Invisible Prey

her keys .” She was no fool; the keys were a problem, and there was fear in her eyes.
    They went around the house and through the back door, Coombs showing Lucas where she’d found the keys, off the back steps, as if they’d been dropped or thrown. “Maybe she dropped them in the dark and couldn’t find them,” Lucas suggested. “Did you look for her car?”
    “No, I didn’t think to. I wonder…sometimes she parked in the alley, behind the fence.” They walked out through the backyard, to a six-foot-high woven-board privacy fence that separated Marilyn Coombs’s house from the alley. The gate was hanging open, and as soon as Lucas pushed through, he saw Gabriella’s rusty Cavalier.
    “Oh, God,” Lucy Coombs said. She hurried past Lucas and then almost tiptoed up to the car, as if she were afraid to look in the windows. But the car was empty, except for some empty herbal tea bottles on the floor of the backseat. The car wasn’t locked; but then, Lucas thought, why would it be? There was nothing in it, and who would steal it?
    “Back to the house,” he said.
    “What do you think happened?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “She’s probably just off somewhere. Maybe I oughta go talk to her boyfriend.”
    “I think you should,” Lucy Coombs said. “I know it wasn’t going very well. I think Gabriella was about to break it off.”
    “Let’s check the house and then I’ll go talk to the guy,” Lucas said. “Do you have any relatives or know any girlfriends or other boyfriends…?”
     
    T HEY WALKED through the house: nobody there. Lucas looked at the broken window. He’d never actually seen it done, but he’d read about it in detective novels—burglars making a small break in a window, usually by pushing the point of a screwdriver against the glass, to get a single pressure crack. Then they’d work the glass out, open the door with a wire, then put the pane back in place and Scotch-tape it. With any luck, the owners didn’t notice the break for a while—sometimes a long while—and that would obscure the date and time of the break-in…
    It did suggest a certain experience with burglary. Or perhaps, with detective novels.
    “I’m going to make a call, get the St. Paul cops to go over the place,” Lucas said. “If you could give me the boyfriend’s name…”
    They were talking in the kitchen, next to the phone, and the color caught his eye: a flash of red. He thought it might be blood, but then instantly knew that it wasn’t. Blood was purple or black. This was scarlet, in the slot between the stove and refrigerator. He hadn’t seen it when he and Gabriella Coombs were in the kitchen, and he’d looked—he’d been doing his typical crime-scene check, casually peering into cracks and under tables and chairs.
    “Excuse me,” he said. He went over to the stove and looked down.
    “What?”
    “Looks like…Just a minute.” He opened a kitchen cabinet, took out a broom, and used the handle to poke out the red thing.
    A spool of thread.
    The spool popped out of the stove space, rolled crookedly in a half circle, and bumped into his shoe. He used a paper towel to pick it up, by the spool edge on one end, and put it on the stove. They both looked at it for a moment.
    “How’d it get there?” Lucy asked.
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Wasn’t there before. There was a closetful of quilting stuff upstairs. Maybe Gabriella came and took it?”
    Lucy frowned. “She doesn’t quilt. I’ve been trying to get her interested, but she’s more interested in a social life. Besides, if she took it, where’d she put it? It’s not in her car.”
    “Neither is she. Maybe she came over with a girlfriend, who quilts…” Lucas was bullshitting, and he knew it. Making up fairy stories.
    “That’s from the old basket,” Lucy said. “It’s old thread, see? I don’t think they even make it anymore. This says Arkansas on it. Now, most of it comes from China or Vietnam.”
    “Let’s go look at the basket,” Lucas said.
    They climbed the stairs together, to the big linen closet, and Lucas used the paper towel to open the door.
    “Ah, fuck me,” he said.
    No wicker sewing basket.
    But there, under a neat stack of fabric clippings, where the basket had been, was a black lacquer box with mother-of-pearl inlay.
    The music box.

15
    L UCAS CALLED J ERRY W ILSON, the St. Paul cop who’d caught the investigation of Marilyn Coombs’s death, and told him about the disappearance