Invisible Prey

of it on the counter.”
    “Huh.” Lucas scratched his forehead. “Let me tell you about these oatmeal cookies…”
     
    T HE B OOTHS ARRIVED ten minutes later, in a black Mercedes-Benz S550. Landford Booth looked like a terrier, as short as Frazier, but thin, with small sharp eyes, a bristly white mustache, and a long nose with oversized pores. He wore a navy blue double-breasted jacket with silver buttons, and gray slacks. Margaret Booth had silvery hair, a face tightened by cosmetic surgery, and pale blue eyes. She wore a cranberry-colored dress and matching shoes, and blinked a lot, as though she were wearing contact lenses. Landford was a well-tended seventy-five, Lucas thought. His wife about the same, or possibly a bit older.
    Lucas and Frazier had just come back from the kitchen and found the Booths standing in the open front door, Margaret’s hand on Landford’s arm, and Landford cleared his throat and said, “Well? Have you discovered anything new?”
     
    T HE B OOTHS KNEW almost nothing—but not quite nothing.
    Lucas asked about missing antiques.
    Margaret said, “Claire was a collector—and a seller. Pieces would come and go, all the time. One day there’d be a sideboard in the front hall, and the next week, there’d be a music cabinet. One week it’d be Regency, the next week Gothic Revival. She claimed she always made a profit on her sales, but I personally doubt that she did. I suspect that what she really wanted was the company—people buying and selling. People to argue with and to talk about antiques with. She considered herself a connoisseur.”
    “Was anything missing, as far as you know?” Lucas asked.
    “Not as far as we know—but we don’t know that much. We have an insurance list, and of course we had to make an inventory of her possessions for the IRS,” Landford said. “There were items on the insurance list that weren’t in the house, but there were things in the house that weren’t on the insurance list. The fact is, it’s difficult to tell.”
    “How about sales records?”
    “We have a big pile of them, but they’re a mess,” Landford said. “I suppose we could go back and check purchases, and what she had when she died, against sales. Might be able to pinpoint something that way,” Landford said.
    “Could you do that?” Lucas asked.
    “We could get our accountant to take a look, she’d be better at it,” Landford said. “Might take a couple of weeks. The papers are a mess.”
     
    T HE B OOTHS MADE one claim, and made it to Lucas, ignoring Frazier as though he were an inconvenient stump: “Somebody should look carefully at Amity Anderson. I’m sure she was involved,” Margaret Booth said.
    Landford quivered: “There is no doubt about it. Although our sheriff’s department seems to doubt it.”
    Behind their backs, Frazier rolled his eyes. Lucas said to Margaret: “Tell me why she must have been involved.”
    “It’s obvious,” she said. “If you go through all the possibilities, you realize, in the end, that the killer-person, whoever he was, was inside the house with Claire. ” She put the last phrase in vocal italics. “Claire would never let anybody inside, not when she was alone, unless she knew them well.”
    Landford: “The police checked all her friends, and friends-of-friends, and everybody was cleared. There was no sign of forced entry, and Claire always kept the doors locked. Ergo, Amity Anderson gave somebody a key. She had quite the sexual history, Claire used to tell me. I believe Amity gave the house key to one of her boyfriends, told him where Claire kept her cash—she always liked to have some cash on hand—and then went to Chicago as an alibi. It’s perfectly clear to me that’s what happened.”
    “Exactly,” Margaret said.
    “How much cash?” Lucas asked.
    “A couple of thousand, maybe three or four, depending,” Landford said. “If she’d just gotten back from somewhere, or was about to go, she’d have more on hand. That doesn’t sound like much to you and me…” He hesitated, looking at the cops, as though he sensed that he might have insulted them. Then he pushed on, “…but to a person like Amity Anderson, it probably seemed like a fortune.”
    “Where is Anderson now?” Lucas asked.
    Frazier cleared his throat. “Her address is in the file I gave you. But you know where the Ford plant is, the one by the river in St. Paul?”
    “Yes.”
    “She lives maybe…six, seven blocks…straight back