Invisible prey

“Canada Geese,” Schirmer said. “You can almost see them flapping, can't you?”

“You can,” Lucas agreed. He looked at it for a moment. He didn't know anything about art, but he knew what he liked, and he liked the quilt.

“This was donated by Ms. Bucher?” Lucas asked.

“Yes.”

“Where are the curses?” he asked.

“Here.” Schirmer's suit had an inside pocket, just like a man's, and she slipped out a mechanical pencil and a penlight. They stood close to the quilt and she pointed out the stitches with the tip of the pencil. “This is an M. See it? You read this way around the edge of the piece, 'Let the man who lies beneath this quilt Lucas followed the curse around the quilted pieces, the letters like hummingbird tracks across fallen autumn leaves. “Jesus,” he said after a moment. “She was really pissed, wasn't she?”

“She was,” Schirmer said. “We have documents from her life that indicate exactly why she was pissed. She had the right to be. Her husband was a maniac.”

“Huh.” A thread of scarlet caught Lucas's eye. He got closer, his nose six inches from the quilt. “Huh.”

Had to be bullshit. Then he thought, no it doesn't -as far as he could tell, the thread was exactly the same shade as the thread on the spool he'd found behind the stove at Marilyn Coombs's. But that thread had come from Arkansas…

He said, “Huh,” a third time, and Schirmer asked, “What?”

Lucas stepped back: “How do you authenticate something like this?”

“Possession is a big part of it. We know where Mrs. Coombs bought them, and we confirmed that with the auctioneer,” she said. “A couple of Mrs. Armstrong's friends verified that she'd once been a pretty busy quilter, and that she'd made these particular quilts. She signed them with a particular mark.”

She pointed at the lower-left-hand corner of the quilt. “See this thing, it looks like a grapevine? It's actually a script SA, for Sharon Armstrong. We know of several more of her quilts without the curses, but the same SA. She used to make them when she was working on the ore boats… You know about the ore boats?”

“Yeah, Gabriella… the missing woman… mentioned that Armstrong worked on the boats.”

“Yes. She apparently had a lot of free time, and not much to do, so she made more quilts. But that was after Frank was in the asylum, so there was no need for curses.”

“Huh.” Lucas poked a finger at the quilt. “Can you tell by the fabric, you know, that they're right? For the time? Or the style, or the cloth, or something?”

“We could, if there was any doubt,” she said.

Lucas looked at her. “What would I have to do,” he asked, “to get a little teeny snip of this red thread, right here?”

An Act of Congress, it turned out, or at least of a judge from the Hennepin County district court.

Schirmer escorted him to the elevator that went down to the parking garage. “If it had been up to me, I'd let you have the snip. But Joe thinks there's a principle involved.”

“Yeah, I know. The principle is, 'Don't help the cops,'“ Lucas said.

He said it pleasantly and she smiled: “I'm sure it won't be any trouble to get a piece of paper.”

“If I weren't looking for Gabriella Coombs…”

“You think the snip of thread would make a difference?” she asked.

“Maybe… hell, probably not,” Lucas admitted. “But I'd like a snip. I'll talk to a judge, send the paper.”

“Bring it yourself,” she said. “I'd be happy to show you around. I haven't seen you here before…”

“When I was in uniform, with the Minneapolis cops, I'd go over to the spoon-and-cherry…” He was talking about the Claes Oldenburg spoon bridge in the sculpture garden across the street. He smiled reflexively and then said, “Never mind.”

“You did not either!” she said, catching his sleeve. What she meant was, You did not either fuck in the spoon.

He shrugged, meaning to tell her that he'd chased people off the spoon a couple of times. Before he could, she leaned close and said, “So'd I.” She giggled in an uncuratorlike way. “If I'd been caught and fired, it still would have been worth it.”

“Jeez, you crazy art people,” Lucas said.

He said goodbye and went down to the car, rolled out of the ramp. A white van was just passing the exit; he cut after it, caught the Minnesota plates-wrong state-and then a sign on the side that said “DeWalt Tools.”

Getting psycho, he thought.

With nobody behind him, he paused at the intersection, fished through his notebook, and found a number for Landford and Margaret Booth, the Donaldson brother-in-law and sister. He dialed and got Margaret: “I need to know the details of how your sister acquired one of the Armstrong quilts, which she donated to the Milwaukee Art Museum.”

“Do you think it's something?” she asked.

“It could be.”

“I bet Amity Anderson is involved,” she said.

“No, no,” Lucas said. “This thing is branching off in an odd direction. If you could look through your sister's tax records, though, and let me know how she acquired it, and when she donated it, I'd appreciate it.”

“I will do that this evening; but we are going out, so could I call you back in the morning?”

“That'd be fine,” Lucas said.

He looked at his watch. Five o'clock. He called Lucy Coombs, and from the way the phone was snatched up after a partial ring, knew that Gabriella had not been found: “Any word at all?” he asked. “Nothing. We don't have anybody else to call,” Lucy Coombs sobbed. “Where is she? Oh, my God, where is she?”

Smith couldn't tell him. He did say the St. Paul cops were going door-to-door around Marilyn Coombs's neighborhood, looking for anything or anybody who could give them a hint. “And what about the van? Still no thoughts?”

“Not a thing, John. Honest to God, it's driving me nuts.”

He thought about going over to Bucher's, and looking at her tax records. But he knew the valuation and the date of the donation, and couldn't think of what else he might find there. With a sense of guilt, he went home. Home to dinner, wondering where Gabriella Coombs might be; or her body.

After dinner, Weather said, “You're really messed up.”

“I know,” Lucas said. He was in the den, staring at a TV, but the TV was turned off.

“Gabriella Coombs is out there. I'm sitting here doing nothing.”

“That thread,” Weather said. Lucas had told her about the spool of thread at Marilyn Coombs's house, and the thread in the quilt. “If that's the same thread, you're suggesting that something is wrong with the quilts?”

“Yeah, but they all wound up in museums, and the woman who benefited is dead,” Lucas said. “It seems like some of the money is missing. She didn't get enough money. Maybe.

It's all so long ago. Maybe the Sotheby's guy could tell me about it tomorrow, but Gabriella's out there now… And what about the van?”

“You're going crazy sitting here,” Weather said. “Why don't you go over to Bucher's place, and see if she has anything on the quilt she donated to the Walker? You'll need to look sooner or later. Why not now? You'd be doing something…”

“Because it feels like the wrong thing to do. I feel like I ought to be out driving down alleys, looking for Gabriella.”

“You're not going to find her driving up and down alleys, Lucas.”

He stood up. “I'm going to eat some cheese and crackers.”

“Why don't you take them with you?”

He DID, a bowl of sliced cheese and water crackers on the passenger seat of the Porsche, munching through them as he wheeled down to Bucher's house. The mansion was brightly lit. Inside, he found the Bucher heirs, six people, four women and two men, dividing up the goodies.

Carol Ann Barker, the woman with the tiny nose, came to greet him. “The St. Paul people said we could begin some preliminary marking of the property,” she explained.

“People are getting ready to go back home, and we wanted to take this moment with the larger pieces.”

Lucas said, “Okay-I'll be in the office, looking at paper. Have you seen check registers anywhere? Stuff going back a few years? Or tax returns…? Anything to do with the buying and donation of the Armstrong quilt?”

“The Armstrong quilt?”

She didn't know what it was, and when Lucas explained, pursed her lips, and said, “She had an annual giving program. There are some records in her office, we looked to see if we could find anything about the Reckless painting. We didn't find anything, but there are documents on donations. Check registers are filed on the third floor, there's a room with several old wooden file cabinets… I don't know what years.”

Barker showed him the file: it was an inch thick, and while Barker went back to marking furniture, he thumbed through it, looking for the quilt donation. Not there. Looked through it again. Still found nothing.

He had the date of the quilt donation, and found donations of smaller items on dates on either side of it. Scratched his head. Rummaged through the files, looking for more on art, or donations. Finally, gave up and climbed the stairs to the third floor.

The file room was small and narrow and smelled of crumbling plaster; dust and small bits of plaster littered the tops of the eight file cabinets. The room was lit by a row of bare bulbs on the ceiling. Lucas began opening drawers, and in the end cabinets, the last ones he looked at, found a neat arrangement of check registers, filed by date. There was nothing of interest that he could see around the time of the quilt donation; but as he worked backward from the donation, he eventually found a check for $5,000 made out to Marilyn Coombs.

For the quilt? Or for something else Coombs had found? He looked in his notebooks for the date of the quilt auction in New York. The check to Coombs had been issued seven months earlier. Maybe not related; but why hadn't there been any other check to Coombs? In fact, the only large check he'd seen had been to a car dealer.

He was still stuck. Stuck in a small room, dust filtering down on his neck. He ought to be out looking for Gabriella…

The heirs were finishing up when Lucas came back down the stairs. Barker asked, “Find anything?”

“No. Listen, have you ever heard of a woman named Marilyn Coombs?”

Barker shook her head: “No… should I have?”

“She was an acquaintance of your aunt's, the person who originally found the Armstrong quilts,” Lucas said. “She was killed a few days ago… If you find anything with the name 'Coombs' on it, could you call me?”

“Sure. Right away. You don't think there's a danger to us?” The other heirs had stopped looking at furniture, and turned toward him.

“I don't think so,” he said. “We've got a complicated and confusing problem, we may have had a couple of murders and maybe a kidnapping. I just don't know.”

There was a babble of questions then, and he outlined the known deaths. One man asked anxiously, “Do you think it's just random? Or is there a purpose behind the killings? Other than money?”

“I don't know that, either,” Lucas said. “Part of this may be coincidence, but I'm starting to think not. If these killings are connected somehow, I would think it would have to do with some special knowledge that would give away the killers. In addition to the money angle, the robbery aspect.”

The man exhaled: “Then I'm good. I don't know nothin' about nothin'.”

Discouraged, Lucas went back to the car, making a mental list of things to do in the morning, calls to make. He didn't want to call Lucy Coombs, because he didn't want to talk to her again. Instead, he called John Smith, who was home watching television.

“Not a thing,” Smith said. “I'll get a call as soon as anybody finds anything. Finds a shoelace. So far, we haven't found a thing.”

Heading toward home, a fire truck, siren blasting away, went by on a cross street.

He could hear more sirens to the south, not far away, and halfway home, with the windows in the car run down, he could smell the distinctive odor of a burning house.

He'd never figured out what it was, exactly-insulation, or plaster, or old wood, or some combination-but he'd encountered it a dozen times in his career, and it never smelled good.

Back at home, he found Weather in the kitchen, sitting at the counter with a notepad.

She asked, “You have time to run to the store?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. Ought to be doing something.

“I'm making a list…”

He was waiting for the list when his cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID: Flowers.

“Yeah?”

“I just got a call from Kathy Barth,” Flowers said. “Somebody just firebombed her house.”

The fire was out by the time Lucas got back. He'd driven right past it on the way home, but a block north, hadn't seen the smoke against the night sky, and the flames had been confined to the back side of the house.

Kathy and Jesse Barth were standing in the front yard talking to firemen when Lucas walked across the fire line. Jesse Barth saw him coming and pointed him out to her mother, who snapped something at her daughter, and then started toward Lucas.

“My house is burned down because of you assholes,” she shouted.

Lucas thought she was going to hit him, and put his hands up, palms out. “Wait, wait, wait… I just heard. Tell me what happened.”

“Somebody threw a firebomb through my back window, right in the kitchen, right through the window, everything's burned and screwed up and there's water…”

She suddenly went to her knees on the dirty wet grass, weeping. Jesse walked up to stand next to her, put her hand on her mother's shoulder. “Virgil said nothing would happen,” the kid said. “Virgil said you'd look out for us.”

Lucas shook his head: “We don't know what's going on here,” he said. “We can't find anybody who might have tried to pull you off the street, who killed Screw…”

“It's those fuckin' Klines, you fuckin' moron,” Kathy Barth shouted, trying to get back on her feet. The fireman caught her under one arm, and helped her get up.

Lucas said, “Ah, Jesus, I'm sorry about this…”

“It's all my pictures, all of Jesse's things from when she was a kid, all of her school papers, my wedding dress…” She took a step toward the house, and the fireman said, “Whoa. Not yet.”

Lucas asked him, “How bad is it?”

“The kitchen's a mess. Miz Barth used a fire extinguisher on it, which was pretty brave, and that held it down some, and we got here pretty quick,” the fireman said.

“The actual fire damage is confined to the kitchen, but there's smoke damage, and foam. Some of the structure under the back of the house could be in trouble.”

Lucas asked Kathy Barth, “Do you have insurance?”

“Yes. Part of the mortgage.”

“Then you'll get it fixed. Better than it was,” Lucas said. “A new kitchen. If it's only smoke, you can save a lot of your stuff, but as soon as the fire guys let you, you've got to get in, and get your photo stuff out.”

She came back at him: “Why can't you stop those guys? They're crazy.” And to Jesse: “We should never have gotten involved with them. We should never have gone to the cops. Now our house… Oh, jeez, our house…”

“Tell me what happened,” Lucas said.

“We were watching television, and there was a crash in the kitchen-” Jesse began.

Kathy interrupted: “One minute before that I was in the kitchen getting Cheez-Its.

I would have been exploded and burned up.”

Jesse, continuing: “-and we heard this window crash, this glass, and boom, there was fire all over the kitchen and I was screaming-” “I ran and got the fire extinguisher from the closet-” Kathy said.

Jesse: “I called nine-one-one and got the fire department to come-” “I squirted the fire extinguisher but there was fire all over, I could smell the gasoline and it wouldn't go out, the whole kitchen was full of fire and we had to run,” Kathy said. She was looking anxiously at the house.

Jesse: “The fire department took forever to get here…”

“Six minutes from when the call came in,” the fireman said. “Fire was out in seven.”

Lucas found the fireman in charge in the backyard. He was talking with another fireman, pointing up at the roof, broke off when Lucas came up. Lucas flashed his ID: “These folks were part of an investigation we did at the BCA.”

“The Klines-they told us,” the fireman said.

“Yeah. They say it was a bomb, came in through the window. What do you think?” Lucas asked.

“Our arson guy''' look it over when he gets here, but it could have been. There was a big flash all over the kitchen, all at once. You can still smell the propellant if you get close. Gas and oil.”

“A Molotov cocktail?”

“Something on that order,” the fireman said. “Maybe like a gallon cider jug.”

“Be pretty heavy to throw,” Lucas said.

The fireman nodded. “You ever in the Army?”

“No.”

“Well, in the Army they've got this thing in Basic Training where you try to throw a dummy grenade through a window from twenty or thirty feet. Most guys can't do it, even with three chances. You got grenades bouncing all over the place,” the fireman said. “Most guys couldn't throw a bottle any better. I'd say somebody ran up to the window, and dunked it, like a basketball.” He hesitated, then added, “If it was an outsider who did it.”

“The alternative would be…?”

The fireman shrugged. “The owner wants a vacant lot. This is a nice piece of property, and it might even be worth more if the house wasn't here. The house isn't so hot.

You take the insurance, you sell the lot… you move to Minnetonka.”

Lucas looked back at the house. He could see Kathy Barth on the front lawn, arms wrapped tight around herself.

“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “She was worried about their pictures being burned, Jesse's school stuff, her wedding dress.”

“Well, that's something,” the fireman agreed. “You don't see people burning up that kind of thing, not unless it's a revenge trip. They don't burn up their own stuff that much.”

The second fireman chipped in: “There was a lot of damage right over the kitchen sink. There are dishes in the sink, and we haven't gone through it yet, but I betcha that bottle landed in the sink, and a lot of the gas wound up in the sink, instead of shooting all over the place. That helped confine it; the arson guys'll know better.”

“So who's your arson guy?”

Lucas took down the name of the head arson investigator, and thanked them for their time. Back in the front yard, he asked Kathy, “You got a credit card?”

“Why?”

“Gonna have to stay in a motel tonight,” Lucas said. “Probably for a few nights.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Got some cash, got an ATM card?”

She nodded again. “We're okay. We're just… we just…”

“We're just really scared,” Jesse finished.

Lucas called the Radisson in downtown St. Paul, got them a room. Told them not to tell anyone else where they were staying. A fireman said he would take them inside to get what they could out of the house. A neighbor volunteered space in her garage, where they temporarily could store whatever they could get out of the house.

The fireman suggested a couple of cleaning companies that could clean up the part of the house that wasn't damaged. “If you guys hadn't been home, if it'd taken another five minutes before somebody reported it, if you hadn't used that fire extinguisher to slow it down, you'd be looking at a hole in the ground. You get it cleaned up, you could be living in it again in a week,” he said. “I see it all the time.”

Lucas called Jenkins and Shrake. They were at the White Bear Yacht Club, having a few drinks after a round of golf, part of what they said was an investigation into gambling on golf courses. “Get your asses out of the country club, and get onto the Klines. Jack those fuckers up. My gut feeling is that they're not involved, but I want you to prove it,” Lucas told Jenkins.

“Can't prove a negative,” Jenkins said.

“Not before this,” Lucas said. “You guys are gonna do it, though, or we're gonna do a gay prostitution sting, and your ass will be on the corner.”

“We get to wear nylons?” Jenkins asked. He didn't threaten well.

Lucas's voice went dark: “I'm not fuckin' around here, man. We had an attempted kidnapping, we got a dead dog, now we got a firebomb.”

“We'll jack them up, no shit,” Jenkins promised. “We're on the case.”

“Flowers is coming up. He'll get in touch.”

Off the phone, Lucas started walking around the neighborhood, checking the houses on each side of the Barths' house, then across the alley in back, and so on, up and down both streets and the houses on the alley. Four houses up from the Barths, and across the alley, he found an elderly man named Stevens.

“I was cooking some Weight Watchers in the microwave, and I saw a car go through the alley,” Stevens said. He was tall, and too thin, balding, with a dark scab at the crest of his head, as if he'd walked into something. They were in the kitchen, and he pointed a trembling hand at the window over the sink, the same arrangement as in the Barths'. “Then, maybe, ten minutes later I was just finished eating, and I took the dish to the trash, and saw more lights in the alley. I didn't see the car, but I think it was the same one. They both had blue headlights.”

“Blue?”

“Not blue-blue, but bluish. Like on German cars. You know, when you look in your rearview mirror on the interstate, and you see a whole bunch of yellow lights, and then, mixed in, some that look blue?”

“Yeah. I've got blue lights myself,” Lucas said.

“Like that,” Stevens said. “Anyway I'd just sat back down again, and I heard the sirens.”

“That was right after you saw the blue headlights.”

“I got up to take the dish to the trash during a commercial,” Stevens said. “Saw the lights, came in, sat back down. The sirens came before there was another commercial.”

“You didn't see what kind of a car it was? The time you actually saw it?”

“Nope. Just getting dark,” Stevens said. “But it was a dark-colored car, black, dark blue, dark green, and I think a sedan. Not a coupe.”

“Not a van.”

“No, no. Not a van. A regular, generic car. Maybe bigger than most. Not a lot bigger, a little bigger. Not an SUV A car.”

“You see many cars back in the alley?” Lucas asked.

“Between five and six o'clock, there are always some, with the garages off the alley.

But not with blue lights. None with blue lights. That's probably why I noticed it.”

That was all he'd seen: he hadn't heard the bomb, the screaming, hadn't heard anything until the sirens came up. He'd been watching Animal Planet.

“Live here alone?” Lucas asked, as he went out.

“Yeah. It sucks.”

Lucas continued walking, found a woman who thought she'd seen a car with bluish lights, but wasn't exactly certain what time. She'd seen it coming out of the alley at least sometime before the sirens, and added nothing to what Stevens said, except to confirm it.

He checked out with the firemen at the Barths'. The arson investigator had shown up, and said he'd have some preliminary ideas in the morning. “But I can tell you, there was gasoline.” He sniffed. “Probably from BP. I'd say, ninety-two octane.”

Lucas frowned and the arson guy grinned: “Pulling your weenie. Talk to you in the morning.”

Lucas got home at midnight and found Weather in bed, reading a book on cottage gardens.

“I think we live in a cottage,” she said.

“Good to know,” he grunted.

“So, I think we should hire a couple of gardeners next year, and get a cottage garden going,” she said. “Maybe a white picket fence.”

“Picket fence would be nice,” he said, grumpily.

She put the book down. “Tell me about it.”

He told her about it, walking back and forth from the bathroom, waving his arms around, getting into his pajamas. He'd brought up a bottle of caffeine-free Diet Coke, with a shot of rum. He sat on the edge of the bed drinking it as he finished, and finally said, “The ultimate problem is, there is no connection between the two cases. But we've got a serious psycho killing people over quilts, and another serious psycho trying to get at the Barths, and they seem to be driving the same van, and goddamnit… I can't find a single fuckin' thing in common between the two cases. There is nothing. The Barths-straight political bullshit. Bucher is a robbery-murder, by people who killed at least one and maybe two other people, and somehow involves quilts.

They've got jack-shit to do with each other.”

He calmed down after a while, and Weather turned out the lights. Lucas usually lay awake in the dark for a while, brooding, even when there wasn't anything to brood about, while Weather dropped off after three deep breaths. This night, she took a half-dozen deep breaths, then lifted her head, said sleepily, “I can think of one thing the cases have in common.”

“What's that?”

“You.” She rolled back over, and went to sleep.

That gave him something to brood about, so he did, for half an hour, coming up with nothing before he drifted away to sleep. At three-fourteen in the morning, his eyes popped open-he knew it was three-fourteen, exactly, because as soon as he woke up, he reached out and touched the alarm clock, and the illuminated green numbers popped up.

The waking state had not been created by an idea, by a concept, by a solution-rather, it had come directly from bladder pressure, courtesy of a late-night twenty-ounce Diet Coke. He navigated through the dark to the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the light, peed, flushed, turned off the light, opened the door, and was halfway across the dark bedroom when another light went on, this one inside his head: “That fuckin' Amity Anderson,” he said aloud.

He lay awake again, thinking about Amity Anderson. She'd worked for Donaldson, lived only a couple of miles from Bucher, and even closer to the Barths. She was an expert on antiques, and must have been working for Donaldson about the time the Armstrong quilt went through.

But the key thing was, she'd heard him talking about the Kline investigation, and he was almost certain that he'd mentioned the Barths' names. At that same time, Ruffe Ignace had published the first Kline story, mentioning Lucas by name. Amity Anderson could have put it all together.

He had, at that point, already hooked the Donaldson killing to Bucher, and he'd told her that. If he had frightened her, if her purpose had been to distract him from Bucher and Donaldson, to push him back at Kline… then she'd almost done it.

He kicked it around for forty-five minutes or so, before slipping off to sleep again.

When he woke, at eight, he was not as sure about Anderson as when he'd gone to sleep.

There were other possibilities, other people who knew he was working both cases.

But Anderson… did she have, or had she ever had, a van? Weather was in the backyard, playing with Sam, who had a toy bulldozer that he was using as a hammer, pounding a stick down into the turf. “He's got great hand-eye coordination,” Weather said, admiring her son's technique. She was wearing gardening gloves, and had what looked like a dead plant in her hand.

“Great,” Lucas said. “By the way, you're a genius. That tip last night could turn out to be something.”

Sam said, “Whack! Whack!”

Lucas told him, “Go get the football.”

Sam looked around, spotted the Nerf football, dropped the bulldozer, and headed for the ball.

“What tip?” Weather asked.

“That I was the common denominator in these cases,” Lucas said.

She looked puzzled. “I said that?”

“Yeah. Just before you went to sleep.”

“I have no memory of it,” she said.

Sam ran up with the ball, stopped three feet from Lucas, and threw it at Lucas's head. Lucas snatched it out of the air and said, “Okay, wide receiver, down, juke, and out.”

Sam ran ten feet, juked, and turned in. He realized his mistake, continued in a full circle, went out, and Lucas threw the ball, which hit the kid in the face and knocked him down. Sam frowned for a moment, uncertain whether to laugh or cry, then decided to laugh, and got up and went after the ball.

“Medical school,” Lucas said. “On a football scholarship.”

“Oh, no. He can play soccer if he's interested in sports,” Weather said.

“Soccer? That's not a sport, that's a pastime,” Lucas said. “Like whittling or checkers.”

“We'll talk about it some other year.”

Down at his office, Lucas began a list:* Call Archie Carton at Sotheby's. * Call the Booths about the quilt donation to the Milwaukee Art Museum. * Get a court order for a snip of red thread from the Walker Gallery quilt. * Call Jenkins and Shrake, and find out where Flowers is. * Find out exactly when Amity Anderson worked for Donaldson, and how she would have known Bucher, Coombs-through the quilts, probably- and Toms, the dead man in Des Moines. * Start a biography on Amity Anderson.

“Carol!”

Carol popped her head in the door. “Yup?”

“Is that Sandy kid still around?”

“Yeah.”

“Get her ass in here.”

“Both Shrake's and Flowers's cell phones were off,” Jenkins answered his and said, “Lucas, Jesus, Kline is gonna get a court order to keep us away from him.”

“What happened? Where are you?”

“I'm up in Brainerd. Kline Jr. was four-wheeling yesterday up by the family cabin,” Jenkins said. “He and his pals went around drinking in the local bars in the evening.”

“What about his old man?” Lucas asked.

“Shrake looked him up last night. He says he was home the whole time, talked to a neighbor late, about the Twins game when they were taking out the garbage, the game was just over. Shrake checked, and that was about the time of the fire.”

“So they're alibied up.”

“Yeah. And they're not smug about it. They're not like, 'Fuck you, figure this out.' They're pissed that we're still coming around. Junior, by the way, is gonna run for his old man's Senate seat, and says they're gonna beat the sex charge by putting Jesse on the stand and making the jurors figure out about how innocent she was.”

“That could work,” Lucas admitted. “You know where Flowers is?”

“I talked to him last night,” Jenkins said. “He was on his way to see the Barths.

He'd be getting in really late, he might still be asleep somewhere.”

“Okay. That's what I needed. Go home,” Lucas said.

“One more thing.”

“Yeah?”

Jenkins said, “I don't know if this means anything to you. Probably not.”

“What?”

“I was talking to Junior Kline. He and his buddies were all wrapped up in Carhartt jackets and boots and concho belts and CAT hats, and they all had Leathermans on their belts and dirt and all that, and somehow… I got the feeling that they might be singin' on the other side of the choir.

A bunch of butt-bandits.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And you know what? I don't think I'm wrong,” Jenkins said. “I don't know how that might reflect on the attacks on the Barths… I mean, I just don't know.”

“Neither do I,” Lucas said.

He got Carol started on getting a court order for a snip of thread from the quilt.

Sandy hurried in. “You called?”

Lucas said, “There's a woman named Amity Anderson. I've got her address, phone number, and I can get her Social Security number and age and all that. I need the most complete biography you can get me. I need it pretty quick. She can't know about it.”

Sandy shrugged: “No problem. I can rip most of it off the Net. Be nice if I could see her federal tax returns.”

“I can't get you the federals, but I can get you the state…”

The Booths came through with a date on the donation to the Milwaukee museum. “The woman who handled the donation for the museum was Tricia Bundt. B-U-N-D-T. She still works there and she'll be in this morning. Her name is on all the letters to Claire,” Landford Booth said.

“She related to the Bundt-cake Bundts?” Lucas asked.

Booth chuckled, the first time Lucas had seen anything that resembled humor in him.

“I asked her that. She isn't.”

Archie Carton came through on the quilts. “The quilts had two owners. One was a Mrs.

Marilyn Coombs, who got a check for one hundred sixty thousand dollars and fifty-nine cents, and one to Cannon Associates, for three hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

“Who's Cannon Associates?”

“That I don't know,” Carton said. “All we did was give them a check. The dealings on the quilts were mostly between our folk art specialist at the time, James Wilson, and Mrs. Coombs. The company, Cannon, I don't know… Let me see what I can get on the check.”

“Can I talk to Wilson?” Lucas asked.

“Only if you're a really good Anglican,” Carton said.

“What?”

“I'm afraid James has gone to his final reward,” Carton said. “He was an intensely Anglican man, however, so I suspect you'd find him in the Anglican part of heaven.

Or hell, depending on what I didn't know about James.”

“That's not good,” Lucas said.

“I suspect James would agree… I'm looking at this check, I actually have an image of it, it was deposited to a Cannon Associates account at Wells Fargo. Do you want the account number?”

“Absolutely…”

“Carol!”

She popped in: “What?”

“I need to borrow Ted Marsalis for a while,” Lucas said. “Could you call over to Revenue and run him down? I need to get an old check traced.”

“Are we hot?”

“Maybe. I mean, we're always hot, but right now, we're maybe hot.”

He got Tricia Bundt on the phone, explained that he was investigating a murder that might somehow involve the Armstrong quilts. “We're trying to track down what happened at the time they were disposed of… at the time they were donated. I know you got the donation from Claire Donaldson, but could you tell me, was there anybody else on the Donaldson side involved in the transaction? Or did Mrs. Donaldson handle all of it?”

“No, she didn't,” Bundt said. Bundt sounded like she had a chipped front tooth, because all of her sibilant Ss whistled a bit. “Actually, I only talked to her twice. Once, when we were working through the valuation on the quilts, and then at the little reception we had with our acquisitions committee, when it came in.”

“So who handled it from the Donaldson side?”

“Her assistant,” Bundt said. “Let me see, her name was something like… Anita Anderson? That's not quite right…”

“Amity Anderson.” He got a little thrill from saying the name.

“That's it,” Bundt said. “She handled all the paperwork details.”

Lucas asked, “Could you tell me, how did you nail down the evaluation on the quilt?”

“That's always difficult,” Bundt said. “We rely on experienced appraisers, people who operate quilt galleries, previous sales of similar quilts, and so on,” she whistled.

“Then let me ask you this,” Lucas said. “Do museums really care about what the appraisal is? I mean, you're getting it for free, right?”

“Oh, we do care,” Bundt said. “If we simply inflated everything, so rich people could get tax write-offs, then pretty soon Congress would change the rules and we wouldn't get anything.”

“Hmph.”

“Really,” she said. But she said “really” the way a New Yorker says “really,” which means “maybe not really.”

“Does the quilt still have its original value?” Lucas asked.

“Hard to say,” she said. “There are no more of them, and their creator is dead. That always helps hold value. They're exceptional quilts, even aside from the curses.”

Lucas thanked her for her help, and just before he rang off, she said, “You didn't ask me if I was related to the Bundt-cake Bundts.”

“Didn't occur to me,” he said.

“Really.”

As soon as he hung up, his phone rang again, and Carol said, “I'm ringing Ted Marsalis for you.”

Marsalis came on a minute later, and Lucas said, “I need you to check with your sources at Wells Fargo. I'm looking to see what happened to an account there, and who's behind it…”

Lucas sat back at his desk and closed his eyes. He was beginning to see something back there: a major fraud. Two rich old ladies, both experienced antique buyers, buy quilts cheaply from a well-known quilt stitcher, and then turn around and donate them to museums.

For this, they get a big tax write-off, probably saving $50,000 or $60,000 actual dollars from their tax bills. Would that mean anything to people as rich as they were? Of course it would. That's how rich people stayed rich. Watch your pennies and the dollars take care of themselves.

The donations established the value of the quilts and created a stir in the art community. The remaining quilts are then moved off to Sotheby's, where they sell for equally large prices to four more museums. Why the museums would necessarily be bidding, he didn't know. Could be fashion, could be something he didn't see.

In any case, Marilyn Coombs gets enough money to buy a house, and put a few bucks in her pocket. Two-thirds of the money disappears into Cannon Associates, which, he would bet, was none other than Amity Anderson.

How that led to the killings, he didn't know yet. Anderson had to have an accomplice.

Maybe the accomplice was even the main motivator in the whole scheme…

He got on the phone to Jenkins again: “How would you feel about around-the-clock surveillance?”

“Oh, motherfucker… don't do this to me.”

More doodling on a notepad, staring out a window. Finally, he called up the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, and got the head of the folk arts department, and was told that the curator who had supervised the acquisition of the quilt had moved on; she was now at the High Museum in Atlanta.

Lucas got the number, and called her. Billie Walker had one of the smooth Southern Comfort voices found in the western parts of the Old South, where the word bug had three vowels between the b and g and they all rhymed with glue.

“I remember that clearly,” she said. “No, we wouldn't have bought it normally, but an outside foundation provided much of the money. A three-to-one match. In other words, if we came up with thirty thousand dollars, they would provide ninety thousand.”

“Is this pretty common?”

“Oh my, yes. That's how we get half of our things,” Walker said.

“Find some people willing to chip in, then find a foundation willing to come up with a matching grant. There are many, many foundations with an interest in the arts.”

“Do you remember the name of this one?” Lucas asked.

“Of course. In my job, you don't forget a funding source. It was the Thune Foundation of Chicago.” Lucas asked her how she spelled it. “T-h-u-n-e.”

“Did you have to dig them out of the underbrush to get the donation? Or did they come to you?”

“That's the odd thing. They volunteered. Never heard from them before,” she said.

“Took no sucking-up at all.”

Lucas scribbled Thune on his desk pad. “Have you ever heard of a woman named Amity Anderson?”

“No… not that I recall. Who is she?”

He'd heard the name Thune, he thought. He didn't know where, but he'd heard it, and recently. At Bucher's, one of the relatives? He couldn't put his finger on it, and finally dialed Chicago directory assistance, got a number for the Thune Foundation, and five minutes later, was talking to the assistant director.

He explained, briefly what he was up to, and then asked, “Do the names Donaldson, Bucher, or Toms mean anything to you?”

“Well, Donaldson, of course. Mr. Thune owned a large brewery in Wisconsin. He had no sons, but one of his daughters married George Donaldson-this would have been way back-and they became the stalwarts of this foundation.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“Claire Donaldson?” Lucas asked. “I believe she was the last Donaldson?”

“Yes, she was. Tragic, what happened. She was on our board for several years, chairwoman, in fact, for many years, although she'd stepped aside from that responsibility before she died.”

“Did she have anything to do with grants? Like, to museums?” “She was on our grants committee, of course…”

Lucas got off the phone and would have said, “Ah-ha!” if he hadn't thought he'd sound like a fool.

A new piece: even the prices paid for the quilts in the auction were a fraud. He'd bet the other purchases were similarly funded. He'd have Sandy nail it down, but it gave him the direction.

A very complicated scheme, he thought, probably set up by Anderson and her accomplice.

Create the quilts. Create an ostensible value for them by donating them to museums, with appraisals that were, he would bet, as rigged as the later sales.

Sell the quilts at Sotheby's to museums who feel that they're getting a great deal, because most of the money is coming from charitable foundations. Why would the foundations give up money like that? Because of pressure from their founders…

The founders would be banned from actually getting money from the foundations themselves.

That was a definite no-no. But this way, they got it, and they got tax write-offs on top of it.

He put down boxes with arrows pointing to the boxes: Anderson sets it up for a cut; the funders, Bucher and Donaldson, get tax write-offs. At the Sotheby's sale, the money is distributed to Coombs and Cannon Associates-Amity Anderson. Anderson kicks back part of it-a third?-to Donaldson and Bucher…

What a great deal. Completely invisible.

Then maybe, Donaldson cracks, or somebody pushes too hard, and Donaldson has to go.

Then Bucher? That would be… odd. And what about Toms? Where did he fit in? Ted Marsalis called back. “The Wells Fargo account was opened by a woman named Barbra Cannon,” he said. “Barbra without the middle a, like in Barbra Streisand. There was a notation on the account that said the owners expected to draw it down to much lower levels fairly quickly, because they were establishing an antiques store in Palm Springs, and were planning to use the money for original store stock. Did I tell you this was all in Las Vegas?”

“Las Vegas?”

“In Nevada,” Marsalis said.

“I know where it is. So what happened?”

“So they drew the money down, right down to taking the last seven hundred dollars out of the account from an ATM, and that's the last Wells Fargo heard from them,” Marsalis said. “After the seven hundred dollars, there were six dollars left in the account. That was burned up by account charges over the years, so now, there's nothing.

Account statements sent to the home address were returned. There's nobody there.”

“Shit.”

“What can I tell you?” Marsalis said.

“What'd the IRS have to say about that?” Lucas asked.

“I don't think they said anything. You want me to call them?”

“Yeah. Do that. That much money can't just go up in smoke.” Lucas said.

“Sure it can,” Marsalis said. “You're a cop. You ever heard of drug dealers? This is how they make money go away.”

Drug dealers? He didn't even want to think about that. He had to focus on Amity Anderson.

Jenkins and Shrake would stake her out, see who she hung with. He needed as much as he could get, because this was all so obscure… He was pretty sure he had it right, but what if the red thread came back as something made only in Wisconsin? Then the whole structure would come down on his head.

He called Sandy: “Anything on Anderson?”

“A lot of raw records, but I haven't coordinated them into a report, yet,” she said.

“I don't want a fu… friggin' PowerPoint-where'd she work? You look at her tax stuff?”

“She worked at her college as a teaching assistant, at Carleton College in Northfield, and then she worked at a Dayton's store in St. Paul,” Sandy said. “Then she worked for Claire Donaldson, which we know about, and then she went straight to the Old Northwest Foundation, where she still is,” Sandy said. “Also, I found out, she has a little tiny criminal record.”

“What was it?” Something involving violence, he hoped.

“She got caught shoplifting at Dayton's. That's why she left there, I think. The arrest is right at the time she left.”

“Huh.”

“Then I've got all kinds of tax stuff, but I have to say, I don't think there's anything that would interest you,” Sandy said. “She does claim a mortgage exemption. She bought her house six years ago for a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and she has a mortgage for a hundred and fifty thousand, so she put down about the minimum-like seventeen thousand dollars.”

“Any bank records?”

“Not that I've gotten, but she only got like forty dollars in interest on her savings account last year. And she doesn't report interest or capital gains on other investments accounts.”

“Car?” Lucas asked.

“I ran her through DMV,” Sandy said. “She has a six-year-old Mazda. One speeding ticket, three years ago.”

“Ever own a van?”

“There's no record of one.”

There was more of the same-but overall, Amity Anderson's biography seemed to paint a picture of a woman who was keeping her head above water, but not easily.

“This does not,” Lucas said to Sandy, “seem like the biography of a woman who came into an untaxed quarter-million bucks a few years ago.”

“It isn't,” Sandy said. “I'll keep looking, but if she's got the money, she's hidden it pretty well. Did you ever think about the possibility that she just bought antiques? That her house is her bank?”

“I've been in her house. It's not full of antiques.”

“Well, maybe there's a big lump of cash moldering in the basement. But if I were her, I would have spent at least some of it on a new car.”

“Yeah. Damnit. This isn't turning out the way I thought it would,” Lucas said.

He sent Sandy back to the salt mines-actually, an aging Dell computer and a stool-to continue the research, and called Jenkins: “You talk to Shrake?”

“Yeah. We figure to start tracking her tonight. We don't know what she looks like, so trying to pick her up outside that foundation… that'd be tough.”

“Tonight's fine. I wasn't serious about twenty-four hours… put her to bed, keep her there for half an hour, pick her up in the morning,” Lucas said. “Mostly, I want to know who she hangs with. Need a big guy: somebody who could snatch Jesse Barth off the street.” Flowers lounged in the door, looking too fresh. “Sat up most of the night with the Barths. They're scared spitless,” he said.

“Well, they got a firebomb through the kitchen window. They say.”

“Oh, they did,” Flowers said. He moved over to the visitor's chair, sat down, and propped one foot on the edge of Lucas's desk. “I talked to the arson guy-there was no glass in the sink, but there was some burned stuff that he thinks is what's left of a half-gallon paper milk jug. Probably had a burning rag stuck in the spout. Said it'd be like throwing a ball of gas through the window; better than a bottle.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.” He propped another foot over the first. “He says wine bottles work fine if you're throwing them onto tanks, but if you throw them onto an ordinary kitchen floor, half the time they'll just bounce along, and not break.”

“Really,” Lucas said.

“Yup. So what're we doing?”

“I got this concept…”

“We needed a concept,” Flowers said. “Like, bad.”

Lucas explained about Amity Anderson. Flowers listened and said, “So call this chick at the Walker and find out if she dealt with Amity Anderson on the Bucher deal.”

Lucas nodded: “I was about to do that.”

Alice Schirmer was mildly pissed: “Well, we got the court order, and your lab person was here, and we butchered the quilt. Hope you're happy.”

Lucas had the feeling that she was posing. He had no time for that, and snapped: “There are several people dead, and one missing and probably dead. For an inch of thread or whatever…”

“I'm sorry, let's start over,” she said quickly. “Hello, this is Alice.”

Lucas took a breath. “When you dealt with Bucher on the quilt, did you ever meet a woman named Amity Anderson?”

“Amity? I know Amity Anderson, but she wasn't involved in the Bucher bequest,” Schirmer said.

“Where do you know her from? Amity?” Lucas asked.

“She works for a foundation here that provides funding for the arts.”

“That's it? You don't know her socially, or know who she hangs with, or know about any ties that might take her back to Bucher?”

“No, I've never mixed with her socially,” Schirmer said. “I know she was associated for a while with a man named Don Harvey, but Don moved to Chicago to run the New Gallery there. That was a couple of years ago.”

“A boyfriend?” “Yes. They were together for a while, but I don't know what she's been up to lately,” Schirmer said.

“Uh, just a moment.” Lucas took the phone away from his face and frowned.

Flowers asked, “What?”

Lucas went back to the phone. “I had understood… from a source… that Amity Anderson is gay.”

“Amity? No-o-o, or maybe, you know, she likes a little of both,” Schirmer said. “She definitely had a relationship with Don, and knowing Don, there was nothing platonic about it. With good ol' Don, it was the more, the merrier.”

“Huh. What does Don look like? Football-player type?”

She laughed. “No. He's a little shrimp with a big mouth and supposedly, a gargantuan… You know. I doubt that he ever lifted anything heavier than a glass of scotch.”

“You say he runs a gallery,” Lucas said. “An antique gallery? Or would he know about antiques?”

“He's a paintings-and-prints guy. Amity's an antique savant, though,” Schirmer said.

“I expect she'll wind up as a dealer someday. If she can get the capital.”

“Okay. Listen, keep this conversation to yourself,” Lucas said.

“Sure,” she said.

“And that thread…”

“From the butchered quilt?” Now she was kidding.

“That one. Is it on the way back here?” Lucas asked.

“It is. Your man left here more than an hour ago.”

Lucas said to Flowers, “Amity Anderson lied to me, in a way most people wouldn't do. I asked her about boyfriends and she said she's gay. I bought it at the time-but it turns out she's not.”

“That make's a difference?” Flowers asked.

“It does if you need somebody large to carry a fifty-thousand-dollar table,” Lucas said. “Somebody you can trust with murder.”

The lab man said, “We've got tests to do, but I took a look at it with a 'scope: it's identical. I mean, identical. I'd be ninety-seven percent surprised if it didn't come off the same spool. We're gonna do some tests on the dye, and so on, just to nail it down.” “The curator said you really butchered the quilt.”

“Yeah. We took a half-inch of loose thread off an overturned corner. You couldn't find the same spot without a searchlight and a bloodhound.”

Lucas hung up. Flowers again asked, “What?”

“There was a major fraud, probably turned over a half-million dollars or so, involving all these people. Think that's enough to kill for?”

“You can go across the river in the wintertime and get killed for a ham sandwich,” Flowers said. “But you told me it was a theft, not a fraud.”

“Here's what I think now,” Lucas said. “I think they all got to know each other through this fraud. That may have seemed like a little game. Or maybe, the rich people didn't even know the quilts were fake. But that opened the door to these guys, who looked around, and cooked up another idea-get to know these people a little, figure out what they had, and how much it was worth, and then, kill them to get it.”

“Kind of crude, for arty people.”

“Not crude,” Lucas said. “Very selective. You had to know exactly what you were doing.

You take a few high-value things, but it has to be the obscure stuff. Maybe the stuff kept in an attic, and forgotten about. An old painting that was worth five hundred dollars, when you bought it fifty years ago, but now it's worth half a million. They looked for people who were isolated by time: old, widows and widowers, with heirlooms going back a hundred or a hundred and fifty years. So a few pieces are missing, a pot here, a table there, a painting from the attic, who's going to know? Some distant nephew? Who's going to know?”

Flowers stood up, stuffed his hands in his pockets, wandered over and looked at a five-foot-tall wall map of Minnesota. “It's the kind of thing that could piss you off,” he said. “If you're civilized at all.” “Yeah. You can't get crazier than that, except that, for money… you can kind of understand it, in its own insane way. But now they're starting to swat people who just get in the way.”

He peered past Flowers at the wall map. “Where the fuck is Gabriella Coombs? Where are you, honey?”

Lucas was sitting in the den with a drawing pad and pen, trying to figure how to get at Amity Anderson, when his cell phone rang. He slipped it out of his pocket and looked at the caller ID: Shrake. He glanced at his watch: ten minutes after midnight.

Shrake had taken over the surveillance of Amity Anderson, and was due to go home.

He flipped open the phone: “Yeah?”

“What, you put me and Jenkins on the gay patrol, right? We pissed you off, so you sent Jenkins to watch Boy Kline, and now…”

“What are you talking about?”

“Amity Anderson went on a date, lot of kissy-face, had dinner, spent three hours at her date's town house, and now we're headed back to Anderson's house. Soon as I get her in bed, I'm going back to her date's place and see if I can get a date,” Shrake said.

“She is gay?”

“Either that or she's dating the swellest looking guy I've ever seen,” Shrake said.

“World-class ass, and red hair right down to it.”

“Goddamnit. Anderson's supposed to have a boyfriend,” Lucas said.

“I can't help you there, Lucas. Her date tonight definitely wasn't a boy,” Shrake said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Go home.”

“You don't want an overnight?”

“Nah. We're looking for her friends,” Lucas said. “Give it half an hour after lights-out…

Hell, give it an hour… then go on home. Jenkins'll pick her up in the morning.”

In the morning, after Weather and Letty had gone, and the housekeeper had settled in with Sam, Lucas went out to the garage, and walked around the nose of the Porsche to a door in the side wall. The door opened to the flight of steps that went up to what the builders called a “bonus room”-a semi-finished warm-storage loft above the garage.

Lucas had supervised the construction of the house from top to bottom, had driven the builders crazy with questions and unwanted advice, had issued six dozen change orders, and, in the end, had gotten it right; and when the builders had walked away, satisfied, he'd added a couple things on his own.

He looked back over his shoulder to the entry from the house, then knelt on the bottom landing, groped under the edge of the tread of the first step, felt the metal edge.

He worked it for a moment with his fingernail, and it folded out, like the blade of a pocketknife.

He pulled on the blade, hard, and the face of the step popped loose. A drawer. He would have bet that not even a crime-scene crew could have found it. Inside, he kept his special cop stuff: two cold pistols with magazines; a homemade silencer that fit none of his guns, and that he kept meaning to throw away, but never had; an old-fashioned lead-and-leather sap; a hydraulic door-spreader that he'd picked up from a burglary site; five thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills in a paper bank envelope; an amber-plastic bottle of amphetamines; a box of surgical gloves lifted from Weather's office; and a battery-powered lock rake.

The rake was about the size and shape of an electric toothbrush. He took it out of the drawer, along with a couple of latex gloves, slipped the drawer back in place, pushed the blade-grip back in place, and took the rake and gloves to his truck.

Back inside the house, he got Weather's digital camera, a pocket-sized Canon G7, got his jacket, and told the housekeeper he was leaving. Kissed Sam.

On the phone to Jenkins: “You still got her?”

“Yeah. She just got in the elevator. So what do I do now, sit on my ass?”

“Ah… yeah,” Lucas said. “Go on over and sit in the Starbucks.”

“Listen, if she wants to get out, there's a back stairs that comes out on the other side of the building,” Jenkins said. “Or she can walk down into the Skyways off the elevators on the second floor, or she could come all the way down and walk out the front door. There's too much I can't see, and if I guess wrong, I'll be standing here with my dick in my hand.”

“She shouldn't have any idea that we're watching her, so she's not gonna be sneaking around,” Lucas said.

“I'm just saying,” Jenkins warned. “We either get three or four guys over here, or she could walk on us.”

“I know what you're saying. Just… sit. Call me if you see her moving.”

Her house was two minutes away in the truck. He parked under a young maple tree, a half block out, watched the street for a moment, then slipped the rake in one pocket, the camera and gloves in the other, and walked down to her door. The door was right out in the open, but with tall ornamental cedars on each side. A dental office building was across the street, with not much looking at him.

He rang the doorbell, holding it for a long time, listening to the muffled buzz.

No reaction; no movement, no footfalls. He rang it again, then pulled open the storm door, as if talking to somebody inside, and pushed the lock-snake into the crappy 1950s Yale. The rake chattered for a moment, then the lock turned in his hand. He was in.

“Hello?” he called. “Hello? Amity? Amity?”

Nothing. A little sunlight through the front window, dappling the carpet and the back of the couch; little sparkles of dust in the light of the doorway to the kitchen.

“Amity?”

He stepped inside, shut the door, pulled on the latex gloves, did a quick search for a security system. Got a jolt when he found a keypad inside the closet next to the front door. And then noticed that the '80s-style liquid-crystal read-out was dead.

He pushed a couple of number-buttons: nothing.

He could risk it, he thought. If the cops came, maybe talk his way out of it. But still: move quick. He hurried through the house, looking for anything that might be construed as an antique. Found a music box-was she a music-box collector? That would be interesting. He took a picture of it. Up to the bedroom, taking shots of an oil painting, a rocking chair, a drawing, a chest of drawers that seemed too elegant for the bedroom.

Into the bathroom: big tub, marijuana and scented candle wax, bottles of alprazolam and Ambien in the medicine cabinet. Stress? Under the sink, a kit in a velvet bag.

He'd seen kits like that, from years ago, but what… He opened it: ah, sure. A diaphragm.

So she swung both ways. Or had, at one time.

His cell phone rang, and vibrated at the same time, in his pocket, nearly giving him a heart attack.

Carol: “Mrs. Coombs called. She wants to talk to you. She's really messed up.”

“I'll get back to her later,” Lucas said.

“She's pretty messed up,” Carol said.

Not a goddamn thing he could do about it, either. He snapped: 'Later. Okay?”

Quick through the bedroom closet, through the chest of drawers, under the bed; looked down the basement, called “Hello?” and got nothing but a muffled echo. Back up the stairs, into a ground-floor bedroom used as an office. He'd been inside a long time now- five, six minutes-and the pressure was growing.

The office had an ornate table used as a desk; everything expensive looked like mahogany to Lucas, and this looked like mahogany, with elaborately carved feet. He took a picture of it. The desk had one center drawer, full of junk: paper clips, envelopes, ticket stubs, a collection of old ballpoints, pencils, rubber bands. He had noticed with the upstairs closets that while the visible parts of the house were neatly kept, the out-of-sight areas were a mess.

The office had two file cabinets, both wooden. Neither looked expensive. He opened a drawer: papers, paid bills. Not enough time to check them. Another drawer: taxes, but only going back four years. He pulled them out, quickly, looked at the bottom numbers on the federal returns: all in the fifties. Two more drawers full of warranties, car-maintenance records-looked at the maintenance records, which covered three different cars, all small, no vans-employment stuff and medical records.

No time, no time, he thought.

He checked a series of personal photographs on the wall behind the desk. One showed a much younger Amity in a graduation gown with several other people, also in gowns, including a guy large enough to carry a $50,000 table. The guy looked familiar, somehow, but Lucas couldn't place him. He turned off the camera's flash, so that it wouldn't reflect off the protective glass, and took a picture of the photograph.

Inside too long.

Damn. If he could have half an hour with the desk drawers… But then, he had the sense that she was careful.

He took a last look around, and left, locking the door behind himself.

Back in the truck, he called Jenkins. “I drank about a gallon of coffee. If my heart quits, it's your fault,” Jenkins said. “I ain't seen her, but I called her office ten minutes ago, and she was in a conference. I told them I'd call back.”

“Don't want to make her curious,” Lucas said.

“I'll take care.”

Ten minutes to a Target store. He pulled the memory card out of the camera and at the Kodak kiosk, printed five-by-sevens of Amity Anderson's furniture. In the photos, it sure didn't look like much; but what'd he know? But he did know somebody who'd know what it was. He looked up John Smith's cell-phone number and called him: “I need to talk to the Widdlers about some furniture. Want to see if it's worth something.”

“On the case? Or personal?”

“Maybe semirelated to the case, but I don't know. I think they're done at Bucher's, right?”

“Yup. They're out in Edina. You need to see them right away?”

“I'm over on the airport strip, I can be there in ten minutes.”

“Let me get you the address…”

The Widdlers had a neat two-story building in old Edina, brown brick with one big display window in front. A transparent shade protected the window box from sunlight, and behind the window, a small oil painting in an elaborate wood frame sat on a desk something like Amity Anderson's, but this desk was smaller and better-looking. The desk, made from what Lucas guessed was mahogany, sat on a six-by-four-foot oriental carpet. The whole arrangement looked like a still-life painting.

Lucas pushed through the front door; a bell tinkled overhead. Inside, the place was jammed with artifacts. He couldn't think of another word for the stuff: bottles and pottery and bronze statues of naked girls with geese, lamps and chairs and tables and desks and busts. The walls were hung with paintings and rugs and quilts and framed maps.

He thought, quilts. Hum.

A stairway went up to the second floor, and looking up the stairwell, he could see even more stuff behind the second-floor railing. A severe-looking portrait of a woman, effective, though it was really nothing more than an arrangement in gray and black, hung on the first landing of the stairway. She was hatchet-faced, but broad through the shoulders, and as with the photograph he'd seen that morning, he had the feeling that he'd seen her before.

He was peering at it when a woman's voice said, “Can I help you?”

He jumped and turned. A motherly woman, white haired and six-tyish, had snuck up behind him from the back room, and was looking pleased with herself for having done it; or at least, amused that she'd startled him. He said, “Uh, jeez, is Leslie around? Or Jane?”

“No. They're in Minnetonka on an appraisal. They won't be back until after lunch, and they'll be in tomorrow… If there's anything I can help you with?”

“Oh, I had some questions about some furniture…” He looked back again at the painting. “That woman looks familiar, but I can't place her.”

“That's Leslie's mom,” the shop lady said. “Painted by quite a talented local artist, James Malone. Although I think he has since moved to New York City.”

A little click in the back of Lucas's mind.

Of course it was Leslie's mom. He could see Leslie's face in the woman's face, although the woman was much thinner than the Leslie that Lucas had met, who was running to fat.

But he hadn't always been fat, Lucas knew. Lucas knew that because Leslie wasn't fat in the picture in Amity Anderson's office. Amity Anderson and the Widdlers: and Leslie was easily big enough to carry a $50,000 table out of a house.

In fact, Leslie was a horse. You didn't see it, because of the bow ties and the fussy clothes and the fake antiquer-artsy accent he put on, but Leslie was a goddamn Minnesota farm boy, probably grew up humping heifers around the barn, or whatever you did with heifers.

The woman said, “So, uh…”

“I'll just come back tomorrow,” Lucas said. “If I have time. No big deal, I was passing by.”

“They should be in right at nine, because I'm off tomorrow,” the woman said.

“I'll talk to them then,” Lucas said. On the way out the door, he stopped, as with an afterthought: “Do you know, did they take the van?”

The woman was puzzled: “They don't have a van.”

“Oh.” Now Lucas put a look of puzzlement on his face. “Maybe I'm just remembering wrong, but I saw them at an auction and they were driving a van. A white van. I thought.”

“Just a rental. They rent when they need one, it's a lot cheaper than actually owning,” the woman said. “That's what I do, when I'm auctioning.”

Lucas nodded: “Hey. Thanks for the help.”

Outside in the parking lot, he sat in the truck for a moment, then got on the phone to John Smith: “If you happen to see them, don't tell the Widdlers I was going out to their place,” Lucas said.

After a moment of silence, Smith said, “You gotta be shittin' me.”

“Probably nothing, but I need to look them up,” Lucas said. “How did they get involved in assessing the Bucher place?”

“I called them,” Smith said. “I asked around, they were recommended. I called them and they took it on.”

“But you didn't call them because somebody suggested them specifically?” Lucas asked.

“Somebody at Bucher's?”

“Nope. I called a guy at the Minneapolis museum who knows about antiques, and he gave me two names. I looked them up in the Yellow Pages and picked the Widdlers because they were closer.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “So: if you talk to them, don't mention me.”

Next, he got Carol at the office: “Get somebody-not Sandy-and have him go out to all the local car-rental agencies and see if there's a record of a Leslie or Jane Widdler-W-I-D-D-L-E-R-renting a white van. Or any van.

“Then, Sandy is doing research on a woman named Amity Anderson. I want her to keep doing that, but put it on the back burner for today. Right now, I need to know everything about Leslie and Jane Widdler. They're married, they own an antique store in Edina. I think they went to college at Carleton. I want a bunch of stuff figured out by the time I get back there.”

“When are you getting back?”

“Half hour,” Lucas said.

“Not much time,” Carol said.

“Sandy's gotta hurry,” Lucas said. “I'm in a really big fuckin' hurry. And get that rental check going. Going right now.”

Carol got in the last word: “Lucy Coombs called again.”

“He was a big guy, dark complexion, blue eyes. Asking about a white van.”

“A van? We haven't had a van in years,” Jane Widdler said. “I'm not getting a clear picture of him. You say, a big guy?”

The sales assistant nodded. “He looked… sort of French. Big shoulders, black hair with a little salt and pepper. Good-looking, but tough,” she said. “He had a scar that started up in his hair and came down across his eye. Not an ugly scar, a white line.”

“He wasn't as big as Leslie,” Jane Widdler suggested.

“No… not as tall, and also…” Widdler's sales assistant groped for a word.

“Not so fat,” Jane Widdler said.

“He looked like he was in really good shape,” the sales assistant said, staying away from the topic of Leslie's heft. “He didn't look like an antiques person.”

“I might know who he is,” Jane Widdler said. She smiled, just a little, because of the Botox. “It might be better if you didn't mention him to Leslie. I think this man is… an old friend of mine. There's nothing going on, but I don't want Leslie to get upset.”

The sales assistant nodded. “Okay. I'll let you deal with it.” She definitely didn't like the idea of upsetting Leslie.

“That would be best,” Jane Widdler said.

Jane thought about it for a long time, until a headache began creeping down her neck from the crown of her head. Finally, she got her BlackBerry from her purse, looked up a number, and punched it in.

“Hello, Jane,” Amity Anderson said.

“We've got to get together. Right now. Without Leslie,” Jane said.

“Why?”

“Because,” Jane Widdler said.

“I just want out,” Amity said.

“That's all I want,” Jane Widdler said. “But things may be getting… difficult.”

They hooked up in a coffee shop in the Skyway. Widdler arrived on the street level, before going up to the Skyway, walking right past Jenkins who sat behind a window in Starbucks, but he'd never seen her before. Anderson came down to the second floor to the Skyway, never going to the street, leaving Jenkins sitting in the Starbucks, with, at least metaphorically, his dick in his hand.

The Skyway shop, a Caribou, had a selection of chairs and tables and Widdler and Anderson both got medium light-roasts and chocolate raspberry thumbprint cookies, and hunched over a table in the corner. Widdler said, “This state agent who talked to you, Davenport. He came to the shop and he asked about a white van. He knows.”

“Knows what?” Amity Anderson took a bite of her thumbprint.

“You know,” Widdler said irritably. They'd never talked about it, but Anderson knew.

“The only thing I know is that we went to college together and you recommended that Mrs. Donaldson buy a rare Armstrong quilt, which was later donated to the Milwaukee, and that's all I know,” Anderson said.

She popped the last of the thumbprint in her mouth and made a dusting motion with her hands.

“I really didn't want to be unpleasant about this,” Widdler said, “but I've got no choice. So I will tell you that if they take me off to prison, you will go with me.

I will make a deal to implicate the rest of the gang, in exchange for time off. Meaning you and Marilyn Coombs.”

Anderson's faced tightened like a fist: “You bitch. I did not…”

“You knew. You certainly knew about the quilts, and if you knew about the quilts, then any jury is going to believe you knew about the rest of it,” Widdler said. “You worked for Donaldson, for Christ's sake. You live five minutes from Bucher. Now, if Davenport knows, and he does, he will eventually be able to put together a fairly incriminating case. We dealt with all those people-Donaldson, Bucher, Toms. There are records, somewhere. Old checks.”

“Where's my money? You were going to get me the money.” Anderson hissed. “I'm going to Italy.”

“I'll get you the money and you can go to Italy,” Jane said. “But we've got to get out of this.”

“If you're talking about doing something to Davenport…”

Widdler shook her head. “No, no. Too late for that. Maybe, right back at the beginning…”

She turned away from Anderson, her eyes narrowing, reviewing the missed opportunity.

Then back to Anderson: “The thing is, cops are bureaucrats. My stepfather was a cop, and I know how they work. Davenport's already told somebody what he thinks. If we did something to him, there'd be eight more cops looking at us. They'd never give up.”

“So who…” Anderson had the paper cup at her lips, looking into Widdler's eyes, when the answer came to her. “Leslie?”

Widdler said, “I never signed anything. He endorsed all the checks, wrote the estimates.

He did the scouting while I watched the shop. They could make a better case against him than they could against me.”

“So what are you thinking?”

Widdler glanced around. A dozen other patrons were sitting in chairs or standing at the counter, but none were close enough to hear them over the chatter and dish-and-silverware clank of the shop. Still, she leaned closer to Anderson. “I'm thinking Leslie could become despondent. He could talk to me about it, hint that he'd done some things he shouldn't have. I could get the feeling that he's worried about something.”

“Suicide?”

“I have some small guns… a house gun, and car guns, for self-protection. Leslie showed me how they work,” Widdler said.

“So…”

“I need a ride. I don't just want him to shoot himself, I want him to… do it on a stage, so to speak. I want people looking in a different direction.”

“And you need a ride?” Anderson was astonished. They were talking about a murder, and the killer needed a ride.

“I can't think of any other way to do it-to get him where I need him, to get back home. I need to move quickly to establish an alibi… I need to be home if somebody calls. I can't take a taxi, it's just… it's just all too hard to work out, if you don't help.”

“All I have to do is give you a ride?”

“That's all,” Widdler said. “It's very convenient. Only a few minutes from your house.”

They argued for another five minutes, in hushed tones, and finally Anderson said, “I couldn't stand it in prison. I couldn't stand it.”

“Neither could I,” Widdler said. Anderson was watching her, and her lips trembled as much as they could. She reached out and put her hand on Anderson's. “Can you do this? Just this one thing?”

“Just the ride,” Anderson said.

“That's all-and then… about the money. Leslie keeps all the controversial stuff in a building at our country place.”

“I didn't know you had a country place,” Anderson said.

“Just a shack, and a storage building. I'll give you the key. You can take whatever you want. If you can get it out to the West Coast… just the small things could be worth a half-million dollars. You could get enough to stay in Europe for ten years, if you were careful. You can take whatever you want.”

“Whatever I want?” Eyebrows up.

“Whatever you want,” Widdler said. “The police will find it sooner or later. I'm not going to get a penny of it, no matter what happens. If you can get there first, take what you want.”

Anderson thought it over: Jane's offer seemed uncharacteristically generous. But then, she was in a serious bind. “So I don't have to do anything else: I just give you a ride.”

“That's all,” Jane said.

“When?”

“Right away. I've started talking to Leslie about it, letting him brood. His tendency, anyway…” She shrugged.

“Is to go crazy,” Anderson finished. “Your husband is a fuckin' lunatic.”

Widdler nodded.

Anderson pressed it: “So when?”

“Tonight. I want to do it tonight.”

Widdler gave her a key to what she said was the storage building. “I'll put a map in the mail this afternoon-Leslie's got one in his car.” When they broke up, Widdler went back down the escalator and walked past the Starbucks, but Jenkins didn't see her. Jenkins had gone. Lucas had pulled him.

Lucas found Sandy hunched in front of her ancient computer, chewing on a fingernail, and she looked up, her hair flyaway, and said, “We had some luck. The Widdlers were written up in a Midwest Home article on antiques, and they have a website with vitae. They both graduated from Carleton the year before Amity Anderson. They had to know each other-Jane Widdler majored in art history, and Amity Anderson in art, and Leslie Widdler had a scholarship in studio art. He did ceramics.”

Lucas dragged a chair over and asked, “On their website, is there anything about clients?”

“No, it's just an ad, really-it's one of the preformatted deals where you just plug stuff in. The last change was dated a month ago.”

“Motor vehicles?”

“Never owned a van,” Sandy said. “Not even when they were in college. But: I looked at their tax records and they both had student loans. And the Home article says they both had scholarships. Leslie- this is funny-Leslie Widdler had an art scholarship, but I get the impression from the website and the Home article that all he did was play football.”

“What's funny about that?” Lucas asked. He'd gone to the University of Minnesota on a hockey scholarship.

“Well, Carleton doesn't have athletic scholarships, see, so they get this giant guy to play football and they give him a scholarship in art…”

“Maybe he was a good artist,” Lucas said, a bit stiff. “Athletes have a wide range of interests.”

She looked at him: “You were a jock, weren't you?”

“So what were you saying?” Lucas asked.

“Did you get a free Camaro?”

“What were you saying?” Lucas repeated.

Unflustered-her self-confidence, Lucas thought, seemed to be growing in leaps and bounds-she turned back to the computer, tapped a few keys, and pulled up a page of notes. “So, about the scholarships. They apparently didn't have a lot of family money.

They get married in their senior year, move to the Twin Cities, start an antique store. Here they are ten years later, starting from nothing, they've got to be millionaires.

They own their store, they have a house on Minnehaha Creek, they drive eighty thousand dollars' worth of cars…”

“That's interesting. But: it could be that they're really smart,” Lucas said.

“And maybe Leslie learned leadership by participating in football,” she suggested.

Lucas leaned back: “Why do women give me shit?”

“Basically, because you're there,” she said.

Sandy had done one more thing. “I made a graph of their income.” She touched a few more keys, and the graph popped up. The income line started flat, then turned up at a forty-five-degree angle, then flattened a bit over the years, but continued up. “Here are the quilts.” She tapped a flat area, just before an upturn. “The upturn in income would come a year later-it would take them a while to flow the money into their sales.” She pointed out two other upturns: “Toms and Donaldson.”

“Bless my soul,” Lucas said. Then, “Can you go back to Des Moines? Right now?”

Jenkins was sitting in Carol's visitor's chair when Lucas got back to his office, moving fast. “Come on in,” Lucas said.

“What's going on?” He followed Lucas into the inner office. Lucas was studying a printout of Sandy's graph.

“I think we finally got our fingernails under something,” Lucas said. “I want you to go to Eau Claire-I'd fly you if it were faster, but I think it would be faster to drive. You're going to talk to some people named Booth and look at some check duplicates and some purchase records for antiques.”

Jenkins said, “Man, you're all cranked up-but you gotta know, if this Gabriella Coombs didn't take off with a boyfriend or something, then she's gone by now.”

Lucas nodded. “I know. Now I just want to get the motherfuckers. You're looking for some people named Widdler…”

Lucas briefed him; Sandy stopped in, halfway through, and said, “I'm on my way. I'll call you tonight.”

“Good. Try to get back here tonight, or early tomorrow. We're gonna have a conference about all of this, get everybody together. Tomorrow morning, I hope.”

She nodded, and was gone.

He finished briefing Jenkins, who asked, “So you're gonna take Bucher?”

“Yeah, and I've got some politics to do with the St. Paul cops and I gotta go see Lucy Coombs. I'll be on my phone all night-until one in the morning, anyway. Call me.”

“I'm outa here.”

The St. Paul Police Department is a brown-brick building that looks like a remodeled brewery, and it's built in a place where a brewery should have been built: across a lot of freeways on the back side of the city.

Lucas parked in the cops' lot, put a sign on the dash, and found John Smith in a cubicle. Another detective sat three cubicles down, playing with a Rubik's Cube so worn that it might have been an original. A third was talking so earnestly on a telephone that it had to be to his wife, and he had to be in trouble. Either that, or she'd just found out that she was pregnant.

Lucas said, “Let's go somewhere quiet.”

Smith sat up. “Widdlers?”

The second detective said, without looking up from the Rubik's Cube, “That's right, talk around me. Like I'm an unperson.”

“You are an unperson,” Smith said. To Lucas: “Come on this way.” Lucas followed him down the hall to the lieutenant's office. Smith stuck his head inside, said, “I thought I heard him leave. Come on in.”

Lucas said, “We're going full steam ahead on the Widdlers. It's not a sure thing by a long way. At the very least, I'll talk to Leslie Widdler and ask him to roll up his pant legs. See if he has any Screw bites.”

“When?”

“Midday tomorrow. I've got people going to Eau Claire and Des Moines right now. I've hooked both Marilyn Coombs and Donaldson to Amity Anderson, and Anderson is a longtime friend of the Widdlers. I think they were involved in a tax fraud together, selling these fake quilts, and I think it went from there. We know the killers involve one very big man, and that they know a lot about antiques, and that they have a way to dispose of them. In other words, the Widdlers.”

“You don't have them directly connected to anybody? I mean, the Widdlers to Donaldson, Bucher, or Toms?”

“Not yet,” Lucas said.

“How about the van?” Smith asked.

“No van.”

“Goddamnit. There's got to be a van,” Smith said.

“I talked to a woman at the Widdlers' who said they rented vans,” Lucas said. “That's being checked.”

“The van in the tape on Summit was too old to be a rental- unless they went to one of the Rent-a-Wreck places.”

“I don't know,” Lucas said. “The van is like a loose bolt in the whole thing.”

“Without a van, without a direct connection… I don't think you have enough to get a warrant to search Leslie.”

Lucas grinned at him: “I was thinking you might want to get the warrant. You probably have more suck with one of the local judges.”

Smith said, “I've got some suck, but I've got to have something.”

“Maybe we will tomorrow morning,” Lucas said. “And if we don't, I can always ask Leslie to roll up his pant leg. If he tells me to go fuck myself, then we'll know.”

Lucas got the key to Bucher's place, went out, sat in his car, stared at his cell phone, then sighed and dialed. Lucy Coombs snatched up the phone and said, “What?”

“This is Lucas Davenport…”

When he got to Coombs's house, she was sitting in the kitchen with a neighbor, eyes all hollow and black, and as soon as she saw Lucas, she started to cry again: “You think she's gone.”

Lucas nodded: “Unless she's with a friend. But she was so intent on getting to the bottom of this, her relationship seemed to be breaking up, this is what she wanted to do. I don't think she would have simply dropped it. I think we have to be ready for… the worst.”

“What do you mean 'we,'“ Coombs sobbed. “This is your fuck-ing job. She's not your daughter.”

“Miz Coombs… Ah, jeez, Gabriella got me going on this,” Lucas said. “She probably was the key person who'll bring all these killers down-and they've killed more people than you know.”

“My mother and my daughter,” Coombs said, her voice drying out and going shrill.

“More than that-maybe three elderly people, they may have attacked a teenager, there may be people who we don't have any idea about,” Lucas said.

“You know who they are?”

“We're beginning to get some ideas.”

“What if they've just kidnapped her? What if they're just keeping her for… for…” She couldn't think of why they might be keeping her. Neither could Lucas.

He said, “That's always a possibility. That's what we hope for. We hope to make some kind of a move tomorrow-and I hope you'll keep that under your hat. Maybe we'll find out something fairly soon. One way or another.”

“Oh, shit,” Coombs said. She looked around the kitchen, then snatched a ceramic plate from where it was hanging on the wall, a plate with two crossed-fish, artsy-craftsy, and hurled it at the side wall, where it shattered.

“Miz Coombs…”

“Where is she… Where's my baby?”

Out ON the street, he exhaled, looked back at Coombs's house, and shook his head.

In her place, he thought, he wouldn't be screaming, or crying-and maybe that was bad. Maybe he should behave that way, but he knew he wouldn't. He could see Weather grieving as Coombs did; he could see most normal people behaving that way.

What Lucas would feel, instead, would be a murderous anger, an iceberg of hate. He would kill anyone who hurt Weather, Sam, or Letty. He'd be cold about it, he'd plan it, but the anger would never go away, and sooner or later, he would find them and kill them.

Bucher's house was dark as a tomb. Lucas let himself in, flipped on lights by the door, and headed for the office. This time, he spent two hours, looking at virtually every piece of paper in the place. Nothing. He moved to the third-floor storage room, with the file cabinets. A small, narrow room, cool; only one light, hanging bare from the ceiling, and no place to sit. Dusty…

He went down the hall, found a chair, and carried it back across the creaking plank floor. As he put the chair down, he thought he heard footsteps, down below, someplace distant, trailing off to silence. The hair rose on the back of his neck. He stepped to the doorway, called, “Hello? Hello?”

Nothing but the air moving through the air conditioners. A light seemed to flicker in the stairway, and he waited, but nothing else moved. The hair was still prickling on the back of his neck, when he went back to the paper.

An amazing amount of junk that people kept: old school papers, newspaper clippings, recipes, warranties and instruction books, notebooks, sketchpads, Christmas, Easter, and birthday cards, postcards from everywhere, old letters, theater programs, maps, remodeling contracts, property-tax notices. An ocean of it.

A current of cold air touched the back of his neck and he shivered; as though somebody had passed in the hallway. He stepped to the door again, looked down the silent hall.

Ghosts. The thought trickled through his mind and he didn't laugh. He didn't believe in them, but he didn't laugh, either, and had never been attracted to the idea of screwing around in a cemetery at night. Two people killed here, their killers not found, blood still drying in the old woodwork… the silence seemed to grow from the hallway walls; except for the soft flowing sound of the air conditioner.

He went back to the paper, feeling his skin crawl. There was nobody else in the house: he knew it, and still…

The phone buzzed, and almost gave him his second heart attack of the day.

He took it out of his pocket, looked at it: out-of-area. He said, “Hello?”

There was a pause and then a vaguely metallic man's voice said, “Hi! This is Tom Drake! We'll be doing some work in your neighborhood next week, sealing driveways. As a homeowner…”

“Fuck you,” Lucas said, slamming the phone shut. Almost killed by a computer voice.

He found a file, two inches thick, of receipts for furniture purchases. Began to go through it, but all the furniture had been bought through decorators, none of them the Widdlers. Still, he was in the right neighborhood, the furniture neighborhood.

The phone took a third shot at his heart: it buzzed again, he jumped again, swore, looked at the screen: out-of-area. He clicked it open: “Hello?”

“Lucas? Ah, Agent Davenport? This is…”

“Sandy. What's up?” Lucas thought he heard something in the hallway, and peeked out.

Nobody but the spirits. He turned back into the room.

Sandy said, “I got your Widdlers. The Toms cousin had a file of purchases, and Mr.

Toms, the dead man, bought three paintings from them, over about five years. He spent a total of sixteen thousand dollars. There's also a check for five thousand dollars that just says “Appraisals,' but doesn't say what was appraised.”

The thrill shook through him. Gotcha. “Okay! Sandy! This is great! That's exactly what we need-we don't have to figure out what the appraisals were, all we have to do is show contact. Now, the originals on those papers, can you get them copied?”

“Yes. They have a Xerox machine right here,” she said.

“Copy them,” Lucas said. “Leave the originals with your guy there, tell him that the local cops will come get them tomorrow, or maybe somebody from the DO.”

“The who?”

“The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation,” Lucas said. “I got a friend down there, he can tell us how to deal with the documents. But bring the copies back with you.

When can you get here?”

“Tonight. I can leave in twenty minutes,” she said. “I'd like to get a sandwich or something.”

“Do what you've got to,” Lucas said. “Call me when you get back.”

He slapped the phone shut. This was just exactly…

A man spoke from six inches behind his ear. “So what's up?”

Lucas lurched across the narrow room, nearly falling over the chair, catching himself on the file cabinet with one hand, the other flailing for his gun, his heart trying to bore through his rib cage.

John Smith, smile fading, stood in the doorway, looked at Lucas's face, and asked, “What?”

“Jesus Christ, I almost shot you,” Lucas rasped.

“Sorry… I heard you talking and came on up,” Smith said. “I thought you might appreciate some help.”

“Yeah.” Lucas ran his hands through his hair, shook himself out. His heart was still rattling off his ribs. “It's just so damn quiet in here.”

Smith nodded, and looked both ways down the hall: “I spent a couple of evenings by myself. You can hear the ghosts creeping around.”

“Glad I'm not the only one,” Lucas said. He turned back to the file cabinets. “I've done two of them, I'm halfway down the third.”

“I'll take the bottom drawer and work up,” Smith said. He went down the hall, got another chair, pulled open the bottom drawer. “You been here the whole time?”

Lucas glanced at his watch. “Three hours. Did the office, started up here. Went over and talked to Miz Coombs, before I came over. She's all messed up. Oh, and by the way-we put the Widdlers with Toms.”

Smith, just settling in his chair, looked up, a light on his face, and said, “You're kidding.”

“Nope.”

Smith scratched under an arm. “This might not look good-you know, calling in the killers to appraise the estate. If they're the killers.”

“I'm not gonna worry about it,” Lucas said. “For one thing, there was no way to know.

For another…” He paused.

Smith said, “For another?”

“Well, for another, I didn't do it.” Lucas smiled. “You did.”

“Fuck you,” Smith said. He dipped into the bottom file drawer and pulled out a file, looked at the flap. “Here's a file that says Antiques.'“ “Bullshit,” Lucas said.

“Man, I'm not kidding you…”

Lucas took the file and looked at the flap: “Antiques.”

Inside, a stack of receipts. There weren't many of them, not nearly as many as there were in the furniture file. But one of them, a pink carbon copy, said at the top, “Widdler Antiques and Objets d”Art.”

He handed it over to Smith who looked at it, then looked at Lucas, looked at the pink sheet again, and said, “Kiss my rosy red rectum.”

“We got them with Toms and Bucher, and we know that their good friend actually worked with Donaldson, and they pulled off a fraud. That's enough for a warrant,” Smith said.

“At the minimum, we get Leslie to lift up his pant legs,” Lucas said. “If he's got bite holes, we take a DNA and compare it to the blood on Screw. At that point, we've got him for attempted kidnapping…”

“And cruelty to animals.”

“I'm not sure Screw actually qualified as an animal. He was more of a beast.”

“Can't throw a dog out a car window. Might be able to get away with an old lady, but not a dog,” Smith said. “Not in the city of St. Paul.”

Lucas was a half block from his house when Jenkins called from Wisconsin. He fumbled the phone, caught it, said, “Yeah?”

“Got 'em,” Jenkins said.

The whole story was so complicated that Jane Widdler almost couldn't contain it.

She wrote down the major points, sitting at her desk while Leslie was upstairs in the shower, singing an ancient Jimmy Buffett song, vaguely audible through the walls.

Jane wrote:* No way out* Arrested* Disgraced* Attorneys* Prison forever Then she drew a line, and below it wrote:* Arrested* Disgraced* Attorneys* Time in prison? Then she drew a second line and wrote:* Save the money The last item held her attention most of the afternoon, but she was working through the other items in the back of her head.

Davenport, she thought, was probably unstoppable. It was possible that he wouldn't get to them, but unlikely. She'd seen him operating.

She nibbled on her bottom lip, looked at the list, then sighed and fed it into the shredder.

If he did get to them, could Davenport convict? Not if Leslie hadn't been bitten by the dog. But with the dog bites, Leslie was cooked. If she hadn't taken some kind of preemptive action before then, she'd be cooked with him.

From watching her stepfather work as a cop, and listening to him talk about court cases, she felt the most likely way to save herself was to give the cops another suspect. Build reasonable doubt into the case. As much reasonable doubt as possible.

As for the money…

They had a safe-deposit box in St. Paul where they had more than $160,000 in hundreds, fifties, and twenties. The cash came from stolen antiques, from four dead old women and one dead old man, each in a different state. The Widdlers had worked the cash slowly back through the store, upgrading their stock, an invisible laundry that the mafia would have appreciated.

With Leslie looking at a china collection in Minnetonka, Jane, after talking to Anderson, had gone alone to the bank, retrieved the money, and wrapped it in Ziploc bags. Where to put it? She'd eventually taken it home and buried it in a flower garden, carefully scraping the bark mulch back over it.

Amity Anderson, Jane knew, was on the edge of cracking. One big fear: that Anderson would crack first, and go to the cops hoping to make a deal. Anderson knew herself well enough to know that she couldn't tolerate prison. She was too fragile for that.

Too much of a free spirit. All she wanted was to go to Italy; look at Cellini and Caravaggio. Amity believed that if she could only get to Italy, somehow, the problems would be left behind.

Magical thinking. Jane Widdler had no such illusions. The victims had been too rich, the money too big, the publicity too great. The cops would be all over them once they had a taste; and Davenport had gotten a taste.

Still, Jane could pull it off, if she had time.

Leslie called, said he was on the way home. Jane hurried over to the shop, opened the safe in the back, and took out the coin collection and a simple.38-caliber pistol.

The coin collection came from the Toms foray, fifty-eight rare gold coins from the nineteenth century, all carefully sealed in plastic grading containers, all MS6through MS69-so choice, in fact, that they'd been a little worried about moving the coins. They still had all but two, but if necessary, she could take them to Mexico and move them there.

The coins went deep in a line of lilacs, behind and to one side of the house, halfway to the creek. She dug them six inches down, covered them with sod, dusted her hands.

If she didn't make it back… what a waste.

The pistol went into her purse. She'd never learned not to jerk the trigger, but that wouldn't matter if you were shooting at a range of half an inch.

She wondered where the jail was. Would it be Hennepin County, or Ramsey? Somehow, she thought it might be Ramsey, since that's where the murders occurred. And Ramsey, she thought, might be preferable, with a better class of felon. Surely they had separate cells, you were presumed innocent until proven guilty. And if Leslie had passed away, the house would be hers to use as a bond for bail…

She went inside. Leslie was perched on the couch in the den, wearing yellow walking shorts and a loose striped shirt from a San Francisco clothier, pale blue stripes on a champagne background that went well with the shorts and the Zelli crocodile slippers, $695. He said, “Hi. I heard you come in… Where'd you go?”

“I thought I saw the fox out back. I walked around to see. But he was gone.”

“Yeah? I'd like a fox tail for the car.”

“We've got to talk,” Jane said. “Something awful happened today.”

When she told him about Davenport visiting the shop, about his question about a white van, Leslie touched one fat finger to his fat nose and said, “He's got to go.”

“There's no time,” Jane said, pouring the anxiety into her voice. “If he was asking about the van this afternoon, he'll be looking at all the files tomorrow. Once that gets into the system…”

Leslie was digging in a pocket. He came up with a pack of breath mints and popped two. “Listen,” he said, clicking the mints off his lower teeth, “we do it tonight.

Just have to figure out how.”

“I looked him up,” Jane volunteered. “He lives on Mississippi River Boulevard in St. Paul. I drove by; a very nice house for a cop. He must be on the take.”

“Maybe that's a possibility,” Leslie suggested. “If he's crooked…”

“No. Too late, too late… The thing is, have you seen him with that gun? And he's going to be wary, I'd be afraid to approach him.”

“So what do you think?” Leslie let her do most of the thinking.

“If you think we should do it, I suggest that rifle. God knows it's powerful enough.

You shoot from the backseat, I drive. We'll ambush him right outside his house. If the opportunity doesn't present itself, we go back tomorrow morning.”

“If we see him in a window-a.300 Mag won't even notice a piece of window glass,” Leslie said.

“Whatever.”

“If we're going to do it, we've got things to do,” Leslie said cheerfully. The thought of killing always warmed him up. “I'm gonna take a shower, clean up the gun. Take my car, I'll sit in the back. We'll need earplugs, but I've got some. What's the layout?”

“We can't park on River Boulevard, it's all no-parking. But there's a spot on the side street, under a big elm tree. It looks sideways at his garage and front door.

If he goes anywhere…”

“Too bad it's summer,” Leslie said. “We'll be shooting in daylight.”

“We can't go too early,” Jane said. “It has to be dark enough that people can't read out faces.”

“Not before nine-fifteen, then,” Leslie said. “I've played golf at nine, but sometime around nine-fifteen or nine-thirty, you can't see the golf ball anymore.”

“Get there at nine-thirty and hope for the best,” Jane said. “Maybe there'd be some way to lure him out?”

“Like what?”

“Let me think about it.”

He went up to take a shower, and she thought about it: how to get Davenport outside, with enough certainty that Leslie would buy the idea. Then she sat down and made her list, looked at the list, dropped it in the shredder, and thought about it some more.

Leslie was working on “Cheeseburger in Paradise” when she stepped into his office and brought up the computer. She typed two notes, one a fragment, the other one longer, taken from models on the Internet. When she was done, she put them in the Documents file, signed off, pushed the chair back in place, walked up the stairs, and called through the bathroom door, “I've got to run out: I'll be back in twenty minutes.”

The water stopped. “Where're you going?”

“Down to Wal-Mart,” she said through the door. “We need a couple of baseballs.”

When she got back home, Leslie was in the living room, sliding the rifle, already loaded, into an olive-drab gun case. He was dressed in a black golf shirt and black slacks.

“God, I hate to throw this thing away,” he said. “We'll have to, but it's really a nice piece of machinery.”

“But we have to,” Jane said. She had a plastic bag in her hand, and took out two boxes with baseballs inside.

“Baseballs?”

“You think, being the big jock, that you could hit a house a hundred feet away with a baseball?”

“Hit a house?” Leslie was puzzled.

“Suppose you're a big-shot cop sitting in your house, and you hear a really loud thump on your front roof, or front side of the house at nine-thirty at night,” Jane said. “Do you send your wife out to take a look?”

Leslie smiled at her. “I can hit a house. And you get smarter all the time.”

“We're both smart,” Jane said. “Let's just see if we can stay ahead of Davenport.”

“Wish we'd done this first, instead of that harebrained dog thing,” Leslie said.

“You oughta see the holes in my legs.”

“Maybe later.” Jane looked at her watch. “I have to change, and we have to leave soon. Oh God, Leslie, is this the end of it?” That, she thought, was what Jane Austen would have asked.

She turned to look back at the house when they left. She'd get back tonight, she thought, but then, if the police arrested her, she might not see it for a while.

A tear trickled down one cheek, then the other. She wiped them away and Leslie growled, “Don't pussy out on me.”

“You know how I hate that word,” she said. She wiped her face again. “I'm so scared.

We should never have done Bucher. Never have killed at home.”

“We'll be okay,” Leslie said. He reached over and patted her thigh. “We've just got to kill our way out of it.”

“I know,” she said. “It scares me so bad…”

They GOT to Davenport's at nine-fifteen and cruised the neighborhood. Still too light.

They went out to a bagel place off Ford Parkway and got a couple of bagels with cream cheese for Leslie. Nine-thirty. There were more people around than they'd expected, riding out the last light of day on the River Boulevard bike trail, and walking dogs on the sidewalk. But the yards were big, and they could park well down the darker side street and still see Davenport's house, one down beyond the corner house.

There were lights all over Davenport's house; the family was in.

“I could probably kill him with the baseball from here,” Leslie said, when they rolled into the spot Jane had picked. He had gotten in the backseat at the bagel shop. Now he slipped the rifle out of the case, and sitting with his back to the driver's side of the car, pointed the rifle through the raised back window at Davenport's front porch.

“No problem,” he said, looking through the scope. Jane put the yellow plastic ear protectors in her ears. Leslie fiddled with the rifle for a moment, then snapped it back to his shoulder. “No problem.

A hundred and fifty feet, if these are hundred-foot lots, less if they're ninety feet…” His voice was muffled, but still audible.

“God. I'm so scared, Les,” she said, slipping the revolver out of her purse. Checked the streets: nobody in sight. “I'm not sure I can do it.”

“Hey,” Leslie said. “Don't pussy out.”

She lifted the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. There was a one-inch spit of flame, not as bright as a flash camera, and a tremendous crack.

She recoiled from it, dropped the gun, hands to her ears, eyes wide. She looked out through the back window. The gunshot had sounded like the end of the world, but the world, a hundred feet away, seemed to go on. A car passed, and ten seconds later, a man on a bicycle with a leashed Labrador running beside him.

Leslie was lying back on the seat, and in the dim light, looked terrifically dead.

“Damn gun,” Jane muttered into the stench of gunpowder and blood. She had to kneel on the seat and reach over the back to get the revolver off the floor. She wiped it with a paper towel, then pressed it into one of Leslie's limp hands, rolling it, making sure of at least one print.

Leslie kept his cell phone plugged into the car's cigarette lighter. She picked it up, called Amity Anderson. When Anderson picked up, she said, “Can you come now?”

“Right now?” The anxiety was heavy in Anderson's voice.

“That would be good.”

“Did you…”

“This is a radio,” Widdler said. “Don't talk, just come.”

She checked for watchers, then let herself out of the car. Shut the door, locked it with the second remote. That was a nice piece of work, she thought. Locked from the inside, with the keys still in Leslie's pocket. These keys, the second set, would go back in the front key drawer, to be found by the investigators.

She walked away into the dark. She was sure she hadn't thought of everything, but she was confident that she'd thought of enough. All she wanted was a simple “Not guilty.” Was that too much to ask? Amity found her on the corner.

Jane wasn't all that cranked: Leslie had been on his way out. His actual passing was more a matter of when than if.

And though she was calm enough, she had to seem cranked. She had to be frantic, flustered, and freaked. As she came up to the corner she brushed her hair forward, messing it up; her hair was never messed up. She slapped herself on the face a couple of times.

She muttered to herself, bit her lip until tears came to her eyes. Slapped herself again.

Amity found her freshly slapped and teary eyed, on the corner, properly disheveled for a recent murderess.

Jane got in the car: “Thank God,” she moaned.

“You did it.”

“We have to go to your house,” Jane said. “For one minute. I'm so scared. I'm going to wet my pants. I just… God, I can't hold it in.”

“Hold it, hold it, we'll be there in two minutes,” Amity said. Down Cretin, left on Ford, up the street past the shopping centers, up the hill, into the driveway.

In thr bathroom, Jane pulled down her pants, listened, then stood up and opened the medicine cabinet. Two prescription bottles. She took the one in the back. Sat down, peed, waddled to the sink with her pants down around her ankles, looked in, then turned around and carefully and silently pried open the shower door. Hair near the drain. She got a piece of toilet paper, and cleaned up some hair, put it in her pocket.

Almost panting now. The cops might be on their way at any moment: a passerby happens to glance into the car, sees a shoe… and she had a lot to get done. She sat back on the toilet, flushed, stood up, pulled up her pants. Lot to get done.

Amity was shaky. “When do you think, ah, what…?” “Let's go,” Jane said. “Now, we're in a hurry.”

In the car, headed west across the bridge, Jane said, “I mailed you the map. You should get it tomorrow. Don't wait too long before you go. Leslie owned the land through a trust, and they'll find it pretty quick. Make sure you're not being followed.

Davenport's talked to you, if he knows anything else, if he's investigating the quilts… then you might be followed.”

Amity looked in the rearview mirror. “How do you know we're not being followed now?”

Jane made a smile. “We can't be,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because if we are, we're finished.”

Amity looked at her, white-faced. “That's it? We can't be because we can't be?”

“Actually they'd be much more likely to be following Leslie and me,” Jane said. “If they were, they probably would have picked me up back at Davenport's house, don't you think?”

Amity nodded. That made sense. “Maybe I should drop you off around the block from your place. Just in case.”

“You could do that,” Jane said. “Just to be perfectly clear about this, you're now an accomplice in whatever it is that happened to Leslie. I happen to think it was a suicide, and you should think that, too. Because if you ever even hint that I know something about it, well, then, you're in it, too.”

“All I want to do is go to Italy,” Amity said.

Amity dropped her off around the block, and Jane strolled home in the soft night light, listening to the insects, to the frogs, to the rustlings in the hedges: cats on their nightly missions, a possum here, a fox there, all unseen.

Nobody waiting. And she thought, No Les, no more.

She made a smile-look, reflecting at her own courage, her own ability to operate under pressure. It was like being a spy, almost…

With one more mission that night. She backed the car out of the garage, took the narrow streets out to I-494, watching the mirror, took 494 to I-35, and headed south.

The country place wasn't that far out, down past the Northfield turnoff to County 1, and east with a few jogs to the south, into the Cannon River Valley.

The country place comprised forty acres of senile maple and box elder along the west or north bank of the Cannon, depending on how you looked at it, with a dirt track leading back to it. Her lights bored a hole through the cornfields on either side of the track, the wheels dropping into washouts and pots, until she punched through to the shack.

When they first bought it, they talked of putting up a little cabin that didn't smell like mold-the shack smelled like it had been built from mold-with a porch that looked out over the river, and Leslie could fish for catfish and Jane could quilt.

In the end, they put up a metal building with good locks, and let the shack slide into ruin. The cabin was never built because, in fact, Leslie was never much interested in catfish, and Jane never got the quilt-making thing going. There was too much to do in the Cities, too much to see, too much to buy. Couldn't even get the Internet at the shack. It was like a hillbilly patch, or something.

But a good place to stash stolen antiques.

She let herself into the shed, fumbling in her headlights with the key. Inside, she turned on the interior lights and then went back and turned off the car lights. She took the amber prescription bottle from her pocket, and rolled it under the front seat of the van.

From her purse, she got a lint roller, peeled it to get fresh tape, and rolled it over the driver's seat. They were always fastidious about the van, wearing hairnets and gloves and jumpsuits, in case they had to ditch it. There shouldn't be a problem, but she was playing with her life.

She rolled it, and then rolled it again, and a third time.

Then she took the wad of hair from her pocket.

Looked at it, and thought, soap. Nibbled at her lip, sighed, thought, do it right, and walked over to the shack and went inside. They kept the pump turned off, so she had to wait for it to cycle and prime, and then to pump out some crappy, shitty water, waiting until it cleared. When it was, she rinsed the wad of hair-nasty-and then patted it dry on a paper towel.

When it was dry, she pulled out a few strands, pinched them in the paper towel, and carried them back to the van. Two here, curled over the back of the seat, not too obvious, and another one here, on the back edge of the seat. She took the rest of the hair and wiped it roughly across the back of the seat, hoping to get some breaks and split ends…

Good as she could do, she thought. That was all she had.

Jane Widdler was home in bed at two a.m. There were no calls on her phone, and the neighborhood was dark when she pulled into the garage. Upstairs, she lit some scented candles and sank into the bathtub, letting the heat carry away her worries.

Didn't work.

She lay awake in the night like a frightened bat, waiting for the day to come, for the police, for disgrace, for humiliation, for lawyers.

Lucas, on the other hand, slept like a log until five-thirty, when his cop sense woke him up. The cop sense had been pricked by a flashing red light on the curtains at the side of the house, the pulsing red light sneaking in under the bottom of the blackout shades.

He cracked his eyes, thought, the cops. What the hell was it? Then he heard a siren, and another one.

He slipped out of bed-Weather had no cop sense, and would sleep soundly until six, unless Sam cried out-and walked to the window, pulled back one side of the shade.

Two cop cars, just up the street, then a third arriving, all gathered around a dark sedan.

What the hell? It looked and smelled like a crime scene.

He got into his jeans and golf shirt, and slipped sockless feet into loafers, and let himself out the front door. As he came across the lawn, his ankles wet with dew, one of the St. Paul cops recognized him. “Where're you coming from?” the cop asked.

“I live right there,” Lucas said. “What've you got?”

“Guy ate his gun,” the cop said. “But he was up to something… You live right there?”

But Lucas was looking in the back window of what he now knew was a Lexus, a Lexus with a bullet hole in the roof above the back window, and at the dead fat face of Leslie Widdler.

“Ah, no,” he said. “Ah, Jesus…”

“What? You know him?” the cop asked.

Rose Marie Roux came steaming through the front door, high heels, nylons, political-red skirt and jacket, white blouse, big hair. She spotted Lucas and demanded, “Are you all right?”

Lucas was chewing on an apple. He swallowed and said, “I'm fine. My case blew up, but I'm fuckin' wonderful.”

“What's this about a guy with a rifle?” Rose Marie said. “They said a guy with a rifle was waiting for you.”

“Must have changed his mind,” Lucas said. “Come on. Everything's still there. You saw the cops when you came in?”

“Of course. A convention. So tell me about it.”

A guy was out running shortly after first light, Lucas told her. He was a marathoner, running out of his home, weaving down the Minneapolis side of the Mississippi, across the Ford Bridge into St. Paul, weaving some more-he tried to get exactly six miles in-north to the Lake Street Bridge and back across the river to Minneapolis.

One of his zigs took him around the corner from Lucas's house. As he approached the Lexus, in the early-morning light, he noticed a splash on the back window that looked curiously like blood in a thriller movie. As he passed the car, he glanced into the backseat and saw the white face and open mouth of a dead fat man, with a rifle lying across his belly.

“Freaked me out when I looked in there,” Lucas admitted. “Last thing in the world that I expected. Leslie Widdler.”

“Better him than you,” Rose Marie said. “What kind of rifle? If he'd taken a shot at you?”

“A.300 Mag,” Lucas said. “Good for elk, caribou, moose. If he'd shot me with that thing, my ass'd have to take the train back from Ohio.”

“Nice that you can joke about it,” Rose Marie said.

“I'm not laughing,” Lucas said. They walked up to a cop who was keeping a sharp eye on the yellow crime-scene tape. Lucas pointed at Rose Marie and said, “Rose Marie Roux. Department of Public Safety.”

The cop lifted the tape, and asked her, “Can I have a job?”

She patted him once on the cheek. “I'm sure you're too nice a boy to work for me.”

“Hey, I'm not,” the cop said to her back. “I'm a jerk. Really.” To Lucas, as Lucas ducked under the tape, “Seriously. I'm an asshole.”

“I'll tell her,” Lucas said.

Rose Marie had briefly been a street cop before she moved into administration, law school, politics, and power. She walked carefully down the route suggested by one of the crime-scene cops, cocked an eye in the window, looked at Widdler, backed away, and said, “That made a mark.”

“Yeah.”

“He killed Bucher? For sure?” she asked.

“He and his wife, I think. I don't know what all of this is about- except… You've been briefed on the Jesse Barth kidnapping attempt, and the firebombing.”

She nodded: “Screw the pooch.”

“The Screw thing and bomb, might have been an… effort, attempt, something… to distract me,” Lucas said. “To get me looking at something else, while the Bucher thing went away. Might have worked, too, except for the white van, and then Gabriella.”

He scratched his head. “Man, is this a mess, or what?”

“Then he decided on direct action, shooting you with a moose gun, but chickened out and shot himself instead?” She was dubious.

“That's what I got,” Lucas said. “Doesn't make me happy.”

“What about the wife?”

“As soon as the crime-scene guys get finished with the basics, we're going to lift up Leslie's pant legs,” Lucas said. “See if he's got Screw holes. If he does, we go have an unpleasant talk with Jane.”

“If he doesn't?”

“We'll still have an unpleasant conversation with Jane. Then everybody'll talk to lawyers and we go back into the weeds to figure out what to do next,” Lucas said.

“How much of this would have happened if Burt Kline hadn't been banging a teenager?”

Lucas had to think about it, finally sighed: “Maybe… there'd be one or two more people alive, but we wouldn't solve the Bucher case.”

They were standing, talking, when John Smith showed up, looking sleepy, said, “Really?”-looked into the car, said, “Holy shit.”

“You want to come along and talk to Jane?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah,” Smith said. “This whole thing is…” He waved a hand in the air; couldn't think of a phrase for it.

“Screwed up?” Rose Marie offered.

Eventually four guys from the Medical Examiner's Office carefully lifted, pulled, and rolled Leslie Widdler's body out of the Lexus and onto a ground-level gurney.

“Guy shoulda worn a wide-load sign,” one of them said. When they got him flat, one of the ME investigators asked Lucas, “Which leg?”

“Both,” Lucas said.

They only needed the first one. Widdler's left leg was riddled with what looked like small-caliber gunshot wounds, surrounded by half-dollar-sized bruises going yellow at the edges. There were a few oohs and aahs from the crowd. Though they didn't really need it, they pulled up the other pant leg and found more bites.

“Good enough for me,” Smith said. “DNA will confirm it, but that, my friends, is what happens when you fuck with a pit bull.”

“Half pit bull,” Lucas said.

“What was the other half?” Rose Marie asked.

“Nobody knows,” Lucas said. “Probably a rat terrier.”

On the way to Widdler's, Lucas and Smith talked about an arrest. They believed that Leslie had been bitten by a dog, but had no proof that Screw had done the biting.

That was yet to come, with the DNA tests. But DNA tests take a while. They knew there had been a second person involved, a driver. They knew that Jane Widdler had probably profited from at least three killings, in the looting of the Donaldson, Bucher, and Toms mansions, but they didn't have a single piece of evidence that would prove it.

“We push her,” Smith said. “We read her rights to her, we push, see if she says anything.

We make the call.”

“We take her over to look at Leslie, put some stress on her,” Lucas said. “I've got a warrant coming, both for her house and the shop.

I'll have my guys sit on both places… look for physical evidence, records. We'll let her know that, maybe crack her on the way to see Leslie.”

“If she doesn't crack?”

“We do the research. We'll get her sooner or later,” Lucas said. “There's no way Leslie Widdler pulled these killings off on his own. No way.”

The thing about Botox, Lucas thought later, was that when you'd had too much, as Jane Widdler had, you then had to fake reactions just to look human-and it's impossible to distinguish real fake reactions from fake fake reactions.

Widdler was at her shop, working the telephone, her back to the door, when Lucas and Smith trailed in, the bell tinkling overhead. Widdler was alone, and turned, saw them, sat up, made a fake look of puzzlement, and said into the phone, “I've got to go. I've got visitors.”

She hung up, then stood, tense, vibrating, gripped the back of the chair, and said, “What?”

“You seem… Do you know?” Lucas asked, tilting his head.

“Where's my husband?” The question wasn't tentative; it came out as a demand.

Lucas looked at Smith, who said, “Well, Mrs. Widdler, there's been a tragedy…”

A series of tiny muscular twitches crossed her face: “Oh, God,” she said. “I knew it. Where is he? What happened to him?”

Lucas said, “Mrs. Widdler, he apparently took his own life.”

“Oh, no!” she shouted. Again, Lucas couldn't tell if it was real or faked. It looked fake… but then, it would. “He wouldn't do that, would he?” she cried. “Leslie wouldn't… Did he jump? Did he jump?”

“I'm afraid he shot himself,” Smith said.

“Oh, no. No. That's not Leslie,” Widdler said. She half turned and dropped into the chair, and made a weeping look, and might have produced a tear. “Leslie would never… his face wasn't… was he hurt?”

Lucas thought, If she's faking it, she's good. Her questions were crazy in pretty much the right way.

“I'm afraid you'll have to come with us, to make a technical identification of the body, but there's really no doubt,” Smith said. “Both Lucas and I know him, of course… Where did you think he was last night? Was he here? Did he go out early?”

Widdler looked away, her voice hesitant, breaking. “He… never came home.”

“Had he ever done that before?”

“Only… yes. I don't think… well, he wouldn't have done it again, under the same circumstances…” Her face was turned up at them, eyes wide, asking for an explanation. “But why? Why would he hurt himself? He had everything to live for…”

She made the weeping face again, and Lucas thought, Jeez.

Smith said, “There are some other problems associated with his death, Mrs. Widdler.

Some illegal activity has turned up, and we think you know about it. We have to inform you that you have the right to remain silent, that anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney…”

“Oh, God!” She was horrified by the ritual words. “You can't think I did anything?”

They were in Lucas's truck, but Smith drove. Lucas sat in the back with Widdler.

Lucas asked, “How well did you know Claire Donaldson?”

“Donaldson? From Chippewa Falls?”

“Yes.”

Widdler made a frownie look: “Well, I knew of her, but I never met her personally.

We bought some antiques from her estate sale, of course, it was a big event for this area. Why?”

“Your husband murdered her,” Lucas said.

“You shut up,” Jane Widdler shouted. “You shut up. Leslie wouldn't hurt anybody…”

“And Mrs. Bucher and a man named Toms in Des Moines. Did you know Mrs. Bucher or Mr. Toms?”

She had covered her head with her arms; hadn't simply buried her face in her hands, but had wrapped her arms around her skull, her face slumped almost into her lap, and she said, “I'm not listening. I'm not listening.”

She snuffled and wept and groaned and wept some more and dug in her purse for the crumpled Kleenex that all women are apparently required to carry, and rubbed her nostrils raw with it, and Lucas stuck her again.

“Do you know a woman named Amity Anderson?”

The snuffling stopped, and Widdler uncoiled, her eyes rimmed with red, her voice thick with mucus, and she asked, “What does that bitch have to do with this?”

“You know her?” Getting somewhere.

She looked down in her purse, took out the crumpled Kleenex, wiped her nose again, looked out the window at the houses along Randolph Street, and said, “I know her.”

“How long?” Looking for a lie.

“Since college,” Widdler said. “She… knew Leslie before I did.”

“Knew him? Had a relationship with him?” Smith asked, eyes in the rearview mirror.

Snuffle: “Yes.”

Lucas asked, “Did, uh… were there ever any indications that a relationship continued?”

She leaned her head against the side window, staring at the back of Smith's head; the morning light through the glass was harsh on her face, making her look older and paler and tougher and German, like a fifteenth-century portrait by Hans Memling or a twentieth-century farm woman by Grant Wood. “Yes.”

“When you say yes…?”

“When he stayed out all night… that's where he was,” she said.

“With Amity Anderson,” Lucas said.

“Yes. She had some kind of hold on him. Some kind of emotional hold on him. Goddamn her.” Turning to Lucas, teeth bared: “Why are you asking about her? How is she involved in this?”

Lucas looked back at her, and saw a puzzle of Botox tics and hair spray, expensive jewelry and ruined makeup. “I don't know,” he said.

When Leslie Widdler was in the car, he looked somewhat dead. There might have been other possibilities, that he was drunk or drugged, sprawled uncomfortably in the backseat of the car, at least until you saw the hole in his temple.

At the ME's, they had peeled him out of the body bag and placed him on a steel table, ready to do a rush autopsy. There, under the harsh white lights, he looked totally dead, pale as a slab of Crisco. His expensive black alligator driving shoes pointed almost sideways, his tongue was visible at the side of his mouth, his eyes were still open. He looked surprised, in a dead way.

Jane blinked and walked away. “Yes,” she said as she went, and outside the examining room, she crumbled into a chair.

Lucas said, “We'll ask you to wait here. Detective Smith and I have to discuss the situation.”

They walked just far enough down the hall to be out of earshot, and Lucas asked, “What do you think?”

“I don't think we've got an arrest,” Smith said. “What about the warrants?”

“We got crime scene both at her house and the business. If you want to send along a couple guys…”

“I'll do that,” Smith said. He looked down the hall at Jane Widdler. “Cut her loose?”

Lucas looked at her, turned back to Smith, and nodded, but reluctantly. “I agree that we don't have an arrest. Yet. We tell her to get a lawyer, and we talk to the lawyer: keep her in town, don't start moving money, or she goes inside. We can always find something… possession of stolen property.”

“If we find any.”

Lucas grinned. “Okay. Suspected possession of stolen property. Or how about, conspiracy to commit murder? We can always apologize later.”

“Tell that to her attorney.”

They walked back down the hall, Widdler watching nervously, twisting her Kleenex.

Lucas said, “Mrs. Widdler. You need to get an attorney, somebody we can talk to.

We believe that you may be involved in the illegal activities surrounding Leslie's death…”

“You're going to arrest me?” She looked frightened; fake-frightened, but who could tell? “We're searching your home and your business right now,” Lucas said. “We're not going to arrest you at the moment, but that could change as we work through the day. You need to be represented. You can get your own attorney, or we can get one for you…”

“I'll get my own…”

Lucas was looking in her eyes when he told her that she wouldn't be arrested; she blinked once, and something cleared from her gaze, almost like a nictitating membrane on a lizard. “You can call from here, we can get you privacy if you want it,” Lucas said, “or you can wait until you get home.”

“I don't care about privacy,” she said. “I do want to make some calls, get an attorney.”

Her chin trembled, and she made a dismayed look. “This is all so incomprehensibly dreadful.”

They offered to drive her home, since they were going there anyway. This time, she sat in the backseat by herself, calling on her cell phone. She talked first to her personal attorney, took down a number, and called that: “Joe Wyzinsky, please? Jane Widdler: Mr. Wyzinsky was recommended by my personal attorney, Laymon Haycraft. I'm with police officers right now. They are threatening to arrest me. Charges? I don't know exactly. Thank you.”

When Wyzinsky's name came up, Lucas and Smith looked at each other and simultaneously grimaced.

Widdler, in the backseat, said, “Mr. Wyzinsky? Jane Widdler, of Widdler Antiques and Objets d”Art. My husband was shot to death this morning, apparently suicide.

The police say that he was involved in murder and theft, and I believe they are talking about the Bucher case. They suspect me of being involved, but I'm not.”

She listened for a moment, then said, “Yes, yes, of course, I'm very capable…

With two police officers, they're driving me home. They say my home and business are being searched. No, I'm not under arrest, but they say they might arrest me later this afternoon, depending on the search.”

She sounded, Lucas thought, like she was making a deal on an overpriced antique tea table. Too cool.

“… Yes. Lucas Davenport, who is an agent of the state, and John Smith, who is on the St. Paul police force. What? Yes. Hang on.” She handed the phone to Lucas. “He wants to talk to you.”

Lucas took the phone and said, “What's happening, big guy?”

Wyzinsky asked, “You Miranda her?”

“Absolutely. John Smith did it, I witnessed. Then we insisted that she get representation, so there'd be no problem. Glad she got a pro.” Lucas wiggled his eyebrows at Smith.

“You're taking her to her house?” Wyzinsky asked.

“Yup.”

“She says you might arrest her. For what?”

“Murder, kidnapping, conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, arson, theft, possession and sale of stolen goods,” Lucas said.

“Cruelty to animals,” Smith added.

“And cruelty to animals,” Lucas said. “We believe she took part in the killing of a dog named Screw, after which Screw's body was thrown out on the streets of St.

Paul. Make that, cruelty to animals and littering.”

“Anything else?”

“Probably a few federal charges,” Lucas said. “We believe she may have been involved in murders in Chippewa Falls and Des Moines, as well as here in St. Paul, so that would be interstate flight, transportation of stolen goods, some firearms charges, et cetera.”

“Huh. Sounds like you don't have much of a case, all that bullshit and no arrest,” Wyzinsky said.

“We're nailing down the finer points,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, I got a nail for you right here,” Wyzinsky said. “How's Weather?”

“She's fine.”

“You guys going to Midsummer Ball?”

“If Weather makes me,” Lucas said. “I do look great in a tux.”

“So do I,” Wyzinsky said. “We ought to stand next to each other, and radiate on the women.”

“I could do that,” Lucas said.

“So-let me talk to her again,” Wyzinsky said. “Is it Widdler? And, Lucas-don't ask her any more questions, okay?”

Widdler took the phone, listened, said, “See you there, then.” She rang off and said to Lucas, “You two seemed pretty friendly.”

“We've known each other for a while,” Lucas said. “He's a good attorney.”

“He won't let friendship stand in the way of defending me?”

“He'd tear my ass off if he thought it'd help his case,” Lucas said. “Joe doesn't believe people should go to jail.”

“Especially when they're innocent,” she said. “By the way, he told me not to answer any more questions.”

Four cops were working through Widdler's house. Lucas suggested that she pack a suitcase, under the supervision of one of the crime-scene people, and move to a motel.

“We're not going to leave you alone in here, until we're finished. We can't take the chance that you might destroy something, or try to.”

“Can I use the bathroom?” she asked.

“If they're done with a bathroom,” Lucas said. “And Mrs. Widdler: don't try to leave the area. We're right on the edge of arresting you. If you go outside the 494-69 loop, we probably will.”

Wyzinsky showed up while Widdler was packing. He was short, stocky, and balding, with olive skin, black eyes, and big hands, and women liked him a lot. He was bullshitting a cop at the front driveway when Lucas saw him. Lucas stepped on the porch, whistled, and waved Wyzinsky in. The lawyer came up, grinning, rubbed his hands together. “This is gonna be good. Where is she?”

“Upstairs packing,” Lucas said. He led the way into the house. “Try not to destroy any evidence.”

“I'll be careful.”

Smith came over: “We thought she'd be happier if she moved out while we tear the place apart.”

Wyzinsky nodded: “You finished with any of the rooms yet? Something private?”

“The den.” Lucas pointed. Two big chairs and a wide-screen TV with French doors.

“I'll take her in there,” Wyzinsky said. To Smith, he said, “Jesus, John, you ought to eat the occasional pizza. What do you weigh, one-twenty?”

“Glad to know you care,” Smith said.

“Of course I care, you're nearly human,” the lawyer said. He looked around, doing an appraisal on the house; its value, not the architecture. He made no effort to hide his glee. “Man, this is gonna be good. A dog named Screw? Can you say, 'Hello, Fox News,' 'Hello, Court TV? Who's that blond chick on CNN who does the court stuff? The one with the glitter lipstick? Hel-lo, blondie.”

“In your dreams,” Smith said, but he was laughing, and he went to get Widdler.

Wyzinsky and Widdler were talking in the den when a cop came out of the home office: “You guys should come and look at this,” he said.

Smith: “What?”

“Looks like we have a suicide note. Or two. Or three.”

Eventually, they decided that there were either three or four suicide notes, depending on how you counted them. One was simply a note to Jane, telling her the status of investment accounts at U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard, and noting that the second-quarter income-tax payments had all been made. Whether that was a suicide note, or not, depended on context.

The other three notes were more clearly about suicide: about depression, about growing trouble, about the unfairness of the world, about the sense of being hunted, about trying to find a solution that would work. One said, to Jane, “If I don't get back to you, I really loved you.”

Wyzinsky and Widdler talked for more than an hour, then Wyzinsky emerged from the den and said, “Mrs. Widdler has some information that she wants to volunteer. She says that she has to do it now, or it might not be useful. If any of this ever comes to a trial, I want it noted that she cooperated on this. That she was helping the investigation. I would like to make the point that she is not opening herself to a general interrogation, but is making a limited statement.”

“That's fine with me. We'll record it, if that's okay,” Lucas said.

“That's okay, though we don't really need it,” Wyzinsky said. “This isn't definitive evidentiary testimony, it's simply a point that she wishes to make, a suggestion.”

“Better to record,” Lucas said. “Just take a minute.”

They got a recorder from one of the crime-scene guys, and a fresh cassette, and set up in the den. Lucas turned it on, checked that it worked, started over, said his name, the date, time, and place of the recording, the names of the witnesses, and turned the show over to Widdler.

Jane Widdler said, “I understand that I'm suspected of being an accomplice to my husband in illegal activities. I deny all of that. However, to help the investigation, I believe that the police must watch Amity Anderson, who has had a romantic attachment to my husband since we were in college, and which I thought was finished. However, I was told by Agent Davenport today that Amity Anderson figures in this investigation.

I know Amity and I believe now that she is involved, and now that Leslie is… gone… she will try to run away. That is her response to crisis, and always has been.

She wouldn't even fight with me over Leslie's affections. Once she is gone, she will be very hard to find, because she is quite familiar with Europe, both eastern and western. If she has money, from these supposed illegal activities, it could take years to find her. That's all I have to say.”

Lucas said, “You think she was involved?”

Wyzinsky made a face, tilted his head, thought it over, then nodded at Widdler.

“I don't know,” Widdler said. “I can't believe my husband was involved in anything illegal. Why should he be? Everything is going wonderfully in the business. We are the top antique and objets d”Art destination in the Twin Cities. But I can't explain how he was found this morning, where he was found, and I can't explain the rifle.

Agent Davenport said that he must have had an accomplice, and accused me of being the accomplice.

I am not and never have been an accomplice. I'm a storekeeper. But Amity Anderson… I don't know if she did anything wrong, but I think she must be watched, or she will run away.”

“That's pretty much it,” Wyzinsky said.

Lucas peered at Jane Widdler for a moment, then reached out and turned off the recorder.

“All right. Do not leave the Twin Cities, Mrs. Widdler.”

“Are you going to watch Amity?”

“We're working on all aspects of the case. I don't want to compromise the case by talking about it with a suspect,” Lucas said.

“He'll watch her,” Wyzinsky grunted. “Not much gets past Agent Davenport.”

Widdler left with Wyzinsky, and the crime-scene people continued to pull the house apart. Lucas got bored, went over to the Widdler shop, talked to the crime-scene guy in charge, who said, “More shit than you can believe, but none of it says 'Bucher' on the bottom. Haven't found any relevant names in the files…” “Keep looking,” Lucas said.

The ME, done with the autopsy late in the day, said that it could be suicide, or it could be murder. “Given the circumstances, we just can't tell,” he said. “The gun was pointed slightly upward and straight into the temple, two inches above the cheekbone, and judging from the burns and powder content inside the wound, the end of the barrel was probably touching the skin. There was almost no dispersion of powder outside the wound, very little tattooing on the skin, so the barrel was close. I could see a murder being done that way… but it'd be rare, especially since the victim doesn't appear to have been restrained in any way.”

As the sun was going down, Lucas stood in his office, calling the members of his crew; and he called Rose Marie, and borrowed an investigator named Jerrold from the Highway Patrol.

“We're taking Widdler's word for it,” he told them all. “We're gonna stake out Anderson.”

They got together in Lucas's family room: Del, Jenkins, Flowers, Jerrold, Smith, and Lucas, Letty sitting in, the four state agents gently bullshitting her, Letty giving it back. Shrake was already on Anderson, picking her up in St. Paul, tagging her back home.

Smith was uneasy with state cops he didn't know well, although he and Del went way back. Lucas passed around bottles of Leinie's, except for Letty, who wanted a Leinie's but took a Coke. Smith and Lucas, who'd be talking to Amity Anderson, also took Cokes.

“I think it would be perfectly all right for me to drink one beer in the house,” Letty said.

“If I gave it to you, I'd have to arrest myself,” Lucas said.

“And probably beat the shit out of himself, too,” Del said, winking at Letty.

Lucas briefed them on Amity Anderson. Jenkins, who'd worked the casual surveillance, suggested good spots to sit, “as long as we don't get rousted by St. Paul.”

“I talked to the watch commander, he'll pass it along to patrol, so you're okay on that,” Smith said.

With six people, they could track her in four-hour shifts, four on and eight off.

That would wear them down after a while, but Lucas planned to put pressure on Amity, to see if he could make her run, see what she took with her.

Lucas and Flowers would take the first shift, from eight to midnight. Shrake and Jenkins would take midnight to four, Del and Jerrold from four to eight, and then Lucas and Flowers would be back.

Tonight, after the meeting, Flowers would be set up, on the street and watching, and then Lucas and Smith would call on Anderson and rattle her cage.

Lucas and Smith drove to Anderson's house separately, and Lucas left his truck at the end of an alley that looked at the back of the house. Then he got into Smith's Ford, and they drove around the corner and pulled into Anderson's driveway. Smith said, “I oughta take a shift.”

“No need to,” Lucas said. “The rest of us have all worked together… no problem.”

“Yeah, but you know,” Smith said. He didn't want to, but it was only polite to offer.

“I know-but no problem.”

They went up the walk, saw the curtains move and a shape behind them, and then Lucas knocked on the door and a second later, Anderson opened it, looking at Lucas over a chain. She was holding a stick of wet celery smeared with orange cheese. “Lucas Davenport, I spoke to you once before,” Lucas said. “This is Detective John Smith from the St. Paul police. We need to speak to you.”

“What about?” Didn't move the chain.

Lucas got formal, putting some asshole in his voice: “A friend of yours, Leslie Widdler, was found dead in a car a few blocks from here this morning. Shot to death. We have questioned his wife, Jane, and she has hired an attorney. But our investigation, along with statements made by Jane Widdler, suggests that you could help us in the investigation. Please open the door.”

“Do you have a warrant?”

“No, but we could get one in a couple of minutes,” Lucas said, talking tougher, his voice dropping into a growl. “You can either talk to us here, or we'll get a warrant, come in and get you and take you downtown. It's your call.”

“Do I get an attorney?” Anderson asked.

“Anytime you want one,” Lucas said. “If you can't get one to come tonight, we'll take you downtown, put you in a cell, and we can wait until one gets here tomorrow.”

“But I haven't done anything,” Anderson said.

“That's what we need to talk about,” Lucas said.

In the end, she let them in, then called an attorney friend, who agreed to come over.

While they waited, they watched American Volcanoes for forty-five minutes, a TV story of how Yellowstone could blow up at any minute and turn the entire United States into a hellhole of ash and lava; Anderson drank two glasses of red wine, and then the attorney arrived.

Lucas knew her, as it happened, Annabelle Ramford, a woman who did a lot of pro bono work for the homeless, but not a lot of criminal law.

“We meet again,” she said, with a thin smile, shaking his hand.

“I hope you can help us,” Lucas said. “Miz Anderson needs some advice.”

Anderson admitted knowing the Widdlers. She looked shocked when Lucas suggested that she'd had a sexual relationship with Leslie Widdler, but admitted it. “You told me you're gay,” Lucas said.

“I am. When I had my relationship with Leslie, I didn't know it,” she said.

“But your relationship with Leslie continued, didn't it?”

She looked at Ramford, who said, “You don't have to say anything at all, if you don't wish to.”

They all looked at Anderson, who said, “What happens if I don't?”

“I'll make a note,” Lucas said. “But we will find out, either from you, with your cooperation, or from other people.”

“You don't have to take threats, either,” Ramford said to Anderson.

“That really wasn't a threat,” Lucas said, his voice going mild. “It's the real situation, Annabelle. If we're not happy when we leave here, we'll be taking Miz Anderson with us. You could then recommend a criminal attorney and we can all talk tomorrow, at the jail.”

“No-no-no,” Anderson said. “Look, my relationship with Leslie… continued… to some extent.”

“To some extent?” Smith asked. “What does that mean?”

“I was…” She bit her lip, looked away from them, then said, “I was actually more interested in Jane.”

“In Jane? Did you have a physical relationship with Jane?” Lucas asked.

“Well… yes. Why would I want to fuck a great big huge fat guy?”

Lucas had no answer for that; but he had more questions for Jane Widdler.

He turned to the quilts, taking notes as Anderson answered the questions. She believed the quilts were genuine. They'd been spotted by Marilyn Coombs, she said, who took them to the Widdlers for confirmation and evaluation.

The Widdlers, in turn, had sent them away for laboratory tests, and confirmed with the tests, and other biographical information about Armstrong, that the quilts were genuine. The Widdlers then put together an investment package in which the quilts would be sold to private investors who would donate them to museums, getting both a tax write-off and a reputation for generosity.

“We have reason to believe that the quilts are faked-that the curses were, in any case. That the primary buyers paid only a fraction of what they said they paid, and took an illegal tax write-off after the donations,” Lucas said.

“I don't know about any of that,” Anderson said. “I was the contact between the Widdlers and Mrs. Donaldson. I brought her attention to the quilts, but she made her own decisions and her own deals. I never handled money.”

“You told me that you didn't know Mrs. Bucher,” Lucas said.

She shrugged. “I didn't. I knew who she was, but I didn't know her.”

“And you still… maintain that position?”

“It's the truth,” she said.

“You didn't go there with Leslie Widdler and kill Mrs. Bucher and her maid?”

“Of course not! That's crazy!”

He asked her about Toms: never heard of him, she said. She'd never been to Des Moines in her life, not even passing through.

“Were you with Leslie Widdler last night?” Smith asked.

“No. I was out until about eight, then I was here,” she said.

“You didn't speak to him, didn't ride around with him…”

“No. No. I didn't speak to him or see him or anything.”

They pushed all the other points, but Anderson wouldn't budge. She hadn't dealt in antiques with either Leslie or Jane Widdler. She had no knowledge of what happened with the Armstrong quilts, after Donaldson, other than the usual art-world reports, gossip, and hearsay. She could prove, she thought, that on the Friday night that the Buchers were killed, she'd been out late with three other women friends, at a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, where she'd not only drunk a little too much, but remembered that there'd been a birthday party in an upper loft area of the restaurant that had turned raucous, and that she was sure people would remember.

When they were done, Anderson said, “Now I have a question. I have the feeling that Jane Widdler has been telling you things that aren't true. I mean, if Jane and Leslie were killing these people, I don't know why Jane would try to drag me into it. Is she trying to do that?”

“Maybe,” Lucas said.

“Do you think they could kill people?” Smith asked.

Anderson turned her face down, thinking, glanced sideways at Ramford, then said, “You know, Jane… has always struck me as greedy. Not really a bad person, but terribly greedy. She wants all this stuff. Diamonds, watches, cars, Hermes this and Tiffany that and Manolo Blahnik something else. She might kill for money-it'd have to be money-but… I don't know.”

Her mouth moved some more, without words, and they all sat and waited, and she went on: “Leslie, I think Leslie might kill. For the pleasure in it. And money. In college, we had this small-college football team. Football didn't mean anything, really You'd go and wave your little pennant or wear your mum and nobody cared if you won or lost.

A lot of people made fun of football players… but Leslie liked to hurt people.

He'd talk about stepping on people's hands with his cleats. Like, if one of the runner-guys did too well, they'd get him down and then Leslie would “Accidentally' step on his hand and break it. He claimed he did it several times. Word got around that he could be dangerous.”

Smith said, “Huh,” and Lucas asked, “Anything heavier than that? That you heard of? Did you get any bad vibrations from Leslie when Mrs. Donaldson was killed?”

She shook her head, looking spooked: “No. Not at all. But now that you mention it…

I mean, jeez, their store really came up out of nowhere.” She looked at Lucas, Smith, and Ramford. “You know what I mean? Most antique people wind up in these little holes-in-the-wall, and the Widdlers are suddenly rich.”

“Makes you think,” Smith said, looking up at Lucas.

There was more, but the returns were diminishing. Lucas finally stood up, sighed, said to Ramford, “You might want to give her a couple of names, just in case,” and he and Smith took off.

“Let's drive around for a while, before you drop me off. Get Ramford out of there,” Lucas said to Smith. “I don't know where she parked, I wouldn't want her to pick me up.” He got on his radio and called Flowers as they walked to the car.

“I'm looking right at you,” Flowers said.

“There should be a lawyer coming out in a few minutes. Stay out of sight, and call when she's gone.”

Smith drove them up to Grand Avenue, and they both got double-dip ice cream cones, and leaned on the hood of Smith's car and watched the college girls go by; blondes and short shirts and remarkably little laughter, intense brooding looks, like they'd been bit on the ass by Sartre or Derrida or some other Frenchman.

Lucas was getting down to cone level on his chocolate pecan fudge when his radio beeped. Flowers said, “The lawyer is getting in her car.”

“I'll be in place in five minutes,” Lucas said.

Surveillance could be exciting, but hardly ever was. This night was one of the hardly-evers, four long hours of nothing. Couldn't even read, sitting in the dark. He talked to Flowers twice on the radio, had a long phone chat with Weather-God bless cell phones-and at midnight, Jenkins eased up behind him.

“You good?” Lucas asked, on the radio.

“Got my video game, got my iPod. Got two sacks of pork rinds and a pound of barbeque ribs, and a quart of Diet Coke for propellant. All set.”

“Glad I'm not in the car with you,” Lucas said. “Those goddamn pork rinds.”

“Ah, you open the door every half hour or so, and you're fine,” Jenkins said. “You might not want to light a cigarette.”

Weather was cutting again in the morning, and was asleep when Lucas tiptoed into the bedroom at twelve-fifteen. He took an Ambien to knock himself down, a Xanax to smooth out the ride, thought about a martini, decided against it, set the alarm clock, and slipped into bed.

The alarm went off exactly seven hours and forty minutes later. Weather was gone; that happened when he was working hard on a case, staying up late. They missed each other, though they were lying side by side…

He cleaned up quickly, looking at his watch, got a Ziploc bag with four pieces of cornbread from the housekeeper, a couple of Diet Cokes from the refrigerator, the newspaper off the front porch, and was on his way. Hated to be late on a stakeout; they were so boring that being even a minute late was considered bad form.

As it was, he pulled up on the side street at two minutes to eight, got the hand-off from Jerrold, called Del, who'd just been pushed by Flowers, and who said that a light had come on ten minutes earlier. “She's up, but she's boring,” Del said.

The newspapers had the Widdler story, and tied it to Bucher, Donaldson, and Toms.

Rose Marie said that more arrests were imminent, but the Star Tribune reporter spelled it “eminent” and the Pioneer Press guy went with “immanent.”

You should never, Lucas thought, trust a spell-checker.

Anderson stepped out of her house at 8:10, picked up the newspaper, and went back inside. At 8:20, carrying a bag and the newspaper, she walked down to the bus stop, apparently a daily routine, because the bus arrived two minutes later.

They tagged her downtown and to her office, parked their cars in no-parking zones, with police IDs on the dashes, and Lucas took the Skyway exit while Flowers took the street. There was a back stairs, but Lucas didn't think the risk was enough to worry about…

As he waited, doing nothing, he had the feeling he might be wrong about that, and worried about it, but not too much: he always had that feeling on stakeouts. A few years earlier, he'd had a killer slip away from a stakeout, planning to use the stakeout itself as his alibi for another murder…

A few minutes before noon, Shrake showed up for the next shift, and Lucas passed off to him, and walked away, headed back to the office. He'd gone fifty feet when his cell phone rang: Shrake. “She's moving,” and he was gone. Lucas looked back.

Shrake was ambling along the Skyway, away from Lucas, on the phone. Talking to somebody else on the cell, probably to Jenkins, probably afraid to use the radio because he was too close to the target; she had practically walked over him.

Seventy-five feet ahead of Shrake, Lucas could see the narrow figure of Amity Anderson speed-walking through the crowd.

Going to lunch? His radio chirped: Flowers. “You want to hang in, until we figure out where she's going?”

“Yeah.”

Shrake took her to a coffee shop, where she bought a cup of coffee to go, and an orange scone, and then headed down to the street, where Jenkins picked her up. “Catching a bus,” Jenkins said.

They took her all the way back to her house. Off the bus, she paused to throw the coffee-shop sack into a corner trash barrel, then headed up to her house, walking quickly, in a hurry. She went straight to the mailbox and took out a few letters, shuffled them quickly, picked one, tore the end off as she went through the door.

“What do you think?” Flowers asked, on the radio.

“Let's give her an hour,” Lucas said.

“That's what I think,” Flowers said. Shrake and Jenkins agreed.

Half an hour later, Anderson walked out of her house wearing a long-sleeved shirt and jeans and what looked like practical shoes or hiking boots. She had a one-car detached garage, with a manual lift. She pushed the door up, backed carefully out, pulled the door down again, pointed the car up the hill, and took off.

“We're rolling,” Jenkins said. “We're gone.”

Lucas got on the radio: “This could be something, guys. Stack it up behind her, and take turns cutting off, but don't lose her.”

Shrake: “Probably going to the grocery store.”

Lucas: “She turned the wrong way. There's one just down the hill.”

They had four cars tagging her, but no air. As long as they stayed in the city, they were good-they'd each tag her for a couple of blocks, then turn away, while the next one in line caught up. They tracked her easily along Ford to Snelling, where she took a right, down the bluff toward Seventh. Snelling was a chute; if she stopped there, they'd all be sacked right on top of her. Flowers followed her down while Lucas, Jenkins, and Shrake waited at the top of the hill.

“I got her,” Flowers said. “She took a left on Seventh, come on through.”

They moved fast down the hill, through the intersection, Flowers peeling away as Lucas came up behind him. They got caught at a stoplight just before I-35, and Lucas hooked away, into a store parking lot, afraid she'd pick up his face if he got bumper-to-bumper.

“Jenkins?”

“Got her. Heading south on Thirty-five E.”

Lucas pulled out of the parking lot, now last in line, and followed the others down the ramp onto I-35. Lucas got on the radio, looking for a highway-patrol plane, but was told that with one thing or another, nobody could get airborne for probably an hour. “Well, get him going, for Christ's sake. This chick may be headed for Des Moines, or something.”

The problem with a four-car tag was that Anderson wasn't a fast driver, and they had to hold back, which meant they'd either loom in her rearview mirror, or they'd have to hold so far back that they might lose her to a sudden move. If she hooked into a shopping center, and several were coming up, they'd be out of luck.

“Jenkins, move up on her slow,” Lucas said. “Get off at Yankee Doodle, even if she doesn't.”

“Got it.”

She didn't get off; Jenkins went up the off-ramp, ran the lights at the top, and came down the on-ramp, falling in behind Lucas.

They played with her down the interstate, the speed picking up. She didn't get off at the Burnsville Mall, a regional shopping center that Lucas had thought would be a possibility. Instead, she pushed out of the metro area, heading south into the countryside.

Lucas could see the possible off-ramps coming on his nav system, and called them out; one of them would fall off at each, then reenter. She didn't get off, but stayed resolutely in the slow lane, poking along at the speed limit.

South, and more south, thirty miles gone before she clicked on her turn signal and carefully rolled up the ramp at Rice County 1, two cars behind Flowers. Flowers had to guess, and Lucas shouted into the radio, “She went to Carleton. Go left. Go east.”

Flowers turned left, the next car went right, and Anderson turned left behind Flowers.

Carleton was off to the east in Northfield, but they'd already gone past the Northfield exit; still, she might be familiar with the countryside around it, Lucas thought, and that had been a better bet than the open countryside to the west.

Now they had a close tag on her, but from the front. Flowers slowly pulled away, leading her into the small town of Dundas; but just before the town, she turned south on County 8, and Flowers was yelling, “I'm coming back around,” and Shrake said, “I got her, I got her.”

Well back, now. Not many cars out, and all but Lucas had been close to her, and she might pick one of them out. They kept south, onto smaller and narrower roads, Shrake breaking away, Jenkins moving up, until she disappeared into a cornfield.

“Whoa. Man, she turned,” Jenkins said. “She's, uh, off the road, hang back guys, I'm gonna go on past…”

Hadn't rained in a few days, and when Jenkins went past the point where she'd disappeared, he looked down a dirt track, weeds growing up in the middle, and called back, “She looks like she's going into a field. I don't know, man… you can probably track her by the dust coming up.”

“That's not a road,” Lucas said, peering at his atlas. “Doesn't even show up here; I think it must go down to the river.”

“Maybe she's going canoeing,” Flowers said. “This is a big canoe river.”

Lucas said into a live radio, “Ah, holy shit.”

“What?”

“It's the Cannon River, man.”

“Yeah?”

“The money that got laundered in Las Vegas, on the quilts-it went to Cannon, Inc., or Cannon Associates, or something like that.”

Shrake came back: “Dust cloud stopped. I think she's out of her car; or lost. What do you want to do?”

“Watch for a minute,” Lucas said. “Flowers, you're wearing boots?”

“Yup.”

“I got my gators,” Shrake said. “I didn't think we were gonna be creeping around in a cornfield.”

“Gators for me,” Jenkins said.

“You guys get a truckload deal?” Flowers asked.

“Shut up,” Lucas said. “Okay, Flowers and I are gonna walk in there. Jenkins and Shrake get down the opposite ends of the road. If she comes out, you'll be tracking her.”

“How do we hide the cars?” Flowers asked.

“Follow me,” Lucas said. He went on south, a hundred yards, a hundred and fifty, found an access point, and plowed thirty feet into the cornfield. The corn didn't quite hide the truck, but it wouldn't be obvious what kind it was, unless you rode right up to it. Flowers followed him in and got out of his state car shaking his head. “Gonna be one pissed-off farmer.”

“Bullshit. He'll get about a hundred dollars a bushel from us,” Lucas said. “Let's go.”

Flowers said, “I got two bottles of water in the car.”

“Get them. And get your gun,” Lucas said.

“The gun? You think?”

“No. I just like to see you wearing the fuckin' gun for a change,” Lucas said. “C'mon, let's get moving.”

Hot Day. Flowers pulled his shoulder rig on as they jogged along the rows of shoulder-high corn, ready to take a dive if Anderson suddenly turned up in the car.

“Looks like she's down by the water,” Flowers said. They could see only the crowns of the box elders and scrub cedar along the river, so she was lower than they were, and they should be able to get close. At the track, they turned toward the river, panting a bit now, hot, big men in suits carrying guns and a pound of water each, no hats; the track was probably 440 yards long, Lucas thought, one chunk of a forty-acre plot; but since it was adjacent to the river, there might be some variance.

“Sand burrs,” Flowers grunted. Their feet were kicking up little puffs of dust.

They RAN the four-forty in about four minutes, Lucas thought, and at the end of it, he decided he needed to start jogging again; the rowing machine wasn't cutting it.

When the field started to look thin, and the terrain started to drop, they cut left into the cornfield and slowed to a walk, then a stooped-over creep. The corn smelled sweet and hot and dusty, and Lucas knew he'd have a couple of sweaty corn cuts on his neck before he got out of it.

At the edge of the field, they looked down a slope at a muddy stream lined on both sides with scrubby trees, and a patch of trees surrounding a shack and a much newer steel building. The access door on the front of the building was standing open; the garage door was down. Anderson's car was backed up to the garage door. The building had no windows at all, and Lucas said, “Cut around back.”

They went off again, running, stooping, watching the building. They were down the side of it when they heard the garage door going up, and they eased back in the cornfield, squatting next to each other, watching.

Anderson came out of the building. She'd taken off the long-sleeve shirt, and was now wearing a green T-shirt; she was carrying two paintings.

“Got her,” he muttered to Flowers.

“So now what?”

“Well, we can watch her, and see what she does with the stuff, or we can go ahead and bust her,” Lucas said.

“Make the call,” Flowers said.

“She's probably moving it somewhere out-of-state. Dumping it. Cashing it in. Getting ready to run.” He sat thinking about it for another thirty seconds, then said, “Fuck it. Let's bust her.”

Anderson had gone back inside the garage and they eased down right next to it, heard her rattling around inside, then stepped around the corner of the open door, inside.

The place was half full of furniture, arranged more or less in a U, down the sides and along the back of the building. The middle of the U was taken up by an old white Chevy van, which had been backed in, and was pointing out toward the door.

Lucas felt something snap when he saw it, a little surge of pleasure: Anderson had her back to them and he said, “How you doing, Amity?”

She literally jumped, turned, took them in, then took three or four running steps toward them and screamed “No,” and dashed down the far side of the van.

Flowers yelled, “Cut her off,” and went around the back of the van, while Lucas ran around the nose. Anderson was fifteen feet away and coming fast when Lucas crossed the front of the van and she screamed, “No,” again, and then he saw something in her hand and she was throwing it, and he almost had time to get out of the way before the hand-grenade-sized vase whacked him in the forehead and dropped him like a sack of kitty litter.

He groped at her as she swerved around him out into the sunlight, then Flowers jumped over him. Lucas struggled back to his feet and saw her first run toward her car, and then, as Flowers closed in, swerve into the shack, the door slamming behind her.

Lucas was moving again, forehead burning like fire-the woman had an arm like A-Rod.

Flowers yelled, “Back door,” as he kicked in the front, and Lucas ran down the side of the house in time to see Anderson burst onto the deck on the river side of the house. She saw him, looked back once, then ran, arms flapping wildly, down toward the river. Lucas shouted, “Don't!”

He was five steps away when she hurled herself in.

Flowers ran down to the bank, stopped beside Lucas, and said, “Jesus. She's gonna stink.”

The river was narrow, murky, and, in front of the shack, shallow. Anderson had thrown herself into four inches of water and a foot of muck, and sat up, groaning, covered with mud. “You got boots on,” Lucas said to Flowers. “Reach in there and get her.”

“You got longer arms,” Flowers said.

“You're up for a step increase and I'm your boss,” Lucas said.

“Goddamnit, I was hoping for a little drama,” Flowers said. Anderson had turned over now, on her hands and knees. Flowers stepped one foot into the muck, caught one of her hands, and pried her out of the stuff.

Lucas said to her, “Amity you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent…”

Flowers said, “Cuffs?” Lucas said, “Hell, yes, she's probably killed about six people.

Or helped, anyway.”

“I did not,” Anderson wailed. “I didn't…”

Lucas ignored her, walked up the bank toward the steel building, turned the radio back up and called Jenkins and Shrake. “Come on in. We grabbed her; and we got a building full of loot.”

Flowers checked Anderson for obvious weapons, removed a switchblade from her side pocket, put her on the ground at the front of the car, and cuffed her to the bumper. She started to cry, and didn't stop.

Lucas put the switchblade on top of Flowers's car, where they wouldn't forget it, and walked around to the trunk. Inside were three plastic-wrapped paintings and an elaborate china clock. Small, high-value stuff, he thought. He looked at the backs of all three paintings, found one old label from Greener Gallery, Chicago, and nothing else.

Flowers had gone inside the steel building, and Lucas followed. “Hell of a lot of furniture,” Flowers said. “I could use a couple pieces for my apartment.”

“Couple pieces would probably buy you a house,” Lucas said. “See any more paintings? Or swoopy chairs?”

“There're a couple of swoopy chairs…”

Sure enough: there was no other way to describe them. They were looking at the chairs when Shrake and Jenkins came in, and Flowers waved at them, and Lucas saw a wooden rack with more plastic-wrapped paintings. He pulled them down, one-two-three, and ripped loose the plastic on the back. One and three were bare.

The back of two had a single word, written in oil paint with a painter's brush, a long time ago: Reckless.

Amity Anderson went to jail in St. Paul, held without bail on suspicion of first-degree murder in the deaths of Constance Bucher and Sugar-Rayette Peebles. Flowers said she cried uncontrollably all the way back and tried to shift the blame to Jane Widdler.

Everybody thought about that, and on the afternoon of Anderson's arrest, two officers and a technician went to Widdler's store with a search warrant, and, after she'd spoken to her attorney, spent some time using sterile Q-tips to scrub cells from the lining of her cheeks.

DNA samples were also taken from Anderson, and from the body of Leslie Widdler, and were packed off to the lab. At the same time, five crime-scene techs from the BSA and the St. Paul Police Department began working over the white van, the steel building, and the shack.

Ownership of the land, shack, and building was held by the Lorna C. Widdler Trust.

Lorna was Leslie's mother, who'd died fourteen years earlier; Leslie was the surviving trustee. No mention of Jane. The land surrounding the shack, the cornfield, was owned by a town-farmer in Dundas, who said he'd seen Leslie-”A big guy? Dresses like a fairy?”-only twice in ten years. He'd had a woman with him, the farmer said, but he couldn't say for certain whether it was Jane Widdler or Amity Anderson.

They paid the farmer $225 for damage to his cornfield.

Smith called Lucas the evening of the arrest and said, “We found a pill bottle under the front seat of the van. It's a prescription for Amity Anderson.”

“There you go,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, and we got some hair, long brown hair. Doesn't look like Widdler's. It does look like Anderson's.”

“Anything on Leslie?”

“Well, there's some discoloration on the back of the passenger seat, might be blood.

One of the techs says it is, so we've got some DNA work to do.”

“If it's either a dog or Leslie…”

“Then we're good.”

The Reckless painting and the swoopy chairs were confirmed by the Lash kid, a painting was found on an old inventory list held by the Toms family in Des Moines, and two pieces of furniture were found on purchase receipts in Donaldson's files.

St. Paul police, making phone checks, found a call from Leslie Widdler's phone to Anderson's house on the night Widdler killed himself.

The quilts were defended by their museum owners as genuine.

So the reporters came and went, and the attorneys; the day after the arrest, Lucas was chatting with Del when Smith came by. Smith had been spending time with Anderson and her court- appointed attorney. They shuffled chairs around Lucas's office and Carol brought a coffee for Smith, and Smith sighed and said, “Gotta tell you, Lucas. I think there's an outside possibility that we got the wrong woman.”

“Talk to me.”

“The hair's gonna be Anderson's-or maybe, somebody we just don't know. But I looked at her hair really close, and it's the same. I mean, the same. Color, texture, split ends… We gotta wait for the DNA, but it's hers.”

“What does she say?” Lucas asked.

“She says she was never in the van,” Smith said.

“Well, shit, you caught her right there,” Del said. “What more do you want?”

“We asked her about the phone call from Leslie, the night Leslie killed himself.

Know what she says?”

“Is this gonna hurt?” Lucas asked.

Smith nodded. “She says that Jane Widdler called her, not Leslie. She said that Jane told her that her car had broken down, and since Anderson was only a few blocks away, asked her to come over and pick her up, give her a ride home. Anderson said she did.

She said Widdler told her she had to pee, so they stopped at Anderson's house, and Widdler went in the bathroom. That's when Widdler picked up the prescription bottle and the hair, Anderson says.”

“She's saying that Jane Widdler murdered Leslie,” Lucas said.

“Yep.”

“Anderson never saw a body?”

“She never saw the car, she says,” Smith said. “She says Widdler told her that she was afraid to wait in a dark area, and walked out to Cretin. She said she picked up Widdler on Cretin, took her back to her house to pee, and then took her home.”

“How long was the phone call?” Lucas asked.

“About twenty-three seconds.”

“Doesn't sound like a call between a guy about to commit suicide, and his lover,” Lucas said to Del.

“I don't know,” Del said. “Never having been in the position.”

“She's got this story, and she admits it sounds stupid, but she's sticking to it.

And she does it like…” Smith hesitated, then said it: “… like she's innocent.

You know those people who never stop screaming, and then it turns out they didn't do it? Like that.”

“Hmm,” Lucas said.

“Another thing,” Del said. “Even if we find some proof that Widdler was involved, how do we ever convict? A defense attorney would put Anderson on trial and shred the case.”

“So you're saying we ought to convict Anderson because we can?” Lucas asked.

“No,” Del said. “Though it's tempting.”

“You oughta go over and talk to her-Anderson,” Smith said to Lucas.

“Maybe I will,” Lucas said. “All right if I take a noncop with me?”

“Who'd that be?”

“A bartender,” Lucas said.

Amity Anderson had never been big, and now she looked like a Manga cartoon character when the crime boss fetches her out of the dungeon. She'd lost any sparkle she'd ever had; her hair hung lank, her nails were chewed to her fingertips.

“This is all off the record,” Lucas said.

Anderson's lawyer nodded. “For your information: no court use, no matter what is said.”

Lucas introduced Sloan, who'd put on his best brown suit for the occasion. “Mr. Sloan is an old friend and a former police officer who has always had a special facility in… conversations with persons suspected of crimes,” Lucas said carefully. “I asked him to come along as a consultant.”

Everybody nodded and Anderson said, “I didn't know about any killings. But I knew Leslie and Jane, and when Mrs. Donaldson was killed, I worried. But that's all. I didn't have any proof, I didn't have any knowledge. With Mrs. Bucher, it never crossed my mind… then, when I read about Marilyn Coombs being killed, I thought about it again. But I pushed it away. Just away-I didn't want to think about it.”

Sloan took her back through the whole thing, with a gentle voice and thin teacher's smile, working more like a therapist than a cop, listening to the history: about how Anderson and the Widdlers had become involved in college, and then drifted apart.

How the surprise call came years later, about the quilts. About her move to the Cities, occasional contacts with the Widdlers, including a sporadic sexual relationship with Jane Widdler.

“And then you drove down to a barn full of stolen antiques and began stealing them a second time-with a key you had in your pocket,” Lucas said.

“That's because Jane set me up,” Anderson said through her teeth, showing the first bit of steel in the interrogation. “I couldn't believe it-I couldn't believe how she must have worked it. She knew I was friends with Don Harvey. He's a very prominent museum person from Chicago, he used to be here. She said he was coming to town, and if he authenticated some paintings for them, that they would give me fifteen percent of the sale price, above their purchase price. She thought I had some influence with Don because we'd dated once, and were friends. If he okayed the paintings-I mean, if he'd okayed that Reckless painting, I could have gotten seventy-five thousand dollars in fees for that one painting.”

She shook her head again, a disbelieving smile flickering across her face: “She gave me a key and said she'd send me a map in the mail. I got it out of my mailbox when you were watching me.”

Lucas nodded. They'd seen her get home, go straight to the mailbox, and then out to the car.

“John Smith found the map…” Anderson began.

“He said it was a really old map, Xeroxed, with your fingerprints all over it.”

“And the envelope…” Anderson said.

“Just an envelope…”

“Well, can't you do some science stuff that shows the key was inside? Or the map? I see all this stuff on Nova, where is it?”

“On Nova,” Lucas said.

Her eyes drifted away: “My God, she completely tangled me up…”

They talked to her for another half hour, Sloan watching her face, backtracking, poking her with apparently nonrelevant questions that knitted back toward possible conflicts in what she was saying.

When he was done, he nodded to Lucas, and Lucas said, “It's been fun. We'll get back to you.”

“Do you believe me?” she asked Lucas.

“I believe evidence,” Lucas said. “I don't know about Sloan.”

Sloan said, “I gotta think about it.”

As they were leaving, Anderson said, with a wan, humorless smile, “You know the last mean thing that Botox bitch did? She stole my alprazolam to put in the van, just when I needed it most. I could really use some stress meds right now.”

Out in the hallway Sloan looked at Lucas. Lucas was leaning against the concrete-block wall, rubbing his temples, and Sloan said, “What?”

Lucas pushed away from the wall and asked, “What do you think?”

“She was bullshitting us some, but not entirely,” Sloan said. “I'd probably convict her if I were on a jury, based on the evidence, but I don't think she killed anyone.”

“Okay.”

“What happened with you?” Sloan asked. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”

Lucas called the evidence guys at St. Paul, then the supervisor of the crime-scene crew who'd gone over Anderson's house. Then he went down to Del's desk and said, “Let's take a walk around the block.”

Outside, summer day, hot again, puffy white fair-weather clouds; flower beds showing a little wilt from the lack of rain. Del asked, “What's happening?”

“Remember all that shit Smith said? About the evidence coming in?”

“Yeah.” Del nodded.

“So one of the clinchers was an amber plastic prescription bottle,” Lucas said. “You know the kind, with the click-off white tops?”

“Uh-huh. I know about the bottle.”

“When I was looking into Anderson, when I first tripped over her, I didn't have anything to go on,” Lucas continued. “I thought I might take an uninvited look around her house.”

“Ah.” They'd both done it before, breaking-and-entering, a dozen times between the two of them. Life in the big city.

“In the bathroom, I found a bottle of alprazolam and a bottle of Ambien,” Lucas said.

“I noticed them because I use them myself. The thing is, there wasn't any alprazolam in Anderson's house when St. Paul went through the place last night. And the stuff in the van was only three weeks old-it was a new prescription. Unless they used the van some other time, that we don't know about, and that seems unlikely, because they'd had some problems the last two times out… how did the alprazolam get in the van?”

“That's awkward,” Del said.

“No shit.”

“Hey. Don't get all honorable about it,” Del said. “I can think of ways that bottle got there-like maybe she went down to take some other pictures out, or maybe she went down to clean out the van, and lost the bottle. Won't do any good for you to start issuing affidavits about breaking-and-entering.”

Lucas grinned. “I wasn't going to do that. But…”

“We need to think about this,” Del said.

They finished walking down the block, and back, and nothing had occurred to them.

At the door, as they were going back in the BCA building, Del asked, “Did anybody ever ask Anderson about Gabriella?”

“No… Gabriella. She's just gone.”

But that evening, sitting in the den listening to the soundtrack from Everything Is Illuminated, Lucas began to think about Gabriella, and where she might have gone. Assuming that she'd been killed by Leslie Widdler, where would he put her? Because of the “Don't Mow Ditches” campaign, it was possible that he'd just heaved her out the van door, the way he'd heaved Screw, and she was lying in two feet of weeds off some back highway. On the other hand, he had, not far away, an obscure wooded tract where he had to take the van anyway, assuming he'd used the van when he killed Gabriella. And if he had a body in it…

He got on the phone to Del, then to Flowers: “Can you come back up here?”

“I'm not doing much good here,” Flowers said. He'd gone back south, still pecking away at the case of the girl found on the river-bank. “My suspect's about to join the Navy to see the world. Which means he won't be around to talk to.”

“All right. Listen, meet Del and me tomorrow at the Widdlers' shack. Wear old clothes.” They hooked up at eleven o'clock in the morning, out at the Widdlers' place, the highway in throwing up heat mirages, the cornfield rustling in the spare dry wind, the sun pounding down. They unloaded in front of the shack, which had been sealed by the crime-scene crew. Flowers was towing a boat, and inside the boat, had a cooler full of Diet Coke and bottles of water.

Lucas and Del were in Lucas's truck, and unloaded three rods of round quarter-inch steel, six feet long; Lucas had ground the tips to sharp points.

He pointed downstream. “We'll start down there. It's thicker. Look at any space big enough to be a grave. Just poke it; it hasn't rained, so if it's been turned over, you should be able to tell.”

Flowers was wearing a straw cowboy hat and aviator glasses. He looked downstream and said, “It's gonna be back in the woods, I think. Probably on the slope down toward the river. If he thought about it, he wouldn't want to put her anyplace that might be farmed someday.”

“But not too close to the river,” Lucas said. “He wouldn't want it to wash out.”

They were probing, complaining to each other about the stupidity of it, for an hour, and were a hundred yards south of the house when Flowers said, “Hey.” He was just under the edge of the crown of a box elder, thirty feet from the river.

“Find something?”

“Something,” Flowers said. They gathered around with their rods, probing. The earth beneath them had been disturbed at some time- squatting, they could see a depression a couple of feet across, maybe four feet long. The feel of the dirt changed across the line. But there was also an aspen tree, with a trunk the size of a man's ankle, just off the depression, with one visible root growing across it.

“I don't know. The tree…”

“But feel this…” Flowers gave his rod to Lucas. “You can feel how easy it went down, how it got softer the lower you go… and then, doesn't that feel like a plastic sack or something? You can feel it…”

“Feel something,” Lucas admitted.

They passed the rod to Del, who said he could feel it, too. Lucas wiped his lower lip with the back of his hand: sweaty and getting dirty. “What do you think? Get crime scene down here, or go get a shovel?”

They all looked up at the shack, and the cars, and then Del said, “Would you feel like a bigger asshole if you got a crew down here and there was nothing? Or if you dug a hole yourself and it was something?”

Lucas and Flowers looked at each other and they shrugged simultaneously and Flowers said, “I'll get the shovel.”

While Flowers went for the shovel, Del probed some more with the rod, scratched it with the tip of a pocketknife, pulled it out and looked at the scratch. “Three feet,” he said. “Or damn close to it.”

They decided to cut a narrow hole, straight down, one shovel wide, two feet long.

The ground was soft all the way, river-bottom silt; grass roots, one tree root, then sandy stuff, and at the bottom of the hole, a glimpse of green.

“Garbage bag,” Flowers grunted. Fie lay down, reached in the hole and began pulling dirt out with one hand. When they'd cleared a six-inch square of plastic, Del handed him his knife, and Flowers cut the plastic. Didn't smell much of anything; Flowers pulled the sliced plastic apart, then said to Lucas, “You're standing in the light, man.”

Lucas moved to the other side of the hole, still peering in, and Flowers got farther down into the hole, poked for a moment, then pushed himself out and rolled onto his butt, dusting his hands. “I can see some jeans,” he said.

The crime-scene supervisor gave them an endless amount of shit about digging out the hole, until Lucas told him to go fuck himself and didn't smile.

The guy was about to try for the last word when Flowers, his shirt still soaked with sweat and grime, added, “If you'd done the crime-scene work right, we wouldn't have had to come down and do it for you, dick-weed.”

“Hey. You didn't say anything about a fuckin' graveyard.” “It's all a crime scene,” Flowers said. He wasn't smiling, either. “You shoulda found it.”

They took two hours getting the bag out of the hole. Lucas didn't want to look at it. He and Flowers and Del gathered around the back of Flowers's boat and drank Diet Cokes and Flowers pulled out a fishing rod and reel and rigged a slip sinker on it, talking about going down to the river and trying for some catfish. “Got a shovel, we'll find some worms somewhere…” The crime-scene guy came over and said, “It's out. Whoever it is had a short black haircut and wore thirty-six/thirty-four Wrangler jeans, Jockey shorts, and size-eleven Adidas.”

Lucas was bewildered. “Size eleven? Jockey shorts?”

And, one of the crime-scene guys said a few minutes later, whoever it was still carried his wallet. Inside the wallet was an Illinois driver's license issued eight years earlier in the name of Theodore Lane.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Del asked.

The crime-scene guy called for a bigger crew with ground-penetrating radar and a gas sniffer. Two dozen people milled around, talking about secret graveyards, but there was no real graveyard.

At three o'clock they found the only other grave that they would find. It was fifty yards south of the first one, in an area that Lucas, Del, and Flowers had walked right over. The top of the grave was occupied by a driftwood stump, which was why they missed it. The bottom was occupied by Gabriella Coombs, curled into a knot in a green plastic garbage bag, wasted and shot through with maggots, almost gone now…

At home that night, after taking a twenty-minute shower, trying to get the stink of death off him, Lucas went down to dinner and grumped at everyone. Coombs was going to haunt him for a while; chip a chunk off the granite of his ass.

The other thing that bothered him a bit was that he knew, from experience, that he'd forget her, that in a year or so, he'd have put her away, and would hardly think of her again.

He'd gotten down a beer and was watching a Cubs game, when Weather came with the phone, and handed it to him. The medical examiner said, “I took a look and can tell you only one thing: it's gonna be tough. Nothing obvious on the body, nothing under her fingernails. We'll process anything we find, but if there wasn't much to start with, and it's been days since she went into the ground…”

“Goddamnit,” Lucas said. “There's gotta be something.”

There was; but it took him a while to think of it.

Lucy Coombs came to the door barefoot and when she saw Lucas standing there, hands in his pockets, asked through the screen door, “Why didn't you come and tell me?”

Coombs had gone to look at her daughter at the medical examiner's. Lucas had avoided all of it: had sent Jerry Wilson, the original St. Paul investigator in the Marilyn Coombs murder, to tell Lucy that her daughter's body had been found.

Now, standing on her porch, he said, “I couldn't bear to do it.” She looked at him for a few seconds, then pushed the screen door open. “You better come in.”

She had a plastic jug of iced tea in the refrigerator and they went out back and sat on the patio, and she told him how she, a man that she thought may have been Gabriella's father, and another couple, had traveled around the Canadian Rockies in a converted old Molson's beer truck, smoking dope and listening to all the furthest-out rock tapes, going to summer festivals and living in provincial parks… and nailing a couple of other good-looking guys along the way. “I always had this thing for hot-looking blond guys, no offense.” “None taken.”

“Summer of my life. Good time, good dope, good friends, and knocked up big-time,” she said, sitting sideways on a redwood picnic-table bench.

“God, I loved the kid. But I wasn't a good mother. We used to fight… we started fighting when she was twelve and didn't quit until she was twenty-two. I think we both had to grow up.”

She rambled on for a while, and then asked the question that had been out there, in the papers and everywhere else. “Are you sure Amity Anderson did it?”

“No,” Lucas said. “In fact, I don't think she did. She might have, but there are some problems…”

He'd gone back to Eau Claire, he told her, and talked to Frazier, the sheriff's deputy, and all the other investigators they could reach. Amity Anderson had no boyfriend, they said. Just didn't have one. They accounted for her nights, they looked at phone records, at gasoline credit-card receipts, they checked her mail. She had no boyfriend…

And she had that alibi for the night Donaldson was killed. The alibi was solid. Would Leslie Widdler have gone into the house on his own? Wouldn't he have wanted a backup? The night Gabriella disappeared, there were two phone calls from Anderson's house, one early, one fairly late. The recipients of the phone calls agreed that they'd spoken to her.

“That doesn't mean she couldn't have done it, but it's pretty thin,” Lucas said.

“You think Widdler's wife, I saw her name in the newspaper…”

“Jane.”

“You think she was involved?” Coombs asked.

“I think so,” Lucas said. “Anderson insists that she was-and to some of us, she sounds like she's telling the truth.”

“So it would be Jane Widdler who killed Gabriella.”

“Probably helped her husband,” Lucas said. “Yes. They worked as a team.”

Coombs took a sip of lemonade, sucked on an ice cube for a moment. “Are you going to get her?”

“I don't know,” Lucas said. “I see a possibility-but we'd need your help.”

“My help?”

“Yes. Because of your mother, and the Armstrong quilts, you're in… sort of a unique position to help us,” Lucas said.

She looked him over for a minute, sucking on the ice cube, then let it slip back into the glass, and leaned toward him. “I'll help, if I can. But you know what I'd really like? Because of Mom and Gabriella?”

“What?”

Her voice came out as a snarl: “I'd like a nice cold slice of revenge. That's what I'd like.”

Jane Widdler was sitting on the floor in a pool of light, working the books and boxes and shipping tape. The cops had photographed everything, with measurement scales, and were looking at lists of stolen antiques. But Widdler knew that the store stock was all legitimate; she had receipts for it all.

Leslie's suicide and implication in the Bucher, Donaldson, and Toms murders had flashed out over the Internet antique forums, so everybody who was anybody knew about it.