Invisible Prey

you have to say that?”
    “Ah, man,” Lucas said. “Look, I’m sorry…”
    She smiled, pleased with herself and the trembling lip: “Relax. I’m just toyin’ with you.”
     
    O N THE WAY out of the house, they walked around the blood spot, and Coombs asked, “What’s a doornail?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Oh.” Disappointed. “I would have thought you’d have heard it a lot, and looked it up. You know, dead as a doornail, and you being a cop.”
    He got her out of the house, into the Porsche, fired it up, rolled six feet, then stopped, frowned at Coombs, and shut it down again.
    “Two things: If your grandma’s name was Coombs, and your mother is her daughter, how come your name…?”
    “I’m a bastard,” Coombs said.
    “Huh?”
    “My mom was a hippie. I’m second-generation hippie. Anyway, she slept around a little, and when the bundle of joy finally showed up, none of the prospective fathers did.” She flopped her hands in the air. “So. I’m a bastard. What was the second thing?”
    “Mmm.” He shook his head, and fished his cell phone out of his pocket. “I’m going to call somebody and ask an unpleasant question about your grandmother. If you want, you could get out and walk around the yard for a minute.”
    She shook her head. “That’s okay. I’d be interested in hearing the question.”
    Lucas dialed, identified himself, and asked for the medical examiner who’d done the postmortem on Coombs. Got her and asked, “What you take out of her stomach. Uh-huh? Uh-huh? Very much? Okay…okay.”
    He hung up and Coombs again asked, “What?”
    “Her stomach was empty. If she fell when she was by herself, I wonder who ate nine oatmeal cookies?” Lucas asked.
     
    B ACK AT BCA headquarters, he briefed Shrake, put Coombs in a room with him, and told them both that he needed every detail. Five minutes later he was on the line with an investigator with the Chippewa County Sheriff’s Office, named Carl Frazier, who’d worked the Donaldson murder.
    “I saw the story in the paper and was going to call somebody, but I needed to talk to the sheriff about it. He’s out of town, back this afternoon,” Frazier said. “Donaldson’s a very touchy subject around here. But since you called me…”
    “It feels the same,” Lucas said. “Donaldson and Bucher.”
    “Yeah, it does,” Frazier said. “What seems most alike is that there was never a single lead. Nothing. We tore up the town, and Eau Claire, we beat on every asshole we knew about, and there never was a thing. I’ve gotten the impression that the St. Paul cops are beating their heads against the same wall.”
    “You nail down anything as stolen?”
    “Nope. That was another mystery,” Frazier said. “As far as we could tell, nothing was touched. I guess the prevailing theory among the big thinkers here was that it was somebody she knew, they got in an argument…”
    “And the guy pulled out a gun and shot her? Why’d he have a gun?”
    “That’s a weak point,” Frazier admitted. “Would have worked better if she’d been killed like Bucher—you know, somebody picked up a frying pan and swatted her. That would have looked a little more spontaneous.”
    “This looked planned?”
    “Like D-Day. She was shot three times in the back of the head. But what for? A few hundred dollars? Nobody who inherited the money needed it. There hadn’t been any family fights or neighborhood feuds or anything else. The second big-thinker theory was that it was some psycho. Came in the back door, maybe for food or booze, killed her.”
    “Man…”
    “I know,” Frazier said. “But that’s what we couldn’t figure out: What for? If you can’t figure out what for, it’s harder than hell to figure out who. ”
    “She’s got these relatives, a sister and brother-in-law, the Booths,” Lucas said. “They still around?”
    “Oh, yeah. The sheriff hears from them regularly.”
    “Okay. Then, I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna go talk to them,” Lucas said. “Maybe I could stop by and look at your files?”
    “Absolutely,” Frazier said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to ride along when you do the interview. Or, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we meet at the Donaldson house? The Booths still own it, and it’s empty. You could take a look at it.”
    “How soon can you do it?”
    “Tomorrow? I’ll call the Booths to make sure they’ll be around,” Frazier said.
     
    W EATHER AND L UCAS spent some time that