Invisible Prey

the name slashed across the back of the canvas. Though Leslie ran to fat, he was still strong. Gripping the frame tightly, he torqued it, wiggled the sides, then the top and bottom, and the frame began to spread. When it was loose enough, he lifted the canvas, still on stretchers, out of the frame, and put it under a good light on the dining room table.
    “Got a strong signature,” he said. Reckless had carefully signed the front of the painting at the lower right, with a nice red signature over a grassy green background. “Don’t need the one on the back.”
    “Take it off?”
    “If we took it off, then it couldn’t be identified as the Bucher painting,” Leslie said.
    “There’d always be some…remnants.”
    “Not if you don’t want to see it,” Leslie said. He looked at the painting for a moment, then said. “Here’s what we do. We stash it at the farm for now. Wrap it up nice and tight. Burn the frame. When I get time, I’ll take the ‘Reckless’ off the back—it’ll take me a couple of weeks, at least. We get some old period paint—we should be able to get some from Dick Calendar—and paint over the area where the ‘Reckless’ was. Then we take it to Omaha, or Kansas City, or even Vegas, rent a safe-deposit box, and stick it away for five years. In five years, it’s good as gold.”
    Bad idea, Jane thought: but she yearned for the money.
     
    T HREE HOURS LATER, the Widdlers were rolling again.
    “There is,” Leslie said, his hands at ten o’clock and four on the wood-rimmed wheel of his Lexus, “a substantial element of insanity in this. No coveralls, no gloves, no hairnets. We are shedding DNA every step we take.”
    “But it’s eighty percent that we won’t have to do anything,” Jane said. “Doing nothing would be best. We pooh-pooh the newspaper clipping, we scare her with the police, with the idea of a trial. Then, when we get past the lumpy parts, we might come back to her. We could do that in our own good time. Or maybe she’ll just drop dead. She’s old enough.”
    They were on Lexington Avenue in St. Paul, headed toward Como Park, a half hour past sunset. The summer afternoon lingered, stretching toward ten o’clock. Though it was one of the major north-south streets, Lexington was quiet at night, a few people along the sidewalks, light traffic. Marilyn Coombs’s house was off the park, on Iowa, a narrower, darker street. They’d park a block away, and walk; it was a neighborhood for walking.
    “Remember about the DNA,” Leslie said. “Just in case. No sudden moves. They can find individual hairs. Think about gliding in there. Let’s not walk all over the house. Try not to touch anything. Don’t pick anything up.”
    “I have as much riding on this as you do,” Jane said, cool air in her voice. “Focus on what we’re doing. Watch the windows. Let me do most of the talking.”
    “The DNA…”
    “Forget about the DNA. Think about anything else.”
    There was a bit of a snarl in her voice. Leslie glanced at her, in the little snaps of light coming in from the street, and thought about what a delicate neck she had…
     
    T HEY WERE coming up on the house. They’d been in it a half-dozen times with the quilt-study group. “What about the trigger?” Leslie asked.
    “Same one. Touch your nose. If I agree, I’ll touch my nose,” Jane said.
    “I’ll have to be behind her. Whatever I do, I’ll have to be behind her.”
    “If that finial is loose…” The finial was a six-inch oak ball on the bottom post of Coombs’s stairway banister. The stairway came down in the hallway, to the right of the inner porch door. “If it’s just plugged in there, the way most of them are…”
    “Can’t count on it,” Leslie said. “I’m not sure that a competent medical examiner would buy it anyway.”
    “Old lady, dead at the bottom of the stairs, forehead fracture that fits the finial, hair on the finial…What’s there to argue about?” Jane asked.
    “I’ll see when I go in,” he said. “We might get away with it. They sure as shit won’t believe she fell on a kitchen knife.”
    “Watch the language, darling. Remember, we’re trying.” Trying for elegance. That was their watchword for the year, written at the top of every page of their Kliban Cat Calendar: Elegance! Better business through Elegance! Jane added, “Two things I don’t like about the knife idea. First, it’s not instantaneous. She could still scream…”
    “Not if her throat