Invisible Prey

  It did suggest a certain experience with burglary. Or perhaps, with detective novels.

  “I’m going to make a call, get the St. Paul cops to go over the place,” Lucas said. “If you could give me the boyfriend’s name…”

  They were talking in the kitchen, next to the phone, and the color caught his eye: a flash of red. He thought it might be blood, but then instantly knew that it wasn’t. Blood was purple or black. This was scarlet, in the slot between the stove and refrigerator. He hadn’t seen it when he and Gabriella Coombs were in the kitchen, and he’d looked—he’d been doing his typical crime-scene check, casually peering into cracks and under tables and chairs.

  “Excuse me,” he said. He went over to the stove and looked down.

  “What?”

  “Looks like…Just a minute.” He opened a kitchen cabinet, took out a broom, and used the handle to poke out the red thing.

  A spool of thread.

  The spool popped out of the stove space, rolled crookedly in a half circle, and bumped into his shoe. He used a paper towel to pick it up, by the spool edge on one end, and put it on the stove. They both looked at it for a moment.

  “How’d it get there?” Lucy asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Wasn’t there before. There was a closetful of quilting stuff upstairs. Maybe Gabriella came and took it?”

  Lucy frowned. “She doesn’t quilt. I’ve been trying to get her interested, but she’s more interested in a social life. Besides, if she took it, where’d she put it? It’s not in her car.”

  “Neither is she. Maybe she came over with a girlfriend, who quilts…” Lucas was bullshitting, and he knew it. Making up fairy stories.

  “That’s from the old basket,” Lucy said. “It’s old thread, see? I don’t think they even make it anymore. This says Arkansas on it. Now, most of it comes from China or Vietnam.”

  “Let’s go look at the basket,” Lucas said.

  They climbed the stairs together, to the big linen closet, and Lucas used the paper towel to open the door.

  “Ah, fuck me,” he said.

  No wicker sewing basket.

  But there, under a neat stack of fabric clippings, where the basket had been, was a black lacquer box with mother-of-pearl inlay.

  The music box.

  15

  LUCAS CALLED JERRY WILSON, the St. Paul cop who’d caught the investigation of Marilyn Coombs’s death, and told him about the disappearance of Gabriella Coombs, about the keys and the car, about the broken window with the Scotch tape, about the spool of thread and the music box.

  Wilson said, “That sounds like an Agatha Christie book.”

  “I know what it sounds like,” Lucas said. “But you need to cover this, Jerry—we need to find Gabriella. I’ll talk to her boyfriend, but I could use some cops spread out behind me, talking to her other friends.”

  “Okay. You got names? And I’ll tell you what—that window wasn’t broken day before yesterday.”

  “I’ll get you names and phone numbers,” Lucas said. “If you find her, God bless you, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Lucas was on his cell phone, looked back to the house, where Lucy Coombs was locking the front door. “I’ve got a feeling she’s gone.”

  LUCY COOMBS wanted to come along when Lucas confronted Ron Stack, the artist boyfriend. Lucas told her to go home and get on the phone, and he lied to her: “There’s an eighty percent chance that she’s at a friend’s house or out for coffee. We’ve just got to run her down, and anything you can do to help…”

  On the way to Stack’s place, Lucas called Carol: “Have you seen Shrake?”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure he saw me. He’s getting coffee, and he needs it. His eyes are the color of a watermelon daiquiri.”

  “Fuck him. Tell him to meet me at the Parkside Lofts in Lowertown. Ten minutes.”

  WHEN LUCAS got back downtown, Shrake was sitting on a park bench across the street from Stack’s apartment building. He got shakily to his feet when Lucas pulled into the curb. He was a tall man in a British-cut gray suit and white shirt, open at the collar. His eyes, as Carol said, were Belgian-hare pink, and he was hungover.

  “I hope we’re gonna kill something,” he said, when Lucas got out of the car. “I really need to kill something.”

  “I know. I talked to Jenkins this morning,” Lucas said. “We’re looking for an artist. His girlfriend disappeared last night.” Lucas told him about it as they crossed the street.

  The Parkside was a six-story building, a onetime warehouse, unprofitably converted to loft apartments, with city subsidies, and was now in its fourth refinancing. They rode up to the top floor in what had been a freight elevator, retained either for its boho cool or for lack of money. For whatever reason, it smelled, Lucas thought, like the inside of an old gym shoe.

  As they got off the elevator, Lucas’s cell phone rang. Lucas looked at the Caller ID: the medical examiner’s office. He said, “I’ve got to take this.”

  The ME: “You know, I like doing dogs,” he said. “It’s a challenge.”

  “Find anything good?” Lucas asked.

  “A lot of people think all we can do is routine, run-of-the-mill dissections and lab tests, like it’s all cut-and-dried,” the ME said. “That’s not what it’s about, is it? It’s a heck of a lot more than that…”

  “Listen, we’ll have lunch someday and you can tell me about it,” Lucas said. “What happened with the dog?”

  “You’re lying to me about the lunch. You’re just leading me on…”

  “What about the fuckin’ dog?” Lucas snarled.

  “Pipe,” the ME said. “I did Bucher—and man, if it ain’t the same pipe, it’s a brother or a cousin. The dog’s skull was crushed, just like Bucher’s and Peebles’s, and the radius of the crushing blow is identical. I don’t mean somewhat the same, I mean, identical. We got mucho blood samples, but I don’t know yet whether they’re human or dog.”

  “Give me a guess,” Lucas suggested.

  “My guess is, it’s human,” the ME said. “It looks to me like the mutt was chewing on somebody. We’ve got enough for DNA, if it’s human.”

  “That’s great,” Lucas said. “And the pipe…”

  “You’re hot,” the ME said. “You’re onto something.”

  “Get a break?” Shrake asked, when Lucas rang off.

  “Maybe, but not on Gabriella.”

  RON STACK was in 610. Lucas knocked on the door, and a moment later a balding, bad-tempered, dark-complected man peered out at them over a chain. He was wearing a nasal spreader on his nose, the kind football players use to help them breathe freely. He was holding a cup of coffee and had a soul patch under his thin lower lip. “What?”

  Lucas held up his ID. “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We’re investigating the disappearance of Gabriella Coombs,” Lucas said.

  Stack’s chin receded into his throat. “Disappearance? She disappeared?”

  “You’re the last person we know for sure who saw her. Can we come in?”

  Stack turned and looked back into his loft, then at Lucas again. “I don’t know. Maybe I should call my lawyer.”

  “Well, whatever you want to do, Mr. Stack, but we aren’t going anywhere until you talk to us. I can have a search warrant down here in twenty minutes if you want to push us. But it’d be a lot easier to sit on the couch and talk, than having you on the floor in handcuffs, while we tear the place apart.”

  “What the fuck? Is that a threat?” His voice climbed an octave.

  From behind Stack, a woman’s voice said, “Who’s that, Ron?”

  Stack said, “The police.”

  “What do they want?” the woman asked.

  “Shut up. I’m trying to think.” Stack scratched his chin, then asked, “Am I a suspect?”

  “Absolutely,” Lucas said.

  Shrake, the nice guy: “Look, all we’re doing is trying to find Gabriella. We don’t know where she’s gone. She’s involved in another case, a
nd now…”

  “Okay,” Stack said. “I’m gonna push the door shut a little so I can take the chain off.”

  He did, and let them in.

  THE LOFT WAS an open cube with floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall. The other three walls were concrete block, covered with six-foot-wide oil paintings of body parts. The place smelled of turpentine, broccoli, and tobacco.

  A kitchen area, indicated by a stove, refrigerator, and sink gathered over a plastic-tile floor, was to their left; and farther to the left, a sitting area was designated by an oriental carpet. A tall blond woman, who looked like Gabriella Coombs, but was not, sat smoking on a scarlet couch.

  At the other end of the cube, a door stood open, and through the open door, Lucas could see a towel rack: the bathroom. Overhead, a platform was hung with steel bars from the fifteen-foot ceiling, with a spiral staircase going up. Bedroom.

  At the center of the cube was an easel, on a fifteen-foot square of loose blue carpet; against the right wall, three battered desks with new Macintosh computer equipment.

  Shrake wandered in, following Lucas, sniffed a couple of times, then tilted his head back and took in the paintings. “Whoa. What is this?”

  “My project,” Stack said, looking around at all the paintings. There were thirty of them, hung all the way to the ceiling, all along one wall and most of the end wall. One showed the palm of a hand, another the back of the hand. One showed a thigh, another a hip, one the lower part of a woman’s face. “I unwrapped a woman.” He paused, then ventured, “Deconstructed her.”

  “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” Shrake asked.

  Stack nodded. “But conceptually, it’s much more than that. These are views that you could never see on an actual woman. I took high-resolution photographs of her entire body, so you could see every pore and every hair, and reproduced them here in a much bigger format, so you can see every hair and pore. You couldn’t do that, just looking at somebody. I call it Outside of a Woman. It was written up last month in American Icarus.”

  “Wow, it’s like being there,” Shrake enthused. He pointed: “Like this one: you’re right there inside her asshole.”

  WRONG FOOT, Lucas thought. To Stack: “We can’t find Gabriella. Her mother tells us that you were out together last night, and Gabriella broke it off with you…”

  “Who’s Gabriella?” the woman asked.

  “How ya doing?” Shrake asked. He winked at her, and pointed up at the paintings. “Is this you?”

  “No,” the woman said, with frost.

  “Gabriella’s a potential model,” Stack said to her. Then to Lucas: “Look, she didn’t break anything off, because there was nothing to break off. We went down to Baker’s Square and had a sandwich, and we couldn’t make a deal on my new project, and I said, ‘Okay,’ and she said, ‘Okay,’ and that was it. She took off.” He shrugged and pushed his hands into his jeans pocket.

  “You go there together?” Shrake asked.

  “No. We met there.”

  “Where were you last night?” Lucas asked.

  “Here,” Stack said. He turned to the woman: “With her.”

  “He was,” the woman said. To Stack: “This Gabriella’s just a model?”

  “Just a model,” Stack agreed.

  “What kind of a car do you drive?” Lucas asked.

  “An E-Class Mercedes-Benz station wagon.”

  “What color?” Lucas asked.

  “Black,” Stack said.

  “You must do pretty well for yourself,” Shrake said. “A Benz.”

  “It’s a ’ninety-four,” Stack said. “I bought it used, with eighty-nine thousand miles on it.”

  “Where’s the van—the one you use for moving paintings?” Lucas asked.

  Stack was mystified: “What van? I have a friend with a blue pickup, when I’m moving big sheets of plywood, but I never used a van.”

  “Did you know Marilyn Coombs?” Lucas asked.

  “No. Gabriella told me about her dying and about you guys investigating,” Stack said. “In fact, I think she sorta had the hots for you.”

  “For Lucas?” Shrake asked skeptically.

  “If you’re the guy who took her around her grandmother’s house,” Stack said to Lucas. “Yeah.”

  “What’d you mean by ‘had’?” Shrake asked. “You said she ‘had’ the hots for Lucas. Do you think she’s dead? Or just stopped having the hots?”

  “Hell, you’re the guys who think she’s dead,” Stack said. “That’s the way you’re talking.”

  “Did she say where she was going last night?” Lucas asked.

  “Well, yeah,” Stack said. “She said she had to go because you—or somebody—asked her to go through her grandma’s papers. Looking for clues, or something. Is that, uh…Where’d she disappear from, anyway?”

  Lucas looked at Shrake, felt an emotional squeeze of fear and the cold finger of depression. “Bad,” he said. “Bad. Goddamnit to hell, this is bad.”

  THEY PUSHED the painter for another ten minutes, then Lucas left Shrake with Stack and the woman, to get details of where they were overnight, to get an ID on the woman, to probe for holes in their stories.

  On the way out to the car, Smith called: “We got a van. A two thousand one Chevy Express, looks to be a pale tan, but one of the geniuses here tells me that could be the light. It might be white. It went past the halfway house three times on Friday night, the night the storm came in. Can’t see the occupants, but we think the tag is Wisconsin and we think we know two letters, but we can’t make out the other letter or the numbers. We’re going to send it off to the feds, see if they can do some photo magic with it. In the meantime, we’re sorting vans out by the letters we know.”

  “That’s something,” Lucas said. “Listen, feed every name you’ve got associated with Bucher into the computer. I’ll get you all the names I can pull out of the Donaldson and Toms files, and the Coombs stuff. Find that van…Once we know who we’re looking for…”

  “Get me the names,” Smith said.

  “And listen: do me a favor,” Lucas said. “Go see this girl in the Kline case, her name is Jesse Barth. She lives up on Grand, her mother is Kathy, they’re in the phone book. Have her look at the van. See if she thinks it might be the same one.”

  “If it is…what does that mean?” Smith asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m freakin’ out here, man. Just have her look at it, okay?”

  “Okay,” Smith said. “I’ll tell you something else: I’m gonna get that fuckin’ Ronnie Lash and turn his ass into a cop.”

  LUCAS WAS in a hurry now, with Gabriella missing.

  He kept thinking, The quilts, the van, the pipe; the quilts, the van, the pipe. The quilts, the van, the pipe…

  He couldn’t get at the van. Too many of them and he didn’t have a starting place, unless Smith or the feds came up with something. The pipe didn’t make any difference, unless he found the actual pipe that did the killing; a killer could buy as much pipe as he wanted at Home Depot.

  That left the quilts. Gabriella had said that her mother was messing with quilts. He got in the car, and pointed it toward the Coombs house, got Lucy Coombs on the phone: “Her friends say anything?”

  “Nobody’s seen her. Oh, God, where’s my baby?”

  “I’m coming over,” Lucas said.

  LUCY COOMBS LIVED in the Witch Hat neighborhood off University Avenue, in an olive-green clapboard house with a stone wall separating the front yard from the sidewalk. The yard had no grass, but was an overgrown jumble of yellow and pink roses, and leggy perennials yet to flower. The house had a damp, mossy, friendly look, with a flagstone pathway running from the front stoop around the side of the house and out of sight.

  The front door was open and Lucas banged on the loosely hung screen door. He could hear people talking, and felt a twitch of hope: Had Gabriella shown up? Then a heavyset woman in a purple shift and long dangly earrings came to the door, said, “Yes?”

  Lucas identified hi
mself and the woman pushed the door open and whispered, “Anything?”

  “No.”

  “Lucy is terrified,” she said.

  Lucas nodded. “I have to talk to her about her mother…”

  THERE WERE THREE more unknown women in the kitchen with Coombs. Lucy Coombs saw him and shuffled forward, shoulders rounded, hands up in front of her as though she might punch him: “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “We’re looking, I’ve got the St. Paul cops out looking around, we’re pushing every button we know.”

  She wanted to shout at him, and to cry; she was crippled with fear: “You’ve got to find her. I can’t stand this, you’ve got to find her.”

  Lucas said, “Please, please, talk to me about your mother.”

  “She was murdered, too, wasn’t she?” Coombs asked. “They killed her and came back and took my baby…”

  “Do you have any idea…who’re they?”

  “I don’t know—the people who killed her.”

  Lucas said, intent on Coombs: “This thing is driving me crazy. We have three dead women, and one missing. Two of them were involved in antiques, but your mother wasn’t—but she had one antique that was taken, and then maybe returned, by somebody who may also have taken a quilting basket.”

  “And Gabriella,” Coombs blurted.

  Lucas nodded. “Maybe.”

  “It’s the Armstrong quilts,” one of the women said. “The curses.”

  Lucas looked at her: She was older, thin, with dry skin and a pencil-thin nose. “The curses…the ones sewn into the quilts? Gabriella told me…”