Invisible Prey

Anderson and the Widdlers had become involved in college, and then drifted apart. How the surprise call came years later, about the quilts. About her move to the Cities, occasional contacts with the Widdlers, including a sporadic sexual relationship with Jane Widdler.
    “And then you drove down to a barn full of stolen antiques and began stealing them a second time—with a key you had in your pocket,” Lucas said.
    “That’s because Jane set me up,” Anderson said through her teeth, showing the first bit of steel in the interrogation. “I couldn’t believe it—I couldn’t believe how she must have worked it. She knew I was friends with Don Harvey. He’s a very prominent museum person from Chicago, he used to be here. She said he was coming to town, and if he authenticated some paintings for them, that they would give me fifteen percent of the sale price, above their purchase price. She thought I had some influence with Don because we’d dated once, and were friends. If he okayed the paintings—I mean, if he’d okayed that Reckless painting, I could have gotten seventy-five thousand dollars in fees for that one painting.”
    She shook her head again, a disbelieving smile flickering across her face: “She gave me a key and said she’d send me a map in the mail. I got it out of my mailbox when you were watching me.”
    Lucas nodded. They’d seen her get home, go straight to the mailbox, and then out to the car.
    “John Smith found the map…” Anderson began.
    “He said it was a really old map, Xeroxed, with your fingerprints all over it.”
    “And the envelope…” Anderson said.
    “Just an envelope…”
    “Well, can’t you do some science stuff that shows the key was inside? Or the map? I see all this stuff on Nova , where is it?”
    “On Nova ,” Lucas said.
    Her eyes drifted away: “My God, she completely tangled me up…”
     
    T HEY TALKED TO her for another half hour, Sloan watching her face, backtracking, poking her with apparently nonrelevant questions that knitted back toward possible conflicts in what she was saying.
    When he was done, he nodded to Lucas, and Lucas said, “It’s been fun. We’ll get back to you.”
    “Do you believe me?” she asked Lucas.
    “I believe evidence,” Lucas said. “I don’t know about Sloan.”
    Sloan said, “I gotta think about it.”
    As they were leaving, Anderson said, with a wan, humorless smile, “You know the last mean thing that Botox bitch did? She stole my alprazolam to put in the van, just when I needed it most. I could really use some stress meds right now.”
     
    O UT IN the hallway, Sloan looked at Lucas. Lucas was leaning against the concrete-block wall, rubbing his temples, and Sloan said, “What?”
    Lucas pushed away from the wall and asked, “What do you think?”
    “She was bullshitting us some, but not entirely,” Sloan said. “I’d probably convict her if I were on a jury, based on the evidence, but I don’t think she killed anyone.”
    “Okay.”
    “What happened with you?” Sloan asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
     
    L UCAS CALLED the evidence guys at St. Paul, then the supervisor of the crime-scene crew who’d gone over Anderson’s house. Then he went down to Del’s desk and said, “Let’s take a walk around the block.”
    Outside, summer day, hot again, puffy white fair-weather clouds; flower beds showing a little wilt from the lack of rain. Del asked, “What’s happening?”
    “Remember all that shit Smith said? About the evidence coming in?”
    “Yeah.” Del nodded.
    “So one of the clinchers was an amber plastic prescription bottle,” Lucas said. “You know the kind, with the click-off white tops?”
    “Uh-huh. I know about the bottle.”
    “When I was looking into Anderson, when I first tripped over her, I didn’t have anything to go on,” Lucas continued. “I thought I might take an uninvited look around her house.”
    “Ah.” They’d both done it before, breaking-and-entering, a dozen times between the two of them. Life in the big city.
    “In the bathroom, I found a bottle of alprazolam and a bottle of Ambien,” Lucas said. “I noticed them because I use them myself. The thing is, there wasn’t any alprazolam in Anderson’s house when St. Paul went through the place last night. And the stuff in the van was only three weeks old—it was a new prescription. Unless they used the van some other time, that we don’t know about, and that seems unlikely, because