Invisible Prey (34 page)

“I have some small guns…a house gun, and car guns, for self-protection. Leslie showed me how they work,” Widdler said.

“So…”

“I need a ride. I don’t just want him to
shoot
himself, I want him to…do it on a stage, so to speak. I want people looking in a different direction.”

“And you need a ride?” Anderson was astonished. They were talking about a murder, and the killer needed
a ride.

“I can’t think of any other way to do it—to get him where I need him, to get back home. I need to move quickly to establish an alibi…I need to be home if somebody calls. I can’t take a taxi, it’s just…it’s just all too hard to work out, if you don’t help.”

“All I have to do is give you a ride?”

“That’s all,” Widdler said. “It’s very convenient. Only a few minutes from your house.”

T
HEY ARGUED
for another five minutes, in hushed tones, and finally Anderson said, “I couldn’t stand it in prison. I couldn’t stand it.”

“Neither could I,” Widdler said. Anderson was watching her, and her lips trembled as much as they could. She reached out and put her hand on Anderson’s. “Can you do this? Just this one thing?”

“Just the ride,” Anderson said.

“That’s all—and then…about the money. Leslie keeps all the controversial stuff in a building at our country place.”

“I didn’t know you had a country place,” Anderson said.

“Just a shack, and a storage building. I’ll give you the key. You can take whatever you want. If you can get it out to the West Coast…just the small things could be worth a half-million dollars. You could get enough to stay in Europe for ten years, if you were careful. You can take whatever you want.”

“Whatever I want?” Eyebrows up.

“Whatever you want,” Widdler said. “The police will find it sooner or later. I’m not going to get a penny of it, no matter what happens. If you can get there first, take what you want.”

Anderson thought it over: Jane’s offer seemed uncharacteristically generous. But then, she was in a serious bind. “So I don’t have to do anything else: I just give you a ride.”

“That’s all,” Jane said.

“When?”

“Right away. I’ve started talking to Leslie about it, letting him brood. His tendency, anyway…” She shrugged.

“Is to go crazy,” Anderson finished. “Your husband is a fuckin’ lunatic.”

Widdler nodded.

Anderson pressed it: “So when?”

“Tonight. I want to do it tonight.”

W
IDDLER GAVE HER
a key to what she said was the storage building. “I’ll put a map in the mail this afternoon—Leslie’s got one in his car.” When they broke up, Widdler went back down the escalator and walked past the Starbucks, but Jenkins didn’t see her.

Jenkins had gone. Lucas had pulled him.

L
UCAS FOUND
S
ANDY
hunched in front of her ancient computer, chewing on a fingernail, and she looked up, her hair flyaway, and said, “We had some luck. The Widdlers were written up in a
Midwest Home
article on antiques, and they have a website with vitae. They both graduated from Carleton the year before Amity Anderson. They had to know each other—Jane Widdler majored in art history, and Amity Anderson in art, and Leslie Widdler had a scholarship in studio art. He did ceramics.”

Lucas dragged a chair over and asked, “On their website, is there anything about clients?”

“No, it’s just an ad, really—it’s one of the preformatted deals where you just plug stuff in. The last change was dated a month ago.”

“Motor vehicles?”

“Never owned a van,” Sandy said. “Not even when they were in college. But: I looked at their tax records and they both had student loans. And the
Home
article says they both had scholarships. Leslie—this is funny—Leslie Widdler had an art scholarship, but I get the impression from the website and the
Home
article that all he did was play football.”

“What’s funny about that?” Lucas asked. He’d gone to the University of Minnesota on a hockey scholarship.

“Well, Carleton doesn’t have athletic scholarships, see, so they get this giant guy to play football and they give him a scholarship in art…”

“Maybe he was a good artist,” Lucas said, a bit stiff. “Athletes have a wide range of interests.”

She looked at him: “You were a jock, weren’t you?”

“So what were you saying?” Lucas asked.

“Did you get a free Camaro?”

“What were you saying?” Lucas repeated.

Unflustered—her self-confidence, Lucas thought, seemed to be growing in leaps and bounds—she turned back to the computer, tapped a few keys, and pulled up a page of notes. “So, about the scholarships. They apparently didn’t have a lot of family money. They get married in their senior year, move to the Twin Cities, start an antique store. Here they are ten years later, starting from nothing, they’ve got to be millionaires. They own their store, they have a house on Minnehaha Creek, they drive eighty thousand dollars’ worth of cars…”

“That’s interesting. But: it could be that they’re really smart,” Lucas said.

“And maybe Leslie learned leadership by participating in football,” she suggested.

Lucas leaned back: “Why do women give me shit?”

“Basically, because you’re there,” she said.

S
ANDY HAD DONE
one more thing. “I made a graph of their income.” She touched a few more keys, and the graph popped up. The income line started flat, then turned up at a forty-five-degree angle, then flattened a bit over the years, but continued up. “Here are the quilts.” She tapped a flat area, just before an upturn. “The upturn in income would come a year later—it would take them a while to flow the money into their sales.” She pointed out two other upturns: “Toms and Donaldson.”

“Bless my soul,” Lucas said. Then, “Can you go back to Des Moines? Right now?”

J
ENKINS WAS SITTING
in Carol’s visitor’s chair when Lucas got back to his office, moving fast. “Come on in,” Lucas said.

“What’s going on?” He followed Lucas into the inner office. Lucas was studying a printout of Sandy’s graph.

“I think we finally got our fingernails under something,” Lucas said. “I want you to go to Eau Claire—I’d fly you if it were faster, but I think it would be faster to drive. You’re going to talk to some people named Booth and look at some check duplicates and some purchase records for antiques.”

Jenkins said, “Man, you’re all cranked up—but you gotta know, if this Gabriella Coombs didn’t take off with a boyfriend or something, then she’s gone by now.”

Lucas nodded. “I know. Now I just want to get the motherfuckers. You’re looking for some people named Widdler…”

L
UCAS BRIEFED HIM;
Sandy stopped in, halfway through, and said, “I’m on my way. I’ll call you tonight.”

“Good. Try to get back here tonight, or early tomorrow. We’re gonna have a conference about all of this, get everybody together. Tomorrow morning, I hope.”

She nodded, and was gone.

He finished briefing Jenkins, who asked, “So you’re gonna take Bucher?”

“Yeah, and I’ve got some politics to do with the St. Paul cops and I gotta go see Lucy Coombs. I’ll be on my phone all night—until one in the morning, anyway. Call me.”

“I’m outa here.”

21

T
HE
S
T.
P
AUL
P
OLICE
D
EPARTMENT
is a brown-brick building that looks like a remodeled brewery, and it’s built in a place where a brewery should have been built: across a lot of freeways on the back side of the city.

Lucas parked in the cops’ lot, put a sign on the dash, and found John Smith in a cubicle. Another detective sat three cubicles down, playing with a Rubik’s Cube so worn that it might have been an original. A third was talking so earnestly on a telephone that it had to be to his wife, and he had to be in trouble. Either that, or she’d just found out that she was pregnant.

Lucas said, “Let’s go somewhere quiet.”

Smith sat up. “Widdlers?”

The second detective said, without looking up from the Rubik’s Cube, “That’s right, talk around me. Like I’m an unperson.”

“You
are
an unperson,” Smith said. To Lucas: “Come on this way.” Lucas followed him down the hall to the lieutenant’s office. Smith stuck his head inside, said, “I thought I heard him leave. Come on in.”

L
UCAS SAID,
“We’re going full steam ahead on the Widdlers. It’s not a sure thing by a long way. At the very least, I’ll talk to Leslie Widdler and ask him to roll up his pant legs. See if he has any Screw bites.”

“When?”

“Midday tomorrow. I’ve got people going to Eau Claire and Des Moines right now. I’ve hooked both Marilyn Coombs and Donaldson to Amity Anderson, and Anderson is a longtime friend of the Widdlers. I think they were involved in a tax fraud together, selling these fake quilts, and I think it went from there. We know the killers involve one very big man, and that they know a lot about antiques, and that they have a way to dispose of them. In other words, the Widdlers.”

“You don’t have them directly connected to anybody? I mean, the Widdlers to Donaldson, Bucher, or Toms?”

“Not yet,” Lucas said.

“How about the van?” Smith asked.

“No van.”

“Goddamnit. There’s got to be a van,” Smith said.

“I talked to a woman at the Widdlers’ who said they rented vans,” Lucas said. “That’s being checked.”

“The van in the tape on Summit was too old to be a rental—unless they went to one of the Rent-a-Wreck places.”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “The van is like a loose bolt in the whole thing.”

“Without a van, without a direct connection…I don’t think you have enough to get a warrant to search Leslie.”

Lucas grinned at him: “I was thinking
you
might want to get the warrant. You probably have more suck with one of the local judges.”

Smith said, “I’ve got some suck, but I’ve got to have
something.
”

“Maybe we will tomorrow morning,” Lucas said. “And if we don’t, I can always ask Leslie to roll up his pant leg. If he tells me to go fuck myself, then we’ll know.”

L
UCAS GOT
the key to Bucher’s place, went out, sat in his car, stared at his cell phone, then sighed and dialed. Lucy Coombs snatched up the phone and said, “What?”

“This is Lucas Davenport…”

W
HEN HE GOT
to Coombs’s house, she was sitting in the kitchen with a neighbor, eyes all hollow and black, and as soon as she saw Lucas, she started to cry again: “You think she’s gone.”

Lucas nodded: “Unless she’s with a friend. But she was so intent on getting to the bottom of this, her relationship seemed to be breaking up, this is what she wanted to do. I don’t think she would have simply dropped it. I think we have to be ready for…the worst.”

“What do you mean ‘we,’” Coombs sobbed. “This is your fucking
job
. She’s not your daughter.”

“Miz Coombs…Ah, jeez, Gabriella got me going on this,” Lucas said. “She probably was the key person who’ll bring all these killers down—and they’ve killed more people than you know.”

“My mother and my daughter,” Coombs said, her voice drying out and going shrill.

“More than that—maybe three elderly people, they may have attacked a teenager, there may be people who we don’t have any idea about,” Lucas said.

“You know who they are?”

“We’re beginning to get some ideas.”

“What if they’ve just kidnapped her? What if they’re just keeping her for…for…” She couldn’t think of why they might be keeping her. Neither could Lucas.

He said, “That’s always a possibility. That’s what we hope for. We hope to make some kind of a move tomorrow—and I hope you’ll keep that under your hat. Maybe we’ll find out something fairly soon. One way or another.”

“Oh, shit,” Coombs said. She looked around the kitchen, then snatched a ceramic plate from where it was hanging on the wall, a plate with two crossed-fish, artsy-craftsy, and hurled it at the side wall, where it shattered.

“Miz Coombs…”

“Where is she…Where’s my baby?”

O
UT ON
the street, he exhaled, looked back at Coombs’s house, and shook his head. In her place, he thought, he wouldn’t be screaming, or crying—and maybe that was bad. Maybe he should behave that way, but he knew he wouldn’t. He could see Weather grieving as Coombs did; he could see most normal people behaving that way.

What Lucas would feel, instead, would be a murderous anger, an iceberg of hate. He would kill anyone who hurt Weather, Sam, or Letty. He’d be cold about it, he’d plan it, but the anger would never go away, and sooner or later, he would find them and kill them.

B
UCHER’S HOUSE
was dark as a tomb. Lucas let himself in, flipped on lights by the door, and headed for the office. This time, he spent two hours, looking at virtually every piece of paper in the place. Nothing. He moved to the third-floor storage room, with the file cabinets. A small, narrow room, cool; only one light, hanging bare from the ceiling, and no place to sit. Dusty…

He went down the hall, found a chair, and carried it back across the creaking plank floor. As he put the chair down, he thought he heard footsteps, down below, someplace distant, trailing off to silence. The hair rose on the back of his neck. He stepped to the doorway, called, “Hello? Hello?”

Nothing but the air moving through the air conditioners. A light seemed to flicker in the stairway, and he waited, but nothing else moved. The hair was still prickling on the back of his neck, when he went back to the paper.

An amazing amount of junk that people kept: old school papers, newspaper clippings, recipes, warranties and instruction books, notebooks, sketchpads, Christmas, Easter, and birthday cards, postcards from everywhere, old letters, theater programs, maps, remodeling contracts, property-tax notices. An ocean of it.