Invisible Prey

you,” Lucas rasped.
    “Sorry…I heard you talking and came on up,” Smith said. “I thought you might appreciate some help.”
    “Yeah.” Lucas ran his hands through his hair, shook himself out. His heart was still rattling off his ribs. “It’s just so damn quiet in here.”
    Smith nodded, and looked both ways down the hall: “I spent a couple of evenings by myself. You can hear the ghosts creeping around.”
    “Glad I’m not the only one,” Lucas said. He turned back to the file cabinets. “I’ve done two of them, I’m halfway down the third.”
    “I’ll take the bottom drawer and work up,” Smith said. He went down the hall, got another chair, pulled open the bottom drawer. “You been here the whole time?”
    Lucas glanced at his watch. “Three hours. Did the office, started up here. Went over and talked to Miz Coombs, before I came over. She’s all messed up. Oh, and by the way—we put the Widdlers with Toms.”
    Smith, just settling in his chair, looked up, a light on his face, and said, “You’re kidding.”
    “Nope.”
    Smith scratched under an arm. “This might not look good—you know, calling in the killers to appraise the estate. If they’re the killers.”
    “I’m not gonna worry about it,” Lucas said. “For one thing, there was no way to know. For another…” He paused.
    Smith said, “For another?”
    “Well, for another, I didn’t do it.” Lucas smiled. “ You did.”
    “Fuck you,” Smith said. He dipped into the bottom file drawer and pulled out a file, looked at the flap. “Here’s a file that says ‘Antiques.’”
    “Bullshit,” Lucas said.
    “Man, I’m not kidding you…”
    Lucas took the file and looked at the flap: “Antiques.”
    Inside, a stack of receipts. There weren’t many of them, not nearly as many as there were in the furniture file. But one of them, a pink carbon copy, said at the top, “Widdler Antiques and Objets d’Art.”
    He handed it over to Smith who looked at it, then looked at Lucas, looked at the pink sheet again, and said, “Kiss my rosy red rectum.”
     
    “W E GOT THEM with Toms and Bucher, and we know that their good friend actually worked with Donaldson, and they pulled off a fraud. That’s enough for a warrant,” Smith said.
    “At the minimum, we get Leslie to lift up his pant legs,” Lucas said. “If he’s got bite holes, we take a DNA and compare it to the blood on Screw. At that point, we’ve got him for attempted kidnapping…”
    “And cruelty to animals.”
    “I’m not sure Screw actually qualified as an animal. He was more of a beast.”
    “Can’t throw a dog out a car window. Might be able to get away with an old lady, but not a dog,” Smith said. “Not in the city of St. Paul.”
    Lucas was a half block from his house when Jenkins called from Wisconsin. He fumbled the phone, caught it, said, “Yeah?”
    “Got ’em,” Jenkins said.

22
    T HE WHOLE STORY was so complicated that Jane Widdler almost couldn’t contain it. She wrote down the major points, sitting at her desk while Leslie was upstairs in the shower, singing an ancient Jimmy Buffett song, vaguely audible through the walls.
    Jane wrote:
No way out
Arrested
Disgraced
Attorneys
Prison forever
    Then she drew a line, and below it wrote:
Arrested
Disgraced
Attorneys
Time in prison?
    Then she drew a second line and wrote:
Save the money
    The last item held her attention most of the afternoon, but she was working through the other items in the back of her head. Davenport, she thought, was probably unstoppable. It was possible that he wouldn’t get to them, but unlikely. She’d seen him operating.
    She nibbled on her bottom lip, looked at the list, then sighed and fed it into the shredder.
    If he did get to them, could Davenport convict? Not if Leslie hadn’t been bitten by the dog. But with the dog bites, Leslie was cooked. If she hadn’t taken some kind of preemptive action before then, she’d be cooked with him.
    From watching her stepfather work as a cop, and listening to him talk about court cases, she felt the most likely way to save herself was to give the cops another suspect. Build reasonable doubt into the case. As much reasonable doubt as possible.
    As for the money…
    They had a safe-deposit box in St. Paul where they had more than $160,000 in hundreds, fifties, and twenties. The cash came from stolen antiques, from four dead old women and one dead old man, each in a different state. The Widdlers had worked the cash