Invisible Prey (40 page)

Lucas pulled out of the parking lot, now last in line, and followed the others down the ramp onto I-35. Lucas got on the radio, looking for a highway-patrol plane, but was told that with one thing or another, nobody could get airborne for probably an hour. “Well, get him going, for Christ’s sake. This chick may be headed for Des Moines, or something.”

The problem with a four-car tag was that Anderson wasn’t a fast driver, and they had to hold back, which meant they’d either loom in her rearview mirror, or they’d have to hold so far back that they might lose her to a sudden move. If she hooked into a shopping center, and several were coming up, they’d be out of luck.

“Jenkins, move up on her slow,” Lucas said. “Get off at Yankee Doodle, even if she doesn’t.”

“Got it.”

She didn’t get off; Jenkins went up the off-ramp, ran the lights at the top, and came down the on-ramp, falling in behind Lucas.

They played with her down the interstate, the speed picking up. She didn’t get off at the Burnsville Mall, a regional shopping center that Lucas had thought would be a possibility. Instead, she pushed out of the metro area, heading south into the countryside.

Lucas could see the possible off-ramps coming on his nav system, and called them out; one of them would fall off at each, then reenter. She didn’t get off, but stayed resolutely in the slow lane, poking along at the speed limit.

South, and more south, thirty miles gone before she clicked on her turn signal and carefully rolled up the ramp at Rice County 1, two cars behind Flowers. Flowers had to guess, and Lucas shouted into the radio, “She went to Carleton. Go left. Go east.”

Flowers turned left, the next car went right, and Anderson turned left behind Flowers. Carleton was off to the east in Northfield, but they’d already gone past the Northfield exit; still, she might be familiar with the countryside around it, Lucas thought, and that had been a better bet than the open countryside to the west.

Now they had a close tag on her, but from the front. Flowers slowly pulled away, leading her into the small town of Dundas; but just before the town, she turned south on County 8, and Flowers was yelling, “I’m coming back around,” and Shrake said, “I got her, I got her.”

Well back, now. Not many cars out, and all but Lucas had been close to her, and she might pick one of them out. They kept south, onto smaller and narrower roads, Shrake breaking away, Jenkins moving up, until she disappeared into a cornfield.

“Whoa. Man, she turned,” Jenkins said. “She’s, uh, off the road, hang back guys, I’m gonna go on past…”

Hadn’t rained in a few days, and when Jenkins went past the point where she’d disappeared, he looked down a dirt track, weeds growing up in the middle, and called back, “She looks like she’s going into a field. I don’t know, man…you can probably track her by the dust coming up.”

“That’s not a road,” Lucas said, peering at his atlas. “Doesn’t even show up here; I think it must go down to the river.”

“Maybe she’s going canoeing,” Flowers said. “This is a big canoe river.”

Lucas said into a live radio, “Ah, holy shit.”

“What?”

“It’s the Cannon River, man.”

“Yeah?”

“The money that got laundered in Las Vegas, on the quilts—it went to Cannon, Inc., or Cannon Associates, or something like that.”

Shrake came back: “Dust cloud stopped. I think she’s out of her car; or lost. What do you want to do?”

“Watch for a minute,” Lucas said. “Flowers, you’re wearing boots?”

“Yup.”

“I got my gators,” Shrake said. “I didn’t think we were gonna be creeping around in a cornfield.”

“Gators for me,” Jenkins said.

“You guys get a truckload deal?” Flowers asked.

“Shut up,” Lucas said. “Okay, Flowers and I are gonna walk in there. Jenkins and Shrake get down the opposite ends of the road. If she comes out, you’ll be tracking her.”

“How do we hide the cars?” Flowers asked.

“Follow me,” Lucas said. He went on south, a hundred yards, a hundred and fifty, found an access point, and plowed thirty feet into the cornfield. The corn didn’t quite hide the truck, but it wouldn’t be obvious what kind it was, unless you rode right up to it. Flowers followed him in and got out of his state car shaking his head. “Gonna be one pissed-off farmer.”

“Bullshit. He’ll get about a hundred dollars a bushel from us,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”

Flowers said, “I got two bottles of water in the car.”

“Get them. And get your gun,” Lucas said.

“The gun? You think?”

“No. I just like to see you wearing the fuckin’ gun for a change,” Lucas said. “C’mon, let’s get moving.”

H
OT DAY.
Flowers pulled his shoulder rig on as they jogged along the rows of shoulder-high corn, ready to take a dive if Anderson suddenly turned up in the car.

“Looks like she’s down by the water,” Flowers said. They could see only the crowns of the box elders and scrub cedar along the river, so she was lower than they were, and they should be able to get close. At the track, they turned toward the river, panting a bit now, hot, big men in suits carrying guns and a pound of water each, no hats; the track was probably 440 yards long, Lucas thought, one chunk of a forty-acre plot; but since it was adjacent to the river, there might be some variance.

“Sand burrs,” Flowers grunted. Their feet were kicking up little puffs of dust.

T
HEY RAN
the four-forty in about four minutes, Lucas thought, and at the end of it, he decided he needed to start jogging again; the rowing machine wasn’t cutting it. When the field started to look thin, and the terrain started to drop, they cut left into the cornfield and slowed to a walk, then a stooped-over creep. The corn smelled sweet and hot and dusty, and Lucas knew he’d have a couple of sweaty corn cuts on his neck before he got out of it.

A
T THE EDGE
of the field, they looked down a slope at a muddy stream lined on both sides with scrubby trees, and a patch of trees surrounding a shack and a much newer steel building. The access door on the front of the building was standing open; the garage door was down. Anderson’s car was backed up to the garage door. The building had no windows at all, and Lucas said, “Cut around back.”

They went off again, running, stooping, watching the building. They were down the side of it when they heard the garage door going up, and they eased back in the cornfield, squatting next to each other, watching.

Anderson came out of the building. She’d taken off the long-sleeve shirt, and was now wearing a green T-shirt; she was carrying two paintings.

“Got her,” he muttered to Flowers.

“So now what?”

“Well, we can watch her, and see what she does with the stuff, or we can go ahead and bust her,” Lucas said.

“Make the call,” Flowers said.

“She’s probably moving it somewhere out-of-state. Dumping it. Cashing it in. Getting ready to run.” He sat thinking about it for another thirty seconds, then said, “Fuck it. Let’s bust her.”

A
NDERSON HAD GONE
back inside the garage and they eased down right next to it, heard her rattling around inside, then stepped around the corner of the open door, inside. The place was half full of furniture, arranged more or less in a U, down the sides and along the back of the building. The middle of the U was taken up by an old white Chevy van, which had been backed in, and was pointing out toward the door.

Lucas felt something snap when he saw it, a little surge of pleasure: Anderson had her back to them and he said, “How you doing, Amity?”

She literally jumped, turned, took them in, then took three or four running steps toward them and screamed “No,” and dashed down the far side of the van.

Flowers yelled, “Cut her off,” and went around the back of the van, while Lucas ran around the nose. Anderson was fifteen feet away and coming fast when Lucas crossed the front of the van and she screamed, “No,” again, and then he saw something in her hand and she was throwing it, and he almost had time to get out of the way before the hand-grenade-sized vase whacked him in the forehead and dropped him like a sack of kitty litter.

He groped at her as she swerved around him out into the sunlight, then Flowers jumped over him. Lucas struggled back to his feet and saw her first run toward her car, and then, as Flowers closed in, swerve into the shack, the door slamming behind her.

Lucas was moving again, forehead burning like fire—the woman had an arm like A-Rod.

Flowers yelled, “Back door,” as he kicked in the front, and Lucas ran down the side of the house in time to see Anderson burst onto the deck on the river side of the house. She saw him, looked back once, then ran, arms flapping wildly, down toward the river. Lucas shouted, “Don’t!”

He was five steps away when she hurled herself in.

F
LOWERS RAN DOWN
to the bank, stopped beside Lucas, and said, “Jesus. She’s gonna stink.”

The river was narrow, murky, and, in front of the shack, shallow. Anderson had thrown herself into four inches of water and a foot of muck, and sat up, groaning, covered with mud. “You got boots on,” Lucas said to Flowers. “Reach in there and get her.”

“You got longer arms,” Flowers said.

“You’re up for a step increase and I’m your boss,” Lucas said.

“Goddamnit, I was hoping for a little drama,” Flowers said. Anderson had turned over now, on her hands and knees. Flowers stepped one foot into the muck, caught one of her hands, and pried her out of the stuff.

Lucas said to her, “Amity, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent…”

F
LOWERS SAID,
“Cuffs?” Lucas said, “Hell, yes, she’s probably killed about six people. Or helped, anyway.”

“I did not,” Anderson wailed. “I didn’t…”

Lucas ignored her, walked up the bank toward the steel building, turned the radio back up and called Jenkins and Shrake. “Come on in. We grabbed her; and we got a building full of loot.”

Flowers checked Anderson for obvious weapons, removed a switchblade from her side pocket, put her on the ground at the front of the car, and cuffed her to the bumper. She started to cry, and didn’t stop.

L
UCAS PUT
the switchblade on top of Flowers’s car, where they wouldn’t forget it, and walked around to the trunk. Inside were three plastic-wrapped paintings and an elaborate china clock. Small, high-value stuff, he thought. He looked at the backs of all three paintings, found one old label from Greener Gallery, Chicago, and nothing else.

Flowers had gone inside the steel building, and Lucas followed. “Hell of a lot of furniture,” Flowers said. “I could use a couple pieces for my apartment.”

“Couple pieces would probably buy you a house,” Lucas said. “See any more paintings? Or swoopy chairs?”

“There’re a couple of swoopy chairs…”

Sure enough: there was no other way to describe them. They were looking at the chairs when Shrake and Jenkins came in, and Flowers waved at them, and Lucas saw a wooden rack with more plastic-wrapped paintings. He pulled them down, one-two-three, and ripped loose the plastic on the back. One and three were bare.

The back of two had a single word, written in oil paint with a painter’s brush, a long time ago:
Reckless.

26

A
MITY
A
NDERSON WENT
to jail in St. Paul, held without bail on suspicion of first-degree murder in the deaths of Constance Bucher and Sugar-Rayette Peebles. Flowers said she cried uncontrollably all the way back and tried to shift the blame to Jane Widdler.

Everybody thought about that, and on the afternoon of Anderson’s arrest, two officers and a technician went to Widdler’s store with a search warrant, and, after she’d spoken to her attorney, spent some time using sterile Q-tips to scrub cells from the lining of her cheeks.

DNA samples were also taken from Anderson, and from the body of Leslie Widdler, and were packed off to the lab. At the same time, five crime-scene techs from the BSA and the St. Paul Police Department began working over the white van, the steel building, and the shack.

Ownership of the land, shack, and building was held by the Lorna C. Widdler Trust. Lorna was Leslie’s mother, who’d died fourteen years earlier; Leslie was the surviving trustee. No mention of Jane. The land surrounding the shack, the cornfield, was owned by a town-farmer in Dundas, who said he’d seen Leslie—“A big guy? Dresses like a fairy?”—only twice in ten years. He’d had a woman with him, the farmer said, but he couldn’t say for certain whether it was Jane Widdler or Amity Anderson. They paid the farmer $225 for damage to his cornfield.

Smith called Lucas the evening of the arrest and said, “We found a pill bottle under the front seat of the van. It’s a prescription for Amity Anderson.”

“There you go,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, and we got some hair, long brown hair. Doesn’t look like Widdler’s. It does look like Anderson’s.”

“Anything on Leslie?”

“Well, there’s some discoloration on the back of the passenger seat, might be blood. One of the techs says it is, so we’ve got some DNA work to do.”

“If it’s either a dog or Leslie…”

“Then we’re good.”

T
HE
R
ECKLESS PAINTING
and the swoopy chairs were confirmed by the Lash kid, a painting was found on an old inventory list held by the Toms family in Des Moines, and two pieces of furniture were found on purchase receipts in Donaldson’s files.

St. Paul police, making phone checks, found a call from Leslie Widdler’s phone to Anderson’s house on the night Widdler killed himself.

The quilts were defended by their museum owners as genuine.

S
O THE REPORTERS
came and went, and the attorneys; the day after the arrest, Lucas was chatting with Del when Smith came by. Smith had been spending time with Anderson and her court-appointed attorney. They shuffled chairs around Lucas’s office and Carol brought a coffee for Smith, and Smith sighed and said, “Gotta tell you, Lucas. I think there’s an outside possibility that we got the wrong woman.”