Invisible Prey

we’ve got a serious psycho killing people over quilts, and another serious psycho trying to get at the Barths, and they seem to be driving the same van, and goddamnit…I can’t find a single fuckin’ thing in common between the two cases. There is nothing. The Barths—straight political bullshit. Bucher is a robbery-murder, by people who killed at least one and maybe two other people, and somehow involves quilts. They’ve got jack-shit to do with each other.”
    He calmed down after a while, and Weather turned out the lights. Lucas usually lay awake in the dark for a while, brooding, even when there wasn’t anything to brood about, while Weather dropped off after three deep breaths. This night, she took a half-dozen deep breaths, then lifted her head, said sleepily, “I can think of one thing the cases have in common.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You.” She rolled back over, and went to sleep.
     
    T HAT GAVE HIM something to brood about, so he did, for half an hour, coming up with nothing before he drifted away to sleep. At three-fourteen in the morning, his eyes popped open—he knew it was three-fourteen, exactly, because as soon as he woke up, he reached out and touched the alarm clock, and the illuminated green numbers popped up.
    The waking state had not been created by an idea, by a concept, by a solution—rather, it had come directly from bladder pressure, courtesy of a late-night twenty-ounce Diet Coke. He navigated through the dark to the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the light, peed, flushed, turned off the light, opened the door, and was halfway across the dark bedroom when another light went on, this one inside his head:
    “That fuckin’ Amity Anderson,” he said aloud.
     
    H E LAY AWAKE AGAIN, thinking about Amity Anderson. She’d worked for Donaldson, lived only a couple of miles from Bucher, and even closer to the Barths. She was an expert on antiques, and must have been working for Donaldson about the time the Armstrong quilt went through.
    But the key thing was, she’d heard him talking about the Kline investigation, and he was almost certain that he’d mentioned the Barths’ names. At that same time, Ruffe Ignace had published the first Kline story, mentioning Lucas by name. Amity Anderson could have put it all together.
    He had, at that point, already hooked the Donaldson killing to Bucher, and he’d told her that. If he had frightened her, if her purpose had been to distract him from Bucher and Donaldson, to push him back at Kline…then she’d almost done it.
    He kicked it around for forty-five minutes or so, before slipping off to sleep again. When he woke, at eight, he was not as sure about Anderson as when he’d gone to sleep. There were other possibilities, other people who knew he was working both cases.
    But Anderson…did she have, or had she ever had, a van?

18
    W EATHER WAS in the backyard, playing with Sam, who had a toy bulldozer that he was using as a hammer, pounding a stick down into the turf. “He’s got great hand-eye coordination,” Weather said, admiring her son’s technique. She was wearing gardening gloves, and had what looked like a dead plant in her hand.
    “Great,” Lucas said. “By the way, you’re a genius. That tip last night could turn out to be something.”
    Sam said, “Whack! Whack!”
    Lucas told him, “Go get the football.”
    Sam looked around, spotted the Nerf football, dropped the bulldozer, and headed for the ball.
    “What tip?” Weather asked.
    “That I was the common denominator in these cases,” Lucas said.
    She looked puzzled. “I said that?”
    “Yeah. Just before you went to sleep.”
    “I have no memory of it,” she said.
    Sam ran up with the ball, stopped three feet from Lucas, and threw it at Lucas’s head. Lucas snatched it out of the air and said, “Okay, wide receiver, down, juke, and out.”
    Sam ran ten feet, juked, and turned in. He realized his mistake, continued in a full circle, went out, and Lucas threw the ball, which hit the kid in the face and knocked him down. Sam frowned for a moment, uncertain whether to laugh or cry, then decided to laugh, and got up and went after the ball.
    “Medical school,” Lucas said. “On a football scholarship.”
    “Oh, no. He can play soccer if he’s interested in sports,” Weather said.
    “Soccer? That’s not a sport, that’s a pastime,” Lucas said. “Like whittling or checkers.”
    “We’ll talk about it some other year.”
     
    D OWN AT HIS