were really calling about money. Anyway, I never met her. I would never have had a chance to clip her money, under any circumstances, but I would have liked to have seen her antiques.”

“‘Clip her money,’” Lucas repeated.

“Trade talk,” she said.

L
UCAS’S CELL PHONE RANG.

He dug it out of his pocket, looked at the screen, and said to Anderson, “Excuse me. I have to take this…”

He stepped away from her, toward the front door, turning a shoulder in the unconscious pretend-privacy that cell-phone users adopt. In his ear, Flowers said, “I’m at the Barths with Susan Conoway—have you talked to her, she’s from Dakota County?”

“No. I talked to somebody. Lyle Pender?”

“Okay, that’s somebody else. Anyway, Susan was assigned to prep the Barths, but Kathy’s heard that she can take the Fifth, if she thinks she might have committed a crime. Or might be accused of one. So now she says she doesn’t want to talk to Susan, and Susan’s got a date that she doesn’t want to miss. The whole fuckin’ thing is about to go up in smoke. I could use some weight over here.”