Invisible Prey

his mouth shut. “He apparently had a sexual relationship with a sixteen-year-old. And maybe a fifteen-year-old—same girl, he just might’ve been nailing her a year ago.”
    “Hmm.” Sloan pulled a face, then said, “I can see that. But it wouldn’t have been rape. I mean, rape-rape, jumping out of the bushes. He’s not the most physical guy.”
    “No, she went along with it,” Lucas said. “But it’s about forty years of statutory.”
    Sloan looked into himself for a minute, then said, “Not forty. Thirty-six.”
    “Enough.”
    Another moment of silence, then Sloan sighed and asked, “Why don’t you bust him? Don’t tell me it’s because he’s a politician.”
    Lucas said to Sloan, “It’s more complicated than that.” When Sloan looked skeptical, he said, “C’mon, Sloan, I wouldn’t bullshit you. It really is more complicated.”
    “I’m listening,” Sloan said.
    “All right. The whole BCA is a bunch of Democrats, run by a Democrat appointee of a Democratic governor, all right?”
    “And God is in his heaven.”
    “If we say, ‘The girl says he did it,’ and bust him, his career’s over. Whether he did it or not. Big pederast stamp on his forehead. If it turns out he didn’t do it, if he’s acquitted, every Republican in the state will be blaming us for a political dirty trick—a really dirty trick. Five months to the election. I mean, he’s the president of the state senate.”
    “Does the kid have any evidence?” Sloan asked. “Any witnesses?”
    “Yes. Semen on a dress,” Lucas said. “She also told the investigator that Kline has moles or freckles on his balls, and she said they look like semicolons. One semicolon on each nut.”
    An amused look crept over Sloan’s face: “She’s lying.”
    “What?”
    “In this day and age,” he asked, “how many sixteen-year-olds know what a semicolon is?”
    Lucas rolled his eyes and said, “Try to concentrate, okay? This is serious.”
    “Doesn’t sound serious,” Sloan said. “Investigating the family jewels.”
    “Well, it is serious,” Lucas said. “She tells the initial investigator…”
    “Who’s that?”
    “Virgil Flowers.”
    “That fuckin’ Flowers,” Sloan said, and he laughed. “Might’ve known.”
    “Yeah. Anyway, she tells Virgil that he’s got semicolons on his balls. And quite a bit of other detail, including the size of what she calls ‘his thing.’ She also provides us with a dress and there’s a semen stain on it. So Virgil gets a search warrant…”
    Sloan giggled, an unattractive sound from a man of his age.
    “…gets a search warrant, and a doctor, and they take a DNA scraping and examine Kline’s testicles,” Lucas said. “Sure enough, it’s like they came out of Microsoft Word: one semicolon on each nut. We got the pictures.”
    “I bet they’re all over the Internet by now,” Sloan said.
    “You’d bet wrong. These are not attractive pictures—and everybody involved knows that their jobs are on the line,” Lucas said. “You don’t mess with Burt Kline unless you can kill him.”
    “Yeah, but the description, the semen…sounds like a big indict to me,” Sloan said.
    “However,” Lucas said.
    “Uh-oh.” Sloan had been a cop for twenty years; he was familiar with howevers.
    “Burt says he never had sex with the daughter, but he did sleep with her mom,” Lucas said. “See, the state pays for an apartment in St. Paul. Kline rents a place from Mom, who owns a duplex on Grand Avenue, what’s left from a divorce settlement. Kline tells Virgil that he’s staying there, doing the people’s work, when Mom starts puttin’ it on him.”
    “Him being such a looker,” Sloan said.
    “Kline resists, but he’s only human. And, she’s got, Virgil believes, certain skills. In fact, Virgil said she’s been around the block so often it looks like a NASCAR track. Anyway, pretty soon Burt is sleeping with Mom every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”
    “How old’s Mom?” Sloan asked.
    “Thirty-four,” Lucas said.
    “With a sixteen-year-old daughter?”
    “Yeah. Mom started young,” Lucas said. “Anyway, Burt says Mom got the idea to blackmail him, because she’s always hurting for money. He says she put the daughter up to it, making the accusation. Burt said that she would have all the necessary grammatical information.”
    “And Mom says…”
    “She said that they had a hasty affair, but that Burt really wanted the daughter, and she was horrified when she