Invisible Prey

own it, and they know that’s bullshit. Radioactive bullshit. We need to be in position before this girl shows up on Channel Three.”
     
    L UCAS WALKED HER out to her car; when she’d gotten out of her spot in a neighboring driveway, he started back to the house. On the way, thinking more about Kline than about the Bucher murder, he spotted a red-haired reporter from the Star Tribune on the other side of the police tape. The reporter lifted a hand and Lucas stepped over.
    “How’d she get it?” Ruffe Ignace asked. He was smiling, simple chitchat with a friend.
    “There are two of them,” Lucas said quietly. “A maid named Sugar-Rayette Peebles and Constance Bucher. Peebles was killed downstairs, near the front door. Her body was wrapped in a Persian carpet in a hallway. The old lady was killed in her bedroom. They were beaten to death, maybe with a pipe. Skulls crushed. House is ransacked, bedrooms tossed. Probably Friday night.”
    “Any leads?” Ignace was taking no notes, just standing on the neighbor’s lawn with his hands in his jacket pockets. He didn’t want to attract the attention of other reporters. Lucas had found that Ignace had an exceptional memory for conversation, for however long it took him to go somewhere and write it down.
    “Not yet,” Lucas said. “We’ll be talking to people who knew the women…”
    “How about that place down the street?” Ignace asked. “The halfway house? Full of junkies.”
    “St. Paul is looking into that,” Lucas said.
    “Did it look like junkies?” Ignace asked.
    “Something like that, but not exactly,” Lucas said.
    “How not exactly?”
    “I don’t know—but not exactly, ” Lucas said. “I’ll get back to you when I figure it out.”
    “You running it?”
    “No. St. Paul. I’ll be consulting,” Lucas said.
    “Okay. I owe you,” Ignace said.
    “You already owed me.”
    “Bullshit. We were dead even,” Ignace said. “But now I owe you one.”
     
    A WOMAN called him. “Lucas! Hey, Lucas!” He turned and saw Shelley Miller in the crowd along the sidewalk. She lived down the street in a house as big as Oak Walk.
    “I gotta talk to this lady,” Lucas said to Ignace.
    “Call me,” Ignace said. He drifted away, fishing in his pocket for a cell phone.
    Miller came up. She was a thin woman; thin by sheer willpower. “Is she…?” Miller was a cross between fascinated and appalled.
    “Yeah. She and her maid,” Lucas said. “How well did you know her?”
    “I talked to her whenever she was outside,” Miller said. “We used to visit back and forth. How did they kill her?”
    “With a pipe, I think,” Lucas said. “The ME’ll figure it out.”
    Miller shivered: “And they’re still running around the neighborhood.”
    Lucas’s forehead wrinkled: “I’m not sure. I mean, if they’re from the neighborhood. Do you know Bucher’s place well enough to see whether anything was taken? I mean, the safe was untouched and we know one jewelry box was dumped and another might have been taken, and some electronics…but other stuff?”
    She nodded. “I know it pretty well. Dan and I are redoing another house, down the street. We talked about buying some old St. Paul paintings from her and maybe some furniture and memorabilia. We thought it would be better to keep her things together, instead of having them dispersed when she died…I guess they’ll be dispersed, now. We never did anything about it.”
    “Would you be willing to take a look inside?” Lucas asked. “See if you notice anything missing?”
    “Sure. Now?”
    “Not now,” Lucas said. “The crime-scene guys are still working over the place, they’ll want to move the bodies out. But I’ll talk to the lead investigator here, get you into the house later today. His name is John Smith.”
    “I’ll do it,” she said.
     
    L UCAS WENT back inside, told Smith about Shelley Miller, then drifted around the house, taking it in, looking for something, not knowing what it was, watching the crime-scene techs work, asking a question now and then. He was astonished at the size of the place: A library the size of a high school library. A ballroom the size of a basketball court, with four crystal chandeliers.
    John Smith was doing the same thing. They bumped into each other a few times:
    “Anything?”
    “Not much,” Lucas said.
    “See all the silverware behind that dining room panel?” Smith asked.
    “Yeah. Sterling.”
    “Looks like it’s all there.”
    Lucas