Invisible Prey

don’t think you did, Mrs. Lash, but we’ve got to talk to everybody,” Smith said. His voice had lost its edge, now that he knew he’d be able to sweat Ronnie, without a lawyer stepping on his act.
     
    L UCAS LEANED AGAINST the hallway wall, listening to the exchange, mother and son going back and forth. The Lashes finally decided that Ronnie could go ahead and talk, but if the cops started saying stuff to him…
    “I’ll call you, Ma.”
    At that point, Lucas was eighty-three percent certain that Ronnie Lash hadn’t killed anyone, and hadn’t helped kill anyone.
     
    T HEY PUT Mrs. Lash on a settee in the music room and took Ronnie into the parlor, John Smith, a fat detective named Sy Schuber, and Lucas, and shut the door. They put Ronnie on a couch and scattered around the room, dragging up chairs, and Smith opened by outlining what had happened, and then said, “So we’ve got to ask you, where were you this weekend? Starting at four-thirty Friday afternoon?”
    “Me’n some other guys took a bus over to Minneapolis, right after school on Friday,” Lash said. “We were going over to BenBo’s on Hennepin. They were having an underage night.”
    BenBo’s was a hip-hop place. Ronnie and four male friends from school spent the next five hours dancing, hanging out with a group of girls who’d gone over separately: so nine other people had been hanging with Ronnie most of the evening. He listed their names, and Schuber wrote them down. At ten o’clock, the mother of one of the kids picked up the boys in her station wagon and hauled them all back to St. Paul.
    “What kind of car?” Lucas asked.
    “A Cadillac SUV—I don’t know exactly what they’re called,” Lash said. “It was a couple of years old.”
    Coming back to St. Paul, Ronnie had been dropped third, so he thought it was shortly before eleven o’clock when he got home. His mother was still up. She’d bought a roasted chicken at the Cub supermarket, and they ate chicken sandwiches in the kitchen, talked, and went to bed.
    On weekends, Lash worked at a food shelf run by his church, which wasn’t a Catholic church, though he went to a Catholic school. He started at nine in the morning, worked until three o’clock.
    “They don’t pay, but, you know, it goes on your record for college,” he said. “It’s also good for your soul.”
    Schuber asked, “If you’re such a religious guy, how come you were out at some hip-hop club all night?”
    “Jesus had no problem with a good time,” Ronnie said. “He turned water into wine, not the other way around.”
    “Yeah, yeah.” Smith was rubbing his eyeballs with his fingertips. “Ronnie, you got a guy down the block from you named Weldon Godfrey. You know Weldon?”
    “Know who he is,” Ronnie said, nodding. He said it so casually that Lucas knew that he’d seen the question coming.
    “You hang out?” Smith asked.
    “Nope. Not since I started at Catholic school,” Lash said. “I knew him most when I went to public school, but he was two grades ahead of me, so we didn’t hang out then, either.”
    “He’s had a lot of trouble,” Schuber said.
    “He’s a jerk,” Ronnie said, and Lucas laughed in spite of himself. The kid sounded like a middle-aged golfer.
    Smith persisted: “But you don’t hang with Weldon or any of his friends?”
    “No. My ma would kill me if I did,” Ronnie said. He twisted and untwisted his bony fingers, and leaned forward. “Ever since I heard Aunt Sugar was murdered, I knew you’d want to talk to me about it. It’d be easy to say, ‘Here’s this black kid, he’s a gang kid, he set this up.’ Well, I didn’t.”
    “Ronnie, we don’t…”
    “Don’t lie to me, sir,” Ronnie said. “This is too serious.”
    Smith nodded: “Okay.”
    “You were saying…” Lucas prompted.
    “I was saying, I really loved Aunt Sugar and I really liked Mrs. Bucher.” A tear started down one cheek, and he let it go. “Aunt Sugar brought me up, just like my ma. When Ma was going to school, Aunt Sugar was my full-time babysitter. When Aunt Sugar got a job with Mrs. B, and I started going to Catholic school, I started coming over here, and Mrs. B gave me money for doing odd jobs. Gave me more money than she had to and she told me that if she lived long enough, she’d help me with college. No way I want those people to get hurt. I wouldn’t put the finger on them for anybody, no matter how much they stole.”
    Lucas bought it. If the kid was lying,