Invisible Prey

must do pretty well for yourself,” Shrake said. “A Benz.”
    “It’s a ’ninety-four,” Stack said. “I bought it used, with eighty-nine thousand miles on it.”
    “Where’s the van—the one you use for moving paintings?” Lucas asked.
    Stack was mystified: “What van? I have a friend with a blue pickup, when I’m moving big sheets of plywood, but I never used a van.”
    “Did you know Marilyn Coombs?” Lucas asked.
    “No. Gabriella told me about her dying and about you guys investigating,” Stack said. “In fact, I think she sorta had the hots for you.”
    “For Lucas?” Shrake asked skeptically.
    “If you’re the guy who took her around her grandmother’s house,” Stack said to Lucas. “Yeah.”
    “What’d you mean by ‘had’?” Shrake asked. “You said she ‘had’ the hots for Lucas. Do you think she’s dead? Or just stopped having the hots?”
    “Hell, you’re the guys who think she’s dead,” Stack said. “That’s the way you’re talking.”
    “Did she say where she was going last night?” Lucas asked.
    “Well, yeah,” Stack said. “She said she had to go because you—or somebody—asked her to go through her grandma’s papers. Looking for clues, or something. Is that, uh…Where’d she disappear from, anyway?”
    Lucas looked at Shrake, felt an emotional squeeze of fear and the cold finger of depression. “Bad,” he said. “Bad. Goddamnit to hell, this is bad.”
     
    T HEY PUSHED the painter for another ten minutes, then Lucas left Shrake with Stack and the woman, to get details of where they were overnight, to get an ID on the woman, to probe for holes in their stories.
    On the way out to the car, Smith called: “We got a van. A two thousand one Chevy Express, looks to be a pale tan, but one of the geniuses here tells me that could be the light. It might be white. It went past the halfway house three times on Friday night, the night the storm came in. Can’t see the occupants, but we think the tag is Wisconsin and we think we know two letters, but we can’t make out the other letter or the numbers. We’re going to send it off to the feds, see if they can do some photo magic with it. In the meantime, we’re sorting vans out by the letters we know.”
    “That’s something,” Lucas said. “Listen, feed every name you’ve got associated with Bucher into the computer. I’ll get you all the names I can pull out of the Donaldson and Toms files, and the Coombs stuff. Find that van…Once we know who we’re looking for…”
    “Get me the names,” Smith said.
    “And listen: do me a favor,” Lucas said. “Go see this girl in the Kline case, her name is Jesse Barth. She lives up on Grand, her mother is Kathy, they’re in the phone book. Have her look at the van. See if she thinks it might be the same one.”
    “If it is…what does that mean?” Smith asked.
    “I don’t know. I’m freakin’ out here, man. Just have her look at it, okay?”
    “Okay,” Smith said. “I’ll tell you something else: I’m gonna get that fuckin’ Ronnie Lash and turn his ass into a cop.”
     
    L UCAS WAS in a hurry now, with Gabriella missing.
    He kept thinking, The quilts, the van, the pipe; the quilts, the van, the pipe. The quilts, the van, the pipe…
    He couldn’t get at the van. Too many of them and he didn’t have a starting place, unless Smith or the feds came up with something. The pipe didn’t make any difference, unless he found the actual pipe that did the killing; a killer could buy as much pipe as he wanted at Home Depot.
    That left the quilts. Gabriella had said that her mother was messing with quilts. He got in the car, and pointed it toward the Coombs house, got Lucy Coombs on the phone: “Her friends say anything?”
    “Nobody’s seen her. Oh, God, where’s my baby ?”
    “I’m coming over,” Lucas said.
     
    L UCY C OOMBS LIVED in the Witch Hat neighborhood off University Avenue, in an olive-green clapboard house with a stone wall separating the front yard from the sidewalk. The yard had no grass, but was an overgrown jumble of yellow and pink roses, and leggy perennials yet to flower. The house had a damp, mossy, friendly look, with a flagstone pathway running from the front stoop around the side of the house and out of sight.
    The front door was open and Lucas banged on the loosely hung screen door. He could hear people talking, and felt a twitch of hope: Had Gabriella shown up? Then a heavyset woman in a purple shift and long