Invisible Prey - By John Sandford Page 0,56

an ax with a head the size of a manhole cover, and wore a blond wig. He was dressed in a furry yellow skin, possibly from a puma, if puma hides are made of Rayon, and his carefully draped loins showed a bulge of Scandinavian humor.

Anderson wasn’t amused. The reception was continuing. If she ate even one more oat cracker with goat cheese, she’d die of heart congestion. If she had one more glass of the Arctic Circle Red Wine, her taste buds would commit suicide.

She moved slowly through the exhibit, clutching the half-empty wineglass, smiling and nodding at the patrons, while avoiding eye contact, and trying, as much as she could, to avoid looking at the art itself. Scandinavian minimalism. It had, like all minimalism, she thought, come to the museum straight from a junkyard, with a minimal amount of interference from an artist.

An offense to a person of good taste. If somebody had pointed a gun at her head and told her that she had to take a piece, she’d have asked for the Viking warrior, which was not part of the show.

Anderson had changed into her professional evening dress: a soft black velvet blouse, falling over black velvet pants, which hid the practical black shoes. The Oslo room was built from beige stone with polished stone floors. The stone look good, but killed your legs, if you had to stand on it too long. Thank God foundation staffers weren’t expected to wear high heels. Heels would have been the end of her.

THE VIKING WARRIOR guarded the entrance. The art exhibit itself, mostly sculpture with a few paintings, spread down the long walls. The end wall was occupied by a fifteen-foot model of a Viking ship, which appeared to have been built of scrap wood by stupid unskilled teenagers. The best thing about the ship was that the stern concealed a door. The door led onto the patio, and once every fifteen minutes or so, Anderson could slip outside and light up.

So the art sucked. The people who were looking at the art also sucked. They were rich, but not rich enough. Millionaires, for sure, but a million wasn’t that much anymore. A million dollars well invested, taking inflation and taxes into account, would generate an income about like a top-end Social Security check.

That was nothing. That was chicken feed. You couldn’t lease a BMW for that; you’d be lucky to get a Chrysler minivan. You needed ten million; or twenty million. And if you were one of these guys, you sure as shit weren’t going to give a million of it to some unknown gay chick at an exhibit of bent-up car fenders, or whatever this was.

Anderson knew all that, but her bosses wanted somebody at the show. Somebody to smile and nod and eat goat-cheese oat crackers. No skin off their butt. She wasn’t getting paid for the time. This was a required voluntary after-hours function; most small foundations had work rules that would have appalled the owners of a Saigon sweatshop.

She looked at her watch. She’d given it fifty-four minutes. Not nearly enough. She idled toward the Viking ship, turned and checked the crowd, and when she judged that no one was looking at her, stepped backward and went out the door.

The evening air was like a kiss, after the refrigerated air of the gallery. Night was coming on. The patio looked over a maple-studded lawn toward the evening lights of downtown Minneapolis, a pretty sight, lights like diamonds on a tic-tac-toe grid. She fumbled the Winstons out of her purse, lit one, blew smoke, trying to keep it away from her hair, and thought about Davenport and Claire Donaldson and Constance Bucher and Marilyn Coombs.

Goddamn money. It all came down to money. The wrong people had it—heirs, car dealers, insurance men, corporate suits who went through life without a single aesthetic impulse, who thought a duck on a pond at sunset was art.

Or these people, who bought a coffee-table book on minimalism, because they thought it put them out on the cutting edge. Made them mini-Applers. But they were still the same bunch of parvenu buck-lickers, the men with their washing-machine-sized Rolexes and the women with the “forever” solitaire hanging between their tits, not yet figuring out that “forever” meant until something fifteen years younger, with bigger tits, came along.

Damn, she was tired of this.

THE DOOR popped open and she flinched. A red-haired woman, about Anderson’s age, stepped outside, and said, “I thought I