Invisible Prey

spent two hours, looking at virtually every piece of paper in the place. Nothing. He moved to the third-floor storage room, with the file cabinets. A small, narrow room, cool; only one light, hanging bare from the ceiling, and no place to sit. Dusty…
    He went down the hall, found a chair, and carried it back across the creaking plank floor. As he put the chair down, he thought he heard footsteps, down below, someplace distant, trailing off to silence. The hair rose on the back of his neck. He stepped to the doorway, called, “Hello? Hello?”
    Nothing but the air moving through the air conditioners. A light seemed to flicker in the stairway, and he waited, but nothing else moved. The hair was still prickling on the back of his neck, when he went back to the paper.
    An amazing amount of junk that people kept: old school papers, newspaper clippings, recipes, warranties and instruction books, notebooks, sketchpads, Christmas, Easter, and birthday cards, postcards from everywhere, old letters, theater programs, maps, remodeling contracts, property-tax notices. An ocean of it.
    A current of cold air touched the back of his neck and he shivered; as though somebody had passed in the hallway. He stepped to the door again, looked down the silent hall.
    Ghosts. The thought trickled through his mind and he didn’t laugh. He didn’t believe in them, but he didn’t laugh, either, and had never been attracted to the idea of screwing around in a cemetery at night. Two people killed here, their killers not found, blood still drying in the old woodwork…the silence seemed to grow from the hallway walls; except for the soft flowing sound of the air conditioner.
    He went back to the paper, feeling his skin crawl. There was nobody else in the house: he knew it, and still…
     
    T HE PHONE BUZZED, and almost gave him his second heart attack of the day.
    He took it out of his pocket, looked at it: out-of-area. He said, “Hello?”
    There was a pause and then a vaguely metallic man’s voice said, “Hi! This is Tom Drake! We’ll be doing some work in your neighborhood next week, sealing driveways. As a homeowner…”
    “Fuck you,” Lucas said, slamming the phone shut. Almost killed by a computer voice.
    He found a file, two inches thick, of receipts for furniture purchases. Began to go through it, but all the furniture had been bought through decorators, none of them the Widdlers. Still, he was in the right neighborhood, the furniture neighborhood.
    The phone took a third shot at his heart: it buzzed again, he jumped again, swore, looked at the screen: out-of-area. He clicked it open: “Hello?”
    “Lucas? Ah, Agent Davenport? This is…”
    “Sandy. What’s up?” Lucas thought he heard something in the hallway, and peeked out. Nobody but the spirits. He turned back into the room.
    Sandy said, “I got your Widdlers. The Toms cousin had a file of purchases, and Mr. Toms, the dead man, bought three paintings from them, over about five years. He spent a total of sixteen thousand dollars. There’s also a check for five thousand dollars that just says ‘appraisals,’ but doesn’t say what was appraised.”
    The thrill shook through him. Gotcha. “Okay! Sandy! This is great! That’s exactly what we need—we don’t have to figure out what the appraisals were, all we have to do is show contact. Now, the originals on those papers, can you get them copied?”
    “Yes. They have a Xerox machine right here,” she said.
    “Copy them,” Lucas said. “Leave the originals with your guy there, tell him that the local cops will come get them tomorrow, or maybe somebody from the DCI.”
    “The who?”
    “The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation,” Lucas said. “I got a friend down there, he can tell us how to deal with the documents. But bring the copies back with you. When can you get here?”
    “Tonight. I can leave in twenty minutes,” she said. “I’d like to get a sandwich or something.”
    “Do what you’ve got to,” Lucas said. “Call me when you get back.”
    He slapped the phone shut. This was just exactly…
     
    A MAN SPOKE from six inches behind his ear. “So what’s up?”
    Lucas lurched across the narrow room, nearly falling over the chair, catching himself on the file cabinet with one hand, the other flailing for his gun, his heart trying to bore through his rib cage.
    John Smith, smile fading, stood in the doorway, looked at Lucas’s face, and asked, “What?”
    “Jesus Christ, I almost shot