Invisible prey

“That's TV,” Lucas said.

“But you have to admit that cops are prejudiced against us,” she said.

“Hey” Lucas said. “I know a guy who walks around in hundred-degree heat in a black hoodie because he's always freezing because he smokes crack all day, supports himself with burglary, and at night he spray-paints glow-in-the-dark archangels on boxcars so he can send Christ's good news to the world. He's an edgy counterculture person.

You're a hippie.”

She clouded up, her lip trembling. “That's a cruel thing to say” she said. “Why'd you have to say that?”

“Ah, man,” Lucas said. “Look, I'm sorry…”

She smiled, pleased with herself and the trembling lip: “Relax. I'm just toyin' with you.”

On the way out of the house, they walked around the blood spot, and Coombs asked, “What's a doornail?”

“I don't know.”

“Oh.” Disappointed. “I would have thought you'd have heard it a lot, and looked it up. You know, dead as a doornail, and you being a cop.”

He got her out of the house, into the Porsche, fired it up, rolled six feet, then stopped, frowned at Coombs, and shut it down again.

“Two things: If your grandma's name was Coombs, and your mother is her daughter, how come your name…?”

“I'm a bastard,” Coombs said.

“Huh?”

“My mom was a hippie. I'm second-generation hippie. Anyway, she slept around a little, and when the bundle of joy finally showed up, none of the prospective fathers did.”

She flopped her hands in the air. “So. I'm a bastard. What was the second thing?”

“Mmm.” He shook his head, and fished his cell phone out of his pocket. “I'm going to call somebody and ask an unpleasant question about your grandmother. If you want, you could get out and walk around the yard for a minute.”

She shook her head. “That's okay. I'd be interested in hearing the question.”

Lucas dialed, identified himself, and asked for the medical examiner who'd done the postmortem on Coombs. Got her and asked, “What you take out of her stomach. Uh-huh? Uh-huh? Very much? Okay… okay.”

He hung up and Coombs again asked, “What?”

“Her stomach was empty. If she fell when she was by herself, I wonder who ate nine oatmeal cookies?” Lucas asked.

Back at BCA headquarters, he briefed Shrake, put Coombs in a room with him, and told them both that he needed every detail. Five minutes later he was on the line with an investigator with the Chippewa County Sheriff's Office, named Carl Frazier, who'd worked the Donaldson murder.

“I saw the story in the paper and was going to call somebody, but I needed to talk to the sheriff about it. He's out of town, back this afternoon,” Frazier said. “Donaldson's a very touchy subject around here. But since you called me…”

“It feels the same,” Lucas said. “Donaldson and Bucher.”

“Yeah, it does,” Frazier said. “What seems most alike is that there was never a single lead. Nothing. We tore up the town, and Eau Claire, we beat on every asshole we knew about, and there never was a thing. I've gotten the impression that the St. Paul cops are beating their heads against the same wall.”

“You nail down anything as stolen?”

“Nope. That was another mystery,”Frazier said. “As far as we could tell, nothing was touched. I guess the prevailing theory among the big thinkers here was that it was somebody she knew, they got in an argument…”

“And the guy pulled out a gun and shot her? Why'd he have a gun?”

“That's a weak point,” Frazier admitted. “Would have worked better if she'd been killed like Bucher-you know, somebody picked up a frying pan and swatted her. That would have looked a little more spontaneous.”

“This looked planned?”

“Like D-Day. She was shot three times in the back of the head. But what for? A few hundred dollars? Nobody who inherited the money needed it. There hadn't been any family fights or neighborhood feuds or anything else. The second big-thinker theory was that it was some psycho. Came in the back door, maybe for food or booze, killed her.”

“Man…”

“I know,” Frazier said. “But that's what we couldn't figure out: What for? If you can't figure out what for, it's harder than hell to figure out who.”

“She's got these relatives, a sister and brother-in-law, the Booths,” Lucas said.

“They still around?”

“Oh, yeah. The sheriff hears from them regularly.”

“Okay. Then, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna go talk to them,” Lucas said. “Maybe I could stop by and look at your files?”

“Absolutely,” Frazier said. “If you don't mind, I'd like to ride along when you do the interview. Or, I'll tell you what. Why don't we meet at the Donaldson house? The Booths still own it, and it's empty. You could take a look at it.”

“How soon can you do it?”

“Tomorrow? I'll call the Booths to make sure they'll be around,” Frazier said.

Weather and LUCAS spent some time that night fooling around, and when the first round was done, Lucas rolled over on his back, his chest slick with sweat, and Weather said, “That wasn't so terrible.”

“Yeah. I was fantasizing about Jesse Barth,” he joked. She swatted him on the stomach, not too hard, but he bounced and complained, “Ouch! You almost exploded one of my balls.”

“You have an extra,”she said. “All we need is one.” She was trying for a second kid, worried that she might be too old, at forty-one.

“Yeah, well, I'd like to keep both of them,” Lucas said, rubbing his stomach. “I think you left a mark.”

She made a rude noise. “Crybaby.” Then, “Did you hear what Sam said today…?”

And later, she asked, “What happened with Jesse Barth, anyway?”

“It's going to the grand jury. Virgil's handling most of it.”

“Mmm. Virgil,” Weather said, with a tone in her voice.

“What about him?”

“If I was going to fantasize during sex, which I'm not saying I'd do, Virgil would be a candidate,” she said.

“Virgil? Flowers?”

“He has a way about him,” Weather said. “And that little tiny butt.”

Lucas was shocked. “He never… I mean, made a move or anything…”

“On me?” she asked. “No, of course not. But… mmm.”

“What?”

“I wonder why? He never made a move? He doesn't even flirt with me,” she said.

“Probably because I carry a gun,” Lucas said.

“Probably because I'm too old,” Weather said.

“You're not too old, believe me,” Lucas said. “I get the strange feeling that Virgil would fuck a snake, if he could get somebody to hold its head.”

“Sort of reminds me of you, when you were his age,” she said.

“You didn't know me when I was his age.”

“You can always pick out the guys who'd fuck a snake, whatever age they are,” Weather said.

“That's unfair.”

“Mmm.”

A minute later, Lucas said, “Virgil thinks that going to Dakota County was a little… iffy.”

“Politically corrupt, you mean,” Weather said.

“Maybe,” Lucas admitted.

“It is,” Weather said.

“I mentioned to Virgil that I occasionally talked to Ruffe over at the Star Tribune.”

She propped herself up on one arm. “You suggested that he call Ruffe?”

“Not at all. That'd be improper,” Lucas said.

“So what are the chances he'll call?”

“Knowing that fuckin' Flowers, about ninety-six percent.”

She dropped onto her back. “So you manipulated him into making the call, so the guy in Dakota County can't bury the case.”

“Can you manipulate somebody into something, if he knows that you're manipulating him, and wants to be?” Lucas asked, rolling up on his side.

“That's a very feminine thought, Lucas. I'm proud of you,” Weather said.

“Hey,” Lucas said, catching her hand and guiding it. “Feminine this.”

Another great day, blue sky almost no wind, dew sparkling on the lawn, the neighbor's sprinkler system cutting in. Sam loved the sprinkler system and could mimic its chi-chi-chi-chiiiii sound almost perfectly.

Lucas got the paper off the porch, pulled it out of the plastic sack, and unrolled it. Nothing in the Star Tribune about Kline. Nothing at all by Ruffe. Had he misfired? Lucas never liked to get up early-though he had no problem staying up until dawn, or longer-but was out of the house at 6:30, nudging out of the driveway just behind Weather. Weather was doing a series of scar revisions on a burn case. The patient was in the hospital overnight to get some sodium numbers fixed, and was being waked as she left the driveway. The patient would be on the table by 7:30, the first of three operations she'd do before noon.

Lucas, on the other hand, was going fishing. He took the truck north on Cretin to I-94, and turned into the rising sun; and watched it rise higher for a bit more than an hour as he drove past incoming rush-hour traffic, across the St. Croix, past cows and buffalo and small towns getting up. He left the interstate at Wisconsin Exit 52, continuing toward Chippewa, veering around the town and up the Chippewa River into Jim Falls.

A retired Minneapolis homicide cop had a summer home just below the dam. He was traveling in Wyoming with his wife, but told Lucas where he'd hidden the keys for the boat.

Lucas was on the river a little after eight, in the cop's eighteen-foot Lund, working the trolling motor with his foot, casting the shoreline with a Billy Bait on a Thorne Brothers custom rod.

Lucas had always been interested in newspapers-thought he might have been a reporter if he hadn't become a cop-and had gotten to the point where he could sense something wrong with a newspaper story. If a story seemed reticent, somehow; deliberately oblique; if the writer did a little tap dance; then, Lucas could say, “Ah, there's something going on.” The writer knew something he couldn't report, at least, not yet.

Lucas, and a lot of other cops, developed the same sense about crimes. A solution was obvious, but wasn't right. The story was hinky Of course, cops sometimes had that feeling and it turned out that they were wrong. The obvious was the truth. But usually, when it seemed like something was wrong, something was.

There'd been a car at the murder scene-if there hadn't been, then somebody had been running down the street with a sixty-pound printer on his back. So there'd been a car. But if there'd been a car, why wasn't a lot of the other small stuff taken? Like the TV in the bedroom, a nice thirty-two-inch flat screen. Could have carried it out under one arm.

Or those video games.

On the other hand, if the killers were professionals after cash and easy-to-hock jewelry, why hadn't they found the safe, and at least tried to open it? It wasn't that well hidden… Why had they spent so much time in the house? Why did they steal that fuckin' printer? The printer bothered him. He put the fishing rod down, pulled his cell phone, was amazed to see he actually had a signal, and called back to the office, to Carol.

“Listen, what's that intern's name? Sandy? Can you get her? Great. Get the call list going: I want to know if anybody in the Metro area found a Hewlett-Packard printer.

Have her call the garbage haulers, too. We're looking for a Hewlett-Packard printer that was tossed in a dumpster. You can get the exact model number from John Smith.

And if somebody saw one, ask if there's anything else that might have come from Bucher's place, like a DVD player. Yeah. Yeah, tell everybody it's the Bucher case. Yeah, I know. Get her started, give her some language to explain what we're doing.”

He'd no more than hung up when he had another thought, fished out the phone, and called Carol again. “Has anyone shown Sandy how to run the computer? Okay. After she does the call list, get her to pull every unsolved murder in the Upper Midwest for the last five years. Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin. Might as well throw in the Dakotas.

Don't do Illinois, there'd be too much static from Chicago. Have her sift them for characteristics similar to the Bucher case. But don't tell her where I am-don't tell her about Donaldson. I want to see if she catches it. No, I'm not trying to fuck her over, I just want to know how good a job she did of sifting them. Yeah. Goodbye.”

Feeling as though he'd accomplished something, he floated the best part of a mile down the river, and then, with some regret, motored back up the opposite shore to the cop's house and the dock.

The river was cool, green, friendly. He could spend a lot of time there, he thought, just floating. Hadn't seen a single muskie; usually didn't-which meant that he didn't smell like fish slime, and wouldn't have to stop at a McDonald's to wash up.

Despite the interruption of the cell-phone call, he had seen a mink, several ducks, a brooding Canada goose, and a nearly empty Fanta orange bottle, floating down the river. He'd hooked it out, emptied it, and carried it up to the truck. Returned the keys to their hiding spot, put away the rod, wrote a thank-you note to the cop, and left it in the mailbox.

Not a bad way to start the day, he thought, rumbling up the hill to the main road.

Took a right and headed into Chippewa.

The Donaldson mansion was on the hill on the west side of town. There were other big houses scattered around, but the Donaldson was the biggest. Frazier was already there, leaning against an unmarked car that everyone but a blind man would recognize as a cop car, talking on a cell phone. Lucas parked, got out of the truck, locked it, and walked over.

Frazier was a short man in his fifties, stout, with iron gray hair cut into a flattop.

He was wearing khaki slacks, a red golf shirt, and a blue sport coat. His nose was red, and spidery red veins webbed his cheekbones. He looked like he should be carrying a bowling bag. He took the phone away from his mouth and asked, “Davenport?”

Lucas nodded and Frazier said into the phone, “Could be a while, but I don't know how long.” He hung up, grinned at Lucas as they shook hands, and said, “My old lady.

My first priority is to get the dry cleaning and the cat food. My second priority is to solve the Donaldson killing.”

“You gotta have your priorities,” Lucas said. He looked up at the mansion. “That's a hell of a house,” Lucas said. “Just like the Bucher house. When are the Booths…?”

“Probably about seven minutes from now,” Frazier said, looking at his watch. “They always keep me waiting about seven or eight minutes, to make a point, I think. We're the public servants, and they are… I don't know. The Dukes of Earl, or something.”

“Like that,” Lucas said.

“Yup.” He handed Lucas a brown-paper portfolio, as thick as a metropolitan phone book. “This is every piece of paper we have on the Donaldson case. Took me two hours to Xerox it. Most of it's bullshit, but I thought you might as well have it all.”

“Let me put it in the truck,” Lucas said.

He ran the paper back to the truck, then caught Frazier halfway up the sidewalk to the house. “Isn't a hell of a lot to see, but you might as well see it,” Frazier said.

Frazier had keys. Inside, the house smelled empty, the odor of dry wallpaper and floor wax. The furniture was sparse and to Lucas's eye, undistinguished, except that it was old. The few paintings on the walls were mostly oil portraits gone dark with age. As they walked around, their footfalls echoed down the hallways; the only other sound was the mechanical whir of an air-conditioner fan.

“What's going on here is that the house isn't worth all that much,” Frazier said.

“It'd need a lot of updating before you'd want to take out a mortgage on it. New wiring, new plumbing, new heating system, new roof, new windows, new siding. Basically, it'd cost you a million bucks to get the place into tip-top shape.”

“But the woman who lived here was rich?”

“Very rich. She was also very old,” Frazier said. “Her friends say she didn't want to be annoyed by a lot of renovation when she only had a few years left. So. She didn't do some things, and the house was perfectly fine for the way she used it.

Went to Palm Beach in the winter, and so on.”

After Donaldson was murdered, Frazier said, the Booths tried to sell it, but it didn't sell. Then somebody came up with the idea that the Booths could donate the place to the city as a rich-lumber-family museum. That idea limped along and then somebody else suggested it could be a venue for arts programs.

“Basically, what was going on is, the Booths couldn't sell it, so they were encouraging all this other bullshit. They'd donate the house and a few paintings and old tables to the city at some ridiculous valuation, like two million bucks, which they would then deduct from their income tax,” Frazier said. “That'd save them, what, about eight hundred thousand dollars? If they can't get that done, if the house just sits here and rots… well, what they've got is about two city lots at fifty thousand dollars each, and it'd probably cost them half of that to get the place torn down and carted away. In the meantime, they pay property tax.”

“Life is tough and then you die,” Lucas said.

“Wasn't tough for the Booths,” Frazier grunted. “They've been rich forever… You want to see where the murder was?”

Donaldson had been killed in the kitchen. There was nothing to see but slightly dusty hardwood floors and appliances that had stepped out of 1985. The refrigerator and stove were a shade of tobacco-juice yellow that Lucas remembered from his first house.

“Very cold,” Frazier said. “I'd talked myself into the idea that it was a traveling killer, passing through, saw a light and wanted money and a sandwich, and went up and killed her with a crappy.22. Stood there and ate the sandwich and looked at the body and never gave a shit. In my brain-movie, he so doesn't give a shit, he doesn't even give a shit if he was caught.”

“Any proof on the sandwich?” Lucas asked, joking.

Frazier wasn't joking: “Yeah. There was a bread crumb in the middle of Donaldson's back. Loose. Not stuck on her blouse, or anything. It was like it fell on her, after she hit the floor. Sea-Bird brand sourdough bread. There was a loaf of it on the counter.”

“Huh.” Lucas scratched his forehead. “Let me tell you about these oatmeal cookies…”

The Booths arrived ten minutes later, in a black Mercedes-Benz S550. Landford Booth looked like a terrier, as short as Frazier, but thin, with small sharp eyes, a bristly white mustache, and a long nose with oversized pores. He wore a navy blue double-breasted jacket with silver buttons, and gray slacks. Margaret Booth had silvery hair, a face tightened by cosmetic surgery, and pale blue eyes. She wore a cranberry-colored dress and matching shoes, and blinked a lot, as though she were wearing contact lenses.

Landford was a well-tended seventy-five, Lucas thought. His wife about the same, or possibly a bit older.

Lucas and Frazier had just come back from the kitchen and found the Booths standing in the open front door, Margaret's hand on Landford's arm, and Landford cleared his throat and said, “Well? Have you discovered anything new?”

The Booths knew almost nothing-but not quite nothing.

Lucas asked about missing antiques.

Margaret said, “Claire was a collector-and a seller. Pieces would come and go, all the time. One day there'd be a sideboard in the front hall, and the next week, there'd be a music cabinet. One week it'd be Regency, the next week Gothic Revival. She claimed she always made a profit on her sales, but I personally doubt that she did. I suspect that what she really wanted was the company-people buying and selling. People to argue with and to talk about antiques with. She considered herself a connoisseur.”

“Was anything missing, as far as you know?” Lucas asked.

“Not as far as we know-but we don't know that much. We have an insurance list, and of course we had to make an inventory of her possessions for the IRS,” Landford said.

“There were items on the insurance list that weren't in the house, but there were things in the house that weren't on the insurance list. The fact is, it's difficult to tell.”

“How about sales records?”

“We have a big pile of them, but they're a mess,” Landford said. “I suppose we could go back and check purchases, and what she had when she died, against sales. Might be able to pinpoint something that way,” Landford said.

“Could you do that?” Lucas asked.

“We could get our accountant to take a look, she'd be better at it,” Landford said.

“Might take a couple of weeks. The papers are a mess.”

The Booths made one claim, and made it to Lucas, ignoring Frazier as though he were an inconvenient stump: “Somebody should look carefully at Amity Anderson. I'm sure she was involved,” Margaret Booth said.

Landford quivered: “There is no doubt about it. Although our sheriff's department seems to doubt it.”

Behind their backs, Frazier rolled his eyes. Lucas said to Margaret: “Tell me why she must have been involved.”

“It's obvious,” she said. “If you go through all the possibilities, you realize, in the end, that the killer-person, whoever he was, was inside the house with Claire.”

She put the last phrase in vocal italics. “Claire would never let anybody inside, not when she was alone, unless she knew them well.”

Landford: “The police checked all her friends, and friends-of-friends, and everybody was cleared. There was no sign of forced entry, and Claire always kept the doors locked. Ergo, Amity Anderson gave somebody a key. She had quite the sexual history, Claire used to tell me. I believe Amity gave the house key to one of her boyfriends, told him where Claire kept her cash-she always liked to have some cash on hand-and then went to Chicago as an alibi. It's perfectly clear to me that's what happened.”

“Exactly,” Margaret said.

“How much cash?” Lucas asked.

“A couple of thousand, maybe three or four, depending,” Landford said. “If she'd just gotten back from somewhere, or was about to go, she'd have more on hand. That doesn't sound like much to you and me…” He hesitated, looking at the cops, as though he sensed that he might have insulted them. Then he pushed on, “… but to a person like Amity Anderson, it probably seemed like a fortune.”

“Where is Anderson now?” Lucas asked.

Frazier cleared his throat. “Her address is in the file I gave you. But you know where the Ford plant is, the one by the river in St. Paul?”

“Yes.”

“She lives maybe… six, seven blocks… straight back away from the river, up that hill. Bunch of older houses. You know where I mean?”

“It's about a ten-minute walk from my house,” Lucas said, “If you're walking slow.” “How far from Bucher's?” Landford asked.

“Five minutes, by car,” Lucas said.

“Holy shit,” Frazier said.

They talked for another ten minutes, and spent some more time looking around the house with the Booths, but the crime had been back far enough that Lucas could learn nothing by walking through the house. He said goodbye to the Booths, gave them a card, and when they'd left, waited until Frazier had locked up the house.

“Why isn't Amity Anderson involved?” Lucas asked.

“I'm not saying it's impossible,” Frazier said. “But Amity Anderson is a mousy little girl who majored in art and couldn't get a job. She wound up being Donaldson's secretary, though really, she was more like a servant. She did a little of everything, and got paid not much. One reason we don't think her boyfriend did it is that there's no evidence that she had a boyfriend.”

“Ever?”

“Not when she lived here. Mrs. Donaldson had a live-in maid, and she told us that Amity never went anywhere,” Frazier said. “Couldn't afford it, apparently had no reason to. In any case, she had no social life-didn't even get personal phone calls.

Go talk to her. You'll see. You'll walk away with frost on your dick.”

On the way back to the Cities, Lucas got a call from Ruffe Ignace.

“I got a tip that you've been investigating Burt Kline for statutory rape,” Ignace said. “Can you tell me when you're gonna bust him?”

“Man, I don't know what you're talking about,” Lucas said, grinning into the phone.

“Ah, c'mon. I've talked to six people and they all say you're in it up to your hips,” Ignace said. “Are you going to testify for the Dakota County grand jury?”

“They've got themselves a grand jury?” Lucas eased the car window down, and held the phone next to the whistling slipstream. “Ruffe, you're breaking up. I can barely hear you.”

“I'll take that as a 'no comment,'“ Ignace said. “Davenport said, 'No comment, you worthless little newspaper prick,' but confirmed that he has sold all of his stock in Kline's boat-waxing business.”

“You get laid the other night?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. Now: will you deny that you're investigating Kline?” Lucas kept his mouth shut, and after ten seconds of silence, Ignace said, “All right, you're not denying it.”

“Not denying or confirming,” Lucas said. “You can quote me on that.”

“Good. Because that confirms. Is this chick…” Pause, paper riffling, “… Jesse Barth… Is she really hot?”

“Ah, fuck.”

“Thank you,” Ruffe said. “That'd be Jesse with two esses.”

“Listen, Ruffe, I don't know where you're getting this, but honest to God, you'll never get another word out of me if you stick me with the leak,” Lucas said. “Put it on Dakota County.”

“I'm not going to put it on anybody,” Ignace said. “It's gonna be like mystery meat-it's gonna come out of nowhere and wind up on the reader's breakfast plate.”

“That's not good enough, because people are going to draw conclusions,” Lucas argued.

“If they conclude that I leaked it, I'll be in trouble, and you won't get another word out of me or anybody else in the BCA. Let people think it's Dakota County. Whisper it in their ear. You don't have to say the words.”

“I'm going after the mother this afternoon,” Ignace said. “Let's see, it's… Kathy? Is she hot?”

“Ruffe, you're breaking up really bad. I'm hanging up now, Ruffe.”

Despite his weaseling, Lucas was pleased. Flowers had done the job, and Ignace would nail Kline to a wall. Further, Ignace wouldn't give up the source, and if the game was played just right, everybody would assume the source was Dakota County.

He called Rose Marie Roux. He didn't like to lie to her, but sometimes did, if only to protect her; necessity is a mother. “I just talked to Ruffe Ignace. He knows about Kline. He's got Jesse Barth's name, he's going to talk to Kathy Barth. I neither confirmed nor denied and I am not his source. But his source is a good one and it comes one day after we briefed Dakota County. We need to start leaking around that Dakota County was talking to Ignace.”

“We can do that,” she said, also pleased. “This is working out.” “Tell the governor. Maybe he could do an off-the-record joke with some of the reporters at the Capitol, about Dakota County leaks,” Lucas said. “Maybe get Mitford to put something together.

A quip. The governor likes quips. And metaphors.”

“A quip,” she said. “A quip would be good.”

Lucas called John Smith. Smith was at the Bucher mansion, and would be there for a while. “I'll stop by,” Lucas said.

The Widdlers were there, finishing the inventory. “There's a lot of good stuff here,” Leslie told Lucas. He was wearing a pink bow tie that looked like an exotic lepidopteran.

“There's two million, conservatively. I really want to be here when they have the auction.”

“Nothing missing?”

He shrugged and his wife picked up the question. “There didn't seem to be any obvious holes in the decor, when you started putting things back together-they trashed the place, but they didn't move things very far.”

“Did you know a woman named Claire Donaldson, over in Eau Claire?”

The Widdlers looked at each other, and then Jane said, “Oh my God. Do you think?”

Lucas said, “There's a possibility, but I'm having trouble figuring out a motive.

There doesn't seem to be anything missing from the Donaldson place, either.”

“We were at some of the Donaldson sales,” Leslie Widdler said. “She had some magnificent things, although I will say, her taste wasn't as extraordinary as everybody made out.” To his wife: “Do you remember that awful Italian neoclassical commode?”

Jane poked a finger at Lucas's chest. “It looked like somebody had been working on it with a wood rasp. And it obviously had been refinished. They sold it as the original finish, but there was no way…”

The Widdlers went back to work, and Lucas and John Smith stepped aside and watched them scribbling, and Lucas said, “John, I've got some serious shit coming down the road. I'll try to stick with you as much as I can, but this other thing is political, and it could be a distraction.”

“Big secret?”

“Not anymore. The goddamn Star Tribune got a sniff of it. I'll try to stay with you…”

Smith flapped his hands in frustration: “I got jack-shit, Lucas. You think this Donaldson woman might be tied in?”

“It feels that way. It feels like this one,” Lucas said. “We might want to talk to the FBI, see if they'd take a look.”

“I hate to do that, as long as we have a chance,” Smith said.

“So do I.”

Smith looked glumly at Leslie Widdler, who was peering at the bottom of a silver plant-watering pot. “It'd spread the blame, if we fall on our asses,” he said. “But I want to catch these motherfuckers. Me.”

On the way out the door, Lucas asked Leslie Widdler, “If we found that there were things missing, how easy would it be to locate them? I mean, in the antiques market?”

“If you had a good professional photograph and good documentation of any idiosyncrasies-you know, dents, or flaws, or repairs- then it's possible,” Widdler said. “Not likely, but possible. If you don't have that, then you're out of luck.”

Jane picked it up: “There are literally hundreds of thousands of antiques sold every year, mostly for cash, and a lot of those sales are to dealers who turn them over and over and over. A chair sold here might wind up in a shop in Santa Monica or Palm Beach after going through five different dealers. They may disappear into somebody's house and not come out for another twenty or thirty years.”

And Leslie: '“Another thing, of course, is that if somebody spends fifty thousand dollars for an armoire, and then finds out it's stolen, are they going to turn it over to the police and lose their money? That's really not how they got rich in the first place… So I wouldn't be too optimistic.”

“There's always hope,” Jane said. She looked as though she were trying to make a perplexed wrinkle in her forehead. “But to tell you the truth, I'm beginning to think there's nothing missing. We haven't been able to identify a single thing.”

“The Reckless painting,” Lucas said.

“If there was one,” she said. “There are a number of Reckless sales every year. If we find no documentation that suggests that Connie owned one, if all we have is the testimony of this one young African-American person… well, Lucas… it's gone.”

Ruffe Ignace's story wasn't huge, but even with a one-column head, and thirty inches of carefully worded text, it was big enough to do all the political damage that Kline had feared.

Best of all, it featured an ambush photograph of Dakota County attorney Jim Cole, whose startled eyes made him look like a raccoon caught at night on the highway.

Kline was now a Dakota County story.

Ignace had gotten to Kathy Barth. Although she was identified only as a “source close to the investigation,” she spoke from the point of view of a victim, and Ignace was skilled enough to let that bleed through. “… the victim was described as devastated by the experience, and experts have told the family that she may need years of treatment if the allegations are true.

” Neil Mitford led Lucas and Rose Marie Roux into the governor's office and closed the door. The governor said, “We're all clear, right? Nobody can get us on leaking the story?” He knew that Lucas had ties with the local media; that Lucas did, in fact, share a daughter with the leading Channel Three editorialist.

“Ruffe called me yesterday and asked for a comment and I told him I couldn't give him one,” Lucas said, doing his tap dance. “It's pretty obvious that he got a lot of his information from the victim's mother.”

“Is Kathy Barth still trying to cut a deal with Burt?” Mitford asked Lucas.

“They want money. That was the whole point of the exercise,” Lucas said. “But now, she's stuck. She can't cut a deal with the grand jury.”

“And Burt's guilty,” the governor said. “I mean, he did it, right? We're not simply fucking him over?”

“Yeah, he did it,” Lucas said. “I think he might've been doing the mother, too, but he definitely was doing the kid.”

Rose Marie: “Screw their negotiations. They can file a civil suit later.”

“Might be more money for the attorney,” Mitford said. “If he's taking it on contingency.”

“Lawyers got to eat, too,” the governor said with satisfaction. To Rose Marie and Lucas: “You two will be managing the BCA's testimony before the grand jury? Is that all set?”

“I talked to Jim Cole, he'll be calling with a schedule,” Rose Marie said. “There's a limited amount of testimony available-the Barths, Agent Flowers, Lucas, the technical people from the lab. Cole wants to move fast. If there's enough evidence to indict, he wants to give Kline a chance to drop out of the election so another Republican can run.”

“Burt might get stubborn…” the governor suggested.

“I don't think so,” Rose Marie said, shaking her head. “Cole won't indict unless he can convict. He wants to nail down the mother, the girl, the physical evidence, and then make a decision. With this newspaper story, he's got even more reason to push. If he tells Burt's lawyer that Burt's going down, and shows him the evidence, I think Burt'll quit.”

The governor nodded: “So. Lucas. Talk to your people. We don't want any bleed-back, we don't want anybody pointing fingers at us, saying there's a political thing going on. We want this straightforward, absolutely professional.

We regret this kind of thing as much as anybody. It's a tragedy for everybody involved, including Burt Kline.”

“And especially the child. We have to protect the children from predators,” Mitford said. “Any contacts with the press, we always hit that point.”

“Of course, absolutely,” the governor said. “The children always come first. Especially when the predators are Republicans.”

Nobody asked about the Bucher case, which was slipping off the front pages.

When they were finished, Lucas walked down the hall with Rose Marie, heading for the parking garage. “Wonder why with Republicans, it's usually fucking somebody that gets them in trouble. And with the Democrats, it's usually stealing?”

“Republicans have money. Most of them don't need more,” she suggested. “But they come from uptight, sexually repressed backgrounds, and sometimes, they just go off.

Democrats are looser about sex, but half the time, they used to be teachers or government workers, and they're desperate for cash. They see all that money up close, around the government, the lobbyists and the corporate guys, they can smell it, they can taste it, they see the rich guys flying to Paris for the weekend, and eating in all the good restaurants, and buying three-thousand-dollar suits. They just want to reach out and take some.”

“I see money in this, for my old company,” Lucas said. He'd once started a software company that developed real-time emergency simulations for 911 centers. “We could make simulation software that would teach Republicans how to fuck and Democrats how to steal.”

“Jeez, I don't know,” Rose Marie said. “Can we trust Republicans with that kind of information?”

Back at his office, Carol told him that the intern, Sandy, had been up half the night preparing a report on Hewlett-Packard printers and on murders in the Upper Midwest.

He also had a call from one of Jim Cole's assistant county attorneys.

Lucas called the attorney, and they agreed that Lucas and Flowers would testify before the grand jury the following day. The assistant wanted to talk to Flowers before the grand-jury presentation, but said it would not be necessary to review testimony with Lucas himself.

“You'll do the basic bureaucratic outline, confirm the arrival of the initial information, the assignment of Agent Flowers to the case, and Flowers's delivery of the technical evidence to the crime lab. We'll need the usual piece of paper that says the evidence was properly logged in. That's about it.”

“Excellent,” Lucas said. “I'll call Agent Flowers now and have him get back to you.”

Lucas called Flowers: “You're gonna have to carry the load, Virgil, so you best memorize every stick of information you put in the files. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody from Kline's circle has been talking to somebody from Cole's circle, if you catch my drift.”

“After that newspaper story, I don't see how Cole could bail out,” Flowers said.

“I don't see it, either. But depending on what may have been said behind the chicken house, we gotta be ready,” Lucas said. “Tell them what you got, don't get mousetrapped into trying out any theories.”

“Gotcha,” Flowers said. “Gonna get my mind tightly wrapped around this one, boss.

Tightly.”

Lucas, exasperated, said, “That means you're going fishing, right?”

“I'll talk to the lab people and make sure the paperwork is right, that we got the semen sample and the pubic hair results, the photos of Kline's nuts. Copies for everyone. And so on, et cetera. I'll polish my boots tonight.”

“You're not going fishing, Virgil,” Luca said. “This is too fuckin' touchy.”

“How's the little woman?” Flowers asked.

“Goddamnit, Virgil…”

Lucas got his share of the paperwork done, reviewed it, then gave it to Carol, who had a nose for correct form. “Look it over, see if there are any holes. Same deal as the Carson case. I'll be back in five.”

“Sandy's been sitting down in her cubicle all day, waiting for you…”

“Yeah, just a few more minutes.”

While Carol was looking over the paperwork, he walked down to the lab and checked the evidence package, making sure everything was there. Whatever else happened, Lucas didn't want Kline to walk because of a bureaucratic snafu. Back at his office, he sat at his desk, kicked back, tried to think of anything else he might need. But the prosecutor had said it: Lucas was essentially the bureaucrat-in-charge, and would be testifying on chain-of-evidence, rather than the evidence itself.

Carol came in and said, “I don't see any holes. How many copies do you want? And you want me to call Sandy?”

“Just give me a minute. I gotta call John Smith.”

Smith was leaving a conference on the stabbing of a man at Regions Hospital a few weeks earlier. The stabbed man had died, just the day before, of an infection, that might or might not have been the result of the stabbing. The screwdriver-wielding drunk might be guilty of a minor assault, or murder, depending.

“Depending,” Smith said, “on what eight different doctors say, and they're all trying to tap-dance around a malpractice suit.”

“Good luck,” Lucas said. “Anything new on Bucher?”

“Thanks for asking,” Smith said.

“Look, I'm going to interview this Amity Anderson. I told you about her, she was the secretary to the Wisconsin woman.”

“Yeah, yeah… Hope something comes out of it.”

Amity Anderson worked at the Old Northwest Foundation in Minneapolis. Lucas tracked her through a friend at Minnesota Revenue, who took a look at her tax returns. Her voice on the phone was a nasal soprano, with a touch of Manhattan. “I have clients all afternoon. I could talk to you after four o'clock, if it's really urgent,” she said.

“I live about a half mile from you,” Lucas said. “Maybe I could drop by when you get home? If you're not going out?”

“I'm going out, but if it won't take too long, you could come at five-fifteen,” she said. “I'd have to leave by six.”

“See you at five-fifteen.”

He hung up and saw a blond girl standing by Carol's desk, peeking at him past the edge of his open door. He recognized her from a meet-and-greet with the summer people.

Sandy.

“Sandy,” he called. “Come in.”

She was tall. Worse, she thought she was too tall, and so rolled her shoulders to make herself look shorter. She had a thin nose, delicate cheekbones, foggy blue eyes, and glasses that were too big for her face. She wore a white blouse and a blue skirt, and black shoes that were wrong for the skirt. She was, Lucas thought, somebody who hadn't yet pulled herself together.

She was maybe twenty years old.

She hurried in and stood, until he said, “Sit down, how y'doing?”

“I'm fine.” She was nervous and plucked at the hem of her skirt. She was wearing nylons, he realized, which had to be hot. “I looked up that information you wanted.

They let me stay late yesterday.”

“You didn't have to…”

“No, it was really interesting,” she said, a spot of pink appearing in her cheeks.

“What, uh…”

“Okay.” She put one set of papers on the floor by her feet, and fumbled through a second set. “On the Hewlett-Packard printers. The answer is, probably. Probably everybody saw a Hewlett-Packard printer, but nobody knows for sure. The thing is, there are all kinds of printers that get thrown away. Nobody wants an old printer, and there are supposed to be restrictions on how you get rid of them, so people put them in garbage sacks and hide them in their garbage cans, or throw them in somebody else's dumpster. There are dozens of them every week.”

“Shit…” He thought about the word, noticed that she flushed. “Excuse me.”

“That's okay. The thing is, because so many printers are in garbage sacks, they don't get seen until they're already in the trash flow, and they wind up getting buried at the landfill,” she said.

“So we're out of luck.”

“Yes. I believe so. There's no way to tell what printer came from where. Even if we found the right printer, nobody would know what truck it came from, or where it was picked up.”

“Okay. Forget it,” Lucas said. “I should have known that.”

She picked up the second pack of papers. “On the unsolved murders, I looked at the five states you asked about, and I also looked at Nebraska, because there are no big cities there. I found one unsolved that looks good. A woman name Claire Donaldson was murdered in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. I told Carol as soon as I found it, but she said I wouldn't have to work anymore on that, because you already knew about it.”

Lucas nodded. “Okay. Good job. And that was the only one?”

“That was the only unsolved,” Sandy said. “But I found one solved murder that also matches everything, except the sex of the victim.”

Lucas frowned. “Solved?”

She nodded. “In Des Moines. An elderly man, wealthy, living alone, house full of antiques. His name was Jacob Toms. He was well known, he was on a lot of boards.

An art museum, the Des Moines Symphony, an insurance company, a publishing company.”

“Jeez, that sounds pretty good. But if it's solved…”

“I pulled the newspaper accounts off LexisNexis. There was a trial, but there wasn't much of a defense. The killer said he couldn't remember doing it, but wouldn't be surprised if he had. He was high on amphetamines, he'd been doing them for four days, he said he was out of his mind and couldn't remember the whole time he was on it.

There wasn't much evidence against him-he was from the neighborhood, his parents were well-off, but he got lost on the drugs. Anyway, people had seen him around the neighborhood, and around the Toms house…”

“Inside?”

“No, outside, but he knew Toms because he'd cut Toms's lawn when he was a teenager.

Toms had a big garden and he didn't like the way the lawn services cut it, because they weren't careful enough, so he hired this guy when he was a teenager. So the guy knew the house.”

“There had to be more than that.”

“Well, the guy admitted that he might have done it. He had cuts on his face that might have been from Toms defending himself…” She leaned forward, her eyes narrowing: “But the interesting thing is, the stuff that was stolen was all stuff that could be sold on the street, including some jewelry and some electronics, but none of it was ever found.”

“Huh.”

“An investigator for the public defender's office told the Register that the case was fabricated by the police because they were under pressure to get somebody, and here was this guy,” Sandy said.

“Maybe he did it,” Lucas said.

“And maybe he didn't,” Sandy said.

Lucas sat back in his chair and stared at her for a moment, until she flinched, and he realized that he was making her even more nervous. “Okay. This is good stuff, Sandy. Now. Do you have a driver's license?”

“Of course. My car is sorta iffy.”

“I'll get you a state car. Could you run down to Des Moines today and Xerox the trial file? I don't think the cops would be too happy about our looking at the raw stuff, but we can get the trial file. If you have to, you could bag out in a Des Moines hotel. I'll get Carol to get you a state credit card.”

“I could do that,” she said. She scooched forward on the chair, her eyes brightening.

“God, do you think this man might have gone to prison for something he didn't do?”

“It happens-and this sounds pretty good,” Lucas said. “This sounds like Bucher and Donaldson and Coombs…”

“Who?”

“Ah, a lady named Coombs, here in the Cities. Anyway. Let's go talk to Carol. Man, looking at solved cases. That was terrific. That was a terrific idea.”

Later, as Lucas left the office, Carol said, “You really got Sandy wound up. She'd jump out of an airplane for you.”

“It'll wear off,” Lucas said.

“Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't,” Carol said.

Amity Anderson probably would not have jumped out of an airplane for him, Lucas decided after meeting her, but she might be willing to push him.

He saw her unlocking the front door of her house, carrying a purse and what looked like a shopping bag, as he walked up the hill toward her. She looked down the hill at him, a glance, and disappeared inside.

She lived in a cheerful postwar Cape Cod-style house, with yellow-painted clapboard siding, white trim, and a brick chimney in the middle of the roof. The yard was small, but intensely cultivated, with perennials pushing out of flower beds along the fences at the side of the house, and bright annuals in two beds on either side of the narrow concrete walk that led to the front door. A lopsided one-car garage sat off to the side, and back.

Lucas knocked, and a moment later, she answered. She was a midsized woman, probably five-six, Lucas thought, and in her early to middle thirties. Her dark hair was tied in a severe, schoolmarmish bun, without style; she wore a dark brown jacket over a beige blouse, with a tweedy skirt and practical brown shoes. Olive-complected, she had dark brown eyes, overgrown eyebrows, and three small frown wrinkles that ran vertically toward her forehead from the bridge of her short nose. She looked at him through the screen door; her face had a sullen aspect, but a full lower lip hinted at a concealed sensuality. “Do you have any identification?”

He showed her his ID. She let him in, and said, “I have to go back to the bathroom.

I'll be just a minute.”

The inside of the house was as cheery as the outside, with rugs and quilts and fabric hangings on the brightly painted plaster walls and the spotless hardwood floors.

A bag sat on the floor, next to her purse. Not a shopping bag, but a gym bag, with three sets of handball gloves tied to the outside, stiff with dried sweat. A serious, sweating handball player…

A toilet flushed, distantly, down a back hallway, and a moment later Anderson came out, tugging down the back of her skirt. “What can I do for you, Mr. Davenport?”

“You worked for Claire Donaldson when she was killed,” Lucas said. “The most specific thing I need to know is, was anything taken from the house? Aside from the obvious? Any high-value antiques, jewelry, paintings, that sort of thing?”

She pointed him at a sofa, then perched on an overstuffed chair, her knees primly tight. “That was a long time ago. Has something new come up?”

Lucas had no reason not to tell her: “I'm looking at connections between the Donaldson murder and the murder of Constance Bucher and her maid. You may have read about it or seen it on television…” Anderson's hand went to her cheek. “Of course. They're very similar, aren't they? In some ways? Do you think they're connected?”

“I don't know,” Lucas said. “We can't seem to find a common motive, other than the obvious one of robbery.”

“Oh. Robbery. Well, I'm sure the police told you she usually had some money around,” Anderson said. “But not enough to kill somebody for. I mean, unless you were a crazy junkie or something, and this was in Chippewa Falls.”

“I was thinking of antiques, paintings…”

She shook her head. “Nothing like that was taken. I was in charge of keeping inventory.

I gave a list of everything to the police and to Claire's sister and brother-in-law.”

“I've seen that,” Lucas said. “So you don't know of anything specific that seemed to be missing, and was valuable.”

“No, I don't. I assume the Booths told you that I was probably involved, that I gave a key to one of my many boyfriends, that I went to Chicago as an alibi, and the boyfriend then came over and killed Claire?”

“They…” He shrugged.

“I know,” she said, waving a hand dismissively.

“So you would categorize that as 'Not true,'“ Lucas suggested with a grin.

She laughed, more of an unhappy bark: “Of course it's not true. Those people…

But I will tell you, the Booths didn't have as much money as people think. I know that, from talking to Claire. I mean, they had enough to go to the country club and pay their bills, and go to Palm Springs in the winter, but I happen to know that they rented in Palm Springs. A condo. They were very tight with money and they were very happy to get Claire's-and they got all of it. She had no other living relatives.”

“You sound unhappy about that,” Lucas said. “Were you expecting something?”

“No. Claire and I had a businesslike arrangement. I was a secretary and I helped with the antiques, which was my main interest. We were friendly, but we had no real emotional connection. She was the boss, I was the employee. She didn't pay much, and I was always looking for another job.”

They looked at each other for a moment, then Lucas said, “I suppose you've been pretty well worked over by the sheriff's investigators. They found no boyfriends, no missing keys…”

“Officer Davenport. Not to put too fine a point on it, I'm gay.”

“Ah.” He hadn't gotten that vibe. Getting old.

“At that moment, I had no personal friend. Chippewa is not a garden spot for lesbians.

And I wasn't even sure I was gay.”

“Okay.” He slapped his knees, ready to get up. “Does the name Jacob Toms mean anything to you? Ever heard of him? From Des Moines?”

“No, I don't think so. I've never been to Des Moines. Is he another…?”

“We don't know,” Lucas said. “How about a woman named Marilyn Coombs. From here in St. Paul?”

Her eyes narrowed. “God. I've heard of the name. Recently.”

“She was killed a couple of days ago,” Lucas said.

Anderson's mouth actually dropped: “Oh… You mean there are three? Or four? I must've heard Coombs's name on television. Four people?”

“Five, maybe, including Mrs. Bucher's maid,” Lucas said.

“That's… crazy,” Anderson said. “Insane. For what?”

“We're trying to figure that out,” Lucas said. “About the Booths. Do you think they were capable of killing Mrs. Donaldson? Or of planning it?”

“Margaret was genuinely horrified. I don't doubt that,” Anderson said, her eyes lifting toward the ceiling, as she thought about it. “Glad to get the money, but horrified by what happened. Landford wasn't horrified. He was just glad to get the money.”

Then she smiled for the first time and looked back at Lucas. “Thinking that Landford… no. He wouldn't do it himself, because he might get blood on his sleeve. Thinking that he might know somebody who'd do it for him, you know, a killer-that's even more ridiculous. You have to know them. Deep in their hearts, way down in their souls, the Booths are twits.”

He smiled back at her and stood up. She was right about the twits.

“One last question, just popped into my head. Did you know Connie Bucher? At all? Through antiques, or whatever?”

“No.” She shook her head. “One of my jobs at the foundation is roping in potential donors, especially those who are old and infirm and have buckets of cash, but she was well tended by other people. She was surrounded, really. I bet she got twenty calls a week from 'friends,' who were really calling about money. Anyway, I never met her. I would never have had a chance to clip her money, under any circumstances, but I would have liked to have seen her antiques.”

“ 'Clip her money' “ Lucas repeated.

“Trade talk,” she said.

Lucas's cell phone rang.

He dug it out of his pocket, looked at the screen, and said to Anderson, “Excuse me. I have to take this…”

He stepped away from her, toward the front door, turning a shoulder in the unconscious pretend-privacy that cell-phone users adopt. In his ear, Flowers said, “I'm at the Barths with Susan Conoway- have you talked to her, she's from Dakota County?”

“No. I talked to somebody. Lyle Pender?”

“Okay, that's somebody else. Anyway, Susan was assigned to prep the Barths, but Kathy's heard that she can take the Fifth, if she thinks she might have committed a crime.

Or might be accused of one. So now she says she doesn't want to talk to Susan, and Susan's got a date that she doesn't want to miss. The whole fuckin' thing is about to go up in smoke. I could use some weight over here.”

“Damnit. What does Barth's lawyer say?”

“He's not here. Kathy's nervous-I don't think this is coming from her lawyer,” Flowers said. “It might be coming from somewhere else.”

“I'm sure Kline wouldn't have… Ah, Jesus. You think Burt Jr. might have talked to her?”

“Maybe. The thought occurred to me, that fat fuck,” Flowers said. “If he has, I'll put his ass in jail. I told Kathy that the grand jury could give her immunity and that she'd have to testify, or go to jail. Nobody told her that. But if she decides to take the Fifth, it's gonna mess up the schedule and it could create some complications.

If Cole started getting cold feet, or Kline's buddies in the legislature got involved… We need to get this done.”

“Why doesn't Conoway talk to her?” Lucas asked.

“Says she can't. Says the Barths have an attorney, and without the other attorney here, she's not comfortable examining a reluctant witness. That's not exactly what she said, but that's what she means.”

“Listen: It'll take me at least ten or fifteen minutes to get there. I have to walk home, I'm six or seven minutes away from my car,” Lucas said. “What is Jesse saying? Is she letting Kathy do the talking, or can you split them, or what?”

“They were both sitting on the couch. It's all about the money, man.”

Lucas groaned. “I don't know why the Klines are holding on like this. You'd think they'd try to deal. Suborning a witness… they'd have to be crazy. How could they think they'd get away with it?”

Flowers said, “Burt's a fuckin' state legislator, Lucas.”

“I know, but I'm always the optimist.”

“Right,” Flowers said. “Ten minutes?”

Lucas glanced at Anderson, who at that moment tipped her wrist to look at her watch.

“I need a minute or two to finish here, then walk home, so… give me fifteen.”

He rang off and stepped back into the living room, took a card from his pocket, and handed it to Anderson. “I've got to run. Thanks for your time. If you think of anything…

About Donaldson, about Bucher, about possible ties between them, I'd like to hear it.”

She took the card, said, “I'll call. I've got what we call a grip-and-grin, trying to soak up some money. So I've got to hurry myself.”

“Seems like everything is about money,” Lucas said.

“More and more,” Anderson said. “To tell you the truth, I find it more and more distasteful.”

Lucas hurried home, waved at a neighbor, stuck his head into the kitchen, blurted, “Got something going, I'll tell you when I get back,” to Weather, and took off; Weather called after him, “When?” He shouted back, “Half an hour. If it's longer, I'll call.”

There was some traffic, but the Barths lived only three miles away, and he knew every street and alley. By chopping off a little traffic, and taking some garbage-can routes, he made it in the fifteen minutes he'd promised Flowers.

Flowers was leaning in a doorway chatting with a solid dishwater-blond woman with a big leather bag hanging from her shoulder: Conoway Lucas had never met her, but when he saw her, he remembered her, from a lecture she gave at a child-abuse convention sponsored by the BCA.

A small-town cop, working with volunteer help and some sheriff's deputies who lived in the area, and a freelance social therapist, had busted a day-care center's owner, her son, and two care providers and charged them with crimes ranging from rape to blasphemy. Conoway, assigned as a prosecutor, had shredded the case. She'd demonstrated that the day-care center operators were innocent, and had shown that if the children had been victimized by anyone, it had been the cops and the therapist, who were involved in what amounted to an anti-pederasty cult. She hadn't endeared herself to the locals, but she had her admirers, including Lucas.

Lucas came up the walk, noticed that the yellow-white dog was gone, the stake sitting at an angle in the yard. He wondered if the dog had broken loose.

Conoway looked tired; like she needed to wash her hair. She saw Lucas coming, through the screen door, cocked an eyebrow, said something to Flowers, and Flowers stepped over and pushed open the door.

“You know Susan Conoway…”

Conoway smiled and shook hands, and Lucas said, “We haven't met, but I admired your work in the Rake Town case.”

“Thank you,” she said. “The admiration isn't universal.”

Lucas looked at Flowers: “What do you need?”

Flowers said, “We just need you-somebody-to talk to the Barths in a polite, nonlegal way, that would convince them to cooperate fully with Ms. Conoway, who has a hot date tonight with somebody who couldn't possibly deserve her attentions.”

Lucas said, “Huh.”

Conoway said, “Actually he does deserve my attentions. If they're not going to talk, I'm outa here.”

“Give me a minute,” Lucas said. “I've got to work myself into a temper tantrum.”

Kathy and Jesse Barth were perched side by side on a green corduroy sofa, Kathy with a Miller Lite and a cigarette and Jesse with Diet Pepsi. Lucas stepped into the room, closed the door, and said, “Kathy, if Ms. Conoway leaves, and this thing doesn't go down tomorrow, you'll have messed up your life. Big-time. You'll wind up in the women's prison and your daughter will wind up in a juvie home. It pisses me off, because I hate to see that happen to a kid. Especially when her mom does it to her.”

Kathy Barth was cool: “We've got a lawyer.”

Lucas jabbed a finger at her, put on his hardest face: “Every asshole in Stillwater had a lawyer. Every single fuckin' one of them.” She opened her mouth to say something, but Lucas waved her down, bullying her. “Have you talked to your lawyer about this?”

“Doesn't answer his cell. But we figured, what difference do a few hours make?”

“I'll tell you what difference it makes-it means somebody either got to you, or tried to get to you,” Lucas said. “You can't sell your testimony, Kathy. That's a felony.

That's mandatory jail time.”

Jesse shifted on her seat, and Kathy glanced at her, then looked back at Lucas. “Burt owes us.” She didn't whine, she just said it.

“So sue him,” Lucas said. “Kline broke a state law and he has to pay for it. Pay the state. If you interfere with the state getting justice, then you're committing a crime. Judges don't fool around with people who mess with witnesses, or witnesses who sell their testimony. They get the max, and they don't get time off for good behavior. You don't fuck with the courts, Kathy, and that's what you're doing.”

Jesse said, “Mom, I don't want to go to jail.”

“He's bullshitting us, hon,” Kathy said, looking at Lucas with skepticism; but unsure of herself.

Lucas turned to Jesse and shook his head. “If your mom goes down this road, you've got to take care of yourself. I can't even explain how stupid and dangerous this is. You won't get any money and you'll be in jail. If your lawyer were here, he'd tell you that. But if Conoway leaves-she's got a date tonight-she's going to pull the plug on your testimony tomorrow, then she's going to turn off her cell phone, and then you are truly fucked. You've got about one minute to decide. Then she's gonna walk.”

“She can't do that…” Kathy said.

“Horseshit,” Lucas said. “She's already after-hours, working on her own time. She's got a right to a life. This isn't the biggest deal of her career, it's not even the biggest deal of her week. She doesn't have to put up with some crap where somebody is trying sell her daughter's ass to a pederast.

She's gonna walk.”

“I'm not trying to sell anybody…” Kathy said.

“I'll talk to her,” Jesse blurted. To her mother: “I'm gonna talk to her, Mom. I don't care if we don't get any money from Burt. I'm not going to jail.”

“Smart girl,” Lucas said.

Back in the hallway, Lucas said to Conoway, “Give them a minute.”

“What're they doing,” Flowers asked, “sopping up the blood?”

“Jesse's telling Kathy what's what,” Lucas said. “I think we're okay.”

A moment later Jesse stuck her head into the hall, looked at Conoway. Kathy was a step behind her. “We'll talk to you,” Jesse said.

Conoway sighed, said, “I thought I was outa here. Okay, let's go, girls…” And to Lucas: “Thanks. You must throw a good tantrum.”

Amity Anderson was annoyed with life, with art, with rich people, with Lucas Davenport.

So annoyed that she had to suppress a little hop of anger and frustration as she drifted past the Viking warrior. The warrior was seven feet tall, made of plaster, carried an ax with a head the size of a manhole cover, and wore a blond wig. He was dressed in a furry yellow skin, possibly from a puma, if puma hides are made of Rayon, and his carefully draped loins showed a bulge of Scandinavian humor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The evening air was like a kiss, after the refrigerated air of the gallery. Night was coming on. The patio looked over a maple-studded lawn toward the evening lights of downtown Minneapolis, a pretty sight, lights like diamonds on a tic-tac-toe grid.

She fumbled the Winstons out of her purse, lit one, blew smoke, trying to keep it away from her hair, and thought about Davenport and Claire Donaldson and Constance Bucher and Marilyn Coombs.

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

Or these people, who bought a coffee-table book on minimalism, because they thought it put them out on the cutting edge.

Made them mini-Applers. But they were still the same bunch of parvenu buck-lickers, the men with their washing-machine-sized Rolexes and the women with the “forever” solitaire hanging between their tits, not yet figuring out that “forever” meant until something fifteen years younger, with bigger tits, came along.

Damn, she was tired of this.

The door popped open and she flinched. A red-haired woman, about Anderson's age, stepped outside, and said, “I thought I saw you disappear.” She took a pack of Salems out of her purse. “I was just about to start screaming.”

“I saw you talking to the Redmonds,” Anderson said. “Do any good?”

“Not much. I'm working on the wife,” the redhead said. A match flared, the woman inhaled, and exhaling, said, “I'll get five thousand a year if I'm lucky.”

“I'd take that,” Anderson said. “We could get a new TV for the employee lounge.”

“Well, I'll take it. It's just that…” She waved her hand, a gesture of futility.

“I know,” Anderson said. “I was pitching Carrie Sue Thorson. She had her DNA analyzed.

She's ninety percent pure Nazi. The other ten percent is some Russian who must've snuck in the back door. I was over there going, It's so fascinating to know that our ancestors reach back to the European Ice Age.' Like, 'Thank Christ they didn't come from Africa in the last hundred generations or so.' “ “Get anything?” the redhead asked.

“Not unless you count a pat on the ass from her husband,” Anderson said.

“You might work that into something.”

“Yeah. A whole-life policy,” Anderson said.

The redhead laughed, blew smoke and screeched, “Run away, run away.”

Anderson wound up staying for almost two hours and failed to raise a single penny-but she scored in one way. An hour and forty-five minutes into the reception, she took a cell-phone call from her supervisor, who “just wanted to check how things were going.”

“I've eaten too much cheese,” Anderson said, sweetly. She understood her dedication was being tested and she'd aced the test. “But the art's okay. Carrie Sue is right over here, isn't she a friend of yours?”

“No, no, not really,” her supervisor said hastily. “I'd hate to bother her. Good going, Amity. I'll talk to you tomorrow.”

Five minutes later, she was out of there. She drove a Mazda, cut southwest across town, down toward Edina. Time for a gutsy move. She knew the truth, and now was the time to use it.

And she didn't want much.

A couple of years in France, or maybe a year in France and another Italy. She could rent her own house, bank the money, come back in a couple of years with the right languages, she could talk about Florence and Venice and Aix and Aries. With a little polish, with the background, she could move up in the foundation world. She could get an executive spot, she could take a shortcut up the ladder, she wouldn't have to go to any more Arctic Circle Red receptions.

Worth the risk. Of course, she needed to be prepared. As she turned the corner at the top of the last block, she reached under the car seat, found the switchblade, and slipped it into the pocket of her velvet pants.

The Widdler house was an older two-story, with cedar shingles and casement windows, built on a grassy lot, with the creek behind. She glanced at her watch: ten-fifteen.

There was a light in an upstairs bedroom and another in the back of the house. An early night for the Widdlers, she thought.

She parked in the drive, went to the front door, and rang the bell. Nothing. She rang it again, and then felt the inaudible vibrations of a heavy man coming down a flight of steps. Leslie Widdler turned on a light in the hallway, then the porch light, squinted at her through the triple-paned, armed-response-alarmed front door.

Widdler was wearing a paisley-patterned silk robe. As fucked up and crazy as the Widdlers might be, there was nothing inhibited about their sex life, Anderson thought.

Widdler opened the inner door, unlocked and pushed open the screen door, and said, “Well, well. Look what washed up on our doorstep. Nice to see you.”

Anderson walked past him and Widdler looked outside, as though he might see somebody else sneaking along behind. Nobody. He shut the door and locked it, turned to Anderson, pushed her against the wall, slipped one big hand up under her blouse, pulled her brassiere down, and squeezed her breast until the pain flared through her chest.

“How have you been?” he asked, his face so close that she could smell the cinnamon toothpaste.

Her own hand was inside his robe, clutching at him. “Ah, Leslie. Where's Jane?”

“Upstairs,” Leslie said.

“Let's go up and fuck her.”

“What a good idea,” Widdler said.

And that's what they did, the three of them, on the Widdlers' king-sized bed, with scented candles burning all around.

Then, when the sweat had dried, Anderson rolled off the bed, found her purse, dug out a cigarette.

“Please don't smoke,” Jane said.

“I'll go out on the back porch, but I need one,” she said. She groped for her pants, said, “Where's that lighter?” She got both the lighter and the switchblade. “We need to talk.”

They didn't bother with robes; they weren't done with the sex yet. Anderson led the way down the stairs in the semidarkness, Leslie poured more wine for himself and Jane, and got a fresh glass from the cupboard and gave a glass to Anderson. They moved out to the porch, and Jane and Anderson settled on the glider, the soft summer air flowing around them, while Leslie pulled a chair over.

“Well,” Jane said. She took a hit of the wine, then dipped a finger in it, and dragged a wet finger-pad over one of Anderson's nipples. “You were such a pleasant surprise.”

“I want a cut,” Anderson said. “Of the Connie Bucher money. Not much. Enough to take me to Europe for a couple of years. Let's say… a hundred and fifty thousand. You can put it down to consulting fees, seventy-five thousand a year.”

“Amity…” Leslie said, and there was a cold thread in the soft sound of her name.

“Don't start, Leslie. I know how mean and cruel you are, and you know I like it, but I just don't want to deal with it tonight. I spotted the Bucher thing as soon as it happened. It had your names written all over it. But I wouldn't have said a thing, I wouldn't have asked for a nickel, except that you managed to drag me into it.”

After a moment of silence, Jane said, “What?”

“I got a visit from a cop named Lucas Davenport. This afternoon. He's an agent with the state police…”

“We know who he is. We're police consultants on the Bucher murder,” Leslie said.

Anderson was astonished; and then she laughed. “Oh, God, you might know it.”

But Jane cut through the astonishment: “How did he get to you?”

“He hooked the Bucher murder to the Donaldson case. He's looking at the Coombs murder.

He knows.”

“Oh, shit.” Anderson couldn't see it, but she could feel Jane turn to her husband.

“He's a danger. I told you, we've got to do something.”

Leslie was on his feet and he moved over in front of Anderson and put a hand on her head and said, “Why shouldn't we just break Amity's little neck? That would close off that particular threat.”

Anderson hit the button on the switchblade and the blade clacked open. She pressed the side of the blade against him. “Take your hand off my head, Leslie, or I swear to God, I will cut your cock off.”

Jane snorted, amused, and said, “A switchblade. You know, you should take off about four inches, just to make him easier to deal with.”

“I'll take off nine inches if he doesn't take his hand off my head,” Anderson snarled.

She could feel the heat coming off Leslie's thighs.

“Fuck you,” Leslie said, but he moved away and sat down again.

Anderson left the blade extended. “One good reason for you not to break my neck: Davenport will then know that the thieves are close. And when they investigate either my death or disappearance, the police will unlock the center drawer of my desk, where they will find a letter.”

“The old letter ploy” Jane said, still amused, but not as amused as she'd been with the switchblade.

“It's what I had to work with,” Anderson said. “About Davenport. He's working on the Bucher case and now on Donaldson and Coombs, but he's also working on a sex scandal.

There was a story in the paper this morning. Some state legislator guy has been screwing some teenager.”

“I saw it,” Leslie said. “So what?”

“So Davenport is running that case, too, and that's apparently more important. He was interviewing me and he had to run off to do something on the other one. Anyway, I heard him talking on his cell phone, and I know the name of the people involved.

The girl's name.”

“Really,” Jane said. “Is that a big deal?”

“It could be,” Anderson said, “If you want to distract Davenport.”

Sandy the intern was sitting next to Carol's desk when Lucas came in. He was running a little late, having taken Sam out for a morning walk. He was wearing his grand-jury suit: navy blue with a white shirt, an Hermes tie with a wine-colored background and vibrating commas of a hard blue that the saleslady said matched his eyes; and cap-toed black tie-shoes with a high shine. His socks had clocks and his shorts had paisleys.

Sandy, on the other hand, looked like she'd been dragged through hell by the ankles-eyes heavy, hair flyaway, glasses smudged. She was wearing a pink blouse with plaid pants, and the same scuffed shoes she'd worn the day before. Somebody, Lucas thought, should give her a book.

She stood up when she saw him, sparks in her eyes: “He's innocent.”

Lucas thought, “Ah, shit.” He didn't need a crusader, if that's what she was morphing into. But he said, “Come on in, tell me,” and to Carol, “I've gotta be at the Dakota County courthouse at one o'clock and it's a trip. I'm gonna get out of here soon as I can and get lunch down there, with Virgil.”

“Okay,” Carol said. “Rose Marie called, she's got her finger in the media dike, but she says the leakers are going crazy and she doesn't have enough fingers. The governor's gone fishing and can't be reached. Kline has issued a statement that said the charges are without foundation and that he can't be distracted because he's got to work up a budget resolution for a special session in July.”

“I bet the papers jumped on that like a hungry trout,” Lucas said. “You're in a news meeting and you have the choice of two stories. A-President of the Senate works on budget resolution. B-President of the Senate bangs hot sixteen-year-old and maybe her mother, too, and faces grand-jury indictment. Whatta you going to do?”

“You think he did them both at the same time? I mean, simultaneously?” Carol asked.

“I don't want to think about why you want to know,” Lucas said. “Sandy, let's talk.”

She sat across the desk from him with a four-inch-thick file. “Lots of people have sex when they're sixteen,” she ventured. “Probably, now, most.”

“Not with the president of the Minnesota Senate,” Lucas said. He dropped into his chair and leaned back. “When did you get in?”

“I came back last night, about midnight. Then I stayed up reading until five…

I had some luck down there.”

“Start from the beginning,” Lucas said.

She nodded. “I went down and found the Polk County Courthouse. Des Moines is in Polk County. Anyway, I went to the clerk's office, and there was this boy there-another intern. I told him what I was looking for, and he really helped a lot. We got the original trial file, and Xeroxed that, and then we discovered that Duane Child-that was the man who was convicted of killing Toms-we found out that Child appealed. His attorney appealed.

They claimed that the investigation was terrible, and that the trial judge let a lot of bad information get in front of the jury.” “What happened with the appeal?” Lucas asked.

“They lost it. Child is in prison. But the appeals court vote was six to three for a new trial, and the three judges who voted for it wrote that there was no substantial evidence, either real or circumstantial, that supported conviction.”

“So…”

She held up a finger: “The main thing, from our point of view, that Bill showed me… Bill is the other intern… is that when they appealed, they got the entire police investigative file entered as evidence. So I got that, too.”

“Excellent!” Lucas said.

“Reading through it, I cannot figure out two things: I cannot figure out why he was indicted, and I cannot figure out how he was convicted,” Sandy said. “It was like all the cops testified that he did it and that was good enough. But there was almost no evidence.”

“None?”

“Some. Circumstantial,” she said.

“Circumstantial is okay…” Lucas said.

“Sure. Sometimes. But if that's all you've really got…”

“What about connections between the Toms murder and the others?” Lucas asked.

“That's another thing, Mr. Davenport…” she began.

“Call me Lucas, please.”

“That's another thing, Lucas. They are almost identical,” she said. “It's a perfect pattern, except for two things. Mr. Toms was male. All the others are female. And he was strangled with a piece of nylon rope, instead of being shot, or bludgeoned.

When I was reading it last night, I thought, Aha.' “ “Aha.”

“Yes. The killers are smart enough to vary the method of murder, so if you're just looking at the murders casually, on paper, you've got one woman clubbed to death, one woman shot, one woman dies in a fall, and one man is strangled,” Sandy said.

“There's no consistent method. But if you look at the killings structurally, you see that they are otherwise identical. It looks to me like the killers deliberately varied the method of murder, to obscure the connections, but they couldn't obscure what they were up to. Which was theft.”

“Very heavy,” Lucas said.

“Yes. By the way, one of the things that hung Duane Child is that he was driving an old Volkswagen van, yellow, or tan,” Sandy said. “The night that Toms was murdered, a man was out walking his dog, an Irish setter. Anyway, he saw a white van in the neighborhood, circling the block a couple of times. This man owns an appliance company, and he said the van was a full-sized Chevrolet, an Express, and he said he knew that because he owns five of them. The cops said that he just thought the van was white, because of the weird sodium lights around there, that the lights made the yellow van look whiter. But the man stuck with it, he said the van was a Chevy. A Chevy van doesn't look anything like the Volkswagen that Child drove. I know because I looked them up on Google. I believe the van was the killers' vehicle, and they needed the van to carry away the stuff they were stealing.”

“Was there a list of stolen stuff?”

“Yes, and it's just like the list Carol showed me, of the stuff taken from Bucher's house. All small junk and jewelry. Obvious stuff. And in Toms's case, a coin collection which never showed up again. But I think-and Carol said you think this happened at Bucher's-I think they took other stuff, too. Antiques and artworks, and they needed the van to move it.”

“Have you read the entire file?” Lucas asked.

She shook her head. “Most of it.”

“Finish it, and then go back through it. Get some of those sticky flag things from Carol, and every time you find another point in the argument, flag it for me,” Lucas said. “I've got to do some politics, but I'll be back late in the afternoon. Can you have it done by then?”

“Maybe. There's an ocean of stuff,” she said. “We Xeroxed off almost a thousand pages yesterday, Bill and I.”

“Do as much as you can. I'll see you around four o'clock.”

Before he left, he checked out with Rose Marie, and with Mitford, the governor's aide. Mitford said, “I had an off-the-record with Cole. He doesn't plan to do any investigation. He's says it'll rise or fall on the BCA presentation. They could possibly put it off for a couple of weeks, if you need to develop some elements, but his people are telling him they should go ahead and indict. That they've got enough, as long as the Barths testify.”

“Everybody wants to get rid of it; finish it, except maybe the Klines,” Lucas said.

Virgil Flowers was waiting in the parking lot of the Dakota County courthouse. Lucas circled around, picked him up, and they drove into the town of Hastings for lunch.

Like Lucas, Flowers was in his grand-jury suit: “You look more like a lawyer than I do,” Lucas said.

“That's impossible.”

“No, it's not. My suit's in extremely good taste. Your suit looks like a lawyer suit.”

“Thanks,” Flowers said. “I just wasted thirty bucks on it, and you're putting it down.”

They went to a riverside cafe, sitting alone on a back patio with checkered-cloth-covered tables, looking toward the Mississippi; ordered hamburgers and Cokes. “Everything is arranged,” Lucas said, when the waitress had gone.

“Yes. The whole package is locked up in the courthouse. The jury starts meeting at one o'clock, Cole and Conoway will make the first presentation, then they'll bring in Russell from Child Protection to talk about the original tip. Then you go on, testify about assigning the investigation to me, and you'll also testify about chain-of-custody on the evidence that came in later, that everything is okay, bureaucratically. Then I go on and testify about the investigation, then we have the tech people coming up, then they get the Barths. After that, they go to dinner. They reconvene at six-thirty, Conoway summarizes, and then they decide whether they need more, or to vote an indictment.”

“Does Conoway think they'll vote?”

“She says they'll do what she tells them to do, and unless something weird happens, they're gonna vote,” Flowers said.

“Okay. You've done a good job on this, Virgil.”

“Nice to work in the Cities again,” Flowers said, “but I gotta get back south. You know Larry White from Jackson County?”

“Yeah. You're talking about that body?”

“Down the riverbank. Yeah. It was the girl. DNA confirms it, they got it back yesterday,” Flowers said. “The thing is, she went to school with Larry's son and they were friendly.

Not dating, but the son knew her pretty well since elementary school, and Larry doesn't want to investigate it himself. He wants us carrying the load, because… you know, small town.”

“Any chance his kid actually did it?” Lucas asked.

“Nah,” Flowers said. “Everybody in town says he's a good kid, and he's actually got most of an alibi, and like I said, he wasn't actually seeing the girl. Didn't run with her crowd. Larry's just trying to avoid talk. He's got the election coming up, and they haven't got the killer yet… if there is one.”

“Any ideas? She didn't get on the riverbank by herself.”

The waitress came back with the Cokes, and said, with a smile, “I haven't seen you fellas around before. You lawyers?”

“God help us,” Flowers said. When she'd gone, Flowers said, “There's a guy name Floyd.

He's a couple years older than the girl, he's been out of school for a while. Does seasonal work at the elevator and out at the golf course, sells a little dope. I need to push him. I think he was dealing to the girl, and I think she might have been fooling around with him.”

“Any dope on the postmortem?”

“No. She'd been down way too long. When they pulled her off the riverbank, they got most of her clothes and all of the bones except from one foot and a small leg bone, which probably got scattered off by dogs or coyotes or whatever. There's no sign of violence on the bones. No holes, no breaks, hyoid was intact. I think she might have OD'd.”

“Can you crack the kid?”

“That's my plan…”

They sat shooting the breeze, talking about cases, talking about fishing. Flowers had a side career going as an outdoor writer, and was notorious for dragging a fishing boat around the state while he was working. Lucas asked, “You go fishing last night?”

“Hour,” Flowers admitted. “Got a line wet, while I was thinking about the grand jury.”

“You're gonna have to decide what you want to do,” Lucas said. “I don't think you can keep writing and keep working as a cop. Not full-time, anyway.” 'Td write, if I could,” Flowers said. “Trouble is, I made fifteen thousand dollars last year, writing. If I went full-time, I could probably make thirty. In other words, Ld starve.”

“Still…”

“I know. I think about it,” Flowers said. “All I can do is, keep juggling. You see my piece last month in Outdoor Life?' “I did, you know?” Lucas said. “Not bad, Virgil. In fact, it was pretty damn good. Guys were passing it around the office.”

The first session of the grand jury was as routine as Flowers had suggested it would be. Lucas sat in a waiting room until 1:45, got called in. The grand jury was arrayed around a long mahogany-grained table, with two assistant county attorneys managing files. The lead attorney, Susan Conoway had Lucas sworn in by a clerk, who then left.

She led him through his handling of the original tip, to the assignment of Flowers, and through the BCAs handling procedures for evidence. After checking to make sure the signatures on the affidavits were really his, she sent him on his way.

In the hallway, Flowers said, “I'll call you about that Jackson case,” and Lucas said, “See ya,” and he was gone.

Back at the office, Sandy had gone.

“I sent her home,” Carol said, as she trailed Lucas into his office. The file was sitting squarely in front of Lucas's chair, with a dozen blue plastic flags sticking out of it. “She was about to fall off the chair. She said you could call her there, and she'd come in… but I think you could let it go until tomorrow. She's really beat.”

“Did she finish the file?” Lucas took off his jacket, hung it on his coatrack, and began rolling up his shirtsleeves.

“Yes. She flagged the critical points. She said she flagged them both pro and con, for and against it being the same killers.”

“She's pretty good,” Lucas said. “I hope she doesn't go overboard, start campaigning to free this Child guy. If his appeal got turned down, we'd be better off working it from the other end. Find the real killers.”

He started on the file, looking first at the flagged items, and going back to the original arrest, the interviews, and immediately saw how Child got himself in trouble: He hadn't denied anything. He had, in fact, meekly agreed that he might have done it. He simply didn't know-and he stuck to that part of the story.

There were other bits of evidence against him. He'd been in the neighborhood the night of the murder; he'd stopped to see if he could get some money from his father.

His father had given him thirty dollars, and Child had spent some of it at a Subway, on a sandwich, and had been recognized there by a former schoolmate.

He knew the Toms house. He was driving a van, and a van had been seen circling the block. He had cuts on his face and one arm, which he said he got from a fall, but which might have been defensive cuts received as he strangled Toms. On the other hand, Toms had no skin under his fingernails-there'd been no foreign DNA at all.

Child had what the police called a history of violence, but he'd never been arrested for it-as far as Lucas could tell, he'd had a number of fights with another street person near the room where he lived, and Child had said that the other bum had started the fights: “He's a crazy, I never started anything.”

But it had been the lack of any denial that had hung him up.

At the sentencing, he made a little speech apologizing to the victim's family, but still maintained that he couldn't remember the crime.

The judge, who must have been running for reelection, if they reelected judges in Iowa, said in a sentencing statement that he rejected Child's memory loss, believed that he did remember, and condemned him as a coward for not admitting it. Child got life.

Carol stuck her head in, said, “I forgot to tell you, Weather got done early and she was heading home. She wants to take the kids out to the Italian place.” “I'll call her…”

The Italian place at six, Weather said; she'd load the kids up, and meet him there.

Lucas looked at his watch. Four-twenty. He could get to the Italian place in ten minutes, so he had an hour and a half to read. It'd be quiet. People were headed out of the building, Carol was getting her purse together, checking her face.

He heard the phone ring, and then Carol called, “You got Flowers on one. Flowers the person.”

Lucas picked up: “Yeah.”

“We got another problem.”

“Ah, shit. What is it?” Lucas asked.

“Jesse didn't come home from school,” Flowers said.

“What?”

“Didn't come home. She left school on time, Kathy checked with her last class and some friends of hers, they saw her on the street, but she never showed up at home.

Kathy might be bullshitting us, but she seems pretty stressed. Conoway doesn't know whether to be pissed or worried. The grand jury's been put on hold for a while, but if we don't find her in the next hour or so, they're gonna send them home. I'm headed up that way, but it's gonna take a while. If you've got a minute, you could run over to their house…”

“Goddamnit,” Lucas said. “If they're fucking with us, I'm gonna break that woman's neck.”

“Hope that's what it is, but Kathy… I don't know, Lucas. Didn't sound like bullshit,” Flowers said. “Of course, it could be something that Jesse thought up on her own.

But she was set to go, she seemed ready…”

“I'm on my way,” Lucas said. “Call me when you get close.”

Kathy Barth was standing in front of her house talking to a uniformed St. Paul cop and a woman in a green turban. Lucas parked at the curb and cut across the small front lawn. They all turned to look at him. Barth called, “Did you find her?” and Lucas knew from the tone of her voice that she wasn't involved in whatever had happened to her daughter; wherever she'd gone.

“I just heard,” Lucas said. “Virgil Flowers was down at the grand jury, he's on his way up.” To the cop: “You guys looking?”

The cop shrugged, “Yeah, we're looking, but she's only a couple hours late. We don't usually even look this soon, for a sixteen-year-old.”

“Get everybody looking,” Lucas said. “She was supposed to be talking to a grand jury about now. If there's a problem, I'll talk to the chief. We need everybody you can spare.” To Barth: “We need to know what she was wearing… the names of all her friends. I need to talk to her best friend right now.”

The woman in the turban hadn't said anything, but now spoke to Barth: “Kelly McGuire.”

“I called, but she's not home yet,” Barth said. Her face was taut with anxiety. She'd seen it all before, on TV, the missing girl, the frantic mother. “She's at a dance place and the phone's off the hook. She won't be home until five-thirty.”

“You know what dance place?” Lucas asked.

“Over on Snelling, by the college,” Barth said. “Just south of Grand.”

“I know it,” Lucas said to the cop, “I'm going over there. Let me give you my cell number…” The cop wrote the number on a pad. “If you need any more authority, call me. I'll call the governor if I have to. Talk to whoever you need to, and tell them that this could be serious. You want everybody out there looking, because the press is gonna get on top of this and by tomorrow, if we don't have this kid, the shit is gonna hit the fan.”

“All right, all right,” the cop said. And to Barth: “You said she had a yellow vest…”

Lucas hustled back to his car, cranked it, and took off. The dance studio was called Aphrodite, the name in red neon with green streaks around it. The windows were covered by Venetian blinds, but through the slots between the blinds and the window posts, you could see the hardwood floor and an occasional dancer in tights.

Lucas parked at a hydrant and pushed through the studio's outer door. An office was straight ahead, the floor to the right, with a door in the back leading to the locker rooms; it smelled like a gym. An instructor had a half-dozen girls working from a barre, the girls all identically dressed in black. Another woman, older, sat behind a desk in the office, and peered at Lucas over a pair of reading glasses. Lucas stepped over and she said, “Can I help you?”

Lucas held out his ID. “I'm with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We have a missing girl, and I need to talk to one of your students. A Kelly McGuire?”

“Who's missing?” the woman asked.

“One of her classmates. Is Kelly still here?”

“Yes… Just a minute.” She got up, stepped onto the floor, and called, “Kelly? Could you come over here for a moment?”

McGuire was a short, slender, dark-haired girl who actually looked like professional dancers Lucas had met. She frowned as she stepped away from the barre and walked across the floor: “Did something happen?”

Everybody paused to listen. Lucas said, “Ah, I'm a police officer, I need to talk to you for a second about a friend of yours. Could you step outside, maybe?”

“I'll have to get my shoes… Or, it's nice, I could go barefoot…” She took off her dance shoes and followed Lucas outside. “What happened?”

“Have you seen Jesse Barth today?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. When school got out.” Her eyes were wide; she'd see it all on TY too. “I talked to her, we usually walk home, but I had a band practice and then my dance lesson… Is she hurt?”

“We can't locate her at the moment,” Lucas said. “She was…”

“She was going to testify to a jury today, tonight,” McGuire said. “She was pretty nervous about it.”

“If she decided to chicken out, where would she go?” Lucas asked. “Does she have any special friends, a boyfriend?”

McGuire was troubled: “Jeez, I don't know…”

“Look, Kelly: if she doesn't want to testify, she doesn't have to. But. We can't find her. That's what we're worried about,” Lucas said. “Somebody saw her on the street, walking home, but she never showed up. We've got to know where she might've gone. If she's okay, we can work it out. But if she's not…”

“Ah…” She stared at Lucas for a moment, then turned and looked at a bus, and then said, “Okay. If she hid out, it'd be either Mike Sochich's house, or she might have gone to Katy Carlson's-or she might have taken a bus to Har Mar, to go to a movie.

Sometimes she goes up to Har Mar and sits there for hours.”

“Where can I find these people…?”

McGuire was an assertive sort: She said, “Give me two minutes to change. I'll show you. That'd be fastest.”

She took five minutes, and hustled out with a bag of clothes. In the car, she said, “Turn around, we want to go over to the other side of Ninety-four, into Frogtown.

Mike would be the best possibility… Best to go down Ninety-four to Lexington, then up Lexington. I'll show you where to turn…”

He did a U-turn on Snelling, caught a string of greens, accelerated down the ramp onto I-94, then up at Lexington, left, and north to Thomas, right, down the street a few blocks until McGuire pointed at a gray-shingled house behind a waist-high chain-link fence. Lucas pulled over and McGuire slumped down in her seat and said, “I'll wait here.”

Lucas said, with a grin, “If she's here, she's gonna know you ratted her out. Might as well face the music.” He popped the door to get out, and heard her door pop a second later. She followed him across the parking strip to the gate. There was a bare spot in the yard with a chain and a stake, and on the end of the chain, the same yellow-white dog he'd seen at the Barth's.

“Jesse's dog,” Lucas said.

“Naw, that's Mike's dog,” McGuire said. “Sometimes Jesse walks home with it. Dog likes her better than Mike.”

Again, they stepped carefully. The dog barked twice and snarled, but knew where the end of the chain was. And a good thing, Lucas thought. All he needed this afternoon was a pitbull-wannabe hanging on his ass.

Mike's house had a low shaky porch, with soft floorboards going to rot. The aluminum storm door was canted a bit, and didn't close completely. Lucas rang the doorbell, then knocked on the door. He heard a thump from inside, and a minute later, saw the curtain move in a window on the left side of the porch.

He felt the tension unwind a notch. He banged on the door, pissed off now. “Jesse.

Goddamnit, Jesse, answer the door. Jesse…”

There was a moment's silence, then Lucas said to McGuire, “If she comes to the door, yell for me.”

He stepped off the porch, circled the dog, and hurried around to the back of the house: five seconds later, Jesse Barth came sneaking out the back door, carrying a backpack.

“Goddamnit, Jesse,” he said.

Startled, she jerked around, saw him at the corner of the house. Gave up: “Oh, shit.

I'm sorry.”

“Come on-I've got to call your mom,” Lucas said. “She's freaked out, half the cops in St. Paul are out looking for you. People thought you were kidnapped.”

“I was just scared,” Jesse said as he led her through the ankle-deep grass back around the house. “What if I make a mistake?” Her lip trembled. “I don't want to make a mistake and go to jail.”

“Did Conoway say she was going to put you in jail?” Lucas asked. “Who said they were gonna put you in jail?”

“Well, you did, for one.”

“That's if you tried to sell your testimony,” Lucas said. “If you just go down and tell the truth, you're fine. You're the victim here.”

“But if I make a mistake…”

“There's a difference between lying and making a mistake,” Lucas told her. “They're not gonna put you in jail for making a mistake. You have to deliberately lie, and know you're lying, and it's gotta be an important lie. You talked to Conoway about what you're going to say. Just say that, and you're fine.”

They cleared the front of the house and found McGuire on the porch, talking to a tall, bespectacled kid wearing a Seal T-shirt and jeans: Mike. McGuire said: “Jesse, they were afraid you were kidnapped. I'm sorry, I was so worried, you know, you see on the news all the time…”

“That's okay,” Jesse said. “I'm just fucked up.”

Lucas called Kathy Barth: “I got her. She was hiding out with a friend. You've still got time to get down to Dakota County.”

“I've got to talk to Jesse,” Barth said.

“She's willing to go. You're holding up a lot of people here,” Lucas said.

“Oh, God.” Long silence, as though she were catching her breath. “Well, I've got to change…”

Lucas called Flowers, who was just crossing the Mississippi bridge into South St.

Paul. He was ten minutes away: “Man, I thought she was gone,” Flowers said. “I was thinking all this shit about the Klines and finding her body under a bridge…”

“Can you pick her up? That'd be best: I'm here with the Porsche and I got a rider.”

“Fast as I can get there. If we turn right around, we'll just about be on time.”

He told Flowers how to find the house, then called the St. Paul cops and canceled the alert: “Yeah, yeah, so I'll go kill myself,” he told a cop who was inclined to pull his weenie.

The three younger people sat on the porch, waiting for Flowers, and Lucas gave Jesse a psychological massage, telling her of various screw-ups with grand juries, and explained the difference between grand juries and trial juries. Jesse unsnapped the dog, whose name, it turned out, was Screw. She put it on a walking leash and the dog rolled over in the dirt and panted and licked its jaws and whimpered when Jesse scratched its stomach. “You're gonna make him come,” Mike said.

“No…” Jesse was embarrassed.

Lucas moved and the dog twitched. “I don't think he likes me.”

“Bit a paperboy once,” Mike said. “They were gonna sue us, but Mom said, 'For what?' so they didn't.”

“That's great,” Lucas said.

Flowers arrived, towing a boat. He got out of his car, ambled over, shaking his head, and said to Jesse, “I ought to turn you over my knee.”

“Oo. Do me, do me,” McGuire said.

In the car, McGuire said she might as well go home, since her class would be ending.

“Hope the neighbors see me coming home in a Porsche. They'll think I'm having a fling.”

“Maybe I oughta put a bag over my head,” Lucas said.

“That'd be no fun,” she said. “I want people to see it's a big tough old guy.”

Lucas was still cranked from Flowers's original call, and, in the back of his head, couldn't believe that they'd found Jesse so quickly. He dropped McGuire off at her home in Highland. She waved goodbye going up the walk, and he thought she was a pretty good kid. He looked at his watch. If he took a little time, rolled down Ford Parkway with his arm out the window, enjoying the day and the leafy street, and maybe blowing the doors off the Corvette that had just turned onto the parkway in front of him, he'd just about make dinner with the wife and kids.

He was done with Kline and the Barths.

Now he had a motherfucker who was killing old people, and he was going to run him down like a skunk on a highway.

Dinner with the kids was fine; in the evening, he read a Chuck Logan thriller novel.

Late at night, Flowers called: “We got an indictment. They're going to process the paper tomorrow, talk to Kline's attorney, set up a surrender late tomorrow afternoon, and then make the announcement day after tomorrow. Cole's set it up so they can arrest and book him before the press finds out, he'll make bail, then go hide out. Then the announcement.”

“Sounds good to me,” Lucas said. “You headed back south?” “I'm here tonight, I'm heading back tomorrow at the crack of dawn.”

In the morning, after a few phone calls, Lucas took a meeting at Bucher's house.

He'd asked Gabriella Coombs to come over, to sit in.

The Widdlers had almost finished the appraisals of the contents of the house, with negative results. “In other words,” Smith said, “there's nothing missing.”

“There are a few things missing, John,” Lucas said. “The Reckless painting, for one.

A couple of chairs.”

“According to a kid, who admitted that he hadn't been up there for a while, and that maybe Bucher got rid of them herself,” Smith said.

“The whole thing smells. And we've now got a couple of other deals…”

“Lucas, I'm not saying you're wrong,” Smith said. “What I'm saying is, you've got a killing years ago in Eau Claire where a woman was shot and nothing was taken but some money. An old man was strangled in Des Moines and the case was cleared. Another woman probably fell, according to the medical examiner, with all respect to Miss Coombs here. We've got nothing to work with. It's been a while since you worked at the city level, but I'll tell you what, it has gotten worse.

I'm up to my ass in open investigations, and until we get more to go on…”

“That's not right,” Coombs said. “My grandmother was murdered and her house was robbed.”

“That's not what…” Smith shook his head.

Leslie Widdler came in, carrying a white paper bag. He said, “We've got a bunch of sticky buns from Frenchy's. Who wants one?”

Lucas held up his hand and Leslie handed him the sack. Lucas took out a sticky bun and passed the bag to Smith, who took one and passed it to Coombs, who took one, and then they all sat chewing and swallowing and Lucas said, “Thanks, Les… John tells me you haven't found a single goddamn stick of furniture missing. Is that right?”

“We've gone through the photographs one at a time, and we've found two pieces that are not actually here,” Widdler said. “We've accounted for both of them. Both were given away.”

“What about the swoopy chairs that the Lash kid was talking about?”

Widdler shrugged. “Can't put our finger on them. 'Swoopy' isn't a good enough description.

He can't even tell us the color of the upholstery, or whether the seats were leather or fabric. All he ever looked at were the legs.”

“Well… if he's right, how much would they be worth?”

“I can't tell you that, either,” Widdler said. “Everything depends on what they were, and condition. A pristine swoopy chair, of a certain kind, might be worth a thousand dollars. The same chair, in bad shape, might be worth fifty. Or, it might be a knockoff, which is very common, and be worth zero. So-I don't know. What I do know is, there's a lot of furniture here that's worth good money, and they didn't take it. There are some old, old oriental carpets, especially one up in Mrs. Bucher's bedroom, that would pull fifty thousand dollars on the open market. There are some other carpets rolled up on the third floor. If these people were really sophisticated, they could have brought one of those carpets down and unrolled it in Mrs. Bucher's bedroom, taken the good one, and who would have known? Really?”

They chewed some more, and Smith said, “One more bun. Who wants it? I'm all done…”

Widdler said, “Me.” Smith passed him the sack and Widdler retrieved the bun, took a bite, and said, “The other thing is, we know for sure that Mrs. Bucher gave things away from time to time. There may have been some swoopy chairs and a Reckless painting.

Has anybody talked to her accountants about deductions the last couple of years?”

“Yeah, we did,” Smith said. “No swoopy chairs or Reckless anything.”

“Well…” Widdler said. And he pressed the rest of the bun into his face as though he were starving.

“Not right,” Coombs said again, turning away from Widdler and the sticky bun.

Lucas sighed, and said, “I'll tell you what. I want you to go over every piece of paper you can find in your grandma's house. Anything that could tie her to Bucher or Donaldson or Toms. I'll do the same thing here, and I'll get Donaldson's sister working on it from her end.”

“The St. Paul cops won't let me into the house yet,” Coombs said. “They let me clean up the open food, but that's it.”

“I'll call them,” Lucas said. “You could get in tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Coombs said.

“Hope you come up with something, because from my point of view, this thing is drifting away to never-never land,” Smith said. “We need a major break.”

“Yeah,” Lucas said. “I hear you.”

“How much time can you put into it?” Smith asked.

“Not much,” Lucas said. “I've got some time in the next two weeks, but with this election coming up, any sheriff with a problem case is gonna try to shift it onto us-make it look like something is getting done. The closer we get to the election, the busier we'll be. “ “Not right,” said Coombs. “I want Grandma's killer found.”

“We're giving it what we can,” Lucas said. “I'll keep it active, but John and I know… we've been cops a long time… it's gonna be tough.”

“Bucher's gonna be tough,” Smith said. “With your grandma and the others… hell, we don't even know that they're tied together. At all. And Donaldson and Toms are colder than ice.” He finished the sticky bun and licked the tips of his fingers.

“Man, that was good, Les.”

“The French aren't all bad,” Widdler said, using his tongue to pry a little sticky bun out of his radically fashionable clear-plastic braces.

Lucas walked Coombs out to her car. “You can't give up,” she said.

Lucas shook his head. “It's not like we're giving up-it's that right now, we don't have any way forward. We'll keep pushing all the small stuff, and maybe something will crack.”

She turned at the car and stepped closer and patted him twice on the chest with an open hand. “Maybe I'm obsessive-compulsive; I don't think I can get on with life until this is settled. I can't stop thinking about it. I need to get something done.

I spent all those years screwing around, lost. Now I've finally got my feet on the ground, I've got some ideas about what I might want to do, I'm getting some friends… it's like I'm just getting started with real life. Then… this. I'm spinning my wheels again.”

“You got a lot of time, you're young,” Lucas said. “When I was your age, everything seemed to move too slow. But this will get done. I'll keep working on Grandma, St.

Paul will keep working. We'll get somebody, sooner or later.”

“You promise?” She had a really nice smile, Lucas thought, soft, and sadly sexy.

Made you want to protect her, to take her someplace safe… like a bed.

“I promise,” he said.

The St. Paul cops had gone through the papers in the Bucher house on-site, and not too closely, because so much of it was clearly irrelevant to the murders.

With Coombs agreeing to comb through her grandmother's papers, Lucas established himself in the Bucher house-office and began going through the paper files. Later, he'd move on to the computer files, but a St. Paul cop had told him that Bucher rarely used the computer-she'd learned to call up and use Microsoft Word for letter-writing, but nothing more-and Peebles never used it.

Lucas had no idea what he was looking for: something, anything, that would reach outside the house, and link with Donaldson, Toms, or Coombs. He'd been working on it for an hour when it occurred to him that he hadn't seen any paper involving quilts.

There was an “art” file, an inventory for insurance, but nothing mentioned the quilts that hung on the walls on the second floor. And quilts ran through all three murders that he knew of. He picked up the phone, dialed his office, got Carol: “Is Sandy still free?”

“If you want her to be.”

“Tell her to call me,” Lucas said.

He walked out in the hall where the Widdlers seemed to be packing up. “All done?”

“Until the auction,” Jane Widdler said. She rubbed her hands. “We'll do well off this, thanks to you police officers.”

“We now know every piece in the house,” Leslie Widdler explained. “We'll work as stand-ins for out-of-state dealers who can't make it.”

“And take a commission,” Jane Widdler said. “The family wants to have the auction pretty quickly, after they each take a couple of pieces out… This will be fun.”

“Hmm,” Lucas said. “My wife is interested in antiques.”

“She works for the state as well?” Leslie Widdler asked.

Lucas realized that Widdler was asking about income. “No. She's a plastic and microsurgeon over at Hennepin General.”

“Well, for pete's sake, Lucas, we're always trying to track down people like that.

Give her our card,” Jane Widdler said, and dug a card out of her purse and passed it over. “We'll talk to her anytime. Antiques can be great investments.”

“Thanks.” Lucas slipped the card in his shirt pocket. “Listen, did you see any paper at all on the quilts upstairs? Receipts, descriptions, anything? All these places… I don't know about Toms…”

His cell phone rang and he said, “Excuse me…” and stepped away. Sandy. “Listen, Sandy, I want you to track down the Toms relatives, whoever inherited, and ask them if Toms had any quilts in the place. Especially, collector quilts. Okay? Okay.”

He hung up and went back to the Widdlers. “These murders I'm looking at, there seems to be a quilt thread… Is that a joke?… Anyway, there seems to be a quilt thing running through them.”

Leslie Widdler was shaking his head. “We didn't see anything like that. Receipts.

And those quilts upstairs, they're not exactly collector quilts… I mean, they're collected, but they're not antiques. They're worth six hundred to a thousand dollars each. If you see a place that says “Amish Shop,' you can get a quilt just like them. Traditional designs, but modern, and machine-pieced and quilted.”

“Huh. So those aren't too valuable.”

Leslie Widdler shook his head. “There's a jug in the china cabinet in the music room that's worth ten times all the quilts put together.”

Lucas nodded. “All right. Listen. Thanks for your help, guys. And thanks for those sticky buns, Les. Sorta made my morning.”

Out of the house, Leslie Widdler said, “We've got to take him out of it.”

“God, we may have overstepped,” Jane said. “If we could only go back.”

“Can't go back,” Leslie said.

“If they look into the Armstrong quilts, they'll find receipts, they'll find people who remember stuff… I don't know if they can do it, but they might find out that Coombs didn't get all the money she should have. Once they get on that trail-it'd be hard, but they might trace it on to us.”

“It's been a long time,” Leslie said.

“Paperwork sticks around. And not only paperwork-there's that sewing basket. If Jackson White still has a receipt, or a memory, he could put us in prison.” Jackson White sold them the sewing basket. “I should have looked for the sewing basket instead of that damn music box. That music box has screwed us.”

“What if we went back to Coombs's place, put the music box someplace that wasn't obvious, and took the basket? That'd solve that thing,” Leslie said.

“What about Davenport?”

“There's Jesse Barth,” Leslie said. “Amity might have been right.”

“So dangerous,” Jane said. “So dangerous.”

“Have to get the van, have to steal another plate.”

“That's no problem. That's fifteen seconds, stealing the plate,” Jane said. She was thinking about it.

“Davenport said he has a week or two to work on it-if we can push him through another week, we could be good,” Leslie said. “He's the dangerous one. Smith already wants to move on. It's Davenport who's lingering…”

“He could come back to it,” Jane said. “He smells the connection.”

“Yes, but the older things get, and the fuzzier… Maybe Jackson White could have a fire,” Leslie said. “If they find the music box, that might erase the Coombs connections.

If he has to go chasing after Jesse Barth, that'll use a lot of time. All we need is a little time.”

“So dangerous to go after Jesse Barth,” Jane said. “We almost have to do it tonight.”

“And we can. She's not the early-to-bed kind. And she walks. She walked over to her boyfriend's yesterday, maybe she'll be walking again.”

“We should have taken her yesterday,” Jane said.

“Never had a clear shot at her… and it didn't seem quite so necessary.”

“Oh, God…” Jane scrubbed at her deadened forehead. “Can't even think.”

“Be simpler to wait for Davenport outside his house, and shoot him. Who'd figure it out?” Leslie said. “There must be dozens or hundreds of people who hate him. Criminals.

If he got shot…”

“Two problems. First, he's not an old lady and he's not a kid and he carries a gun and he's naturally suspicious. If we missed, he'd kill us. Look at all those stories about him,” Jane said. “Second, we only know two cases he's working on. One of them is almost over. If the cops think the Bucher killers went out and killed a cop, especially a cop like Davenport who has been working as long as he has… they'd tear up everything.

They'd never let go. They'd work on it for years, if they had to.”

They rode in silence for a while. Then Jane said, “Jesse Barth.” “Only if everything is perfect,” Leslie said. “We only do it if everything is exactly right. We don't have to pull the trigger until the last second, when we actually stop her. Then if we do it, we've got an hour of jeopardy until we can get her underground. They don't have to know she's dead. They can think she ran away. But Davenport'll be working it forever, trying to find her.”

“Only if everything is perfect,” Jane said. “Only if the stars are right.”

Lucas was still poring over paper at Bucher's when Sandy called back. “I talked to Clayton Toms. He's the grandson of Jacob Toms-the murdered man,” she said. “He said there were several quilts in the house, but they were used as bedspreads and weren't worth too much. He still has one. None of them were these Armstrong quilts. None of them were hung on walls. He's going to check to see if there's anything that would indicate that he knew Mrs. Bucher or Mrs. Donaldson or Mrs. Coombs.”

“Thanks,” Lucas said. Maybe quilts weren't the magic bullet.

Gabriella Coombs decided to put off her research into Grandma's quilts. She had a date, the fifth in a series. She liked the guy all right, and he definitely wanted to get her clothes off, and she was definitely willing to take them off.

Unfortunately, he wanted them off for the wrong reason. He was a painter. The owner of the High Plains Drifter Bar amp; Grill in Minneapolis wanted a naked-lady painting to hang over his bar, and the painter, whose name was Ron, figured that Gabriella would be perfect as a model, although he suggested she might want to “fill out your tits” a little.

She didn't even mind that idea, as long as she got laid occasionally. The problem was, he worked from photographs, and Gabriella's very firm sixteenth Rule of Life was Never Take Off Your Clothes Around a Camera.

Ron had been pleading: “Listen, even if I did put your picture on the Internet, who'd recognize it? Who looks at faces? The facts are, one in every ten women in the United States, and maybe the world, is naked on the Internet. Nobody would look at your face. Besides, I won't put it on the Internet.”

On that last part, his eyes drifted, and she had the bad feeling that she'd be on the Internet about an hour after he took the picture. And three hours after that, the wife of some friend would call up to tell her that everyone was ordering prints from Pussy-R-Us.

So the question was, was he going to make a move? Or did he only want her body in a computer file? Coombs was a lighthearted sort, like her mother, and while she carefully chose her clothing for the way it looked on her, she didn't use much in the way of makeup.

That was trickery, she thought. She did use perfume: scents were primal, she believed, and something musky might get a rise out of the painter. If not, well, then, Ron might be missing out on a great opportunity, she thought.

She dabbed the perfume on her mastoids, between her breasts, and finally at the top of her thighs. As she did it, her thoughts drifted to Lucas Davenport. The guy was growing on her, even though he was a cop and therefore on the Other Side, but he had a way of talking with women that made her think photography wouldn't be an issue.

And she could feel little attraction molecules flowing out of him; he liked her looks.

Of course, he was married, and older. Not that marriage always made a difference.

And he wasn't that much older.

“Hmm,” she said to herself.

Jesse Barth used a Bic lighter to fire up two cigarettes at once, handed one of them to Mike. The evening was soft, the cool humid air lying comfortably on her bare forearms and shoulders. They sat on the front porch, under the yellow bug light, and Screw, the pooch, came over and snuffed at her leg and then plopped down in the dirt and whimpered for a stomach scratch.

Two blocks away, Jane Widdler, behind the wheel, watched for a moment with the image-stabilizing binoculars, then said, “That's her.”

“About time,” Leslie said. “Wonder if the kid's gonna walk her home?”

“If he does, it's off,” Jane said.

“Yeah,” Leslie said. But he was hot. He had a new pipe, with new tape on the handle, and he wanted to use it.

Lucas was drinking a caffeine-free Diet Coke out of the bottle, his butt propped against a kitchen counter. He said to Weather, “There's a good possibility that whoever killed Coombs didn't have anything to do with the others. The others fit a certain profile: they were rich, you could steal from them and nobody would know. They were carefully spaced both in time and geography- there was no overlap in police jurisdictions, so there'd be nobody to compare them, to see the similarities. Still: Coombs knew at least two of them. And the way she was killed…”

Weather was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a raw carrot. She pointed it at him and said, “You might be wasting your time with Coombs. But in the lab, when we're looking at a puzzle, and we get an interesting outlier in an experiment-Coombs would be an outlier-it often cracks the puzzle. There's something going on with it, that gives you a new angle.”

“You think I might be better focusing on Coombs?”

“Maybe. What's the granddaughter's name?” Weather asked.

“Gabriella.”

“Yes. You say she's looking at all the paper. That's fine, but she doesn't have your eye,” Weather said. “What you should do, is get her to compile it all. Everything she can find. Then you read it. The more links you can find between Coombs and the other victims, the more likely you are to stumble over the solution. You need to pile up the data.”

A stretch of Hague Avenue west of Lexington was perfect. The Widdlers had gone around the block, well ahead of Jesse, and scouted down Hague, spotted the dark stretch.

“If she stays on this street…”Jane said.

They circled back, getting behind her again, never getting closer than two blocks.

The circling also gave them a chance to spot cop cars. They'd seen one, five minutes earlier, five blocks away, quickly departing, as though it were on its way somewhere.

That was good.

They could see Jesse moving between streetlights, walking slowly. Leslie was in the back of the van, looking over the passenger seat with the glasses. He saw the dark stretch coming and said, “Move up, move up. In ten seconds, she'll be right.”

“Nylons,” Jane said.

They unrolled dark nylon stockings over their heads. They could see fine, but their faces would be obscured should there be an unexpected witness. Better yet, the dark stockings, seen from any distance, made them look as though they were black.

“Why is she walking so slow?” Jane asked.

“I don't know… she keeps stopping,” Leslie said. “But she's getting there…”

“So dangerous,” Jane said.

“Do it, goddamnit,” Leslie snarled. “She's there. Put me on her.”

Jesse heard the sudden acceleration of the van coming up behind her. In this neighborhood, that could be a bad thing. She turned toward it, her face a pale oval in the dark patch. The van was coming fast, and just as quickly lurched to a stop. Now she was worried, and already turning away, to run, when the van's sliding door slammed open, and a big man was coming at her, running, one big arm lifting overhead, and Jesse screamed…

Leslie hoped to be on her before she could scream, realized somewhere in the calculating part of his brain that they'd done it wrong, that they should have idled up to her, but that was all done now, in the past. He hit the grass verge, running, before the van had even fully stopped, his chin hot from his breath under the nylon stocking, his arm going up, and he heard the girl scream “Shoe,” or “Shoot,” or “Schmoo.”

Or “Screw”? He was almost there, the girl trying to run, he almost had her when he became aware of something like a soccer ball flying at his hip, he had the pipe back ready to swing, and cocked his head toward whatever it was…

Then Screw hit him.

Leslie Widdler hit the ground like a side of beef, a solid thump, thrashing at the dog, the dog's snarls reaching toward a ravening lupine howl, Leslie thrashing at it with the pipe, the dog biting him on the butt, the leg, an upper arm, on the back, Leslie thrashing, finally kicking at the dog, and dog fastening on his ankle. Leslie managed to stagger upright, could hear Jane screaming something, hit the dog hard with the pipe, but the dog held on, ripping, and Leslie hit it again, still snarling, and, its back broken, the dog launched itself with its front paws, getting Leslie's other leg, and Leslie, now picking up Jane's “Get in get in get in…” threw himself into the back of the van.

The dog came with him, and the van accelerated into a U-turn, the side door still open, almost rolling both Leslie and the dog into the street, and Leslie hit the dog on the skull again, and then again, and the dog finally let go and Leslie, overcome with anger, lurched forward, grabbed it around the body, and threw it out in the street.

Jane screamed, “Close the door, close the door.”

Leslie slammed the door and they were around another corner and a few seconds later, accelerating down the ramp onto I-94.

“I'm hurt,” he groaned. “I'm really hurt.”

Lucas and Letty were watching Slap Shot when Flowers called. “I'm down in Jackson. Kathy Barth just called me and said that somebody tried to snatch Jesse off the street. About twenty minutes ago.”

“You gotta be shittin' me.” Lucas was on his feet.

“Jesse said somebody in a white van, a really big guy, she said, pulled up and tried to grab her. She was walking this dog home from her boyfriend's…”

“Screw,” Lucas said.

“What?”

“That's the dog's name,” Lucas said. “Screw.”

“Yeah. That yellow dog. Anyway, she said Screw went after the guy, and the guy wound up back in the van with Screw and that's the last she saw of them,” Flowers said. “She said the van did a U-turn and headed back to Lexington and then turned toward the interstate and she never saw them again.

She ran home and told Kathy. Kathy called nine-one-one and then called me. She's fuckin' hysterical.”

“Call Kathy, tell her I'm coming over,” Lucas said. “Are the cops looking for a van?”

“I guess, but the call probably didn't go out for ten minutes after Jesse got jumped,” Flowers said. “She said the guy was big and beefy and mean, like a football player.

Who do we know like that?”

“Junior Kline… Can you get back on this?” Lucas asked.

“I could, but I'm a long way away,” Flowers said.

“All right, forget it,” Lucas said. “I'll get Jenkins or Shrake to find Junior and shake his ass up.”

“Jesus, tell them not to beat on the guy unless they know he's guilty,” Flowers said.

“Those guys can get out of hand.”

“Tell Barth I'm on the way,” Lucas said.

The artist was wearing a black T-shirt, black slacks, and a black watch cap on his shaven head, a dramatic but unnecessary touch, since it was probably seventy degrees outside, Coombs thought, as she peered at him over the cafe table.

There was tension in the air, and it involved who was going to be the first to look at the check. The photographer was saying, “Camera had eight-bit color channels, and I'm asking myself, eight-bit? What the hell is that all about? How're you gonna get any color depth with eight-bit channels? Furthermore, they compress the shit out of the files, which means that the highlights get absolutely blown out, and the blacks fill up with noise…”

Coombs knew it was a lost cause. Almost without any personal volition, her fingertips crawled across the table toward the check.

Jane pulled the van into the garage and said, “Let's go look. Can you walk?”

“Yeah, I can walk,” Leslie said. “Ah, God, bit me up. The fuckin' dog. That's why the kid was walking so slow. She had the dog on a goddamn leash, why didn't you see that? You had the binoculars…”

“The dog was just too close to the ground, or the leash was too long, or something, but I swear to God, I never had a hint,” Jane said.

They went inside, Jane leading the way, up to the master bath. Leslie was wearing the anti-DNA coveralls, which were showing patches of blood on the back of his upper right arm, his right hip, and down both legs. He stripped the coveralls off and Jane gaped: “Oh, my God.”

Probably fifteen tooth-holes, and four quarter-sized chunks of loose flesh. Leslie looked at himself in the mirror: he'd stopped leaking, but the wounds were wet with blood. “No arteries,” he said. “Can't get stitches, the cops will call the hospitals looking for dog bites.”

“So what do you think?” Jane asked. She didn't want to touch him.

“I think we use lots of gauze pads and tape and Mycitracin, and you tape everything together and then… When you had that bladder infection, you had some pills left over, the ones that made you sick.”

“I've still got them,” Jane said. The original antibiotics had given her hives, and she'd switched prescriptions.

“I'll use those.” He looked at himself in the mirror, and a tear popped out of one eye and ran down his cheek. “It's not just holes, I'm going to have bruises the size of saucers.”

“Time to go to Paris,” Jane said. “Or Budapest, or anywhere. Antique-scouting. If anybody should take your shirt off in the next month…”

“But we're not done yet,” Leslie said. “We've got to get that music box back in place, we've got to get the sewing basket.”

“Leslie…”

“I've been hurt worse than this, playing ball,” Leslie said. Another tear popped out. “Just get me taped up.”

A St. Paul COP car was sitting at the curb at Barth's house. Every light in the house was on, and people who might have been neighbors were standing off the stoop, smoking.

Lucas pulled in behind the cop car, got out, and walked up to the stoop.

“They're pretty busy in there,” one of the smokers said.

“I'm a cop,” Lucas said. He knocked once and let himself into the house. Two uniformed cops were standing in the living room, talking with the Barths, who were sitting on the couch. Lucas didn't recognize either of the cops, and when they turned to him, he said, “Lucas Davenport, I'm with the BCA. I worked with the Barths on the grand jury.”

One of the cops nodded and Lucas said to Jesse, “You all right?”

“They got Screw,” she said.

“Bui you're all right.”

“She's scared shitless, if that's all right,” Kathy snapped.

“We just got a call from another squad,” one of the cops said. “There's a dead dog on the side of the road, just off Lexington. It's white, sounds like… Screw.”

“All right,” Lucas said. Back to Jesse. “You think you could come down with me, look at the dog?”

She snuffled.

The cop said, “We called Animal Control, they're gonna pick it up.”

Lucas to Jesse: “What do you think?”

“I could look,” she said. “He saved my life.”

“Tell me exactly what happened…”

She TOLD the story in an impressionistic fashion-touches of color, touches of panic, not a lot of detail. When the dog hit the big man, she said, she was already running, and she was fast. “I didn't look back for a block and then I saw him jump in the van and Screw was stuck on his leg. Then the van went around in a circle, and that's the last I saw. They turned on Lexington toward the interstate. Then I ran some more until I got home.”

“So there had to be at least two people,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. Because one was driving and the other one tried to hit me,” she said.

“What'd he try to hit you with?” Lucas asked.

“Like a cane.”

“A cane?”

“Yeah, like a cane,” she said.

“Could it have been a pipe?”

She thought for a minute, and then said, “Yeah. It could have been a pipe. About this long.” She held her hands three feet apart.

Lucas turned away for a second, closed his eyes, felt people looking at him. “Jesus.”

“What?” Kathy Barth was peering at him. “You havin' a stroke?”

“No, it's just… Never mind.” He thought: the van guys were in the wrong case. To Jesse: “Honey, let's go look at the dog, okay?”

They found the dog lying in the headlights of a St. Paul squad car. The cop was out talking to passersby and broke away when Lucas pulled up. This cop he knew: “Hey, Jason.”

“This your dog?” Jason was smiling, shaking his head.

“It's sorta mine,” Jesse said. She looked so sad that the cop's smile vanished. She got up close and peered down at Screw's body. “That's him. He looks so… dead.”

The body was important for two major reasons: it confirmed Jesse's story; and one other thing…

Lucas squatted next to it: the dog was twisted and scuffed, but also, it seemed, broken. Better though: its muzzle was stained with blood.

Lucas stood up and said to the cop, “Somebody said Animal Control was coming?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't know how to do this, exactly, but I want an autopsy done,” Lucas said. “I'd like to have it done by the Ramsey medical examiner, if they'll do it.”

“An autopsy?” Jason looked doubtfully at the dead dog.

“Yeah. I want to know how he was killed. Specifically, if it might have been a pipe,” Lucas said. “I want the nose, there, the mouth, checked for human blood. If there is human blood, I want DNA.”

“Who'd he bite?” the cop asked.

“We don't know. But this is seriously important. When I find this guy, I'm gonna hang him up by his… I'm gonna hang him up,” Lucas said.

“By his balls,” said Jesse.

Gabriella didn't notice the broken window in the back door until she actually pushed the door open and was reaching for the kitchen light switch. The back door had nine small windows in it, and the broken one was bottom left, above the knob. The glass was still there, held together by transparent Scotch tape, but she could see the cracks when the light snapped on. She frowned and took a step into the kitchen and the other woman was right there.

Jane Widdler had just come down the stairs, carrying the sewing basket. She turned and walked down the hall into the kitchen, quiet in running shoes, Leslie twenty feet behind, when she heard the key in the back door lock and the door popped open and the light went on and a woman stepped into the kitchen and there they were.

The woman froze and blurted, “What?” and then a light of recognition flared in her eyes.

Jane recognized her from the meeting at Bucher's. The woman shrank back and looked as though she were about to scream or run, or scream and run, and Jane knew that a running fight in a crowded neighborhood just wouldn't work, not with the dog bites in Leslie's legs, and Leslie was still too far away, so she dropped the basket and launched herself at Coombs, windmilling at her, fingernails flying, mouth open, smothering a war shriek.

Coombs put up a hand and tried to backpedal and Jane hit her in the face and the two women bounced off the doorjamb and went down and rolled across the floor, Coombs pounding at Jane's midriff and legs, then Leslie was there, trying to get behind Coombs, and they rolled over into the kitchen table, and then back, and then Leslie plumped down on both of them and got an arm around Coombs and pulled her off of Jane like a mouse being pulled off flypaper.

Coombs tried to scream, her mouth open, her eyes bulging as Leslie choked her, and she was looking right in Jane's eyes when her spine cracked, and her eyes rolled up and her body went limp.

Jane pushed the body away and Leslie said, “Motherfucker,” and backed up to the door, then turned around and closed it.

Jane was on her hands and knees, used the table to push herself up. “Is she dead?”

“Yeah.” Leslie's voice was hoarse. He'd been angry with the world ever since the dog. His arms, ass, and legs burned like fire, and his heart was pounding from the surprise and murder of Coombs.

Coombs lay like a crumpled rag in the nearly nonexistent light on the kitchen floor; a shadow, a shape in a black-and-white photograph. “We can't leave her,” Leslie said.

“She's got to disappear. She's one too many dead people.”

“They'll know,” Jane said, near panic. “We've got to get out of here.”

“We've got to take her with us. We'll go back to the house, get the van, we've got to move the van anyway. We'll take her down to the farm, like we were gonna do with the kid,” Leslie said.

“Then what? Then what?”

“Then tomorrow, we go to see John Smith at Bucher's, give him some papers of some kind, tell him we forgot something,” Leslie said “We let him see us: see that I'm not all bitten up. I can fake that. We tell him we're thinking of a scouting trip… and then we take off.”

“Oh, God, Leslie, I'm frightened. I think…” Jane looked at the shadow on the floor.

What she thought was, This won't work.

But better not to tell Les. Not in the mood he was in. “Maybe. Maybe that's the best plan. I don't know if we should go away, though. Going away won't help us if they decide to start looking for us…”

“We can talk about that later. Get your flashlight, see if there're some garbage bags here. We gotta bag this bitch up and get rid of her. And we've gotta pick up this sewing shit… What'd you do, you dumbshit, throw it at her?”

“Don't be vulgar. Not now. Please.”

They scrabbled around in the dark, afraid to let the light of the flash play against the walls or windows. They got the sewing basket back together, hurriedly, and found garbage bags in a cleaning closet next to the refrigerator. They stuffed the lower half of Coombs's limp body into a garbage bag, then pulled another over the top of her body.

Leslie squatted on the floor and sprayed around some Scrubbing Bubbles cleaner, then wiped it up with paper towels and put the towels in the bags with the body. He did most of the kitchen floor that way, waddling backward away from the wet parts until he'd done most of the kitchen floor.

“Should be good,” he muttered. Then: “Get the car. Pull it through the alley. I'll meet you by the fence.”

She didn't say a word, but went out the back door, carrying the wicker sewing basket.

And she thought, Won't work. Won't work.

She moved slowly around the house, in the dark, then down the front lawn and up the street to the car. She got in, thinking, Won't work.

Some kind of dark, disturbing mantra. She had to break out of it, had to think. Leslie didn't see it yet, but he would.

Had to think.

The alley was a line of battered garages, with one or two new ones, and a broken up, rolling street surface. She moved through it slowly and carefully, around an old battered car, maybe Coombs's, paused by the back gate to Coombs's house, popped the trunk: felt the weight when the body went in the trunk. Then Leslie was in the car and said, “Move it.”

She had to think. “We need supplies. We need to get the coveralls. If we're going to dig… we need some boots we can leave behind. In the ground. We need gloves.

We need a shovel.”

Leslie looked out the window, at the houses passing on Lexington Avenue, staring, sullen: he got like that after he'd killed someone. “We've got to go away,” he said, finally. “Someplace… far away. For a couple of months. Even then… these goddamn holes in me, they're pinning us down. We don't dare get in a situation where somebody wants to look at my legs. They don't even have to suspect us-if they start looking at antique dealers, looking in general, asking about dog bites, want to look at my legs… We're fucked.”

Maybe you, Jane thought. “We can't just go rushing off. There's no sign that they'll be looking at you right away, so we'll tell Mary Belle and Kathy that we're going on a driving loop, that we'll be gone at least three weeks. Then, we can stretch it, once we're out there. Talk to the girls tomorrow, get it going… and then leave. End of the week.”

“Just fuckin' itch like crazy,” Leslie said. “Just want to pull the bandages off and scratch myself.”

“Leslie, could you please… watch the language? Please? I know this is upsetting, but you know how upset I get…”

Leslie looked OUT the window and thought, We're fucked. It was getting away from them, and he knew it. And with the bites on his legs, he was a sitting duck. He could run. They had a good bit of cash stashed, and if he loaded the van with all the highest-value stuff, drove out to L.A., and was very, very careful, he could walk off with a million and a half in cash.

It'd take some time; but he could buy an ID, grow a beard, lose some weight. Move to Mexico, or Costa Rica.

Jane was a problem, he thought. She required certain living standards. She'd run with him, all right, but then she'd get them caught. She'd talk about art, she'd talk about antiques, she'd show off… and she'd fuck them. Leslie, on the other hand, had grown up on a dairy farm and had shoveled his share of shit. He wouldn't want to do that again, but he'd be perfectly content with a little beach cantina, selling cocktails with umbrellas, maybe killing the occasional tourist…

He sighed and glanced at Jane. She had such a thin, delicate neck…

At the house, Jane went around and rounded up the equipment and they both changed into coveralls. She was being calm. “Should we move the girl into the van?”

Leslie shook his head: “No point. The police might be looking for a van, after the thing with the kid. Better just to go like we are. You follow in the car, I take the van, if I get stopped… keep going.”

But there was no problem. There were a million white vans. The cops weren't even trying. They rolled down south through the countryside and never saw a patrol car of any kind. Saw a lot of white vans, though.

The farm was a patch of forty scraggly acres beside the Cannon River, with a falling-down house and a steel building in back. When they inherited it, they'd had some idea of cleaning it up, someday, tearing down the house, putting in a cabin, idling away summer days waving at canoeists going down the river. They'd have a vegetable garden, eat natural food… And waterfront was always good, right? Nothing ever came of it. The house continued to rot, everything inside was damp and smelled like mice; it was little better than a place to use the bathroom and take a shower, and even the shower smelled funny, like sulfur. Something wrong with the well.

But the farm was well off the main highways, down a dirt road, tucked away in a hollow.

Invisible. The steel building had a good concrete floor, a powerful lock on the only door, and was absolutely dry.

The contractor who put in the building said, “Quite the hideout.”

“Got that right,” Leslie had said.

They put the van in the building, then got a flashlight, and Jane carried the shovel and Leslie put the girl in a garden cart and they dragged her up the hill away from the river; got fifty yards with Leslie cursing the cart and unseen branches and holes in the dark, and finally he said, “Fuck this,” and picked up the body, still wrapped in garbage bags, and said, “I'll carry her.”

Digging the hole was no treat: there were dozens of roots and rocks the size of skulls, and Leslie got angrier and angrier and angrier, flailing away in the dark. An hour after they started, taking turns on the shovel, they had a hole four feet deep.

When Leslie was in the hole, digging, Jane touched her pocket. There was a pistol in her pocket, their house gun, a snub-nosed.38. A clean gun, bought informally at a gun show in North Dakota. She could take it out, shoot Leslie in the head. Pack him into the hole under the girl. Go to the police: “Where's my husband…? What happened to Leslie?”

But there were complications to all that. She hadn't thought about it long enough.

This was the perfect opportunity, but she just couldn't see far enough ahead…

She relaxed. Not yet.

They packed the body in, and Leslie started shoveling the dirt back.

“Stay here overnight,” Leslie said. “Tomorrow, we can come up and spread some leaves around. Drag that stump over it… Don't want some hunter falling in the hole. Or seeing the dirt.”

“Leslie…” She wanted to say it, wanted to say, “This won't work,” but she held back.

“What?”

“I don't know. I hate to stay here. It smells funny,” she said.

“Gotta do it,” he grunted. He was trampling down the dirt. “Nothing has been working, you know? Nothing.”

The bed they slept in was broken down; tended to sag in the middle. Neither could sleep much; and Leslie woke in the middle of the night, his eyes springing open.

Two people in the world knew about him and the killings. One was Amity Anderson, who wanted money. They'd promised her a cut, as soon as they could move the furniture, which was out in the steel building.

The other one was Jane.

A tear dribbled down his face; good old Jane. He unconsciously scratched at a dog bite. He could pull Anderson in with the promise of money-come on out to the house, we've got it. Kill her, bring her out here.

And Jane… Another tear.

Jenkins was asleep in the visitor's chair when Lucas arrived at his office the next morning. Carol said, “He was asleep when I got here,” and nodded toward the office.

Lucas eased the door open and said, quietly, “Time to work, bright eyes.”

Jenkins was wearing a gray suit, a yellow shirt, and black shoes with thick soles, and, knowing Jenkins's penchant for kicking suspects, the shoes probably had steel toes. He'd taken off his necktie and gun and placed them under his chair.

He didn't move when Lucas spoke, but Lucas could tell he was alive because his head was tipped back and he was snoring. He was tempted to slam the door, give him a little gunshot action, but Jenkins might return fire before Lucas could slow him down. So he said, louder this time: “Hey! Jenkins! Wake up.”

Jenkins's eyes popped open and he stirred and said, “Ah, my back… This is really a fucked-up chair, you know that?” He stood up and slowly bent over and touched his toes, then stood up again, rolled his head and his hips, smacked his lips. “My mouth tastes like mud.”

“How long you been here?” Lucas asked.

“Ahhh… Since six? I found the Kline kid last night, then I went out with Shrake and had a few.”

“Until six?”

“No, no. Five-thirty, maybe,” Jenkins said. “Farmer's market was open, I ate a tomato.

And one of those long green things, they look like a dildo…”

“A cucumber?” Lucas ventured.

“Yeah. One of those,” Jenkins said.

“What about the kid?”

“Ah, whoever was in the truck, it wasn't Kline,” Jenkins said. He yawned, scratched his head with both hands. “He was out with some of his business-school buddies. They're not the kind to lie to the cops. Stuffy little cocksuckers. They agree that he was with them from eight o'clock, or so, to midnight.”

“That would have been too easy, anyway.” Jenkins yawned again, and that made Lucas yawn.

“Girl have any kind of description?” Jenkins asked.

“The guy had a nylon on his head,” Lucas said. “She was too scared to look for a tag number. All we got is the dead dog and a white van, and we don't know where the van is.”

“Well, the dog's something. I bet they're doing high-fives over at the ME's office,” Jenkins said. He yawned and shuffled toward the door. “Maybe I'll go out for a run.

Wake myself up.”

“Call nine-one-one before you start,” Lucas said. Jenkins was not a runner. The healthiest thing he did was sometimes smoke less than two packs a day “Yeah.” He coughed and went out. “See ya.”

“Eat another tomato,” Lucas called after him.

Lucas couldn't think of what to do next, so he phoned John Smith at the St. Paul cops: “You going up to Bucher's?”

“Yeah, eventually, but I don't know what I'm going to do,” Smith said.

“Anybody up there?”

“Barker, the niece with the small nose, an accountant, and a real estate appraiser.

They're doing an inventory of contents for the IRS-everything, not just what the Widdlers did. Widdlers are finished. School got out, and the Lash kid called to see if he could go over and pick up his games. He'll be up there sometime… probably some people in and out all day, if you want to go over. If there's nobody there when you get there, there's a lockbox on the door. Number is two-four-six-eight.”

“All right. I'm gonna go up and look at paper,” Lucas said.

“I understand there'll be some excitement in Dakota County this morning, and you were involved,” Smith said.

“Oh, yeah. Almost forgot,” Lucas said. “Where'd you hear that?”

“Pioneer Press reporter,” Smith said. “He was on his way out to Dakota County. Politicians don't do good in Stillwater.”

“Shouldn't fuck children,” Lucas said.

He checked out of the office and headed over to Bucher's, took a cell-phone call from Flowers on the way Flowers wanted the details on Jesse Barth: “Yeah, it happened, and no, it wasn't the Kline kid,” Lucas said. He explained, and then asked about the girl's body on the riverbank. Flowers was pushing it. “Keep in touch,” Lucas said.

In his mind's eye, Lucas could see the attack of the night before. A big man with a pipe-or maybe a cane-in a white van, going after Jesse. A man with a pipe, or a cane, killed Bucher. But as far as he knew, there hadn't been a van.

A van had figured into the Toms case, but Toms had been strangled.

Coombs's head had hit a wooden ball, which St. Paul actually had locked up in the lab-and it had a dent, and hair, and blood, and even smudged handprints, but the handprints were probably from people coming down the stairs. But then, Coombs probably had nothing to do with it anyway… except for all those damn quilts. And the missing music box. He hadn't heard from Gabriella Coombs, and made a mental note to call her.

There was a good possibility that the van was a coincidence. He remembered that years before, during a long series of sniper attacks in Washington, D.C., everybody had been looking for a white van, and after every attack, somebody remembered seeing one. But the shooters hadn't been in a white van. They'd been shooting through a hole in the trunk of a sedan, if he remembered correctly. The fact is, there were millions of white vans out there, half the plumbers and electricians and carpenters and roofers and lawn services were working out of white vans.

Barker and the accountant and the real estate appraiser had set up in the main dining room. Lucas said hello, and Barker showed him some restored pots, roughly glued together by the wife of a St. Paul cop who'd taken pottery lessons: “Just pots,” she said.

“Nothing great.”

“Huh.”

“Does that mean something?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he said.

In the office, he started flipping through paper, his heart not in it. He really didn't feel like reading more, because he hadn't yet found anything, and he'd looked through most of the high-probability stuff. Weather had said that he needed to pile up more data; but he was running out of data to pile up.

The pots. No high-value pots had been smashed, but the cabinet had been full of them.

Maybe not super-high value, but anything from fifty to a couple of hundred bucks each.

The pots on the floor were worth nothing, as if only the cheaper pots had been broken.

If a knowledgeable pot enthusiast had robbed the place, is that what he'd do? Take the most valuable, put the somewhat valuable back-perhaps out of some aesthetic impulse-and then break only the cheap ones as a cover-up? Or was he, as Kathy Barth suggested the night before, simply having a stroke? The Widdlers came in, Leslie cheerful in his blue seersucker suit and, this time, with a blue bow tie with white stars; Jane was dressed in shades of gold.

“Bringing the lists to Mrs. Barker,” Jane called, and they went on through. Five minutes later, they went by the office on the way out. Lucas watched them down the front walk, toward their Lexus. Ronnie Lash rode up on a bike as they got to the street, and they looked each other over, and then Lash turned up the driveway toward the portico.

Lash walked in, stuck his head in the office door, and said, “Hi, Officer Davenport.”

“Hey, Ronnie.”

Lash stepped in the door. “Figured anything out yet?”

“Not yet. How about you?” Lucas asked.

“You know when we discovered that whoever did it, had to have a car?”

“Yeah?”

“Detective Smith said they'd check the security camera at the Hill House to see what cars were on it. Did he do it?” Lash asked.

“Yup. But the cameras operate on a motion detector that cover the grounds,” Lucas said. “They didn't have anything in the time frame we needed.”

“Huh. How about that halfway house?”

Lucas said, “They're mostly drunks. We've been looking at their histories…”

“I mean the camera,” Lash said. “They've got a camera on their porch roof pointing out at the street.” Lucas scratched his chin: “Really?” “Yeah. I just came by there,” Lash said.

“I'll call John Smith. Ask him to look into it. Thanks, Ronnie.” “You're welcome.”

Lucas called Smith. Smith said he would check it right away. “If it's there, what I'm interested in would be a van,” Lucas said. “Probably won't be anything,” Smith said. “Nothing goes longer than about forty-eight hours, you know, those tapes. But I'll give them a call.”

Ronnie came back through, carrying a shopping bag full of video games. “I talked to Mrs. Barker, and she showed me those vases.

Those pots, the ones that got glued back together.”

“You recognize them?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah. Last time I saw them, they were upstairs. On a table upstairs. They were never in that glass cabinet.”

“You sure?”

“I'm sure,” Lash said. “They were in a corner, in a jog of the hallway, on a little table. I dusted them off myself, when I was helping Aunt Sugar.”

Lucas paced around the office, impatient with himself for not getting anywhere. He watched Lash go down the walk, get on his bike, and wobble off, the games bag dangling from one hand. There had been a robbery. He didn't give a shit what the Widdlers said.

His cell phone rang, and he glanced at the screen: Smith.

“Yeah?”

“We got a break-they archive the tapes for a month, in case they've got to see who was with who. I'm gonna run over there and take a look.”

“Van,” Lucas said.

His shut the phone, but before he could put it in his pocket, it rang again: Carol, from the office. He flipped it open. “Yeah?”

“You need to make a phone call. A Mrs. Coombs…”

“Gabriella. I've been meaning to call her.”

“This is Lucy Coombs. The mother. She's calling about Gabriella. Lucy says Gabriella's disappeared, and she's afraid something happened to her.”

Lucy Coombs was at her mother's house. She was tall, thin, and blond, like her daughter, with the same clear oval face, but threaded with fine wrinkles; a good-looking woman, probably now in her late fifties, Lucas thought. She met him on the front lawn, twisting a key ring in her hands.

“I called you because Gabriella said she was working with you,” she said. “I can't find her. I've been looking all over, I called the man she was dating, and he said he dropped her off at her apartment last night and that she planned to come over here to look at papers and so I came over here and I…”

She paused to take a breath and Lucas said, “Slow down, slow down. Have you been inside?”

“Yes, there's no sign of anything. But there's a broken window on the back door, right by the latch. And I found these by the back porch.” She held up the key ring.

“They're her keys.”

Lucas thought, Oh, shit. Out loud, he said, “Let's go look around. Does she have a cell phone?”

“No, we don't believe in cell phones,” Coombs said. “Because of EMI.”

“Okay… Has she done this before? Wandered off?”

“Not lately. I mean she did when she was younger, but she's been settling down,” Coombs said. “She's been in touch every day since my mom died. I mean, I found her keys.”

She was no fool; the keys were a problem, and there was fear in her eyes.

They went around the house and through the back door, Coombs showing Lucas where she'd found the keys, off the back steps, as if they'd been dropped or thrown. “Maybe she dropped them in the dark and couldn't find them,” Lucas suggested. “Did you look for her car?”

“No, I didn't think to. I wonder… sometimes she parked in the alley, behind the fence.” They walked out through the backyard, to a six-foot-high woven-board privacy fence that separated Marilyn Coombs's house from the alley. The gate was hanging open, and as soon as Lucas pushed through, he saw Gabriella's rusty Cavalier.

“Oh, God,” Lucy Coombs said. She hurried past Lucas and then almost tiptoed up to the car, as if she were afraid to look in the windows. But the car was empty, except for some empty herbal tea bottles on the floor of the backseat. The car wasn't locked; but then, Lucas thought, why would it be? There was nothing in it, and who would steal it? “Back to the house,” he said.

“What do you think happened?”

“I don't know,” Lucas said. “She's probably just off somewhere. Maybe I oughta go talk to her boyfriend.”

“I think you should,” Lucy Coombs said. “I know it wasn't going very well. I think Gabriella was about to break it off.”

“Let's check the house and then I'll go talk to the guy,” Lucas said. “Do you have any relatives or know any girlfriends or other boyfriends…?”

They walked through the house: nobody there. Lucas looked at the broken window. He'd never actually seen it done, but he'd read about it in detective novels-burglars making a small break in a window, usually by pushing the point of a screwdriver against the glass, to get a single pressure crack. Then they'd work the glass out, open the door with a wire, then put the pane back in place and Scotch-tape it. With any luck, the owners didn't notice the break for a while-sometimes a long while-and that would obscure the date and time of the break-in…

It did suggest a certain experience with burglary. Or perhaps, with detective novels.

“I'm going to make a call, get the St. Paul cops to go over the place,” Lucas said.

“If you could give me the boyfriend's name…”

They were talking in the kitchen, next to the phone, and the color caught his eye: a flash of red. He thought it might be blood, but then instantly knew that it wasn't.

Blood was purple or black. This was scarlet, in the slot between the stove and refrigerator.

He hadn't seen it when he and Gabriella Coombs were in the kitchen, and he'd looked-he'd been doing his typical crime-scene check, casually peering into cracks and under tables and chairs.

“Excuse me,” he said. He went over to the stove and looked down.

“What?”

“Looks like…Just a minute.” He opened a kitchen cabinet, took out a broom, and used the handle to poke out the red thing.

A spool of thread.

The spool popped out of the stove space, rolled crookedly in a half circle, and bumped into his shoe. He used a paper towel to pick it up, by the spool edge on one end, and put it on the stove. They both looked at it for a moment.

“How'd it get there?” Lucy asked.

“I don't know,” Lucas said. “Wasn't there before. There was a closetful of quilting stuff upstairs. Maybe Gabriella came and took it?”

Lucy frowned. “She doesn't quilt. I've been trying to get her interested, but she's more interested in a social life. Besides, if she took it, where'd she put it? It's not in her car.”

“Neither is she. Maybe she came over with a girlfriend, who quilts…” Lucas was bullshitting, and he knew it. Making up fairy stories.

“That's from the old basket,” Lucy said. “It's old thread, see? I don't think they even make it anymore. This says Arkansas on it. Now, most of it comes from China or Vietnam.”

“Let's go look at the basket,” Lucas said.

They climbed the stairs together, to the big linen closet, and Lucas used the paper towel to open the door.

“Ah, fuck me,” he said.

No wicker sewing basket.

But there, under a neat stack of fabric clippings, where the basket had been, was a black lacquer box with mother-of-pearl inlay.

The music box.

Lucas called Jerry Wilson, the St. Paul cop who'd caught the investigation of Marilyn Coombs's death, and told him about the disappearance of Gabriella Coombs, about the keys and the car, about the broken window with the Scotch tape, about the spool of thread and the music box.

Wilson said, “That sounds like an Agatha Christie book.”

“I know what it sounds like,” Lucas said. “But you need to cover this, Jerry-we need to find Gabriella. I'll talk to her boyfriend, but I could use some cops spread out behind me, talking to her other friends.”

“Okay. You got names? And I'll tell you what-that window wasn't broken day before yesterday.”

“I'll get you names and phone numbers,” Lucas said. “If you find her, God bless you, but I've got a bad feeling about this.” Lucas was on his cell phone, looked back to the house, where Lucy Coombs was locking the front door. “I've got a feeling she's gone.”

Lucy Coombs wanted to come along when Lucas confronted Ron Stack, the artist boyfriend.

Lucas told her to go home and get on the phone, and he lied to her: “There's an eighty percent chance that she's at a friend's house or out for coffee. We've just got to run her down, and anything you can do to help…”

On the way to Stack's place, Lucas called Carol: “Have you seen Shrake?”

“Yes, but I'm not sure he saw me. He's getting coffee, and he needs it. His eyes are the color of a watermelon daiquiri.”

“Fuck him. Tell him to meet me at the Parkside Lofts in Lowertown. Ten minutes.”

When Lucas got back downtown, Shrake was sitting on a park bench across the street from Stack's apartment building. He got shakily to his feet when Lucas pulled into the curb. He was a tall man in a British-cut gray suit and white shirt, open at the collar. His eyes, as Carol said, were Belgian-hare pink, and he was hungover.

“I hope we're gonna kill something,” he said, when Lucas got out of the car. “I really need to kill something.”

“I know. I talked to Jenkins this morning,” Lucas said. “We're looking for an artist.

His girlfriend disappeared last night.” Lucas told him about it as they crossed the street.

The Parkside was a six-story building, a onetime warehouse, un-profitably converted to loft apartments, with city subsidies, and was now in its fourth refinancing. They rode up to the top floor in what had been a freight elevator, retained either for its boho cool or for lack of money. For whatever reason, it smelled, Lucas thought, like the inside of an old gym shoe.

As they got off the elevator, Lucas's cell phone rang. Lucas looked at the Caller ID: the medical examiner's office. He said, “I've got to take this.”

The ME: “You know, I like doing dogs,” he said. “It's a challenge.”

“Find anything good?” Lucas asked.

“A lot of people think all we can do is routine, run-of-the-mill dissections and lab tests, like it's all cut-and-dried,” the ME said. “That's not what it's about, is it? It's a heck of a lot more than that…”

“Listen, we'll have lunch someday and you can tell me about it,” Lucas said. “What happened with the dog?”

“You're lying to me about the lunch. You're just leading me on…”

“What about the fuckin' dog?” Lucas snarled.

“Pipe,” the ME said. “I did Bucher-and man, if it ain't the same pipe, it's a brother or a cousin. The dog's skull was crushed, just like Bucher's and Peebles's, and the radius of the crushing blow is identical. I don't mean somewhat the same, I mean, identical. We got mucho blood samples, but I don't know yet whether they're human or dog.”

“Give me a guess,” Lucas suggested.

“My guess is, it's human,” the ME said. “It looks to me like the mutt was chewing on somebody. We've got enough for DNA, if it's human.”

“That's great,” Lucas said. “And the pipe…”

“You're hot,” the ME said. “You're onto something.”

“Get a break?” Shrake asked, when Lucas rang off.

“Maybe, but not on Gabriella.”

Ron Stack was in 610. Lucas knocked on the door, and a moment later a balding, bad-tempered, dark-complected man peered out at them over a chain. He was wearing a nasal spreader on his nose, the kind football players use to help them breathe freely. He was holding a cup of coffee and had a soul patch under his thin lower lip. “What?”

Lucas held up his ID. “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We're investigating the disappearance of Gabriella Coombs,” Lucas said.

Stack's chin receded into his throat. “Disappearance? She disappeared?”

“You're the last person we know for sure who saw her. Can we come in?”

Stack turned and looked back into his loft, then at Lucas again. “I don't know. Maybe I should call my lawyer.”

“Well, whatever you want to do, Mr. Stack, but we aren't going anywhere until you talk to us. I can have a search warrant down here in twenty minutes if you want to push us. But it'd be a lot easier to sit on the couch and talk, than having you on the floor in handcuffs, while we tear the place apart.”

“What the fuck? Is that a threat?” His voice climbed an octave.

From behind Stack, a woman's voice said, “Who's that, Ron?”

Stack said, “The police.”

“What do they want?” the woman asked.

“Shut up. I'm trying to think.” Stack scratched his chin, then asked, “Am I a suspect?”

“Absolutely,” Lucas said.

Shrake, the nice guy: “Look, all we're doing is trying to find Gabriella. We don't know where she's gone. She's involved in another case, and now…”

“Okay,” Stack said. “I'm gonna push the door shut a little so I can take the chain off.”

He did, and let them in.

The loft was an open cube with floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall. The other three walls were concrete block, covered with six-foot-wide oil paintings of body parts. The place smelled of turpentine, broccoli, and tobacco.

A kitchen area, indicated by a stove, refrigerator, and sink gathered over a plastic-tile floor, was to their left; and farther to the left, a sitting area was designated by an oriental carpet. A tall blond woman, who looked like Gabriella Coombs, but was not, sat smoking on a scarlet couch.

At the other end of the cube, a door stood open, and through the open door, Lucas could see a towel rack: the bathroom. Overhead, a platform was hung with steel bars from the fifteen-foot ceiling, with a spiral staircase going up. Bedroom.

At the center of the cube was an easel, on a fifteen-foot square of loose blue carpet; against the right wall, three battered desks with new Macintosh computer equipment.

Shrake wandered in, following Lucas, sniffed a couple of times, then tilted his head back and took in the paintings. “Whoa. What is this?”

“My project,” Stack said, looking around at all the paintings. There were thirty of them, hung all the way to the ceiling, all along one wall and most of the end wall. One showed the palm of a hand, another the back of the hand. One showed a thigh, another a hip, one the lower part of a woman's face. “I unwrapped a woman.” He paused, then ventured, “Deconstructed her.”

“It's like a jigsaw puzzle,” Shrake asked.

Stack nodded. “But conceptually, it's much more than that. These are views that you could never see on an actual woman. I took high-resolution photographs of her entire body, so you could see every pore and every hair, and reproduced them here in a much bigger format, so you can see every hair and pore. You couldn't do that, just looking at somebody. I call it Outside of a Woman. It was written up last month in American Icarus.”

“Wow, it's like being there,” Shrake enthused. He pointed: “Like this one: you're right there inside her asshole.”

Wrong foot, Lucas thought. To Stack: “We can't find Gabriella. Her mother tells us that you were out together last night, and Gabriella broke it off with you…” “Who's Gabriella?” the woman asked.

“How ya doing?” Shrake asked. He winked at her, and pointed up at the paintings.

“Is this you?”

“No,” the woman said, with frost.

“Gabriella's a potential model,” Stack said to her. Then to Lucas: “Look, she didn't break anything off, because there was nothing to break off. We went down to Baker's Square and had a sandwich, and we couldn't make a deal on my new project, and I said, 'Okay' and she said, 'Okay' and that was it. She took off.” He shrugged and pushed his hands into his jeans pocket.

“You go there together?” Shrake asked.

“No. We met there.”

“Where were you last night?” Lucas asked.

“Here,” Stack said. He turned to the woman: “With her.”

“He was,” the woman said. To Stack: “This Gabriella's just a model?”

“Just a model,” Stack agreed.

“What kind of a car do you drive?” Lucas asked.

“An E-Class Mercedes-Benz station wagon.”

“What color?” Lucas asked.

“Black,” Stack said.

“You must do pretty well for yourself,” Shrake said. “A Benz.”

“It's a 'ninety-four,” Stack said. “I bought it used, with eighty-nine thousand miles on it.”

“Where's the van-the one you use for moving paintings?” Lucas asked.

Stack was mystified: “What van? I have a friend with a blue pickup, when I'm moving big sheets of plywood, but I never used a van.”

“Did you know Marilyn Coombs?” Lucas asked.

“No. Gabriella told me about her dying and about you guys investigating,” Stack said.

“In fact, I think she sorta had the hots for you.”

“For Lucas?” Shrake asked skeptically.

“If you're the guy who took her around her grandmother's house,” Stack said to Lucas.

“Yeah.”

“What'd you mean by 'had'?” Shrake asked. “You said she 'had' the hots for Lucas.

Do you think she's dead? Or just stopped having the hots?”

“Hell, you're the guys who think she's dead,” Stack said. “That's the way you're talking.”

“Did she say where she was going last night?” Lucas asked.

“Well, yeah,” Stack said. “She said she had to go because you-or somebody-asked her to go through her grandma's papers. Looking for clues, or something. Is that, uh… Where'd she disappear from, anyway?”

Lucas looked at Shrake, felt an emotional squeeze of fear and the cold finger of depression. “Bad,” he said. “Bad. Goddamnit to hell, this is bad.”

They pushed the painter for another ten minutes, then Lucas left Shrake with Stack and the woman, to get details of where they were overnight, to get an ID on the woman, to probe for holes in their stories.

On the way out to the car, Smith called: “We got a van. A two thousand one Chevy Express, looks to be a pale tan, but one of the geniuses here tells me that could be the light. It might be white. It went past the halfway house three times on Friday night, the night the storm came in. Can't see the occupants, but we think the tag is Wisconsin and we think we know two letters, but we can't make out the other letter or the numbers. We're going to send it off to the feds, see if they can do some photo magic with it. In the meantime, we're sorting vans out by the letters we know.”

“That's something,” Lucas said. “Listen, feed every name you've got associated with Bucher into the computer. I'll get you all the names I can pull out of the Donaldson and Toms files, and the Coombs stuff. Find that van… Once we know who we're looking for…”

“Get me the names,” Smith said.

“And listen: do me a favor,” Lucas said. “Go see this girl in the Kline case, her name is Jesse Barth. She lives up on Grand, her mother is Kathy, they're in the phone book. Have her look at the van. See if she thinks it might be the same one.”

“If it is… what does that mean?” Smith asked.

“I don't know. I'm freakin' out here, man. Just have her look at it, okay?”

“Okay,” Smith said. “I'll tell you something else: I'm gonna get that fuckin' Ronnie Lash and turn his ass into a cop.”

Lucas was in a hurry now, with Gabriella missing.

He kept thinking, The quilts, the van, the pipe; the quilts, the van, the pipe. The quilts, the van, the pipe…

He couldn't get at the van. Too many of them and he didn't have a starting place, unless Smith or the feds came up with something. The pipe didn't make any difference, unless he found the actual pipe that did the killing; a killer could buy as much pipe as he wanted at Home Depot.

That left the quilts. Gabriella had said that her mother was messing with quilts.

He got in the car, and pointed it toward the Coombs house, got Lucy Coombs on the phone: “Her friends say anything?”

“Nobody's seen her. Oh, God, where's my baby?”

“I'm coming over,” Lucas said.

Lucy Coombs lived in the Witch Hat neighborhood off University Avenue, in an olive-green clapboard house with a stone wall separating the front yard from the sidewalk. The yard had no grass, but was an overgrown jumble of yellow and pink roses, and leggy perennials yet to flower. The house had a damp, mossy, friendly look, with a flagstone pathway running from the front stoop around the side of the house and out of sight.

The front door was open and Lucas banged on the loosely hung screen door. He could hear people talking, and felt a twitch of hope: Had Gabriella shown up? Then a heavyset woman in a purple shift and long dangly earrings came to the door, said, “Yes?”

Lucas identified himself and the woman pushed the door open and whispered, “Anything?”

“No.”

“Lucy is terrified,” she said.

Lucas nodded. “I have to talk to her about her mother…”

There were three more unknown women in the kitchen with Coombs. Lucy Coombs saw him and shuffled forward, shoulders rounded, hands up in front of her as though she might punch him: “Where is she?”

“I don't know,” Lucas said. “We're looking, I've got the St. Paul cops out looking around, we're pushing every button we know.”

She wanted to shout at him, and to cry; she was crippled with fear: “You've got to find her. I can't stand this, you've got to find her.”

Lucas said, “Please, please, talk to me about your mother.”

“She was murdered, too, wasn't she?” Coombs asked. “They killed her and came back and took my baby…”

“Do you have any idea… who're they?”

“I don't know-the people who killed her.”

Lucas said, intent on Coombs: “This thing is driving me crazy. We have three dead women, and one missing. Two of them were involved in antiques, but your mother wasn't-but she had one antique that was taken, and then maybe returned, by somebody who may also have taken a quilting basket.”

“And Gabriella,” Coombs blurted.

Lucas nodded. “Maybe.”

“It's the Armstrong quilts,” one of the women said. “The curses.”

Lucas looked at her: She was older, thin, with dry skin and a pencil-thin nose. “The curses… the ones sewn into the quilts? Gabriella told me…”

The woman looked at the others and said, “It's the curses working. Not only three women dead, but the son who committed suicide, the father dies in the insane asylum.”

Another of the women shivered: “You're scaring me.”

“Did Bucher and Donaldson have something to do with the Armstrong quilts?” Lucas asked, impatient. He didn't believe in witchcraft.

Coombs said, “Yes. They both bought one from my mom, after Mom found them.”

Lucas said, “There were what, five quilts? Six, I can't remember…”

“Six,” the thin-nosed woman said. “One went to Mrs. Bucher, one went to Mrs. Donaldson, the other four were sold at auction. Big money. I think two of them went to museums and two went to private collectors. I don't know who…”

“Who did the auction?” Coombs said, “One of the big auction houses in New York. Um, I don't know how to pronounce it, Sotheby's?”

“Are there any here in Minneapolis?” Lucas asked.

The dangly-earring woman said, “At the Walker Gallery. Mrs. Bucher donated it.”

“Good. I'll go look at it, if I have time,” Lucas said. “Have you ever heard the name Jacob Toms?”

The women all looked at each other, shaking their heads. “Who's he?”

He was on his way out the door, intent on tracing the Armstrong quilts, when he was struck by a thought and turned around, asked Coombs: “The music box. You don't think Gabriella had it, do you? That she just used it to get an investigation going?”

Coombs shook her head: “No. I found Mom, and called the police, and then called Gabriella.

The police were already there when she came over. She was sad and mentioned the music box, and we went to look at it, and it wasn't there.”

“Okay. So somebody brought back the music box and took the sewing basket,” Lucas said. “Why did they do that? Why did they take the sewing basket? Was that part of the Armstrong quilt thing?”

“No, she just bought that kind of thing when she was hunting for antiques-I don't know where she got it.”

“I remember her talking about it at quilt group,” said the big woman in the purple shift. “She said she might see if she could sell it to a museum, or somewhere that did restorations, because the thread was old and authentic. Nothing special, but you know-worth a few dollars and kinda interesting.”

Coombs said, “There might be a… clue… wrapped up in the quilts. But that won't save Gabriella, will it? If they took her? A clue like that would take forever to work out…” Tears started running down her face.

Lucas lied again: “I still think it's better than fifty-fifty that she went off someplace.

She may have lost her keys in the dark, called somebody over to pick her up. She's probably asleep somewhere…”

He looked at his watch: she'd been gone for sixteen or eighteen hours. Too long.

“I'm running,” he said. “We'll find her.”

From his office, he looked up Sotheby's in New York, called, got routed around by people who spoke in hushed tones and non-New York accents, and finally wound up with a vice president named Archie Carton. “Sure. The auctions are public, so there's no secret about who bought what-most of the time, anyway. Let me punch that up for you…”

“What about the rest of the time?” Lucas asked.

“Well, sometimes we don't know,” Carton said. “A dealer may be bidding, and he's the buyer of record, but he's buying it for somebody else. And sometimes people bid by phone, to keep their identify confidential, and we maintain that confidentiality-but in a police matter, of course, we respond to subpoenas.”

“So if one of these things was a secret deal…”

“That's not a problem. I've got them on-screen, and all four sales were public,” Carton said. “One went to the Museum of Modern Art here in New York, one went to the National Museum of Women's Art in Washington, D.C., one went to the Amon Carter in Fort Worth, Texas, and one went to the Modern in San Francisco.”

“Does it say how much?”

“Yup. Let me run that up for you…” Lucas could hear keys clicking, and then Carton said, “The total was four hundred seventy thousand dollars. If you want, I could send you the file. I could have it out in five minutes.”

“Terrific,” Lucas said. “If my wife ever buys another antique, I'll make sure she buys it from you.”

“We'll be looking forward to it,” Carton said.

That'd been easy. Lucas leaned back and looked at the number scrawled on his notepad: $470,000. He thought about it for a moment, then picked up the phone and called Carton back.

“I'm sorry to bother you again, but I was looking in an antiques book, and I didn't see any quilts that sold for this much,” Lucas said. “Was there something really special about these things?”

“I could get you to somebody who could answer that…”

Two minutes later, a woman with a Texas accent said, “Yes, the price was high, but they were unique. The whole history of them pushed the price, and the curses themselves have almost a poetic quality to them. Besides, the quilts are brilliant. Have you seen one?”

“No. Not yet,” Lucas said.

“You should,” she said. “So you'd pay, what, a hundred and twenty-five thousand for one?”

The woman laughed. “No. Not exactly. What happened, was, the owner of the quilts, a Mrs. Coombs, put them up for sale, and we publicized the sale. Now, as it happened, two of the original six quilts had already been acquired by museums…”

“Two?”

“Yes. One was donated to the Art Institute of Chicago, and the other to the Walker Gallery in Minneapolis,” she said.

“I knew about the Walker.”

“The Walker and Chicago. Their original sales price established a price level.

Then, when the other four came up, the museums that were interested would have reached out to their donor base, informed them of the Armstrong quilt history, and they would have asked for support on this specific acquisition. All of these museums have thousands of supporters. All they had to do was find a hundred and thirty women interested in donating a thousand dollars each.

Remember: these quilts commemorate a woman fighting for her freedom and safety, for her very life, the only way she knew how. And how many affluent veterans of the feminist wars do we have donating to museums? Many, many.”

“Ah.” That made sense, he thought.

“Yes. So raising the money wouldn't have been a problem,” the woman said. “There were a dozen bids on each of them, mostly other regional museums, and, we had the four winners.”

“Thank you.”

Who'd said it? The woman with the dangly earrings? The thin-nosed woman? One of them had said, “Big money.”

Lucas turned and looked up at the wall over his bookcase, at a map of St. Paul. Gabriella Coombs had told him that her grandmother “got lucky” with the quilts, and with the money, and the money she had in her former house, and been able to buy in the Como neighborhood.

But houses on Coombs's block didn't cost $470,000, certainly not when she bought, and not even now, after the big price run-up. They might cost $250,000 now, probably not more than two-thirds of that when Coombs bought. Maybe $160,000, or $175,000.

And Gabriella said she'd put in money from her old house…

There was money missing. Where was it? For the first time, Lucas had the sense of moving forward. Most murders didn't involve big money. Most involved too many six-packs and a handy revolver. But if you had a murder, and there was big money missing… the two were gonna be related.

Bucher and Donaldson and Coombs, tied by quilts and methods.

As for the kidnap attempt on Jesse Barth, by somebody in a van, that was most likely a coincidence, he thought now. An odd coincidence, but they happened-and as he'd thought earlier, there were many, many vans around, especially white vans.

The two cases were separate: Coombs/Bucher on one side, Barth/Kline on the other.

All of Marilyn Coombs 's papers were in her house. He had Gabriella's keys in a bag in his car, he could use them to get in. All that time at Bucher's house, looking at paper, had been wasted. He'd been looking at the wrong paper. He needed Coombs's.

He was on his way north in the Porsche, when John Smith called.

“We showed the tape to Jesse Barth. She swears it's the same van.”

“What?”

“That's what she says. The van in the film shows what looks like a dent in the front passenger-side door, and she swears to God, she remembers the dent.”

Lucas had no reply, and after a moment, Smith asked, “So. What does that mean? Lucas?”

Marilyn Coombs's house was not as organized as Bucher's. There were papers all over the place, some in an old wooden file cabinet, others stuffed in drawers in the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom. Lucas found a plastic storage bin full of checkbooks trailing back to the '70s, but tax returns going back only four years.

He finally called his contact at the state tax office, and asked her to check Coombs's state returns, to see when she'd gotten the big money.

He had the answer in five minutes-computers made some things easier: “She had a big bump in income for one year, a hundred eighty-six thousand dollars and then, let's see, a total of thirty-three thousand dollars the year before, and thirty-five thousand nine hundred dollars the year after. We queried the discrepancy, and there's an accountant's letter reporting it as a onetime gain from the sale of antique quilts bought two years earlier. I don't have the letter, just the notation. Does that help?”

“I'll call you later and tell you,” Lucas said.

He spent an hour scratching through the pile of check registers, stopping now and again to peer sightlessly at the living room wall, thinking about the van. What the fuck was it? Where was the van coming from? The checks were in no particular order-it seemed that she'd simply tossed the latest one in a drawer, and then, when the drawer got full, dumped the old ones in a plastic tub and started a new pile in the drawer.

He finally found one that entered a check for $155,000. The numbers were heavily inked, as though they'd been written in with some emotion. He went through check registers for six months on either side of the big one, and found only two exceptionally large numbers: a check for $167,500 to Central States Title Company. She'd bought the house.

A few months later, she registered a check for $27,500; and then, a week later, a check payable to U.S. Bank for $17,320. The $27,500 was the sale of her old house, Lucas thought. She'd taken out a swing loan to cover the cost of her new house, and the check to U.S. Bank was repayment.

He'd been sitting on a rug as he sorted through the checks, and now he rocked back on his heels. Not enough coming in. There'd been $470,000 up for grabs, and she only showed $155,000 coming in as a lump sum. He closed one eye and divided $470,000 by $155,000… and figured the answer was very close to three.

He got a scrap of paper and did the actual arithmetic: $470,000 divided by three was $156,666. If Marilyn Coombs had gotten a check for that amount, and to use the $1,666 as a little happy-time mad money… then she might have deposited $155,000.

Where was the rest? And what the fuck was that van all about? He called Archie Carton at Sotheby's, and was told that Carton had left for the day, that the administrative offices were closed, and no, they didn't give out Carton's cell-phone number. Lucas pressed, and was told that they didn't know Carton's cell-phone number, which sounded like an untruth, but Lucas was out in flyover country, on the end of a long phone line, and the woman he was talking to was paid to frustrate callers.

“Thanks for your help,” he snarled, and rang off. Carton would have to wait overnight: he was obviously the guy to go to. In the meantime…

Alice Schirmer was the folk art curator at the Walker. She was tall and too thin with close-cropped dark hair and fashionable black-rimmed executive glasses. She wore a dark brown summer suit with a gold silk scarf as a kind of necktie. She said, “I had two of our workpersons bring it out; we've had it in storage.”

“Thank you.”

“You said there was a woman missing…?” Schirmer asked. She did a finger twiddle at a guy with a two-day stubble and a $400 haircut.

“Yeah. One of the heirs to the Armstrong fortune, in a way,” Lucas said. “Granddaughter of the woman who found them. That woman may also have been murdered.”

“Mrs. Coombs?”

“Yup.”

“Good God,” Schirmer said, touching her lips with three bony fingers. “They really do hold a curse. Like the tomb of Tutankhamen.”

“Maybe you could palm it off on another museum,” Lucas suggested. “Get a picture or a statue back.”

“I don't think… we'd get enough,” Schirmer said, reluctantly. She pointed: “Through here.”

They walked past a painting that looked like a summer salad. “Why wouldn't you get enough?”

“I'm afraid the value of the Armstrongs peaked a while ago. Like, the year we got it.”

“Really.”

“First the stock market had problems, and art in general cooled off, and then, you know, we began to get further and further from the idealism of the early feminists,” she said. “The cycle turns, women's folk art begins to slip in value. Here we go.”

They stepped past a sign that said gallery closed, installation in progress, into an empty, white-walled room. The quilt was stretched between naturally finished timber supports; it was a marvel of color: black, brown, red, blue, and yellow rectangles that seemed to shape and reshape themselves into three-dimensional triangles that swept diagonally across the fabric field.