Invisible Prey

porch, he said, “I couldn’t bear to do it.”
    She looked at him for a few seconds, then pushed the screen door open. “You better come in.”
     
    S HE HAD a plastic jug of iced tea in the refrigerator and they went out back and sat on the patio, and she told him how she, a man that she thought may have been Gabriella’s father, and another couple, had traveled around the Canadian Rockies in a converted old Molson’s beer truck, smoking dope and listening to all the furthest-out rock tapes, going to summer festivals and living in provincial parks…and nailing a couple of other good-looking guys along the way. “I always had this thing for hot-looking blond guys, no offense.”
    “None taken.”
    “Summer of my life. Good time, good dope, good friends, and knocked up big-time,” she said, sitting sideways on a redwood picnic-table bench. “God, I loved the kid. But I wasn’t a good mother. We used to fight…we started fighting when she was twelve and didn’t quit until she was twenty-two. I think we both had to grow up.”
    She rambled on for a while, and then asked the question that had been out there, in the papers and everywhere else. “Are you sure Amity Anderson did it?”
    “No,” Lucas said. “In fact, I don’t think she did. She might have, but there are some problems…”
     
    H E’D GONE BACK to Eau Claire, he told her, and talked to Frazier, the sheriff’s deputy, and all the other investigators they could reach. Amity Anderson had no boyfriend, they said. Just didn’t have one. They accounted for her nights, they looked at phone records, at gasoline credit-card receipts, they checked her mail. She had no boyfriend…
    And she had that alibi for the night Donaldson was killed. The alibi was solid. Would Leslie Widdler have gone into the house on his own? Wouldn’t he have wanted a backup? The night Gabriella disappeared, there were two phone calls from Anderson’s house, one early, one fairly late. The recipients of the phone calls agreed that they’d spoken to her.
    “That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have done it, but it’s pretty thin,” Lucas said.
    “You think Widdler’s wife, I saw her name in the newspaper…”
    “Jane.”
    “You think she was involved?” Coombs asked.
    “I think so,” Lucas said. “Anderson insists that she was—and to some of us, she sounds like she’s telling the truth.”
    “So it would be Jane Widdler who killed Gabriella.”
    “Probably helped her husband,” Lucas said. “Yes. They worked as a team.”
    Coombs took a sip of lemonade, sucked on an ice cube for a moment. “Are you going to get her?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “I see a possibility—but we’d need your help.”
    “My help?”
    “Yes. Because of your mother, and the Armstrong quilts, you’re in…sort of a unique position to help us,” Lucas said.
    She looked him over for a minute, sucking on the ice cube, then let it slip back into the glass, and leaned toward him. “I’ll help, if I can. But you know what I’d really like? Because of Mom and Gabriella?”
    “What?”
    Her voice came out as a snarl: “I’d like a nice cold slice of revenge. That’s what I’d like.”
     
    J ANE W IDDLER was sitting on the floor in a pool of light, working the books and boxes and shipping tape. The cops had photographed everything, with measurement scales, and were looking at lists of stolen antiques. But Widdler knew that the store stock was all legitimate; she had receipts for it all.
    Leslie’s suicide and implication in the Bucher, Donaldson, and Toms murders had flashed out over the Internet antique forums, so everybody who was anybody knew about it. She’d had tentative calls from other dealers, sniffing around for deals.
    At first, she’d been angry about it, the goddamn vultures. Then she realized she could move quite a bit of stuff, at cost or even a small profit, and pile up some serious dollars. She was doing that—took Visa, MasterCard, or American Express, shipping the next day…
    Her clerk had walked out. Left a note saying that she couldn’t deal with the pressure, asked that her last paycheck be mailed to her apartment. Good luck on that, Widdler thought, pouring plastic peanuts around a bubble-wrapped nineteenth-century Tiffany-style French-made china clock, set in a shipping box. Eight hundred dollars, four hundred less than the in-store price, but cash was cash.
    There was a knock on the front door, on the glass. The CLOSED sign was