Invisible Prey

BCA’s handling procedures for evidence. After checking to make sure the signatures on the affidavits were really his, she sent him on his way.
    In the hallway, Flowers said, “I’ll call you about that Jackson case,” and Lucas said, “See ya,” and he was gone.
     
    B ACK AT THE OFFICE, Sandy had gone.
    “I sent her home,” Carol said, as she trailed Lucas into his office. The file was sitting squarely in front of Lucas’s chair, with a dozen blue plastic flags sticking out of it. “She was about to fall off the chair. She said you could call her there, and she’d come in…but I think you could let it go until tomorrow. She’s really beat.”
    “Did she finish the file?” Lucas took off his jacket, hung it on his coatrack, and began rolling up his shirtsleeves.
    “Yes. She flagged the critical points. She said she flagged them both pro and con, for and against it being the same killers.”
    “She’s pretty good,” Lucas said. “I hope she doesn’t go overboard, start campaigning to free this Child guy. If his appeal got turned down, we’d be better off working it from the other end. Find the real killers.”
     
    H E STARTED on the file, looking first at the flagged items, and going back to the original arrest, the interviews, and immediately saw how Child got himself in trouble: He hadn’t denied anything. He had, in fact, meekly agreed that he might have done it. He simply didn’t know—and he stuck to that part of the story.
    There were other bits of evidence against him. He’d been in the neighborhood the night of the murder; he’d stopped to see if he could get some money from his father. His father had given him thirty dollars, and Child had spent some of it at a Subway, on a sandwich, and had been recognized there by a former schoolmate.
    He knew the Toms house. He was driving a van, and a van had been seen circling the block. He had cuts on his face and one arm, which he said he got from a fall, but which might have been defensive cuts received as he strangled Toms. On the other hand, Toms had no skin under his fingernails—there’d been no foreign DNA at all.
    Child had what the police called a history of violence, but he’d never been arrested for it—as far as Lucas could tell, he’d had a number of fights with another street person near the room where he lived, and Child had said that the other bum had started the fights: “He’s a crazy, I never started anything.”
    But it had been the lack of any denial that had hung him up.
    At the sentencing, he made a little speech apologizing to the victim’s family, but still maintained that he couldn’t remember the crime.
    The judge, who must have been running for reelection, if they reelected judges in Iowa, said in a sentencing statement that he rejected Child’s memory loss, believed that he did remember, and condemned him as a coward for not admitting it. Child got life.
     
    C AROL STUCK her head in, said, “I forgot to tell you, Weather got done early and she was heading home. She wants to take the kids out to the Italian place.”
    “I’ll call her…”
     
    T HE I TALIAN place at six, Weather said; she’d load the kids up, and meet him there. Lucas looked at his watch. Four-twenty. He could get to the Italian place in ten minutes, so he had an hour and a half to read. It’d be quiet. People were headed out of the building, Carol was getting her purse together, checking her face.
    He heard the phone ring, and then Carol called, “You got Flowers on one. Flowers the person.”
    Lucas picked up: “Yeah.”
    “We got another problem.”
    “Ah, shit. What is it?” Lucas asked.
    “Jesse didn’t come home from school,” Flowers said.
    “What?”
    “Didn’t come home. She left school on time, Kathy checked with her last class and some friends of hers, they saw her on the street, but she never showed up at home. Kathy might be bullshitting us, but she seems pretty stressed. Conoway doesn’t know whether to be pissed or worried. The grand jury’s been put on hold for a while, but if we don’t find her in the next hour or so, they’re gonna send them home. I’m headed up that way, but it’s gonna take a while. If you’ve got a minute, you could run over to their house…”
    “Goddamnit,” Lucas said. “If they’re fucking with us, I’m gonna break that woman’s neck.”
    “Hope that’s what it is, but Kathy…I don’t know, Lucas. Didn’t sound like bullshit,” Flowers said. “Of course, it