Invisible Prey (26 page)

The pots. No high-value pots had been smashed, but the cabinet had been full of them. Maybe not super-high value, but anything from fifty to a couple of hundred bucks each.

The pots on the floor were worth nothing, as if only the cheaper pots had been broken. If a knowledgeable pot enthusiast had robbed the place, is that what he’d do? Take the most valuable, put the somewhat valuable back—perhaps out of some aesthetic impulse—and then break only the cheap ones as a cover-up? Or was he, as Kathy Barth suggested the night before, simply having a stroke?

T
HE
W
IDDLERS CAME IN,
Leslie cheerful in his blue seersucker suit and, this time, with a blue bow tie with white stars; Jane was dressed in shades of gold.

“Bringing the lists to Mrs. Barker,” Jane called, and they went on through. Five minutes later, they went by the office on the way out. Lucas watched them down the front walk, toward their Lexus. Ronnie Lash rode up on a bike as they got to the street, and they looked each other over, and then Lash turned up the driveway toward the portico.

Lash walked in, stuck his head in the office door, and said, “Hi, Officer Davenport.”

“Hey, Ronnie.”

Lash stepped in the door. “Figured anything out yet?”

“Not yet. How about you?” Lucas asked.

“You know when we discovered that whoever did it, had to have a car?”

“Yeah?”

“Detective Smith said they’d check the security camera at the Hill House to see what cars were on it. Did he do it?” Lash asked.

“Yup. But the cameras operate on a motion detector that cover the grounds,” Lucas said. “They didn’t have anything in the time frame we needed.”

“Huh. How about that halfway house?”

Lucas said, “They’re mostly drunks. We’ve been looking at their histories…”

“I mean the camera,” Lash said. “They’ve got a camera on their porch roof pointing out at the street.”

Lucas scratched his chin: “Really?”

“Yeah. I just came by there,” Lash said.

“I’ll call John Smith. Ask him to look into it. Thanks, Ronnie.”

“You’re welcome.”

L
UCAS CALLED
S
MITH.
Smith said he would check it right away. “If it’s there, what I’m interested in would be a van,” Lucas said.

“Probably won’t be anything,” Smith said. “Nothing goes longer than about forty-eight hours, you know, those tapes. But I’ll give them a call.”

R
ONNIE CAME BACK THROUGH,
carrying a shopping bag full of video games. “I talked to Mrs. Barker, and she showed me those vases. Those pots, the ones that got glued back together.”

“You recognize them?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah. Last time I saw them, they were upstairs. On a table upstairs. They were never in that glass cabinet.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure,” Lash said. “They were in a corner, in a jog of the hallway, on a little table. I dusted them off myself, when I was helping Aunt Sugar.”

L
UCAS PACED AROUND
the office, impatient with himself for not getting anywhere. He watched Lash go down the walk, get on his bike, and wobble off, the games bag dangling from one hand. There
had
been a robbery. He didn’t give a shit what the Widdlers said.

His cell phone rang, and he glanced at the screen: Smith.

“Yeah?”

“We got a break—they archive the tapes for a month, in case they’ve got to see who was with who. I’m gonna run over there and take a look.”

“Van,” Lucas said.

His shut the phone, but before he could put it in his pocket, it rang again: Carol, from the office. He flipped it open. “Yeah?”

“You need to make a phone call. A Mrs. Coombs…”

“Gabriella. I’ve been meaning to call her.”

“This is Lucy Coombs. The mother. She’s calling about Gabriella. Lucy says Gabriella’s disappeared, and she’s afraid something happened to her.”

L
UCY
C
OOMBS WAS
at her mother’s house. She was tall, thin, and blond, like her daughter, with the same clear oval face, but threaded with fine wrinkles; a good-looking woman, probably now in her late fifties, Lucas thought. She met him on the front lawn, twisting a key ring in her hands.

“I called you because Gabriella said she was working with you,” she said. “I can’t find her. I’ve been looking all over, I called the man she was dating, and he said he dropped her off at her apartment last night and that she planned to come over here to look at papers and so I came over here and I…”

She paused to take a breath and Lucas said, “Slow down, slow down. Have you been inside?”

“Yes, there’s no sign of anything. But there’s a broken window on the back door, right by the latch. And I found these by the back porch.” She held up the key ring. “They’re her keys.”

Lucas thought,
Oh, shit.
Out loud, he said, “Let’s go look around. Does she have a cell phone?”

“No, we don’t believe in cell phones,” Coombs said. “Because of EMI.”

“Okay…Has she done this before? Wandered off?”

“Not lately. I mean she did when she was younger, but she’s been settling down,” Coombs said. “She’s been in touch every day since my mom died. I mean, I found her
keys
.” She was no fool; the keys were a problem, and there was fear in her eyes.

They went around the house and through the back door, Coombs showing Lucas where she’d found the keys, off the back steps, as if they’d been dropped or thrown. “Maybe she dropped them in the dark and couldn’t find them,” Lucas suggested. “Did you look for her car?”

“No, I didn’t think to. I wonder…sometimes she parked in the alley, behind the fence.” They walked out through the backyard, to a six-foot-high woven-board privacy fence that separated Marilyn Coombs’s house from the alley. The gate was hanging open, and as soon as Lucas pushed through, he saw Gabriella’s rusty Cavalier.

“Oh, God,” Lucy Coombs said. She hurried past Lucas and then almost tiptoed up to the car, as if she were afraid to look in the windows. But the car was empty, except for some empty herbal tea bottles on the floor of the backseat. The car wasn’t locked; but then, Lucas thought, why would it be? There was nothing in it, and who would steal it?

“Back to the house,” he said.

“What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “She’s probably just off somewhere. Maybe I oughta go talk to her boyfriend.”

“I think you should,” Lucy Coombs said. “I know it wasn’t going very well. I think Gabriella was about to break it off.”

“Let’s check the house and then I’ll go talk to the guy,” Lucas said. “Do you have any relatives or know any girlfriends or other boyfriends…?”

T
HEY WALKED
through the house: nobody there. Lucas looked at the broken window. He’d never actually seen it done, but he’d read about it in detective novels—burglars making a small break in a window, usually by pushing the point of a screwdriver against the glass, to get a single pressure crack. Then they’d work the glass out, open the door with a wire, then put the pane back in place and Scotch-tape it. With any luck, the owners didn’t notice the break for a while—sometimes a long while—and that would obscure the date and time of the break-in…

It did suggest a certain experience with burglary. Or perhaps, with detective novels.

“I’m going to make a call, get the St. Paul cops to go over the place,” Lucas said. “If you could give me the boyfriend’s name…”

They were talking in the kitchen, next to the phone, and the color caught his eye: a flash of red. He thought it might be blood, but then instantly knew that it wasn’t. Blood was purple or black. This was scarlet, in the slot between the stove and refrigerator. He hadn’t seen it when he and Gabriella Coombs were in the kitchen, and he’d looked—he’d been doing his typical crime-scene check, casually peering into cracks and under tables and chairs.

“Excuse me,” he said. He went over to the stove and looked down.

“What?”

“Looks like…Just a minute.” He opened a kitchen cabinet, took out a broom, and used the handle to poke out the red thing.

A spool of thread.

The spool popped out of the stove space, rolled crookedly in a half circle, and bumped into his shoe. He used a paper towel to pick it up, by the spool edge on one end, and put it on the stove. They both looked at it for a moment.

“How’d it get there?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Wasn’t there before. There was a closetful of quilting stuff upstairs. Maybe Gabriella came and took it?”

Lucy frowned. “She doesn’t quilt. I’ve been trying to get her interested, but she’s more interested in a social life. Besides, if she took it, where’d she put it? It’s not in her car.”

“Neither is she. Maybe she came over with a girlfriend, who quilts…” Lucas was bullshitting, and he knew it. Making up fairy stories.

“That’s from the old basket,” Lucy said. “It’s old thread, see? I don’t think they even make it anymore. This says Arkansas on it. Now, most of it comes from China or Vietnam.”

“Let’s go look at the basket,” Lucas said.

They climbed the stairs together, to the big linen closet, and Lucas used the paper towel to open the door.

“Ah, fuck me,” he said.

No wicker sewing basket.

But there, under a neat stack of fabric clippings, where the basket had been, was a black lacquer box with mother-of-pearl inlay.

The music box.

15

L
UCAS CALLED
J
ERRY
W
ILSON,
the St. Paul cop who’d caught the investigation of Marilyn Coombs’s death, and told him about the disappearance of Gabriella Coombs, about the keys and the car, about the broken window with the Scotch tape, about the spool of thread and the music box.

Wilson said, “That sounds like an Agatha Christie book.”

“I know what it sounds like,” Lucas said. “But you need to cover this, Jerry—we need to find Gabriella. I’ll talk to her boyfriend, but I could use some cops spread out behind me, talking to her other friends.”

“Okay. You got names? And I’ll tell you what—that window wasn’t broken day before yesterday.”

“I’ll get you names and phone numbers,” Lucas said. “If you find her, God bless you, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Lucas was on his cell phone, looked back to the house, where Lucy Coombs was locking the front door. “I’ve got a feeling she’s gone.”

L
UCY
C
OOMBS
wanted to come along when Lucas confronted Ron Stack, the artist boyfriend. Lucas told her to go home and get on the phone, and he lied to her: “There’s an eighty percent chance that she’s at a friend’s house or out for coffee. We’ve just got to run her down, and anything you can do to help…”

On the way to Stack’s place, Lucas called Carol: “Have you seen Shrake?”

“Yes, but I’m not sure he saw me. He’s getting coffee, and he needs it. His eyes are the color of a watermelon daiquiri.”

“Fuck him. Tell him to meet me at the Parkside Lofts in Lowertown. Ten minutes.”

W
HEN
L
UCAS
got back downtown, Shrake was sitting on a park bench across the street from Stack’s apartment building. He got shakily to his feet when Lucas pulled into the curb. He was a tall man in a British-cut gray suit and white shirt, open at the collar. His eyes, as Carol said, were Belgian-hare pink, and he was hungover.

“I hope we’re gonna kill something,” he said, when Lucas got out of the car. “I really need to kill something.”

“I know. I talked to Jenkins this morning,” Lucas said. “We’re looking for an artist. His girlfriend disappeared last night.” Lucas told him about it as they crossed the street.

The Parkside was a six-story building, a onetime warehouse, unprofitably converted to loft apartments, with city subsidies, and was now in its fourth refinancing. They rode up to the top floor in what had been a freight elevator, retained either for its boho cool or for lack of money. For whatever reason, it smelled, Lucas thought, like the inside of an old gym shoe.

As they got off the elevator, Lucas’s cell phone rang. Lucas looked at the Caller ID: the medical examiner’s office. He said, “I’ve got to take this.”

The ME: “You know, I like doing dogs,” he said. “It’s a challenge.”

“Find anything good?” Lucas asked.

“A lot of people think all we can do is routine, run-of-the-mill dissections and lab tests, like it’s all cut-and-dried,” the ME said. “That’s not what it’s about, is it? It’s a heck of a lot more than that…”

“Listen, we’ll have lunch someday and you can tell me about it,” Lucas said. “What happened with the dog?”

“You’re lying to me about the lunch. You’re just leading me on…”

“What about the fuckin’ dog?” Lucas snarled.

“Pipe,” the ME said. “I did Bucher—and man, if it ain’t the
same
pipe, it’s a brother or a cousin. The dog’s skull was crushed, just like Bucher’s and Peebles’s, and the radius of the crushing blow is identical. I don’t mean somewhat the same, I mean,
identical.
We got mucho blood samples, but I don’t know yet whether they’re human or dog.”

“Give me a guess,” Lucas suggested.

“My guess is, it’s human,” the ME said. “It looks to me like the mutt was chewing on somebody. We’ve got enough for DNA, if it’s human.”

“That’s great,” Lucas said. “And the pipe…”

“You’re hot,” the ME said. “You’re onto something.”

“Get a break?” Shrake asked, when Lucas rang off.

“Maybe, but not on Gabriella.”

R
ON
S
TACK
was in 610. Lucas knocked on the door, and a moment later a balding, bad-tempered, dark-complected man peered out at them over a chain. He was wearing a nasal spreader on his nose, the kind football players use to help them breathe freely. He was holding a cup of coffee and had a soul patch under his thin lower lip. “What?”

Lucas held up his ID. “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We’re investigating the disappearance of Gabriella Coombs,” Lucas said.