They sat at the kitchen table, and Lucas took the newspaper clip. It was printed on standard typing paper, taken from a website. The clip was the top half of the front page in the Chippewa Falls Post, the text running under a large headline, Chippewa Heiress Murdered.
A noted Chippewa Falls art collector and heir to the Thune brewing fortune was found shot to death in her home Wednesday morning by relatives, a Chippewa Falls police spokesman said Wednesday afternoon.
The body of Claire Donaldson, 72, was discovered in the kitchen of her West Hill mansion by her sister, Margaret Donaldson Booth, and Mrs. Booth's husband, Landford Booth, of Eau Claire.
Mrs. Donaldson's secretary, Amity Anderson, who lives in an apartment in Mrs. Donaldson's home, was in Chicago on business for Mrs. Donaldson, police said. When she was unable to reach Mrs. Donaldson by telephone on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, Anderson called the Booths, who went to Donaldson's home and found her body.
Police said they have several leads in the case.
“Claire Donaldson was brilliant and kind, and that this should happen to her is a tragedy for all of Chippewa Falls,” said the Rev. Carl Hoffer, pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Chippewa Falls, and a longtime friend of Mrs. Donaldson…
Lucas read through the clip, which was long on history and short on crime detail; no matter, he could get the details from the Chippewa cops. But, he thought, if you changed the name and the murder weapon, the news story of Claire Donaldson's death could just as easily have been the story of Constance Bucher's murder.
“ When we get back to the office, I'll want a complete statement,” he told Coombs.
“I'll get a guy to take it from you. We'll need a detailed description of that music box. This could get complicated.”
“God. I wasn't sure you were going to believe me,”Coombs said. “About Grandma being murdered.”
“She probably wasn't-but there's a chance that she was,” Lucas said. “The idea that somebody hit her with that ball… That would take some thought, some knowledge of the house.”
“And a serious psychosis,” Coombs said.
“And that. But it's possible.”
“On the TV shows, the cops never believe the edgy counterculture person the first time she tells them something,” Coombs said. “Two or three people usually have to get killed first.”
“That's TV,” Lucas said.
“But you have to admit that cops are prejudiced against us,” she said.
“Hey” Lucas said. “I know a guy who walks around in hundred-degree heat in a black hoodie because he's always freezing because he smokes crack all day, supports himself with burglary, and at night he spray-paints glow-in-the-dark archangels on boxcars so he can send Christ's good news to the world. He's an edgy counterculture person.
You're a hippie.”
She clouded up, her lip trembling. “That's a cruel thing to say” she said. “Why'd you have to say that?”
“Ah, man,” Lucas said. “Look, I'm sorry…”
She smiled, pleased with herself and the trembling lip: “Relax. I'm just toyin' with you.”
On the way out of the house, they walked around the blood spot, and Coombs asked, “What's a doornail?”
“I don't know.”
“Oh.” Disappointed. “I would have thought you'd have heard it a lot, and looked it up. You know, dead as a doornail, and you being a cop.”
He got her out of the house, into the Porsche, fired it up, rolled six feet, then stopped, frowned at Coombs, and shut it down again.
“Two things: If your grandma's name was Coombs, and your mother is her daughter, how come your name…?”
“I'm a bastard,” Coombs said.
“Huh?”
“My mom was a hippie. I'm second-generation hippie. Anyway, she slept around a little, and when the bundle of joy finally showed up, none of the prospective fathers did.”
She flopped her hands in the air. “So. I'm a bastard. What was the second thing?”
“Mmm.” He shook his head, and fished his cell phone out of his pocket. “I'm going to call somebody and ask an unpleasant question about your grandmother. If you want, you could get out and walk around the yard for a minute.”
She shook her head. “That's okay. I'd be interested in hearing the question.”
Lucas dialed, identified himself, and asked for the medical examiner who'd done the postmortem on Coombs. Got her and asked, “What you take out of her stomach. Uh-huh? Uh-huh? Very much? Okay… okay.”
He hung up and Coombs again asked, “What?”
“Her stomach was empty. If she fell when she was by herself, I wonder who ate nine oatmeal cookies?” Lucas asked.
Back at BCA headquarters, he briefed Shrake, put Coombs in a room with him, and told them both that he needed every detail. Five minutes later he was on the line with an investigator with the Chippewa County Sheriff's Office, named Carl Frazier, who'd worked the Donaldson murder.
“I saw the story in the paper and was going to call somebody, but I needed to talk to the sheriff about it. He's out of town, back this afternoon,” Frazier said. “Donaldson's a very touchy subject around here. But since you called me…”
“It feels the same,” Lucas said. “Donaldson and Bucher.”
“Yeah, it does,” Frazier said. “What seems most alike is that there was never a single lead. Nothing. We tore up the town, and Eau Claire, we beat on every asshole we knew about, and there never was a thing. I've gotten the impression that the St. Paul cops are beating their heads against the same wall.”
“You nail down anything as stolen?”
“Nope. That was another mystery,”Frazier said. “As far as we could tell, nothing was touched. I guess the prevailing theory among the big thinkers here was that it was somebody she knew, they got in an argument…”
“And the guy pulled out a gun and shot her? Why'd he have a gun?”
“That's a weak point,” Frazier admitted. “Would have worked better if she'd been killed like Bucher-you know, somebody picked up a frying pan and swatted her. That would have looked a little more spontaneous.”
“This looked planned?”
“Like D-Day. She was shot three times in the back of the head. But what for? A few hundred dollars? Nobody who inherited the money needed it. There hadn't been any family fights or neighborhood feuds or anything else. The second big-thinker theory was that it was some psycho. Came in the back door, maybe for food or booze, killed her.”
“Man…”
“I know,” Frazier said. “But that's what we couldn't figure out: What for? If you can't figure out what for, it's harder than hell to figure out who.”
“She's got these relatives, a sister and brother-in-law, the Booths,” Lucas said.
“They still around?”
“Oh, yeah. The sheriff hears from them regularly.”
“Okay. Then, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna go talk to them,” Lucas said. “Maybe I could stop by and look at your files?”
“Absolutely,” Frazier said. “If you don't mind, I'd like to ride along when you do the interview. Or, I'll tell you what. Why don't we meet at the Donaldson house? The Booths still own it, and it's empty. You could take a look at it.”
“How soon can you do it?”
“Tomorrow? I'll call the Booths to make sure they'll be around,” Frazier said.
Weather and LUCAS spent some time that night fooling around, and when the first round was done, Lucas rolled over on his back, his chest slick with sweat, and Weather said, “That wasn't so terrible.”
“Yeah. I was fantasizing about Jesse Barth,” he joked. She swatted him on the stomach, not too hard, but he bounced and complained, “Ouch! You almost exploded one of my balls.”
“You have an extra,”she said. “All we need is one.” She was trying for a second kid, worried that she might be too old, at forty-one.
“Yeah, well, I'd like to keep both of them,” Lucas said, rubbing his stomach. “I think you left a mark.”
She made a rude noise. “Crybaby.” Then, “Did you hear what Sam said today…?”
And later, she asked, “What happened with Jesse Barth, anyway?”
“It's going to the grand jury. Virgil's handling most of it.”
“Mmm. Virgil,” Weather said, with a tone in her voice.