Invisible Prey

that all her fingers, including her thumbs, had rings, and some had two or three. “There was another woman, also rich, and old, in Chippewa Falls. That’s in Wisconsin.”
    “I know,” Lucas said. “I’ve been there.”
    Her eyes narrowed. “To drink beer, I bet.”
    “No. It was for a police function,” Lucas lied. He’d gone on a brewery tour.
    She was suspicious, but continued: “Sometimes Grandma and Connie Bucher would go over to this other lady’s house for quilt group. They weren’t in the same quilt groups, but the two groups intersected. Anyway, this other woman—her name was Donaldson—was shot to death in her kitchen. She was an antique collector. Grandma said the killers were never caught. This was four years ago.”
    Lucas stared at her for a moment, then asked, “Is your grandma’s house open? Have the St. Paul police finished with it?”
    “No. We’re not allowed in yet. They took us through to see if there was anything unusual, or disturbed, other than the blood spot on the carpet. But see, the deal always was, when Grandma died, her son and daughter would divide up everything equally, but since I was the only granddaughter, I got the music box. It was like, a woman-thing. I looked for it when the police took us through, and it was missing.”
     
    L UCAS DID a drum tap with his pencil. “How’d you get down here?”
    She blinked a couple of times, and then said, “I may look edgy to you, Mr. Davenport, but I do own a car.”
    “All right.” Lucas picked up the phone, said to Carol, “Get me the number of the guy who’s investigating the death of a woman named Coombs, which is spelled…”
    He looked at Coombs and she nodded and said, “C-O-O-M-B-S.”
    “…In St. Paul. I’ll be on my cell.” He dropped the phone on the hook, took his new Italian leather shoulder rig out of a desk drawer, put it on, took his jacket off the file cabinet, slipped into it. “You can meet me at your grandma’s house or you can ride with me. If you ride with me, you can give me some more detail.”
    “I’ll ride with you,” she said. “That’ll also save gasoline.”
    As they headed out of the office, Carol called after them, “Hey, wait. I’ve got Jerry Wilson on his cell phone.”
    Lucas went back and took the phone. “I’d like to take a look at the Coombs place, if you’re done with it. I’ve got her granddaughter over here, she thinks maybe something else is going on…uh-huh. Just a minute.” He looked at Coombs. “Have you got a key?”
    She nodded.
    Back to the phone: “She’s got a key. Yeah, yeah, I’ll call you.”
    He hung up and said, “We’re in.”
     
    C OOMBS HAD PARKED on the street. She got a bag and a bottle of Summer Sunrise Herbal Tea from her salt-rotted Chevy Cavalier and carried it over to the Porsche. The Porsche, she said, as she buckled in, was a “nice little car,” and asked if he’d ever driven a Corolla, “which is sorta like this. My girlfriend has one.”
    “That’s great,” Lucas said, as they eased into traffic.
    She nodded. “It’s nice when people drive small cars. It’s ecologically sensitive.” Lucas accelerated hard enough to snap her neck, but she didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she looked around, fiddling with her bottle of tea. “Where’re the cup holders?”
    “They left them off,” Lucas said, not moving his jaw.
    Halfway to Grandma’s house, she said, “I drove a stick shift in Nepal.”
    “Nepal?”
    “Yeah. A Kia. Have you ever driven a Kia?”
    Being a detective, Lucas began to suspect that Gabriella Coombs, guileless as her cornflower eyes might have been, was fucking with him.
     
    T HE STREETS WERE quiet, the lawns were green and neat, the houses were older but well kept. Lucas might have been in a thousand houses like Marilyn Coombs’s, as a uniformed cop, trying to keep the peace, or to find a window peeper, or to take a break-in report, or figure out who stole the lawn mower. They left the car on the street at the bottom of the front lawn, and climbed up to the porch.
    “Not a bad place,” Lucas said. “I could see living my life around here.”
    “She got very lucky,” Coombs said. The comment struck Lucas as odd, but as Coombs was pushing through the front door, he let it go.
     
    T HEY STARTED WITH a fast tour, something Lucas did mostly to make sure there was nobody else around. Marilyn Coombs’s house was tidy without being psychotic about it, smelled of cooked potatoes and