Invisible Prey

Receipts. And those quilts upstairs, they’re not exactly collector quilts…I mean, they’re collected, but they’re not antiques. They’re worth six hundred to a thousand dollars each. If you see a place that says ‘Amish Shop,’ you can get a quilt just like them. Traditional designs, but modern, and machine-pieced and quilted.”
    “Huh. So those aren’t too valuable.”
    Leslie Widdler shook his head. “There’s a jug in the china cabinet in the music room that’s worth ten times all the quilts put together.”
    Lucas nodded. “All right. Listen. Thanks for your help, guys. And thanks for those sticky buns, Les. Sorta made my morning.”
     
    O UT OF THE HOUSE, Leslie Widdler said, “We’ve got to take him out of it.”
    “God, we may have overstepped,” Jane said. “If we could only go back.”
    “Can’t go back,” Leslie said.
    “If they look into the Armstrong quilts, they’ll find receipts, they’ll find people who remember stuff…I don’t know if they can do it, but they might find out that Coombs didn’t get all the money she should have. Once they get on that trail—it’d be hard, but they might trace it on to us.”
    “It’s been a long time,” Leslie said.
    “Paperwork sticks around. And not only paperwork—there’s that sewing basket. If Jackson White still has a receipt, or a memory, he could put us in prison.” Jackson White sold them the sewing basket. “I should have looked for the sewing basket instead of that damn music box. That music box has screwed us.”
    “What if we went back to Coombs’s place, put the music box someplace that wasn’t obvious, and took the basket? That’d solve that thing,” Leslie said.
    “What about Davenport?”
    “There’s Jesse Barth,” Leslie said. “Amity might have been right.”
    “So dangerous,” Jane said. “So dangerous.”
    “Have to get the van, have to steal another plate.”
    “That’s no problem. That’s fifteen seconds, stealing the plate,” Jane said. She was thinking about it.
    “Davenport said he has a week or two to work on it—if we can push him through another week, we could be good,” Leslie said. “He’s the dangerous one. Smith already wants to move on. It’s Davenport who’s lingering…”
    “He could come back to it,” Jane said. “He smells the connection.”
    “Yes, but the older things get, and the fuzzier…Maybe Jackson White could have a fire,” Leslie said. “If they find the music box, that might erase the Coombs connections. If he has to go chasing after Jesse Barth, that’ll use a lot of time. All we need is a little time.”
    “So dangerous to go after Jesse Barth,” Jane said. “We almost have to do it tonight.”
    “And we can. She’s not the early-to-bed kind. And she walks. She walked over to her boyfriend’s yesterday, maybe she’ll be walking again.”
    “We should have taken her yesterday,” Jane said.
    “Never had a clear shot at her…and it didn’t seem quite so necessary.”
    “Oh, God…” Jane scrubbed at her deadened forehead. “Can’t even think.”
    “Be simpler to wait for Davenport outside his house, and shoot him. Who’d figure it out?” Leslie said. “There must be dozens or hundreds of people who hate him. Criminals. If he got shot…”
    “Two problems. First, he’s not an old lady and he’s not a kid and he carries a gun and he’s naturally suspicious. If we missed, he’d kill us. Look at all those stories about him,” Jane said. “Second, we only know two cases he’s working on. One of them is almost over. If the cops think the Bucher killers went out and killed a cop, especially a cop like Davenport who has been working as long as he has…they’d tear up everything. They’d never let go. They’d work on it for years, if they had to.”
     
    T HEY RODE in silence for a while. Then Jane said, “Jesse Barth.”
    “Only if everything is perfect,” Leslie said. “We only do it if everything is exactly right. We don’t have to pull the trigger until the last second, when we actually stop her. Then if we do it, we’ve got an hour of jeopardy until we can get her underground. They don’t have to know she’s dead. They can think she ran away. But Davenport’ll be working it forever, trying to find her.”
    “Only if everything is perfect,” Jane said. “Only if the stars are right.”

13
    L UCAS WAS STILL PORING over paper at Bucher’s when Sandy called back. “I talked to Clayton Toms. He’s the