“Yeah, but they all wound up in museums, and the woman who benefited is dead,” Lucas said. “It seems like some of the money is missing. She didn't get enough money. Maybe.
It's all so long ago. Maybe the Sotheby's guy could tell me about it tomorrow, but Gabriella's out there now… And what about the van?”
“You're going crazy sitting here,” Weather said. “Why don't you go over to Bucher's place, and see if she has anything on the quilt she donated to the Walker? You'll need to look sooner or later. Why not now? You'd be doing something…”
“Because it feels like the wrong thing to do. I feel like I ought to be out driving down alleys, looking for Gabriella.”
“You're not going to find her driving up and down alleys, Lucas.”
He stood up. “I'm going to eat some cheese and crackers.”
“Why don't you take them with you?”
He DID, a bowl of sliced cheese and water crackers on the passenger seat of the Porsche, munching through them as he wheeled down to Bucher's house. The mansion was brightly lit. Inside, he found the Bucher heirs, six people, four women and two men, dividing up the goodies.
Carol Ann Barker, the woman with the tiny nose, came to greet him. “The St. Paul people said we could begin some preliminary marking of the property,” she explained.
“People are getting ready to go back home, and we wanted to take this moment with the larger pieces.”
Lucas said, “Okay-I'll be in the office, looking at paper. Have you seen check registers anywhere? Stuff going back a few years? Or tax returns…? Anything to do with the buying and donation of the Armstrong quilt?”
“The Armstrong quilt?”
She didn't know what it was, and when Lucas explained, pursed her lips, and said, “She had an annual giving program. There are some records in her office, we looked to see if we could find anything about the Reckless painting. We didn't find anything, but there are documents on donations. Check registers are filed on the third floor, there's a room with several old wooden file cabinets… I don't know what years.”
Barker showed him the file: it was an inch thick, and while Barker went back to marking furniture, he thumbed through it, looking for the quilt donation. Not there. Looked through it again. Still found nothing.
He had the date of the quilt donation, and found donations of smaller items on dates on either side of it. Scratched his head. Rummaged through the files, looking for more on art, or donations. Finally, gave up and climbed the stairs to the third floor.
The file room was small and narrow and smelled of crumbling plaster; dust and small bits of plaster littered the tops of the eight file cabinets. The room was lit by a row of bare bulbs on the ceiling. Lucas began opening drawers, and in the end cabinets, the last ones he looked at, found a neat arrangement of check registers, filed by date. There was nothing of interest that he could see around the time of the quilt donation; but as he worked backward from the donation, he eventually found a check for $5,000 made out to Marilyn Coombs.
For the quilt? Or for something else Coombs had found? He looked in his notebooks for the date of the quilt auction in New York. The check to Coombs had been issued seven months earlier. Maybe not related; but why hadn't there been any other check to Coombs? In fact, the only large check he'd seen had been to a car dealer.
He was still stuck. Stuck in a small room, dust filtering down on his neck. He ought to be out looking for Gabriella…
The heirs were finishing up when Lucas came back down the stairs. Barker asked, “Find anything?”
“No. Listen, have you ever heard of a woman named Marilyn Coombs?”
Barker shook her head: “No… should I have?”
“She was an acquaintance of your aunt's, the person who originally found the Armstrong quilts,” Lucas said. “She was killed a few days ago… If you find anything with the name 'Coombs' on it, could you call me?”
“Sure. Right away. You don't think there's a danger to us?” The other heirs had stopped looking at furniture, and turned toward him.
“I don't think so,” he said. “We've got a complicated and confusing problem, we may have had a couple of murders and maybe a kidnapping. I just don't know.”
There was a babble of questions then, and he outlined the known deaths. One man asked anxiously, “Do you think it's just random? Or is there a purpose behind the killings? Other than money?”
“I don't know that, either,” Lucas said. “Part of this may be coincidence, but I'm starting to think not. If these killings are connected somehow, I would think it would have to do with some special knowledge that would give away the killers. In addition to the money angle, the robbery aspect.”
The man exhaled: “Then I'm good. I don't know nothin' about nothin'.”
Discouraged, Lucas went back to the car, making a mental list of things to do in the morning, calls to make. He didn't want to call Lucy Coombs, because he didn't want to talk to her again. Instead, he called John Smith, who was home watching television.
“Not a thing,” Smith said. “I'll get a call as soon as anybody finds anything. Finds a shoelace. So far, we haven't found a thing.”
Heading toward home, a fire truck, siren blasting away, went by on a cross street.
He could hear more sirens to the south, not far away, and halfway home, with the windows in the car run down, he could smell the distinctive odor of a burning house.
He'd never figured out what it was, exactly-insulation, or plaster, or old wood, or some combination-but he'd encountered it a dozen times in his career, and it never smelled good.
Back at home, he found Weather in the kitchen, sitting at the counter with a notepad.
She asked, “You have time to run to the store?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said. Ought to be doing something.
“I'm making a list…”
He was waiting for the list when his cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID: Flowers.
“Yeah?”
“I just got a call from Kathy Barth,” Flowers said. “Somebody just firebombed her house.”
The fire was out by the time Lucas got back. He'd driven right past it on the way home, but a block north, hadn't seen the smoke against the night sky, and the flames had been confined to the back side of the house.
Kathy and Jesse Barth were standing in the front yard talking to firemen when Lucas walked across the fire line. Jesse Barth saw him coming and pointed him out to her mother, who snapped something at her daughter, and then started toward Lucas.
“My house is burned down because of you assholes,” she shouted.
Lucas thought she was going to hit him, and put his hands up, palms out. “Wait, wait, wait… I just heard. Tell me what happened.”
“Somebody threw a firebomb through my back window, right in the kitchen, right through the window, everything's burned and screwed up and there's water…”
She suddenly went to her knees on the dirty wet grass, weeping. Jesse walked up to stand next to her, put her hand on her mother's shoulder. “Virgil said nothing would happen,” the kid said. “Virgil said you'd look out for us.”
Lucas shook his head: “We don't know what's going on here,” he said. “We can't find anybody who might have tried to pull you off the street, who killed Screw…”
“It's those fuckin' Klines, you fuckin' moron,” Kathy Barth shouted, trying to get back on her feet. The fireman caught her under one arm, and helped her get up.
Lucas said, “Ah, Jesus, I'm sorry about this…”
“It's all my pictures, all of Jesse's things from when she was a kid, all of her school papers, my wedding dress…” She took a step toward the house, and the fireman said, “Whoa. Not yet.”
Lucas asked him, “How bad is it?”
“The kitchen's a mess. Miz Barth used a fire extinguisher on it, which was pretty brave, and that held it down some, and we got here pretty quick,” the fireman said.
“The actual fire damage is confined to the kitchen, but there's smoke damage, and foam. Some of the structure under the back of the house could be in trouble.”
Lucas asked Kathy Barth, “Do you have insurance?”
