Davenport, she thought, was probably unstoppable. It was possible that he wouldn't get to them, but unlikely. She'd seen him operating.
She nibbled on her bottom lip, looked at the list, then sighed and fed it into the shredder.
If he did get to them, could Davenport convict? Not if Leslie hadn't been bitten by the dog. But with the dog bites, Leslie was cooked. If she hadn't taken some kind of preemptive action before then, she'd be cooked with him.
From watching her stepfather work as a cop, and listening to him talk about court cases, she felt the most likely way to save herself was to give the cops another suspect. Build reasonable doubt into the case. As much reasonable doubt as possible.
As for the money…
They had a safe-deposit box in St. Paul where they had more than $160,000 in hundreds, fifties, and twenties. The cash came from stolen antiques, from four dead old women and one dead old man, each in a different state. The Widdlers had worked the cash slowly back through the store, upgrading their stock, an invisible laundry that the mafia would have appreciated.
With Leslie looking at a china collection in Minnetonka, Jane, after talking to Anderson, had gone alone to the bank, retrieved the money, and wrapped it in Ziploc bags. Where to put it? She'd eventually taken it home and buried it in a flower garden, carefully scraping the bark mulch back over it.
Amity Anderson, Jane knew, was on the edge of cracking. One big fear: that Anderson would crack first, and go to the cops hoping to make a deal. Anderson knew herself well enough to know that she couldn't tolerate prison. She was too fragile for that.
Too much of a free spirit. All she wanted was to go to Italy; look at Cellini and Caravaggio. Amity believed that if she could only get to Italy, somehow, the problems would be left behind.
Magical thinking. Jane Widdler had no such illusions. The victims had been too rich, the money too big, the publicity too great. The cops would be all over them once they had a taste; and Davenport had gotten a taste.
Still, Jane could pull it off, if she had time.
Leslie called, said he was on the way home. Jane hurried over to the shop, opened the safe in the back, and took out the coin collection and a simple.38-caliber pistol.
The coin collection came from the Toms foray, fifty-eight rare gold coins from the nineteenth century, all carefully sealed in plastic grading containers, all MS6through MS69-so choice, in fact, that they'd been a little worried about moving the coins. They still had all but two, but if necessary, she could take them to Mexico and move them there.
The coins went deep in a line of lilacs, behind and to one side of the house, halfway to the creek. She dug them six inches down, covered them with sod, dusted her hands.
If she didn't make it back… what a waste.
The pistol went into her purse. She'd never learned not to jerk the trigger, but that wouldn't matter if you were shooting at a range of half an inch.
She wondered where the jail was. Would it be Hennepin County, or Ramsey? Somehow, she thought it might be Ramsey, since that's where the murders occurred. And Ramsey, she thought, might be preferable, with a better class of felon. Surely they had separate cells, you were presumed innocent until proven guilty. And if Leslie had passed away, the house would be hers to use as a bond for bail…
She went inside. Leslie was perched on the couch in the den, wearing yellow walking shorts and a loose striped shirt from a San Francisco clothier, pale blue stripes on a champagne background that went well with the shorts and the Zelli crocodile slippers, $695. He said, “Hi. I heard you come in… Where'd you go?”
“I thought I saw the fox out back. I walked around to see. But he was gone.”
“Yeah? I'd like a fox tail for the car.”
“We've got to talk,” Jane said. “Something awful happened today.”
When she told him about Davenport visiting the shop, about his question about a white van, Leslie touched one fat finger to his fat nose and said, “He's got to go.”
“There's no time,” Jane said, pouring the anxiety into her voice. “If he was asking about the van this afternoon, he'll be looking at all the files tomorrow. Once that gets into the system…”
Leslie was digging in a pocket. He came up with a pack of breath mints and popped two. “Listen,” he said, clicking the mints off his lower teeth, “we do it tonight.
Just have to figure out how.”
“I looked him up,” Jane volunteered. “He lives on Mississippi River Boulevard in St. Paul. I drove by; a very nice house for a cop. He must be on the take.”
“Maybe that's a possibility,” Leslie suggested. “If he's crooked…”
“No. Too late, too late… The thing is, have you seen him with that gun? And he's going to be wary, I'd be afraid to approach him.”
“So what do you think?” Leslie let her do most of the thinking.
“If you think we should do it, I suggest that rifle. God knows it's powerful enough.
You shoot from the backseat, I drive. We'll ambush him right outside his house. If the opportunity doesn't present itself, we go back tomorrow morning.”
“If we see him in a window-a.300 Mag won't even notice a piece of window glass,” Leslie said.
“Whatever.”
“If we're going to do it, we've got things to do,” Leslie said cheerfully. The thought of killing always warmed him up. “I'm gonna take a shower, clean up the gun. Take my car, I'll sit in the back. We'll need earplugs, but I've got some. What's the layout?”
“We can't park on River Boulevard, it's all no-parking. But there's a spot on the side street, under a big elm tree. It looks sideways at his garage and front door.
If he goes anywhere…”
“Too bad it's summer,” Leslie said. “We'll be shooting in daylight.”
“We can't go too early,” Jane said. “It has to be dark enough that people can't read out faces.”
“Not before nine-fifteen, then,” Leslie said. “I've played golf at nine, but sometime around nine-fifteen or nine-thirty, you can't see the golf ball anymore.”
“Get there at nine-thirty and hope for the best,” Jane said. “Maybe there'd be some way to lure him out?”
“Like what?”
“Let me think about it.”
He went up to take a shower, and she thought about it: how to get Davenport outside, with enough certainty that Leslie would buy the idea. Then she sat down and made her list, looked at the list, dropped it in the shredder, and thought about it some more.
Leslie was working on “Cheeseburger in Paradise” when she stepped into his office and brought up the computer. She typed two notes, one a fragment, the other one longer, taken from models on the Internet. When she was done, she put them in the Documents file, signed off, pushed the chair back in place, walked up the stairs, and called through the bathroom door, “I've got to run out: I'll be back in twenty minutes.”
The water stopped. “Where're you going?”
“Down to Wal-Mart,” she said through the door. “We need a couple of baseballs.”
When she got back home, Leslie was in the living room, sliding the rifle, already loaded, into an olive-drab gun case. He was dressed in a black golf shirt and black slacks.
“God, I hate to throw this thing away,” he said. “We'll have to, but it's really a nice piece of machinery.”
“But we have to,” Jane said. She had a plastic bag in her hand, and took out two boxes with baseballs inside.
“Baseballs?”
“You think, being the big jock, that you could hit a house a hundred feet away with a baseball?”
“Hit a house?” Leslie was puzzled.
“Suppose you're a big-shot cop sitting in your house, and you hear a really loud thump on your front roof, or front side of the house at nine-thirty at night,” Jane said. “Do you send your wife out to take a look?”