“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 investigation 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?”
