including rural agricultural scenes, some from the American West, others apparently French; and on the herringboned hardwood floors, a series of Persian carpets would have marched toward the far back door in perfectly aligned diminishing perspective.
The hall was no longer lined with paintings, but Lucas knew that it had been, because the paintings were lying on the floor, most faceup, some facedown, helter-skelter.
The rugs had been pulled askew, as though somebody had been looking beneath them.
For what, Lucas couldn't guess. The glass doors on an enormous china cabinet had been broken; there were a dozen collector-style pots still sitting on the shelves inside, and the shattered remains of more on the floor, as if the vandals had been looking for something hidden in the pots. What would that be? A dozen pieces of furniture had been dumped. Drawers lay on the floor, along with candles and candlesticks, knickknacks, linen, photo albums, and shoe boxes that had once contained photos. The photos were now scattered around like leaves; a good number of them black-and-white. There was silverware, and three or four gold-colored athletic trophies, a dozen or so plaques. One of the plaques, lying faceup at Lucas's feet, said, “For Meritorious Service to the City, This Key Given March 1, 1899, Opening All the Doors of St. Paul.”
Cops were scattered along the hall, like clerks, being busy, looking at papers, chatting.
Two were climbing the stairs to the second floor, hauling with them a bright-yellow plastic equipment chest.
Lieutenant John T. Smith was in what Lucas thought must have been the music room, since it contained two grand pianos and an organ.
Smith was sitting backward on a piano bench, in front of a mahogany-finished Steinway grand, talking on a cell phone. He was looking at the feet and legs of a dead black woman who was lying facedown on a Persian carpet in a hallway off the music room.
All around him, furniture had been dumped, and there must have been a thousand pieces of sheet music lying around. “Beautiful Brown Eyes.” “Camping Tonight.” “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” “Tammy.”
An amazing amount of shit that rich people had, Lucas thought.
Smith saw Lucas, raised a hand. Lucas nodded, stuck his head into the hallway, where a St. Paul crime-scene crew, and two men from the medical examiner's office, were working over the body.
Not much to see. From Lucas's angle, the woman was just a lump of clothing. One of the ME's investigators, a man named Ted, looked up, said, “Hey, Lucas.”
“What happened?”
“Somebody beat the shit out of her with a pipe. Maybe a piece of re-rod. Not a hammer, nothing with an edge. Crushed her skull, that's what killed her. Might have some postmortem crushing, we've got lacerations but not much bleeding. Same with Mrs.
Bucher, upstairs. Fast, quick, and nasty” “When?”
Ted looked up, and eased back on his heels. “Johnny says they were seen late Friday afternoon, alive, by a researcher from the Historical Society who's doing a book on Summit Avenue homes. He left at four-thirty. Neither one of them went to church on Sunday Sometimes Mrs. Bucher didn't, but Mrs. Peebles always did. So Johnny thinks it was after four-thirty Friday and before Sunday morning, and that looks good to me. We'll rush the lab work…”
“That's Peebles there,” Lucas said.
“Yo. This is Peebles.”
Smith got off the cell phone and Lucas stepped over, grinned: “You'll be rolling in glory on this one,” he said. “Tom Cruise will probably play your character. Nothing but watercress sandwiches and crиme brыlйe from now on.”
“I'm gonna be rolling in something,” Smith said. “You getting involved?”
“If there's anything for me to do,” Lucas said.
“You're more'n welcome, man.”
“Thanks. Ted says sometime between Friday night and Sunday morning?”
Smith stood up and stretched and yawned. “Probably Friday night. I got guys all over the neighborhood and we can't find anybody who saw them Saturday, and they were usually out in the garden on Saturday afternoon. Beheading roses, somebody said. Do you decapitate roses?”
“I don't know,” Lucas said. “I don't, personally.”
“Anyway, they got four phone calls Saturday and three more Sunday, all of them kicked through to the answering service,” Smith said. “I think they were dead before the phone calls came in.”
“Big storm Friday night,” Lucas said.
“I was thinking about that-there were a couple of power outages, darker'n a bitch.
Somebody could have climbed the hill and come in through the back, you wouldn't see them come or go.”
Lucas looked back at Peebles's legs. Couldn't be seen from outside the house. “Alarm system?”
“Yeah, but it was old and it was turned off. They had a series of fire alarms a couple of years ago, a problem with the system. The trucks came out, nothing happening.
They finally turned it off, and were going to get it fixed, but didn't.”
“Huh. Who found them?”
“Employees. Bucher had a married couple who worked for them, did the housekeeping, the yard work, maintenance,” Smith said. “They're seven-thirty to three, Monday through Friday, but they were off at a nursery this morning, down by Hastings, buying some plants, and didn't get back here until one o'clock. Found them first thing, called nine-one-one. We checked, the story seems good. They were freaked out. In the right way.”
“Anything stolen?”
“Yeah, for sure. They got jewelry, don't know how much, but there's a jewelry box missing from the old lady's bedroom and another one dumped. Talked to Bucher's niece, out in L.A., she said Mrs. Bucher kept her important jewelry in a safe-deposit box at Wells Fargo. Anything big she had here she'd keep in a wall safe behind a panel in the dining room…” He pointed down a hall to his right, past a chest of drawers that had held children's clothing, pajamas with cowboys and Indians on them, and what looked like a coonskin cap; all been dumped on the floor.
“The dining room's down that way. Whoever did it, didn't find the panel. The safe wasn't touched. Anyway, the jewelry's probably small stuff, earrings, and so on.
And they took electronics. A DVD player definitely, a CD player, a radio, maybe, there might be a computer missing… We're getting most of this from Mrs. Bucher's friends, but not many really knew the house that well.”
“So it's local.”
“Seems to be local,” Smith said. “But I don't know. Don't have a good feel for it yet.”
“Looking at anybody?”
Smith turned his head, checking for eavesdroppers, then said, “Two different places.
Keep it under your hat?”
“Sure.”
“Peebles had a nephew,” Smith said. “He's in tenth grade over at Cretin. His mother's a nurse, and right now she's working three to eleven at Regions. When she's on that shift, he'll come here after school. Peebles'd feed him dinner, and keep an eye on him until his mom picked him up. Sometimes he stayed over. Name is Ronnie Lash. He'd do odd jobs for the old ladies, edge trimming, garden cleanup, go to the store. Pick up laundry.”
“Bad kid?”
Smith shook his head. “Don't have a thing on him. Good in school. Well liked. Wasn't here Friday night, he was out dancing with kids from school. But his neighborhood… there are some bad dudes on his street. If he's been hanging out, he could've provided a key. But it's really sensitive.”
“Yeah.” A black kid with a good school record, well liked, pushed on a brutal double murder. All they had to do was ask a question and there'd be accusations of racism. “Gotta talk to him, though,” Lucas said. “Get a line going, make him one of many. You know.”
Smith nodded, but looked worried anyway. The whole thing was going to be enough of a circus, without a civil-rights pie fight at the same time.
