Invisible Prey

door. “Maybe I’ll go out for a run. Wake myself up.”
    “Call nine-one-one before you start,” Lucas said. Jenkins was not a runner. The healthiest thing he did was sometimes smoke less than two packs a day.
    “Yeah.” He coughed and went out. “See ya.”
    “Eat another tomato,” Lucas called after him.
     
    L UCAS COULDN’T THINK of what to do next, so he phoned John Smith at the St. Paul cops: “You going up to Bucher’s?”
    “Yeah, eventually, but I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Smith said.
    “Anybody up there?”
    “Barker, the niece with the small nose, an accountant, and a real estate appraiser. They’re doing an inventory of contents for the IRS—everything, not just what the Widdlers did. Widdlers are finished. School got out, and the Lash kid called to see if he could go over and pick up his games. He’ll be up there sometime…probably some people in and out all day, if you want to go over. If there’s nobody there when you get there, there’s a lockbox on the door. Number is two-four-six-eight.”
    “All right. I’m gonna go up and look at paper,” Lucas said.
    “I understand there’ll be some excitement in Dakota County this morning, and you were involved,” Smith said.
    “Oh, yeah. Almost forgot,” Lucas said. “Where’d you hear that?”
    “ Pioneer Press reporter,” Smith said. “He was on his way out to Dakota County. Politicians don’t do good in Stillwater.”
    “Shouldn’t fuck children,” Lucas said.
     
    H E CHECKED OUT of the office and headed over to Bucher’s, took a cell-phone call from Flowers on the way. Flowers wanted the details on Jesse Barth: “Yeah, it happened, and no, it wasn’t the Kline kid,” Lucas said. He explained, and then asked about the girl’s body on the riverbank. Flowers was pushing it. “Keep in touch,” Lucas said.
     
    I N HIS MIND’S EYE, Lucas could see the attack of the night before. A big man with a pipe—or maybe a cane—in a white van, going after Jesse. A man with a pipe, or a cane, killed Bucher. But as far as he knew, there hadn’t been a van.
    A van had figured into the Toms case, but Toms had been strangled.
    Coombs’s head had hit a wooden ball, which St. Paul actually had locked up in the lab—and it had a dent, and hair, and blood, and even smudged handprints, but the handprints were probably from people coming down the stairs. But then, Coombs probably had nothing to do with it anyway…except for all those damn quilts. And the missing music box. He hadn’t heard from Gabriella Coombs, and made a mental note to call her.
    There was a good possibility that the van was a coincidence. He remembered that years before, during a long series of sniper attacks in Washington, D.C., everybody had been looking for a white van, and after every attack, somebody remembered seeing one. But the shooters hadn’t been in a white van. They’d been shooting through a hole in the trunk of a sedan, if he remembered correctly. The fact is, there were millions of white vans out there, half the plumbers and electricians and carpenters and roofers and lawn services were working out of white vans.
     
    B ARKER AND THE ACCOUNTANT and the real estate appraiser had set up in the main dining room. Lucas said hello, and Barker showed him some restored pots, roughly glued together by the wife of a St. Paul cop who’d taken pottery lessons: “Just pots,” she said. “Nothing great.”
    “Huh.”
    “Does that mean something?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    In the office, he started flipping through paper, his heart not in it. He really didn’t feel like reading more, because he hadn’t yet found anything, and he’d looked through most of the high-probability stuff. Weather had said that he needed to pile up more data; but he was running out of data to pile up.
    The pots. No high-value pots had been smashed, but the cabinet had been full of them. Maybe not super-high value, but anything from fifty to a couple of hundred bucks each.
    The pots on the floor were worth nothing, as if only the cheaper pots had been broken. If a knowledgeable pot enthusiast had robbed the place, is that what he’d do? Take the most valuable, put the somewhat valuable back—perhaps out of some aesthetic impulse—and then break only the cheap ones as a cover-up? Or was he, as Kathy Barth suggested the night before, simply having a stroke?
     
    T HE W IDDLERS CAME IN, Leslie cheerful in his blue seersucker suit and, this