Invisible Prey

am.”
    “Whatever you want,” Lucas said, trying not to grit his teeth.
    She picked up on that. “I want us both to be comfortable and I think appropriate concepts of life status contribute to comfort,” she said.
    “What can I do for you? You are…?”
    “Gabriella Coombs. Ruffe Ignace at the Star Tribune said I should talk to you; he’s the one who told me that you’re a captain. He said that you were into the higher levels of strategy on the Bucher case, and that you provide intellectual guidance for the city police.”
    “I try,” Lucas said modestly, picked up a pen and scrawled, Get Ruffe, on a notepad. “So…”
     
    “M Y MOTHER, Lucy Coombs, two fifty-seven…” She stopped, looked around the room, as if to spot the TV cameras. Then, “Do you want to record this?”
    “Maybe later,” Lucas said. “Just give me the gist of it now.”
    “My mom didn’t hear from Grandma the night before last. Grandma had a little stroke a few months ago and they talk every night,” Coombs said. “So anyway, she stopped by Grandma’s place the morning before last, to see what was up, and found her at the bottom of the stairs. Dead as a doornail. The cops say it looks like she fell down the stairs and hit her head on one of those big balls on the banister post. You know the kind I mean?”
    “Yup.”
    “Well, I don’t believe it. She was murdered.”
     
    L UCAS HAD a theory about intelligence: there was critical intelligence, and there was silly intelligence. Most people tended toward one or the other, although everybody carried at least a little of both. Einstein was a critical intelligence in physics; with women, it was silly.
    Cops ran into silly intelligences all the time—true believers without facts, who looked at a cocaine bust and saw fascism, or, when somebody got killed in a back-alley gunfight, reflexively referred to the cops as murderers. It wasn’t that they were stupid—they were often wise in the ways of public relations. They were simply silly.
    Gabriella Coombs…
     
    “I THINK the medical examiner could probably tell us one way or the other, Miss Coombs,” Lucas said.
    “No, probably not,” Coombs said, genially contradicting him. “Everybody, including the medical examiner, is influenced by environmental and social factors. The medical examiner’s version of science, and figuring out what happened, is mostly a social construct, which is why all the crime-scene television shows are such a load of crap.”
    “Anyway.” He was being patient, and let it show.
    “Anyway, the police tell the medical examiner that it looks like a fall,” she said. “The medical examiner doesn’t find anything that says it wasn’t a fall, so he rules it a fall. That’s the end of the case. Nobody’s curious about it.”
    Lucas doodled a fly line with a hook, with little pencil scratches for the fly’s body, around the Get Ruffe. “You know, a person like yourself,” he said. “…have you studied psychology at all?”
    She nodded. “I majored in it for three quarters.”
    He was not surprised. “You know what Freud said about cigars?”
    “That sometimes they’re just cigars? Frankly, Mr. Davenport, your point is so simple that it’s moronic.”
    He thought, Hmm, she’s got teeth.
    She asked, “Are you going to listen to what I have to say, or are you going to perform amateur psychoanalysis?”
    “Say it,” Lucas said.
    She did: “My grandmother was killed by a blow to the head that fractured her skull. Last Friday or Saturday, Constance Bucher and Sugar-Rayette Peebles died the same way. Grandma and Connie were friends. They were in the same quilt group; or, at least, they had been. A story in the Star Tribune said that Mrs. Bucher’s murder might have been a cover-up for a robbery. When Grandma died, I was supposed to inherit a valuable music box that her grandmother—my great-great-grandmother—brought over from the Old Country. From Switzerland.”
    “It’s missing?” Lucas asked, sitting up, listening now.
    “We couldn’t find it,” Coombs said. “It used to be in a built-in bookshelf with glass doors. The police wouldn’t let us look everywhere, and she could have moved it, but it’s been in that bookcase since she bought the house. Everything else seems to be there, but the music box is gone.”
    “Do you have a description?” Lucas asked. “Was it insured?”
    “Wait a minute, I’m not done,” Coombs said, holding up an index finger. Lucas noticed