Invisible Prey

also pleased. “This is working out.”
    “Tell the governor. Maybe he could do an off-the-record joke with some of the reporters at the Capitol, about Dakota County leaks,” Lucas said. “Maybe get Mitford to put something together. A quip. The governor likes quips. And metaphors.”
    “A quip,” she said. “A quip would be good.”
     
    L UCAS CALLED John Smith. Smith was at the Bucher mansion, and would be there for a while. “I’ll stop by,” Lucas said.
     
    T HE W IDDLERS were there, finishing the inventory. “There’s a lot of good stuff here,” Leslie told Lucas. He was wearing a pink bow tie that looked like an exotic lepidopteran. “There’s two million, conservatively. I really want to be here when they have the auction.”
    “Nothing missing?”
    He shrugged and his wife picked up the question. “There didn’t seem to be any obvious holes in the decor, when you started putting things back together—they trashed the place, but they didn’t move things very far.”
    “Did you know a woman named Claire Donaldson, over in Eau Claire?”
    The Widdlers looked at each other, and then Jane said, “Oh my God. Do you think?”
    Lucas said, “There’s a possibility, but I’m having trouble figuring out a motive. There doesn’t seem to be anything missing from the Donaldson place, either.”
    “We were at some of the Donaldson sales,” Leslie Widdler said. “She had some magnificent things, although I will say, her taste wasn’t as extraordinary as everybody made out.” To his wife: “Do you remember that awful Italian neoclassical commode?”
    Jane poked a finger at Lucas’s chest. “It looked like somebody had been working on it with a wood rasp. And it obviously had been refinished. They sold it as the original finish, but there was no way…”
     
    T HE W IDDLERS went back to work, and Lucas and John Smith stepped aside and watched them scribbling, and Lucas said, “John, I’ve got some serious shit coming down the road. I’ll try to stick with you as much as I can, but this other thing is political, and it could be a distraction.”
    “Big secret?”
    “Not anymore. The goddamn Star Tribune got a sniff of it. I’ll try to stay with you…”
    Smith flapped his hands in frustration: “I got jack-shit, Lucas. You think this Donaldson woman might be tied in?”
    “It feels that way. It feels like this one,” Lucas said. “We might want to talk to the FBI, see if they’d take a look.”
    “I hate to do that, as long as we have a chance,” Smith said.
    “So do I.”
    Smith looked glumly at Leslie Widdler, who was peering at the bottom of a silver plant-watering pot. “It’d spread the blame, if we fall on our asses,” he said. “But I want to catch these motherfuckers. Me.”
     
    O N THE WAY out the door, Lucas asked Leslie Widdler, “If we found that there were things missing, how easy would it be to locate them? I mean, in the antiques market?”
    “If you had a good professional photograph and good documentation of any idiosyncrasies—you know, dents, or flaws, or repairs—then it’s possible ,” Widdler said. “Not likely, but possible. If you don’t have that, then you’re out of luck.”
    Jane picked it up: “There are literally hundreds of thousands of antiques sold every year, mostly for cash, and a lot of those sales are to dealers who turn them over and over and over. A chair sold here might wind up in a shop in Santa Monica or Palm Beach after going through five different dealers. They may disappear into somebody’s house and not come out for another twenty or thirty years.”
    And Leslie: “Another thing, of course, is that if somebody spends fifty thousand dollars for an armoire, and then finds out it’s stolen, are they going to turn it over to the police and lose their money? That’s really not how they got rich in the first place…So I wouldn’t be too optimistic.”
    “There’s always hope,” Jane said. She looked as though she were trying to make a perplexed wrinkle in her forehead. “But to tell you the truth, I’m beginning to think there’s nothing missing. We haven’t been able to identify a single thing.”
    “The Reckless painting,” Lucas said.
    “If there was one,” she said. “There are a number of Reckless sales every year. If we find no documentation that suggests that Connie owned one, if all we have is the testimony of this one young African-American person…well, Lucas…it’s gone.”

9
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