Invisible Prey

mentioned, that’s for sure.”
    “There are some antique experts downstairs,” Lucas said. “Maybe they’ll know.”
     
    H E AND B ARKER took the photos down to the Widdlers. Barker coughed when they were introduced, and pressed her knuckles against her teeth for a moment, and said, “Oh, my. I think I swallowed a bug.”
    “Protein,” Jane Widdler said. She added, still speaking to Barker, “That’s a lovely necklace…Tiffany?”
    “I hope so,” Barker said, smiling.
    Lucas said to the dealers, “We’ve got a missing table. Think it might be a folding checkerboard.” He handed the photograph of the table to Leslie Widdler, and asked, “Any idea what it’s worth?”
    The two dealers looked at it for a moment, then at each other, then at the photograph again. Leslie Widdler said to his wife, “Fifty-one thousand, five hundred dollars?”
    She ticked an index finger at him: “Exactly.”
    “You can tell that closely?” Lucas asked.
    Leslie Widdler handed the photograph back to Lucas. “Mrs. Bucher donated the table—it’s a China-trade backgammon table, not a checkerboard, late eighteenth century—to the Minnesota Orchestra Guild for a fund-raising auction, let’s see, must’ve been two Decembers ago. It was purchased by Mrs. Leon Cobler, of Cobler Candies, and she donated it to the Minneapolis Institute.” He stopped to take a breath, then finished, “Where it is today.”
    “Shoot,” Lucas said.
     
    T HE GOVERNOR CALLED and Lucas drifted down a hallway to take it. “Good job. Your man Flowers was here and gave an interesting presentation,” the governor said. His name was Elmer Henderson. He was two years into his first term, popular, and trying to put together a Democratic majority in both houses in the upcoming elections. “We pushed the Dakota County proposal and Flowers agreed that it might be feasible. We—you—could take the evidence to Dakota County and get them to convene a grand jury. Nice and tidy.”
    “If it works.”
    “Has to,” the governor said. “This girl…mmm…the evidentiary photos would suggest that she is not, uh, entirely undeveloped. I mean, as a woman.”
    “Governor…sir…”
    “Oh, come on, loosen up, Lucas. I’m not going to call her up,” Henderson said. “But that, ‘Oh God, lick my balls’—that does tend to attract one’s attention.”
    “I’ll talk to Dakota County,” Lucas said.
    “Do so. By the way, why does everybody call your man ‘that fuckin’ Flowers’?”

6
    E ARLIER THAT MORNING, Leslie Widdler had been sitting on his marigold-rimmed flagstone patio eating toast with low-calorie butter substitute and Egg Beaters, looking out over the brook, enjoying the sun, unfolding the Star Tribune ; his wife, Jane, was inside, humming along with Mozart on Minnesota Public Radio.
    A butterfly flapped by, something gaudy, a tiger swallowtail, maybe, and Leslie followed it for a second with his eyes. This was typical, he thought, of the kind of wildlife experience you had along the creek—no, wait, it was the brook; he had to remember that—and he rather approved.
    A butterfly wasn’t noisy, like, for instance, a crow or a blue jay; quite delicate and pretty and tasteful. A plane flew over, but well to the east, and he’d become accustomed to the sound. A little noise wasn’t significant if you lived on the brook. Right on the brook—it was right there in his backyard when he shook open the paper, and at night he could hear it burbling, when the air conditioner wasn’t running.
    Jane was working on her own breakfast, consumed by the music, projected across the kitchen by her Bang & Olufsen speakers; it was like living inside an orchestra, and by adjusting the speakers according to the Bang & Olufsen instructions, she could vary her position from, say, the violas, back through the woodwinds, and all the way around the violins. It was lovely. She never referred to the speakers as speakers; she always referred to them as the Bang & Olufsens.
    Jane Widdler, née Little. At Carleton College, where she and Leslie had met and become a couple, Leslie had been known to his roommates as Big Widdler, which the roommates had found hilarious for some obscure reason that Leslie had never discovered.
    And when he courted and then, halfway through his senior year, married a woman named Little, of course, they’d become Big and Little Widdler. For some reason, the same ex-roommates thought that was even more hilarious, and could be