Invisible Prey

they’d had some problems the last two times out…how did the alprazolam get in the van?”
    “That’s awkward,” Del said.
    “No shit.”
    “Hey. Don’t get all honorable about it,” Del said. “I can think of ways that bottle got there—like maybe she went down to take some other pictures out, or maybe she went down to clean out the van, and lost the bottle. Won’t do any good for you to start issuing affidavits about breaking-and-entering.”
    Lucas grinned. “I wasn’t going to do that. But…”
    “We need to think about this,” Del said.
     
    T HEY FINISHED WALKING down the block, and back, and nothing had occurred to them. At the door, as they were going back in the BCA building, Del asked, “Did anybody ever ask Anderson about Gabriella?”
    “No…Gabriella. She’s just gone.”
     
    B UT THAT EVENING, sitting in the den listening to the soundtrack from Everything Is Illuminated , Lucas began to think about Gabriella, and where she might have gone. Assuming that she’d been killed by Leslie Widdler, where would he put her? Because of the “Don’t Mow Ditches” campaign, it was possible that he’d just heaved her out the van door, the way he’d heaved Screw, and she was lying in two feet of weeds off some back highway. On the other hand, he had, not far away, an obscure wooded tract where he had to take the van anyway, assuming he’d used the van when he killed Gabriella. And if he had a body in it…
    He got on the phone to Del, then to Flowers: “Can you come back up here?”
    “I’m not doing much good here,” Flowers said. He’d gone back south, still pecking away at the case of the girl found on the riverbank. “My suspect’s about to join the Navy to see the world. Which means he won’t be around to talk to.”
    “All right. Listen, meet Del and me tomorrow at the Widdlers’ shack. Wear old clothes.”
     
    T HEY HOOKED UP at eleven o’clock in the morning, out at the Widdlers’ place, the highway in throwing up heat mirages, the cornfield rustling in the spare dry wind, the sun pounding down. They unloaded in front of the shack, which had been sealed by the crime-scene crew. Flowers was towing a boat, and inside the boat, had a cooler full of Diet Coke and bottles of water.
    Lucas and Del were in Lucas’s truck, and unloaded three rods of round quarter-inch steel, six feet long; Lucas had ground the tips to sharp points.
    He pointed downstream. “We’ll start down there. It’s thicker. Look at any space big enough to be a grave. Just poke it; it hasn’t rained, so if it’s been turned over, you should be able to tell.”
    Flowers was wearing a straw cowboy hat and aviator glasses. He looked downstream and said, “It’s gonna be back in the woods, I think. Probably on the slope down toward the river. If he thought about it, he wouldn’t want to put her anyplace that might be farmed someday.”
    “But not too close to the river,” Lucas said. “He wouldn’t want it to wash out.”
    They were probing, complaining to each other about the stupidity of it, for an hour, and were a hundred yards south of the house when Flowers said, “Hey.” He was just under the edge of the crown of a box elder, thirty feet from the river.
    “Find something?”
    “Something,” Flowers said. They gathered around with their rods, probing. The earth beneath them had been disturbed at some time—squatting, they could see a depression a couple of feet across, maybe four feet long. The feel of the dirt changed across the line. But there was also an aspen tree, with a trunk the size of a man’s ankle, just off the depression, with one visible root growing across it.
    “I don’t know. The tree…”
    “But feel this…” Flowers gave his rod to Lucas. “You can feel how easy it went down, how it got softer the lower you go…and then, doesn’t that feel like a plastic sack or something? You can feel it…”
    “Feel something,” Lucas admitted.
    They passed the rod to Del, who said he could feel it, too. Lucas wiped his lower lip with the back of his hand: sweaty and getting dirty. “What do you think? Get crime scene down here, or go get a shovel?”
    They all looked up at the shack, and the cars, and then Del said, “Would you feel like a bigger asshole if you got a crew down here and there was nothing? Or if you dug a hole yourself and it was something?”
    Lucas and Flowers looked at each other and they shrugged simultaneously and Flowers said, “I’ll get the