Invisible Prey

didn’t…I gotta get a book.”
    Weather marched on: “This Lash kid, he said she had some old pots, and you said there were smashed pots lying around. They were covering up for what they took. Art Deco pots can go for fifty thousand dollars. Swoopy chairs with leather sets? There are Mies van der Rohe swoopy chairs that go for five thousand dollars each. I know, because Gloria Chatham bought two, and she never stops talking about it. Lucas, they could’ve taken millions out of this place. Not even counting those diamonds.”
    Lucas looked down at his roast, then back up to Weather: “You paid nine thousand dollars for this table? We could have gone over to IKEA.”
    “Fuck IKEA,” Weather said.
    Letty giggled. “I’d like to see that.”
    Sam hit a glass with a spoon; Weather looked at him and smiled and said, “Good boy.”
     
    W HEN THEY WERE done with dinner, Lucas hiked down to the Highland Park bookstore and bought a copy of Judith Miller’s Antiques Price Guide, which was the biggest and slickest one. Back at home, sitting in the quiet of the den, he flipped through it. Weather hadn’t been exaggerating. Lamps worth as much as $100,000; vases worth $25,000; Indian pots worth $30,000; a Dinky truck —a Dinky truck like Lucas had played with new, as a kid, made in 1964!— worth $10,000. Tables worth $20,000, $50,000, $70,000; a painting of a creek in winter, by a guy named Edward Willis Redfield, of whom Lucas had never heard, valued at $650,000.
    “Who’d buy this shit?” he asked aloud. He spent another fifteen minutes with the book, made some notes, then got his briefcase, found his phone book, and called Smith at home.
    “You catch ’em?” Smith asked.
    “No. I’ve already been asked that,” Lucas said. “By the governor.”
    “Well, shit.”
    “Listen, I’ve been doing some research…”
    Lucas told Smith about the antiques book, and what he thought had to be done at the murder scene: “Interrogate the relatives. Try to nail down every piece of furniture and every painting. Get somebody who’s good at puzzles, go over to that pot cupboard, whatever you call it, and glue those smashed pots back together. Get an antiques dealer in there to evaluate the place. My guys checked her insurance, but there’s some bullshit about writs and privacy, so it’d probably be easier to check her safe-deposit box; or maybe there’s a copy in one of those file cabinets. We need some paperwork.”
    Smith was uncertain: “Lucas, those pot pieces are smaller’n your dick. How in the hell are we going to get them back together?”
    “The pots don’t have to be perfect. We need to see what they are, and get somebody who knows what he’s doing, and put a value on them. I’ve got this idea…”
    “What?”
    “If the people who hit the place are big-time antique thieves, if this is some kind of huge invisible heist, I’ll bet they didn’t bust up the good stuff,” Lucas said. “I bet there’s twenty thousand bucks worth of pots in the cupboard, there’s a thousand bucks worth of busted pots on the floor, and the six missing pots are worth a hundred grand. That’s what I think.”
    After a moment of silence, Smith sighed and said, “I’ll freeze the scene, won’t allow anybody to start cleaning anything out. Take pictures of everything, inch by inch. I’ll get a warrant to open the safe-deposit box, get the insurance policies. I’ll find somebody who can do the pots. I don’t know any artists, but I can call around to the galleries. What was that the Lash kid said? A painting that said ‘reckless’?”
    “I put it in Google, and got nothing,” Lucas said. “There’s a guy here in town named Kidd, he’s a pretty well-known artist. He’s helped me out a couple of times, I’ll give him a call, see if he has any ideas.”
     
    O FF THE PHONE with Smith, he considered for a moment. The media were usually a pain in the ass, but they could also be a useful club. If the robbery aspect of the murders were highlighted, it could have two positive effects: if the killers were local, and had already tried to dump the stuff, then some useful leads might pop up. If they were professionals, hitting Bucher for big money, it might freeze the resale of anything that was taken out. That’d be good, because it’d still be on their hands when the cops arrived.
    There was no doubt in Lucas’s mind that the cops would arrive, sooner or later. He looked in his address book again, and dialed a