John Sandford: Invisible prey

Cops were standing around on the lawn, talking, clusters and groups of two and three, a little cigarette and cigar smoke drifting around, pleasantly acrid. One of the cops was Clark Wain, the guy who'd explored the third floor. Lucas stepped over, said, “Clark,” and Wain said, “Yeah, Lucas, what's going on?”

“You went up to the third floor?”

“Me and a couple of other guys,” Wain said. “Making sure there wasn't anybody else.”

“Were there footprints going up? In the dust?”

“Yeah. We had them photographed but there wasn't anything to see, really-too many of them,” Wain said. “Looked like people were up there a lot.”

“Nothing seemed out of place?”

Wain's eyes drifted away as he thought it over, then came back to Lucas: “Nothing that hit me at the time. They didn't trash the place like they did some of the other rooms. Maybe they took a peek and then came back down-if it was even their footprints.

Could have been anyone.”

“All right…” Rose Marie came out on the porch looking for him, and Lucas raised a hand to her. To Wain he said, “Gotta talk to the boss.”

They stepped back into the dining room. Rose Marie asked, “What do you have going besides Kline?”

“The Heny killing down in Rochester, that's still pooping along, and we've got a girl's body down by Jackson, we don't know what happened there. The feds are pushing for more cooperation on illegal aliens, they want us to put somebody in the packing plants down in Austin… But Kline is the big one. And this.”

“Did Burt do it?” Rose Marie asked. She and Kline were old political adversaries.

“Yeah. I don't know if we can prove it,” Lucas said.

He told her about the DNA and the size-ten dress, and the girl's sexual history.

She already knew about the semicolons and that Kline had admitted an affair with Mom.

“The newest thing is, Kline wants to do something like a consent agreement,” Lucas said. “Everybody agrees that nobody did anything wrong and that nobody will ever do it again. He, in return, pays them another year's rent on the room and a car-storage fee for her garage, like twenty thousand bucks total.”

“That's bullshit. You can't sign a consent agreement that gets you out of a statutory-rape charge,” Rose Marie said. “Especially not if you're a state senator.”

“So I'll send Virgil around and you tell him what you want him to do,” Lucas said.

She made a rude noise, shook her head. “That fuckin' Flowers…”

“C'mon, Rose Marie.”

She sighed. “All right. Send him up. Tell him to bring the file, make a presentation.

Three or four people will be there, he doesn't have to be introduced to them, or look them up later. Tell him to wear a jacket, slacks, and to get rid of those goddamn cowboy boots for one day. Tell him we don't need an attitude. Tell him if we get attitude, I'll donate his ass to the Fulda City Council as the town cop.”

“I'll tell him…” He looked around. Several panels in the wall of the dining room had been pulled open. One showed a safe door; another, rows of liquor bottles; a third, crockery serving dishes with molded vegetables as decoration.

“Listen. This is a sideshow,” she said, waving a hand at the trashed room. “The governor wants a presence here, because she's big political and social money. But you need to focus on Kline.” She popped a piece of Nicorette gum, started chewing rapidly, rolling it with her tongue. “I don't care who fixes it, but it's gotta be fixed.”

“Why don't we just go the grand jury route? You know, 'We presented it to the grand jury and in their wisdom, they decided to indict'? Or not indict?”

“Because we're playing with the legislature, and the Republicans still own it, and they know that's bullshit. Radioactive bullshit. We need to be in position before this girl shows up on Channel Three.”

Lucas walked her out to her car; when she'd gotten out of her spot in a neighboring driveway, he started back to the house. On the way, thinking more about Kline than about the Bucher murder, he spotted a red-haired reporter from the Star Tribune on the other side of the police tape. The reporter lifted a hand and Lucas stepped over.

“How'd she get it?” Ruffe Ignace asked. He was smiling, simple chitchat with a friend.

“There are two of them,” Lucas said quietly. “A maid named Sugar-Rayette Peebles and Constance Bucher. Peebles was killed downstairs, near the front door. Her body was wrapped in a Persian carpet in a hallway. The old lady was killed in her bedroom.

They were beaten to death, maybe with a pipe. Skulls crushed. House is ransacked, bedrooms tossed. Probably Friday night.”

“Any leads?” Ignace was taking no notes, just standing on the neighbor's lawn with his hands in his jacket pockets. He didn't want to attract the attention of other reporters. Lucas had found that Ignace had an exceptional memory for conversation, for however long it took him to go somewhere and write it down.

“Not yet,” Lucas said. “We'll be talking to people who knew the women…”

“How about that place down the street?” Ignace asked. “The halfway house? Full of junkies.”

“St. Paul is looking into that,” Lucas said.

“Did it look like junkies?” Ignace asked.

“Something like that, but not exactly,” Lucas said.

“How not exactly?”

“I don't know-but not exactly,” Lucas said. “I'll get back to you when I figure it out.”

“You running it?”

“No. St. Paul. I'll be consulting,” Lucas said.

“Okay. I owe you,” Ignace said.

“You already owed me.”

“Bullshit. We were dead even,” Ignace said. “But now I owe you one.”

A woman called him. “Lucas! Hey, Lucas!” He turned and saw Shelley Miller in the crowd along the sidewalk. She lived down the street in a house as big as Oak Walk.

“I gotta talk to this lady,” Lucas said to Ignace.

“Call me,” Ignace said. He drifted away, fishing in his pocket for a cell phone.

Miller came up. She was a thin woman; thin by sheer willpower. “Is she…?” Miller was a cross between fascinated and appalled.

“Yeah. She and her maid,” Lucas said. “How well did you know her?”

“I talked to her whenever she was outside,” Miller said. “We used to visit back and forth. How did they kill her?”

“With a pipe, I think,” Lucas said. “The ME'll figure it out.”

Miller shivered: “And they're still running around the neighborhood.”

Lucas's forehead wrinkled: “I'm not sure. I mean, if they're from the neighborhood.

Do you know Bucher's place well enough to see whether anything was taken? I mean, the safe was untouched and we know one jewelry box was dumped and another might have been taken, and some electronics… but other stuff?”

She nodded. “I know it pretty well. Dan and I are redoing another house, down the street. We talked about buying some old St. Paul paintings from her and maybe some furniture and memorabilia. We thought it would be better to keep her things together, instead of having them dispersed when she died… I guess they'll be dispersed, now. We never did anything about it.”

“Would you be willing to take a look inside?” Lucas asked. “See if you notice anything missing?”

“Sure. Now?”

“Not now,” Lucas said. “The crime-scene guys are still working over the place, they'll want to move the bodies out. But I'll talk to the lead investigator here, get you into the house later today. His name is John Smith.”

“I'll do it,” she said.

Lucas went back inside, told Smith about Shelley Miller, then drifted around the house, taking it in, looking for something, not knowing what it was, watching the crime-scene techs work, asking a question now and then. He was astonished at the size of the place: A library the size of a high school library. A ballroom the size of a basketball court, with four crystal chandeliers.