Invisible Prey

they’re tied together. At all. And Donaldson and Toms are colder than ice.” He finished the sticky bun and licked the tips of his fingers. “Man, that was good, Les.”
    “The French aren’t all bad,” Widdler said, using his tongue to pry a little sticky bun out of his radically fashionable clear-plastic braces.
     
    L UCAS WALKED C OOMBS out to her car. “You can’t give up,” she said.
    Lucas shook his head. “It’s not like we’re giving up—it’s that right now, we don’t have any way forward. We’ll keep pushing all the small stuff, and maybe something will crack.”
    She turned at the car and stepped closer and patted him twice on the chest with an open hand. “Maybe I’m obsessive-compulsive; I don’t think I can get on with life until this is settled. I can’t stop thinking about it. I need to get something done. I spent all those years screwing around, lost. Now I’ve finally got my feet on the ground, I’ve got some ideas about what I might want to do, I’m getting some friends…it’s like I’m just getting started with real life. Then… this . I’m spinning my wheels again.”
    “You got a lot of time, you’re young,” Lucas said. “When I was your age, everything seemed to move too slow. But this will get done. I’ll keep working on Grandma, St. Paul will keep working. We’ll get somebody, sooner or later.”
    “You promise?” She had a really nice smile, Lucas thought, soft, and sadly sexy. Made you want to protect her, to take her someplace safe…like a bed.
    “I promise,” he said.
     
    T HE S T. P AUL COPS had gone through the papers in the Bucher house on-site, and not too closely, because so much of it was clearly irrelevant to the murders.
    With Coombs agreeing to comb through her grandmother’s papers, Lucas established himself in the Bucher house-office and began going through the paper files. Later, he’d move on to the computer files, but a St. Paul cop had told him that Bucher rarely used the computer—she’d learned to call up and use Microsoft Word for letter-writing, but nothing more—and Peebles never used it.
    Lucas had no idea what he was looking for: something, anything, that would reach outside the house, and link with Donaldson, Toms, or Coombs. He’d been working on it for an hour when it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen any paper involving quilts.
    There was an “art” file, an inventory for insurance, but nothing mentioned the quilts that hung on the walls on the second floor. And quilts ran through all three murders that he knew of. He picked up the phone, dialed his office, got Carol: “Is Sandy still free?”
    “If you want her to be.”
    “Tell her to call me,” Lucas said.
    He walked out in the hall where the Widdlers seemed to be packing up. “All done?”
    “Until the auction,” Jane Widdler said. She rubbed her hands. “We’ll do well off this, thanks to you police officers.”
    “We now know every piece in the house,” Leslie Widdler explained. “We’ll work as stand-ins for out-of-state dealers who can’t make it.”
    “And take a commission,” Jane Widdler said. “The family wants to have the auction pretty quickly, after they each take a couple of pieces out…This will be fun.”
    “Hmm,” Lucas said. “My wife is interested in antiques.”
    “She works for the state as well?” Leslie Widdler asked.
    Lucas realized that Widdler was asking about income. “No. She’s a plastic and microsurgeon over at Hennepin General.”
    “Well, for pete’s sake, Lucas, we’re always trying to track down people like that. Give her our card,” Jane Widdler said, and dug a card out of her purse and passed it over. “We’ll talk to her anytime. Antiques can be great investments.”
    “Thanks.” Lucas slipped the card in his shirt pocket. “Listen, did you see any paper at all on the quilts upstairs? Receipts, descriptions, anything? All these places…I don’t know about Toms…”
    His cell phone rang and he said, “Excuse me…” and stepped away. Sandy. “Listen, Sandy, I want you to track down the Toms relatives, whoever inherited, and ask them if Toms had any quilts in the place. Especially, collector quilts. Okay? Okay.”
    He hung up and went back to the Widdlers. “These murders I’m looking at, there seems to be a quilt thread…Is that a joke?…Anyway, there seems to be a quilt thing running through them.”
    Leslie Widdler was shaking his head. “We didn’t see anything like that.