Invisible prey ld-17

by John Sandford

  “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?”