Invisible Prey Read Online Free PDF Page B

a little odd, if it’s just local assholes.”
    Smith rubbed his lip, then said, “Yeah, I know. I saw that. Maybe in a hurry?”
    “They had time to trash the place,” Lucas said. “Must have been in here for half an hour.”
    “So…”
    “Maybe somebody asked them not to,” Lucas said.
    “You think?” They were talking about the Lash kid.
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “They stole the game console, but not the games? I don’t know. Maybe check and see if Lash has another console at home.”
     
    L UCAS FOUND Rose Marie in the small kitchen talking with the state representative for the district, an orange-haired woman with a black mustache who was leaking real tears, brushing them away with a Kleenex. Lucas came up and Rose Marie said, “You know Kathy. She and Mrs. Bucher were pretty close.”
    “I-ba-I-ba-I-ba…” Kathy said.
    “She identified the bodies,” Rose Marie said. “She lives two doors up the street.”
    “I-ba-I-ba…”
    Lucas would have felt sorrier for her if she hadn’t been such a vicious political wolverine, married to a vicious plaintiffs’ attorney. And he couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for her anyway. “You oughta sit down,” he said. “You look tippy.”
    “Come on,” Rose Marie said, taking the other woman’s arm. “I’ll get you a couch.” To Lucas: “Back in a minute.”
     
    T HE KITCHEN had been tossed like the rest of house, all the cabinet drawers pulled out, the freezer trays lying on the floor, a flour jar dumped along with several other ceramic containers. Flour was everywhere, mixed with crap from the refrigerator. Dried pickles were scattered around, like olive-drab weenies, and he could smell ketchup and relish, rotting in the sunshine, like the remnants of a three-day-old picnic, or a food tent at the end of the state fair.
    To get out of the mess, Lucas walked through the dining room and stepped out on the back porch, a semicircle of warm yellow stone thirty feet across. Below it, the lawn slipped away to the edge of the bluff, and below that, out of sight, I-35, then United Hospital, then the old jumble of West Seventh, and farther down, the Mississippi. Cops were standing around on the lawn, talking, clusters and groups of two and three, a little cigarette and cigar smoke drifting around, pleasantly acrid. One of the cops was Clark Wain, the guy who’d explored the third floor. Lucas stepped over, said, “Clark,” and Wain said, “Yeah, Lucas, what’s going on?”
    “You went up to the third floor?”
    “Me and a couple of other guys,” Wain said. “Making sure there wasn’t anybody else.”
    “Were there footprints going up? In the dust?”
    “Yeah. We had them photographed but there wasn’t anything to see, really—too many of them,” Wain said. “Looked like people were up there a lot.”
    “Nothing seemed out of place?”
    Wain’s eyes drifted away as he thought it over, then came back to Lucas: “Nothing that hit me at the time. They didn’t trash the place like they did some of the other rooms. Maybe they took a peek and then came back down—if it was even their footprints. Could have been anyone.”
    “All right…” Rose Marie came out on the porch looking for him, and Lucas raised a hand to her. To Wain he said, “Gotta talk to the boss.”
    They stepped back into the dining room. Rose Marie asked, “What do you have going besides Kline?”
    “The Heny killing down in Rochester, that’s still pooping along, and we’ve got a girl’s body down by Jackson, we don’t know what happened there. The feds are pushing for more cooperation on illegal aliens, they want us to put somebody in the packing plants down in Austin…But Kline is the big one. And this.”
    “Did Burt do it?” Rose Marie asked. She and Kline were old political adversaries.
    “Yeah. I don’t know if we can prove it,” Lucas said.
    He told her about the DNA and the size-ten dress, and the girl’s sexual history. She already knew about