Invisible Prey (30 page)

“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “She was worried about their pictures being burned, Jesse’s school stuff, her wedding dress.”

“Well, that’s something,” the fireman agreed. “You don’t see people burning up that kind of thing, not unless it’s a revenge trip. They don’t burn up their own stuff that much.”

The second fireman chipped in: “There was a lot of damage right over the kitchen sink. There are dishes in the sink, and we haven’t gone through it yet, but I betcha that bottle landed in the sink, and a lot of the gas wound up in the sink, instead of shooting all over the place. That helped confine it; the arson guys’ll know better.”

“So who’s your arson guy?”

Lucas took down the name of the head arson investigator, and thanked them for their time. Back in the front yard, he asked Kathy, “You got a credit card?”

“Why?”

“Gonna have to stay in a motel tonight,” Lucas said. “Probably for a few nights.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Got some cash, got an ATM card?”

She nodded again. “We’re okay. We’re just…we just…”

“We’re just really scared,” Jesse finished.

L
UCAS CALLED
the Radisson in downtown St. Paul, got them a room. Told them not to tell anyone else where they were staying. A fireman said he would take them inside to get what they could out of the house. A neighbor volunteered space in her garage, where they temporarily could store whatever they could get out of the house.

The fireman suggested a couple of cleaning companies that could clean up the part of the house that wasn’t damaged. “If you guys hadn’t been home, if it’d taken another five minutes before somebody reported it, if you hadn’t used that fire extinguisher to slow it down, you’d be looking at a hole in the ground. You get it cleaned up, you could be living in it again in a week,” he said. “I see it all the time.”

L
UCAS CALLED
Jenkins and Shrake. They were at the White Bear Yacht Club, having a few drinks after a round of golf, part of what they said was an investigation into gambling on golf courses. “Get your asses out of the country club, and get onto the Klines. Jack those fuckers up. My gut feeling is that they’re not involved, but I want you to prove it,” Lucas told Jenkins.

“Can’t prove a negative,” Jenkins said.

“Not before this,” Lucas said. “You guys are gonna do it, though, or we’re gonna do a gay prostitution sting, and your ass will be on the corner.”

“We get to wear nylons?” Jenkins asked. He didn’t threaten well.

Lucas’s voice went dark: “I’m not fuckin’ around here, man. We had an attempted kidnapping, we got a dead dog, now we got a firebomb.”

“We’ll jack them up, no shit,” Jenkins promised. “We’re on the case.”

“Flowers is coming up. He’ll get in touch.”

O
FF THE PHONE,
Lucas started walking around the neighborhood, checking the houses on each side of the Barths’ house, then across the alley in back, and so on, up and down both streets and the houses on the alley. Four houses up from the Barths, and across the alley, he found an elderly man named Stevens.

“I was cooking some Weight Watchers in the microwave, and I saw a car go through the alley,” Stevens said. He was tall, and too thin, balding, with a dark scab at the crest of his head, as if he’d walked into something. They were in the kitchen, and he pointed a trembling hand at the window over the sink, the same arrangement as in the Barths’. “Then, maybe, ten minutes later I was just finished eating, and I took the dish to the trash, and saw more lights in the alley. I didn’t see the car, but I think it was the same one. They both had blue headlights.”

“Blue?”

“Not blue-blue, but bluish. Like on German cars. You know, when you look in your rearview mirror on the interstate, and you see a whole bunch of yellow lights, and then, mixed in, some that look blue?”

“Yeah. I’ve got blue lights myself,” Lucas said.

“Like that,” Stevens said. “Anyway, I’d just sat back down again, and I heard the sirens.”

“That was right after you saw the blue headlights.”

“I got up to take the dish to the trash during a commercial,” Stevens said. “Saw the lights, came in, sat back down. The sirens came before there was another commercial.”

“You didn’t see what kind of a car it was? The time you actually saw it?”

“Nope. Just getting dark,” Stevens said. “But it was a dark-colored car, black, dark blue, dark green, and I think a sedan. Not a coupe.”

“Not a van.”

“No, no. Not a van. A regular, generic car. Maybe bigger than most. Not a lot bigger, a little bigger. Not an SUV. A car.”

“You see many cars back in the alley?” Lucas asked.

“Between five and six o’clock, there are always some, with the garages off the alley. But not with blue lights. None with blue lights. That’s probably why I noticed it.”

That was all he’d seen: he hadn’t heard the bomb, the screaming, hadn’t heard anything until the sirens came up. He’d been watching
Animal Planet.

“Live here alone?” Lucas asked, as he went out.

“Yeah. It sucks.”

L
UCAS CONTINUED WALKING,
found a woman who thought she’d seen a car with bluish lights, but wasn’t exactly certain what time. She’d seen it coming out of the alley at least sometime before the sirens, and added nothing to what Stevens said, except to confirm it.

H
E CHECKED OUT
with the firemen at the Barths’. The arson investigator had shown up, and said he’d have some preliminary ideas in the morning. “But I can tell you, there was gasoline.” He sniffed. “Probably from BP. I’d say, ninety-two octane.” Lucas frowned and the arson guy grinned: “Pulling your weenie. Talk to you in the morning.”

L
UCAS GOT HOME
at midnight and found Weather in bed, reading a book on cottage gardens. “I think we live in a cottage,” she said.

“Good to know,” he grunted.

“So, I think we should hire a couple of gardeners next year, and get a cottage garden going,” she said. “Maybe a white picket fence.”

“Picket fence would be nice,” he said, grumpily.

She put the book down. “Tell me about it.”

H
E TOLD
her about it, walking back and forth from the bathroom, waving his arms around, getting into his pajamas. He’d brought up a bottle of caffeine-free Diet Coke, with a shot of rum. He sat on the edge of the bed drinking it as he finished, and finally said, “The ultimate problem is, there is no connection between the two cases. But we’ve got a serious psycho killing people over quilts, and another serious psycho trying to get at the Barths, and they seem to be driving the same van, and goddamnit…I can’t find a single fuckin’ thing in common between the two cases. There is nothing. The Barths—straight political bullshit. Bucher is a robbery-murder, by people who killed at least one and maybe two other people, and somehow involves quilts. They’ve got jack-shit to do with each other.”

He calmed down after a while, and Weather turned out the lights. Lucas usually lay awake in the dark for a while, brooding, even when there wasn’t anything to brood about, while Weather dropped off after three deep breaths. This night, she took a half-dozen deep breaths, then lifted her head, said sleepily, “I can think of one thing the cases have in common.”

“What’s that?”

“You.” She rolled back over, and went to sleep.

T
HAT GAVE HIM
something to brood about, so he did, for half an hour, coming up with nothing before he drifted away to sleep. At three-fourteen in the morning, his eyes popped open—he knew it was three-fourteen, exactly, because as soon as he woke up, he reached out and touched the alarm clock, and the illuminated green numbers popped up.

The waking state had not been created by an idea, by a concept, by a solution—rather, it had come directly from bladder pressure, courtesy of a late-night twenty-ounce Diet Coke. He navigated through the dark to the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the light, peed, flushed, turned off the light, opened the door, and was halfway across the dark bedroom when another light went on, this one inside his head:

“That fuckin’ Amity Anderson,” he said aloud.

H
E LAY AWAKE AGAIN,
thinking about Amity Anderson. She’d worked for Donaldson, lived only a couple of miles from Bucher, and even closer to the Barths. She was an expert on antiques, and must have been working for Donaldson about the time the Armstrong quilt went through.

But the key thing was, she’d heard him talking about the Kline investigation, and he was almost certain that he’d mentioned the Barths’ names. At that same time, Ruffe Ignace had published the first Kline story, mentioning Lucas by name. Amity Anderson could have put it all together.

He had, at that point, already hooked the Donaldson killing to Bucher, and he’d told her that. If he had frightened her, if her purpose had been to distract him from Bucher and Donaldson, to push him back at Kline…then she’d almost done it.

He kicked it around for forty-five minutes or so, before slipping off to sleep again. When he woke, at eight, he was not as sure about Anderson as when he’d gone to sleep. There were other possibilities, other people who knew he was working both cases.

But Anderson…did she have, or had she ever had, a van?

18

W
EATHER WAS
in the backyard, playing with Sam, who had a toy bulldozer that he was using as a hammer, pounding a stick down into the turf. “He’s got great hand-eye coordination,” Weather said, admiring her son’s technique. She was wearing gardening gloves, and had what looked like a dead plant in her hand.

“Great,” Lucas said. “By the way, you’re a genius. That tip last night could turn out to be something.”

Sam said, “Whack! Whack!”

Lucas told him, “Go get the football.”

Sam looked around, spotted the Nerf football, dropped the bulldozer, and headed for the ball.

“What tip?” Weather asked.

“That I was the common denominator in these cases,” Lucas said.

She looked puzzled. “I said that?”

“Yeah. Just before you went to sleep.”

“I have no memory of it,” she said.

Sam ran up with the ball, stopped three feet from Lucas, and threw it at Lucas’s head. Lucas snatched it out of the air and said, “Okay, wide receiver, down, juke, and out.”

Sam ran ten feet, juked, and turned in. He realized his mistake, continued in a full circle, went out, and Lucas threw the ball, which hit the kid in the face and knocked him down. Sam frowned for a moment, uncertain whether to laugh or cry, then decided to laugh, and got up and went after the ball.

“Medical school,” Lucas said. “On a football scholarship.”

“Oh, no. He can play soccer if he’s interested in sports,” Weather said.

“Soccer? That’s not a sport, that’s a pastime,” Lucas said. “Like whittling or checkers.”

“We’ll talk about it some other year.”

D
OWN AT HIS OFFICE,
Lucas began a list:

• Call Archie Carton at Sotheby’s.
  
• Call the Booths about the quilt donation to the Milwaukee Art Museum.
  
• Get a court order for a snip of red thread from the Walker Gallery quilt.
  
• Call Jenkins and Shrake, and find out where Flowers is.
  
• Find out exactly when Amity Anderson worked for Donaldson, and how she would have known Bucher, Coombs—through the quilts, probably—and Toms, the dead man in Des Moines.
  
• Start a biography on Amity Anderson.
  

“Carol!”

Carol popped her head in the door. “Yup?”

“Is that Sandy kid still around?”

“Yeah.”

“Get her ass in here.”

B
OTH
S
HRAKE’S
and Flowers’s cell phones were off. Jenkins answered his and said, “Lucas, Jesus, Kline is gonna get a court order to keep us away from him.”

“What happened? Where are you?”

“I’m up in Brainerd. Kline Jr. was four-wheeling yesterday up by the family cabin,” Jenkins said. “He and his pals went around drinking in the local bars in the evening.”

“What about his old man?” Lucas asked.

“Shrake looked him up last night. He says he was home the whole time, talked to a neighbor late, about the Twins game when they were taking out the garbage, the game was just over. Shrake checked, and that was about the time of the fire.”

“So they’re alibied up.”

“Yeah. And they’re not smug about it. They’re not like, ‘Fuck you, figure this out.’ They’re pissed that we’re still coming around. Junior, by the way, is gonna run for his old man’s Senate seat, and says they’re gonna beat the sex charge by putting Jesse on the stand and making the jurors figure out about how innocent she was.”

“That could work,” Lucas admitted. “You know where Flowers is?”

“I talked to him last night,” Jenkins said. “He was on his way to see the Barths. He’d be getting in really late, he might still be asleep somewhere.”

“Okay. That’s what I needed. Go home,” Lucas said.

“One more thing.”

“Yeah?”

Jenkins said, “I don’t know if this means anything to you. Probably not.”

“What?”

“I was talking to Junior Kline. He and his buddies were all wrapped up in Carhartt jackets and boots and concho belts and CAT hats, and they all had Leathermans on their belts and dirt and all that, and somehow…I got the feeling that they might be singin’ on the other side of the choir. A bunch of butt-bandits.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And you know what? I don’t think I’m wrong,” Jenkins said. “I don’t know how that might reflect on the attacks on the Barths…I mean, I just don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” Lucas said.

H
E GOT
C
AROL
started on getting a court order for a snip of thread from the quilt.

S
ANDY HURRIED IN.
“You called?”

Lucas said, “There’s a woman named Amity Anderson. I’ve got her address, phone number, and I can get her Social Security number and age and all that. I need the most complete biography you can get me. I need it pretty quick. She can’t know about it.”