“What's funny about that?” Lucas asked. He'd gone to the University of Minnesota on a hockey scholarship.
“Well, Carleton doesn't have athletic scholarships, see, so they get this giant guy to play football and they give him a scholarship in art…”
“Maybe he was a good artist,” Lucas said, a bit stiff. “Athletes have a wide range of interests.”
She looked at him: “You were a jock, weren't you?”
“So what were you saying?” Lucas asked.
“Did you get a free Camaro?”
“What were you saying?” Lucas repeated.
Unflustered-her self-confidence, Lucas thought, seemed to be growing in leaps and bounds-she turned back to the computer, tapped a few keys, and pulled up a page of notes. “So, about the scholarships. They apparently didn't have a lot of family money.
They get married in their senior year, move to the Twin Cities, start an antique store. Here they are ten years later, starting from nothing, they've got to be millionaires.
They own their store, they have a house on Minnehaha Creek, they drive eighty thousand dollars' worth of cars…”
“That's interesting. But: it could be that they're really smart,” Lucas said.
“And maybe Leslie learned leadership by participating in football,” she suggested.
Lucas leaned back: “Why do women give me shit?”
“Basically, because you're there,” she said.
Sandy had done one more thing. “I made a graph of their income.” She touched a few more keys, and the graph popped up. The income line started flat, then turned up at a forty-five-degree angle, then flattened a bit over the years, but continued up. “Here are the quilts.” She tapped a flat area, just before an upturn. “The upturn in income would come a year later-it would take them a while to flow the money into their sales.” She pointed out two other upturns: “Toms and Donaldson.”
“Bless my soul,” Lucas said. Then, “Can you go back to Des Moines? Right now?”
Jenkins was sitting in Carol's visitor's chair when Lucas got back to his office, moving fast. “Come on in,” Lucas said.
“What's going on?” He followed Lucas into the inner office. Lucas was studying a printout of Sandy's graph.
“I think we finally got our fingernails under something,” Lucas said. “I want you to go to Eau Claire-I'd fly you if it were faster, but I think it would be faster to drive. You're going to talk to some people named Booth and look at some check duplicates and some purchase records for antiques.”
Jenkins said, “Man, you're all cranked up-but you gotta know, if this Gabriella Coombs didn't take off with a boyfriend or something, then she's gone by now.”
Lucas nodded. “I know. Now I just want to get the motherfuckers. You're looking for some people named Widdler…”
Lucas briefed him; Sandy stopped in, halfway through, and said, “I'm on my way. I'll call you tonight.”
“Good. Try to get back here tonight, or early tomorrow. We're gonna have a conference about all of this, get everybody together. Tomorrow morning, I hope.”
She nodded, and was gone.
He finished briefing Jenkins, who asked, “So you're gonna take Bucher?”
“Yeah, and I've got some politics to do with the St. Paul cops and I gotta go see Lucy Coombs. I'll be on my phone all night-until one in the morning, anyway. Call me.”
“I'm outa here.”
The St. Paul Police Department is a brown-brick building that looks like a remodeled brewery, and it's built in a place where a brewery should have been built: across a lot of freeways on the back side of the city.
Lucas parked in the cops' lot, put a sign on the dash, and found John Smith in a cubicle. Another detective sat three cubicles down, playing with a Rubik's Cube so worn that it might have been an original. A third was talking so earnestly on a telephone that it had to be to his wife, and he had to be in trouble. Either that, or she'd just found out that she was pregnant.
Lucas said, “Let's go somewhere quiet.”
Smith sat up. “Widdlers?”
The second detective said, without looking up from the Rubik's Cube, “That's right, talk around me. Like I'm an unperson.”
“You are an unperson,” Smith said. To Lucas: “Come on this way.” Lucas followed him down the hall to the lieutenant's office. Smith stuck his head inside, said, “I thought I heard him leave. Come on in.”
Lucas said, “We're going full steam ahead on the Widdlers. It's not a sure thing by a long way. At the very least, I'll talk to Leslie Widdler and ask him to roll up his pant legs. See if he has any Screw bites.”
“When?”
“Midday tomorrow. I've got people going to Eau Claire and Des Moines right now. I've hooked both Marilyn Coombs and Donaldson to Amity Anderson, and Anderson is a longtime friend of the Widdlers. I think they were involved in a tax fraud together, selling these fake quilts, and I think it went from there. We know the killers involve one very big man, and that they know a lot about antiques, and that they have a way to dispose of them. In other words, the Widdlers.”
“You don't have them directly connected to anybody? I mean, the Widdlers to Donaldson, Bucher, or Toms?”
“Not yet,” Lucas said.
“How about the van?” Smith asked.
“No van.”
“Goddamnit. There's got to be a van,” Smith said.
“I talked to a woman at the Widdlers' who said they rented vans,” Lucas said. “That's being checked.”
“The van in the tape on Summit was too old to be a rental- unless they went to one of the Rent-a-Wreck places.”
“I don't know,” Lucas said. “The van is like a loose bolt in the whole thing.”
“Without a van, without a direct connection… I don't think you have enough to get a warrant to search Leslie.”
Lucas grinned at him: “I was thinking you might want to get the warrant. You probably have more suck with one of the local judges.”
Smith said, “I've got some suck, but I've got to have something.”
“Maybe we will tomorrow morning,” Lucas said. “And if we don't, I can always ask Leslie to roll up his pant leg. If he tells me to go fuck myself, then we'll know.”
Lucas got the key to Bucher's place, went out, sat in his car, stared at his cell phone, then sighed and dialed. Lucy Coombs snatched up the phone and said, “What?”
“This is Lucas Davenport…”
When he got to Coombs's house, she was sitting in the kitchen with a neighbor, eyes all hollow and black, and as soon as she saw Lucas, she started to cry again: “You think she's gone.”
Lucas nodded: “Unless she's with a friend. But she was so intent on getting to the bottom of this, her relationship seemed to be breaking up, this is what she wanted to do. I don't think she would have simply dropped it. I think we have to be ready for… the worst.”
“What do you mean 'we,'“ Coombs sobbed. “This is your fuck-ing job. She's not your daughter.”
“Miz Coombs… Ah, jeez, Gabriella got me going on this,” Lucas said. “She probably was the key person who'll bring all these killers down-and they've killed more people than you know.”
“My mother and my daughter,” Coombs said, her voice drying out and going shrill.
“More than that-maybe three elderly people, they may have attacked a teenager, there may be people who we don't have any idea about,” Lucas said.
“You know who they are?”
“We're beginning to get some ideas.”
“What if they've just kidnapped her? What if they're just keeping her for… for…” She couldn't think of why they might be keeping her. Neither could Lucas.
He said, “That's always a possibility. That's what we hope for. We hope to make some kind of a move tomorrow-and I hope you'll keep that under your hat. Maybe we'll find out something fairly soon. One way or another.”
“Oh, shit,” Coombs said. She looked around the kitchen, then snatched a ceramic plate from where it was hanging on the wall, a plate with two crossed-fish, artsy-craftsy, and hurled it at the side wall, where it shattered.
“Miz Coombs…”
“Where is she… Where's my baby?”
Out ON the street, he exhaled, looked back at Coombs's house, and shook his head.