Invisible Prey

on the door, and she ignored it. Knock again, louder this time. Maybe the police? Or the lawyer?
    She made a frown look and got to her feet, spanked her hands together to get rid of the Styrofoam dust, and walked to the door. Outside, a woman with huge bushy blond hair, dressed in a shapeless green muumuu and sandals, had cupped her hands around her eyes and was peering through the window in the door.
    Irritated, Widdler walked toward the door, shaking her head, jabbing her finger at the CLOSED sign. The woman held up a file folder, then pressed it to the glass and jabbed her own finger at it. Making an even deeper frown look, Widdler put her nose next to the glass and peered at the tab on the file folder. It said, in a spidery hand, “Armstrong quilts.”
    The woman on the other side shouted, loud enough to be heard through the door, “I’m Lucy Coombs. I’m Marilyn Coombs’s daughter. Open the door.”
    Widdler thought, “Shit,” then thought, “Elegance.” What is this? She threw the lock, opened the door a crack.
    “I’m closed.”
    “Are you Jane Widdler?”
    Widdler thought about it for a second, then nodded. “Yes.”
    The words came tumbling out of the woman’s mouth, a rehearsed spiel: “My mother’s house has been attached by the Walker and now by the Milwaukee museum. They say the Armstrong quilts are fakes and they want their money back and that it was all a big tax fraud. I have her file. There’s a letter in it and there’s a note that says you and your husband were Cannon Associates and that you got most of the money. Mom’s house was worth two hundred thousand dollars and I’m supposed to be the heir and now I’m not going to get anything. I’ll sell you the original file for two hundred thousand dollars, or I’m going to take it to the police. The museums can get the money back from you, not from me.”
    The woman sounded crazy-angry, but the part about Cannon and the Armstrongs wasn’t crazy.
    “Wait-wait-wait,” said Widdler, opening the door another inch.
    “I’m not going to talk to you here. I’m afraid of you and I’m afraid the police are tapping your telephones. They tap everything now, everything, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the FBI. I brought this copy of the file and the letter and inside there’s a telephone number where you can call me at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. It’s at a Wal-Mart and if you don’t call me, you won’t be able to find me and I’ll go to the police.”
    The woman thrust the file through the door and Widdler took it, as much to keep it from falling to the floor, as anything, and Widdler said, “Wait-wait-wait” but the woman went running off through the parking lot, vaulted into the junkiest car that had ever been parked at the store, a battered Chevy that looked as though it had been painted yellow with a brush, with rust holes in the back fender. The woman started it, a throaty rumble, and sped away.
    Jane looked at the file. “What?”
     
    A T TEN O’CLOCK the next morning, Jane Widdler got self-consciously into her Audi and drove slowly away from her house, watching everything. Looking for other cars, for the same cars, for cars that were driving too slow, for parked cars with men in them. She would be headed, eventually, for the Wal-Mart.
    The night before, given the phone number by Coombs, she’d found the Wal-Mart in a cross-reference website. She’d also found Coombs’s address. She’d sat and thought about it for a while, and then she’d driven slowly, carefully, watchfully out to scout the Wal-Mart, where she found a block of three pay phones on the wall inside the entrance. One showed the number given her by Coombs. She’d noted the number of all three, then had driven another circuitous route out to the interstate, and then across town to Coombs’s house.
    She considered the possibility of shooting the woman at her own door; but then, what about the file? Would she have time to find it? Were there other people in the house?
    Too much uncertainty. She’d gone home—the police had finished their search—and had drunk most of a bottle of wine.
    In the morning, at ten o’clock, she started out, a feeling of climax sitting on her shoulders.
    She drove six blocks, watching her back, then hooked into the jumble of narrow streets to the north, on backstreets, long narrow lanes, into dead ends, where she turned and came back out, looking at her tail. In ten minutes, she’d seen precisely