Invisible Prey

grandson of Jacob Toms—the murdered man,” she said. “He said there were several quilts in the house, but they were used as bedspreads and weren’t worth too much. He still has one. None of them were these Armstrong quilts. None of them were hung on walls. He’s going to check to see if there’s anything that would indicate that he knew Mrs. Bucher or Mrs. Donaldson or Mrs. Coombs.”
    “Thanks,” Lucas said. Maybe quilts weren’t the magic bullet.
     
    G ABRIELLA C OOMBS DECIDED to put off her research into Grandma’s quilts. She had a date, the fifth in a series. She liked the guy all right, and he definitely wanted to get her clothes off, and she was definitely willing to take them off.
    Unfortunately, he wanted them off for the wrong reason. He was a painter. The owner of the High Plains Drifter Bar & Grill in Minneapolis wanted a naked-lady painting to hang over his bar, and the painter, whose name was Ron, figured that Gabriella would be perfect as a model, although he suggested she might want to “fill out your tits” a little.
    She didn’t even mind that idea, as long as she got laid occasionally. The problem was, he worked from photographs, and Gabriella’s very firm sixteenth Rule of Life was Never Take Off Your Clothes Around a Camera.
    Ron had been pleading: “Listen, even if I did put your picture on the Internet, who’d recognize it? Who looks at faces? The facts are, one in every ten women in the United States, and maybe the world, is naked on the Internet. Nobody would look at your face. Besides, I won’t put it on the Internet.”
    On that last part, his eyes drifted, and she had the bad feeling that she’d be on the Internet about an hour after he took the picture. And three hours after that, the wife of some friend would call up to tell her that everyone was ordering prints from Pussy-R-Us.
    So the question was, was he going to make a move? Or did he only want her body in a computer file?
    Coombs was a lighthearted sort, like her mother, and while she carefully chose her clothing for the way it looked on her, she didn’t use much in the way of makeup. That was trickery, she thought. She did use perfume: scents were primal, she believed, and something musky might get a rise out of the painter. If not, well, then, Ron might be missing out on a great opportunity, she thought.
    She dabbed the perfume on her mastoids, between her breasts, and finally at the top of her thighs. As she did it, her thoughts drifted to Lucas Davenport. The guy was growing on her, even though he was a cop and therefore on the Other Side, but he had a way of talking with women that made her think photography wouldn’t be an issue. And she could feel little attraction molecules flowing out of him; he liked her looks. Of course, he was married, and older. Not that marriage always made a difference. And he wasn’t that much older.
    “Hmm,” she said to herself.
     
    J ESSE B ARTH USED a Bic lighter to fire up two cigarettes at once, handed one of them to Mike. The evening was soft, the cool humid air lying comfortably on her bare forearms and shoulders. They sat on the front porch, under the yellow bug light, and Screw, the pooch, came over and snuffed at her leg and then plopped down in the dirt and whimpered for a stomach scratch.
    Two blocks away, Jane Widdler, behind the wheel, watched for a moment with the image-stabilizing binoculars, then said, “That’s her.”
    “About time,” Leslie said. “Wonder if the kid’s gonna walk her home?”
    “If he does, it’s off,” Jane said.
    “Yeah,” Leslie said. But he was hot. He had a new pipe, with new tape on the handle, and he wanted to use it.
     
    L UCAS WAS DRINKING a caffeine-free Diet Coke out of the bottle, his butt propped against a kitchen counter. He said to Weather, “There’s a good possibility that whoever killed Coombs didn’t have anything to do with the others. The others fit a certain profile: they were rich, you could steal from them and nobody would know. They were carefully spaced both in time and geography—there was no overlap in police jurisdictions, so there’d be nobody to compare them, to see the similarities. Still: Coombs knew at least two of them. And the way she was killed…”
    Weather was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a raw carrot. She pointed it at him and said, “You might be wasting your time with Coombs. But in the lab, when we’re looking at a puzzle, and we get an interesting outlier in an