John Sandford - Invisible prey

“He's a jerk,” Ronnie said, and Lucas laughed in spite of himself. The kid sounded like a middle-aged golfer.

Smith persisted: “But you don't hang with Weldon or any of his friends?”

“No. My ma would kill me if I did,” Ronnie said. He twisted and untwisted his bony fingers, and leaned forward. “Ever since I heard Aunt Sugar was murdered, I knew you'd want to talk to me about it. It'd be easy to say, 'Here's this black kid, he's a gang kid, he set this up.' Well, I didn't.”

“Ronnie, we don't…”

“Don't lie to me, sir,” Ronnie said. “This is too serious.”

Smith nodded: “Okay.”

“You were saying…” Lucas prompted.

“I was saying, I really loved Aunt Sugar and I really liked Mrs. Bucher.” A tear started down one cheek, and he let it go. “Aunt Sugar brought me up, just like my ma. When Ma was going to school, Aunt Sugar was my full-time babysitter. When Aunt Sugar got a job with Mrs. B, and I started going to Catholic school, I started coming over here, and Mrs. B gave me money for doing odd jobs. Gave me more money than she had to and she told me that if she lived long enough, she'd help me with college.

No way I want those people to get hurt. I wouldn't put the finger on them for anybody, no matter how much they stole.”

Lucas bought it. If the kid was lying, and could consciously generate those tears, then he was a natural little psychopath. Which, of course, was possible.

Lucas felt John Smith sign off, Schuber shrugged, and Lucas jumped in: “So what'd they steal, kid?”

“I don't know. Nobody would let me look,” Lash said.

Lucas to Smith: “Can I drag him around the house one time?”

Smith nodded. “Go ahead. Get back to me.”

“We all done?” Ronnie asked.

“For now,” Smith said, showing a first smile. “Don't book any trips to South America.”

Ronnie's face was dead serious. “No sir.”

Out IN the hallway, Mrs. Lash was standing with her back to the wall, staring at the door. As soon as Lucas stepped through, she asked, “What?”

Lucas shrugged. “Ronnie's offered to show me around the house.”

She asked Ronnie, “They say anything to you?”

“No. They don't think I did it,” Lash said.

To Lucas: “Is that right?”

Lucas said, “We never really did. But we have to check. Is it all right if he shows me around?”

She eyed him for a moment, an always present skepticism that Lucas saw when he dealt with blacks, as a white cop. Her eyes shifted to her son, and she said, “I've got to talk to the police about Sugar. About the funeral arrangements. You help this man, and if he starts putting anything on you, you shut up and we'll get a lawyer.”

“What I want to know, is what these people took,” Lucas told Lash. “We know they took some electronics… a game machine, probably a DVD. What else?”

They started with the TV room. “Took a DVD and an Xbox and a CD player-Mrs. B liked to sit in here and listen to her albums and she figured out how to run the CD player with the remote, and also, it was off here, to the side, so she didn't have to bend over to put a CD in. The DVD was on the shelf below the TV and she couldn't get up if she bent over that far, Aunt Sugar had to do that,” Lash said. He looked in the closet: “Huh. Didn't take the games.” He seemed to look inward, to some other Ronnie Lash, who knew about the streets, and muttered to himself, “Games is same as cash.”

“Your games?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. But why didn't they take them?”

Lucas scratched his nose. “What else?”

“There was a money jar in the butler's pantry.” Lash led the way to the small kitchen where Lucas had run into Rose Marie and the weeping politician.

“This is a butler's pantry?” Lucas asked, looking around. “What the hell is that?”

“The real kitchen is down the basement. When you had a big dinner, the food would get done down there, and then it'd come on this little elevator-it's called a dumbwaiter.”

Lash opened a panel to show off an open shaft going down. “The servants would get it here and take it to the table. But for just every day, Mrs. B had the pantry remodeled into a kitchen.”

“Okay.”

An orange ceramic jar, molded to look like a pumpkin, with the word “Cookies” on the side, sat against a wall on the kitchen counter. Lash reached for it but Lucas caught his arm. “Don't touch,” he said.

He got a paper towel from a rack, put his hand behind the jar, and pushed it toward the edge of the countertop. When it was close enough to look into, he took the lid off, gripping the lid by its edges. “Fingerprints.”

Lash peered inside. “Nope. Cleaned it out. There was usually a couple of hundred bucks in here. Sometimes more and sometimes less.”

“Slush fund.”

“Yes. For errands and when deliverymen came,” Lash said. “Mostly twenties, and some smaller bills and change. Though… I wonder what happened to the change barrel?”

“What's that?” Lucas asked.

“It's upstairs. I'll show you.”

Lucas called a crime-scene tech, who'd stretch warning tape around the kitchen counter.

Then they walked through the house, and Lash mentioned a half-dozen items: a laptop computer was missing, mostly used by the housekeeping couple, but also by Lash for his schoolwork. A Dell, Lash said, and he pointed to a file drawer with the warranty papers.

Lucas copied down the relevant information and the serial number. Also missing: a computer printer, binoculars, an old Nikon spotting scope that Bucher had once used for birding, two older film cameras, a compact stereo. “Stamps,” Lash said. “There was a big roll of stamps in the desk drawer…”

The drawer had been dumped.

“How big was the printer?” Lucas asked.

“An HP LaserJet, about so big,” Lash said, gesturing with his hands, indicating a two-foot square.

“Heavy?”

“I don't know. I didn't put it in. But pretty heavy, I think,” Lash said. “It looked heavy. It was more like a business machine, than like a home printer.”

“Huh.”

“What means 'huh'?” Lash asked.

Lucas said, “You think they put all this stuff in a bag and went running down the street?”

Lash looked at him for a minute, then said, “They had a car.” He looked toward the back of the house, his fingers tapping his lower lip. “But Detective Smith said they probably came in through the back, up the hill.”

“Well?”

Lash shrugged: “He was wrong.”

In THE upstairs hallway, a brass vase-or something like a vase, but four feet tall-lay on its side. Lucas had noticed it among the other litter on his first trip through the house, but had just seen it as another random piece of vandalism.

Lash lifted it by the lip: “Got it,” he said. To Lucas: “Every night, Mrs. B put the change she got in here. Everything but pennies. She said someday, she was going to call the Salvation Army at Christmas, and have them send a bell ringer around, and she'd give, like, the whole vase full of coins.”

“How much was in there?”

Lash shook his head: “Who knows? It was too heavy to move. I couldn't even tip it.”

“So hundreds of dollars.”

“I don't know. It was all nickels, dimes, and quarters, so, quite a bit,” Lash said.

“Maybe thousands, when you think about it.”

On the rest of the floor, Lash couldn't pick out anything that Lucas didn't already suspect: the jewelry, the drugs. Maybe something hidden in the dressers, but Lash had never looked inside of them, he said, so he didn't know what might be missing.

On the third floor, they had a moment: Lash had spent some time on the third floor, sorting and straightening under Bucher's direction. “Sugar said Mrs. B was getting ready to die,” Lash said.