Invisible Prey

“I’m just fucked up.”
     
    L UCAS CALLED K ATHY B ARTH: “I got her. She was hiding out with a friend. You’ve still got time to get down to Dakota County.”
    “I’ve got to talk to Jesse,” Barth said.
    “She’s willing to go. You’re holding up a lot of people here,” Lucas said.
    “Oh, God.” Long silence, as though she were catching her breath. “Well, I’ve got to change…”
    Lucas called Flowers, who was just crossing the Mississippi bridge into South St. Paul. He was ten minutes away: “Man, I thought she was gone,” Flowers said. “I was thinking all this shit about the Klines and finding her body under a bridge…”
    “Can you pick her up? That’d be best: I’m here with the Porsche and I got a rider.”
    “Fast as I can get there. If we turn right around, we’ll just about be on time.”
    He told Flowers how to find the house, then called the St. Paul cops and canceled the alert: “Yeah, yeah, so I’ll go kill myself,” he told a cop who was inclined to pull his weenie.
     
    T HE THREE younger people sat on the porch, waiting for Flowers, and Lucas gave Jesse a psychological massage, telling her of various screw-ups with grand juries, and explained the difference between grand juries and trial juries. Jesse unsnapped the dog, whose name, it turned out, was Screw. She put it on a walking leash and the dog rolled over in the dirt and panted and licked its jaws and whimpered when Jesse scratched its stomach. “You’re gonna make him come,” Mike said.
    “No…” Jesse was embarrassed.
    Lucas moved and the dog twitched. “I don’t think he likes me.”
    “Bit a paperboy once,” Mike said. “They were gonna sue us, but Mom said, ‘For what?’ so they didn’t.”
    “That’s great,” Lucas said.
    Flowers arrived, towing a boat. He got out of his car, ambled over, shaking his head, and said to Jesse, “I ought to turn you over my knee.”
    “Oo. Do me, do me,” McGuire said.
     
    I N THE CAR, McGuire said she might as well go home, since her class would be ending. “Hope the neighbors see me coming home in a Porsche. They’ll think I’m having a fling.”
    “Maybe I oughta put a bag over my head,” Lucas said.
    “That’d be no fun,” she said. “I want people to see it’s a big tough old guy.”
     
    L UCAS WAS still cranked from Flowers’s original call, and, in the back of his head, couldn’t believe that they’d found Jesse so quickly. He dropped McGuire off at her home in Highland. She waved goodbye going up the walk, and he thought she was a pretty good kid. He looked at his watch. If he took a little time, rolled down Ford Parkway with his arm out the window, enjoying the day and the leafy street, and maybe blowing the doors off the Corvette that had just turned onto the parkway in front of him, he’d just about make dinner with the wife and kids.
    He was done with Kline and the Barths.
    Now he had a motherfucker who was killing old people, and he was going to run him down like a skunk on a highway.
     
    D INNER WITH the kids was fine; in the evening, he read a Chuck Logan thriller novel. Late at night, Flowers called: “We got an indictment. They’re going to process the paper tomorrow, talk to Kline’s attorney, set up a surrender late tomorrow afternoon, and then make the announcement day after tomorrow. Cole’s set it up so they can arrest and book him before the press finds out, he’ll make bail, then go hide out. Then the announcement.”
    “Sounds good to me,” Lucas said. “You headed back south?”
    “I’m here tonight, I’m heading back tomorrow at the crack of dawn.”
     
    I N THE MORNING, after a few phone calls, Lucas took a meeting at Bucher’s house. He’d asked Gabriella Coombs to come over, to sit in.
    The Widdlers had almost finished the appraisals of the contents of the house, with negative results. “In other words,” Smith said, “there’s nothing missing.”
    “There are a few things missing, John,” Lucas said. “The Reckless painting, for one. A couple of chairs.”
    “According to a kid, who admitted that he hadn’t been up there for a while, and that maybe Bucher got rid of them herself,” Smith said.
    “The whole thing smells. And we’ve now got a couple of other deals…”
    “Lucas, I’m not saying you’re wrong,” Smith said. “What I’m saying is, you’ve got a killing years ago in Eau Claire where a woman was shot and nothing was taken but some money. An old man was strangled in