Invisible Prey

flour jar dumped along with several other ceramic containers. Flour was everywhere, mixed with crap from the refrigerator. Dried pickles were scattered around, like olive-drab weenies, and he could smell ketchup and relish, rotting in the sunshine, like the remnants of a three-day-old picnic, or a food tent at the end of the state fair.
    To get out of the mess, Lucas walked through the dining room and stepped out on the back porch, a semicircle of warm yellow stone thirty feet across. Below it, the lawn slipped away to the edge of the bluff, and below that, out of sight, I-35, then United Hospital, then the old jumble of West Seventh, and farther down, the Mississippi. Cops were standing around on the lawn, talking, clusters and groups of two and three, a little cigarette and cigar smoke drifting around, pleasantly acrid. One of the cops was Clark Wain, the guy who’d explored the third floor. Lucas stepped over, said, “Clark,” and Wain said, “Yeah, Lucas, what’s going on?”
    “You went up to the third floor?”
    “Me and a couple of other guys,” Wain said. “Making sure there wasn’t anybody else.”
    “Were there footprints going up? In the dust?”
    “Yeah. We had them photographed but there wasn’t anything to see, really—too many of them,” Wain said. “Looked like people were up there a lot.”
    “Nothing seemed out of place?”
    Wain’s eyes drifted away as he thought it over, then came back to Lucas: “Nothing that hit me at the time. They didn’t trash the place like they did some of the other rooms. Maybe they took a peek and then came back down—if it was even their footprints. Could have been anyone.”
    “All right…” Rose Marie came out on the porch looking for him, and Lucas raised a hand to her. To Wain he said, “Gotta talk to the boss.”
    They stepped back into the dining room. Rose Marie asked, “What do you have going besides Kline?”
    “The Heny killing down in Rochester, that’s still pooping along, and we’ve got a girl’s body down by Jackson, we don’t know what happened there. The feds are pushing for more cooperation on illegal aliens, they want us to put somebody in the packing plants down in Austin…But Kline is the big one. And this.”
    “Did Burt do it?” Rose Marie asked. She and Kline were old political adversaries.
    “Yeah. I don’t know if we can prove it,” Lucas said.
    He told her about the DNA and the size-ten dress, and the girl’s sexual history. She already knew about the semicolons and that Kline had admitted an affair with Mom.
    “The newest thing is, Kline wants to do something like a consent agreement,” Lucas said. “Everybody agrees that nobody did anything wrong and that nobody will ever do it again. He, in return, pays them another year’s rent on the room and a car-storage fee for her garage, like twenty thousand bucks total.”
    “That’s bullshit. You can’t sign a consent agreement that gets you out of a statutory-rape charge,” Rose Marie said. “Especially not if you’re a state senator.”
    “So I’ll send Virgil around and you tell him what you want him to do,” Lucas said.
    She made a rude noise, shook her head. “That fuckin’ Flowers…”
    “C’mon, Rose Marie.”
    She sighed. “All right. Send him up. Tell him to bring the file, make a presentation. Three or four people will be there, he doesn’t have to be introduced to them, or look them up later. Tell him to wear a jacket, slacks, and to get rid of those goddamn cowboy boots for one day. Tell him we don’t need an attitude. Tell him if we get attitude, I’ll donate his ass to the Fulda City Council as the town cop.”
    “I’ll tell him…” He looked around. Several panels in the wall of the dining room had been pulled open. One showed a safe door; another, rows of liquor bottles; a third, crockery serving dishes with molded vegetables as decoration.
    “Listen. This is a sideshow,” she said, waving a hand at the trashed room. “The governor wants a presence here, because she’s big political and social money. But you need to focus on Kline.” She popped a piece of Nicorette gum, started chewing rapidly, rolling it with her tongue. “I don’t care who fixes it, but it’s gotta be fixed.”
    “Why don’t we just go the grand jury route? You know, ‘We presented it to the grand jury and in their wisdom, they decided to indict’? Or not indict?”
    “Because we’re playing with the legislature, and the Republicans still