Invisible Prey (32 page)

“This does not,” Lucas said to Sandy, “seem like the biography of a woman who came into an untaxed quarter-million bucks a few years ago.”

“It isn’t,” Sandy said. “I’ll keep looking, but if she’s got the money, she’s hidden it pretty well. Did you ever think about the possibility that she just bought antiques? That her house is her bank?”

“I’ve been in her house. It’s not full of antiques.”

“Well, maybe there’s a big lump of cash moldering in the basement. But if I were her, I would have spent at least some of it on a new car.”

“Yeah. Damnit. This isn’t turning out the way I thought it would,” Lucas said.

H
E SENT
S
ANDY
back to the salt mines—actually, an aging Dell computer and a stool—to continue the research, and called Jenkins: “You talk to Shrake?”

“Yeah. We figure to start tracking her tonight. We don’t know what she looks like, so trying to pick her up outside that foundation…that’d be tough.”

“Tonight’s fine. I wasn’t serious about twenty-four hours…put her to bed, keep her there for half an hour, pick her up in the morning,” Lucas said. “Mostly, I want to know who she hangs with. Need a big guy: somebody who could snatch Jesse Barth off the street.”

F
LOWERS LOUNGED
in the door, looking too fresh. “Sat up most of the night with the Barths. They’re scared spitless,” he said.

“Well, they got a firebomb through the kitchen window. They say.”

“Oh, they did,” Flowers said. He moved over to the visitor’s chair, sat down, and propped one foot on the edge of Lucas’s desk. “I talked to the arson guy—there was no glass in the sink, but there was some burned stuff that he thinks is what’s left of a half-gallon paper milk jug. Probably had a burning rag stuck in the spout. Said it’d be like throwing a ball of gas through the window; better than a bottle.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.” He propped another foot over the first. “He says wine bottles work fine if you’re throwing them onto tanks, but if you throw them onto an ordinary kitchen floor, half the time they’ll just bounce along, and not break.”

“Really,” Lucas said.

“Yup. So what’re we doing?”

“I got this concept…”

“We needed a concept,” Flowers said. “Like, bad.”

Lucas explained about Amity Anderson. Flowers listened and said, “So call this chick at the Walker and find out if she dealt with Amity Anderson on the Bucher deal.”

Lucas nodded: “I was about to do that.”

A
LICE
S
CHIRMER
was mildly pissed: “Well, we got the court order, and your lab person was here, and we butchered the quilt. Hope you’re happy.”

Lucas had the feeling that she was posing. He had no time for that, and snapped: “There are several people dead, and one missing and probably dead. For an inch of thread or whatever…”

“I’m sorry, let’s start over,” she said quickly. “Hello, this is Alice.”

Lucas took a breath. “When you dealt with Bucher on the quilt, did you ever meet a woman named Amity Anderson?”

“Amity? I know Amity Anderson, but she wasn’t involved in the Bucher bequest,” Schirmer said.

“Where do you know her from? Amity?” Lucas asked.

“She works for a foundation here that provides funding for the arts.”

“That’s it? You don’t know her socially, or know who she hangs with, or know about any ties that might take her back to Bucher?”

“No, I’ve never mixed with her socially,” Schirmer said. “I know she was associated for a while with a man named Don Harvey, but Don moved to Chicago to run the New Gallery there. That was a couple of years ago.”

“A boyfriend?”

“Yes. They were together for a while, but I don’t know what she’s been up to lately,” Schirmer said.

“Uh, just a moment.” Lucas took the phone away from his face and frowned.

Flowers asked, “What?”

Lucas went back to the phone. “I had understood…from a source…that Amity Anderson is gay.”

“Amity? No-o-o, or maybe, you know, she likes a little of both,” Schirmer said. “She definitely had a relationship with Don, and knowing Don, there was nothing platonic about it. With good ol’ Don, it was the more, the merrier.”

“Huh. What does Don look like? Football-player type?”

She laughed. “No. He’s a little shrimp with a big mouth and supposedly, a gargantuan…You know. I doubt that he ever lifted anything heavier than a glass of scotch.”

“You say he runs a gallery,” Lucas said. “An antique gallery? Or would he know about antiques?”

“He’s a paintings-and-prints guy. Amity’s an antique savant, though,” Schirmer said. “I expect she’ll wind up as a dealer someday. If she can get the capital.”

“Okay. Listen, keep this conversation to yourself,” Lucas said.

“Sure,” she said.

“And that thread…”

“From the butchered quilt?” Now she was kidding.

“That one. Is it on the way back here?” Lucas asked.

“It is. Your man left here more than an hour ago.”

L
UCAS SAID
to Flowers, “Amity Anderson lied to me, in a way most people wouldn’t do. I asked her about boyfriends and she said she’s gay. I bought it at the time—but it turns out she’s not.”

“That make’s a difference?” Flowers asked.

“It does if you need somebody large to carry a fifty-thousand-dollar table,” Lucas said. “Somebody you can trust with murder.”

T
HE LAB MAN SAID,
“We’ve got tests to do, but I took a look at it with a ’scope: it’s identical. I mean, identical. I’d be ninety-seven percent surprised if it didn’t come off the same spool. We’re gonna do some tests on the dye, and so on, just to nail it down.”

“The curator said you really butchered the quilt.”

“Yeah. We took a half-inch of loose thread off an overturned corner. You couldn’t find the same spot without a searchlight and a bloodhound.”

L
UCAS HUNG UP.
Flowers again asked, “What?”

“There was a major fraud, probably turned over a half-million dollars or so, involving all these people. Think that’s enough to kill for?”

“You can go across the river in the wintertime and get killed for a ham sandwich,” Flowers said. “But you told me it was a theft, not a fraud.”

“Here’s what I think now,” Lucas said. “I think they all got to know each other through this fraud. That may have seemed like a little game. Or maybe, the rich people didn’t even know the quilts were fake. But that opened the door to these guys, who looked around, and cooked up another idea—get to know these people a little, figure out what they had, and how much it was worth, and then, kill them to get it.”

“Kind of crude, for arty people.”

“Not crude,” Lucas said. “Very selective. You had to know exactly what you were doing. You take a few high-value things, but it has to be the obscure stuff. Maybe the stuff kept in an attic, and forgotten about. An old painting that was worth five hundred dollars, when you bought it fifty years ago, but now it’s worth half a million. They looked for people who were isolated by time: old, widows and widowers, with heirlooms going back a hundred or a hundred and fifty years. So a few pieces are missing, a pot here, a table there, a painting from the attic, who’s going to know? Some distant nephew? Who’s going to know?”

Flowers stood up, stuffed his hands in his pockets, wandered over and looked at a five-foot-tall wall map of Minnesota. “It’s the kind of thing that could piss you off,” he said. “If you’re civilized at all.”

“Yeah. You can’t get crazier than that, except that, for money…you can kind of understand it, in its own insane way. But now they’re starting to swat people who just get in the way.” He peered past Flowers at the wall map. “Where the fuck is Gabriella Coombs? Where are you, honey?”

19

L
UCAS WAS SITTING
in the den with a drawing pad and pen, trying to figure how to get at Amity Anderson, when his cell phone rang. He slipped it out of his pocket and looked at the caller ID: Shrake. He glanced at his watch: ten minutes after midnight. Shrake had taken over the surveillance of Amity Anderson, and was due to go home. He flipped open the phone: “Yeah?”

“What, you put me and Jenkins on the gay patrol, right? We pissed you off, so you sent Jenkins to watch Boy Kline, and now…”

“What are you talking about?”

“Amity Anderson went on a date, lot of kissy-face, had dinner, spent three hours at her date’s town house, and now we’re headed back to Anderson’s house. Soon as I get her in bed, I’m going back to her date’s place and see if
I
can get a date,” Shrake said.

“She
is
gay?”

“Either that or she’s dating the swellest looking guy I’ve ever seen,” Shrake said. “World-class ass, and red hair right down to it.”

“Goddamnit. Anderson’s supposed to have a boyfriend,” Lucas said.

“I can’t help you there, Lucas. Her date tonight definitely wasn’t a boy,” Shrake said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Go home.”

“You don’t want an overnight?”

“Nah. We’re looking for her friends,” Lucas said. “Give it half an hour after lights-out…Hell, give it an hour…then go on home. Jenkins’ll pick her up in the morning.”

I
N THE MORNING,
after Weather and Letty had gone, and the housekeeper had settled in with Sam, Lucas went out to the garage, and walked around the nose of the Porsche to a door in the side wall. The door opened to the flight of steps that went up to what the builders called a “bonus room”—a semi-finished warm-storage loft above the garage.

Lucas had supervised the construction of the house from top to bottom, had driven the builders crazy with questions and unwanted advice, had issued six dozen change orders, and, in the end, had gotten it right; and when the builders had walked away, satisfied, he’d added a couple things on his own.

He looked back over his shoulder to the entry from the house, then knelt on the bottom landing, groped under the edge of the tread of the first step, felt the metal edge. He worked it for a moment with his fingernail, and it folded out, like the blade of a pocketknife.

He pulled on the blade, hard, and the face of the step popped loose. A drawer. He would have bet that not even a crime-scene crew could have found it. Inside, he kept his special cop stuff: two cold pistols with magazines; a homemade silencer that fit none of his guns, and that he kept meaning to throw away, but never had; an old-fashioned lead-and-leather sap; a hydraulic door-spreader that he’d picked up from a burglary site; five thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills in a paper bank envelope; an amber-plastic bottle of amphetamines; a box of surgical gloves lifted from Weather’s office; and a battery-powered lock rake.

The rake was about the size and shape of an electric toothbrush. He took it out of the drawer, along with a couple of latex gloves, slipped the drawer back in place, pushed the blade-grip back in place, and took the rake and gloves to his truck.

Back inside the house, he got Weather’s digital camera, a pocketsized Canon G7, got his jacket, and told the housekeeper he was leaving. Kissed Sam.

On the phone to Jenkins: “You still got her?”

“Y
EAH
. She just got in the elevator. So what do I do now, sit on my ass?”

“Ah…yeah,” Lucas said. “Go on over and sit in the Starbucks.”

“Listen, if she wants to get out, there’s a back stairs that comes out on the other side of the building,” Jenkins said. “Or she can walk down into the Skyways off the elevators on the second floor, or she could come all the way down and walk out the front door. There’s too much I can’t see, and if I guess wrong, I’ll be standing here with my dick in my hand.”

“She shouldn’t have any idea that we’re watching her, so she’s not gonna be sneaking around,” Lucas said.

“I’m just saying,” Jenkins warned. “We either get three or four guys over here, or she could walk on us.”

“I know what you’re saying. Just…sit. Call me if you see her moving.”

H
ER HOUSE WAS
two minutes away in the truck. He parked under a young maple tree, a half block out, watched the street for a moment, then slipped the rake in one pocket, the camera and gloves in the other, and walked down to her door. The door was right out in the open, but with tall ornamental cedars on each side. A dental office building was across the street, with not much looking at him.

He rang the doorbell, holding it for a long time, listening to the muffled buzz. No reaction; no movement, no footfalls. He rang it again, then pulled open the storm door, as if talking to somebody inside, and pushed the lock-snake into the crappy 1950s Yale. The rake chattered for a moment, then the lock turned in his hand. He was in.

“Hello?” he called. “Hello? Amity? Amity?”

Nothing. A little sunlight through the front window, dappling the carpet and the back of the couch; little sparkles of dust in the light of the doorway to the kitchen. “Amity?”

He stepped inside, shut the door, pulled on the latex gloves, did a quick search for a security system. Got a jolt when he found a keypad inside the closet next to the front door. And then noticed that the ’80s-style liquid-crystal read-out was dead.

He pushed a couple of number-buttons: nothing.

He could risk it, he thought. If the cops came, maybe talk his way out of it. But still: move quick. He hurried through the house, looking for anything that might be construed as an antique. Found a music box—was she a music-box collector? That would be interesting. He took a picture of it. Up to the bedroom, taking shots of an oil painting, a rocking chair, a drawing, a chest of drawers that seemed too elegant for the bedroom.

Into the bathroom: big tub, marijuana and scented candle wax, bottles of alprazolam and Ambien in the medicine cabinet. Stress? Under the sink, a kit in a velvet bag. He’d seen kits like that, from years ago, but what…He opened it: ah, sure. A diaphragm. So she swung both ways. Or had, at one time.

His cell phone rang, and vibrated at the same time, in his pocket, nearly giving him a heart attack.