Invisible Prey

letting the heat carry away her worries.
    Didn’t work.
    She lay awake in the night like a frightened bat, waiting for the day to come, for the police, for disgrace, for humiliation, for lawyers.
     
    L UCAS, on the other hand, slept like a log until five-thirty, when his cop sense woke him up. The cop sense had been pricked by a flashing red light on the curtains at the side of the house, the pulsing red light sneaking in under the bottom of the blackout shades.
    He cracked his eyes, thought, the cops. What the hell was it? Then he heard a siren, and another one.
    He slipped out of bed—Weather had no cop sense, and would sleep soundly until six, unless Sam cried out—and walked to the window, pulled back one side of the shade. Two cop cars, just up the street, then a third arriving, all gathered around a dark sedan.
    What the hell? It looked and smelled like a crime scene.
    He got into his jeans and golf shirt, and slipped sockless feet into loafers, and let himself out the front door. As he came across the lawn, his ankles wet with dew, one of the St. Paul cops recognized him. “Where’re you coming from?” the cop asked.
    “I live right there,” Lucas said. “What’ve you got?”
    “Guy ate his gun,” the cop said. “But he was up to something…You live right there?”
    But Lucas was looking in the back window of what he now knew was a Lexus, a Lexus with a bullet hole in the roof above the back window, and at the dead fat face of Leslie Widdler.
    “Ah, no,” he said. “Ah, Jesus…”
    “What? You know him?” the cop asked.

23
    R OSE M ARIE R OUX came steaming through the front door, high heels, nylons, political-red skirt and jacket, white blouse, big hair. She spotted Lucas and demanded, “Are you all right?”
    Lucas was chewing on an apple. He swallowed and said, “I’m fine. My case blew up, but I’m fuckin’ wonderful.”
    “What’s this about a guy with a rifle?” Rose Marie said. “They said a guy with a rifle was waiting for you.”
    “Must have changed his mind,” Lucas said. “Come on. Everything’s still there. You saw the cops when you came in?”
    “Of course. A convention. So tell me about it.”
     
    A GUY WAS out running shortly after first light, Lucas told her. He was a marathoner, running out of his home, weaving down the Minneapolis side of the Mississippi, across the Ford Bridge into St. Paul, weaving some more—he tried to get exactly six miles in—north to the Lake Street Bridge and back across the river to Minneapolis.
    One of his zigs took him around the corner from Lucas’s house. As he approached the Lexus, in the early-morning light, he noticed a splash on the back window that looked curiously like blood in a thriller movie. As he passed the car, he glanced into the backseat and saw the white face and open mouth of a dead fat man, with a rifle lying across his belly.
    “Freaked me out when I looked in there,” Lucas admitted. “Last thing in the world that I expected. Leslie Widdler.”
    “Better him than you,” Rose Marie said. “What kind of rifle? If he’d taken a shot at you?”
    “A .300 Mag,” Lucas said. “Good for elk, caribou, moose. If he’d shot me with that thing, my ass’d have to take the train back from Ohio.”
    “Nice that you can joke about it,” Rose Marie said.
    “I’m not laughing,” Lucas said. They walked up to a cop who was keeping a sharp eye on the yellow crime-scene tape. Lucas pointed at Rose Marie and said, “Rose Marie Roux. Department of Public Safety.”
    The cop lifted the tape, and asked her, “Can I have a job?”
    She patted him once on the cheek. “I’m sure you’re too nice a boy to work for me.”
    “Hey, I’m not,” the cop said to her back. “I’m a jerk. Really.” To Lucas, as Lucas ducked under the tape, “Seriously. I’m an asshole.”
    “I’ll tell her,” Lucas said.
     
    R OSE M ARIE HAD briefly been a street cop before she moved into administration, law school, politics, and power. She walked carefully down the route suggested by one of the crime-scene cops, cocked an eye in the window, looked at Widdler, backed away, and said, “That made a mark.”
    “Yeah.”
    “He killed Bucher? For sure?” she asked.
    “He and his wife, I think. I don’t know what all of this is about—except…You’ve been briefed on the Jesse Barth kidnapping attempt, and the firebombing.”
    She nodded: “Screw the pooch.”
    “The Screw thing and bomb, might have been an…effort,