“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?
18
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 mone
y 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.”