Invisible Prey Read Free Page A

said. “Investigating the family jewels.”
    “Well, it is serious,” Lucas said. “She tells the initial investigator…”
    “Who’s that?”
    “Virgil Flowers.”
    “That fuckin’ Flowers,” Sloan said, and he laughed. “Might’ve known.”
    “Yeah. Anyway, she tells Virgil that he’s got semicolons on his balls. And quite a bit of other detail, including the size of what she calls ‘his thing.’ She also provides us with a dress and there’s a semen stain on it. So Virgil gets a search warrant…”
    Sloan giggled, an unattractive sound from a man of his age.
    “…gets a search warrant, and a doctor, and they take a DNA scraping and examine Kline’s testicles,” Lucas said. “Sure enough, it’s like they came out of Microsoft Word: one semicolon on each nut. We got the pictures.”
    “I bet they’re all over the Internet by now,” Sloan said.
    “You’d bet wrong. These are not attractive pictures—and everybody involved knows that their jobs are on the line,” Lucas said. “You don’t mess with Burt Kline unless you can kill him.”
    “Yeah, but the description, the semen…sounds like a big indict to me,” Sloan said.
    “However,” Lucas said.
    “Uh-oh.” Sloan had been a cop for twenty years; he was familiar with howevers.
    “Burt says he never had sex with the daughter, but he did sleep with her mom,” Lucas said. “See, the state pays for an apartment in St. Paul. Kline rents a place from Mom, who owns a duplex on Grand Avenue, what’s left from a divorce settlement. Kline tells Virgil that he’s staying there, doing the people’s work, when Mom starts puttin’ it on him.”
    “Him being such a looker,” Sloan said.
    “Kline resists, but he’s only human. And, she’s got, Virgil believes, certain skills. In fact, Virgil said she’s been around the block so often it looks like a NASCAR track. Anyway, pretty soon Burt is sleeping with Mom every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”
    “How old’s Mom?” Sloan asked.
    “Thirty-four,” Lucas said.
    “With a sixteen-year-old daughter?”
    “Yeah. Mom started young,” Lucas said. “Anyway, Burt says Mom got the idea to blackmail him, because she’s always hurting for money. He says she put the daughter up to it, making the accusation. Burt said that she would have all the necessary grammatical information.”
    “And Mom says…”
    “She said that they had a hasty affair, but that Burt really wanted the daughter, and she was horrified when she found out he’d gotten to her,” Lucas said. “She says no way would she have done what she would have had to do to see the semicolons, or get semen on the neckline of the dress. That’s something that her daughter had to be forced into.”
    “Mom was horrified.”
    “Absolutely,” Lucas said. “So Virgil asks her if she’d gained any weight lately.”
    “She was heavy?”
    “No, not especially. I’d say…solid. Plays broomball in the winter. Blades in the summer. Or, more to the point, about a size ten-twelve. She said no, she hadn’t gained any weight since she had the kid, sixteen years ago. So Virgil points out that the dress with the semen stain is a size ten and the girl herself is about a size four. The kid looks like that fashion model who puts all the cocaine up her nose.”
    “Oooo.” Sloan thought about it for a moment, then asked, “What’s Mom say?”
    “She says that they trade clothes all the time,” Lucas said. “If you want to believe that a size-four fashion-aware teenager is going to drag around in a size ten.”
    “That’s a…problem,” Sloan agreed.
    “Another problem,” Lucas said. “Virgil put the screws on a neighbor boy who seemed to be sniffing around. The neighbor kid says the girl’s been sexually active since she was twelve. That Mom knew it. Maybe encouraged it.”
    “Huh.”
    “So what do you think?” Lucas asked.
    “Mom’s on record saying she doesn’t do oral?” Sloan asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “Jury’s not gonna