Invisible Prey

ASHES LEFT, Smith and another cop came rolling down the hall, picking up their feet, in a jacket-flapping, gun-flashing hurry.
    “Got a break,” Smith said, coming up to Lucas. “Let’s go.”
    Lucas started walking. “What happened?”
    “Guy showed up at Rhodes’s with some jewelry in a jewelry box. Jewelry was cheap but the box was terrific. Our guys turned it over, it’s inscribed ‘Bucher’ on the back.”
    Rhodes’s was a pawnshop. Lucas asked, “Do they know who brought it in?”
    “That’s the weird thing,” Smith said. “They do.”
    “Where’re we going?” Lucas asked.
    “Six-twelve Hay. It’s off Payne, nine blocks north of Seventh. SWAT is setting up in the parking lot behind the Minnesota Music Café.”
    “See you there.”
     
    P AYNE A VENUE WAS one of the signature drags across St. Paul’s east side, once the Archie Bunker bastion of the city’s white working class. The neighborhood had been in transition for decades, reliable old employers leaving, a new mix of Southeast Asians and blacks moving in. Lucas dropped past the cathedral, onto I-94 in a minute or so, up the hill to Mounds Boulevard, left and left again.
    The café was an old hangout of his, at the corner of East Seventh and Payne, with a graveled parking lot in back, and inside, the best music in town. A dozen cars were in the lot, cops pulling on body armor. A half-dozen civilians were watching from the street. Smith arrived ten seconds after Lucas, and they walked over to Andy Landis, the SWAT squad commander.
    “What you got?” Smith asked.
    “We’re in the house behind him and on both sides,” Landis said. “Name is Nathan Brown. Don’t have anything local on him, but the people in the house behind him say he moved here from Chicago four or five years ago. There’re about fifty Nathan and Nate Browns with files down in Chicago, so we don’t know who he is.”
    “Got the warrant?” Smith asked.
    “On the way. Two minutes,” Landis said.
    “Love this shit,” Smith said to Lucas.
    “You ever been on the SWAT squad?”
    “Ten years, until the old lady nagged me out of it,” Smith said. “Turned my crank.”
    “Wasn’t it called something else? They called you the ‘breath mint’?”
    “CIRT,” Smith said. “Critical Incident Response Team.”
    “SWAT’s better,” Lucas said.
     
    T HE WARRANT ARRIVED and the SWAT squad moved out in three groups. Lucas and Smith tagged behind.
    “The couple who found the bodies…did they notice anything missing around the house?” Lucas asked.
    Smith shook his head. “Not that they mentioned. But they weren’t housekeepers—the wife does the cooking, the husband did maintenance and gardening and the lawn. And with shit thrown all over the place like it was…The niece is on the way from California. She’ll probably know something.”
     
    T HE SWAT TEAM came in three groups: a blocking group at the back door, and two at the front of the house, one from each side. They came across the neighboring lawns, armored, face shields, carrying long arms. Moved diagonally across the lawn of the target house, quietly swarming the porch, doing a peek at the window, then kicking the front door in.
    Nathan Brown, as it happened, was asleep in a downstairs bedroom. His girlfriend was feeding her kids grilled-cheese sandwiches in the kitchen, and began screaming when the cops came through, had the phone in her hand screaming “Nine-one-one, nine-one-one,” and the kids were screaming, and then the cops were in the bedroom on top of Brown.
    Brown was yelling, “Hey…hey…hey,” like a stuck record.
    Lucas came in as they rolled him and cuffed him; his room smelled of old wallpaper, sweat, and booze. Brown was shirtless, dazed, wearing boxer shorts. He’d left a damp sweat stain on the sheet of the queen-sized bed.
    After some thrashing around, the freaked-out girlfriend sat in a corner sobbing, her two children crying with her. The cops found a plastic baggie with an assortment of earrings on the floor by Brown’s pants. Asked where he got them, Brown roused himself to semicoherence, and said, “I shoulda known, there ain’t no fuckin’ toot’ fairy.”
    “Where’d you get them?
    He shook his head, not in refusal, but knowing the reaction he’d get: “I got them off a bus bench.”
    That was stupid enough that it stopped everybody. “Off a bus bench?” Smith said.
    “Off a bus bunch. Up at…up at Dale. Dale and Grand,” Brown said. His eyes