"We can try," Mallard said. "Of course, it depends on what kind of cooperation we get. If it's Holland, we ought to be able to do something. We're fairly tight with the Dutch."
Lucas gave Mallard the details on Ware and the site address, and said, "Let me know."
"I'll call you tomorrow. And we ought to have something on the drawings first thing tomorrow morning."
LATER THAT NIGHT, Lucas and Weather walked down to Eau du Chien, a new French-American restaurant a block from the Ford Bridge in St. Paul. A waitress lit the white tapers on their table, they ordered Chardonnay and looked at the menus, and Weather asked, without taking her eyes off the menu, "Whatever happened to that engagement ring?"
"Gave it away," Lucas said absently, peering at his own menu.
Now she looked up, a wrinkle of vexation on her forehead. "Gave it away?"
"For charity. They had an auction, I got a tax write-off."
She said, "Lucas, this is serious. If you're pulling my leg…"
"It's in the chest of drawers, second drawer, in the box under my socks."
They looked at the menus for another moment, then Weather said, over the menu, "I've been thinking. We may be going at this whole thing a little too informally."
"You're scaring me," he said.
"I don't want to scare you. I just think we should Talk," she said.
"Ah, Jesus. Not that."
"What?" The wrinkle was back.
"Talk. I don't want to talk with a capital T. I want to get married and have a couple of kids and send them to parochial schools or wherever you think is best, but I really don't want to fuckin' hack through all the pieces ahead of time."
"I don't want to hack through all the pieces," she said. "I just want to have some kind of rational, up-front discussion. I mean, we haven't even formally decided to get married yet."
"Weather, will you marry me?"
"That's not what I was looking for, exactly," she said.
"Well, will you?"
"Well, yes," she said, the menu still open in front of her, like a book.
"Good. That's taken care of. Put the ring on. And tell me what the fuck Number Five is. That's not something with snails or clams, is it? Or from diseased geese?"
"Lucas…"
"Weather, I'm begging you," Lucas said. "Not right now. Not in Eau du Chien. We can go home, have a beer, get comfortable."
"You'll wave your arms around and rave," she said.
"I will not."
"You won't if we Talk here," she said.
"Goddamnit, Weather."
The waiter thought they were having a fight.
8
LUCAS ARRIVED AT the office at nine o'clock, ragged after a long, intense evening. Marcy was shouting at somebody on the telephone. A bullet-headed man sat in a chair next to her desk, watching her talk. When she saw Lucas walk in, she shouted, "Gotta go," hung up, and said, "Where've you been?"
"Had to run Weather over to her place early, then bagged out there for a couple of hours. What happened?"
"You know the guy with the butch haircut and the long black coat who was seen with Aronson outside of Cheese-It?"
"Yeah?" Lucas's eyes drifted toward the bullet-headed man, who'd turned to look up at him.
"This is the guy," Marcy said. "Jim Wise. Walked in a half hour ago."
Wise stood up, and Lucas noticed that he had a black coat folded over his arm. "I saw the picture in the paper and I thought it had to be me," he said. "I was in there with her, and I had the coat, and my hair used to be cut shorter."
"Put the coat on," Marcy said.
Wise pulled the coat on, buttoned it, shrugged his shoulders, and looked at Lucas.
"Damnit," Lucas said. Behind Wise, Marcy rolled her eyes in exasperation. "How well did you know her?"
"Not very well. I've got a furniture business, Wise-Hammersmith American Loft. Maybe you've heard of it?" When Lucas shook his head, Wise continued. "We sell period furniture and accessories-lamps, art pottery, and so on. Anyway, Ms. Aronson did freelance ad work and we needed some good-looking ads cheap, to run in the trade magazines… and that's what I was seeing her about."
"Did she do the ads?"
"Yeah. Three of them. They're still running." He stooped, picked up a brown leather briefcase, and took out a magazine with a chair on the front cover. He opened it to a folded-over page and showed Lucas the ad-a photograph of an English-flavored arrangement of fruitwood furniture topped with a glass lamp, and overlain with an arty typeface. "The thing is, getting an ad done is a lot more complicated that it should be. You've got to get certain kinds of output and all that computer stuff-I don't understand it. We just paid her two thousand dollars, and she arranged for the photographer and did the digital stuff, and gave us disks with the ads on them, all to the magazine's specs. That was what it was."
"Did you see her more than the one time?" Lucas asked.
"Yeah, when she delivered them. The disks with the ads. Our store's down on Lake Street."
"Why'd you meet at Cheese-It? She lived downtown here."
"She worked there. She was up front about it-she was working until she got her feet on the ground-and suggested that I just stop in when I had a minute, and we'd talk. We wound up walking down to a coffee bar so I could sketch out what we wanted. We'd already put a special type font on our signs and business cards, and we wanted to keep going with that in the ad."
They talked for another three minutes, and Lucas was convinced: Not only was he probably the right guy, he probably had nothing to do with the killing. "I've got a guy I want you to talk to, if you have a few minutes. Give a statement," he told Wise.
"You think I'm okay? The whole thing was quite a shock. Seeing the picture in the paper."
"We'll pull the picture," Lucas said. "We'll say that you came forward voluntarily and… Whatever sounds good."
LUCAS CALLED SLOAN, who was the best interrogator on the force, took him aside, and explained what he needed. Sloan took Wise off to Homicide to make the statement. Lucas looked at Marcy and said, "Shoots that idea in the ass."
"Not only that, wait'll you hear what the feds have for us," Marcy said.
"Good news or bad?"
"One of each. Which do you want first?"
"Bad."
"You know that profiling stuff on the drawings? It's shit. You could get it out of a book. When I got finished with the FBI stuff, I knew less than when I started. It's like somebody sawed off the top of my head and poured in sawdust."
"Nothing?"
"He's probably between twenty-five and forty and has some formal education in the arts."
"Ah, man. What's the good news?"
"The Dutch cops grabbed Ware's computer site in Holland. The forensic computer people traced it, and it was early morning in Holland already, and they called over there and the cops busted the place. They're doing something that copies all the files out, I don't know what, but they say there are huge files that gotta be pictures. Hundreds of them."
"Has Ware made bail yet?"
"Hearing's right now. The county's asking for a lien on his house."
"Who's his attorney?" Lucas asked.
"Jeff Baxter."
"All right. We want to talk to him, soon as he gets out of the hearing. In fact, I'll walk on over there and see if I can catch him."
"Too bad about the drawings," Marcy said.
"Yeah…" Lucas pulled at his lip for a moment, then said, "There's an art guy over in St. Paul. Supposed to be a big name. He's a painter. I don't know anything about him except that I called him one time. There was a question about a painting, and he just told me the answer right off the top of his head. A guy over at the U says he's a genius. Maybe if we asked him to take a look…"
"What's his name?" Marcy asked.
Lucas scratched his head. "Uh, Kidd. I can't remember his first name, but he's supposed to be pretty famous."
"I'll run him down," she said. "What're you doing the rest of the day?"
"Talk to Baxter and Ware, if I can. Think about it. Read all the paper. Goddamnit, I wish Wise had run for the border instead of coming in here. We woulda had him in a day."