Invisible Prey

considered bad form.
    As it was, he pulled up on the side street at two minutes to eight, got the hand-off from Jerrold, called Del, who’d just been pushed by Flowers, and who said that a light had come on ten minutes earlier. “She’s up, but she’s boring,” Del said.
    The newspapers had the Widdler story, and tied it to Bucher, Donaldson, and Toms. Rose Marie said that more arrests were imminent, but the Star Tribune reporter spelled it “eminent” and the Pioneer Press guy went with “immanent.”
    You should never, Lucas thought, trust a spell-checker.
     
    A NDERSON STEPPED OUT of her house at 8:10, picked up the newspaper, and went back inside. At 8:20, carrying a bag and the newspaper, she walked down to the bus stop, apparently a daily routine, because the bus arrived two minutes later.
    They tagged her downtown and to her office, parked their cars in no-parking zones, with police IDs on the dashes, and Lucas took the Skyway exit while Flowers took the street. There was a back stairs, but Lucas didn’t think the risk was enough to worry about…
    As he waited, doing nothing, he had the feeling he might be wrong about that, and worried about it, but not too much: he always had that feeling on stakeouts. A few years earlier, he’d had a killer slip away from a stakeout, planning to use the stakeout itself as his alibi for another murder…
    A few minutes before noon, Shrake showed up for the next shift, and Lucas passed off to him, and walked away, headed back to the office. He’d gone fifty feet when his cell phone rang: Shrake. “She’s moving,” and he was gone. Lucas looked back. Shrake was ambling along the Skyway, away from Lucas, on the phone. Talking to somebody else on the cell, probably to Jenkins, probably afraid to use the radio because he was too close to the target; she had practically walked over him.
    Seventy-five feet ahead of Shrake, Lucas could see the narrow figure of Amity Anderson speed-walking through the crowd.
    Going to lunch? His radio chirped: Flowers. “You want to hang in, until we figure out where she’s going?”
    “Yeah.”
    Shrake took her to a coffee shop, where she bought a cup of coffee to go, and an orange scone, and then headed down to the street, where Jenkins picked her up. “Catching a bus,” Jenkins said.
    They took her all the way back to her house. Off the bus, she paused to throw the coffee-shop sack into a corner trash barrel, then headed up to her house, walking quickly, in a hurry. She went straight to the mailbox and took out a few letters, shuffled them quickly, picked one, tore the end off as she went through the door.
    “What do you think?” Flowers asked, on the radio.
    “Let’s give her an hour,” Lucas said.
    “That’s what I think,” Flowers said. Shrake and Jenkins agreed.
    Half an hour later, Anderson walked out of her house wearing a long-sleeved shirt and jeans and what looked like practical shoes or hiking boots. She had a one-car detached garage, with a manual lift. She pushed the door up, backed carefully out, pulled the door down again, pointed the car up the hill, and took off.
    “We’re rolling,” Jenkins said. “We’re gone.”

25
    L UCAS GOT ON THE RADIO : “This could be something, guys. Stack it up behind her, and take turns cutting off, but don’t lose her.”
    Shrake: “Probably going to the grocery store.”
    Lucas: “She turned the wrong way. There’s one just down the hill.”
    They had four cars tagging her, but no air. As long as they stayed in the city, they were good—they’d each tag her for a couple of blocks, then turn away, while the next one in line caught up. They tracked her easily along Ford to Snelling, where she took a right, down the bluff toward Seventh. Snelling was a chute; if she stopped there, they’d all be sacked right on top of her. Flowers followed her down while Lucas, Jenkins, and Shrake waited at the top of the hill.
    “I got her,” Flowers said. “She took a left on Seventh, come on through.”
    They moved fast down the hill, through the intersection, Flowers peeling away as Lucas came up behind him. They got caught at a stoplight just before I-35, and Lucas hooked away, into a store parking lot, afraid she’d pick up his face if he got bumper-to-bumper. “Jenkins?”
    “Got her. Heading south on Thirty-five E.”
    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