Invisible Prey

“Jeez, I don’t know…”
    “Look, Kelly: if she doesn’t want to testify, she doesn’t have to. But. We can’t find her. That’s what we’re worried about,” Lucas said. “Somebody saw her on the street, walking home, but she never showed up. We’ve got to know where she might’ve gone. If she’s okay, we can work it out. But if she’s not…”
    “Ah…” She stared at Lucas for a moment, then turned and looked at a bus, and then said, “Okay. If she hid out, it’d be either Mike Sochich’s house, or she might have gone to Katy Carlson’s—or she might have taken a bus to Har Mar, to go to a movie. Sometimes she goes up to Har Mar and sits there for hours.”
    “Where can I find these people…?”
     
    M C G UIRE WAS an assertive sort: She said, “Give me two minutes to change. I’ll show you. That’d be fastest.”
    She took five minutes, and hustled out with a bag of clothes. In the car, she said, “Turn around, we want to go over to the other side of Ninety-four, into Frogtown. Mike would be the best possibility…Best to go down Ninety-four to Lexington, then up Lexington. I’ll show you where to turn…”
    He did a U-turn on Snelling, caught a string of greens, accelerated down the ramp onto I-94, then up at Lexington, left, and north to Thomas, right, down the street a few blocks until McGuire pointed at a gray-shingled house behind a waist-high chain-link fence. Lucas pulled over and McGuire slumped down in her seat and said, “I’ll wait here.”
    Lucas said, with a grin, “If she’s here, she’s gonna know you ratted her out. Might as well face the music.” He popped the door to get out, and heard her door pop a second later. She followed him across the parking strip to the gate. There was a bare spot in the yard with a chain and a stake, and on the end of the chain, the same yellow-white dog he’d seen at the Barth’s.
    “Jesse’s dog,” Lucas said.
    “Naw, that’s Mike’s dog,” McGuire said. “Sometimes Jesse walks home with it. Dog likes her better than Mike.”
    Again, they stepped carefully. The dog barked twice and snarled, but knew where the end of the chain was. And a good thing, Lucas thought. All he needed this afternoon was a pitbull-wannabe hanging on his ass.
    Mike’s house had a low shaky porch, with soft floorboards going to rot. The aluminum storm door was canted a bit, and didn’t close completely. Lucas rang the doorbell, then knocked on the door. He heard a thump from inside, and a minute later, saw the curtain move in a window on the left side of the porch.
    He felt the tension unwind a notch. He banged on the door, pissed off now. “Jesse. Goddamnit, Jesse, answer the door. Jesse…”
    There was a moment’s silence, then Lucas said to McGuire, “If she comes to the door, yell for me.”
    He stepped off the porch, circled the dog, and hurried around to the back of the house: five seconds later, Jesse Barth came sneaking out the back door, carrying a backpack.
    “Goddamnit, Jesse,” he said.
    Startled, she jerked around, saw him at the corner of the house. Gave up: “Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”
    “Come on—I’ve got to call your mom,” Lucas said. “She’s freaked out, half the cops in St. Paul are out looking for you. People thought you were kidnapped.”
    “I was just scared,” Jesse said as he led her through the ankle-deep grass back around the house. “What if I make a mistake?” Her lip trembled. “I don’t want to make a mistake and go to jail.”
    “Did Conoway say she was going to put you in jail?” Lucas asked. “Who said they were gonna put you in jail?”
    “Well, you did, for one.”
    “That’s if you tried to sell your testimony,” Lucas said. “If you just go down and tell the truth, you’re fine. You’re the victim here.”
    “But if I make a mistake…”
    “There’s a difference between lying and making a mistake,” Lucas told her. “They’re not gonna put you in jail for making a mistake. You have to deliberately lie, and know you’re lying, and it’s gotta be an important lie. You talked to Conoway about what you’re going to say. Just say that, and you’re fine.”
    They cleared the front of the house and found McGuire on the porch, talking to a tall, bespectacled kid wearing a Seal T-shirt and jeans: Mike. McGuire said: “Jesse, they were afraid you were kidnapped. I’m sorry, I was so worried, you know, you see on the news all the time…”
    “That’s okay,” Jesse said.