Invisible prey

An anonymous van, some-kind-of-pale, cruised Summit Avenue, windows dark with the coming night. The killers inside watched three teenagers, two boys and a girl, hurrying along the sidewalk like windblown leaves. The kids were getting somewhere quick, finding shelter before the storm.

The killers trailed them, saw them off, then turned their faces toward Oak Walk. The mansion was an architectural remnant of the nineteenth century, red brick with green trim, gloomy and looming in the dying light. Along the wrought-iron fence, well-tended beds of blue and yellow iris, and clumps of pink peonies, were going gray to the eye.

Oak Walk was perched on a bluff. The back of the house looked across the lights of St. Paul, down into the valley of the Mississippi, where the groove of the river had already gone dark. The front faced Summit Avenue; Oak Walk was the second-richest house on the richest street in town.

Six aging burr oaks covered the side yard. In sunlight, their canopies created a leafy glade, with sundials and flagstone walks, charming with moss and violets; but moon shadows gave the yard a menacing aura, now heightened by the lightning that flickered through the incoming clouds.

“Like the Munsters should live there,” the bigger of the killers said.

“Like a graveyard,” the little one agreed.

The Weather Channel had warned of tornadic events, and the killers could feel a twister in the oppressive heat, the smell of ozone thick in the air. The summer was just getting started. The last snow slipped into town on May 2, and was gone a day later. The rest of the month had been sunny and warm, and by the end of it, even the ubiquitous paper-pale blondes were showing tan lines. Now the first of the big summer winds. Refreshing, if it didn't knock your house down.

On the fourth pass, the van turned into the driveway, eased up under the portico, and the killers waited there for a porch light. No light came on. That was good.

They got out of the van, one Big, one Little, stood there for a moment, listening, obscure in the shadows, facing the huge front doors. They were wearing coveralls, of the kind worn by automotive mechanics, and hairnets, and nylon stockings over their faces. Behind them, the van's engine ticked as it cooled. A Wisconsin license plate, stolen from a similar vehicle in a 3M parking lot, was stuck on the back of the van.

Big said, “Let's do it.”

Little led the way up the porch steps. After a last quick look around, Big nodded again, and Little pushed the doorbell.

They'd done this before. They were good at it.

They could feel the footsteps on the wooden floors inside the house. “Ready,” said Big.

A moment later, one of the doors opened. A shaft of light cracked across the porch, flashing on Little's burgundy jacket. Little said a few words-”Miz Peebles? Is this where the party is?”

A slender black woman, sixtyish, Peebles said, “Why no…” Her jaw continued to work wordlessly, searching for a scream, as she took in the distorted faces. Little was looking past her at an empty hallway. The grounds-keeper and the cook were home, snug in bed. This polite inquiry at the door was a last-minute check to make sure that there were no unexpected guests. Seeing no one, Little stepped back and snapped, “Go.”

Big went through the door, fast, one arm flashing in the interior light. Big was carrying a two-foot-long steel gas pipe, with gaffer tape wrapped around the handle-end.

Peebles didn't scream, because she didn't have time. Her eyes widened, her mouth dropped open, one hand started up, and then Big hit her on the crown of her head, crushing her skull.

The old woman dropped like a sack of bones. Big hit her again, as insurance, and then a third time, as insurance on the insurance: three heavy floor-shaking impacts, whack! whack! whack!

Then a voice from up the stairs, tentative, shaky. “Sugar? Who was it, Sugar?”

Big's head turned toward the stairs and Little could hear him breathing. Big slipped out of his loafers and hurried up the stairs in his stocking feet, a man on the hunt.

Little stepped up the hall, grabbed a corner of a seven-foot-long Persian carpet and dragged it back to the black woman's body. And from upstairs, three more impacts: a gasping, thready scream, and whack! whack! whack!

Little smiled. Murder-and the insurance.

Little stooped, caught the sleeve of Peebles's housecoat, and rolled her onto the carpet. Breathing a little harder, Little began dragging the carpet toward an interior hallway that ran down to the kitchen, where it'd be out of sight of any of the windows.

A pencil-thin line of blood, like a slug's trail, tracked the rug across the hardwood floor.

Peebles's face had gone slack. Her eyes were still open, the eyeballs rolled up, white against her black face. Too bad about the rug, Little thought. Chinese, the original dark blue gone pale, maybe 1890. Not a great rug, but a good one. Of course, it'd need a good cleaning now, with the blood-puddle under Peebles's head. Outside, there'd been no sound of murder. No screams or gunshots audible on the street.

A window lit up on Oak Walk's second floor. Then another on the third floor, and yet another, on the first floor, in the back, in the butler's pantry: Big and Little, checking out the house, making sure that they were the only living creatures inside.

When They knew that the house was clear, Big and Little met at the bottom of the staircase. Big's mouth under the nylon was a bloody O. He'd chewed into his bottom lip while killing the old woman upstairs, something he did when the frenzy was on him. He was carrying a jewelry box and one hand was closed in a fist. “You won't believe this,” he said. “She had it around her neck.” He opened his fist-his hands were covered with latex kitchen gloves- to show off a diamond the size of a quail's egg.

“Is it real?”

“It's real and it's blue. We're not talking Boxsters anymore. We're talking SLs.” Big opened the box. “There's more: earrings, a necklace. There could be a half million, right here.”

“Can Fleckstein handle it?”

Big snorted. “Fleckstein's so dirty that he wouldn't recognize the Mona Lisa. He'll handle it.”

He pushed the jewelry at Little, started to turn, caught sight of Peebles lying on the rug. “Bitch,” he said, the word grating through his teeth. “Bitch.” In a second, in three long steps, he was on her again, beating the dead woman with the pipe, heavy impacts shaking the floor. Little went after him, catching him after the first three impacts, pulling him away, voice hard, “She's gone, for Christ's sakes, she's gone, she's gone…”

“Fucker,” Big said. “Piece of shit.”

Little thought, sometimes, that Big should have a bolt through his neck.

Big stopped, and straightened, looked down at Peebles, muttered, “She's gone.” He shuddered, and said, “Gone.” Then he turned to Little, blood in his eye, hefting the pipe.

Little's hands came up: “No, no-it's me. It's me. For God's sake.”

Big shuddered again. “Yeah, yeah. I know. It's you.”

Little took a step back, still uncertain, and said, “Let's get to work. Are you okay?

Let's get to work.”

Twenty minutes after they went in, the front door opened again. Big came out, looked both ways, climbed into the van, and eased it around the corner of the house and down the side to the deliveries entrance. Because of the pitch of the slope at the back of the house, the van was no longer visible from the street.

The last light was gone, the night now as dark as a coal sack, the lightning flashes closer, the wind coming like a cold open palm, pushing against Big's face as he got out of the van. A raindrop, fat and round as a marble, hit the toe of his shoe. Then another, then more, cold, going pat-pat… pat… pat-pat-pat on the blacktop and concrete and brick.

He hustled up to the back door; Little opened it from the inside.

“Another surprise,” Little said, holding up a painting, turning it over in the thin light. Big squinted at it, then looked at Little: “We agreed we wouldn't take anything off the walls.”

“Wasn't on the walls,” Little said. “It was stuffed away in the storage room.

It's not on the insurance list.”

“Amazing. Maybe we ought to quit now, while we're ahead.”

“No.” Little's voice was husky with greed. “This time… this time, we can cash out. We'll never have to do this again.”

“I don't mind,” Big said.

“You don't mind the killing, but how about thirty years in a cage? Think you'd mind that?”

Big seemed to ponder that for a moment, then said, “All right.”

Little nodded. “Think about the SLs. Chocolate for you, silver for me.

Apartments:New York and Los Angeles. Something right on the Park, in New York. Something where you can lean out the window, and see the Met.”

“We could buy…” Big thought about it for a few more seconds. “Maybe… a Picasso?”

“A Picasso…” Little thought about it, nodded. “But first-I'm going back upstairs. And you…”

Big grinned under the mask. “I trash the place. God, I love this job.”

Outside, across the back lawn, down the bluff, over the top of the United Hospital buildings and Seventh Street and the houses below, down three-quarters of a mile away, a towboat pushed a line of barges toward the moorings at Pig's Eye. Not hurrying.

Tows never hurried. All around, the lights of St. Paul sparkled like diamonds, on the first line of bluffs, on the second line below the cathedral, on the bridges fore and aft, on the High Bridge coming up.

The pilot in the wheelhouse was looking up the hill at the lights of Oak Walk, Dove Hill, and the Hill House, happened to be looking when the lights dimmed, all at once.

The rain-front had topped the bluff and was coming down on the river.

Hard rain coming, the pilot thought. Hard rain.

Sloan carried a couple of Diet Cokes over to the booth where Lucas Davenport waited, sitting sideways, his feet up on the booth seat. The bar was modern, but with an old-timey decor: creaking wooden floors, high-topped booths, a small dance floor at one end.

Sloan was the proprietor, and he dressed like it. He was wearing a brown summer suit, a tan shirt with a long pointed collar, a white tie with woven gold diamonds, and a genuine straw Panama hat. He was a slat-built man, narrow through the face, shoulders, and hips. Not gaunt, but narrow; might have been a clarinet player in a fading jazz band, Lucas thought, or the cover character on a piece of 1930s pulp fiction. “Damn Diet Coke, it fizzes like crazy. I thought there was something wrong with the pump, but it's just the Coke. Don't know why,” Sloan said, as he dropped the glasses on the table.

At the far end of the bar, the bartender was reading a Wall Street Journal by the light from a peanut-sized reading lamp clamped to the cash register. Norah Jones burbled in the background; the place smelled pleasantly of fresh beer and peanuts.

Lucas said, “Two guys in the bar and they're both drinking Cokes. You're gonna go broke.”

Sloan smiled comfortably, leaned across the table, his voice pitched down so the bartender couldn't hear him, “I put ten grand in my pocket last month.

I never had so much money in my life.”

“Probably because you don't spend any money on lights,” Lucas said. “It's so dark in here, I can't see my hands.”

“Cops like the dark. You can fool around with strange women,” Sloan said. He hit on the Diet Coke.

“Got the cops, huh?” The cops had been crucial to Sloan's business plan.

“Cops and schoolteachers,” Sloan said with satisfaction. “A cop and schoolteacher bar. The teachers drink like fish. The cops hit on the schoolteachers. One big happy family.”

The bartender laughed at something in the Journal, a nasty laugh, and he said, to no one in particular, “Gold's going to a thousand, you betcha. Now we'll see what's what.”

They looked at him for a moment, then Sloan shrugged, said, “He's got a B.S. in economics.

And I do mean a B.S.”

“Not bad for a bartender… So what's the old lady think about the place?”

“She's gotten into it,” Sloan said. He was happy that an old pal could see him doing well. “She took a course in bookkeeping, she handles all the cash, running these QuickBook things on the computer. She's talking about taking a couple weeks in Cancun or Palm Springs next winter. Hawaii.”

“That's terrific,” Lucas said. And he was pleased by all of it. So they talked about wives and kids for a while, Sloan's retirement check, and the price of a new sign for the place, which formerly had been named after a tree, and which Sloan had changed to Shooters.

Even from a distance, it was clear that the two men were good friends: they listened to each other with a certain narrow-eyed intensity, and with a cop-quick skepticism. They were close, but physically they were a study in contrasts. Sloan was slight, beige and brown, tentative.

Lucas was none of those. Tall, dark haired, with the thin white line of a scar draped across his tanned forehead, down into an eyebrow, he might have been a thug of the leading-man sort. He had intense blue eyes, a hawk nose, and large hands and square shoulders; an athlete, a onetime University of Minnesota hockey player. Sloan knew nothing about fashion, and never cared; Lucas went for Italian suits, French ties, and English shoes. He read the men's fashion magazines, of the serious kind, and spent some time every spring and fall looking at suits. When he and his wife traveled to Manhattan, she went to the Museum of Modern Art, he went to Versace.

Today he wore a French-blue shirt under a linen summer jacket, lightweight woolen slacks, and loafers; and a compact.45 in a Bianchi shoulder rig.

Lucas's smile came and went, flashing in his face. He had crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes, and silver hair threaded through the black. In the morning, when shaving, he worried about getting old. He had a way to go before that happened, but he imagined he could see it, just over the hill.

When they finished the Diet Cokes, Sloan went and got two more and then said, “What about Burt Kline?”

“You know him, right?” Lucas asked.

“I went to school with him, thirteen years,” Sloan said. “I still see him around, when there's a campaign.”

“Good guy, bad guy?” Lucas asked.

“He was our class representative in first grade and every grade after that,” Sloan said. “He's a politician. He's always been a politician. He's always fat, greasy, jolly, easy with the money, happy to see you. Like that. First time I ever got in trouble in school, was when I pushed him into a snowbank. He reported me.”

“Squealer.”

Sloan nodded.

“But what's even more interesting, is that you were a school bully. I never saw that in you,” Lucas said. He scratched the side of his nose, a light in his eye.

Sloan made a rude noise. “I weighed about a hundred and ten pounds when I graduated.

I didn't bully anybody.”

“You bullied Kline. You just said so.”

“Fuck you.” After a moment of silence, Sloan asked, “What'd he do?”

Lucas looked around, then said, quietly, “This is between you and me.”

“Of course.”

Lucas nodded. Sloan could keep his mouth shut. “He apparently had a sexual relationship with a sixteen-year-old. And maybe a fifteen-year-old-same girl, he just might've been nailing her a year ago.”

“Hmm.” Sloan pulled a face, then said, “I can see that. But it wouldn't have been rape. I mean, rape-rape, jumping out of the bushes. He's not the most physical guy.”

“No, she went along with it,” Lucas said. “But it's about forty years of statutory.”

Sloan looked into himself for a minute, then said, “Not forty. Thirty-six.”

“Enough.”

Another moment of silence, then Sloan sighed and asked, “Why don't you bust him? Don't tell me it's because he's a politician.”

Lucas said to Sloan, “It's more complicated than that.” When Sloan looked skeptical, he said, “C'mon, Sloan, I wouldn't bullshit you. It really is more complicated.”

“I'm listening,” Sloan said.

“All right. The whole BCA is a bunch of Democrats, run by a Democrat appointee of a Democratic governor, all right?”

“And God is in his heaven.”

“If we say, 'The girl says he did it,' and bust him, his career's over. Whether he did it or not. Big pederast stamp on his forehead. If it turns out he didn't do it, if he's acquitted, every Republican in the state will be blaming us for a political dirty trick-a really dirty trick. Five months to the election. I mean, he's the president of the state senate.”

“Does the kid have any evidence?” Sloan asked. “Any witnesses?”

“Yes. Semen on a dress,” Lucas said. “She also told the investigator that Kline has moles or freckles on his balls, and she said they look like semicolons. One semicolon on each nut.”

An amused look crept over Sloan's face: “She's lying.”

“What?”

“In this day and age,” he asked, “how many sixteen-year-olds know what a semicolon is?”

Lucas rolled his eyes and said, “Try to concentrate, okay? This is serious.”

“Doesn't sound serious,” Sloan said. “Investigating the family jewels.”

“Well, it is serious,” Lucas said. “She tells the initial investigator…”

“Who's that?”

“Virgil Flowers.”

“That fuckin' Flowers,” Sloan said, and he laughed. “Might've known.”

“Yeah. Anyway, she tells Virgil that he's got semicolons on his balls. And quite a bit of other detail, including the size of what she calls 'his thing.' She also provides us with a dress and there's a semen stain on it. So Virgil gets a search warrant…”

Sloan giggled, an unattractive sound from a man of his age.

“… gets a search warrant, and a doctor, and they take a DNA scraping and examine Kline's testicles,” Lucas said. “Sure enough, it's like they came out of Microsoft Word: one semicolon on each nut. We got the pictures.”

“I bet they're all over the Internet by now,” Sloan said.

“You'd bet wrong. These are not attractive pictures-and everybody involved knows that their jobs are on the line,” Lucas said. “You don't mess with Burt Kline unless you can kill him.”

“Yeah, but the description, the semen… sounds like a big indict to me,” Sloan said.

“However,” Lucas said.

“Uh-oh.” Sloan had been a cop for twenty years; he was familiar with howevers.

“Burt says he never had sex with the daughter, but he did sleep with her mom,” Lucas said. “See, the state pays for an apartment in St. Paul. Kline rents a place from Mom, who owns a duplex on Grand Avenue, what's left from a divorce settlement. Kline tells Virgil that he's staying there, doing the people's work, when Mom starts puttin' it on him.”

“Him being such a looker,” Sloan said.

“Kline resists, but he's only human. And, she's got, Virgil believes, certain skills.

In fact, Virgil said she's been around the block so often it looks like a NASCAR track. Anyway, pretty soon Burt is sleeping with Mom every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

“How old's Mom?” Sloan asked.

“Thirty-four,” Lucas said.

“With a sixteen-year-old daughter?”

“Yeah. Mom started young,” Lucas said. “Anyway, Burt says Mom got the idea to blackmail him, because she's always hurting for money. He says she put the daughter up to it, making the accusation. Burt said that she would have all the necessary grammatical information.”

“And Mom says…”

“She said that they had a hasty affair, but that Burt really wanted the daughter, and she was horrified when she found out he'd gotten to her,” Lucas said. “She says no way would she have done what she would have had to do to see the semicolons, or get semen on the neckline of the dress. That's something that her daughter had to be forced into.”

“Mom was horrified.”

“Absolutely,” Lucas said. “So Virgil asks her if she'd gained any weight lately.”

“She was heavy?”

“No, not especially. I'd say… solid. Plays broomball in the winter. Blades in the summer. Or, more to the point, about a size ten-twelve. She said no, she hadn't gained any weight since she had the kid, sixteen years ago. So Virgil points out that the dress with the semen stain is a size ten and the girl herself is about a size four. The kid looks like that fashion model who puts all the cocaine up her nose.”

“Oooo.” Sloan thought about it for a moment, then asked, “What's Mom say?”

“She says that they trade clothes all the time,” Lucas said. “If you want to believe that a size-four fashion-aware teenager is going to drag around in a size ten.”

“That's a… problem,” Sloan agreed.

“Another problem,” Lucas said. “Virgil put the screws on a neighbor boy who seemed to be sniffing around. The neighbor kid says the girl's been sexually active since she was twelve. That Mom knew it. Maybe encouraged it.”

“Huh.”

“So what do you think?” Lucas asked.

“Mom's on record saying she doesn't do oral?” Sloan asked.

“Yeah.”

“Jury's not gonna believe that,” Sloan said. “Sounds like there's a lot of sex in the family. She can't get away with playing the Virgin Mary. If they think she's lying about that, they'll think she's lying about the whole thing.”

“Yup.”

Sloan thought it over for a while, then asked, “What's the point of this investigation?”

“Ah, jeez,” Lucas said. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “That's another problem.

I don't know what the point is. Maybe the whole point is to push Burt Kline out of his job. The original tip was anonymous. It came into child protection in St. Paul.

St. Paul passed it on to us because there were out-state aspects-the biggest so-called overt act might've been that Kline took the girl up to Mille Lacs for a naked weekend.

Anyway, the tip was anonymous. Maybe Kline said something to a Democrat. Or maybe… Virgil suspects the tip might've come from Mom. As part of a blackmail hustle.”

“Flowers is smart,” Sloan admitted.

“Yeah.”

“And Mom's cooperating now?”

“She runs hot and cold,” Lucas said. “What she doesn't believe is, that she can't cut off the investigation. She thought we'd be working for her. Or at least, that's what she thought until Virgil set her straight.”

“Hmph. Well, if the point is to push Burt out of his job… I mean, that's not good,” Sloan said. He shook a finger at Lucas. “Not good for you. You don't want to get a rep as a political hit man. If the point is to stop a pederast…”

“If he is one.”

Silence.

“Better get that straight,” Sloan said. “Here's what I think: I think you ask whether it was rape. Do you believe he did it? If you do, screw him-indict him. Forget all the politics, let the chips fall.”

“Yeah,” Lucas said. He fiddled with his Coke glass. “Easy to say.”

More silence, looking out the window at a freshly striped parking lot. A battered Chevy, a repainted Highway Patrol pursuit car, with rust holes in the back fender, pulled in. They were both looking at it when Del Capslock climbed out.

“Del,” Lucas said. “Is he hangin' out here?”

“No,” Sloan said. “He's been in maybe twice since opening night. Where'd he get that nasty car?”

“He's got an undercover gig going,” Lucas said.

Capslock scuffed across the parking lot, and a moment later, pushed inside. Lucas saw the bartender do a check and a recheck, and put down the paper.

Del was a gaunt, pasty-faced man with a perpetual four-day beard and eyes that looked too white. He was wearing a jeans jacket out at the elbows, a black T-shirt, and dusty boot-cut jeans. The T-shirt said, in large letters, I found Jesus! and beneath that, in smaller letters, He was behind the couch.

Lucas called, “Del.” Del looked around in the gloom, saw them in the booth, and walked over.

Sloan said, “My tone just got lowered.”

“Jenkins said you might be here,” Del said to Lucas. “I was in the neighborhood…”

He waved at the bartender. “'Nother Coke. On the house.” To Sloan, he said, “Whyn't you turn on some goddamn lights?” And to Lucas, “People have been trying to call you. Your cell phone is turned off.”

“I feel like such a fool,” Lucas said, groping for the phone. He turned it on and waited for it to come up.

“That's what they thought you'd feel like,” Del said. “Anyway the governor's calling.”

Lucas's eyebrows went up. “What happened?” His phone came up and showed a list of missed calls. Six of them.

“You know Constance Bucher?” Del asked. “Lived up on Summit?”

“Sure…” Lucas said. The hair prickled on the back of his neck as he picked up the past tense in lived. “Know of her, never met her.”

“Somebody beat her to death,” Del said. He frowned, picked at a nit on his jeans jacket, flicked it on the floor. “Her and her maid, both.”

“Oh, boy.” Lucas slid out of the booth. “When?”

“Two or three days, is what they're saying. Most of St. Paul is up there, and the governor called, he wants your young white ass on the scene.”

Lucas said to Sloan, “It's been wonderful.”

“Who is she?” Sloan asked. He wasn't a St. Paul guy.

“Constance Bucher-Bucher Natural Resources,” Lucas said. “Lumber, paper mills, land.

Remember the Rembrandt that went to the Art Institute?”

“I remember something about a Rembrandt,” Sloan said doubtfully.

“Bucher Boulevard?” Del suggested.

“That Bucher,” Sloan said. To Lucas: “Good luck. With both cases.”

“Yeah. You get any ideas about your pal, give me a call. I'm hurtin',” Lucas said.

“And don't tell Del about it.”

“You mean about Burt Kline?” Del asked, his eyebrows working.

“That fuckin' Flowers,” Lucas said, and he went out the door.

Lucas was driving the Porsche. Once behind the wheel and moving, he punched up the list of missed calls on his telephone. Three of them came from the personal cell phone of Rose Marie Roux, director of the Department of Public Safety, and his real boss; one came from the superintendent of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, his nominal boss; the other two came from one of the governor's squids. He tapped the phone, and Rose Marie answered after the first ring.

“Where are you?” she asked without preamble. He was listed in her cell-phone directory.

“In Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “I'm on my way. She's what, four doors down from the cathedral?”

“About that. I'm coming up on it now. About a million St. Paul cops scattered all…

Ah! Jesus!”

“What?”

She laughed. “Almost hit a TV guy… nothing serious.”

“I hear the governor's calling,” Lucas said.

“He is. He said, quote, I want Davenport on this like brass on a doorknob, unquote.”

“He's been working on his metaphors again,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. He thinks it gives him the common touch,” she said.

“Listen, Lucas, she was really, really rich. A lot of money is about to go somewhere, and there's the election coming.”

“I'll see you in ten minutes,” Lucas said. “You got an attitude from St. Paul?”

“Not yet. Harrington is here somewhere, I'll talk to him,” Rose Marie said. “I gotta put the phone down and park… He'll be happy to see us-he's trying to get more overtime money from the state.” Harrington was the St. Paul chief.

“Ten minutes,” Lucas said.

He was on the west side of Minneapolis. He took Highway 100 north, got on I-394, aimed the nose of the car at the IDS building in the distance, and stepped on the accelerator, flashing past minivans, SUVs, pickups, and fat-assed sedans, down to I-94.

Feeling all right, whistling a little.

He'd had a past problem with depression. The depression, he believed, was probably genetic, and he'd shared it with his father and grandfather; a matter of brain chemicals.

And though depression was always off the coast, like a fog bank, it had nothing to do with the work. He actually liked the hunt, liked chasing assholes. He'd killed a few of them, and had never felt particularly bad about it. He'd been dinged up along the way, as well, and never thought much about that, either. No post-traumatic stress.

As for rich old ladies getting killed, well, hell, they were gonna die sooner or later. Sometimes, depending on who it was, a murder would make him angry, or make him sad, and he wouldn't have wished for it. But if it was going to happen, he'd be pleased to chase whoever had done it.

He didn't have a mission; he had an interest.

Emmylou Harris came up on the satellite radio, singing “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight,” and he sang along in a crackling baritone, heading for bloody murder through city traffic at ninety miles per hour; wondered why Catholics didn't have something like a St. Christopher's medal that would ward off the Highway Patrol. He'd have to talk to his parish priest about it, if he ever saw the guy again.

Gretchen Wilson came up, with Kris Kristofferson's “Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down,” and he sang along with her, too.

The day was gorgeous, puffy clouds with a breeze, just enough to unfold the flags on buildings along the interstate. Eighty degrees, maybe. Lucas took I-94 to Marion Street, around a couple of corners onto John Ireland, up the hill past the hulking cathedral, and motored onto Summit.

Summit Avenue was aptly named. Beginning atop a second-line bluff above the Mississippi, it looked out over St. Paul, not only from a geographical high point, but also an economic one. The richest men in the history of the city had built mansions along Summit, and some of them still lived there.

Oak Walk Was a three-story red-brick mansion with a white-pillared portico out front, set back a bit farther from the street than its gargantuan neighbors. He'd literally passed it a thousand times, on his way downtown, almost without noticing it. When he got close, the traffic began coagulating in front of him, and then he saw the TV trucks and the foot traffic on the sidewalks, and then the wooden barricades-Summit had been closed and cops were routing traffic away from the murder house, back around the cathedral. Lucas held his ID out the window, nosed up to the barricades, called “BCA” to the cop directing traffic, and was pointed around the end of a barricade and down the street.

Oak Walk's driveway was jammed with cop cars. Lucas left the Porsche in the street, walked past a uniformed K-9 cop with his German shepherd. The cop said, “Hey, hot dog.” Lucas nodded, said, “George,” and climbed the front steps and walked through the open door.

Just inside the door was a vestibule, where arriving or departing guests could gather up their coats, or sit on a bench and wait for the limo. The vestibule, in turn, opened into a grand hallway that ran the length of the house, and just inside the vestibule door, two six-foot bronze figures, torchieres, held aloft six-bulb lamps.

Straight ahead, two separate stairways, one on each side of the hall, curled up to a second floor, with a crystal chandelier hanging maybe twenty feet above the hall, between the stairs.

The hallway, with its pinkish wallpaper, would normally have been lined with paintings, mostly portraits, but including rural agricultural scenes, some from the American West, others apparently French; and on the herringboned hardwood floors, a series of Persian carpets would have marched toward the far back door in perfectly aligned diminishing perspective.

The hall was no longer lined with paintings, but Lucas knew that it had been, because the paintings were lying on the floor, most faceup, some facedown, helter-skelter.

The rugs had been pulled askew, as though somebody had been looking beneath them.

For what, Lucas couldn't guess. The glass doors on an enormous china cabinet had been broken; there were a dozen collector-style pots still sitting on the shelves inside, and the shattered remains of more on the floor, as if the vandals had been looking for something hidden in the pots. What would that be? A dozen pieces of furniture had been dumped. Drawers lay on the floor, along with candles and candlesticks, knickknacks, linen, photo albums, and shoe boxes that had once contained photos. The photos were now scattered around like leaves; a good number of them black-and-white. There was silverware, and three or four gold-colored athletic trophies, a dozen or so plaques. One of the plaques, lying faceup at Lucas's feet, said, “For Meritorious Service to the City, This Key Given March 1, 1899, Opening All the Doors of St. Paul.”

Cops were scattered along the hall, like clerks, being busy, looking at papers, chatting.

Two were climbing the stairs to the second floor, hauling with them a bright-yellow plastic equipment chest.

Lieutenant John T. Smith was in what Lucas thought must have been the music room, since it contained two grand pianos and an organ.

Smith was sitting backward on a piano bench, in front of a mahogany-finished Steinway grand, talking on a cell phone. He was looking at the feet and legs of a dead black woman who was lying facedown on a Persian carpet in a hallway off the music room.

All around him, furniture had been dumped, and there must have been a thousand pieces of sheet music lying around. “Beautiful Brown Eyes.” “Camping Tonight.” “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” “Tammy.”

An amazing amount of shit that rich people had, Lucas thought.

Smith saw Lucas, raised a hand. Lucas nodded, stuck his head into the hallway, where a St. Paul crime-scene crew, and two men from the medical examiner's office, were working over the body.

Not much to see. From Lucas's angle, the woman was just a lump of clothing. One of the ME's investigators, a man named Ted, looked up, said, “Hey, Lucas.”

“What happened?”

“Somebody beat the shit out of her with a pipe. Maybe a piece of re-rod. Not a hammer, nothing with an edge. Crushed her skull, that's what killed her. Might have some postmortem crushing, we've got lacerations but not much bleeding. Same with Mrs.

Bucher, upstairs. Fast, quick, and nasty” “When?”

Ted looked up, and eased back on his heels. “Johnny says they were seen late Friday afternoon, alive, by a researcher from the Historical Society who's doing a book on Summit Avenue homes. He left at four-thirty. Neither one of them went to church on Sunday Sometimes Mrs. Bucher didn't, but Mrs. Peebles always did. So Johnny thinks it was after four-thirty Friday and before Sunday morning, and that looks good to me. We'll rush the lab work…”

“That's Peebles there,” Lucas said.

“Yo. This is Peebles.”

Smith got off the cell phone and Lucas stepped over, grinned: “You'll be rolling in glory on this one,” he said. “Tom Cruise will probably play your character. Nothing but watercress sandwiches and crиme brыlйe from now on.”

“I'm gonna be rolling in something,” Smith said. “You getting involved?”

“If there's anything for me to do,” Lucas said.

“You're more'n welcome, man.”

“Thanks. Ted says sometime between Friday night and Sunday morning?”

Smith stood up and stretched and yawned. “Probably Friday night. I got guys all over the neighborhood and we can't find anybody who saw them Saturday, and they were usually out in the garden on Saturday afternoon. Beheading roses, somebody said. Do you decapitate roses?”

“I don't know,” Lucas said. “I don't, personally.”

“Anyway, they got four phone calls Saturday and three more Sunday, all of them kicked through to the answering service,” Smith said. “I think they were dead before the phone calls came in.”

“Big storm Friday night,” Lucas said.

“I was thinking about that-there were a couple of power outages, darker'n a bitch.

Somebody could have climbed the hill and come in through the back, you wouldn't see them come or go.”

Lucas looked back at Peebles's legs. Couldn't be seen from outside the house. “Alarm system?”

“Yeah, but it was old and it was turned off. They had a series of fire alarms a couple of years ago, a problem with the system. The trucks came out, nothing happening.

They finally turned it off, and were going to get it fixed, but didn't.”

“Huh. Who found them?”

“Employees. Bucher had a married couple who worked for them, did the housekeeping, the yard work, maintenance,” Smith said. “They're seven-thirty to three, Monday through Friday, but they were off at a nursery this morning, down by Hastings, buying some plants, and didn't get back here until one o'clock. Found them first thing, called nine-one-one. We checked, the story seems good. They were freaked out. In the right way.”

“Anything stolen?”

“Yeah, for sure. They got jewelry, don't know how much, but there's a jewelry box missing from the old lady's bedroom and another one dumped. Talked to Bucher's niece, out in L.A., she said Mrs. Bucher kept her important jewelry in a safe-deposit box at Wells Fargo. Anything big she had here she'd keep in a wall safe behind a panel in the dining room…” He pointed down a hall to his right, past a chest of drawers that had held children's clothing, pajamas with cowboys and Indians on them, and what looked like a coonskin cap; all been dumped on the floor.

“The dining room's down that way. Whoever did it, didn't find the panel. The safe wasn't touched. Anyway, the jewelry's probably small stuff, earrings, and so on.

And they took electronics. A DVD player definitely, a CD player, a radio, maybe, there might be a computer missing… We're getting most of this from Mrs. Bucher's friends, but not many really knew the house that well.”

“So it's local.”

“Seems to be local,” Smith said. “But I don't know. Don't have a good feel for it yet.”

“Looking at anybody?”

Smith turned his head, checking for eavesdroppers, then said, “Two different places.

Keep it under your hat?”

“Sure.”

“Peebles had a nephew,” Smith said. “He's in tenth grade over at Cretin. His mother's a nurse, and right now she's working three to eleven at Regions. When she's on that shift, he'll come here after school. Peebles'd feed him dinner, and keep an eye on him until his mom picked him up. Sometimes he stayed over. Name is Ronnie Lash. He'd do odd jobs for the old ladies, edge trimming, garden cleanup, go to the store. Pick up laundry.”

“Bad kid?”

Smith shook his head. “Don't have a thing on him. Good in school. Well liked. Wasn't here Friday night, he was out dancing with kids from school. But his neighborhood… there are some bad dudes on his street. If he's been hanging out, he could've provided a key. But it's really sensitive.”

“Yeah.” A black kid with a good school record, well liked, pushed on a brutal double murder. All they had to do was ask a question and there'd be accusations of racism. “Gotta talk to him, though,” Lucas said. “Get a line going, make him one of many. You know.”

Smith nodded, but looked worried anyway. The whole thing was going to be enough of a circus, without a civil-rights pie fight at the same time.

“You said two things,” Lucas prompted.

“There's a halfway house across the street, down a block. Drugs, alcohol. People coming and going. You could sit up in one of those windows and watch Bucher's house all night long, thinking about how easy it would be.”

“Huh. Unless you got something else, that sounds as good as the nephew,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, we're trying to get a list out of corrections.”

“Was there… did the women fight back? Anything that might show some DNA?”

Smith looked over his shoulder toward Peebles. “Doesn't look like it. It looks like the assholes came in, killed them, took what they wanted, and left. The women didn't run, didn't hide, didn't struggle as far as we can tell. Came in and killed them.

Peebles was probably killed at the front door and dragged back there on the rug.

We think the rug should be right in front of the door.”

They thought about it for a minute, then Smith's cell phone rang, and Lucas asked quickly, “Can I look around?”

“Sure. Go ahead.” Smith flipped open the phone and added, “Your boss was out in the backyard talking to the chief, ten minutes ago… Hello?”

Lucas took the stairs up to the bedroom level, where another team was working over Bucher's body. The bedroom was actually a suite of four rooms: a sitting room, a dressing room, a bathroom, and the main room. The main room had a big king-sized bed covered with a log-cabin quilt, two lounge chairs, and a wood-burning fireplace. All four rooms had been dumped: drawers pulled out of chests, a jewelry box upside down on the carpet.

A half-dozen paintings hung crookedly on the walls and two lay on the floor. Another quilt, this one apparently a wall hanging, had been pulled off the wall and left lying on the floor. Looking for a safe? The bath opened off to the right side and behind the bed. The medicine cabinet stood open, and squeeze bottles of lotion, tubes of antiseptic and toothpaste littered the countertop beneath it. No prescription medicine bottles.

Junkies. They'd take everything, then throw away what they couldn't use; or, try it and see what happened.

A St. Paul investigator was squatting next to a wallet that was lying on a tile by the fireplace.

“Anything?” Lucas asked.

“Look at this,” the investigator said. “Not a dollar in the wallet. But they didn't take the credit cards or the ATM cards or the ID.”

“Couldn't get the PINs if Bucher and Peebles were already dead,” Lucas said.

The cop scratched his head. “Guess not. Just, you don't see this every day. The cards not stolen.”

Lucas browsed through the second floor, nodding at cops, taking it in. One of the cops pointed him down the hall at Peebles's apartment, a bedroom, a small living room with an older television, a bathroom with a shower and a cast-iron tub. Again, the medicine cabinet was open, with some of the contents knocked out; another quilt had been pulled off the wall.

The other bedrooms showed paintings knocked to the floor, bedcovers disturbed.

A door to a third floor stood open and Lucas took the stairs.

Hotter up here; the air-conditioning was either turned off, or didn't reach this far. Old-time servants' quarters, storage rooms. One room was full of luggage, dozens of pieces dating back to the early part of the twentieth century, Lucas thought.

Steamer trunks. A patina of dust covered the floor, and people had walked across it: Lucas found multiple footprints came and went, some in athletic shoes, others in plain-bottomed shoes.

He browsed through the other rooms, and found a few more footprints, as well as stacks of old furniture, racks of clothing, rolls of carpet, shelves full of glassware, a few old typewriters, an antique TV with a screen that was nearly oval, cardboard boxes full of puzzles and children's toys. A room full of framed paintings. A cork bulletin board with dozens of promotional pins and medallions from the St. Paul Winter Carnival. The dumbshits should have taken them, he thought; some of the pins were worth several hundred dollars.

He was alone in the dust motes and silence and heat, wondered about the footprints, turned around, went back downstairs, and started hunting for his boss.

On THE first floor, he walked around the crime scene in the hallway and past another empty room, stopped, went back. This was the TV room, with a sixty-inch high-definition television set into one wall.

Below it was a shelf for electronics, showing nothing but a bunch of gold cable ends.

He was about to step out, when he saw a bright blue plastic square behind the half-open door of a closet. He stepped over, nudged the door farther open, found a bookcase set into the closet, the top shelves full of DVD movies, the bottom shelves holding a dozen video games. He recognized the latest version of Halo, an Xbox game. There was no Xbox near the TV so it must have been taken with the rest of the electronics.

Were the old ladies playing Halo? Or did this belong to the Lash kid? Smith went by, and Lucas called, “Hey, Johnny… have you been up on the third floor?”

“No. I was told there wasn't much there,” Smith said.

“Who went up?” Lucas asked.

“Clark Wain. You know Clark? Big pink bald guy?”

“Yeah, thanks,” Lucas said. “When're you talking to Peebles's nephew?”

“Soon. You want to sit in?”

“Maybe. I noticed that all the electronics were taken, but there were a bunch of games and DVDs there that weren't,” Lucas said. “That's a little odd, if it's just local assholes.”

Smith rubbed his lip, then said, “Yeah, I know. I saw that. Maybe in a hurry?”

“They had time to trash the place,” Lucas said. “Must have been in here for half an hour.”

“So…”

“Maybe somebody asked them not to,” Lucas said.

“You think?” They were talking about the Lash kid.

“I don't know,” Lucas said. “They stole the game console, but not the games? I don't know. Maybe check and see if Lash has another console at home.”

Lucas found Rose Marie in the small kitchen talking with the state representative for the district, an orange-haired woman with a black mustache who was leaking real tears, brushing them away with a Kleenex. Lucas came up and Rose Marie said, “You know Kathy She and Mrs. Bucher were pretty close.”

“I-ba-I-ba-I-ba…” Kathy said.

“She identified the bodies,” Rose Marie said. “She lives two doors up the street.”

“I-ba-I-ba…”

Lucas would have felt sorrier for her if she hadn't been such a vicious political wolverine, married to a vicious plaintiffs' attorney. And he couldn't help feeling a little sorry for her anyway. “You oughta sit down,” he said. “You look tippy.”

“Come on,” Rose Marie said, taking the other woman's arm. “I'll get you a couch.”

To Lucas: “Back in a minute.”

The kitchen had been tossed like the rest of house, all the cabinet drawers pulled out, the freezer trays lying on the floor, a flour jar dumped along with several other ceramic containers. Flour was everywhere, mixed with crap from the refrigerator.

Dried pickles were scattered around, like olive-drab weenies, and he could smell ketchup and relish, rotting in the sunshine, like the remnants of a three-day-old picnic, or a food tent at the end of the state fair.

To get out of the mess, Lucas walked through the dining room and stepped out on the back porch, a semicircle of warm yellow stone thirty feet across. Below it, the lawn slipped away to the edge of the bluff, and below that, out of sight, I-35, then United Hospital, then the old jumble of West Seventh, and farther down, the Mississippi.

Cops were standing around on the lawn, talking, clusters and groups of two and three, a little cigarette and cigar smoke drifting around, pleasantly acrid. One of the cops was Clark Wain, the guy who'd explored the third floor. Lucas stepped over, said, “Clark,” and Wain said, “Yeah, Lucas, what's going on?”

“You went up to the third floor?”

“Me and a couple of other guys,” Wain said. “Making sure there wasn't anybody else.”

“Were there footprints going up? In the dust?”

“Yeah. We had them photographed but there wasn't anything to see, really-too many of them,” Wain said. “Looked like people were up there a lot.”

“Nothing seemed out of place?”

Wain's eyes drifted away as he thought it over, then came back to Lucas: “Nothing that hit me at the time. They didn't trash the place like they did some of the other rooms. Maybe they took a peek and then came back down-if it was even their footprints.

Could have been anyone.”

“All right…” Rose Marie came out on the porch looking for him, and Lucas raised a hand to her. To Wain he said, “Gotta talk to the boss.”

They stepped back into the dining room. Rose Marie asked, “What do you have going besides Kline?”

“The Heny killing down in Rochester, that's still pooping along, and we've got a girl's body down by Jackson, we don't know what happened there. The feds are pushing for more cooperation on illegal aliens, they want us to put somebody in the packing plants down in Austin… But Kline is the big one. And this.”

“Did Burt do it?” Rose Marie asked. She and Kline were old political adversaries.

“Yeah. I don't know if we can prove it,” Lucas said.

He told her about the DNA and the size-ten dress, and the girl's sexual history.

She already knew about the semicolons and that Kline had admitted an affair with Mom.

“The newest thing is, Kline wants to do something like a consent agreement,” Lucas said. “Everybody agrees that nobody did anything wrong and that nobody will ever do it again. He, in return, pays them another year's rent on the room and a car-storage fee for her garage, like twenty thousand bucks total.”

“That's bullshit. You can't sign a consent agreement that gets you out of a statutory-rape charge,” Rose Marie said. “Especially not if you're a state senator.”

“So I'll send Virgil around and you tell him what you want him to do,” Lucas said.

She made a rude noise, shook her head. “That fuckin' Flowers…”

“C'mon, Rose Marie.”

She sighed. “All right. Send him up. Tell him to bring the file, make a presentation.

Three or four people will be there, he doesn't have to be introduced to them, or look them up later. Tell him to wear a jacket, slacks, and to get rid of those goddamn cowboy boots for one day. Tell him we don't need an attitude. Tell him if we get attitude, I'll donate his ass to the Fulda City Council as the town cop.”

“I'll tell him…” He looked around. Several panels in the wall of the dining room had been pulled open. One showed a safe door; another, rows of liquor bottles; a third, crockery serving dishes with molded vegetables as decoration.

“Listen. This is a sideshow,” she said, waving a hand at the trashed room. “The governor wants a presence here, because she's big political and social money. But you need to focus on Kline.” She popped a piece of Nicorette gum, started chewing rapidly, rolling it with her tongue. “I don't care who fixes it, but it's gotta be fixed.”

“Why don't we just go the grand jury route? You know, 'We presented it to the grand jury and in their wisdom, they decided to indict'? Or not indict?”

“Because we're playing with the legislature, and the Republicans still own it, and they know that's bullshit. Radioactive bullshit. We need to be in position before this girl shows up on Channel Three.”

Lucas 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.

Lucas 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 scratched his forehead. “Maybe they figured it'd be hard to fence?”

“Throw it in a car, drive down to Miami, sayonara.”

“It's got names and monograms…” Lucas suggested.

“Polish it off. Melt it down,” Smith said. “Wouldn't take a rocket scientist.”

“Maybe it was too heavy?”

“Dunno…”

Lucas wandered on, thinking about it. A hundred pounds of solid silver? Surely, not that much. He went back to the dining room, looked inside the built-in cabinet. Three or four sets of silverware, some bowls, some platters. He turned one of the platters over, thinking it might be gilded pewter or something; saw the sterling mark. Hefted it, hefted a dinner set, calculated… maybe forty pounds total? Still, worth a fortune.

A uniformed cop walked by, head bent back, looking at the ceiling.

“What?” Lucas asked.

“Look at the ceiling. Look at the crown molding.” Lucas looked. The ceiling was molded plaster, the crown molding was a frieze of running horses. “The crown molding is worth more than my house.”

“So if it turns up missing, we should look in your garage,” Lucas said.

The cop nodded. “You got that right.”

A couple of people from the ME's office wheeled a gurney through the dining room and out a side door; a black plastic body bag sat on top of it. Peebles.

Lucas went back to the silver. Where was he? Oh yeah- must be worth a fortune. Then a stray thought: Was it really? Say, forty pounds of solid silver; 640 ounces… but silver was weighed in troy ounces, which, if he remembered correctly, were about ten percent heavier than regular ounces. Sterling wasn't pure, only about 90 percent, so you'd have some more loss.

Call it roughly 550 troy ounces of pure silver at… he didn't know how much. Ten bucks? Fifteen? Not a fortune. After fencing it off, reworking it and refining it, getting it to the end user, the guys who carried it out of the house would be lucky to take out a grand.

In the meantime, they'd be humping around a lot of silver that had the dead woman's initials all over it. Maybe, he thought, they didn't take it because it wasn't worth the effort or risk. Maybe smarter than your average cokehead.

Another gurney went by in the hall, another body bag: Bucher. Then a cop stuck his head in the dining room door: “The Lash kid is here. They've taken him into the front parlor.”

Lucas went that way, thinking about the silver, about the video games, about the way the place was trashed, the credit cards not stolen… Superficially, it looked local, but under that, he thought, it looked like something else. Smith was getting the same bad feeling about it: something was going on, and they didn't know what it was.

Ronnie Lash was tall and thin, nervous-scared-a sheen of perspiration on his coffee-brown forehead, tear tracks on his cheeks. He was neatly dressed in a red short-sleeved golf shirt, tan slacks, and athletic shoes; his hands were in his lap, and he twisted and untwisted them. His mother, a thin woman in a nurse's uniform, clutched a black handbag the size of a grocery sack, stood with him, talking to John Smith.

“They always say, get a lawyer,” Mrs. Lash said. “Ronnie didn't do anything, to anybody, he loved Sugar, but they always say, get a lawyer.”

“We, uh, Mrs. Lash, you've got to do what you think is right,” Smith said. “We could get a lawyer here to sit with Ronnie, we could have somebody here in an hour from the public defender, won't cost you a cent.” Which was the last thing Smith wanted.

He wanted the kid alone, where he could lie to him.

Mrs. Lash was saying, “… don't have a lot of money for lawyers, but I can pay my share.”

Ronnie was shaking his head, looking up at his mother: “I want to get this over with, Ma. I want to talk to these guys. I don't want a lawyer.”

She put a hand on his shoulder. “They always say get a lawyer, Ronnie.”

“If you need one, Ma,” the Lash kid said. “I don't need one. Jesus will take care of me. I'll just tell the truth.”

She shook a finger at him: “You talk to them then, but if they start saying stuff to you, you holler for me and we'll get a lawyer up here.” To John Smith: “I still don't understand why I can't come in. He's a juvenile.”

“Because we need to talk to Ronnie-not to the two of you. We need to talk to you, too, separately.”

“But I didn't…” she protested.

“We don't think you did, Mrs. Lash, but we've got to talk to everybody,” Smith said.

His voice had lost its edge, now that he knew he'd be able to sweat Ronnie, without a lawyer stepping on his act.

Lucas leaned against the hallway wall, listening to the exchange, mother and son going back and forth. The Lashes finally decided that Ronnie could go ahead and talk, but if the cops started saying stuff to him…

“I'll call you, Ma.”

At that point, Lucas was eighty-three percent certain that Ronnie Lash hadn't killed anyone, and hadn't helped kill anyone.

They put Mrs. Lash on a settee in the music room and took Ronnie into the parlor, John Smith, a fat detective named Sy Schuber, and Lucas, and shut the door. They put Ronnie on a couch and scattered around the room, dragging up chairs, and Smith opened by outlining what had happened, and then said, “So we've got to ask you, where were you this weekend? Starting at four-thirty Friday afternoon?”

“Me'n some other guys took a bus over to Minneapolis, right after school on Friday,” Lash said. “We were going over to BenBo's on Hennepin. They were having an underage night.”

BenBo's was a hip-hop place. Ronnie and four male friends from school spent the next five hours dancing, hanging out with a group of girls who'd gone over separately: so nine other people had been hanging with Ronnie most of the evening. He listed their names, and Schuber wrote them down. At ten o'clock, the mother of one of the kids picked up the boys in her station wagon and hauled them all back to St. Paul.

“What kind of car?” Lucas asked.

“A Cadillac SUV-I don't know exactly what they're called,” Lash said. “It was a couple of years old.”

Coming back to St. Paul, Ronnie had been dropped third, so he thought it was shortly before eleven o'clock when he got home. His mother was still up. She'd bought a roasted chicken at the Cub supermarket, and they ate chicken sandwiches in the kitchen, talked, and went to bed.

On weekends, Lash worked at a food shelf run by his church, which wasn't a Catholic church, though he went to a Catholic school. He started at nine in the morning, worked until three o'clock.

“They don't pay, but, you know, it goes on your record for college,” he said. “It's also good for your soul.”

Schuber asked, “If you're such a religious guy, how come you were out at some hip-hop club all night?”

“Jesus had no problem with a good time,” Ronnie said. “He turned water into wine, not the other way around.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Smith was rubbing his eyeballs with his fingertips. “Ronnie, you got a guy down the block from you named Weldon Godfrey. You know Weldon?”

“Know who he is,” Ronnie said, nodding. He said it so casually that Lucas knew that he'd seen the question coming.

“You hang out?” Smith asked.

“Nope. Not since I started at Catholic school,” Lash said. “I knew him most when I went to public school, but he was two grades ahead of me, so we didn't hang out then, either.”

“He's had a lot of trouble,” Schuber said.

“He's a jerk,” Ronnie said, and Lucas laughed in spite of himself. The kid sounded like a middle-aged golfer.

Smith persisted: “But you don't hang with Weldon or any of his friends?”

“No. My ma would kill me if I did,” Ronnie said. He twisted and untwisted his bony fingers, and leaned forward. “Ever since I heard Aunt Sugar was murdered, I knew you'd want to talk to me about it. It'd be easy to say, 'Here's this black kid, he's a gang kid, he set this up.' Well, I didn't.”

“Ronnie, we don't…”

“Don't lie to me, sir,” Ronnie said. “This is too serious.”

Smith nodded: “Okay.”

“You were saying…” Lucas prompted.

“I was saying, I really loved Aunt Sugar and I really liked Mrs. Bucher.” A tear started down one cheek, and he let it go. “Aunt Sugar brought me up, just like my ma. When Ma was going to school, Aunt Sugar was my full-time babysitter. When Aunt Sugar got a job with Mrs. B, and I started going to Catholic school, I started coming over here, and Mrs. B gave me money for doing odd jobs. Gave me more money than she had to and she told me that if she lived long enough, she'd help me with college.

No way I want those people to get hurt. I wouldn't put the finger on them for anybody, no matter how much they stole.”

Lucas bought it. If the kid was lying, and could consciously generate those tears, then he was a natural little psychopath. Which, of course, was possible.

Lucas felt John Smith sign off, Schuber shrugged, and Lucas jumped in: “So what'd they steal, kid?”

“I don't know. Nobody would let me look,” Lash said.

Lucas to Smith: “Can I drag him around the house one time?”

Smith nodded. “Go ahead. Get back to me.”

“We all done?” Ronnie asked.

“For now,” Smith said, showing a first smile. “Don't book any trips to South America.”

Ronnie's face was dead serious. “No sir.”

Out IN the hallway, Mrs. Lash was standing with her back to the wall, staring at the door. As soon as Lucas stepped through, she asked, “What?”

Lucas shrugged. “Ronnie's offered to show me around the house.”

She asked Ronnie, “They say anything to you?”

“No. They don't think I did it,” Lash said.

To Lucas: “Is that right?”

Lucas said, “We never really did. But we have to check. Is it all right if he shows me around?”

She eyed him for a moment, an always present skepticism that Lucas saw when he dealt with blacks, as a white cop. Her eyes shifted to her son, and she said, “I've got to talk to the police about Sugar. About the funeral arrangements. You help this man, and if he starts putting anything on you, you shut up and we'll get a lawyer.”

“What I want to know, is what these people took,” Lucas told Lash. “We know they took some electronics… a game machine, probably a DVD. What else?”

They started with the TV room. “Took a DVD and an Xbox and a CD player-Mrs. B liked to sit in here and listen to her albums and she figured out how to run the CD player with the remote, and also, it was off here, to the side, so she didn't have to bend over to put a CD in. The DVD was on the shelf below the TV and she couldn't get up if she bent over that far, Aunt Sugar had to do that,” Lash said. He looked in the closet: “Huh. Didn't take the games.” He seemed to look inward, to some other Ronnie Lash, who knew about the streets, and muttered to himself, “Games is same as cash.”

“Your games?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. But why didn't they take them?”

Lucas scratched his nose. “What else?”

“There was a money jar in the butler's pantry.” Lash led the way to the small kitchen where Lucas had run into Rose Marie and the weeping politician.

“This is a butler's pantry?” Lucas asked, looking around. “What the hell is that?”

“The real kitchen is down the basement. When you had a big dinner, the food would get done down there, and then it'd come on this little elevator-it's called a dumbwaiter.”

Lash opened a panel to show off an open shaft going down. “The servants would get it here and take it to the table. But for just every day, Mrs. B had the pantry remodeled into a kitchen.”

“Okay.”

An orange ceramic jar, molded to look like a pumpkin, with the word “Cookies” on the side, sat against a wall on the kitchen counter. Lash reached for it but Lucas caught his arm. “Don't touch,” he said.

He got a paper towel from a rack, put his hand behind the jar, and pushed it toward the edge of the countertop. When it was close enough to look into, he took the lid off, gripping the lid by its edges. “Fingerprints.”

Lash peered inside. “Nope. Cleaned it out. There was usually a couple of hundred bucks in here. Sometimes more and sometimes less.”

“Slush fund.”

“Yes. For errands and when deliverymen came,” Lash said. “Mostly twenties, and some smaller bills and change. Though… I wonder what happened to the change barrel?”

“What's that?” Lucas asked.

“It's upstairs. I'll show you.”

Lucas called a crime-scene tech, who'd stretch warning tape around the kitchen counter.

Then they walked through the house, and Lash mentioned a half-dozen items: a laptop computer was missing, mostly used by the housekeeping couple, but also by Lash for his schoolwork. A Dell, Lash said, and he pointed to a file drawer with the warranty papers.

Lucas copied down the relevant information and the serial number. Also missing: a computer printer, binoculars, an old Nikon spotting scope that Bucher had once used for birding, two older film cameras, a compact stereo. “Stamps,” Lash said. “There was a big roll of stamps in the desk drawer…”

The drawer had been dumped.

“How big was the printer?” Lucas asked.

“An HP LaserJet, about so big,” Lash said, gesturing with his hands, indicating a two-foot square.

“Heavy?”

“I don't know. I didn't put it in. But pretty heavy, I think,” Lash said. “It looked heavy. It was more like a business machine, than like a home printer.”

“Huh.”

“What means 'huh'?” Lash asked.

Lucas said, “You think they put all this stuff in a bag and went running down the street?”

Lash looked at him for a minute, then said, “They had a car.” He looked toward the back of the house, his fingers tapping his lower lip. “But Detective Smith said they probably came in through the back, up the hill.”

“Well?”

Lash shrugged: “He was wrong.”

In THE upstairs hallway, a brass vase-or something like a vase, but four feet tall-lay on its side. Lucas had noticed it among the other litter on his first trip through the house, but had just seen it as another random piece of vandalism.

Lash lifted it by the lip: “Got it,” he said. To Lucas: “Every night, Mrs. B put the change she got in here. Everything but pennies. She said someday, she was going to call the Salvation Army at Christmas, and have them send a bell ringer around, and she'd give, like, the whole vase full of coins.”

“How much was in there?”

Lash shook his head: “Who knows? It was too heavy to move. I couldn't even tip it.”

“So hundreds of dollars.”

“I don't know. It was all nickels, dimes, and quarters, so, quite a bit,” Lash said.

“Maybe thousands, when you think about it.”

On the rest of the floor, Lash couldn't pick out anything that Lucas didn't already suspect: the jewelry, the drugs. Maybe something hidden in the dressers, but Lash had never looked inside of them, he said, so he didn't know what might be missing.

On the third floor, they had a moment: Lash had spent some time on the third floor, sorting and straightening under Bucher's direction. “Sugar said Mrs. B was getting ready to die,” Lash said.

They'd looked into a half-dozen rooms, when Lash said, suddenly, “Wait a minute.”

He walked back to the room they'd just left, which had been stacked with furniture and a number of cardboard boxes; a broken lamp stuck out of one of them. Lash said, “Where're the chairs?”

“The chairs?”

“Yeah. There were two old chairs in here. One was turned upside down on the other one, like in a restaurant when it's closing. At least…” He touched his chin. “Maybe they were in the next one.”

They stepped down to the next room. Several chairs, but not, Lash said, the two he was thinking of. They went back to the first room. “They were right here.”

“When did you last see them?”

Lash put a finger in his ear, rolled it for a moment, thinking, then said, “Well, it's been a while. I was cleaning this room out… gosh, Christmas vacation. Six months.”

“Two old chairs,” Lucas said.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe Mrs. Bucher got rid of them?”

Lash shrugged. “I suppose. She never said anything. 1 don't think she thought about them.”

“Really old, like French antiques or something?” Lucas asked.

“No, no,” Lash said. “More like my mom's age. Or maybe your age.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they were like… swoopy. Like one big swoop was the back and the other swoop was the seat. They were like, you know, what'd you see on old TV-Star Trek, like that. Or maybe chairs at the Goodwill store.”

“Huh. So you couldn't mistake them,” Lucas said.

“No. They're not here.”

As they went through the last few rooms, Lash said, finally, “You know, I'm not sure, but it seems like somebody's been poking around up here. Things are not quite like it was. It seems like stuff has been moved.”

“Like what?”

Lash pointed across the room, to a battered wooden rocking chair with a torn soft seat. Behind the rocker, four framed paintings were stacked against the wall. “Like somebody moved that rocker. When the old lady wanted something moved, she usually got me to do it.”

“Was there something back there?”

Lash had to think about it for a moment, then went and looked in another room, and came back and looked at the old rocker and said, “There might have been more pictures than that. Behind the rocker.”

“How many?” Lucas asked.

“I don't know, but the stack was thicker. Maybe six? Maybe five. Or maybe seven.

But the stack was thicker. One of the frames was gold colored, but all covered with dust. I don't see that one. Let me see, one said 'reckless' on the back…”

“Reckless?”

“Yeah, somebody had painted 'reckless' on it,” Lash said. “Just that one word. On the back of the painting, not the picture side. In dark gray paint. Big letters.”

“Portrait, landscape…?”

“I don't know. I didn't look at the front, I just remember that word on the back.

There are a couple of paintings gone. At least two.”

“There were some pictures down the hall in that third room, the one with the ironing boards,” Lucas said.

“No, no, I know about those,” Lash said. “These up here had frames that were, like, carved with flowers and grapes and stuff. And the gold one. Those other ones are just plain.”

“Chairs that weren't very old, and maybe some paintings,” Lucas said.

“Yeah.” They stood in silence for a moment, then Lash added, “I'll tell you what, Mr. Davenport, Weldon Godfrey didn't steal any chairs and paintings. Or maybe he'd take the chairs, because his house never had much furniture. But Weldon wouldn't give you a dollar for any painting I can think of. Unless it was like a blond woman with big boobs.”

They tramped back through the house, and on the way, Lash's pocket started to play a rock version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He took a cell phone out of his pocket, looked at it, pushed a button, and stuck it back in his pocket.

“You've got a cell phone,” Lucas said.

“Everybody's got a cell phone. Mom'n me, we don't have a regular phone anymore.”

Back ON the first floor, they ran into Smith again. Smith's left eyebrow went up, a question.

“Maybe something,” Lucas said. “Ronnie thinks a few things may have been taken. Can't nail it down, but stuff looks like it's been moved on the third floor. Couple of chairs may be missing, maybe a painting or two.”

“Tell him about the car,” Lash said.

“Oh yeah,” Lucas said. “They used a car to move the stuff. Or a van or a truck.”

Lucas explained and Smith said, “The Hill House has a security system with cameras looking out at the street. Maybe we'll see something on the tapes.”

“If they took those chairs, it'd have to be pretty good-sized,” Lash said. “Not a car. A truck.”

“Maybe they'll turn up on Antiques Roadshow?”

Smith said.

“Maybe. But we're not sure what's missing,” Lucas said. “Ronnie's not even sure that Bucher didn't get rid of the chairs herself.”

Mrs. Lash was sitting in the foyer, waiting for her son. When Lucas brought him back, she asked Ronnie, “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine. But just wait here for one minute, I want to look at something. I noticed it when the police brought us in…” He went back down the hall and into the music room, his feet cracking through bits and pieces of broken glass.

“He's been a big help,” Lucas said to Mrs. Lash. “We appreciate it.”

“I'm sure,” she said. Then, “I've seen you at Hennepin General. I used to work over there.”

“My wife's a surgeon, she's on staff at Hennepin,” Lucas said. “I'd hang out sometimes.”

“What's her name?” Lash asked.

“Weather Karkinnen.”

Lash brightened: “Oh, I know Dr. Karkinnen. She's really good.”

“Yeah, I know.” He touched a scar at his throat, made by Weather with a jackknife.

Ronnie came back, gestured toward the music room with his thumb.

“There's a cabinet in there with a glass front. It used to be full of old vases and dishes and bowls. One of them had Chinese coins in it. I'm not sure, because some of it's broken, but I don't think there are as many pieces as there used to be. It looks too… loose.”

“Could you identify any of it? If we came up with some stuff?”

Lash shook his head doubtfully. “I don't know anything about it. I never really looked at it, except, one time when Mrs. Bucher showed me the coins. It just looks too loose.

It used to be jammed with vases and bowls. Coins are all over the floor now, so they didn't take those.”

“Okay… Any other last thoughts?”

Ronnie said to Lucas, “ The love of money is the root of all evils.' Timothy, six-ten.”

The little asshole was getting on top of him.

Lucas said, “ 'Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.' Woody Allen.”

His mother cracked a smile, but Ronnie said, “I'll go with Timothy.”

As the Lashes left, Smith and another cop came rolling down the hall, picking up their feet, in a jacket-flapping, gun-flashing hurry.

“Got a break,” Smith said, coming up to Lucas. “Let's go.”

Lucas started walking. “What happened?”

“Guy showed up at Rhodes's with some jewelry in a jewelry box. Jewelry was cheap but the box was terrific. Our guys turned it over, it's inscribed 'Bucher' on the back.”

Rhodes's was a pawnshop. Lucas asked, “Do they know who brought it in?”

“That's the weird thing,” Smith said. “They do.”

“Where're we going?” Lucas asked. “Six-twelve Hay. It's off Payne, nine blocks north of Seventh. SWAT is setting up in the parking lot behind the Minnesota Music Cafe.”

“See you there.”

Payne Avenue was one of the signature drags across St. Paul's east side, once the Archie Bunker bastion of the city's white working class. The neighborhood had been in transition for decades, reliable old employers leaving, a new mix of Southeast Asians and blacks moving in. Lucas dropped past the cathedral, onto I-94 in a minute or so, up the hill to Mounds Boulevard, left and left again.

The cafe was an old hangout of his, at the corner of East Seventh and Payne, with a graveled parking lot in back, and inside, the best music in town. A dozen cars were in the lot, cops pulling on body armor. A half-dozen civilians were watching from the street. Smith arrived ten seconds after Lucas, and they walked over to Andy Landis, the SWAT squad commander.

“What you got?” Smith asked.

“We're in the house behind him and on both sides,” Landis said. “Name is Nathan Brown.

Don't have anything local on him, but the people in the house behind him say he moved here from Chicago four or five years ago. There're about fifty Nathan and Nate Browns with files down in Chicago, so we don't know who he is.”

“Got the warrant?” Smith asked.

“On the way. Two minutes,” Landis said.

“Love this shit,” Smith said to Lucas.

“You ever been on the SWAT squad?”

“Ten years, until the old lady nagged me out of it,” Smith said. “Turned my crank.”

“Wasn't it called something else? They called you the 'breath mint'?”

“CIRT,” Smith said. “Critical Incident Response Team.”

“SWAT's better,” Lucas said.

The warrant arrived and the SWAT squad moved out in three groups. Lucas and Smith tagged behind.

“The couple who found the bodies… did they notice anything missing around the house?” Lucas asked.

Smith shook his head. “Not that they mentioned. But they weren't housekeepers-the wife does the cooking, the husband did maintenance and gardening and the lawn. And with shit thrown all over the place like it was…

The niece is on the way from California. She'll probably know something.”

The SWAT team came in three groups: a blocking group at the back door, and two at the front of the house, one from each side. They came across the neighboring lawns, armored, face shields, carrying long arms. Moved diagonally across the lawn of the target house, quietly swarming the porch, doing a peek at the window, then kicking the front door in.

Nathan Brown, as it happened, was asleep in a downstairs bedroom. His girlfriend was feeding her kids grilled-cheese sandwiches in the kitchen, and began screaming when the cops came through, had the phone in her hand screaming “Nine-one-one, nine-one-one,” and the kids were screaming, and then the cops were in the bedroom on top of Brown.

Brown was yelling, “Hey… hey… hey,” like a stuck record.

Lucas came in as they rolled him and cuffed him; his room smelled of old wallpaper, sweat, and booze. Brown was shirtless, dazed, wearing boxer shorts. He'd left a damp sweat stain on the sheet of the queen-sized bed.

After some thrashing around, the freaked-out girlfriend sat in a corner sobbing, her two children crying with her. The cops found a plastic baggie with an assortment of earrings on the floor by Brown's pants. Asked where he got them, Brown roused himself to semicoherence, and said, “I shoulda known, there ain't no fuckin' toot' fairy.”

“Where'd you get them? He shook his head, not in refusal, but knowing the reaction he'd get: “I got them off a bus bench.”

That was stupid enough that it stopped everybody. “Off a bus bench?” Smith said.

“Off a bus bunch. Up at… up at Dale. Dale and Grand,” Brown said. His eyes tended to wander in his head. “Friday night. Midnight. Lookin' for a bus so I don't got to walk downtown. The box was sit-tin' right there, like the toot' fairy left it.”

“Full of jewelry,” said one of the cops.

“Not full. Only a little in there.” He craned his neck toward the door. He could hear the children, still screaming, and their mother now trying to calm them down.

Cops were starting to prop themselves in the doorway, to listen to what Brown was saying. “Did you knock the door down?” Brown asked. “Why the kids crying? Are the kids okay?”

“The kids are okay…” The air was going out of the SWAT guys.

“Is the house hurt?” There was a pleading note in Brown's voice.

Smith stepped away, put a radio to his face. Lucas asked, “Anybody see you pick this box up?”

Brown said, “Not that I seen. I just seen the box, thought somebody left it, opened it up, didn't see no name.”

“There was a name on the bottom of the box.”

“Didn't look on the bottom of the box,” Brown said helplessly.

Lucas didn't take long to make up his mind. Smith was uncertain, but after talking to Brown, and then to Brown's girlfriend, Lucas was pretty sure that Brown was telling the truth about the jewelry box.

Smith served the search warrant on the woman, who owned the house, and the cops started tearing it apart.

Lucas went back to his car alone, rolled down Payne to the cafe, got a notebook from behind the car seat, took a table on the sidewalk out in front of the place, bought a beer, and started doodling his way through the killings.

The murders of Bucher and Peebles looked like a gang-related home invasion. Two or three assholes would bust a house, tape up the occupants-most often older people, scouted in advance-and then take their time cleaning the house out. Easier, safer, and often more lucrative than going into liquor or convenience stores, which had hardened themselves with cameras, safes, and even bulletproof screens.

But with Bucher and Peebles, the robbers had not taken credit cards or ATM cards.

In most house invasions, those would be the first targets, because they'd yield cash.

Bucher and Peebles appeared to have been killed quickly, before they could resist.

Most home invaders, even if they were planning to kill the victims, would keep them alive long enough to squeeze out the PIN numbers for the ATM cards.

ATMs had cameras, but it was easy enough to put a rag over your face. They might not have intended to kill. Say they came onto Peebles, somebody got excited and swatted her with a pipe. Then they'd have to kill Bucher just to clean up.

But there was no sign that Peebles resisted…

The halfway house was becoming more interesting. Lucas made up a scenario and played it through his head: suppose you had a couple of real hard guys in the halfway house, looking out the second-floor windows, watching the housekeepers come and go, the two old ladies in the garden during the day, the one or two bedroom lights at night, one light going out, then the other.

They'd be in a perfect spot to watch, sitting in a bedroom all evening, nothing to do, making notes, counting heads, thinking about what must be inside.

Get a car, roll down there during a storm. Real hard guys, knowing in advance what they were doing, knowing they were going to kill, maybe drinking a little bit, but wearing gloves, knowing about DNA…

But why would they take a bunch of junk? Stereos and game machines? The stuff they'd taken, as far as Lucas knew of it, wouldn't be worth more than several hundred dollars on the street, not counting the cash, stamps, the vase full of change, and any jewelry they might have gotten. If they'd kept the old ladies alive long enough to get PINs, they could have probably taken down a thousand dollars a day, Friday through Sunday, all cash, then killed them and run with a car full of stuff.

Maybe, though, there was something else in the house. What happened to those chairs? The paintings? Were those figments of Ronnie Lash's imagination? How much could a couple of swoopy chairs be worth, anyway? He took out his cell phone and called home: the housekeeper answered. “Could you get the address book off Weather's desk, and bring it to the phone?” The housekeeper put down the phone, and was back a minute later. “There should be a listing for a cell phone for a Shelley Miller.”

Lucas jotted the number in the palm of his hand, rang off, and dialed Miller, the woman he'd talked to at Oak Walk. The cops had been taking her inside when Lucas and Smith left for the raid.

She came up on the phone: “This is Shelley…”

“Shelley, this is Lucas. Anything?”

“Lucas, I'm not sure. There's just too much stuff lying around. God, it makes me want to cry. You know, my great-uncle is in one of the portraits with Connie's husband's father…” She sniffed. “But… Connie always liked to wear nice earrings and I think she probably kept those at her bedside. She had diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, pearls… uh, probably a couple of more things. They weren't small. For the single-stone earrings, I'd say two or three carats each. Then she had some dangly ones, with smaller stones; and she always wore them. I'd see her out working on the lawn, grubbing around in the dirt, and she'd have very nice earrings on. She also had a blue singleton diamond, a wedding gift from her husband, that she always wore around her neck on a platinum chain, probably eight or ten carats, and her engagement ring, also blue, a fragment of the neck stone, I think, probably another five carats. I really doubt that she locked them up every night.”

After digesting it for a moment, Lucas asked, “How much?”

“Oh, I don't know. I really don't. It would depend so much on quality-but the Buchers wouldn't get cheap stones. I wouldn't be surprised if, huh. I don't know. A half million?”

“Holy shit.”

“I thought you should know.”

The cafe's OWNER, Karen Palm, came by, patted him on the shoulder. She was a nice-looking woman, big smile and dark hair on her shoulders, an old pal; as many St. Paul cops hung out at the cafe as Minneapolis cops hung out at Sloan's place on the other side of the river.

“Were you with the SWAT team?” she asked.

“Yeah. You heard about the Bucher thing.”

“Terrible. Did you get the guy?” she asked.

“I don't think so,” Lucas said. “He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time…”

“Well, shoot…”

They chatted for a minute, catching up, then Carol called and Palm went back to work.

Carol said, “I'm switching you over to McMahon.”

McMahon was a BCA investigator. He came on and said, “I looked at the people from the halfway house. I've run them all against the feds and our own records, and it's, uh, difficult.”

“What's difficult?” Lucas asked.

“These guys were cherry-picked for their good behavior. That's the most famous halfway house in the Cities. If that place flies, nobody can complain about one in their neighborhood. So, what you've got is a bunch of third-time DUI arrests and low-weight pot dealers from the university. No heavy hitters.”

“There can't be nobody…” “Yes, there can,” McMahon said. “There's not a single violent crime or sex crime against any of them. There's not even a hit-and-run with the DUIs.”

“Not a lot of help,” Lucas said.

McMahon said, “The guy who runs the place is named Dan Westchester. He's there every night until six. You could talk to him in person. I'll run a few more levels on the records checks, but it doesn't look like there'll be much.”

Lucas dropped a five-dollar bill on the table, stretched, thought about it, then drove back to Brown's house. Brown was in the back of a squad, his girlfriend and her daughter sitting on a glider on the front porch, the girlfriend looking glumly at the busted door.

Smith was standing in the kitchen doorway and Lucas took him aside.

“I've got a friend who knew Bucher. She says Bucher used to wear some diamonds, big ones…” Lucas said. He explained about Miller, and her thoughts about the jewelry.

Smith said, “A half million? If it's a half million, no wonder they didn't take the ATM cards. A half million could be pros.”

“Unless it was just a couple of dopers who got lucky,” Lucas said. “There could be some little dolly dancing on Hennepin Avenue with a ten-carat stone around her neck, thinking it's glass.”

“So…”

“These guys take the game box, but not the games. They take diamonds and swoopy chairs and a painting, but they also take a roll of stamps and a DVD player and a printer and a laptop. It's not adding up, John.”

“Brown's not adding up, either,” Smith said. “He's an alcoholic, he's on the bottle, really bad, and there's a liquor cabinet full of the best stuff in the world back there, and it's not touched.” Smith looked down to the squad where Brown was sitting.

“Jesus. Why couldn't it be easy?”

Lucas left the raid site, headed back to the Bucher house and the halfway house.

The crowd outside had gotten thinner- dinnertime, he thought-and what was left was coalescing around four TV trucks, where reporters were doing stand-ups for the evening news.

Inside, the crime-scene people were expanding their search, but had nothing new to report. He walked through the place one last time, then headed across the street to the halfway house.

The halfway house looked like any of the fading mansions on the wrong side of Summit, a brown-brick three-story with a carriage house out back, a broad front porch with white pillars, now flaking paint, and an empty porch swing.

Dan Westchester somewhat resembled the house: he was on the wrong side of fifty, the fat side of two-twenty and the short side of five-ten. He had a small gray ponytail, a gold earring in his left ear-lobe, and wore long cotton slacks, a golf shirt, and sandals. The name plaque on his desk showed a red-yellow-green Vietnam ribbon under his name.

“I already talked to St. Paul, and I talked to your guy at the BCA,” he said unhappily.

“What do you want from us?”

“Just trying to see what's what,” Lucas said. “We've got two murdered old ladies across the street from a halfway house full of convicted criminals. If we didn't talk to you, our asses would get fired.”

“I know, but we've worked so hard…”

“I can believe that,” Lucas said. “But…” He shrugged.

Westchester nodded. “The guys here… we've had exactly six complaints since we opened the facility, and they involved alcoholic relapses,” he said. “None of the people were violent. The DOC made a decision early on that we wouldn't house violent offenders here.”

Lucas: “Look. I'm not here to dragoon the house, I'm just looking for an opinion: If one of your guys did this, who would it be?”

“None of them,” Westchester snapped.

“Bullshit,” Lucas snapped back. “If this was a convent, there'd be two or three nuns who'd be more likely than the others to do a double murder. I'm asking for an assessment, not an accusation.”

“None of them,” Westchester repeated. “The guys in this house wouldn't beat two old ladies to death. Most of them are just unhappy guys…”

“Yeah.” Unhappy guys who got drunk and drove cars onto sidewalks and across centerlines into traffic.

Westchester: “I'm not trying to mess with you. I'm not silly about convicted felons.

But honest to God, most of the people here are sick. They don't intend to do bad, they're just sick. They're inflicted with an evil drug.”

“So you don't have a single guy…”

“I can't give you a name,” Westchester said. “But I'll tell you what: you or St.

Paul can send over anyone you want, and I'll go over my guys, file by file, and I'll tell you everything I know. Then you make the assessment. I don't want a goddamn killer in here. But I don't think I've got one. I'm sure I don't.”

Lucas thought about it for a moment: “All right. That's reasonable.” He stood up, turned at the office door. “Not a single guy?”

“Not one.”

“Where were you Friday night?”

Westchester sat back and grinned. “I'm in a foosball league. I was playing foosball.

I got two dozen 'bailers to back me up.”

LUCAS LEFT, a little pissed, feeling thwarted: he'd wanted a name, any name, a place to start. Halfway down the sidewalk, his cell phone rang, and when he looked at the number, saw that it came from the governor's office.

“Yeah. Governor,” Lucas said.

“You catch them?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, fuck 'em then, they're too smart for you,” the governor said. “Now: I want you to talk to Neil tomorrow morning. He has some suggestions about the way you conduct the Kline investigation, okay?”

“Maybe not,” Lucas said. “I hate the charge, 'suborning justice.'“ “We're not going to suborn anything, Lucas,” said the governor, putting a little buttermilk in his voice. “You know me better than that. We're managing a difficult situation.”

“Not difficult for me, at this point,” Lucas said. “Could get difficult, if I talk to Neil.”

“Talk to Neil. Talk. How can it hurt?” the governor asked.

“Ask the White House guys in federal minimum security… Listen, sir, there's a straightforward way to handle this.”

“No, there isn't,” the governor said. “We've gone over all the options. We need more.

If you can think up some reasonable options, then we won't have to turn Neil loose.

So talk to him.”

At dinner, Lucas told the Bucher story to his wife, Weather; his fifteen-year-old ward, Letty; and his son, Sam, who was almost two feet tall now, and who'd developed an intense interest in spoons.

Weather was a short blonde with a bold nose, square shoulders, and shrewd Finnish eyes; she was a plastic and microsurgeon and spent her days fixing heads and faces, revising scars, and replacing skin and cutting out lesions. When he was done with the story, Weather said, “So it was a robbery.”

“Odd robbery,” Lucas said, with a shake of his head. “If they were after the jewelry, why did they trash the rest of the house? If they were after paintings, why were there terrific old paintings all over the place? Why would they take swoopy furniture? The kid said it looked like they took it off the Star Trek set. It's just weird: They stole a printer? They stole an Xbox but not the hottest game on the market?”

“That is definitely strange,” Letty said. She was a lanky girl, dark haired, and was growing into a heart-stopper.

“All that other stuff was to throw you off, so you'd think dopers did it, but it's really a gang of serious antique and jewel thieves,” Weather said. “They took a few special pieces and scattered the rest around to conceal it. It's as plain as the nose on your face.”

“Weather…” Lucas said impatiently.

“Lucas,” Weather snapped. “Look around, if you can get your head out of your butt long enough.”

Letty giggled. “… head out of your butt.” Sam pointed his spoon and yelled, “Butt!”

“We have three antiques,” Weather said. “The most expensive one cost sixteen thousand.”

“Sixteen thousand?” Lucas was appalled. “Which one was that?”

“The china cabinet,” Weather said. “Most real antique people would tell you it is a piece of junk. When I redid the house, how much do you think I spent on furniture? Just give me a ballpark figure.”

Lucas's eyes wandered down the dining room, toward the living room; thought about the new bedroom set, the couches in the den, the living room, the family room, and the TV room. The latter now needed new covers because he kept putting his feet on the arms. “I don't know. Forty, fifty thousand?” It sounded high, but better high than low.

Weather stared at him, then looked at Letty, and back to Lucas. “Lucas, I mean, sweet-bleedin'…”

She looked at Letty again, who filled in, “Jesus.”

Lucas said, “We're letting our mouths get a little out of control here…” That was an uphill fight he'd never win. He was laying down a smoke screen to cover his furniture-pricing faux pas, if that's what it was.

Weather said, “Lucas, I spent two hundred and ten thousand dollars, and that wasn't the really good stuff that I actually wanted.”

His mouth didn't drop open, but he felt as if it had.

She continued: “Lucas, a fair-to-middling couch with custom coverings starts at five thousand dollars. This table”-she rapped with her knuckles on the dining table-”cost nine thousand dollars with eight chairs. And that's nothing. Nothing.

Rich people would spit on this table.”

“Not with me around,” Lucas said.

Weather jabbed a fork at him. “Now. You say Bucher has as much money as your old pal Miller.”

“Yeah. Same league,” Lucas said. “Maybe some of the same ancestors.”

“Those people were billionaires when a billion dollars was serious money,” Weather said. “Everything in their houses would be top quality-and an eighty-year-old woman's house would be stuffed to the gills with antiques… Lucas, I don't know much about antiques, but I know you could get a million dollars' worth in a van. Paintings, who knows what they're worth? I thought maybe I'd buy a couple of nice old American paintings for the living room.

But you know what old American impressionist-style paintings go for now? You could put twenty million dollars in the trunk of your Porsche. I'm not even talking about the biggest names. Painters you never heard of, you have to pay a half million dollars for their work.”

Now he was impressed. He pushed back from the table: “I didn't… I gotta get a book.”

Weather marched on: “This Lash kid, he said she had some old pots, and you said there were smashed pots lying around. They were covering up for what they took. Art Deco pots can go for fifty thousand dollars. Swoopy chairs with leather sets? There are Mies van der Rohe swoopy chairs that go for five thousand dollars each. I know, because Gloria Chatham bought two, and she never stops talking about it. Lucas, they could've taken millions out of this place. Not even counting those diamonds.”

Lucas looked down at his roast, then back up to Weather: “You paid nine thousand dollars for this table? We could have gone over to IKEA.”

“Fuck IKEA,” Weather said.

Letty giggled. “I'd like to see that.”

Sam hit a glass with a spoon; Weather looked at him and smiled and said, “Good boy.”

When they were done with dinner, Lucas hiked down to the Highland Park bookstore and bought a copy of Judith Miller's Antiques Price Guide, which was the biggest and slickest one. Back at home, sitting in the quiet of the den, he flipped through it. Weather hadn't been exaggerating. Lamps worth as much as $100,000; vases worth $25,000; Indian pots worth $30,000; a Dinky truck-a Dinky truck like Lucas had played with new, as a kid, made in 1964! -worth $10,000. Tables worth $20,000, $50,000, $70,000; a painting of a creek in winter, by a guy named Edward Willis Redfield, of whom Lucas had never heard, valued at $650,000.

“Who'd buy this shit?” he asked aloud. He spent another fifteen minutes with the book, made some notes, then got his briefcase, found his phone book, and called Smith at home.

“You catch 'em?” Smith asked.

“No. I've already been asked that,” Lucas said. “By the governor.”

“Well, shit.”

“Listen, I've been doing some research…”

Lucas told Smith about the antiques book, and what he thought had to be done at the murder scene: “Interrogate the relatives. Try to nail down every piece of furniture and every painting. Get somebody who's good at puzzles, go over to that pot cupboard, whatever you call it, and glue those smashed pots back together. Get an antiques dealer in there to evaluate the place. My guys checked her insurance, but there's some bullshit about writs and privacy, so it'd probably be easier to check her safe-deposit box; or maybe there's a copy in one of those file cabinets. We need some paperwork.”

Smith was uncertain: “Lucas, those pot pieces are smaller'n your dick. How in the hell are we going to get them back together?”

“The pots don't have to be perfect. We need to see what they are, and get somebody who knows what he's doing, and put a value on them. I've got this idea…”

“What?”

“If the people who hit the place are big-time antique thieves, if this is some kind of huge invisible heist, I'll bet they didn't bust up the good stuff,” Lucas said.

“I bet there's twenty thousand bucks worth of pots in the cupboard, there's a thousand bucks worth of busted pots on the floor, and the six missing pots are worth a hundred grand. That's what I think.”

After a moment of silence, Smith sighed and said, “I'll freeze the scene, won't allow anybody to start cleaning anything out. Take pictures of everything, inch by inch.

I'll get a warrant to open the safe-deposit box, get the insurance policies. I'll find somebody who can do the pots. I don't know any artists, but I can call around to the galleries. What was that the Lash kid said? A painting that said 'reckless'?”

“I put it in Google, and got nothing,” Lucas said. “There's a guy here in town named Kidd, he's a pretty well-known artist. He's helped me out a couple of times, I'll give him a call, see if he has any ideas.”

Off the phone with Smith, he considered for a moment. The media were usually a pain in the ass, but they could also be a useful club. If the robbery aspect of the murders were highlighted, it could have two positive effects: if the killers were local, and had already tried to dump the stuff, then some useful leads might pop up. If they were professionals, hitting Bucher for big money, it might freeze the resale of anything that was taken out. That'd be good, because it'd still be on their hands when the cops arrived.

There was no doubt in Lucas's mind that the cops would arrive, sooner or later. He looked in his address book again, and dialed a number. Ruffe Ignace, the reporter from the Star Tribune, said, without preface, “This better be good, because I could get laid tonight if I don't go back to the office. It's a skinny blonde with a deep need for kinky sex.”

“You owe me,” Lucas said. “Besides, I'm doing you another favor, and then you'll owe me two.”

“Is this a favor that'll keep me from getting laid?” Ignace asked.

“You gotta work that out yourself,” Lucas said. “What I'm going to tell you comes from an anonymous source close to the investigation.”

“Are you talking about Brown? I got that.”

“Not Brown,” Lucas said. “But to me, it looks like a smart reporter might speculate that the murders and the trashing of the Bucher house were covers for one of the biggest arts and antiquities thefts in history, but one that's invisible.”

Open cell phone: restaurant dishes clinking in the background. Then, hushed, “Holy shit. You think?”

“It could be speculated,” Lucas said.

“How could I find out what they had in there?”

“Call Shelley Miller. Let me get you that number. Don't tell her that I gave it to you.”

“Motherfucker,” Ignace groaned. “The blonde just walked up to the bar. She's wearing a dress you can see her legs through. She's like wearing a thong? In Minneapolis? You know how rare that is? And she wants my body? You know how rare that is?”

“That number is… You gotta pen?”

“Davenport, man, you're killing me,” Ignace said.

“Ruffe, listen: Tell her the story. The whole thing, the murders, everything. Tell her that Deep Throat called. Take her back to your office, drive as fast as you can, scream into your cell phone at the editors while you're driving. Fake it, if nobody's working. Then when you get there, sit her down, write the story, and ask her what she thinks. Then make some change she suggests; joke that she ought to get a share of the byline.”

“Yeah, bullshit. The Ignace doesn't share bylines.”

“Listen, Ruffe, she'll be all over you,” Lucas said. “You'll nail her in the front seat of your car.”

“I got a Prelude, man. With a stick shift. It'd hit her right in the small of the back.”

“Whatever,” Lucas said. “This will not mess up your night. I swear to God. You're good as gold-but try to get it in tomorrow morning, okay? I need this.”

“You need that and I need this-” The phone clicked off.

But Lucas smiled.

He knew his reporters. No way Ignace wouldn't write the story.

And late that night, in bed, Weather reading the latest Anne Perry, Lucas said, “I'm worried about the Kline thing. The governor's got me talking to Mitford tomorrow.”

“I thought you liked him. Mitford.”

“I do-but that doesn't mean that he's not a rattlesnake,” Lucas said. “You gotta watch your ankles when he's around.”

“You've never talked to the girl, have you?” Weather asked. “It's all been that fuckin' Flowers.”

“No. I haven't talked to her. I should. But we've been trying to keep it at the cop level, apolitical. Now Kline's trying to cut a separate deal, but Rose Marie says that's not gonna fly. Nobody'll buy it. I expect I'm going to have to talk to Kline and then we're gonna bring in the Ramsey County attorney. That little chickenshit will do everything he can to turn it into a three-ring circus.”

“Don't get in too deep, Lucas,” Weather said. “This sounds like it'll require scapegoats.”

“That worries me,” he said.

“And sort of interests you, too.”

He sat for a moment looking at the book in his lap. He was learning more about antiques.

Then he grinned at her and admitted, “Maybe.”

Lucas read the paper in the morning, over breakfast, and was happy to see Ignace's story on the possible theft; and he truly hoped that Ignace had gotten laid, which he, like most newspaper reporters, of both sexes, desperately needed.

In any case, the story should wake somebody up.

Sam was still working on his spoon technique, slopping oatmeal in a five-foot radius of his high chair; the housekeeper was cursing like a sailor, something to do with the faucet on the front of the house wouldn't turn off. Weather was long gone to work, where she spent almost every morning cutting on people. Letty was at school, the first summer session.

Lucas noticed a story on a zoning fight in the Dakota County suburbs south of the Twin Cities. One of the big shopping centers, the Burnsville Mall, was looking to expand, and some of its commercial neighbors thought that was a bad idea.

Lucas thought, “Hmmm,” and closed his eyes. Dakota County…

Lucas told the housekeeper to call a plumber, kissed Sam on the head, dodged a spoonful of oatmeal, and went to look up Kidd's phone number. Kidd was the artist who might be able to help with the reckless painting. Lucas found his book, dialed, and got a dairy. Kidd had either changed numbers, or left town.

He glanced at his watch: Kidd's apartment was down by the river. He could drop by after he talked with Neil Mitford. Mitford was the governor's hatchet man; he tried to cut out at least one gizzard every morning before going out for a double latte grande.

Lucas finished his coffee and headed up the stairs to suit up; and once outside, it was another great day, puffy fair-weather clouds under a pale blue sky, just enough wind to ruffle the stars 'n' stripes outside an elementary school. He motored along Summit Avenue toward the Capitol, elbow out, counting women on cell phones making illegal turns.

Mitford had a modest office down the hall from the governor's, in what he said had been a janitor's closet when the building was first put up. With just enough room for a desk, a TV, a computer, a thousand books, and a pile of paper the size of a cartoon doghouse, it might have been.

Mitford himself was short and burly, his dark hair thinning at the crown. He'd been trying to dress better lately, but in Lucas's opinion, had failed. This morning he was wearing pleated khaki slacks with permanent ironed-in wrinkles, a striped short-sleeved dress shirt, featureless black brogans with dusty toes, a chromed watch large enough to be a cell phone, and two actual cell phones, which were clipped to his belt like cicadas on a tree trunk.

Altogether, five or six separate and simultaneous fashion faux pas, in Lucas's view, depending on how you counted the cell phones.

“Lucas.” Mitford didn't bother to smile. “How are we going to handle this?”

“That seems to be a problem,” Lucas said, settling in a crappy chair across the desk from Mitford. “Everybody's doing a tap dance.”

“You know, Burt backed us on the school-aid bill,” Mitford said tentatively.

“Fuck a bunch of school-aid bill,” Lucas said. “School aid is gonna be a bad joke if the word gets out that he'd been banging a ninth-grader.”

Mitford winced. “Tenth-grader.”

“Yeah, now,” Lucas said. “But not when they started, if she's telling the truth.”

“So…”

“I've got one possibility that nobody has suggested yet, and it's thin,” Lucas said.

“Roll it out,” Mitford said.

“The girl says Kline once took her to the Burnsville Mall and bought her clothes-a couple of blouses, skirts, some white cotton underpants, and a couple of push-up bras. She said he liked to have a little underwear-and-push-up-bra parade at night.

Anyway, he got so turned on that they did a little necking and groping in the parking lot. She said she, quote, cooled him off, unquote.”

“All right. So… the push-up bra?”

“She said he bought her gifts in return for the sex.”

Mitford digressed: “He really said, 'Oh God, lick my balls, lick my balls'?”

“According to Virgil Flowers, Kline admits he might have said it, but he would've said it to Mom, not the daughter,” Lucas said.

“Ah, Jesus,” Mitford said. “This is dreadful.”

“Kline said his old lady never…”

“Hey, hey-forget it.” Mitford rubbed his face, and shuddered. “I know his old lady.

Anyway, he took the kid to the Burnsville Mall and groped her and she cooled him off… Is that a big deal?”

“That'd be up to you,” Lucas said. “We can make an argument that he was buying the clothes in return for sex, because of the kid's testimony. And then there was the touching in the car, what you call your basic manual stimulation. So one element of the crime happened at the mall.”

“So what?”

“The mall is in Burnsville,” Lucas said, “which happens to be in Dakota County. Dakota County, in its wisdom, elected itself a Republican as county attorney.”

Mitford instantly brightened. “Holy shit! I knew there was a reason we hired you.”

“That doesn't mean…” Lucas began.

Mitford was on his feet, circling his desk, shaking a finger at Lucas. “Yes, it does.

One way or the other, it does. If we can get a Republican to indict this cocksucker…”

“Actually, he wasn't the…”

“… then we're in the clear. Our hands are clean. There is no Democratic involvement in the process, no goddamn little intransigent Democratic cockroach publicity-seeking motherfucking horsefly Ramsey County attorney to drag us all down. It's a Republican problem. Yes, it is.”

“Virgil is coming up here today to brief some people on the details,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. I'll be going. I've been hearing some odd things about Flowers,” Mitford said.

“Somebody said he once whistled at a guy in an interrogation cell until the guy cracked and confessed.”

“Well, yeah, you have to understand the circumstances, the guy belonged to a cult…”

Mitford didn't care about Flowers and whistling. “Goddamn! Lucas! A Republican county attorney! You my daddy!”

Lucas was feeling okay when he took the hill down into the St. Paul loop. He zigzagged southeast until he got to a chunky red-brick building that had once been a warehouse, then a loft association, and was now a recently trendy condominium.

One of the good things about the Bucher and Kline cases was that the major crime sites were so close to his house-maybe ten minutes on residential streets; and they were even closer to his office. He knew all the top cops in both cases, and even most of the uniformed guys. In the past couple of years he'd covered cases all over the southern half of Minnesota, on the Iron Range in the north, and in the Red River Valley, which was even farther north and west. Minnesota is a tall state, and driving it can wear a guy out.

Not these two cases. These were practically on his lawn.

He was whistling as he walked into the condo. An elderly lady was coming through the inner doors with a shopping bag full of old clothes. He held it for her, she twinkled at him, and he went on inside, skipping past the apartment buzzers.

Kidd came to the door looking tired and slightly dazed. He had a wrinkled red baby, about the size of a loaf of Healthy Choice bread, draped over one shoulder, on a towel. He was patting the baby's back.

“Hey…” He seemed slightly taken aback. Every time Lucas had seen him, he'd seemed slightly taken aback.

“Didn't know you had children,” Lucas said.

“First one,” Kidd said. “Trying to get a burp. You want to take him?”

“No, thanks,” Lucas said hastily. “I've got a two-year-old, I just got done with that.”

“Uh… come on in,” Kidd said, stepping back from the door. Over his shoulder he called, “Lauren? Put on some pants. We've got company. It's the cops.”

Kidd led the way into the living room. He was a couple inches shorter than Lucas, but broader through the shoulders, and going gray. He'd been a scholarship wrestler at the university when Lucas played hockey. He still looked like he could pull your arms off.

He also had, Lucas thought, the best apartment in St. Paul, a huge sprawling place put together from two condos, bought when condos were cheap. Now the place was worth a million, if you could get it for that. The balcony looked out over the Mississippi, and windows were open and the faint smell of riverbank carp mixed with the closer odor of spoiled milk, the odor that hangs around babies; and maybe a touch of oil paint, or turpentine.

“Ah, God,” Kidd called. “Lauren, we're gonna need a change here. He's really wet.

Ah… shit.”

“Just a minute…” Lauren was a slender, dark-haired, small-hipped woman with a wide mouth and shower-wet hair down to her shoulders. She was barefoot, wearing a black blouse and faded boot-cut jeans. She came out of the back, buttoning the jeans.

“You could do it, you ain't crippled,” she said to Kidd.

Kidd said, “Yeah, yeah. This is Detective Davenport… He's probably got an art problem?”

This last was phrased as a question, and they both looked at Lucas as Lauren took the baby.

Lucas nodded. “You heard about the killings up on Summit?”

“Yeah. Fuckin' maniacs,” Kidd said.

“We're wondering if it might not be a cover for a crime…” Lucas explained about the murders, about the china cabinet swept of pots, and his theory that real art experts wouldn't have broken the good stuff, and about getting restorers and antique experts. “But there's this kid, the nephew of one of the dead women, who said he thinks a couple of old paintings are missing from the attic. All he knows is that they're old, and one of them had the word 'reckless' written on the back. Actually, he said it was painted on the back. I wonder if that might mean something to you? You know of any paintings called Recklesst Or databases that might list it? Or anything?”

Kidd's eyes narrowed, then he said, “Capital r in 'reckless'?”

“I don't know,” Lucas said. “Should there be?”

“There was an American painter, first half of the twentieth century named Reckless.

I might have something on him…”

Lucas followed him through a studio, into a library, a narrow, darker space, four walls jammed with art books, Lauren and the baby trailing behind. Kidd took down a huge book, flipped through it… “Alphabetical,” he muttered to himself, and he turned more pages, and finally, “Here we go. Stanley Reckless. Sort of funky impressionism.

Not bad, but not quite the best.”

He showed Lucas a color illustration, a riverside scene. Next to them, the baby made a bad smell and seemed pleased. Lucas asked, “How much would a painting like that be worth?”

Kidd shook his head: “We'll have to go to the computer for that… I subscribe to an auction survey service.”

“I want to hear this,” Lauren said. “Bring the laptop into the baby's room while I change the diaper.” To the baby: “Did you just poop? Did you just poop, you little man? Did you just…”

Kidd had a 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 $415,00in 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 yet?” Lucas asked.

'Just getting started,” Jane Widdler said. “There are some very nice things here.

These damn vandals… they surely don't realize the damage they've done.”

“To say nothing of the killings,” Lucas said.

“Oh, well,” Jane said, and waved a hand. She somehow mirrored Lucas's guilty attitude: old ladies came and went, but a Louis XVI gilt-bronze commode went on forever.

Lucas asked Smith, “Get the insurance papers?”

“Yeah.” Smith dipped into his briefcase and handed Lucas a sheaf of papers. “Your copy.”

Lucas told him about Kidd's take on Stanley Reckless. “Between the jewelry and this one painting, we're talking big money, John. We don't even know what else is missing.

I'm thinking, man, this is way out of Nate Brown's league.”

Smith said, “Ah, Brown didn't do it. I don't think he's bright enough to resist the way he has been. And I don't think he's mean enough to kill old ladies. He's sort of an old hangout guy.”

“What's the Reckless painting?” Leslie Widdler asked, frowning. “It's not on the insurance list.”

“Should it be?”

“Certainly. A genuine Stanley Reckless painting would be extremely valuable. Where was it hung? Did they take the frame, or…”

“Wasn't hung,” Lucas said. “It would have been in storage.”

“In storage? You're sure?”

“That's what we've been told,” Lucas said. “Why?”

Widdler pursed his lips around his braces. “The thing is, some of these paintings here, I mean… frankly, there's a lot of crap. I'm sure Mrs. Bucher had them hung for sentimental reasons.”

“Which are purely legitimate and understandable,” Jane Widdler said, while managing to imply that they weren't.

“… but a genuine Reckless shouldn't have been in storage. My goodness…” Widdler looked at the high ceiling, his lips moving, then down at Lucas: “A good Reckless painting, today, could be worth a half-million dollars.”

Smith to Lucas: “It's piling up, isn't it? A pro job.”

“I think so,” Lucas said. “Professional, but maybe a little nuts. No fight, no struggle, no sounds, no signs of panic. Whack. They're dead. Then the killers take their time going through the house.”

“Pretty goddamned cold.”

“Pretty goddamned big money,” Lucas said. “We both know people who've killed somebody for thirty bucks and for no reason at all. But this…”

Smith nodded. “That Ignace guy from the Star Tribune really nailed us. We've got calls coming in from all over.”

“New York Times?”

“Not yet, but I'm waiting,” Smith said.

“Best find the killer, John,” Lucas said.

“I know.” Smith wasn't happy: still didn't have anything to work with, and the case was getting old. “By the way, Carol Ann Barker's upstairs, checking out Bucher's stuff.”

“Barker?” Lucas didn't remember the name.

“The niece, from L.A.,” Smith said. “She's the executor of the will. She's, uh, an actress.”

“Yeah?”

“Character actress, I think. She's got a funny nose.” He glanced at the Widdlers.

“I didn't actually mean that…”

“That's all right,” Jane Widdler said, with a wooden smile. “Her nose is quite small.”

Lucas wanted to talk to Barker. On the way up the stairs, he thumbed through the insurance papers, which, in addition to the standard boilerplate, included a ten-page inventory of household items. Ten pages weren't enough. He noticed that none of the furniture or paintings was valued at less than $10,000, which meant that a lot of stuff had been left off.

He counted paintings: ten, twelve, sixteen. There were at least thirty or forty in the house. Of course, if Widdler was right, many of them had only sentimental value.

Lucas would have bet that none of the sentimental-value paintings were missing…

Lucas found Barker sitting on the floor of Bucher's bedroom, sorting through family photo albums. She was a little too heavy, her hair was a little too big, and she had glasses that were three fashions ahead of anything seen in the Twin Cities.

The glasses were perched on one of the smallest noses Lucas had ever seen on an adult; its carefully sculpted edges suggested a major nose job. Weather would have been interested. She had a whole rap on rhinoplasties, their value, and the problems that come up. Barker had been ill served by her surgeon, Lucas thought.

She looked up when Lucas loomed over her. The glasses slipped a quarter inch, and she peered at him over the black plastic frames. “There are way too many pictures, but this should give us a start.”

“On what?” Lucas asked.

She pushed the glasses back up her tiny nose. “Oh, I'm sorry- you're not with the police?”

“I'm with the state police, not St. Paul,” Lucas said. “Give us a start on what?”

She waved her hand at three stacks of leather-bound photo albums. “Aunt Connie used to have big Christmas and birthday parties. There were Easter-egg hunts both inside and outside, and a lot of pictures were taken,” Barker said. “We can probably get most of the furniture in one picture or another.”

“Great idea,” Lucas said, squatting next to her, picking up one of the photos. Connie Bucher, much younger, with a half-dozen people and a drinks cabinet in the background.

“What about her jewelry?” Lucas asked. “One of her friends said even the bedside jewelry was worth a lot.”

“She's right. Unfortunately, most of it was old, so there aren't any microphotographs.

All we have is descriptions in the insurance rider and those are essentially meaningless.

If the thieves are sophisticated, the loose stones might already be in Amsterdam.”

“But we could probably find out weights and so on?” Lucas asked.

“I'm sure.”

“Have you ever heard of a painter called Stanley Reckless?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Huh. There supposedly was a painting up in the storage rooms that had 'reckless' written on the back,” Lucas said. “There's an artist named Stanley Reckless, his paintings are worth a bundle.”

Barker shook her head: “It's possible. But I don't know of it. I could ask around the other kids.”

“If you would.”

A cop came in with a handful of photographs. “We're missing one,” he said. “The photograph was taken in the music room, but I can't find it anywhere.”

Lucas and Barker stood up, Barker took the photo and Lucas looked at it over her shoulder. The photo showed a diminutive brown table, just about square on top. The top was divided in half, either by an inlaid line or an actual division. Below the tabletop, they could make out a small drawer with a brass handle.

After looking at it for a moment, Barker said, “You know, I remember that. This was years and years ago, when I was a child. If you folded the top back, there was a checkerboard inside. I think it was a checkerboard. The kids thought it was a secret hiding place, but there was never anything hidden in it. The checkers were kept in the drawer.”

“Is it on the insurance list?” Lucas asked. “Any idea what it's worth?” He thumbed his papers.

The cop shook his head: “I checked John's list. Doesn't look like there's anything like it. Checkers isn't mentioned, that's for sure.”

“There are some antique experts downstairs,” Lucas said. “Maybe they'll know.”

He and Barker took the photos down to the Widdlers. Barker coughed when they were introduced, and pressed her knuckles against her teeth for a moment, and said, “Oh, my. I think I swallowed a bug.”

“Protein,” Jane Widdler said. She added, still speaking to Barker, “That's a lovely necklace… Tiffany?”

“I hope so,” Barker said, smiling.

Lucas said to the dealers, “We've got a missing table. Think it might be a folding checkerboard.” He handed the photograph of the table to Leslie Widdler, and asked, “Any idea what it's worth?”

The two dealers looked at it for a moment, then at each other, then at the photograph again. Leslie Widdler said to his wife, “Fifty-one thousand, five hundred dollars?”

She ticked an index finger at him: “Exactly.”

“You can tell that closely?” Lucas asked.

Leslie Widdler handed the photograph back to Lucas. “Mrs. Bucher donated the table-it's a China-trade backgammon table, not a checkerboard, late eighteenth century-to the Minnesota Orchestra Guild for a fund-raising auction, let's see, must've been two Decembers ago. It was purchased by Mrs. Leon Cobler, of Cobler Candies, and she donated it to the Minneapolis Institute.” He stopped to take a breath, then finished, “Where it is today.”

“Shoot,” Lucas said.

The governor called and Lucas drifted down a hallway to take it. “Good job. Your man Flowers was here and gave an interesting presentation,” the governor said. His name was Elmer Henderson. He was two years into his first term, popular, and trying to put together a Democratic majority in both houses in the upcoming elections. “We pushed the Dakota County proposal and Flowers agreed that it might be feasible. We-you-could take the evidence to Dakota County and get them to convene a grand jury. Nice and tidy.”

“If it works.”

“Has to,” the governor said. “This girl… mmm… the evidentiary photos would suggest that she is not, uh, entirely undeveloped. I mean, as a woman.”

“Governor… sir…”

“Oh, come on, loosen up, Lucas. I'm not going to call her up,” Henderson said. “But that, 'Oh God, lick my balls'-that does tend to attract one's attention.”

“I'll talk to Dakota County,” Lucas said.

“Do so. By the way, why does everybody call your man 'that fuckin' Flowers'?”

Earlier that morning, Leslie Widdler had been sitting on his marigold-rimmed flagstone patio eating toast with low-calorie butter substitute and Egg Beaters, looking out over the brook, enjoying the sun, unfolding the Star Tribune; his wife, Jane, was inside, humming along with Mozart on Minnesota Public Radio.

A butterfly flapped by, something gaudy, a tiger swallowtail, maybe, and Leslie followed it for a second with his eyes. This was typical, he thought, of the kind of wildlife experience you had along the creek-no, wait, it was the brook; he had to remember that-and he rather approved.

A butterfly wasn't noisy, like, for instance, a crow or a blue jay; quite delicate and pretty and tasteful. A plane flew over, but well to the east, and he'd become accustomed to the sound. A little noise wasn't significant if you lived on the brook.

Right on the brook-it was right there in his backyard when he shook open the paper, and at night he could hear it burbling, when the air conditioner wasn't running.

Jane was working on her own breakfast, consumed by the music, projected across the kitchen by her Bang amp; Olufsen speakers; it was like living inside an orchestra, and by adjusting the speakers according to the Bang amp; Olufsen instructions, she could vary her position from, say, the violas, back through the woodwinds, and all the way around the violins. It was lovely. She never referred to the speakers as speakers; she always referred to them as the Bang amp; Olufsens.

Jane Widdler, nee Little. At Carleton College, where she and Leslie had met and become a couple, Leslie had been known to his roommates as Big Widdler, which the roommates had found hilarious for some obscure reason that Leslie had never discovered.

And when he courted and then, halfway through his senior year, married a woman named Little, of course, they'd become Big and Little Widdler. For some reason, the same ex-roommates thought that was even more hilarious, and could be heard laughing at the back of the wedding chapel.

Jane Little Widdler disapproved of the nicknames; but she rarely thought of it, since nobody used them but long-ago acquaintances from Carleton, most of whom had sunk out of sight in the muck of company relations, widget sales, and circus management.

Jane was putting together her breakfast smoothie. A cup of pineapple juice, a cup of strawberries, a half cup of bananas, a little of this, a little of that, and some yogurt and ice, blended for one annoying minute, the whining of the blender drowning out the Mozart. When it stopped, she heard Leslie's voice, through the sliding screen door: “Oh, my God!”

She could tell from his tone that it was serious. She couldn't frown, exactly, because of the Botox injections, but she made a frowning look and stepped to the door: “What? Is it the brook?”

The Widdlers were leading a petition drive to have the name officially changed from Minnehaha Creek to Minnehaha Brook, a combination they felt was more euphonic. They'd had some trashy kayakers on the brook lately-including one who was, of course, a left-wing lawyer, who had engaged in a shouting match with Leslie. Paddling for the People. Well, fuck that. The brook didn't belong to the people.

But it wasn't the creek, or the brook, that put the tone in Big Widdler's voice.

Leslie was on his feet. He was wearing a white pullover Egyptian long-staple cotton shirt with loose sleeves, buttoned at the wrists with black mother-of-pearl buttons, madras plaid shorts, and Salvatore Ferragamo sandals, and looked quite good in the morning sunlight, she thought. “Check this out,” he said.

He passed her the Star Tribune.

The big headline said: Did Murders Conceal Invisible Heist? Under that, in smaller type, Millions in Antiques May Be Missing.

“Oh, my gosh,” Jane said. Her frowning look grew deeper as she read. “I wonder who Ruffe Ignace is?”

“Just a reporter. That's not the problem,” said Big Widdler, flapping his hands like a butterfly. “If they do an inventory, there may be items…” The Bang amp; Olufsen slimline phone started to ring from its spot next to the built-in china cabinet, and he reached toward it. “… on the list that can be identified, and we won't know which ones they are. If there are photos…”

He picked up the phone and said, “Hello?” and a second later, “Uh, Detective? Well, sure…”

Jane was shaken, placed one hand on her breast, the other on the countertop. This could be it: everything they'd worked for, gone in the blink of an eye.

Leslie said, “Hello, yes, it is… uh huh, uh huh…” Then he smiled, but kept his voice languid, professional. “We'd be delighted to help, as long as it wouldn't prejudice our position in bidding, if there should be an estate auction. I can't see why it would, if all you want is an opinion… Mmm, this afternoon would be fine. I'll bring my wife. Our assistant can watch the shop. One o'clock, then. See you after lunch.”

He put down the phone and chuckled: “We've been asked to advise the St. Paul police on the Bucher investigation.”

Jane made a smiling look. “Leslie, that's too rich. And you know what? It's really going to piss off Carmody amp; Loan.”

Carmody amp; Loan were their only possible competition, in terms of quality, in the Cities. If C amp;L had been asked to do the valuations, Jane would have been royally pissed. She couldn't wait to hear what Melody Loan had to say about this.

She'd be furious. She said, “Maybe we could find a way to get the news of the appointment to this Ruffe Ignace person.”

Leslie's eyebrows went up: “You mean to rub it in? Mmmm. You are such a bitch sometimes. I like it.” He moved up to her, slipped his hand inside her morning slacks, which were actually the bottoms of a well-washed Shotokan karate gi, down through her pubic hair.

She widened her stance a bit, put her butt back against the counter, bit her lip, made a look, the best she could, considering the Botox, of semi-ecstasy. “Rub it in, big guy,” she whispered, the smoothie almost forgotten.

But as Leslie was inclined to say, the Lord giveth, and the Lord is damn well likely to taketh it away in the next breath. They spent the morning at the shop, calling customers and other dealers, dealing with bills, arguing with the State Farm agent about their umbrella policy. At noon, they stopped at a sandwich shop for Asiago roast-beef sandwiches on sourdough bread, then headed for St. Paul.

They were driving east on I-494 in Jane's Audi A4, which she now referred to as “that piece of junk,” when another unwelcome call came in. Jane fumbled her cell phone out and looked at the screen. The caller ID said Marilyn Coombs.

“Marilyn Coombs,” she said to Leslie.

“It's that damned story,” Leslie said.

Jane punched the answer button, said, “Hello?”

Marilyn Coombs was an old lady, who, in Jane's opinion, should have been dead a long time ago. Her voice was weak and thready: she said, “Jane? Have you heard about Connie Bucher?”

“Just read it in the paper this morning,” Jane said. “We were shocked.”

“It's the same thing that happened to Claire Donaldson,” Coombs whimpered. “Don't you think we should call the police?”

“Well, gosh, I'd hate to get involved with the police,” Jane said. “We'd probably have to wind up hiring lawyers, and we wouldn't want… you know.”

“Well, we wouldn't say anything about that,” Coombs said. “But I got my clipping of when Claire was killed, and Jane, they're just alike.”

“I thought Claire was shot,” Jane said. “That's what I heard.”

“Well, except for that, they're the same,” Coombs said. Jane rolled her eyes.

“You know, I didn't know Claire that well,” Jane said.

“I thought you were friends…”

“No, no, we knew who she was, through the quilt-study group, but we didn't really know her. Anyway, I'd like to see the clipping. I could probably tell you better about the police, if I could see the clipping.”

“I've got it right here,” Coombs said.

“Well. Why don't we stop by this evening,” Jane suggested. “It'll probably be late, we're out on an appointment right now. Let me take a look at it.”

“If you think that'd be right,” Coombs said.

“Well, we don't want to make a mistake.”

“Okay, then,” Coombs said. “After dinner.”

“It'll be later than that, I'm afraid. We're on our way to Eau Claire. What time do you go to bed?”

“Not until after the TV news.”

“Okay. We'll be back before then. Probably… about dark.”

That gave them something to talk about. “Is it all falling apart, Leslie? Is it all falling apart?” Jane asked. She'd been in drama club, and was a former vice president of the Edina Little Theater.

“Of course not,” Leslie said. “We just need to do some cleanup.”

Jane sighed. Then she said, “Do you think the Hermes is too much?” She was wearing an Hermes scarf with ducks on it, and the ducks had little red collars and were squawking at each other.

“No, no. I think it looks quite good on you.”

“I hope it's not falling apart on us,” Jane said.

“Most cops are dumber than a bowl of spaghetti,” Leslie said. “Not to worry, sweet.”

Still, Jane, with her delicate elbow on the leather bolster below the Audi's window, her fingers along her cheek, couldn't help think, if it were all coming to an end, if there might not be some way she could shift all the blame to Leslie.

Perhaps even… She glanced at him, speculatively, at his temple, and thought, No.

That's way premature.

Then they met the cops. And talked about missing antiques, including a painting by Stanley Reckless.

On The way out of Oak Walk, Jane said, “That Davenport person is not dumber than a bowl of spaghetti.”

“No, he's not,” Leslie said. He held the car door for her, tucked her in, leaned forward and said, “We've got to talk about the Reckless.”

“We've got to get rid of it. Burn it,” Jane said.

“I'm not going to give up a half-million-dollar painting,” Leslie said. “But we have to do something.”

They talked it over on the way home. The solution, Jane argued, was to destroy it.

There was no statute of limitations on murder, and, sometime, in the future, if the call of the money was too strong, they might be tempted to sell it-and get caught.

“A new, fresh Reckless-that's going to attract some attention,” she said.

“Private sale,” Leslie said.

“I don't know,” Jane said.

“Half-million dollars,” Leslie said, and when he said it, Jane knew that she wanted the money.

They went home, and after dinner, Leslie stood on a stool and got the Reckless out of the double-secret storage area in the rafters of the attic.

“Gorgeous piece?” he said. He flipped it over, looked at the name slashed across the back of the canvas. Though Leslie ran to fat, he was still strong. Gripping the frame tightly, he torqued it, wiggled the sides, then the top and bottom, and the frame began to spread. When it was loose enough, he lifted the canvas, still on stretchers, out of the frame, and put it under a good light on the dining room table.

“Got a strong signature,” he said. Reckless had carefully signed the front of the painting at the lower right, with a nice red signature over a grassy green background.

“Don't need the one on the back.”

“Take it off?”

“If we took it off, then it couldn't be identified as the Bucher painting,” Leslie said.

“There'd always be some… remnants.”

“Not if you don't want to see it,” Leslie said. He looked at the painting for a moment, then said. “Here's what we do. We stash it at the farm for now. Wrap it up nice and tight. Burn the frame. When I get time, I'll take the 'Reckless' off the back-it'll take me a couple of weeks, at least. We get some old period paint-we should be able to get some from Dick Calendar-and paint over the area where the 'Reckless' was. Then we take it to Omaha, or Kansas City, or even Vegas, rent a safe-deposit box, and stick it away for five years. In five years, it's good as gold.”

Bad idea, Jane thought: but she yearned for the money.

Three hours later, the Widdlers were rolling again.

“There is,” Leslie said, his hands at ten o'clock and four on the wood-rimmed wheel of his Lexus, “a substantial element of insanity in this. No coveralls, no gloves, no hairnets. We are shedding DNA every step we take.”

“But it's eighty percent that we won't have to do anything,” Jane said. “Doing nothing would be best. We pooh-pooh the newspaper clipping, we scare her with the police, with the idea of a trial. Then, when we get past the lumpy parts, we might come back to her. We could do that in our own good time. Or maybe she'll just drop dead. She's old enough.”

They were on Lexington Avenue in St. Paul, headed toward Como Park, a half hour past sunset. The summer afternoon lingered, stretching toward ten o'clock. Though it was one of the major north-south streets, Lexington was quiet at night, a few people along the sidewalks, light traffic. Marilyn Coombs's house was off the park, on Iowa, a narrower, darker street. They'd park a block away, and walk; it was a neighborhood for walking.

“Remember about the DNA,” Leslie said. “Just in case. No sudden moves. They can find individual hairs. Think about gliding in there. Let's not walk all over the house. Try not to touch anything. Don't pick anything up.”

“I have as much riding on this as you do,” Jane said, cool air in her voice. “Focus on what we're doing. Watch the windows. Let me do most of the talking.”

“The DNA…”

“Forget about the DNA. Think about anything else.”

There was a bit of a snarl in her voice. Leslie glanced at her, in the little snaps of light coming in from the street, and thought about what a delicate neck she had…

They were coming up on the house. They'd been in it a half-dozen times with the quilt-study group. “What about the trigger?” Leslie asked.

“Same one. Touch your nose. If I agree, I'll touch my nose,” Jane said.

“I'll have to be behind her. Whatever I do, I'll have to be behind her.”

“If that finial is loose…” The finial was a six-inch oak ball on the bottom post of Coombs's stairway banister. The stairway came down in the hallway, to the right of the inner porch door. “If it's just plugged in there, the way most of them are…”

“Can't count on it,” Leslie said. “I'm not sure that a competent medical examiner would buy it anyway.”

“Old lady, dead at the bottom of the stairs, forehead fracture that fits the finial, hair on the finial… What's there to argue about?” Jane asked.

“I'll see when I go in,” he said. “We might get away with it. They sure as shit won't believe she fell on a kitchen knife.”

“Watch the language, darling. Remember, we're trying.” Trying for elegance. That was their watchword for the year, written at the top of every page of their Kliban Cat Calendar: Elegance! Better business through Elegance! Jane added, “Two things I don't like about the knife idea. First, it's not instantaneous. She could still scream…”

“Not if her throat was cut,” Leslie said. Leslie liked the knife idea; the idea made him hot.

“Second,” Jane continued, “She could be spraying blood all over the place. If we track it, or get some on our clothes… it could be a mess. With the finial, it's boom.

She goes down. We won't even have to move her, if we do it right.”

“On the way out.”

“On the way out. We're calm, cool, and collected while we're there,” Jane said. She could see it. “We talk. If it doesn't work, we make nice, and we get her to take us to the door.”

“I walk behind her, get the glove on.”

“Yes. If the finial comes loose, you either have to hit her on the back of her skull, low, or right on her forehead. Maybe… I'm thinking of how people fall. Maybe we'll have to break a finger or something. A couple of fingers. Like she caught them on the railing on the way down.”

Leslie nodded, touched the brakes for a cyclist in the street. “I could pick her up, and we could scratch her fingernails on the railing, maybe put some carpet fiber in the other hand. She's small, I could probably lift her close enough, all we need to do is get some varnish under a fingernail…”

“It's a plan,” Jane said. “If the finial comes loose.”

“Still, the knife has a certain appeal,” Leslie said, after a moment of silence.

“Two older women, their skulls crushed, three days apart. Somebody is going to think it's a pretty heavy coincidence. The knife is a different MO and it looks stupid. Another little junkie thing. And if nothing is taken…”

“Probably be better to take something, if we do it with the knife,” Jane said. “I mean, then there'll be no doubt that it's murder. Why kill her? To rob her. We don't want a mystery. We want a clear story. Kill her, take her purse. Get out. With the finial, if they figure out it was murder, there'll be a huge mystery.”

“And they'll see it as smart. They'll know it wasn't some little junkie.”

Jane balanced the two. “I think, the finial,” Jane said. “If the finial works, we walk away clear. Nobody even suspects. With the knife, they'll be looking for something, chasing down connections.”

Then, for about the fifteenth time since they left home, Leslie said, “If the finial comes out…”

“Probably won't do it anyway,” Jane said. “We'll scare the bejesus out of the old bat.”

Marilyn Coombs lived in a nice postwar home, the kind with a big picture window and two-car garage in back, once unattached, now attached with a breezeway that was probably built in the '60s. The siding was newer plastic, with heated plastic gutters at the eaves. The front yard was narrow, decorative, and steep. Five concrete steps got you up on the platform, and another five to the outer porch door. The backyard, meant for boomers when they were babies, was larger and fenced.

They climbed the steps in the yard, up to the porch door, through the porch door; in these houses, the doorbell was inside the porch. On the way up, Leslie pulled a cotton gardening glove over his right hand, and pushed the doorbell with a glove finger, then slipped the hand into his jacket pocket.

Coombs was eighty, Jane thought, or even eighty-five. Her hair had a pearly white quality, nearly liquid, fine as cashmere, as she walked under the living room lights.

She was thin, and had to tug the door open with both hands, and smiled at them: “How are you? Jane, Leslie. Long time no see.”

“Marilyn…”

“I have cookies in the kitchen. Oatmeal. I made them this afternoon.” Coombs squinted past Leslie at the sidewalk. “You didn't see any gooks out there, did you?”

“No.” Leslie looked at Jane and shrugged, and they both looked out at the empty sidewalk.

“Gooks are moving in. They get their money from heroin,” Coombs said, pushing the door shut. “I'm thinking about getting an alarm. All the neighbors have them now.”

She turned toward the kitchen. As they passed the bottom of the stairs, Leslie reached out with the gloved hand, slipped it around the bottom of the finial, and lifted.

It came free. It was the size of a slo-pitch softball, but much heavier. Jane, who'd turned her head, nodded, and Leslie let it drop back into place.

A platter of oatmeal cookies waited on a table in the breakfast nook. They sat down, Coombs passed the dish, and Jane and Leslie both took one, and Leslie bolted his and mumbled, “Good.”

“So, Marilyn,” Jane said. “This newspaper clipping.”

“Yes, yes, it's right here.” Coombs was wearing a housecoat. She fumbled in the pocket, extracted a wad of Kleenex, a bottle of Aleve, and finally, a clipping. She passed it to Jane, her hand shaking a bit. Leslie took another cookie.

A noted Chippewa Falls art collector and heir to the Thune brewing fortune was found shot to death in her home Wednesday morning by relatives…

“They never caught anybody. They didn't have any leads,” Coombs said. She ticked off the points on her fingers: “She came from a rich family, just like Connie. She was involved in quilting, just like Connie.

She collected antiques, just like Connie. She lived with a maid, like Connie, but Claire's maid wasn't there that night, thank goodness for her.”

“She was shot,” Jane said. “Connie was killed with a pipe or a baseball bat or something.”

“I know, I know, but maybe they had to be quieter,” Coombs said. “Or maybe they wanted to change it, so nobody would suspect.”

“We really worry about getting involved with the police,” Jane said. “If they talk to you, and then to us, because of the quilt connection, and they say, 'Look, here's some people who know all of the murdered people… then they'll begin to suspect.

Even though we're innocent. And then they might take a closer look at the Armstrong quilts. We really don't want that.” Coombs's eyes flicked away. “I'd feel so guilty if somebody else got hurt. Or if these people got away scot-free because of me,” she said.

“So would I,” Jane said. “But…”

And Coombs said, “But…”

They talked about it for a while, trying to work the old woman around, and while she was deferential, she was also stubborn. Finally, Jane looked at Leslie and touched her nose. Leslie nodded, rubbed the side of his nose, and said to Coombs, “I have to say, you've talked me around. We've got to be really, really careful, though.

They've got some smart police officers working on this.”

He stopped and stuffed another oatmeal cookie in his mouth, mumbling around the crumbs.

“We need to keep the quilts out of it. Maybe I could send an anonymous note mentioning the antique connection, and leave the quilts out of it.”

Coombs brightened. She liked that idea. Jane smiled and shook her head and said, “Leslie's always liked you too much. I think we should stay away from the police, but if you're both for it…”

Coombs shuffled OUT to the front door as they left, leading the way. In the rear, Leslie pulled on the cotton gloves, and at the door, Jane stepped past Coombs as Leslie pulled the finial out of the banister post. He said, “Hey, Marilyn?”

When she turned, he hit her on the forehead with the finial ball. Hit her hard. She bounced off Jane and landed at the foot of the stairs. They both looked at her for a moment. Her feet made a quivering run, almost as though dog-paddling, then stopped.

“She dead?” Jane asked.

Leslie said, “Gotta be. I swatted her like a fuckin' fly with a fuckin' bowling ball.”

“Elegance!” Jane snapped.

“Fuck that…” Leslie was breathing hard. He squatted, watching the old lady, watching her, seeing never a breath. After a long two minutes, he looked up and said, “She's gone.”

“Pretty good. Never made a sound,” Jane said. She noticed that Leslie's bald spot was spreading.

“Yeah.” Leslie could see hair, a bit of skin and possibly a speck of blood on the wood of the finial ball. He stood up, turned it just so, and slipped it back on the mounting down in the banister post, and tapped it down tight. The hair and skin were on the inside of the ball, where Coombs might have struck her head if she'd fallen.

“Fingers?” he asked. “Break the fingers?”

“I don't think we should touch her,” Jane said. “She fell perfectly… What we could do…” She pulled off one of Coombs's slippers and tossed it on the bottom stair.

“Like she tripped on the toe.”

“I'll buy that,” Leslie said.

“So…”

“Give me a minute to look around,” Jane said. “Just a minute.”

“Lord, Jane…”

“She was an old lady,” Jane said. “She might have had something good.”

Out in the car, they drove fifty yards, turned onto Lexington, went half a mile, then Leslie pulled into a side street, continued to a dark spot, killed the engine.

“What?” Jane asked, though she suspected. They weren't talking Elegance here.

Leslie unsnapped his seat belt, pushed himself up to loosen his pants, unzipped his fly. “Gimme a little hand, here. Gimme a little hand.”

“God, Leslie.”

“Come on, goddamnit, I'm really hurtin',” he said.

“I won't do it if you continue to use that kind of language,” Jane said.

“Just do it,” he said.

Jane unsnapped her own seat belt, reached across, then said, “What did you do with that package of Kleenex? It must be there in the side pocket…”

“Fuck the Kleenex,” Leslie groaned.

The next two days were brutal. Kline was hot, and Lucas had no time for the Bucher case. He talked to Smith both days, getting updates, but there wasn't much movement.

The papers were getting bad tempered about it and Smith was getting defensive.

Reports came in from the insurance companies and from the Department of Corrections; the halfway house was looking like a bad bet. The St. Paul cops did multiple interviews with relatives, who were arriving for the funeral and to discuss the division of the Bucher goodies. There were rumors of interfamilial lawsuits.

Despite the onset of bad feelings, none of the relatives had accused any of the others of being near St. Paul at the time of the murder. They'd been more or less evenly divided between Santa Barbara and Palm Beach, with one weirdo at his apartment in Paris.

All of them had money, Smith said. While Aunt Connie's inheritance would be a nice maraschino cherry on the sundae, they already had the ice cream.

Lucas had three long interviews over the two days, and twice as many meetings.

The first interview went badly.

Kathy Barth had both tits and ass: and perhaps a bit too much of each, as she slipped toward forty. Her daughter, Jesse, had gotten her momma's genes, but at sixteen, everything was tight, and when she walked, she quivered like a bowl of cold Jell-O.

While she talked like a teenager, and walked like a teenager, and went around plugged into an iPod, Jesse had the face of a bar-worn thirty-year-old: too grainy, too used, with a narrow down-turned sullen mouth and eyes that looked like she was afraid that somebody might hit her.

At the first interview, she and Kathy Barth sat behind the shoulder of their lawyer, who was running through a bunch of mumbo-jumbo: “… conferring to see if we can decide exactly what happened and when, and if it really makes any sense to continue this investigation…”

Virgil Flowers, a lean, tanned blond man dressed in jeans, a blue cotton shirt with little yellow flowers embroidered on it, and scuffed black cowboy boots, said, “We've already got her on tape, Jimbo.”

“That would be James' to you, Officer,” the lawyer said, pretending to be offended.

Flowers looked at Lucas, “The old Jimster here is trying to put the screws to Kline.”

He looked back at the lawyer. “What'd you find? He's got some kind of asset we didn't know about?” His eyes came back to Lucas: “I say we take a research guy, pull every tax record we can find, run down every asset Kline has got, and attach it. Do a real estate search, put Kline on the wall…”

“Why do you want to steal the rightful compensation from this young woman?” the lawyer demanded. “It's not going to do her any good if Burt Kline goes to jail and that's it. She may need years of treatment-years!-if it's true that Mr. Kline had sexual contact with her. Which, of course, we're still trying to determine.”

“Motherfucker,” Flowers said.

The lawyer, shocked-shocked-turned to Jesse and said, “Put your hands over your ears.”

Jesse just looked at Flowers, twisted a lock of her hair between her fingers, and stuck a long pink tongue out at him. Flowers grinned back.

“She's hot,” Flowers said when they left the house. They had to step carefully, because a yellow-white dog with bent-over ears, big teeth, and a bad attitude was chained to a stake in the center of the yard.

“She's sixteen years old,” Lucas said, watching the dog.

“Us Jews bat mitzvah our women when they're fourteen, and after that, they're up for grabs,” Flowers said. “Sixteen's no big thing, in the right cultural context.”

“You're a fuckin' Presbyterian, Virgil, and you live in Minnesota.”

“Oh, yeah. Ya got me there, boss,” Flowers said. “What do we do next?”

The second interview was worse, if you didn't like to see old men cry.

Burt Kline sat in his heavy leather chair, all the political photos on the walls behind him, all the plaques, the keys, the letters from presidents, and put his face in his hands, rocked back and forth, and wept. Nothing faked about it. His son, a porky twenty-three-year-old and heir apparent, kept smacking one meaty fist into the palm of the other hand. He'd been a football player at St. Johns, and wore a St. Johns T-shirt, ball cap, and oversized belt buckle.

Burt Kline, blubbering: “She's just a girl, how could you think…”

Flowers yawned and looked out the window. Lucas said, “Senator Kline…”

“I-I-l d-d-didn't do it,” Kline sobbing. “I swear to God, I never touched the girl.

This is all a lie…”

“It's a fuckin' lie, he didn't do it, those bitches are trying to blackmail us,” Burt Jr. shouted.

“There's that whole thing about the semen and the DNA,” Flowers said.

The blubbering intensified and Kline swiveled his chair toward his desk and dropped his head on it, with a thump like a pumpkin hitting a storm door. “That's got to be some kind of mistake,” he wailed.

“You're trying to frame us,” Burt Jr. said. “You and that whole fuckin' bunch of tree-hugging motherfuckers. That so-called lab guy is probably some left-wing nut…”

“Here's the thing, Senator Kline,” Lucas said, ignoring the kid. “You know we've got no choice. We've got to send it to a grand jury. Now we can send it to a grand jury here in Ramsey County, and you know what that little skunk will do with it.”

“Oh, God…”

“Just not right,” Burt Jr. said, smacking his fist into his palm. His face was so red that Lucas wondered about his blood pressure. Lucas kept talking to the old man: “Or, Jesse Barth said you once took her on a shopping trip to the Burnsville Mall and bought her some underwear and push-up bras…”

“Oh, God…”

“If you did that for sex, or if we feel we can claim that you did, then that aspect of the crime would have taken place in Dakota County. Jim Cole is the county attorney there, and runs the grand jury.”

The sobbing diminished, and Kline, damp faced, looked up, a line of calculation back in his eyes. “That's Dave Cole's boy.”

“I wouldn't know,” Lucas said. “But if you actually took Jesse over to Burnsville…”

“I never had sex with her,” Kline said. “But I might've taken her to Burnsville once.

She needed back-to-school clothes.”

“They wear push-up bras to high school?” Lucas asked.

“Shit, yes. And thongs,” Flowers said. “Don't even need Viagra with that kind of teenybopper quiff running around, huh, Burt?”

“You motherfucker, I ought to throw you out the fuckin' window,” Burt Jr. snarled at Flowers.

“You said something like that last time,” Flowers said. He didn't move, but his eyes had gone flat and gray like stones. “So why don't you do it? Come on, fat boy, let's see what you got.”

The kid balled his fists and opened and shut his mouth a couple of times, and then Kline said to him, “Shut up and sit down,” then asked Lucas, “What do I gotta do?”

“Agree that you took her to Burnsville. Agent Flowers will put that in his report and we will make a recommendation to the county attorney.”

“Dave Cole's boy…”

“I guess,” Lucas said. “Neil Mitford would like to talk to you. Just on the phone.”

“I bet he would,” Kline said.

On the street, Flowers said, “I don't like the smell of this, Lucas.”

Lucas sighed. “Neither do I, Virgil. But there's a big load of crap coming down the line, no matter what we do, and there's no point in our people getting hurt, if we can confine the damage to Kline.'' “And the Republicans.”

“Well, Kline's a Republican,” Lucas said.

“Fuck me,” Flowers said.

Lucas said, “Look, I've got loyalties. People have helped me out, have given me a job chasing crooks. I like it. But every once in a while, we catch one of these.

If you can tell me who we ought to put in jail here-Burt Kline or Kathy Barth-then I'll look into it. But honest to God, they're a couple of dirtbags and nobody else ought to get hurt for it.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Flowers was pissed.

Lucas continued rambling. “There's a guy I talk to over at the Star Tribune.

Ruffe Ignace. He's a guy who can sit on a secret, sit on a source. I'd never talk to Ruffe about something like this-I've got those loyalties-but we go out for a sandwich, now and then, and we always argue about it: Who has the right to know what? And when? And what about the people who get hurt? Is it going to help Jesse to get her ass dragged through the courts?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Flowers said again.

“So I gotta go talk to this Cole guy, down in Dakota County,” Lucas said.

“Sounds like another in a long line of assholes,” Flowers said.

“Probably,” Lucas said.

They walked along for a while and then Flowers grinned, clapped Lucas on the shoulder, and said, “Thanks, boss. I needed the talk.”

The third interview was better, but not much, and Lucas left it feeling a little more grime on his soul.

Jim Cole was a stiff; a guy who'd get out of the shower to pee. He said, “That all sounds a little thin, Agent Davenport, on the elements, but I'll assign my best person to it.” Behind him, on the wall, among the political pictures, plaques, and a couple of gilt tennis trophies, was a photo-painting that said, “Dave Cole-A Man for the Ages.”

Lucas thought the elder Cole looked like a woodpecker, but, that was neither here nor there. Dave's boy, Jim, bought the case.

“I would assume there's been a lot of concern about this,” Cole said. “It seems like a touchy affair.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Why don't you ask Neil Mitford to give me a call-I'd like to discuss it. Purely off the record, of course.”

“Sure,” Lucas said.

All of that took two days. On the third day, Lucas made a quick call to Smith about the Bucher case. She was still dead.

“I'm gonna get eaten alive if something doesn't break,” Smith said. “Why don't you do some of that special-agent shit?”

“I'll think about it,” Lucas said.

He did, and couldn't think of anything.

He had his feet on his top desk drawer, and was reading Strike! Catch Your River Muskie!, a how-to book, when his secretary came into the office and shut the door behind her.

“There's a hippie chick here to see you,” she said. The secretary was a young woman named Carol, with auburn hair and blue eyes. She had been overweight, but recently had gone on a no-fat diet, which made her touchy. Despite her youth, she was famous in the BCA for her Machiavellian ruthlessness. “About the Bucher case, and about her grandmother, who fell down the stairs and died.”

Lucas was confused, his mind still stuck in how to fish the upstream side of a wing dam without losing your lower unit; something, in his opinion, that all men should know. “A hippie? Her grandmother died?”

She shrugged. “What can I tell you? But I know you're attracted to fucky blondes, especially the kind with small but firm breasts…”

“Be quiet,” Lucas said. He peered through the door window past the secretary's desk into the waiting area. He couldn't see anybody. “Is she nuts?”

“Probably,” Carol said. “But she made enough sense that I thought you should talk to her.”

“Why doesn't she talk to Smith?” Lucas asked.

“I don't know. I didn't ask her.”

“Ah, for Christ's sakes…”

“I'll send her in,” Carol said.

Gabriella Coombs had an oval face and blue-sky eyes and blond hair that fell to her small but firm breasts. Lucas couldn't tell for sure-she was wearing a shapeless shift of either gingham or calico, he could never remember which one was the print, with tiny yellow coneflowers, black-eyed Susans-but from the way her body rattled around in the shift, he suspected she could, as his subordinate Jenkins had once observed of another slender blond hippie chick, “crack walnuts between the cheeks of her ass.”

She had a string of penny-colored South American nuts around her neck, and silver rings pierced both the lobes and rims of her ears, and probably other parts of her body, unseen, but not unsuspected.

Given her dress and carriage, her face would normally be as unclouded as a drink of water, Lucas thought, her wa smooth and round and uninflected by daily trials. Today she carried two horizontal worry lines on her forehead, and another vertically between her guileless eyes. She sat down, perched on the edge of Lucas's visitor's chair, and said, “Captain Davenport?”

“Uh, no,” Lucas said. “I'm more like a special agent; but you can call me Lucas.”

She looked at him for a moment, then said, “Could I call you mister? You're quite a bit older than I am.”

“Whatever you want,” Lucas said, trying not to grit his teeth.

She picked up on that. “I want us both to be comfortable and I think appropriate concepts of life status contribute to comfort,” she said.

“What can I do for you? You are…?”

“Gabriella Coombs. Ruffe Ignace at the Star Tribune said I should talk to you; he's the one who told me that you're a captain. He said that you were into the higher levels of strategy on the Bucher case, and that you provide intellectual guidance for the city police.”

“I try,” Lucas said modestly, picked up a pen and scrawled, Get Ruffe, on a notepad.

“So…”

“My mother, Lucy Coombs, two fifty-seven…” She stopped, looked around the room, as if to spot the TV cameras. Then, “Do you want to record this?”

“Maybe later,” Lucas said. “Just give me the gist of it now.”

“My mom didn't hear from Grandma the night before last. Grandma had a little stroke a few months ago and they talk every night,” Coombs said. “So anyway, she stopped by Grandma's place the morning before last, to see what was up, and found her at the bottom of the stairs. Dead as a doornail. The cops say it looks like she fell down the stairs and hit her head on one of those big balls on the banister post.

You know the kind I mean?”

“Yup.”

“Well, I don't believe it. She was murdered.”

Lucas had a theory about intelligence: there was critical intelligence, and there was silly intelligence. Most people tended toward one or the other, although everybody carried at least a little of both. Einstein was a critical intelligence in physics; with women, it was silly.

Cops ran into silly intelligences all the time-true believers without facts, who looked at a cocaine bust and saw fascism, or, when somebody got killed in a back-alley gunfight, reflexively referred to the cops as murderers. It wasn't that they were stupid-they were often wise in the ways of public relations. They were simply silly. Gabriella Coombs…

“I think the medical examiner could probably tell us one way or the other, Miss Coombs,” Lucas said.

“No, probably not,” Coombs said, genially contradicting him. “Everybody, including the medical examiner, is influenced by environmental and social factors. The medical examiner's version of science, and figuring out what happened, is mostly a social construct, which is why all the crime-scene television shows are such a load of crap.”

“Anyway.” He was being patient, and let it show.

“Anyway the police tell the medical examiner that it looks like a fall,” she said.

“The medical examiner doesn't find anything that says it wasn't a fall, so he rules it a fall. That's the end of the case. Nobody's curious about it.”

Lucas doodled a fly line with a hook, with little pencil scratches for the fly's body, around the Get Ruffe.

“You know, a person like yourself,” he said. “… have you studied psychology at all?”

She nodded. “I majored in it for three quarters.”

He was not surprised. “You know what Freud said about cigars?”

“That sometimes they're just cigars? Frankly, Mr. Davenport, your point is so simple that it's moronic.”

He thought, Hmm, she's got teeth.

She asked, “Are you going to listen to what I have to say, or are you going to perform amateur psychoanalysis?”

“Say it,” Lucas said.

She did: “My grandmother was killed by a blow to the head that fractured her skull. Last Friday or Saturday, Constance Bucher and Sugar-Rayette Peebles died the same way. Grandma and Connie were friends. They were in the same quilt group; or, at least, they had been. A story in the Star Tribune said that Mrs. Bucher's murder might have been a cover-up for a robbery. When Grandma died, I was supposed to inherit a valuable music box that her grandmother-my great-great-grandmother-brought over from the Old Country. From Switzerland.”

“It's missing?” Lucas asked, sitting up, listening now.

“We couldn't find it,” Coombs said. “It used to be in a built-in bookshelf with glass doors. The police wouldn't let us look everywhere, and she could have moved it, but it's been in that bookcase since she bought the house. Everything else seems to be there, but the music box is gone.”

“Do you have a description?” Lucas asked. “Was it insured?”

“Wait a minute, I'm not done,” Coombs said, holding up an index finger. Lucas noticed that all her fingers, including her thumbs, had rings, and some had two or three.

“There was another woman, also rich, and old, in Chippewa Falls. That's in Wisconsin.”

“I know,” Lucas said. “I've been there.”

Her eyes narrowed. “To drink beer, I bet.”

“No. It was for a police function,” Lucas lied. He'd gone on a brewery tour.

She was suspicious, but continued: “Sometimes Grandma and Connie Bucher would go over to this other lady's house for quilt group. They weren't in the same quilt groups, but the two groups intersected. Anyway, this other woman-her name was Donaldson- was shot to death in her kitchen. She was an antique collector. Grandma said the killers were never caught. This was four years ago.”

Lucas stared at her for a moment, then asked, “Is your grandma's house open? Have the St. Paul police finished with it?”

“No. We're not allowed in yet. They took us through to see if there was anything unusual, or disturbed, other than the blood spot on the carpet. But see, the deal always was, when Grandma died, her son and daughter would divide up everything equally, but since I was the only granddaughter, I got the music box. It was like, a woman-thing.

I looked for it when the police took us through, and it was missing.”

Lucas did a drum tap with his pencil. “How'd you get down here?”

She blinked a couple of times, and then said, “I may look edgy to you, Mr. Davenport, but I do own a car.”

“All right.” Lucas picked up the phone, said to Carol, “Get me the number of the guy who's investigating the death of a woman named Coombs, which is spelled…”

He looked at Coombs and she nodded and said, “C-O-O-M-B-S.”

“… In St. Paul. I'll be on my cell.” He dropped the phone on the hook, took his new Italian leather shoulder rig out of a desk drawer, put it on, took his jacket off the file cabinet, slipped into it. “You can meet me at your grandma's house or you can ride with me. If you ride with me, you can give me some more detail.”

“I'll ride with you,” she said. “That'll also save gasoline.”

As they headed out of the office, Carol called after them, “Hey, wait. I've got Jerry Wilson on his cell phone.”

Lucas went back and took the phone. “I'd like to take a look at the Coombs place, if you're done with it. I've got her granddaughter over here, she thinks maybe something else is going on… uh-huh. Just a minute.” He looked at Coombs. “Have you got a key?”

She nodded.

Back to the phone: “She's got a key. Yeah, yeah, I'll call you.”

He hung up and said, “We're in.”

Coombs had parked on the street. She got a bag and a bottle of Summer Sunrise Herbal Tea from her salt-rotted Chevy Cavalier and carried it over to the Porsche. The Porsche, she said, as she buckled in, was a “nice little car,” and asked if he'd ever driven a Corolla, “which is sorta like this. My girlfriend has one.”

“That's great,” Lucas said, as they eased into traffic.

She nodded. “It's nice when people drive small cars. It's ecologically sensitive.”

Lucas accelerated hard enough to snap her neck, but she didn't seem to notice. Instead, she looked around, fiddling with her bottle of tea. “Where're the cup holders?”

“They left them off,” Lucas said, not moving his jaw.

Halfway to Grandma's house, she said, “I drove a stick shift in Nepal.”

“Nepal?”

“Yeah. A Kia. Have you ever driven a Kia?”

Being a detective, Lucas began to suspect that Gabriella Coombs, guileless as her cornflower eyes might have been, was fucking with him.

The streets were quiet, the lawns were green and neat, the houses were older but well kept. Lucas might have been in a thousand houses like Marilyn Coombs's, as a uniformed cop, trying to keep the peace, or to find a window peeper, or to take a break-in report, or figure out who stole the lawn mower. They left the car on the street at the bottom of the front lawn, and climbed up to the porch.

“Not a bad place,” Lucas said. “I could see living my life around here.”

“She got very lucky,” Coombs said. The comment struck Lucas as odd, but as Coombs was pushing through the front door, he let it go.

They started with a fast tour, something Lucas did mostly to make sure there was nobody else around. Marilyn Coombs's house was tidy without being psychotic about it, smelled of cooked potatoes and cauliflower and eggplant and pine-scent spray, and old wood and insulation. There were creaking wooden floors with imitation oriental carpets, and vinyl in the kitchen; brown walls; doilies; three now-dried-out oatmeal cookies sitting on a plate on the kitchen table.

An old electric organ was covered with gilt-framed photographs of people staring at the camera, wearing clothes from the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s. The earliest were small, and black-and-white. Then a decade or so later, color arrived, and now was fading. The organ looked as though it probably hadn't been played since 1956, and sat under a framed painting of St. Christopher carrying the Christ Child across the river.

There was a blood spot, about the size of a saucer, on the floor next to the bottom of the stairway.

“They took the ball,” Coombs said, pointing to the bottom post on the stairway. The post had a hole in it, where a mounting pin would fit. “They supposedly found hair and blood on it.”

“Huh.”

He looked up the stairs, and could see it. Had seen it, once or twice, an older woman either killing or hurting herself in a fall down the stairs. The stairs were wooden, with a runner. The runner had become worn at the edges of the treads, and Coombs might have been hurrying down to the phone and had caught her foot on a worn spot…

“Could have been a fall,” Lucas said.

“Except for the missing music box,”Coombs said. “And her relationships with the other mysteriously murdered women.”

“Let's look for the box.”

They looked and didn't find it. The box, Coombs said, was a distinctive black-lacquered rectangle about the size of a ream of paper, and about three reams thick. On top of the box, a mother-of-pearl inlaid decoration showed a peasant girl, a peasant boy, and some sheep. “Like the boy was making a choice between them,” Coombs said, still with the guileless voice.

When you opened the box, she said, four painted wooden figures, a boy, a girl, and two sheep, popped up, and then shuttled around in a circle, one after the other, as music played from beneath them.

“Is the boy following the girl, or the sheep?” Lucas asked.

“The girl,” Coombs said, showing the faintest of smiles.

“I think we're okay, then,” Lucas said.

Although they didn't find the box, they did find what Coombs said, and Lucas conceded might possibly be, a faint rectangle in the light dust on the surface of the bookshelf where the box should have been.

“Right there,” Coombs said. “We need a light…” She dragged a floor lamp over, pulled off the shade, replugged it, turned it on. “See?”

The light raked the shelf, which had perhaps a week's accumulation of dust. There may have been a rectangle. “Maybe,” Lucas said.

“For sure,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“Only two possibilities,” Coombs said. “Grandma was killed for the music box, or the cops stole it. Pick one.”

The house didn't have anything else that looked to Lucas like expensive antiques or pottery, although it did have a jumble of cracked and reglued Hummel figurines; and it had quilts. Coombs had decorated all the rooms except the living room with a variety of quilts-crib quilts and single-bed crazy quilts, carefully attached to racks made of one-by-two pine, the racks hung from nails in the real-plaster walls.

“No quilts are missing?” Lucas asked.

“Not that I know of. My mom might. She's started quilting a bit. Grandma was a fanatic.”

“It doesn't seem like there'd be much more space for them,” Lucas said.

“Yeah… I wish one of the Armstrongs were left. I'd like to go to India for a while.”

“The Armstrongs?”

“Grandma… this was ten years ago… Grandma bought a bunch of quilts at an estate sale and they became famous,” Coombs said. “Biggest find of her life. She sold them for enough to buy this house. I mean, I don't know exactly how much, but with what she got for her old house, and the quilts, she bought this one.”

They were at the top of the stairs, about to come down, and Coombs said, “Look over here.”

She stepped down the hall to a built-in cabinet with dark oak doors and trim, and pulled a door open. The shelves were packed with transparent plastic cases the size of shoe boxes, and the cases were stuffed with pieces of fabric, with quilting gear, with spools of thread, with needles and pins and scissors and tapes and stuff that Lucas didn't recognize, but that he thought might be some kind of pattern-drawing gear.

The thread was sorted by hue, except for the stuff in two sewing containers. Containers, because only one of them was the traditional woven-wicker sewing basket; the other was a semitransparent blue tackle box. All the plastic boxes had been labeled with a black Sharpie, in a neat school script: “Threads, red.”

“Threads, blue.”

“A lot of stuff,” Lucas said. He put a finger in the wicker sewing basket, pulled it out an inch. More spools, and the spools looked old to him. Collector spools? Which tripped off a thought. “Do you think these Armstrongs, would they have been classified as antiques?”

“No, not really,” Coombs said. “They were made in what, the 1930s? I don't think that's old enough to be an antique, but I really don't know. I don't know that much about the whole deal, except that Grandma got a lot of money from them, because of the curse thing.”

“The curse thing.”

“Yes. The quilts had curses sewn into them. They became… what?” She had to think about it for a second, then said, “I suppose they became feminist icons.”

Like this, she said: Grandma Coombs had once lived in a tiny house on Snelling Avenue. Her husband had died in the '70s, and she was living on half of a postal pension, the income from a modest IRA, and Social Security. She haunted estate sales, flea markets, and garage sales all over the Upper Midwest, buying cheap, reselling to antique stores in the Cities.

“She probably didn't make ten thousand dollars a year, after expenses, but she enjoyed it, and it helped,” Coombs said. Then she found the Armstrong quilts at an estate sale in northern Wisconsin. The quilts were brilliantly colored and well made. Two were crazy quilts, two were stars, one was a log-cabin, and the other was unique, now called “Canada Geese.”

None of that made them famous. They were famous, Coombs said, because the woman who made them, Sharon Armstrong, had been married to a drunken sex freak named Frank Armstrong who beat her, raped her, and abused the two children, one boy and one girl, all in the small and oblivious town of Carton, Wisconsin.

Frank Armstrong was eventually shot by his son, Bill, who then shot himself. Frank didn't die from the gunshot, although Bill did. The shootings brought out all the abuse stories, which were horrific, and after a trial, Frank was locked up in a state psychiatric hospital and died there twenty years later.

Sharon Armstrong and her daughter moved to Superior, where first the mother and then the daughter got jobs as cooks on the big interlake ore ships. Sharon died shortly after World War II. The daughter, Annabelle, lived, unmarried and childless, until 1995. When she died, her possessions were sold off to pay her credit-card debts.

“There were six quilts. I was in Germany when Grandma found them, and I only saw them a couple of times, because I was moving around a lot, but they were beautiful.

The thing is, when Grandma bought them, she also bought a scrapbook that had clippings about Frank Armstrong, and Sharon Armstrong, and what happened to them.

“When Grandma got home, she put the quilts away for a while. She was going to build racks, to stretch them, and then sell them at an art fair. She used to do that with old quilts and Red Wing pottery.

“When she got them out, she was stretching one, and she noticed that the stitching looked funny. When she looked really close, she saw that the stitches were letters, and when you figured them out, they were curses.”

“Curses,” Lucas said.

“Curses against Frank. They were harsh: they said stuff like 'Goddamn the man who sleeps beneath this quilt, may the devils pull out his bowels and burn them in front of his eyes; may they pour boiling lead in his ears for all eternity'… They went on, and on, and on, for like… hours. But they were also, kind of, poetic, in an ugly way.”

“Hmmm.” Lucas said. “Grandma sold them for what?”

“I don't know, exactly. Mom might. But enough that she could sell her old house and buy this one.”

“All this quilt stuff ties to Connie Bucher.”

“Yeah. There are thousands of quilt groups all over the country. They're like rings, and a lot of the women belong to two rings. Or even three. So there are all these connections. You can be a quilter on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and you need to go to Los Angeles for something, so you call a friend, and the friend calls a friend, and the next thing you know, somebody's calling you from Los Angeles, ready to help out. The connections are really amazing.”

“They wouldn't be mostly Democrats, would they?” Lucas asked.

“Well… I suppose. Why?”

“Nothing. But: your grandma was connected to Bucher. And there was another woman killed. Do you have a name?”

“Better than that. I have a newspaper story.”

Lucas didn't want to sit anywhere in the room where the elderly Coombs had died, in case it became necessary to tear it apart. He took Gabriella Coombs and the clipping into the kitchen, turned on the light.

“Ah, God,” Coombs stepped back, clutched at his arm.

“What?” Then he saw the cockroaches scuttling for cover. A half dozen of them had been perched on a cookie sheet on the stove. He could still see faint grease rings from a dozen or so cookies, and the grease had brought out the bugs.

“I've gotta get my mom and clean this place up,” Gabriella said. “Once you get the bugs established, they're impossible to get rid of. We should call an exterminator.

How long does it take the crime-scene people to finish?”

“Depends on the house and what they're looking for,” Lucas said.

“I think they're pretty much done here, but they'll probably wait until there's a ruling on the death.”

“You think I could wash the dishes?” she asked.

“You could call and ask. Tell them about the bugs.”

They sat at the kitchen table, and Lucas took the newspaper clip. It was printed on standard typing paper, taken from a website. The clip was the top half of the front page in the Chippewa Falls Post, the text running under a large headline, Chippewa Heiress Murdered.

A noted Chippewa Falls art collector and heir to the Thune brewing fortune was found shot to death in her home Wednesday morning by relatives, a Chippewa Falls police spokesman said Wednesday afternoon.

The body of Claire Donaldson, 72, was discovered in the kitchen of her West Hill mansion by her sister, Margaret Donaldson Booth, and Mrs. Booth's husband, Landford Booth, of Eau Claire.

Mrs. Donaldson's secretary, Amity Anderson, who lives in an apartment in Mrs. Donaldson's home, was in Chicago on business for Mrs. Donaldson, police said. When she was unable to reach Mrs. Donaldson by telephone on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, Anderson called the Booths, who went to Donaldson's home and found her body.

Police said they have several leads in the case.

“Claire Donaldson was brilliant and kind, and that this should happen to her is a tragedy for all of Chippewa Falls,” said the Rev. Carl Hoffer, pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Chippewa Falls, and a longtime friend of Mrs. Donaldson…

Lucas read through the clip, which was long on history and short on crime detail; no matter, he could get the details from the Chippewa cops. But, he thought, if you changed the name and the murder weapon, the news story of Claire Donaldson's death could just as easily have been the story of Constance Bucher's murder.

“ When we get back to the office, I'll want a complete statement,” he told Coombs.

“I'll get a guy to take it from you. We'll need a detailed description of that music box. This could get complicated.”

“God. I wasn't sure you were going to believe me,”Coombs said. “About Grandma being murdered.”

“She probably wasn't-but there's a chance that she was,” Lucas said. “The idea that somebody hit her with that ball… That would take some thought, some knowledge of the house.”

“And a serious psychosis,” Coombs said.

“And that. But it's possible.”

“On the TV shows, the cops never believe the edgy counterculture person the first time she tells them something,” Coombs said. “Two or three people usually have to get killed first.”