Invisible Prey

be tough.”
    “Tonight’s fine. I wasn’t serious about twenty-four hours…put her to bed, keep her there for half an hour, pick her up in the morning,” Lucas said. “Mostly, I want to know who she hangs with. Need a big guy: somebody who could snatch Jesse Barth off the street.”
     
    F LOWERS LOUNGED in the door, looking too fresh. “Sat up most of the night with the Barths. They’re scared spitless,” he said.
    “Well, they got a firebomb through the kitchen window. They say.”
    “Oh, they did,” Flowers said. He moved over to the visitor’s chair, sat down, and propped one foot on the edge of Lucas’s desk. “I talked to the arson guy—there was no glass in the sink, but there was some burned stuff that he thinks is what’s left of a half-gallon paper milk jug. Probably had a burning rag stuck in the spout. Said it’d be like throwing a ball of gas through the window; better than a bottle.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yes.” He propped another foot over the first. “He says wine bottles work fine if you’re throwing them onto tanks, but if you throw them onto an ordinary kitchen floor, half the time they’ll just bounce along, and not break.”
    “Really,” Lucas said.
    “Yup. So what’re we doing?”
    “I got this concept…”
    “We needed a concept,” Flowers said. “Like, bad.”
    Lucas explained about Amity Anderson. Flowers listened and said, “So call this chick at the Walker and find out if she dealt with Amity Anderson on the Bucher deal.”
    Lucas nodded: “I was about to do that.”
     
    A LICE S CHIRMER was mildly pissed: “Well, we got the court order, and your lab person was here, and we butchered the quilt. Hope you’re happy.”
    Lucas had the feeling that she was posing. He had no time for that, and snapped: “There are several people dead, and one missing and probably dead. For an inch of thread or whatever…”
    “I’m sorry, let’s start over,” she said quickly. “Hello, this is Alice.”
    Lucas took a breath. “When you dealt with Bucher on the quilt, did you ever meet a woman named Amity Anderson?”
    “Amity? I know Amity Anderson, but she wasn’t involved in the Bucher bequest,” Schirmer said.
    “Where do you know her from? Amity?” Lucas asked.
    “She works for a foundation here that provides funding for the arts.”
    “That’s it? You don’t know her socially, or know who she hangs with, or know about any ties that might take her back to Bucher?”
    “No, I’ve never mixed with her socially,” Schirmer said. “I know she was associated for a while with a man named Don Harvey, but Don moved to Chicago to run the New Gallery there. That was a couple of years ago.”
    “A boyfriend?”
    “Yes. They were together for a while, but I don’t know what she’s been up to lately,” Schirmer said.
    “Uh, just a moment.” Lucas took the phone away from his face and frowned.
    Flowers asked, “What?”
    Lucas went back to the phone. “I had understood…from a source…that Amity Anderson is gay.”
    “Amity? No-o-o, or maybe, you know, she likes a little of both,” Schirmer said. “She definitely had a relationship with Don, and knowing Don, there was nothing platonic about it. With good ol’ Don, it was the more, the merrier.”
    “Huh. What does Don look like? Football-player type?”
    She laughed. “No. He’s a little shrimp with a big mouth and supposedly, a gargantuan…You know. I doubt that he ever lifted anything heavier than a glass of scotch.”
    “You say he runs a gallery,” Lucas said. “An antique gallery? Or would he know about antiques?”
    “He’s a paintings-and-prints guy. Amity’s an antique savant, though,” Schirmer said. “I expect she’ll wind up as a dealer someday. If she can get the capital.”
    “Okay. Listen, keep this conversation to yourself,” Lucas said.
    “Sure,” she said.
    “And that thread…”
    “From the butchered quilt?” Now she was kidding.
    “That one. Is it on the way back here?” Lucas asked.
    “It is. Your man left here more than an hour ago.”
     
    L UCAS SAID to Flowers, “Amity Anderson lied to me, in a way most people wouldn’t do. I asked her about boyfriends and she said she’s gay. I bought it at the time—but it turns out she’s not.”
    “That make’s a difference?” Flowers asked.
    “It does if you need somebody large to carry a fifty-thousand-dollar table,” Lucas said. “Somebody you can trust with murder.”
     
    T HE LAB MAN SAID, “We’ve