Invisible Prey

account was opened by a woman named Barbra Cannon,” he said. “Barbra without the middle a , like in Barbra Streisand. There was a notation on the account that said the owners expected to draw it down to much lower levels fairly quickly, because they were establishing an antiques store in Palm Springs, and were planning to use the money for original store stock. Did I tell you this was all in Las Vegas?”
    “Las Vegas?”
    “In Nevada,” Marsalis said.
    “I know where it is. So what happened?”
    “So they drew the money down, right down to taking the last seven hundred dollars out of the account from an ATM, and that’s the last Wells Fargo heard from them,” Marsalis said. “After the seven hundred dollars, there were six dollars left in the account. That was burned up by account charges over the years, so now, there’s nothing. Account statements sent to the home address were returned. There’s nobody there.”
    “Shit.”
    “What can I tell you?” Marsalis said.
    “What’d the IRS have to say about that?” Lucas asked.
    “I don’t think they said anything. You want me to call them?”
    “Yeah. Do that. That much money can’t just go up in smoke.” Lucas said.
    “Sure it can,” Marsalis said. “You’re a cop. You ever heard of drug dealers? This is how they make money go away.”
     
    D RUG DEALERS? He didn’t even want to think about that. He had to focus on Amity Anderson. Jenkins and Shrake would stake her out, see who she hung with. He needed as much as he could get, because this was all so obscure…He was pretty sure he had it right, but what if the red thread came back as something made only in Wisconsin? Then the whole structure would come down on his head.
     
    H E CALLED S ANDY: “Anything on Anderson?”
    “A lot of raw records, but I haven’t coordinated them into a report, yet,” she said.
    “I don’t want a fu…friggin’ PowerPoint—where’d she work? You look at her tax stuff?”
    “She worked at her college as a teaching assistant, at Carleton College in Northfield, and then she worked at a Dayton’s store in St. Paul,” Sandy said. “Then she worked for Claire Donaldson, which we know about, and then she went straight to the Old Northwest Foundation, where she still is,” Sandy said. “Also, I found out, she has a little tiny criminal record.”
    “What was it?” Something involving violence, he hoped.
    “She got caught shoplifting at Dayton’s. That’s why she left there, I think. The arrest is right at the time she left.”
    “Huh.”
    “Then I’ve got all kinds of tax stuff, but I have to say, I don’t think there’s anything that would interest you,” Sandy said. “She does claim a mortgage exemption. She bought her house six years ago for a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and she has a mortgage for a hundred and fifty thousand, so she put down about the minimum—like seventeen thousand dollars.”
    “Any bank records?”
    “Not that I’ve gotten, but she only got like forty dollars in interest on her savings account last year. And she doesn’t report interest or capital gains on other investments accounts.”
    “Car?” Lucas asked.
    “I ran her through DMV,” Sandy said. “She has a six-year-old Mazda. One speeding ticket, three years ago.”
    “Ever own a van?”
    “There’s no record of one.”
     
    T HERE WAS MORE of the same—but overall, Amity Anderson’s biography seemed to paint a picture of a woman who was keeping her head above water, but not easily.
    “This does not,” Lucas said to Sandy, “seem like the biography of a woman who came into an untaxed quarter-million bucks a few years ago.”
    “It isn’t,” Sandy said. “I’ll keep looking, but if she’s got the money, she’s hidden it pretty well. Did you ever think about the possibility that she just bought antiques? That her house is her bank?”
    “I’ve been in her house. It’s not full of antiques.”
    “Well, maybe there’s a big lump of cash moldering in the basement. But if I were her, I would have spent at least some of it on a new car.”
    “Yeah. Damnit. This isn’t turning out the way I thought it would,” Lucas said.
     
    H E SENT S ANDY back to the salt mines—actually, an aging Dell computer and a stool—to continue the research, and called Jenkins: “You talk to Shrake?”
    “Yeah. We figure to start tracking her tonight. We don’t know what she looks like, so trying to pick her up outside that foundation…that’d