Know what she says?”
“Is this gonna hurt?” Lucas asked.
Smith nodded. “She says that Jane Widdler called her, not Leslie. She said that Jane told her that her car had broken down, and since Anderson was only a few blocks away, asked her to come over and pick her up, give her a ride home. Anderson said she did.
She said Widdler told her she had to pee, so they stopped at Anderson's house, and Widdler went in the bathroom. That's when Widdler picked up the prescription bottle and the hair, Anderson says.”
“She's saying that Jane Widdler murdered Leslie,” Lucas said.
“Yep.”
“Anderson never saw a body?”
“She never saw the car, she says,” Smith said. “She says Widdler told her that she was afraid to wait in a dark area, and walked out to Cretin. She said she picked up Widdler on Cretin, took her back to her house to pee, and then took her home.”
“How long was the phone call?” Lucas asked.
“About twenty-three seconds.”
“Doesn't sound like a call between a guy about to commit suicide, and his lover,” Lucas said to Del.
“I don't know,” Del said. “Never having been in the position.”
“She's got this story, and she admits it sounds stupid, but she's sticking to it.
And she does it like…” Smith hesitated, then said it: “… like she's innocent.
You know those people who never stop screaming, and then it turns out they didn't do it? Like that.”
“Hmm,” Lucas said.
“Another thing,” Del said. “Even if we find some proof that Widdler was involved, how do we ever convict? A defense attorney would put Anderson on trial and shred the case.”
“So you're saying we ought to convict Anderson because we can?” Lucas asked.
“No,” Del said. “Though it's tempting.”
“You oughta go over and talk to her-Anderson,” Smith said to Lucas.
“Maybe I will,” Lucas said. “All right if I take a noncop with me?”
“Who'd that be?”
“A bartender,” Lucas said.
Amity Anderson had never been big, and now she looked like a Manga cartoon character when the crime boss fetches her out of the dungeon. She'd lost any sparkle she'd ever had; her hair hung lank, her nails were chewed to her fingertips.
“This is all off the record,” Lucas said.
Anderson's lawyer nodded. “For your information: no court use, no matter what is said.”
Lucas introduced Sloan, who'd put on his best brown suit for the occasion. “Mr. Sloan is an old friend and a former police officer who has always had a special facility in… conversations with persons suspected of crimes,” Lucas said carefully. “I asked him to come along as a consultant.”
Everybody nodded and Anderson said, “I didn't know about any killings. But I knew Leslie and Jane, and when Mrs. Donaldson was killed, I worried. But that's all. I didn't have any proof, I didn't have any knowledge. With Mrs. Bucher, it never crossed my mind… then, when I read about Marilyn Coombs being killed, I thought about it again. But I pushed it away. Just away-I didn't want to think about it.”
Sloan took her back through the whole thing, with a gentle voice and thin teacher's smile, working more like a therapist than a cop, listening to the history: about how Anderson and the Widdlers had become involved in college, and then drifted apart.
How the surprise call came years later, about the quilts. About her move to the Cities, occasional contacts with the Widdlers, including a sporadic sexual relationship with Jane Widdler.
“And then you drove down to a barn full of stolen antiques and began stealing them a second time-with a key you had in your pocket,” Lucas said.
“That's because Jane set me up,” Anderson said through her teeth, showing the first bit of steel in the interrogation. “I couldn't believe it-I couldn't believe how she must have worked it. She knew I was friends with Don Harvey. He's a very prominent museum person from Chicago, he used to be here. She said he was coming to town, and if he authenticated some paintings for them, that they would give me fifteen percent of the sale price, above their purchase price. She thought I had some influence with Don because we'd dated once, and were friends. If he okayed the paintings-I mean, if he'd okayed that Reckless painting, I could have gotten seventy-five thousand dollars in fees for that one painting.”
She shook her head again, a disbelieving smile flickering across her face: “She gave me a key and said she'd send me a map in the mail. I got it out of my mailbox when you were watching me.”
Lucas nodded. They'd seen her get home, go straight to the mailbox, and then out to the car.
“John Smith found the map…” Anderson began.
“He said it was a really old map, Xeroxed, with your fingerprints all over it.”
“And the envelope…” Anderson said.
“Just an envelope…”
“Well, can't you do some science stuff that shows the key was inside? Or the map? I see all this stuff on Nova, where is it?”
“On Nova,” Lucas said.
Her eyes drifted away: “My God, she completely tangled me up…”
They talked to her for another half hour, Sloan watching her face, backtracking, poking her with apparently nonrelevant questions that knitted back toward possible conflicts in what she was saying.
When he was done, he nodded to Lucas, and Lucas said, “It's been fun. We'll get back to you.”
“Do you believe me?” she asked Lucas.
“I believe evidence,” Lucas said. “I don't know about Sloan.”
Sloan said, “I gotta think about it.”
As they were leaving, Anderson said, with a wan, humorless smile, “You know the last mean thing that Botox bitch did? She stole my alprazolam to put in the van, just when I needed it most. I could really use some stress meds right now.”
Out in the hallway Sloan looked at Lucas. Lucas was leaning against the concrete-block wall, rubbing his temples, and Sloan said, “What?”
Lucas pushed away from the wall and asked, “What do you think?”
“She was bullshitting us some, but not entirely,” Sloan said. “I'd probably convict her if I were on a jury, based on the evidence, but I don't think she killed anyone.”
“Okay.”
“What happened with you?” Sloan asked. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”
Lucas called the evidence guys at St. Paul, then the supervisor of the crime-scene crew who'd gone over Anderson's house. Then he went down to Del's desk and said, “Let's take a walk around the block.”
Outside, summer day, hot again, puffy white fair-weather clouds; flower beds showing a little wilt from the lack of rain. Del asked, “What's happening?”
“Remember all that shit Smith said? About the evidence coming in?”
“Yeah.” Del nodded.
“So one of the clinchers was an amber plastic prescription bottle,” Lucas said. “You know the kind, with the click-off white tops?”
“Uh-huh. I know about the bottle.”
“When I was looking into Anderson, when I first tripped over her, I didn't have anything to go on,” Lucas continued. “I thought I might take an uninvited look around her house.”
“Ah.” They'd both done it before, breaking-and-entering, a dozen times between the two of them. Life in the big city.
“In the bathroom, I found a bottle of alprazolam and a bottle of Ambien,” Lucas said.
“I noticed them because I use them myself. The thing is, there wasn't any alprazolam in Anderson's house when St. Paul went through the place last night. And the stuff in the van was only three weeks old-it was a new prescription. Unless they used the van some other time, that we don't know about, and that seems unlikely,
