“Here,” Stack said. He turned to the woman: “With her.”
“He was,” the woman said. To Stack: “This Gabriella's just a model?”
“Just a model,” Stack agreed.
“What kind of a car do you drive?” Lucas asked.
“An E-Class Mercedes-Benz station wagon.”
“What color?” Lucas asked.
“Black,” Stack said.
“You must do pretty well for yourself,” Shrake said. “A Benz.”
“It's a 'ninety-four,” Stack said. “I bought it used, with eighty-nine thousand miles on it.”
“Where's the van-the one you use for moving paintings?” Lucas asked.
Stack was mystified: “What van? I have a friend with a blue pickup, when I'm moving big sheets of plywood, but I never used a van.”
“Did you know Marilyn Coombs?” Lucas asked.
“No. Gabriella told me about her dying and about you guys investigating,” Stack said.
“In fact, I think she sorta had the hots for you.”
“For Lucas?” Shrake asked skeptically.
“If you're the guy who took her around her grandmother's house,” Stack said to Lucas.
“Yeah.”
“What'd you mean by 'had'?” Shrake asked. “You said she 'had' the hots for Lucas.
Do you think she's dead? Or just stopped having the hots?”
“Hell, you're the guys who think she's dead,” Stack said. “That's the way you're talking.”
“Did she say where she was going last night?” Lucas asked.
“Well, yeah,” Stack said. “She said she had to go because you-or somebody-asked her to go through her grandma's papers. Looking for clues, or something. Is that, uh… Where'd she disappear from, anyway?”
Lucas looked at Shrake, felt an emotional squeeze of fear and the cold finger of depression. “Bad,” he said. “Bad. Goddamnit to hell, this is bad.”
They pushed the painter for another ten minutes, then Lucas left Shrake with Stack and the woman, to get details of where they were overnight, to get an ID on the woman, to probe for holes in their stories.
On the way out to the car, Smith called: “We got a van. A two thousand one Chevy Express, looks to be a pale tan, but one of the geniuses here tells me that could be the light. It might be white. It went past the halfway house three times on Friday night, the night the storm came in. Can't see the occupants, but we think the tag is Wisconsin and we think we know two letters, but we can't make out the other letter or the numbers. We're going to send it off to the feds, see if they can do some photo magic with it. In the meantime, we're sorting vans out by the letters we know.”
“That's something,” Lucas said. “Listen, feed every name you've got associated with Bucher into the computer. I'll get you all the names I can pull out of the Donaldson and Toms files, and the Coombs stuff. Find that van… Once we know who we're looking for…”
“Get me the names,” Smith said.
“And listen: do me a favor,” Lucas said. “Go see this girl in the Kline case, her name is Jesse Barth. She lives up on Grand, her mother is Kathy, they're in the phone book. Have her look at the van. See if she thinks it might be the same one.”
“If it is… what does that mean?” Smith asked.
“I don't know. I'm freakin' out here, man. Just have her look at it, okay?”
“Okay,” Smith said. “I'll tell you something else: I'm gonna get that fuckin' Ronnie Lash and turn his ass into a cop.”
Lucas was in a hurry now, with Gabriella missing.
He kept thinking, The quilts, the van, the pipe; the quilts, the van, the pipe. The quilts, the van, the pipe…
He couldn't get at the van. Too many of them and he didn't have a starting place, unless Smith or the feds came up with something. The pipe didn't make any difference, unless he found the actual pipe that did the killing; a killer could buy as much pipe as he wanted at Home Depot.
That left the quilts. Gabriella had said that her mother was messing with quilts.
He got in the car, and pointed it toward the Coombs house, got Lucy Coombs on the phone: “Her friends say anything?”
“Nobody's seen her. Oh, God, where's my baby?”
“I'm coming over,” Lucas said.
Lucy Coombs lived in the Witch Hat neighborhood off University Avenue, in an olive-green clapboard house with a stone wall separating the front yard from the sidewalk. The yard had no grass, but was an overgrown jumble of yellow and pink roses, and leggy perennials yet to flower. The house had a damp, mossy, friendly look, with a flagstone pathway running from the front stoop around the side of the house and out of sight.
The front door was open and Lucas banged on the loosely hung screen door. He could hear people talking, and felt a twitch of hope: Had Gabriella shown up? Then a heavyset woman in a purple shift and long dangly earrings came to the door, said, “Yes?”
Lucas identified himself and the woman pushed the door open and whispered, “Anything?”
“No.”
“Lucy is terrified,” she said.
Lucas nodded. “I have to talk to her about her mother…”
There were three more unknown women in the kitchen with Coombs. Lucy Coombs saw him and shuffled forward, shoulders rounded, hands up in front of her as though she might punch him: “Where is she?”
“I don't know,” Lucas said. “We're looking, I've got the St. Paul cops out looking around, we're pushing every button we know.”
She wanted to shout at him, and to cry; she was crippled with fear: “You've got to find her. I can't stand this, you've got to find her.”
Lucas said, “Please, please, talk to me about your mother.”
“She was murdered, too, wasn't she?” Coombs asked. “They killed her and came back and took my baby…”
“Do you have any idea… who're they?”
“I don't know-the people who killed her.”
Lucas said, intent on Coombs: “This thing is driving me crazy. We have three dead women, and one missing. Two of them were involved in antiques, but your mother wasn't-but she had one antique that was taken, and then maybe returned, by somebody who may also have taken a quilting basket.”
“And Gabriella,” Coombs blurted.
Lucas nodded. “Maybe.”
“It's the Armstrong quilts,” one of the women said. “The curses.”
Lucas looked at her: She was older, thin, with dry skin and a pencil-thin nose. “The curses… the ones sewn into the quilts? Gabriella told me…”
The woman looked at the others and said, “It's the curses working. Not only three women dead, but the son who committed suicide, the father dies in the insane asylum.”
Another of the women shivered: “You're scaring me.”
“Did Bucher and Donaldson have something to do with the Armstrong quilts?” Lucas asked, impatient. He didn't believe in witchcraft.
Coombs said, “Yes. They both bought one from my mom, after Mom found them.”
Lucas said, “There were what, five quilts? Six, I can't remember…”
“Six,” the thin-nosed woman said. “One went to Mrs. Bucher, one went to Mrs. Donaldson, the other four were sold at auction. Big money. I think two of them went to museums and two went to private collectors. I don't know who…”
“Who did the auction?” Coombs said, “One of the big auction houses in New York. Um, I don't know how to pronounce it, Sotheby's?”
“Are there any here in Minneapolis?” Lucas asked.
The dangly-earring woman said, “At the Walker Gallery. Mrs. Bucher donated it.”
“Good. I'll go look at it, if I have time,” Lucas said. “Have you ever heard the name Jacob Toms?”
The women all looked at each other, shaking their heads. “Who's he?”
He was on his way out the door, intent on tracing the Armstrong quilts, when he was struck by a thought and turned around, asked Coombs: “The music box. You don't think Gabriella had it, do you? That she just used it to get an invest
igation going?”
Coombs shook her head: “No. I found Mom, and called the police, and then called Gabriella.
The police were already there when she came over. She was sad and mentioned the music box, and we went to look at it, and it wasn't there.”
“Okay. So somebody brought back the music box and took the sewing basket,” Lucas said. “Why did they do that? Why did they take the sewing basket? Was that part of the Armstrong quilt thing?”
“No, she just bought that kind of thing when she was hunting for antiques-I don't know where she got it.”
“I remember her talking about it at quilt group,” said the big woman in the purple shift. “She said she might see if she could sell it to a museum, or somewhere that did restorations, because the thread was old and authentic. Nothing special, but you know-worth a few dollars and kinda interesting.”
Coombs said, “There might be a… clue… wrapped up in the quilts. But that won't save Gabriella, will it? If they took her? A clue like that would take forever to work out…” Tears started running down her face.
Lucas lied again: “I still think it's better than fifty-fifty that she went off someplace.
She may have lost her keys in the dark, called somebody over to pick her up. She's probably asleep somewhere…”
He looked at his watch: she'd been gone for sixteen or eighteen hours. Too long.
“I'm running,” he said. “We'll find her.”
From his office, he looked up Sotheby's in New York, called, got routed around by people who spoke in hushed tones and non-New York accents, and finally wound up with a vice president named Archie Carton. “Sure. The auctions are public, so there's no secret about who bought what-most of the time, anyway. Let me punch that up for you…”
“What about the rest of the time?” Lucas asked.
“Well, sometimes we don't know,” Carton said. “A dealer may be bidding, and he's the buyer of record, but he's buying it for somebody else. And sometimes people bid by phone, to keep their identify confidential, and we maintain that confidentiality-but in a police matter, of course, we respond to subpoenas.”
“So if one of these things was a secret deal…”
“That's not a problem. I've got them on-screen, and all four sales were public,” Carton said. “One went to the Museum of Modern Art here in New York, one went to the National Museum of Women's Art in Washington, D.C., one went to the Amon Carter in Fort Worth, Texas, and one went to the Modern in San Francisco.”
“Does it say how much?”
“Yup. Let me run that up for you…” Lucas could hear keys clicking, and then Carton said, “The total was four hundred seventy thousand dollars. If you want, I could send you the file. I could have it out in five minutes.”
“Terrific,” Lucas said. “If my wife ever buys another antique, I'll make sure she buys it from you.”
“We'll be looking forward to it,” Carton said.
That'd been easy. Lucas leaned back and looked at the number scrawled on his notepad: $470,000. He thought about it for a moment, then picked up the phone and called Carton back.
“I'm sorry to bother you again, but I was looking in an antiques book, and I didn't see any quilts that sold for this much,” Lucas said. “Was there something really special about these things?”
“I could get you to somebody who could answer that…”
Two minutes later, a woman with a Texas accent said, “Yes, the price was high, but they were unique. The whole history of them pushed the price, and the curses themselves have almost a poetic quality to them. Besides, the quilts are brilliant. Have you seen one?”
“No. Not yet,” Lucas said.
“You should,” she said. “So you'd pay, what, a hundred and twenty-five thousand for one?”
The woman laughed. “No. Not exactly. What happened, was, the owner of the quilts, a Mrs. Coombs, put them up for sale, and we publicized the sale. Now, as it happened, two of the original six quilts had already been acquired by museums…”
“Two?”
“Yes. One was donated to the Art Institute of Chicago, and the other to the Walker Gallery in Minneapolis,” she said.
“I knew about the Walker.”
“The Walker and Chicago. Their original sales price established a price level.
Then, when the other four came up, the museums that were interested would have reached out to their donor base, informed them of the Armstrong quilt history, and they would have asked for support on this specific acquisition. All of these museums have thousands of supporters. All they had to do was find a hundred and thirty women interested in donating a thousand dollars each.
Remember: these quilts commemorate a woman fighting for her freedom and safety, for her very life, the only way she knew how. And how many affluent veterans of the feminist wars do we have donating to museums? Many, many.”
“Ah.” That made sense, he thought.
“Yes. So raising the money wouldn't have been a problem,” the woman said. “There were a dozen bids on each of them, mostly other regional museums, and, we had the four winners.”
“Thank you.”
Who'd said it? The woman with the dangly earrings? The thin-nosed woman? One of them had said, “Big money.”
Lucas turned and looked up at the wall over his bookcase, at a map of St. Paul. Gabriella Coombs had told him that her grandmother “got lucky” with the quilts, and with the money, and the money she had in her former house, and been able to buy in the Como neighborhood.
But houses on Coombs's block didn't cost $470,000, certainly not when she bought, and not even now, after the big price run-up. They might cost $250,000 now, probably not more than two-thirds of that when Coombs bought. Maybe $160,000, or $175,000.
And Gabriella said she'd put in money from her old house…
There was money missing. Where was it? For the first time, Lucas had the sense of moving forward. Most murders didn't involve big money. Most involved too many six-packs and a handy revolver. But if you had a murder, and there was big money missing… the two were gonna be related.
Bucher and Donaldson and Coombs, tied by quilts and methods.
As for the kidnap attempt on Jesse Barth, by somebody in a van, that was most likely a coincidence, he thought now. An odd coincidence, but they happened-and as he'd thought earlier, there were many, many vans around, especially white vans.
The two cases were separate: Coombs/Bucher on one side, Barth/Kline on the other.
All of Marilyn Coombs 's papers were in her house. He had Gabriella's keys in a bag in his car, he could use them to get in. All that time at Bucher's house, looking at paper, had been wasted. He'd been looking at the wrong paper. He needed Coombs's.
He was on his way north in the Porsche, when John Smith called.
“We showed the tape to Jesse Barth. She swears it's the same van.”
“What?”
“That's what she says. The van in the film shows what looks like a dent in the front passenger-side door, and she swears to God, she remembers the dent.”
Lucas had no reply, and after a moment, Smith asked, “So. What does that mean? Lucas?”
Marilyn Coombs's house was not as organized as Bucher's. There were papers all over the place, some in an old wooden file cabinet, others stuffed in drawers in the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom. Lucas found a plastic storage bin full of checkbooks trailing back to the '70s, but tax returns going back only four years.
He finally called his contact at the state tax office, and asked her to check Coombs's state returns, to see when she'd gotten the big money.
He had the answer in five minutes-computers made some things easier: “She had a big bump in income for one year, a hundred eighty-six thousand dollars and then, let's see, a total of thirty-three thousand dollars the year before, and thirty-five thousand nine hundred dollars the year after. We queried the discrepancy, and there's an accountant's letter reporting it as a onetime gain from the sale of antique quilts b
ought two years earlier. I don't have the letter, just the notation. Does that help?”
“I'll call you later and tell you,” Lucas said.
He spent an hour scratching through the pile of check registers, stopping now and again to peer sightlessly at the living room wall, thinking about the van. What the fuck was it? Where was the van coming from? The checks were in no particular order-it seemed that she'd simply tossed the latest one in a drawer, and then, when the drawer got full, dumped the old ones in a plastic tub and started a new pile in the drawer.
He finally found one that entered a check for $155,000. The numbers were heavily inked, as though they'd been written in with some emotion. He went through check registers for six months on either side of the big one, and found only two exceptionally large numbers: a check for $167,500 to Central States Title Company. She'd bought the house.
A few months later, she registered a check for $27,500; and then, a week later, a check payable to U.S. Bank for $17,320. The $27,500 was the sale of her old house, Lucas thought. She'd taken out a swing loan to cover the cost of her new house, and the check to U.S. Bank was repayment.
He'd been sitting on a rug as he sorted through the checks, and now he rocked back on his heels. Not enough coming in. There'd been $470,000 up for grabs, and she only showed $155,000 coming in as a lump sum. He closed one eye and divided $470,000 by $155,000… and figured the answer was very close to three.
He got a scrap of paper and did the actual arithmetic: $470,000 divided by three was $156,666. If Marilyn Coombs had gotten a check for that amount, and to use the $1,666 as a little happy-time mad money… then she might have deposited $155,000.
Where was the rest? And what the fuck was that van all about? He called Archie Carton at Sotheby's, and was told that Carton had left for the day, that the administrative offices were closed, and no, they didn't give out Carton's cell-phone number. Lucas pressed, and was told that they didn't know Carton's cell-phone number, which sounded like an untruth, but Lucas was out in flyover country, on the end of a long phone line, and the woman he was talking to was paid to frustrate callers.
“Thanks for your help,” he snarled, and rang off. Carton would have to wait overnight: he was obviously the guy to go to. In the meantime…
Invisible prey ld-17 Page 21
