Invisible Prey

like a coonskin cap; all been dumped on the floor. “The dining room’s down that way. Whoever did it, didn’t find the panel. The safe wasn’t touched. Anyway, the jewelry’s probably small stuff, earrings, and so on. And they took electronics. A DVD player definitely, a CD player, a radio, maybe, there might be a computer missing…We’re getting most of this from Mrs. Bucher’s friends, but not many really knew the house that well.”
    “So it’s local.”
    “Seems to be local,” Smith said. “But I don’t know. Don’t have a good feel for it yet.”
    “Looking at anybody?”
    Smith turned his head, checking for eavesdroppers, then said, “Two different places. Keep it under your hat?”
    “Sure.”
    “Peebles had a nephew,” Smith said. “He’s in tenth grade over at Cretin. His mother’s a nurse, and right now she’s working three to eleven at Regions. When she’s on that shift, he’ll come here after school. Peebles’d feed him dinner, and keep an eye on him until his mom picked him up. Sometimes he stayed over. Name is Ronnie Lash. He’d do odd jobs for the old ladies, edge trimming, garden cleanup, go to the store. Pick up laundry.”
    “Bad kid?”
    Smith shook his head. “Don’t have a thing on him. Good in school. Well liked. Wasn’t here Friday night, he was out dancing with kids from school. But his neighborhood…there are some bad dudes on his street. If he’s been hanging out, he could’ve provided a key. But it’s really sensitive.”
    “Yeah.” A black kid with a good school record, well liked, pushed on a brutal double murder. All they had to do was ask a question and there’d be accusations of racism. “Gotta talk to him, though,” Lucas said. “Get a line going, make him one of many. You know.”
    Smith nodded, but looked worried anyway. The whole thing was going to be enough of a circus, without a civil-rights pie fight at the same time.
    “You said two things,” Lucas prompted.
    “There’s a halfway house across the street, down a block. Drugs, alcohol. People coming and going. You could sit up in one of those windows and watch Bucher’s house all night long, thinking about how easy it would be.”
    “Huh. Unless you got something else, that sounds as good as the nephew,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, we’re trying to get a list out of corrections.”
    “Was there…did the women fight back? Anything that might show some DNA?”
    Smith looked over his shoulder toward Peebles. “Doesn’t look like it. It looks like the assholes came in, killed them, took what they wanted, and left. The women didn’t run, didn’t hide, didn’t struggle as far as we can tell. Came in and killed them. Peebles was probably killed at the front door and dragged back there on the rug. We think the rug should be right in front of the door.”
    They thought about it for a minute, then Smith’s cell phone rang, and Lucas asked quickly, “Can I look around?”
    “Sure. Go ahead.” Smith flipped open the phone and added, “Your boss was out in the backyard talking to the chief, ten minutes ago…Hello?”
     
    L UCAS TOOK the stairs up to the bedroom level, where another team was working over Bucher’s body. The bedroom was actually a suite of four rooms: a sitting room, a dressing room, a bathroom, and the main room. The main room had a big king-sized bed covered with a log-cabin quilt, two lounge chairs, and a wood-burning fireplace. All four rooms had been dumped: drawers pulled out of chests, a jewelry box upside down on the carpet.
    A half-dozen paintings hung crookedly on the walls and two lay on the floor. Another quilt, this one apparently a wall hanging, had been pulled off the wall and left lying on the floor. Looking for a safe? The bath opened off to the right side and behind the bed. The medicine cabinet stood open, and squeeze bottles of lotion, tubes of antiseptic and toothpaste littered the countertop beneath it. No prescription medicine bottles.
    Junkies. They’d take everything, then throw away what they couldn’t use; or, try it and see what happened.
    A St. Paul investigator was squatting next to a wallet that was lying on a tile by the fireplace.
    “Anything?” Lucas asked.
    “Look at this,” the investigator said. “Not a dollar in the wallet. But they didn’t take the credit cards or the ATM cards or the ID.”
    “Couldn’t get the PINs if Bucher and Peebles were already dead,” Lucas said.
    The cop scratched his head. “Guess not. Just,