Invisible Prey

pieces of furniture were found on purchase receipts in Donaldson’s files.
    St. Paul police, making phone checks, found a call from Leslie Widdler’s phone to Anderson’s house on the night Widdler killed himself.
    The quilts were defended by their museum owners as genuine.
     
    S O THE REPORTERS came and went, and the attorneys; the day after the arrest, Lucas was chatting with Del when Smith came by. Smith had been spending time with Anderson and her court-appointed attorney. They shuffled chairs around Lucas’s office and Carol brought a coffee for Smith, and Smith sighed and said, “Gotta tell you, Lucas. I think there’s an outside possibility that we got the wrong woman.”
    “Talk to me.”
    “The hair’s gonna be Anderson’s—or maybe, somebody we just don’t know. But I looked at her hair really close, and it’s the same. I mean, the same. Color, texture, split ends…We gotta wait for the DNA, but it’s hers.”
    “What does she say?” Lucas asked.
    “She says she was never in the van,” Smith said.
    “Well, shit, you caught her right there,” Del said. “What more do you want?”
    “We asked her about the phone call from Leslie, the night Leslie killed himself. Know what she says?”
    “Is this gonna hurt?” Lucas asked.
    Smith nodded. “She says that Jane Widdler called her, not Leslie. She said that Jane told her that her car had broken down, and since Anderson was only a few blocks away, asked her to come over and pick her up, give her a ride home. Anderson said she did. She said Widdler told her she had to pee, so they stopped at Anderson’s house, and Widdler went in the bathroom. That’s when Widdler picked up the prescription bottle and the hair, Anderson says.”
    “She’s saying that Jane Widdler murdered Leslie,” Lucas said.
    “Yep.”
    “Anderson never saw a body?”
    “She never saw the car, she says,” Smith said. “She says Widdler told her that she was afraid to wait in a dark area, and walked out to Cretin. She said she picked up Widdler on Cretin, took her back to her house to pee, and then took her home.”
    “How long was the phone call?” Lucas asked.
    “About twenty-three seconds.”
    “Doesn’t sound like a call between a guy about to commit suicide, and his lover,” Lucas said to Del.
    “I don’t know,” Del said. “Never having been in the position.”
     
    “S HE’S GOT THIS STORY, and she admits it sounds stupid, but she’s sticking to it. And she does it like…” Smith hesitated, then said it: “…like she’s innocent. You know those people who never stop screaming, and then it turns out they didn’t do it? Like that.”
    “Hmm,” Lucas said.
    “Another thing,” Del said. “Even if we find some proof that Widdler was involved, how do we ever convict? A defense attorney would put Anderson on trial and shred the case.”
    “So you’re saying we ought to convict Anderson because we can?” Lucas asked.
    “No,” Del said. “Though it’s tempting.”
    “You oughta go over and talk to her—Anderson,” Smith said to Lucas.
    “Maybe I will,” Lucas said. “All right if I take a noncop with me?”
    “Who’d that be?”
    “A bartender,” Lucas said.
     
    A MITY A NDERSON had never been big, and now she looked like a Manga cartoon character when the crime boss fetches her out of the dungeon. She’d lost any sparkle she’d ever had; her hair hung lank, her nails were chewed to her fingertips.
    “This is all off the record,” Lucas said.
    Anderson’s lawyer nodded. “For your information: no court use, no matter what is said.”
    Lucas introduced Sloan, who’d put on his best brown suit for the occasion. “Mr. Sloan is an old friend and a former police officer who has always had a special facility in…conversations with persons suspected of crimes,” Lucas said carefully. “I asked him to come along as a consultant.”
    Everybody nodded and Anderson said, “I didn’t know about any killings. But I knew Leslie and Jane, and when Mrs. Donaldson was killed, I worried. But that’s all. I didn’t have any proof, I didn’t have any knowledge. With Mrs. Bucher, it never crossed my mind…then, when I read about Marilyn Coombs being killed, I thought about it again. But I pushed it away. Just away—I didn’t want to think about it.”
    Sloan took her back through the whole thing, with a gentle voice and thin teacher’s smile, working more like a therapist than a cop, listening to the history: about how