“Brown's not adding up, either,” Smith said. “He's an alcoholic, he's on the bottle, really bad, and there's a liquor cabinet full of the best stuff in the world back there, and it's not touched.” Smith looked down to the squad where Brown was sitting.
“Jesus. Why couldn't it be easy?”
Lucas left the raid site, headed back to the Bucher house and the halfway house.
The crowd outside had gotten thinner- dinnertime, he thought-and what was left was coalescing around four TV trucks, where reporters were doing stand-ups for the evening news.
Inside, the crime-scene people were expanding their search, but had nothing new to report. He walked through the place one last time, then headed across the street to the halfway house.
The halfway house looked like any of the fading mansions on the wrong side of Summit, a brown-brick three-story with a carriage house out back, a broad front porch with white pillars, now flaking paint, and an empty porch swing.
Dan Westchester somewhat resembled the house: he was on the wrong side of fifty, the fat side of two-twenty and the short side of five-ten. He had a small gray ponytail, a gold earring in his left ear-lobe, and wore long cotton slacks, a golf shirt, and sandals. The name plaque on his desk showed a red-yellow-green Vietnam ribbon under his name.
“I already talked to St. Paul, and I talked to your guy at the BCA,” he said unhappily.
“What do you want from us?”
“Just trying to see what's what,” Lucas said. “We've got two murdered old ladies across the street from a halfway house full of convicted criminals. If we didn't talk to you, our asses would get fired.”
“I know, but we've worked so hard…”
“I can believe that,” Lucas said. “But…” He shrugged.
Westchester nodded. “The guys here… we've had exactly six complaints since we opened the facility, and they involved alcoholic relapses,” he said. “None of the people were violent. The DOC made a decision early on that we wouldn't house violent offenders here.”
Lucas: “Look. I'm not here to dragoon the house, I'm just looking for an opinion: If one of your guys did this, who would it be?”
“None of them,” Westchester snapped.
“Bullshit,” Lucas snapped back. “If this was a convent, there'd be two or three nuns who'd be more likely than the others to do a double murder. I'm asking for an assessment, not an accusation.”
“None of them,” Westchester repeated. “The guys in this house wouldn't beat two old ladies to death. Most of them are just unhappy guys…”
“Yeah.” Unhappy guys who got drunk and drove cars onto sidewalks and across centerlines into traffic.
Westchester: “I'm not trying to mess with you. I'm not silly about convicted felons.
But honest to God, most of the people here are sick. They don't intend to do bad, they're just sick. They're inflicted with an evil drug.”
“So you don't have a single guy…”
“I can't give you a name,” Westchester said. “But I'll tell you what: you or St.
Paul can send over anyone you want, and I'll go over my guys, file by file, and I'll tell you everything I know. Then you make the assessment. I don't want a goddamn killer in here. But I don't think I've got one. I'm sure I don't.”
Lucas thought about it for a moment: “All right. That's reasonable.” He stood up, turned at the office door. “Not a single guy?”
“Not one.”
“Where were you Friday night?”
Westchester sat back and grinned. “I'm in a foosball league. I was playing foosball.
I got two dozen 'bailers to back me up.”
LUCAS LEFT, a little pissed, feeling thwarted: he'd wanted a name, any name, a place to start. Halfway down the sidewalk, his cell phone rang, and when he looked at the number, saw that it came from the governor's office.
“Yeah. Governor,” Lucas said.
“You catch them?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, fuck 'em then, they're too smart for you,” the governor said. “Now: I want you to talk to Neil tomorrow morning. He has some suggestions about the way you conduct the Kline investigation, okay?”
“Maybe not,” Lucas said. “I hate the charge, 'suborning justice.'“ “We're not going to suborn anything, Lucas,” said the governor, putting a little buttermilk in his voice. “You know me better than that. We're managing a difficult situation.”
“Not difficult for me, at this point,” Lucas said. “Could get difficult, if I talk to Neil.”
“Talk to Neil. Talk. How can it hurt?” the governor asked.
“Ask the White House guys in federal minimum security… Listen, sir, there's a straightforward way to handle this.”
“No, there isn't,” the governor said. “We've gone over all the options. We need more.
If you can think up some reasonable options, then we won't have to turn Neil loose.
So talk to him.”
At dinner, Lucas told the Bucher story to his wife, Weather; his fifteen-year-old ward, Letty; and his son, Sam, who was almost two feet tall now, and who'd developed an intense interest in spoons.
Weather was a short blonde with a bold nose, square shoulders, and shrewd Finnish eyes; she was a plastic and microsurgeon and spent her days fixing heads and faces, revising scars, and replacing skin and cutting out lesions. When he was done with the story, Weather said, “So it was a robbery.”
“Odd robbery,” Lucas said, with a shake of his head. “If they were after the jewelry, why did they trash the rest of the house? If they were after paintings, why were there terrific old paintings all over the place? Why would they take swoopy furniture? The kid said it looked like they took it off the Star Trek set. It's just weird: They stole a printer? They stole an Xbox but not the hottest game on the market?”
“That is definitely strange,” Letty said. She was a lanky girl, dark haired, and was growing into a heart-stopper.
“All that other stuff was to throw you off, so you'd think dopers did it, but it's really a gang of serious antique and jewel thieves,” Weather said. “They took a few special pieces and scattered the rest around to conceal it. It's as plain as the nose on your face.”
“Weather…” Lucas said impatiently.
“Lucas,” Weather snapped. “Look around, if you can get your head out of your butt long enough.”
Letty giggled. “… head out of your butt.” Sam pointed his spoon and yelled, “Butt!”
“We have three antiques,” Weather said. “The most expensive one cost sixteen thousand.”
“Sixteen thousand?” Lucas was appalled. “Which one was that?”
“The china cabinet,” Weather said. “Most real antique people would tell you it is a piece of junk. When I redid the house, how much do you think I spent on furniture? Just give me a ballpark figure.”
Lucas's eyes wandered down the dining room, toward the living room; thought about the new bedroom set, the couches in the den, the living room, the family room, and the TV room. The latter now needed new covers because he kept putting his feet on the arms. “I don't know. Forty, fifty thousand?” It sounded high, but better high than low.
Weather stared at him, then looked at Letty, and back to Lucas. “Lucas, I mean, sweet-bleedin'…”
She looked at Letty again, who filled in, “Jesus.”
Lucas said, “We're letting our mouths get a little out of control here…” That was an uphill fight he'd never win. He was laying down a smoke screen to cover his furniture-pricing faux pas, if that's what it was.
Weather said, “Lucas, I spent two hundred and ten thousand dollars, and that wasn't the really good stuff that I actually wanted.”
His mouth didn't drop open, but he felt as if it had.
She continued: “Lucas, a fair-to-middling couch with custom coverings starts at five thousand dollars. This table”-she rapped with her knuckles on the dining table-”cost nine thousand dollars with eight chairs. And that's nothing. Nothing.
Rich people would spit on this table.”
“Not with me around,” Lucas said.
Weather jabbed a fork at him. “Now. You say Bucher has as much money as your old pal Miller.”
“Yeah. Same league,” Lucas said. “Maybe some of the same ancestors.”
“Those people were billionaires when a billion dollars was serious money,” Weather said. “Everything in their houses would be top quality-and an eighty-year-old woman's house would be stuffed to the gills with antiques… Lucas, I don't know much about antiques, but I know you could get a million dollars' worth in a van. Paintings, who knows what they're worth? I thought maybe I'd buy a couple of nice old American paintings for the living room.