Invisible Prey

LaserJet, about so big,” Lash said, gesturing with his hands, indicating a two-foot square.
    “Heavy?”
    “I don’t know. I didn’t put it in. But pretty heavy, I think,” Lash said. “It looked heavy. It was more like a business machine, than like a home printer.”
    “Huh.”
    “What means ‘huh’?” Lash asked.
    Lucas said, “You think they put all this stuff in a bag and went running down the street?”
    Lash looked at him for a minute, then said, “They had a car.” He looked toward the back of the house, his fingers tapping his lower lip. “But Detective Smith said they probably came in through the back, up the hill.”
    “Well?”
    Lash shrugged: “He was wrong.”
     
    I N THE upstairs hallway, a brass vase—or something like a vase, but four feet tall—lay on its side. Lucas had noticed it among the other litter on his first trip through the house, but had just seen it as another random piece of vandalism.
    Lash lifted it by the lip: “Got it,” he said. To Lucas: “Every night, Mrs. B put the change she got in here. Everything but pennies. She said someday, she was going to call the Salvation Army at Christmas, and have them send a bell ringer around, and she’d give, like, the whole vase full of coins.”
    “How much was in there?”
    Lash shook his head: “Who knows? It was too heavy to move. I couldn’t even tip it.”
    “So hundreds of dollars.”
    “I don’t know. It was all nickels, dimes, and quarters, so, quite a bit,” Lash said. “Maybe thousands, when you think about it.”
    On the rest of the floor, Lash couldn’t pick out anything that Lucas didn’t already suspect: the jewelry, the drugs. Maybe something hidden in the dressers, but Lash had never looked inside of them, he said, so he didn’t know what might be missing.
    On the third floor, they had a moment: Lash had spent some time on the third floor, sorting and straightening under Bucher’s direction. “Sugar said Mrs. B was getting ready to die,” Lash said.
    They’d looked into a half-dozen rooms, when Lash said, suddenly, “Wait a minute.” He walked back to the room they’d just left, which had been stacked with furniture and a number of cardboard boxes; a broken lamp stuck out of one of them. Lash said, “Where’re the chairs?”
    “The chairs?”
    “Yeah. There were two old chairs in here. One was turned upside down on the other one, like in a restaurant when it’s closing. At least…” He touched his chin. “Maybe they were in the next one.”
    They stepped down to the next room. Several chairs, but not, Lash said, the two he was thinking of. They went back to the first room. “They were right here.”
    “When did you last see them?”
    Lash put a finger in his ear, rolled it for a moment, thinking, then said, “Well, it’s been a while. I was cleaning this room out…gosh, Christmas vacation. Six months.”
    “Two old chairs,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah.”
    “Maybe Mrs. Bucher got rid of them?”
    Lash shrugged. “I suppose. She never said anything. I don’t think she thought about them.”
    “Really old, like French antiques or something?” Lucas asked.
    “No, no,” Lash said. “More like my mom’s age. Or maybe your age.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because they were like…swoopy. Like one big swoop was the back and the other swoop was the seat. They were like, you know, what’d you see on old TV— Star Trek, like that. Or maybe chairs at the Goodwill store.”
    “Huh. So you couldn’t mistake them,” Lucas said.
    “No. They’re not here.”
     
    A S THEY WENT through the last few rooms, Lash said, finally, “You know, I’m not sure, but it seems like somebody’s been poking around up here. Things are not quite like it was. It seems like stuff has been moved.”
    “Like what?”
    Lash pointed across the room, to a battered wooden rocking chair with a torn soft seat. Behind the rocker, four framed paintings were stacked against the wall. “Like somebody moved that rocker. When the old lady wanted something moved, she usually got me to do it.”
    “Was there something back there?”
    Lash had to think about it for a moment, then went and looked in another room, and came back and looked at the old rocker and said, “There might have been more pictures than that. Behind the rocker.”
    “How many?” Lucas asked.
    “I don’t know, but the stack was thicker. Maybe six? Maybe five. Or maybe seven. But the stack was thicker. One of the frames was gold