Invisible Prey

Lucas said. “It seems like some of the money is missing. She didn’t get enough money. Maybe. It’s all so long ago. Maybe the Sotheby’s guy could tell me about it tomorrow, but Gabriella’s out there now…And what about the van?”
    “You’re going crazy sitting here,” Weather said. “Why don’t you go over to Bucher’s place, and see if she has anything on the quilt she donated to the Walker? You’ll need to look sooner or later. Why not now? You’d be doing something…”
    “Because it feels like the wrong thing to do. I feel like I ought to be out driving down alleys, looking for Gabriella.”
    “You’re not going to find her driving up and down alleys, Lucas.”
    He stood up. “I’m going to eat some cheese and crackers.”
    “Why don’t you take them with you?”
     
    H E DID, a bowl of sliced cheese and water crackers on the passenger seat of the Porsche, munching through them as he wheeled down to Bucher’s house. The mansion was brightly lit. Inside, he found the Bucher heirs, six people, four women and two men, dividing up the goodies.
    Carol Ann Barker, the woman with the tiny nose, came to greet him. “The St. Paul people said we could begin some preliminary marking of the property,” she explained. “People are getting ready to go back home, and we wanted to take this moment with the larger pieces.”
    Lucas said, “Okay—I’ll be in the office, looking at paper. Have you seen check registers anywhere? Stuff going back a few years? Or tax returns…? Anything to do with the buying and donation of the Armstrong quilt?”
    “The Armstrong quilt?”
    She didn’t know what it was, and when Lucas explained, pursed her lips, and said, “She had an annual giving program. There are some records in her office, we looked to see if we could find anything about the Reckless painting. We didn’t find anything, but there are documents on donations. Check registers are filed on the third floor, there’s a room with several old wooden file cabinets…I don’t know what years.”
    Barker showed him the file: it was an inch thick, and while Barker went back to marking furniture, he thumbed through it, looking for the quilt donation. Not there. Looked through it again. Still found nothing.
    He had the date of the quilt donation, and found donations of smaller items on dates on either side of it. Scratched his head. Rummaged through the files, looking for more on art, or donations. Finally, gave up and climbed the stairs to the third floor.
    The file room was small and narrow and smelled of crumbling plaster; dust and small bits of plaster littered the tops of the eight file cabinets. The room was lit by a row of bare bulbs on the ceiling. Lucas began opening drawers, and in the end cabinets, the last ones he looked at, found a neat arrangement of check registers, filed by date. There was nothing of interest that he could see around the time of the quilt donation; but as he worked backward from the donation, he eventually found a check for $5,000 made out to Marilyn Coombs.
    For the quilt? Or for something else Coombs had found? He looked in his notebooks for the date of the quilt auction in New York. The check to Coombs had been issued seven months earlier. Maybe not related; but why hadn’t there been any other check to Coombs? In fact, the only large check he’d seen had been to a car dealer.
    He was still stuck. Stuck in a small room, dust filtering down on his neck. He ought to be out looking for Gabriella…
     
    T HE HEIRS were finishing up when Lucas came back down the stairs. Barker asked, “Find anything?”
    “No. Listen, have you ever heard of a woman named Marilyn Coombs?”
    Barker shook her head: “No…should I have?”
    “She was an acquaintance of your aunt’s, the person who originally found the Armstrong quilts,” Lucas said. “She was killed a few days ago…If you find anything with the name ‘Coombs’ on it, could you call me?”
    “Sure. Right away. You don’t think there’s a danger to us?” The other heirs had stopped looking at furniture, and turned toward him.
    “I don’t think so,” he said. “We’ve got a complicated and confusing problem, we may have had a couple of murders and maybe a kidnapping. I just don’t know.”
    There was a babble of questions then, and he outlined the known deaths. One man asked anxiously, “Do you think it’s just random? Or is there a purpose behind the killings? Other than money?”
    “I don’t know