Invisible Prey

so you call a friend, and the friend calls a friend, and the next thing you know, somebody’s calling you from Los Angeles, ready to help out. The connections are really amazing.”
    “They wouldn’t be mostly Democrats, would they?” Lucas asked.
    “Well…I suppose. Why?”
    “Nothing. But: your grandma was connected to Bucher. And there was another woman killed. Do you have a name?”
    “Better than that. I have a newspaper story.”
     
    L UCAS DIDN’T WANT to sit anywhere in the room where the elderly Coombs had died, in case it became necessary to tear it apart. He took Gabriella Coombs and the clipping into the kitchen, turned on the light.
    “Ah, God,” Coombs stepped back, clutched at his arm.
    “What?” Then he saw the cockroaches scuttling for cover. A half dozen of them had been perched on a cookie sheet on the stove. He could still see faint grease rings from a dozen or so cookies, and the grease had brought out the bugs.
    “I’ve gotta get my mom and clean this place up,” Gabriella said. “Once you get the bugs established, they’re impossible to get rid of. We should call an exterminator. How long does it take the crime-scene people to finish?”
    “Depends on the house and what they’re looking for,” Lucas said. “I think they’re pretty much done here, but they’ll probably wait until there’s a ruling on the death.”
    “You think I could wash the dishes?” she asked.
    “You could call and ask. Tell them about the bugs.”
     
    T HEY SAT AT the kitchen table, and Lucas took the newspaper clip. It was printed on standard typing paper, taken from a website. The clip was the top half of the front page in the Chippewa Falls Post, the text running under a large headline, Chippewa Heiress Murdered.
    A noted Chippewa Falls art collector and heir to the Thune brewing fortune was found shot to death in her home Wednesday morning by relatives, a Chippewa Falls police spokesman said Wednesday afternoon.
    The body of Claire Donaldson, 72, was discovered in the kitchen of her West Hill mansion by her sister, Margaret Donaldson Booth, and Mrs. Booth’s husband, Landford Booth, of Eau Claire.
    Mrs. Donaldson’s secretary, Amity Anderson, who lives in an apartment in Mrs. Donaldson’s home, was in Chicago on business for
    Mrs. Donaldson, police said. When she was unable to reach Mrs. Donaldson by telephone on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, Anderson called the Booths, who went to Donaldson’s home and found her body.
    Police said they have several leads in the case.
    “Claire Donaldson was brilliant and kind, and that this should happen to her is a tragedy for all of Chippewa Falls,” said the Rev. Carl Hoffer, pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Chippewa Falls, and a longtime friend of Mrs. Donaldson…
    Lucas read through the clip, which was long on history and short on crime detail; no matter, he could get the details from the Chippewa cops. But, he thought, if you changed the name and the murder weapon, the news story of Claire Donaldson’s death could just as easily have been the story of Constance Bucher’s murder.
     
    “W HEN WE get back to the office, I’ll want a complete statement,” he told Coombs. “I’ll get a guy to take it from you. We’ll need a detailed description of that music box. This could get complicated.”
    “God. I wasn’t sure you were going to believe me,” Coombs said. “About Grandma being murdered.”
    “She probably wasn’t—but there’s a chance that she was,” Lucas said. “The idea that somebody hit her with that ball…That would take some thought, some knowledge of the house.”
    “And a serious psychosis,” Coombs said.
    “And that. But it’s possible.”
    “On the TV shows, the cops never believe the edgy counterculture person the first time she tells them something,” Coombs said. “Two or three people usually have to get killed first.”
    “That’s TV,” Lucas said.
    “But you have to admit that cops are prejudiced against us,” she said.
    “Hey,” Lucas said. “I know a guy who walks around in hundred-degree heat in a black hoodie because he’s always freezing because he smokes crack all day, supports himself with burglary, and at night he spray-paints glow-in-the-dark archangels on boxcars so he can send Christ’s good news to the world. He’s an edgy counterculture person. You’re a hippie.”
    She clouded up, her lip trembling. “That’s a cruel thing to say,” she said. “Why’d