“Oo. Do me, do me,” McGuire said.
In the car, McGuire said she might as well go home, since her class would be ending.
“Hope the neighbors see me coming home in a Porsche. They'll think I'm having a fling.”
“Maybe I oughta put a bag over my head,” Lucas said.
“That'd be no fun,” she said. “I want people to see it's a big tough old guy.”
Lucas was still cranked from Flowers's original call, and, in the back of his head, couldn't believe that they'd found Jesse so quickly. He dropped McGuire off at her home in Highland. She waved goodbye going up the walk, and he thought she was a pretty good kid. He looked at his watch. If he took a little time, rolled down Ford Parkway with his arm out the window, enjoying the day and the leafy street, and maybe blowing the doors off the Corvette that had just turned onto the parkway in front of him, he'd just about make dinner with the wife and kids.
He was done with Kline and the Barths.
Now he had a motherfucker who was killing old people, and he was going to run him down like a skunk on a highway.
Dinner with the kids was fine; in the evening, he read a Chuck Logan thriller novel.
Late at night, Flowers called: “We got an indictment. They're going to process the paper tomorrow, talk to Kline's attorney, set up a surrender late tomorrow afternoon, and then make the announcement day after tomorrow. Cole's set it up so they can arrest and book him before the press finds out, he'll make bail, then go hide out. Then the announcement.”
“Sounds good to me,” Lucas said. “You headed back south?” “I'm here tonight, I'm heading back tomorrow at the crack of dawn.”
In the morning, after a few phone calls, Lucas took a meeting at Bucher's house.
He'd asked Gabriella Coombs to come over, to sit in.
The Widdlers had almost finished the appraisals of the contents of the house, with negative results. “In other words,” Smith said, “there's nothing missing.”
“There are a few things missing, John,” Lucas said. “The Reckless painting, for one.
A couple of chairs.”
“According to a kid, who admitted that he hadn't been up there for a while, and that maybe Bucher got rid of them herself,” Smith said.
“The whole thing smells. And we've now got a couple of other deals…”
“Lucas, I'm not saying you're wrong,” Smith said. “What I'm saying is, you've got a killing years ago in Eau Claire where a woman was shot and nothing was taken but some money. An old man was strangled in Des Moines and the case was cleared. Another woman probably fell, according to the medical examiner, with all respect to Miss Coombs here. We've got nothing to work with. It's been a while since you worked at the city level, but I'll tell you what, it has gotten worse.
I'm up to my ass in open investigations, and until we get more to go on…”
“That's not right,” Coombs said. “My grandmother was murdered and her house was robbed.”
“That's not what…” Smith shook his head.
Leslie Widdler came in, carrying a white paper bag. He said, “We've got a bunch of sticky buns from Frenchy's. Who wants one?”
Lucas held up his hand and Leslie handed him the sack. Lucas took out a sticky bun and passed the bag to Smith, who took one and passed it to Coombs, who took one, and then they all sat chewing and swallowing and Lucas said, “Thanks, Les… John tells me you haven't found a single goddamn stick of furniture missing. Is that right?”
“We've gone through the photographs one at a time, and we've found two pieces that are not actually here,” Widdler said. “We've accounted for both of them. Both were given away.”
“What about the swoopy chairs that the Lash kid was talking about?”
Widdler shrugged. “Can't put our finger on them. 'Swoopy' isn't a good enough description.
He can't even tell us the color of the upholstery, or whether the seats were leather or fabric. All he ever looked at were the legs.”
“Well… if he's right, how much would they be worth?”
“I can't tell you that, either,” Widdler said. “Everything depends on what they were, and condition. A pristine swoopy chair, of a certain kind, might be worth a thousand dollars. The same chair, in bad shape, might be worth fifty. Or, it might be a knockoff, which is very common, and be worth zero. So-I don't know. What I do know is, there's a lot of furniture here that's worth good money, and they didn't take it. There are some old, old oriental carpets, especially one up in Mrs. Bucher's bedroom, that would pull fifty thousand dollars on the open market. There are some other carpets rolled up on the third floor. If these people were really sophisticated, they could have brought one of those carpets down and unrolled it in Mrs. Bucher's bedroom, taken the good one, and who would have known? Really?”
They chewed some more, and Smith said, “One more bun. Who wants it? I'm all done…”
Widdler said, “Me.” Smith passed him the sack and Widdler retrieved the bun, took a bite, and said, “The other thing is, we know for sure that Mrs. Bucher gave things away from time to time. There may have been some swoopy chairs and a Reckless painting.
Has anybody talked to her accountants about deductions the last couple of years?”
“Yeah, we did,” Smith said. “No swoopy chairs or Reckless anything.”
“Well…” Widdler said. And he pressed the rest of the bun into his face as though he were starving.
“Not right,” Coombs said again, turning away from Widdler and the sticky bun.
Lucas sighed, and said, “I'll tell you what. I want you to go over every piece of paper you can find in your grandma's house. Anything that could tie her to Bucher or Donaldson or Toms. I'll do the same thing here, and I'll get Donaldson's sister working on it from her end.”
“The St. Paul cops won't let me into the house yet,” Coombs said. “They let me clean up the open food, but that's it.”
“I'll call them,” Lucas said. “You could get in tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Coombs said.
“Hope you come up with something, because from my point of view, this thing is drifting away to never-never land,” Smith said. “We need a major break.”
“Yeah,” Lucas said. “I hear you.”
“How much time can you put into it?” Smith asked.
“Not much,” Lucas said. “I've got some time in the next two weeks, but with this election coming up, any sheriff with a problem case is gonna try to shift it onto us-make it look like something is getting done. The closer we get to the election, the busier we'll be. “ “Not right,” said Coombs. “I want Grandma's killer found.”
“We're giving it what we can,” Lucas said. “I'll keep it active, but John and I know… we've been cops a long time… it's gonna be tough.”
“Bucher's gonna be tough,” Smith said. “With your grandma and the others… hell, we don't even know that they're tied together. At all. And Donaldson and Toms are colder than ice.” He finished the sticky bun and licked the tips of his fingers.
“Man, that was good, Les.”
“The French aren't all bad,” Widdler said, using his tongue to pry a little sticky bun out of his radically fashionable clear-plastic braces.
Lucas walked Coombs out to her car. “You can't give up,” she said.
Lucas shook his head. “It's not like we're giving up-it's that right now, we don't have any way forward. We'll keep pushing all the small stuff, and maybe something will crack.”
She turned at the car and stepped closer and patted him twice on the chest with an open hand. “Maybe I'm obsessive-compulsive; I don't think I can get on with life until this is settled. I can't stop thinking about it. I need to get something done.
I spent all those years screwing around, lost. Now I've finally got my feet on the ground, I've got some ideas about what I might want to do, I'm getting some friends… it's like I'm just getting started with real life. Then… this. I'm spinning my wheels again.”
“You got a lot of time, you're young,” Lucas said. “When I was your age, everything seemed to move too slow.
