Invisible Prey

  Nobody waiting. And she thought, No Les, no more. She made a smile-look, reflecting at her own courage, her own ability to operate under pressure. It was like being a spy, almost…

  WITH ONE MORE mission that night. She backed the car out of the garage, took the narrow streets out to I-494, watching the mirror, took 494 to I-35, and headed south. The country place wasn’t that far out, down past the Northfield turnoff to County 1, and east with a few jogs to the south, into the Cannon River Valley.

  The country place comprised forty acres of senile maple and box elder along the west or north bank of the Cannon, depending on how you looked at it, with a dirt track leading back to it. Her lights bored a hole through the cornfields on either side of the track, the wheels dropping into washouts and pots, until she punched through to the shack.

  When they first bought it, they talked of putting up a little cabin that didn’t smell like mold—the shack smelled like it had been built from mold—with a porch that looked out over the river, and Leslie could fish for catfish and Jane could quilt.

  In the end, they put up a metal building with good locks, and let the shack slide into ruin. The cabin was never built because, in fact, Leslie was never much interested in catfish, and Jane never got the quilt-making thing going. There was too much to do in the Cities, too much to see, too much to buy. Couldn’t even get the Internet at the shack. It was like a hillbilly patch, or something.

  But a good place to stash stolen antiques.

  She let herself into the shed, fumbling in her headlights with the key. Inside, she turned on the interior lights and then went back and turned off the car lights. She took the amber prescription bottle from her pocket, and rolled it under the front seat of the van.

  From her purse, she got a lint roller, peeled it to get fresh tape, and rolled it over the driver’s seat. They were always fastidious about the van, wearing hairnets and gloves and jumpsuits, in case they had to ditch it. There shouldn’t be a problem, but she was playing with her life.

  She rolled it, and then rolled it again, and a third time.

  Then she took the wad of hair from her pocket.

  Looked at it, and thought, soap. Nibbled at her lip, sighed, thought, do it right, and walked over to the shack and went inside. They kept the pump turned off, so she had to wait for it to cycle and prime, and then to pump out some crappy, shitty water, waiting until it cleared. When it was, she rinsed the wad of hair—nasty—and then patted it dry on a paper towel.

  When it was dry, she pulled out a few strands, pinched them in the paper towel, and carried them back to the van. Two here, curled over the back of the seat, not too obvious, and another one here, on the back edge of the seat. She took the rest of the hair and wiped it roughly across the back of the seat, hoping to get some breaks and split ends…

  Good as she could do, she thought. That was all she had.

  JANE WIDDLER was home in bed at two A.M. There were no calls on her phone, and the neighborhood was dark when she pulled into the garage. Upstairs, she lit some scented candles and sank into the bathtub, letting the heat carry away her worries.

  Didn’t work.

  She lay awake in the night like a frightened bat, waiting for the day to come, for the police, for disgrace, for humiliation, for lawyers.

  LUCAS, on the other hand, slept like a log until five-thirty, when his cop sense woke him up. The cop sense had been pricked by a flashing red light on the curtains at the side of the house, the pulsing red light sneaking in under the bottom of the blackout shades.

  He cracked his eyes, thought, the cops. What the hell was it? Then he heard a siren, and another one.

  He slipped out of bed—Weather had no cop sense, and would sleep soundly until six, unless Sam cried out—and walked to the window, pulled back one side of the shade. Two cop cars, just up the street, then a third arriving, all gathered around a dark sedan.

  What the hell? It looked and smelled like a crime scene.

  He got into his jeans and golf shirt, and slipped sockless feet into loafers, and let himself out the front door. As he came across the lawn, his ankles wet with dew, one of the St. Paul cops recognized him. “Where’re you coming from?” the cop asked.

  “I live right there,” Lucas said. “What’ve you got?”

  “Guy ate his gun,” the cop said. “But he was up to something…You live right there?”

  But Lucas was looking in the back window of what he now knew was a Lexus, a Lexus with a bullet hole in the roof above the back window, and at the dead fat face of Leslie Widdler.

  “Ah, no,” he said. “Ah, Jesus…”

  “What? You know him?” the cop asked.

  23

  ROSE MARIE ROUX came steaming through the front door, high heels, nylons, political-red skirt and jacket, white blouse, big hair. She spotted Lucas and demanded, “Are you all right?”

  Lucas was chewing on an apple. He swallowed and said, “I’m fine. My case blew up, but I’m fuckin’ wonderful.”

  “What’s this about a guy with a rifle?” Rose Marie said. “They said a guy with a rifle was waiting for you.”

  “Must have changed his mind,” Lucas said. “Come on. Everything’s still there. You saw the cops when you came in?”

  “Of course. A convention. So tell me about it.”

  A GUY WAS out running shortly after first light, Lucas told her. He was a marathoner, running out of his home, weaving down the Minneapolis side of the Mississippi, across the Ford Bridge into St. Paul, weaving some more—he tried to get exactly six miles in—north to the Lake Street Bridge and back across the river to Minneapolis.

  One of his zigs took him around the corner from Lucas’s house. As he approached the Lexus, in the early-morning light, he noticed a splash on the back window that looked curiously like blood in a thriller movie. As he passed the car, he glanced into the backseat and saw the white face and open mouth of a dead fat man, with a rifle lying across his belly.

  “Freaked me out when I looked in there,” Lucas admitted. “Last thing in the world that I expected. Leslie Widdler.”

  “Better him than you,” Rose Marie said. “What kind of rifle? If he’d taken a shot at you?”

  “A .300 Mag,” Lucas said. “Good for elk, caribou, moose. If he’d shot me with that thing, my ass’d have to take the train back from Ohio.”

  “Nice that you can joke about it,” Rose Marie said.

  “I’m not laughing,” Lucas said. They walked up to a cop who was keeping a sharp eye on the yellow crime-scene tape. Lucas pointed at Rose Marie and said, “Rose Marie Roux. Department of Public Safety.”

  The cop lifted the tape, and asked her, “Can I have a job?”

  She patted him once on the cheek. “I’m sure you’re too nice a boy to work for me.”

  “Hey, I’m not,” the cop said to her back. “I’m a jerk. Really.” To Lucas, as Lucas ducked under the tape, “Seriously. I’m an asshole.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Lucas said.

  ROSE MARIE HAD briefly been a street cop before she moved into administration, law school, politics, and power. She walked carefully down the route suggested by one of the crime-scene cops, cocked an eye in the window, looked at Widdler, backed away, and said, “That made a mark.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He killed Bucher? For sure?” she asked.

  “He and his wife, I think. I don’t know what all of this is about—except…You’ve been briefed on the Jesse Barth kidnapping attempt, and the firebombing.”

  She nodded: “Screw the pooch.”

  “The Screw thing and bomb, might have been an…effort, attempt, something…to distract me,” Lucas said. “To get me looking at something else, while the Bucher thing went away. Might have worked, too, except for the white van, and then Gabriella.” He scratched his head. “Man, is this a mess, or what?”

  “Then he decided on direct action, shooting you with a moose gun, but chickened out and shot himself instead?” She was dubious.

  ??
?That’s what I got,” Lucas said. “Doesn’t make me happy.”

  “What about the wife?”

  “As soon as the crime-scene guys get finished with the basics, we’re going to lift up Leslie’s pant legs,” Lucas said. “See if he’s got Screw holes. If he does, we go have an unpleasant talk with Jane.”

  “If he doesn’t?”

  “We’ll still have an unpleasant conversation with Jane. Then everybody’ll talk to lawyers and we go back into the weeds to figure out what to do next,” Lucas said.

  “How much of this would have happened if Burt Kline hadn’t been banging a teenager?”

  Lucas had to think about it, finally sighed: “Maybe…there’d be one or two more people alive, but we wouldn’t solve the Bucher case.”

  THEY WERE STANDING, talking, when John Smith showed up, looking sleepy, said, “Really?”—looked into the car, said, “Holy shit.”

  “You want to come along and talk to Jane?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah,” Smith said. “This whole thing is…” He waved a hand in the air; couldn’t think of a phrase for it.

  “Screwed up?” Rose Marie offered.

  EVENTUALLY F OUR GUYS from the Medical Examiner’s Office carefully lifted, pulled, and rolled Leslie Widdler’s body out of the Lexus and onto a ground-level gurney. “Guy shoulda worn a wide-load sign,” one of them said. When they got him flat, one of the ME investigators asked Lucas, “Which leg?”

  “Both,” Lucas said.

  They only needed the first one. Widdler’s left leg was riddled with what looked like small-caliber gunshot wounds, surrounded by half-dollar-sized bruises going yellow at the edges. There were a few oohs and aahs from the crowd. Though they didn’t really need it, they pulled up the other pant leg and found more bites.

  “Good enough for me,” Smith said. “DNA will confirm it, but that, my friends, is what happens when you fuck with a pit bull.”

  “Half pit bull,” Lucas said.

  “What was the other half?” Rose Marie asked.

  “Nobody knows,” Lucas said. “Probably a rat terrier.”

  ON THE WAY to Widdler’s, Lucas and Smith talked about an arrest. They believed that Leslie had been bitten by a dog, but had no proof that Screw had done the biting. That was yet to come, with the DNA tests. But DNA tests take a while. They knew there had been a second person involved, a driver. They knew that Jane Widdler had probably profited from at least three killings, in the looting of the Donaldson, Bucher, and Toms mansions, but they didn’t have a single piece of evidence that would prove it.

  “We push her,” Smith said. “We read her rights to her, we push, see if she says anything. We make the call.”

  “We take her over to look at Leslie, put some stress on her,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a warrant coming, both for her house and the shop. I’ll have my guys sit on both places…look for physical evidence, records. We’ll let her know that, maybe crack her on the way to see Leslie.”

  “If she doesn’t crack?”

  “We do the research. We’ll get her sooner or later,” Lucas said. “There’s no way Leslie Widdler pulled these killings off on his own. No way.”

  THE THING ABOUT BOTOX, Lucas thought later, was that when you’d had too much, as Jane Widdler had, you then had to fake reactions just to look human—and it’s impossible to distinguish real fake reactions from fake fake reactions.

  Widdler was at her shop, working the telephone, her back to the door, when Lucas and Smith trailed in, the bell tinkling overhead. Widdler was alone, and turned, saw them, sat up, made a fake look of puzzlement, and said into the phone, “I’ve got to go. I’ve got visitors.”

  She hung up, then stood, tense, vibrating, gripped the back of the chair, and said, “What?”

  “You seem…Do you know?” Lucas asked, tilting his head.

  “Where’s my husband?” The question wasn’t tentative; it came out as a demand.

  Lucas looked at Smith, who said, “Well, Mrs. Widdler, there’s been a tragedy…”

  A series of tiny muscular twitches crossed her face: “Oh, God,” she said. “I knew it. Where is he? What happened to him?”

  Lucas said, “Mrs. Widdler, he apparently took his own life.”

  “Oh, no!” she shouted. Again, Lucas couldn’t tell if it was real or faked. It looked fake…but then, it would. “He wouldn’t do that, would he?” she cried. “Leslie wouldn’t…Did he jump? Did he jump?”

  “I’m afraid he shot himself,” Smith said.

  “Oh, no. No. That’s not Leslie,” Widdler said. She half turned and dropped into the chair, and made a weeping look, and might have produced a tear. “Leslie would never…his face wasn’t…was he hurt?”

  Lucas thought, If she’s faking it, she’s good. Her questions were crazy in pretty much the right way.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us, to make a technical identification of the body, but there’s really no doubt,” Smith said. “Both Lucas and I know him, of course…Where did you think he was last night? Was he here? Did he go out early?”

  Widdler looked away, her voice hesitant, breaking. “He…never came home.”

  “Had he ever done that before?”

  “Only…yes. I don’t think…well, he wouldn’t have done it again, under the same circumstances…” Her face was turned up at them, eyes wide, asking for an explanation. “But why? Why would he hurt himself? He had everything to live for…”

  She made the weeping face again, and Lucas thought, Jeez.

  Smith said, “There are some other problems associated with his death, Mrs. Widdler. Some illegal activity has turned up, and we think you know about it. We have to inform you that you have the right to remain silent, that anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney…”

  “Oh, God!” She was horrified by the ritual words. “You can’t think I did anything?”

  THEY WERE IN Lucas’s truck, but Smith drove. Lucas sat in the back with Widdler. Lucas asked, “How well did you know Claire Donaldson?”

  “Donaldson? From Chippewa Falls?”

  “Yes.”

  Widdler made a frownie look: “Well, I knew of her, but I never met her personally. We bought some antiques from her estate sale, of course, it was a big event for this area. Why?”

  “Your husband murdered her,” Lucas said.

  “You shut up,” Jane Widdler shouted. “You shut up. Leslie wouldn’t hurt anybody…”

  “And Mrs. Bucher and a man named Toms in Des Moines. Did you know Mrs. Bucher or Mr. Toms?”

  She had covered her head with her arms; hadn’t simply buried her face in her hands, but had wrapped her arms around her skull, her face slumped almost into her lap, and she said, “I’m not listening. I’m not listening.”

  SHE SNUFFLED and wept and groaned and wept some more and dug in her purse for the crumpled Kleenex that all women are apparently required to carry, and rubbed her nostrils raw with it, and Lucas stuck her again.

  “Do you know a woman named Amity Anderson?”

  The snuffling stopped, and Widdler uncoiled, her eyes rimmed with red, her voice thick with mucus, and she asked, “What does that bitch have to do with this?”

  “You know her?” Getting somewhere.

  She looked down in her purse, took out the crumpled Kleenex, wiped her nose again, looked out the window at the houses along Randolph Street, and said, “I know her.”

  “How long?” Looking for a lie.

  “Since college,” Widdler said. “She…knew Leslie before I did.”

  “Knew him? Had a relationship with him?” Smith asked, eyes in the rearview mirror.

  Snuffle: “Yes.”

  Lucas asked, “Did, uh…were there ever any indications that a relationship continued?”

  She leaned her head against the side window, staring at the back of Smith’s head; the morning light through the glass was harsh on her face, making her look older and paler and tougher and Ger
man, like a fifteenth-century portrait by Hans Memling or a twentieth-century farm woman by Grant Wood. “Yes.”

  “When you say yes…?”

  “When he stayed out all night…that’s where he was,” she said.

  “With Amity Anderson,” Lucas said.

  “Yes. She had some kind of hold on him. Some kind of emotional hold on him. Goddamn her.” Turning to Lucas, teeth bared: “Why are you asking about her? How is she involved in this?”

  Lucas looked back at her, and saw a puzzle of Botox tics and hair spray, expensive jewelry and ruined makeup. “I don’t know,” he said.

  WHEN LESLIE WIDDLER was in the car, he looked somewhat dead. There might have been other possibilities, that he was drunk or drugged, sprawled uncomfortably in the backseat of the car, at least until you saw the hole in his temple.

  At the ME’s, they had peeled him out of the body bag and placed him on a steel table, ready to do a rush autopsy. There, under the harsh white lights, he looked totally dead, pale as a slab of Crisco. His expensive black alligator driving shoes pointed almost sideways, his tongue was visible at the side of his mouth, his eyes were still open. He looked surprised, in a dead way.

  Jane blinked and walked away. “Yes,” she said as she went, and outside the examining room, she crumbled into a chair.

  Lucas said, “We’ll ask you to wait here. Detective Smith and I have to discuss the situation.”

  They walked just far enough down the hall to be out of earshot, and Lucas asked, “What do you think?”

  “I don’t think we’ve got an arrest,” Smith said. “What about the warrants?”

  “We got crime scene both at her house and the business. If you want to send along a couple guys…”

  “I’ll do that,” Smith said. He looked down the hall at Jane Widdler. “Cut her loose?”