Invisible Prey (25 page)

“Don’t be vulgar. Not now. Please.”

T
HEY SCRABBLED AROUND
in the dark, afraid to let the light of the flash play against the walls or windows. They got the sewing basket back together, hurriedly, and found garbage bags in a cleaning closet next to the refrigerator. They stuffed the lower half of Coombs’s limp body into a garbage bag, then pulled another over the top of her body.

Leslie squatted on the floor and sprayed around some Scrubbing Bubbles cleaner, then wiped it up with paper towels and put the towels in the bags with the body. He did most of the kitchen floor that way, waddling backward away from the wet parts until he’d done most of the kitchen floor.

“Should be good,” he muttered. Then: “Get the car. Pull it through the alley. I’ll meet you by the fence.”

She didn’t say a word, but went out the back door, carrying the wicker sewing basket. And she thought,
Won’t work. Won’t work.
She moved slowly around the house, in the dark, then down the front lawn and up the street to the car. She got in, thinking,
Won’t work
. Some kind of dark, disturbing mantra. She had to break out of it, had to think. Leslie didn’t see it yet, but he would.

Had to think.

T
HE ALLEY WAS
a line of battered garages, with one or two new ones, and a broken up, rolling street surface. She moved through it slowly and carefully, around an old battered car, maybe Coombs’s, paused by the back gate to Coombs’s house, popped the trunk: felt the weight when the body went in the trunk. Then Leslie was in the car and said, “Move it.”

She had to think. “We need supplies. We need to get the coveralls. If we’re going to dig…we need some boots we can leave behind. In the ground. We need gloves. We need a shovel.”

Leslie looked out the window, at the houses passing on Lexington Avenue, staring, sullen: he got like that after he’d killed someone. “We’ve got to go away,” he said, finally. “Someplace…far away. For a couple of months. Even then…these goddamn holes in me, they’re pinning us down. We don’t dare get in a situation where somebody wants to look at my legs. They don’t even have to suspect us—if they start looking at antique dealers, looking in general, asking about dog bites, want to look at my legs…We’re fucked.”

Maybe you,
Jane thought. “We can’t just go rushing off. There’s no sign that they’ll be looking at you right away, so we’ll tell Mary Belle and Kathy that we’re going on a driving loop, that we’ll be gone at least three weeks. Then, we can stretch it, once we’re out there. Talk to the girls tomorrow, get it going…and then leave. End of the week.”

“Just fuckin’ itch like crazy,” Leslie said. “Just want to pull the bandages off and scratch myself.”

“Leslie, could you please…watch the language? Please? I know this is upsetting, but you know how upset
I
get…”

L
ESLIE LOOKED OUT
the window and thought,
We’re fucked
. It was getting away from them, and he knew it. And with the bites on his legs, he was a sitting duck. He could run. They had a good bit of cash stashed, and if he loaded the van with all the highest-value stuff, drove out to L.A., and was very, very careful, he could walk off with a million and a half in cash.

It’d take some time; but he could buy an ID, grow a beard, lose some weight. Move to Mexico, or Costa Rica.

Jane was a problem, he thought. She required certain living standards. She’d run with him, all right, but then she’d get them caught. She’d talk about art, she’d talk about antiques, she’d show off…and she’d fuck them. Leslie, on the other hand, had grown up on a dairy farm and had shoveled his share of shit. He wouldn’t want to do that again, but he’d be perfectly content with a little beach cantina, selling cocktails with umbrellas, maybe killing the occasional tourist…

He sighed and glanced at Jane. She had such a thin, delicate neck…

A
T THE HOUSE,
Jane went around and rounded up the equipment and they both changed into coveralls. She was being calm. “Should we move the girl into the van?”

Leslie shook his head: “No point. The police might be looking for a van, after the thing with the kid. Better just to go like we are. You follow in the car, I take the van, if I get stopped…keep going.”

B
UT THERE
was no problem. There were a million white vans. The cops weren’t even trying. They rolled down south through the countryside and never saw a patrol car of any kind. Saw a lot of white vans, though.

T
HE FARM WAS
a patch of forty scraggly acres beside the Cannon River, with a falling-down house and a steel building in back. When they inherited it, they’d had some idea of cleaning it up, someday, tearing down the house, putting in a cabin, idling away summer days waving at canoeists going down the river. They’d have a vegetable garden, eat natural food…Andwaterfront was always good, right?

Nothing ever came of it. The house continued to rot, everything inside was damp and smelled like mice; it was little better than a place to use the bathroom and take a shower, and even the shower smelled funny, like sulfur. Something wrong with the well.

But the farm was well off the main highways, down a dirt road, tucked away in a hollow. Invisible. The steel building had a good concrete floor, a powerful lock on the only door, and was absolutely dry.

The contractor who put in the building said, “Quite the hideout.”

“Got that right,” Leslie had said.

T
HEY PUT
the van in the building, then got a flashlight, and Jane carried the shovel and Leslie put the girl in a garden cart and they dragged her up the hill away from the river; got fifty yards with Leslie cursing the cart and unseen branches and holes in the dark, and finally he said, “Fuck this,” and picked up the body, still wrapped in garbage bags, and said, “I’ll carry her.”

D
IGGING THE HOLE
was no treat: there were dozens of roots and rocks the size of skulls, and Leslie got angrier and angrier and angrier, flailing away in the dark. An hour after they started, taking turns on the shovel, they had a hole four feet deep.

When Leslie was in the hole, digging, Jane touched her pocket. There was a pistol in her pocket, their house gun, a snub-nosed .38. A clean gun, bought informally at a gun show in North Dakota. She could take it out, shoot Leslie in the head. Pack him into the hole under the girl. Go to the police: “Where’s my husband…? What happened to Leslie?”

But there were complications to all that. She hadn’t thought about it long enough. This was the perfect opportunity, but she just couldn’t see far enough ahead…

She relaxed. Not yet.

T
HEY PACKED
the body in, and Leslie started shoveling the dirt back.

“Stay here overnight,” Leslie said. “Tomorrow, we can come up and spread some leaves around. Drag that stump over it…Don’t want some hunter falling in the hole. Or seeing the dirt.”

“Leslie…” She wanted to say it, wanted to say, “This won’t work,” but she held back.

“What?”

“I don’t know. I hate to stay here. It smells funny,” she said.

“Gotta do it,” he grunted. He was trampling down the dirt. “Nothing has been working, you know? Nothing.”

T
HE BED
they slept in was broken down; tended to sag in the middle. Neither could sleep much; and Leslie woke in the middle of the night, his eyes springing open.

Two people in the world knew about him and the killings. One was Amity Anderson, who wanted money. They’d promised her a cut, as soon as they could move the furniture, which was out in the steel building.

The other one was Jane.

A tear dribbled down his face; good old Jane. He unconsciously scratched at a dog bite. He could pull Anderson in with the promise of money—come on out to the house, we’ve got it. Kill her, bring her out here.

And Jane…Another tear.

14

J
ENKINS WAS ASLEEP
in the visitor’s chair when Lucas arrived at his office the next morning. Carol said, “He was asleep when I got here,” and nodded toward the office. Lucas eased the door open and said, quietly, “Time to work, bright eyes.”

Jenkins was wearing a gray suit, a yellow shirt, and black shoes with thick soles, and, knowing Jenkins’s penchant for kicking suspects, the shoes probably had steel toes. He’d taken off his necktie and gun and placed them under his chair.

He didn’t move when Lucas spoke, but Lucas could tell he was alive because his head was tipped back and he was snoring. He was tempted to slam the door, give him a little gunshot action, but Jenkins might return fire before Lucas could slow him down. So he said, louder this time: “Hey! Jenkins! Wake up.”

Jenkins’s eyes popped open and he stirred and said, “Ah, my back…This is really a fucked-up chair, you know that?” He stood up and slowly bent over and touched his toes, then stood up again, rolled his head and his hips, smacked his lips. “My mouth tastes like mud.”

“How long you been here?” Lucas asked.

“Ahhh…Since six? I found the Kline kid last night, then I went out with Shrake and had a few.”

“Until six?”

“No, no. Five-thirty, maybe,” Jenkins said. “Farmer’s market was open, I ate a tomato. And one of those long green things, they look like a dildo…”

“A cucumber?” Lucas ventured.

“Yeah. One of those,” Jenkins said.

“What about the kid?”

“Ah, whoever was in the truck, it wasn’t Kline,” Jenkins said. He yawned, scratched his head with both hands. “He was out with some of his business-school buddies. They’re not the kind to lie to the cops. Stuffy little cocksuckers. They agree that he was with them from eight o’clock, or so, to midnight.”

“That would have been too easy, anyway.” Jenkins yawned again, and that made Lucas yawn.

“Girl have any kind of description?” Jenkins asked.

“The guy had a nylon on his head,” Lucas said. “She was too scared to look for a tag number. All we got is the dead dog and a white van, and we don’t know where the van is.”

“Well, the dog’s something. I bet they’re doing high-fives over at the ME’s office,” Jenkins said. He yawned and shuffled toward the door. “Maybe I’ll go out for a run. Wake myself up.”

“Call nine-one-one before you start,” Lucas said. Jenkins was not a runner. The healthiest thing he did was sometimes smoke less than two packs a day.

“Yeah.” He coughed and went out. “See ya.”

“Eat another tomato,” Lucas called after him.

L
UCAS COULDN’T THINK
of what to do next, so he phoned John Smith at the St. Paul cops: “You going up to Bucher’s?”

“Yeah, eventually, but I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Smith said.

“Anybody up there?”

“Barker, the niece with the small nose, an accountant, and a real estate appraiser. They’re doing an inventory of contents for the IRS—everything, not just what the Widdlers did. Widdlers are finished. School got out, and the Lash kid called to see if he could go over and pick up his games. He’ll be up there sometime…probably some people in and out all day, if you want to go over. If there’s nobody there when you get there, there’s a lockbox on the door. Number is two-four-six-eight.”

“All right. I’m gonna go up and look at paper,” Lucas said.

“I understand there’ll be some excitement in Dakota County this morning, and you were involved,” Smith said.

“Oh, yeah. Almost forgot,” Lucas said. “Where’d you hear that?”

“
Pioneer Press
reporter,” Smith said. “He was on his way out to Dakota County. Politicians don’t do good in Stillwater.”

“Shouldn’t fuck children,” Lucas said.

H
E CHECKED OUT
of the office and headed over to Bucher’s, took a cell-phone call from Flowers on the way. Flowers wanted the details on Jesse Barth: “Yeah, it happened, and no, it wasn’t the Kline kid,” Lucas said. He explained, and then asked about the girl’s body on the riverbank. Flowers was pushing it. “Keep in touch,” Lucas said.

I
N HIS MIND’S EYE,
Lucas could see the attack of the night before. A big man with a pipe—or maybe a cane—in a white van, going after Jesse. A man with a pipe, or a cane, killed Bucher. But as far as he knew, there hadn’t been a van.

A van had figured into the Toms case, but Toms had been strangled.

Coombs’s head had hit a wooden ball, which St. Paul actually had locked up in the lab—and it had a dent, and hair, and blood, and even smudged handprints, but the handprints were probably from people coming down the stairs. But then, Coombs probably had nothing to do with it anyway…except for all those damn quilts. And the missing music box. He hadn’t heard from Gabriella Coombs, and made a mental note to call her.

There was a good possibility that the van was a coincidence. He remembered that years before, during a long series of sniper attacks in Washington, D.C., everybody had been looking for a white van, and after every attack, somebody remembered seeing one. But the shooters hadn’t been in a white van. They’d been shooting through a hole in the trunk of a sedan, if he remembered correctly. The fact is, there were millions of white vans out there, half the plumbers and electricians and carpenters and roofers and lawn services were working out of white vans.

B
ARKER AND THE ACCOUNTANT
and the real estate appraiser had set up in the main dining room. Lucas said hello, and Barker showed him some restored pots, roughly glued together by the wife of a St. Paul cop who’d taken pottery lessons: “Just pots,” she said. “Nothing great.”

“Huh.”

“Does that mean something?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

In the office, he started flipping through paper, his heart not in it. He really didn’t feel like reading more, because he hadn’t yet found anything, and he’d looked through most of the high-probability stuff. Weather had said that he needed to pile up more data; but he was running out of data to pile up.