Invisible Prey

shovel.”
    While Flowers went for the shovel, Del probed some more with the rod, scratched it with the tip of a pocketknife, pulled it out and looked at the scratch. “Three feet,” he said. “Or damn close to it.”
    They decided to cut a narrow hole, straight down, one shovel wide, two feet long. The ground was soft all the way, river-bottom silt; grass roots, one tree root, then sandy stuff, and at the bottom of the hole, a glimpse of green.
    “Garbage bag,” Flowers grunted. He lay down, reached in the hole and began pulling dirt out with one hand. When they’d cleared a six-inch square of plastic, Del handed him his knife, and Flowers cut the plastic. Didn’t smell much of anything; Flowers pulled the sliced plastic apart, then said to Lucas, “You’re standing in the light, man.”
    Lucas moved to the other side of the hole, still peering in, and Flowers got farther down into the hole, poked for a moment, then pushed himself out and rolled onto his butt, dusting his hands. “I can see some jeans,” he said.
     
    T HE CRIME-SCENE SUPERVISOR gave them an endless amount of shit about digging out the hole, until Lucas told him to go fuck himself and didn’t smile.
    The guy was about to try for the last word when Flowers, his shirt still soaked with sweat and grime, added, “If you’d done the crime-scene work right, we wouldn’t have had to come down and do it for you, dick-weed.”
    “Hey. You didn’t say anything about a fuckin’ graveyard.”
    “It’s all a crime scene,” Flowers said. He wasn’t smiling, either. “You shoulda found it.”
     
    T HEY TOOK two hours getting the bag out of the hole. Lucas didn’t want to look at it. He and Flowers and Del gathered around the back of Flowers’s boat and drank Diet Cokes and Flowers pulled out a fishing rod and reel and rigged a slip sinker on it, talking about going down to the river and trying for some catfish.
    “Got a shovel, we’ll find some worms somewhere…”
    The crime-scene guy came over and said, “It’s out. Whoever it is had a short black haircut and wore thirty-six/thirty-four Wrangler jeans, Jockey shorts, and size-eleven Adidas.”
    Lucas was bewildered. “Size eleven? Jockey shorts?”
     
    A ND, one of the crime-scene guys said a few minutes later, whoever it was still carried his wallet. Inside the wallet was an Illinois driver’s license issued eight years earlier in the name of Theodore Lane.
    “What the fuck is going on here?” Del asked.
     
    T HE CRIME-SCENE guy called for a bigger crew with ground-penetrating radar and a gas sniffer. Two dozen people milled around, talking about secret graveyards, but there was no real graveyard.
    At three o’clock they found the only other grave that they would find. It was fifty yards south of the first one, in an area that Lucas, Del, and Flowers had walked right over. The top of the grave was occupied by a driftwood stump, which was why they missed it. The bottom was occupied by Gabriella Coombs, curled into a knot in a green plastic garbage bag, wasted and shot through with maggots, almost gone now…
     
    A T HOME THAT NIGHT, after taking a twenty-minute shower, trying to get the stink of death off him, Lucas went down to dinner and grumped at everyone. Coombs was going to haunt him for a while; chip a chunk off the granite of his ass.
    The other thing that bothered him a bit was that he knew, from experience, that he’d forget her, that in a year or so, he’d have put her away, and would hardly think of her again.
    He’d gotten down a beer and was watching a Cubs game, when Weather came with the phone, and handed it to him. The medical examiner said, “I took a look and can tell you only one thing: it’s gonna be tough. Nothing obvious on the body, nothing under her fingernails. We’ll process anything we find, but if there wasn’t much to start with, and it’s been days since she went into the ground…”
    “Goddamnit,” Lucas said. “There’s gotta be something.”
    There was; but it took him a while to think of it.

27
    L UCY C OOMBS CAME to the door barefoot and when she saw Lucas standing there, hands in his pockets, asked through the screen door, “Why didn’t you come and tell me?”
    Coombs had gone to look at her daughter at the medical examiner’s. Lucas had avoided all of it: had sent Jerry Wilson, the original St. Paul investigator in the Marilyn Coombs murder, to tell Lucy that her daughter’s body had been found.
    Now, standing on her