Invisible Prey

“I have clients all afternoon. I could talk to you after four o’clock, if it’s really urgent,” she said.
    “I live about a half mile from you,” Lucas said. “Maybe I could drop by when you get home? If you’re not going out?”
    “I’m going out, but if it won’t take too long, you could come at five-fifteen,” she said. “I’d have to leave by six.”
    “See you at five-fifteen.”
     
    H E HUNG UP and saw a blond girl standing by Carol’s desk, peeking at him past the edge of his open door. He recognized her from a meet-and-greet with the summer people. Sandy.
    “Sandy,” he called. “Come in.”
    She was tall. Worse, she thought she was too tall, and so rolled her shoulders to make herself look shorter. She had a thin nose, delicate cheekbones, foggy blue eyes, and glasses that were too big for her face. She wore a white blouse and a blue skirt, and black shoes that were wrong for the skirt. She was, Lucas thought, somebody who hadn’t yet pulled herself together. She was maybe twenty years old.
    She hurried in and stood, until he said, “Sit down, how y’doing?”
    “I’m fine.” She was nervous and plucked at the hem of her skirt. She was wearing nylons, he realized, which had to be hot. “I looked up that information you wanted. They let me stay late yesterday.”
    “You didn’t have to…”
    “No, it was really interesting,” she said, a spot of pink appearing in her cheeks.
    “What, uh…”
    “Okay.” She put one set of papers on the floor by her feet, and fumbled through a second set. “On the Hewlett-Packard printers. The answer is, probably. Probably everybody saw a Hewlett-Packard printer, but nobody knows for sure. The thing is, there are all kinds of printers that get thrown away. Nobody wants an old printer, and there are supposed to be restrictions on how you get rid of them, so people put them in garbage sacks and hide them in their garbage cans, or throw them in somebody else’s dumpster. There are dozens of them every week.”
    “Shit…” He thought about the word, noticed that she flushed. “Excuse me.”
    “That’s okay. The thing is, because so many printers are in garbage sacks, they don’t get seen until they’re already in the trash flow, and they wind up getting buried at the landfill,” she said.
    “So we’re out of luck.”
    “Yes. I believe so. There’s no way to tell what printer came from where. Even if we found the right printer, nobody would know what truck it came from, or where it was picked up.”
    “Okay. Forget it,” Lucas said. “I should have known that.”
     
    S HE PICKED UP the second pack of papers. “On the unsolved murders, I looked at the five states you asked about, and I also looked at Nebraska, because there are no big cities there. I found one unsolved that looks good. A woman name Claire Donaldson was murdered in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. I told Carol as soon as I found it, but she said I wouldn’t have to work anymore on that, because you already knew about it.”
    Lucas nodded. “Okay. Good job. And that was the only one?”
    “That was the only unsolved,” Sandy said. “But I found one solved murder that also matches everything, except the sex of the victim.”
    Lucas frowned. “Solved?”
    She nodded. “In Des Moines. An elderly man, wealthy, living alone, house full of antiques. His name was Jacob Toms. He was well known, he was on a lot of boards. An art museum, the Des Moines Symphony, an insurance company, a publishing company.”
    “Jeez, that sounds pretty good. But if it’s solved…”
    “I pulled the newspaper accounts off LexisNexis. There was a trial, but there wasn’t much of a defense. The killer said he couldn’t remember doing it, but wouldn’t be surprised if he had. He was high on amphetamines, he’d been doing them for four days, he said he was out of his mind and couldn’t remember the whole time he was on it. There wasn’t much evidence against him—he was from the neighborhood, his parents were well-off, but he got lost on the drugs. Anyway, people had seen him around the neighborhood, and around the Toms house…”
    “Inside?”
    “No, outside, but he knew Toms because he’d cut Toms’s lawn when he was a teenager. Toms had a big garden and he didn’t like the way the lawn services cut it, because they weren’t careful enough, so he hired this guy when he was a teenager. So the guy knew the house.”
    “There had to be more than that.”
    “Well, the guy