They tramped back through the house, and on the way, Lash's pocket started to play a rock version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He took a cell phone out of his pocket, looked at it, pushed a button, and stuck it back in his pocket.
“You've got a cell phone,” Lucas said.
“Everybody's got a cell phone. Mom'n me, we don't have a regular phone anymore.”
Back ON the first floor, they ran into Smith again. Smith's left eyebrow went up, a question.
“Maybe something,” Lucas said. “Ronnie thinks a few things may have been taken. Can't nail it down, but stuff looks like it's been moved on the third floor. Couple of chairs may be missing, maybe a painting or two.”
“Tell him about the car,” Lash said.
“Oh yeah,” Lucas said. “They used a car to move the stuff. Or a van or a truck.”
Lucas explained and Smith said, “The Hill House has a security system with cameras looking out at the street. Maybe we'll see something on the tapes.”
“If they took those chairs, it'd have to be pretty good-sized,” Lash said. “Not a car. A truck.”
“Maybe they'll turn up on Antiques Roadshow?”
Smith said.
“Maybe. But we're not sure what's missing,” Lucas said. “Ronnie's not even sure that Bucher didn't get rid of the chairs herself.”
Mrs. Lash was sitting in the foyer, waiting for her son. When Lucas brought him back, she asked Ronnie, “Are you okay?”
“I'm fine. But just wait here for one minute, I want to look at something. I noticed it when the police brought us in…” He went back down the hall and into the music room, his feet cracking through bits and pieces of broken glass.
“He's been a big help,” Lucas said to Mrs. Lash. “We appreciate it.”
“I'm sure,” she said. Then, “I've seen you at Hennepin General. I used to work over there.”
“My wife's a surgeon, she's on staff at Hennepin,” Lucas said. “I'd hang out sometimes.”
“What's her name?” Lash asked.
“Weather Karkinnen.”
Lash brightened: “Oh, I know Dr. Karkinnen. She's really good.”
“Yeah, I know.” He touched a scar at his throat, made by Weather with a jackknife.
Ronnie came back, gestured toward the music room with his thumb.
“There's a cabinet in there with a glass front. It used to be full of old vases and dishes and bowls. One of them had Chinese coins in it. I'm not sure, because some of it's broken, but I don't think there are as many pieces as there used to be. It looks too… loose.”
“Could you identify any of it? If we came up with some stuff?”
Lash shook his head doubtfully. “I don't know anything about it. I never really looked at it, except, one time when Mrs. Bucher showed me the coins. It just looks too loose.
It used to be jammed with vases and bowls. Coins are all over the floor now, so they didn't take those.”
“Okay… Any other last thoughts?”
Ronnie said to Lucas, “ The love of money is the root of all evils.' Timothy, six-ten.”
The little asshole was getting on top of him.
Lucas said, “ 'Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.' Woody Allen.”
His mother cracked a smile, but Ronnie said, “I'll go with Timothy.”
As the Lashes left, Smith and another cop came rolling down the hall, picking up their feet, in a jacket-flapping, gun-flashing hurry.
“Got a break,” Smith said, coming up to Lucas. “Let's go.”
Lucas started walking. “What happened?”
“Guy showed up at Rhodes's with some jewelry in a jewelry box. Jewelry was cheap but the box was terrific. Our guys turned it over, it's inscribed 'Bucher' on the back.”
Rhodes's was a pawnshop. Lucas asked, “Do they know who brought it in?”
“That's the weird thing,” Smith said. “They do.”
“Where're we going?” Lucas asked. “Six-twelve Hay. It's off Payne, nine blocks north of Seventh. SWAT is setting up in the parking lot behind the Minnesota Music Cafe.”
“See you there.”
Payne Avenue was one of the signature drags across St. Paul's east side, once the Archie Bunker bastion of the city's white working class. The neighborhood had been in transition for decades, reliable old employers leaving, a new mix of Southeast Asians and blacks moving in. Lucas dropped past the cathedral, onto I-94 in a minute or so, up the hill to Mounds Boulevard, left and left again.
The cafe was an old hangout of his, at the corner of East Seventh and Payne, with a graveled parking lot in back, and inside, the best music in town. A dozen cars were in the lot, cops pulling on body armor. A half-dozen civilians were watching from the street. Smith arrived ten seconds after Lucas, and they walked over to Andy Landis, the SWAT squad commander.
“What you got?” Smith asked.
“We're in the house behind him and on both sides,” Landis said. “Name is Nathan Brown.
Don't have anything local on him, but the people in the house behind him say he moved here from Chicago four or five years ago. There're about fifty Nathan and Nate Browns with files down in Chicago, so we don't know who he is.”
“Got the warrant?” Smith asked.
“On the way. Two minutes,” Landis said.
“Love this shit,” Smith said to Lucas.
“You ever been on the SWAT squad?”
“Ten years, until the old lady nagged me out of it,” Smith said. “Turned my crank.”
“Wasn't it called something else? They called you the 'breath mint'?”
“CIRT,” Smith said. “Critical Incident Response Team.”
“SWAT's better,” Lucas said.
The warrant arrived and the SWAT squad moved out in three groups. Lucas and Smith tagged behind.
“The couple who found the bodies… did they notice anything missing around the house?” Lucas asked.
Smith shook his head. “Not that they mentioned. But they weren't housekeepers-the wife does the cooking, the husband did maintenance and gardening and the lawn. And with shit thrown all over the place like it was…
The niece is on the way from California. She'll probably know something.”
The SWAT team came in three groups: a blocking group at the back door, and two at the front of the house, one from each side. They came across the neighboring lawns, armored, face shields, carrying long arms. Moved diagonally across the lawn of the target house, quietly swarming the porch, doing a peek at the window, then kicking the front door in.
Nathan Brown, as it happened, was asleep in a downstairs bedroom. His girlfriend was feeding her kids grilled-cheese sandwiches in the kitchen, and began screaming when the cops came through, had the phone in her hand screaming “Nine-one-one, nine-one-one,” and the kids were screaming, and then the cops were in the bedroom on top of Brown.
Brown was yelling, “Hey… hey… hey,” like a stuck record.
Lucas came in as they rolled him and cuffed him; his room smelled of old wallpaper, sweat, and booze. Brown was shirtless, dazed, wearing boxer shorts. He'd left a damp sweat stain on the sheet of the queen-sized bed.
After some thrashing around, the freaked-out girlfriend sat in a corner sobbing, her two children crying with her. The cops found a plastic baggie with an assortment of earrings on the floor by Brown's pants. Asked where he got them, Brown roused himself to semicoherence, and said, “I shoulda known, there ain't no fuckin' toot' fairy.”
“Where'd you get them? He shook his head, not in refusal, but knowing the reaction he'd get: “I got them off a bus bench.”
That was stupid enough that it stopped everybody. “Off a bus bench?” Smith said.
“Off a bus bunch. Up at… up at Dale. Dale and Grand,” Brown said. His eyes tended to wander in his head. “Friday night. Midnight. Lookin' for a bus so I don't got to walk downtown. The box was sit-tin' right there, like the toot' fairy left it.”
“Full of jewelry,” said one of the cops.
“Not full. Only a little in there.” He craned his neck toward the door. He could hear the children, still screaming, and their mother now trying to calm them down.
Cops were starting to prop themselves in the doorway, to listen to what Brown was saying. “Did you knock the door down?” Brown asked. “Why the kids crying? Are the kids okay?”