Lucas Davenport Collection

by John Sandford

  “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.”

  21

  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 fucking 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 p
eople 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 DCI.”

  “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 S
mith 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.

  22

  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.