Invisible Prey (27 page)

Stack’s chin receded into his throat. “Disappearance? She disappeared?”

“You’re the last person we know for sure who saw her. Can we come in?”

Stack turned and looked back into his loft, then at Lucas again. “I don’t know. Maybe I should call my lawyer.”

“Well, whatever you want to do, Mr. Stack, but we aren’t going anywhere until you talk to us. I can have a search warrant down here in twenty minutes if you want to push us. But it’d be a lot easier to sit on the couch and talk, than having you on the floor in handcuffs, while we tear the place apart.”

“What the fuck? Is that a threat?” His voice climbed an octave.

From behind Stack, a woman’s voice said, “Who’s that, Ron?”

Stack said, “The police.”

“What do they want?” the woman asked.

“Shut up. I’m trying to think.” Stack scratched his chin, then asked, “Am I a suspect?”

“Absolutely,” Lucas said.

Shrake, the nice guy: “Look, all we’re doing is trying to find Gabriella. We don’t know where she’s gone. She’s involved in another case, and now…”

“Okay,” Stack said. “I’m gonna push the door shut a little so I can take the chain off.”

He did, and let them in.

T
HE LOFT WAS
an open cube with floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall. The other three walls were concrete block, covered with six-foot-wide oil paintings of body parts. The place smelled of turpentine, broccoli, and tobacco.

A kitchen area, indicated by a stove, refrigerator, and sink gathered over a plastic-tile floor, was to their left; and farther to the left, a sitting area was designated by an oriental carpet. A tall blond woman, who looked like Gabriella Coombs, but was not, sat smoking on a scarlet couch.

At the other end of the cube, a door stood open, and through the open door, Lucas could see a towel rack: the bathroom. Overhead, a platform was hung with steel bars from the fifteen-foot ceiling, with a spiral staircase going up. Bedroom.

At the center of the cube was an easel, on a fifteen-foot square of loose blue carpet; against the right wall, three battered desks with new Macintosh computer equipment.

Shrake wandered in, following Lucas, sniffed a couple of times, then tilted his head back and took in the paintings. “Whoa. What
is
this?”

“My project,” Stack said, looking around at all the paintings. There were thirty of them, hung all the way to the ceiling, all along one wall and most of the end wall. One showed the palm of a hand, another the back of the hand. One showed a thigh, another a hip, one the lower part of a woman’s face. “I unwrapped a woman.” He paused, then ventured, “Deconstructed her.”

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” Shrake asked.

Stack nodded. “But conceptually, it’s much more than that. These are views that you could never see on an actual woman. I took high-resolution photographs of her entire body, so you could see every pore and every hair, and reproduced them here in a much bigger format, so you
can
see every hair and pore. You couldn’t do that, just looking at somebody. I call it
Outside of a Woman.
It was written up last month in
American Icarus
.”

“Wow, it’s like being there,” Shrake enthused. He pointed: “Like this one: you’re right there inside her asshole.”

W
RONG FOOT,
Lucas thought. To Stack: “We can’t find Gabriella. Her mother tells us that you were out together last night, and Gabriella broke it off with you…”

“Who’s Gabriella?” the woman asked.

“How ya doing?” Shrake asked. He winked at her, and pointed up at the paintings. “Is this you?”

“No,” the woman said, with frost.

“Gabriella’s a potential model,” Stack said to her. Then to Lucas: “Look, she didn’t break anything off, because there was nothing to break off. We went down to Baker’s Square and had a sandwich, and we couldn’t make a deal on my new project, and I said, ‘Okay,’ and she said, ‘Okay,’ and that was it. She took off.” He shrugged and pushed his hands into his jeans pocket.

“You go there together?” Shrake asked.

“No. We met there.”

“Where were you last night?” Lucas asked.

“Here,” Stack said. He turned to the woman: “With her.”

“He was,” the woman said. To Stack: “This Gabriella’s just a model?”

“Just a model,” Stack agreed.

“What kind of a car do you drive?” Lucas asked.

“An E-Class Mercedes-Benz station wagon.”

“What color?” Lucas asked.

“Black,” Stack said.

“You must do pretty well for yourself,” Shrake said. “A Benz.”

“It’s a ’ninety-four,” Stack said. “I bought it used, with eighty-nine thousand miles on it.”

“Where’s the van—the one you use for moving paintings?” Lucas asked.

Stack was mystified: “What van? I have a friend with a blue pickup, when I’m moving big sheets of plywood, but I never used a van.”

“Did you know Marilyn Coombs?” Lucas asked.

“No. Gabriella told me about her dying and about you guys investigating,” Stack said. “In fact, I think she sorta had the hots for you.”

“For Lucas?” Shrake asked skeptically.

“If you’re the guy who took her around her grandmother’s house,” Stack said to Lucas. “Yeah.”

“What’d you mean by ‘had’?” Shrake asked. “You said she ‘had’ the hots for Lucas. Do you think she’s dead? Or just stopped having the hots?”

“Hell,
you’re
the guys who think she’s dead,” Stack said. “That’s the way you’re talking.”

“Did she say where she was going last night?” Lucas asked.

“Well, yeah,” Stack said. “She said she had to go because you—or somebody—asked her to go through her grandma’s papers. Looking for clues, or something. Is that, uh…Where’d she disappear from, anyway?”

Lucas looked at Shrake, felt an emotional squeeze of fear and the cold finger of depression. “Bad,” he said. “Bad. Goddamnit to hell, this is bad.”

T
HEY PUSHED
the painter for another ten minutes, then Lucas left Shrake with Stack and the woman, to get details of where they were overnight, to get an ID on the woman, to probe for holes in their stories.

On the way out to the car, Smith called: “We got a van. A two thousand one Chevy Express, looks to be a pale tan, but one of the geniuses here tells me that could be the light. It might be white. It went past the halfway house three times on Friday night, the night the storm came in. Can’t see the occupants, but we think the tag is Wisconsin and we think we know two letters, but we can’t make out the other letter or the numbers. We’re going to send it off to the feds, see if they can do some photo magic with it. In the meantime, we’re sorting vans out by the letters we know.”

“That’s something,” Lucas said. “Listen, feed every name you’ve got associated with Bucher into the computer. I’ll get you all the names I can pull out of the Donaldson and Toms files, and the Coombs stuff. Find that van…Once we know who we’re looking for…”

“Get me the names,” Smith said.

“And listen: do me a favor,” Lucas said. “Go see this girl in the Kline case, her name is Jesse Barth. She lives up on Grand, her mother is Kathy, they’re in the phone book. Have her look at the van. See if she thinks it might be the same one.”

“If it is…what does that mean?” Smith asked.

“I don’t know. I’m freakin’ out here, man. Just have her look at it, okay?”

“Okay,” Smith said. “I’ll tell you something else: I’m gonna get that fuckin’ Ronnie Lash and turn his ass into a cop.”

L
UCAS WAS
in a hurry now, with Gabriella missing.

He kept thinking,
The quilts, the van, the pipe; the quilts, the van, the pipe. The quilts, the van, the pipe…

He couldn’t get at the van. Too many of them and he didn’t have a starting place, unless Smith or the feds came up with something. The pipe didn’t make any difference, unless he found the actual pipe that did the killing; a killer could buy as much pipe as he wanted at Home Depot.

That left the quilts. Gabriella had said that her mother was messing with quilts. He got in the car, and pointed it toward the Coombs house, got Lucy Coombs on the phone: “Her friends say anything?”

“Nobody’s seen her. Oh, God,
where’s my baby
?”

“I’m coming over,” Lucas said.

L
UCY
C
OOMBS LIVED
in the Witch Hat neighborhood off University Avenue, in an olive-green clapboard house with a stone wall separating the front yard from the sidewalk. The yard had no grass, but was an overgrown jumble of yellow and pink roses, and leggy perennials yet to flower. The house had a damp, mossy, friendly look, with a flagstone pathway running from the front stoop around the side of the house and out of sight.

The front door was open and Lucas banged on the loosely hung screen door. He could hear people talking, and felt a twitch of hope: Had Gabriella shown up? Then a heavyset woman in a purple shift and long dangly earrings came to the door, said, “Yes?”

Lucas identified himself and the woman pushed the door open and whispered, “Anything?”

“No.”

“Lucy is terrified,” she said.

Lucas nodded. “I have to talk to her about her mother…”

T
HERE WERE THREE
more unknown women in the kitchen with Coombs. Lucy Coombs saw him and shuffled forward, shoulders rounded, hands up in front of her as though she might punch him: “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “We’re looking, I’ve got the St. Paul cops out looking around, we’re pushing every button we know.”

She wanted to shout at him, and to cry; she was crippled with fear: “You’ve got to find her. I can’t stand this, you’ve
got
to find her.”

Lucas said, “Please, please, talk to me about your mother.”

“She was murdered, too, wasn’t she?” Coombs asked. “They killed her and came back and took my baby…”

“Do you have any idea…who’re
they
?”

“I don’t know—the people who killed her.”

Lucas said, intent on Coombs: “This thing is driving me crazy. We have three dead women, and one missing. Two of them were involved in antiques, but your mother wasn’t—but she had one antique that was taken, and then maybe returned, by somebody who may also have taken a quilting basket.”

“And Gabriella,” Coombs blurted.

Lucas nodded. “Maybe.”

“It’s the Armstrong quilts,” one of the women said. “The curses.”

Lucas looked at her: She was older, thin, with dry skin and a pencil-thin nose. “The curses…the ones sewn into the quilts? Gabriella told me…”

The woman looked at the others and said, “It’s the curses working. Not only three women dead, but the son who committed suicide, the father dies in the insane asylum.”

Another of the women shivered: “You’re scaring me.”

“Did Bucher and Donaldson have something to do with the Armstrong quilts?” Lucas asked, impatient. He didn’t believe in witchcraft.

Coombs said, “Yes. They both bought one from my mom, after Mom found them.”

Lucas said, “There were what, five quilts? Six, I can’t remember…”

“Six,” the thin-nosed woman said. “One went to Mrs. Bucher, one went to Mrs. Donaldson, the other four were sold at auction. Big money. I think two of them went to museums and two went to private collectors. I don’t know who…”

“Who did the auction?”

Coombs said, “One of the big auction houses in New York. Um, I don’t know how to pronounce it, Sotheby’s?”

“Are there any here in Minneapolis?” Lucas asked.

The dangly-earring woman said, “At the Walker Gallery. Mrs. Bucher donated it.”

“Good. I’ll go look at it, if I have time,” Lucas said. “Have you ever heard the name Jacob Toms?”

The women all looked at each other, shaking their heads. “Who’s he?”

H
E WAS
on his way out the door, intent on tracing the Armstrong quilts, when he was struck by a thought and turned around, asked Coombs: “The music box. You don’t think Gabriella had it, do you? That she just used it to get an investigation going?”

Coombs shook her head: “No. I found Mom, and called the police, and then called Gabriella. The police were already there when she came over. She was sad and mentioned the music box, and we went to look at it, and it wasn’t there.”

“Okay. So somebody brought back the music box and took the sewing basket,” Lucas said. “Why did they do that? Why did they take the sewing basket? Was that part of the Armstrong quilt thing?”

“No, she just bought that kind of thing when she was hunting for antiques—I don’t know where she got it.”

“I remember her talking about it at quilt group,” said the big woman in the purple shift. “She said she might see if she could sell it to a museum, or somewhere that did restorations, because the thread was old and authentic. Nothing special, but you know—worth a few dollars and kinda interesting.”

Coombs said, “There might be a…clue…wrapped up in the quilts. But that won’t save Gabriella, will it? If they took her? A clue like that would take forever to work out…” Tears started running down her face.

Lucas lied again: “I still think it’s better than fifty-fifty that she went off someplace. She may have lost her keys in the dark, called somebody over to pick her up. She’s probably asleep somewhere…” He looked at his watch: she’d been gone for sixteen or eighteen hours. Too long.

“I’m running,” he said. “We’ll find her.”

F
ROM HIS OFFICE,
he looked up Sotheby’s in New York, called, got routed around by people who spoke in hushed tones and non–New York accents, and finally wound up with a vice president named Archie Carton. “Sure. The auctions are public, so there’s no secret about who bought what—most of the time, anyway. Let me punch that up for you…”

“What about the rest of the time?” Lucas asked.

“Well, sometimes we don’t know,” Carton said. “A dealer may be bidding, and he’s the buyer of record, but he’s buying it for somebody else. And sometimes people bid by phone, to keep their identify confidential, and we maintain that confidentiality—but in a police matter, of course, we respond to subpoenas.”