Invisible Prey - By John Sandford Page 0,26

black Lenovo laptop in the living room, and they followed Lauren to the baby’s room, a bright little cube with its own view of the river. Kidd had painted cheerful, dancing children all around the lemon-colored walls.

“Really nice,” Lucas said, looking around.

“Uh.” Kidd brought up the laptop and Lauren began wiping the baby’s butt with high-end baby-butt cleaner that Lucas recognized from his own changing table. Then Kidd started typing, and a moment later he said, “Says his paintings are rare. Auction record is four hundred fifteen thousand dollars, that was two years ago, and prices are up since then. He had a relatively small oeuvre. The range is down to thirty-two thousand dollars…but that was for a watercolor.”

“Four hundred fifteen thousand dollars,” Lucas repeated.

“Yup.”

“That seems like a lot for one painting, but then, my wife tells me that I’m out of touch,” Lucas said.

“Shoot, Kidd makes that much,” Lauren said. “He’s not even dead.”

“Not for one painting,” Kidd said.

“Not yet…”

“Jeez, I was gonna ask you how much you’d charge to paint my kid’s bedroom,” Lucas said, waving at the walls of the room. “Sorta be out of my range, huh?”

“Maybe,” Kidd said. “From what I’ve read, your range is pretty big.”

LUCAS WROTE Stanley Reckless and $415,000 in his notebook as they drifted out toward the door. “You know,” Lauren said, squinting at him. “I think I met you once, a long time ago, out at the track. You gave me a tip on a horse. This must have been…what? Seven or eight years ago?”

Lucas studied her face for a minute, then said, “You were wearing cowboy boots?”

“Yes! I went off to place the bet, and when I got back, you were gone,” Lauren said. She touched his arm. “I never got to thank you.”

“Well…”

“Enough of that,” Kidd said, and they all laughed.

“You know, these killings…they might be art pros, but they aren’t professional thieves,” Lauren said. “A pro would have gone in there, taken what he wanted, maybe trashed the place to cover up. But he wouldn’t have killed anybody. You guys would have sent some new detective over there to write everything down, and he would have come back with a notebook that said, ‘Maybe pots stolen,’ and nobody would care.”

Lucas shrugged.

“Come on. Tell the truth. Would they care? Would anybody really care if some old bat got her pots stolen, and nobody got hurt? Especially if she didn’t even know which pots they were?”

“Probably not,” Lucas said.

“So they might be art pros, but they weren’t professional burglars,” Lauren said. “If you kill an old lady, everybody gets excited. Though, I suppose, it could be a couple of goofy little amateur crackheads. Or maybe acquaintances or relatives, who had to kill them.”

Lucas’s forehead wrinkled. “What do you do, Lauren? You weren’t a cop?”

“No, no,” she said. “I’m trying to be a writer.”

“Novels?”

“No. I don’t have a fictive imagination. Is that a word? Fictive?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said.

She bounced the baby a couple of times; stronger than she looked, Lucas thought. “No,” she said. “If I can get something published, it’ll probably be more on the order of true crime.”

WHEN LUCAS LEFT, Lauren and Kidd came to the door with the baby, and Lauren took the baby’s hand and said, “Wave goodbye to the man, wave goodbye…”

Lucas thought, hmm. A rivulet of testosterone had run into his bloodstream. She was the kind of skinny, cowgirl-looking woman who could make you breathe a little harder; and she did. Something about the tilt of her eyes, as well as her name, reminded him of Lauren Hutton, the best-looking woman in the world. And finally, she made him think about the killers. Her argument was made from common sense, but then, like most writers, she probably knew jack-shit about burglars.

THERE WERE a half-dozen cops at Bucher’s, mostly doing clerical work—checking out phone books and answering-machine logs, looking at checks and credit cards, trying to put together a picture of Bucher’s financial and social life.

Lucas found Smith in the music room. He was talking to a woman dressed from head to toe in black, and a large man in a blue seersucker suit with a too-small bow tie under his round chin.

Smith introduced them, Leslie and Jane Little Widdler, antique experts who ran a shop in Edina. They all shook hands; Leslie was six-seven and fleshy, with fat hands and transparent braces on his teeth. Jane was small, had a short, tight haircut, bony cold hands, and a strangely stolid expression.

“Figure anything out