“So I'll send Virgil around and you tell him what you want him to do,” Lucas said.
She made a rude noise, shook her head. “That fuckin' Flowers…”
“C'mon, Rose Marie.”
She sighed. “All right. Send him up. Tell him to bring the file, make a presentation.
Three or four people will be there, he doesn't have to be introduced to them, or look them up later. Tell him to wear a jacket, slacks, and to get rid of those goddamn cowboy boots for one day. Tell him we don't need an attitude. Tell him if we get attitude, I'll donate his ass to the Fulda City Council as the town cop.”
“I'll tell him…” He looked around. Several panels in the wall of the dining room had been pulled open. One showed a safe door; another, rows of liquor bottles; a third, crockery serving dishes with molded vegetables as decoration.
“Listen. This is a sideshow,” she said, waving a hand at the trashed room. “The governor wants a presence here, because she's big political and social money. But you need to focus on Kline.” She popped a piece of Nicorette gum, started chewing rapidly, rolling it with her tongue. “I don't care who fixes it, but it's gotta be fixed.”
“Why don't we just go the grand jury route? You know, 'We presented it to the grand jury and in their wisdom, they decided to indict'? Or not indict?”
“Because we're playing with the legislature, and the Republicans still own it, and they know that's bullshit. Radioactive bullshit. We need to be in position before this girl shows up on Channel Three.”
Lucas walked her out to her car; when she'd gotten out of her spot in a neighboring driveway, he started back to the house. On the way, thinking more about Kline than about the Bucher murder, he spotted a red-haired reporter from the Star Tribune on the other side of the police tape. The reporter lifted a hand and Lucas stepped over.
“How'd she get it?” Ruffe Ignace asked. He was smiling, simple chitchat with a friend.
“There are two of them,” Lucas said quietly. “A maid named Sugar-Rayette Peebles and Constance Bucher. Peebles was killed downstairs, near the front door. Her body was wrapped in a Persian carpet in a hallway. The old lady was killed in her bedroom.
They were beaten to death, maybe with a pipe. Skulls crushed. House is ransacked, bedrooms tossed. Probably Friday night.”
“Any leads?” Ignace was taking no notes, just standing on the neighbor's lawn with his hands in his jacket pockets. He didn't want to attract the attention of other reporters. Lucas had found that Ignace had an exceptional memory for conversation, for however long it took him to go somewhere and write it down.
“Not yet,” Lucas said. “We'll be talking to people who knew the women…”
“How about that place down the street?” Ignace asked. “The halfway house? Full of junkies.”
“St. Paul is looking into that,” Lucas said.
“Did it look like junkies?” Ignace asked.
“Something like that, but not exactly,” Lucas said.
“How not exactly?”
“I don't know-but not exactly,” Lucas said. “I'll get back to you when I figure it out.”
“You running it?”
“No. St. Paul. I'll be consulting,” Lucas said.
“Okay. I owe you,” Ignace said.
“You already owed me.”
“Bullshit. We were dead even,” Ignace said. “But now I owe you one.”
A woman called him. “Lucas! Hey, Lucas!” He turned and saw Shelley Miller in the crowd along the sidewalk. She lived down the street in a house as big as Oak Walk.
“I gotta talk to this lady,” Lucas said to Ignace.
“Call me,” Ignace said. He drifted away, fishing in his pocket for a cell phone.
Miller came up. She was a thin woman; thin by sheer willpower. “Is she…?” Miller was a cross between fascinated and appalled.
“Yeah. She and her maid,” Lucas said. “How well did you know her?”
“I talked to her whenever she was outside,” Miller said. “We used to visit back and forth. How did they kill her?”
“With a pipe, I think,” Lucas said. “The ME'll figure it out.”
Miller shivered: “And they're still running around the neighborhood.”
Lucas's forehead wrinkled: “I'm not sure. I mean, if they're from the neighborhood.
Do you know Bucher's place well enough to see whether anything was taken? I mean, the safe was untouched and we know one jewelry box was dumped and another might have been taken, and some electronics… but other stuff?”
She nodded. “I know it pretty well. Dan and I are redoing another house, down the street. We talked about buying some old St. Paul paintings from her and maybe some furniture and memorabilia. We thought it would be better to keep her things together, instead of having them dispersed when she died… I guess they'll be dispersed, now. We never did anything about it.”
“Would you be willing to take a look inside?” Lucas asked. “See if you notice anything missing?”
“Sure. Now?”
“Not now,” Lucas said. “The crime-scene guys are still working over the place, they'll want to move the bodies out. But I'll talk to the lead investigator here, get you into the house later today. His name is John Smith.”
“I'll do it,” she said.
Lucas went back inside, told Smith about Shelley Miller, then drifted around the house, taking it in, looking for something, not knowing what it was, watching the crime-scene techs work, asking a question now and then. He was astonished at the size of the place: A library the size of a high school library. A ballroom the size of a basketball court, with four crystal chandeliers.
John Smith was doing the same thing. They bumped into each other a few times: “Anything?”
“Not much,” Lucas said.
“See all the silverware behind that dining room panel?” Smith asked.
“Yeah. Sterling.”
“Looks like it's all there.”
Lucas scratched his forehead. “Maybe they figured it'd be hard to fence?”
“Throw it in a car, drive down to Miami, sayonara.”
“It's got names and monograms…” Lucas suggested.
“Polish it off. Melt it down,” Smith said. “Wouldn't take a rocket scientist.”
“Maybe it was too heavy?”
“Dunno…”
Lucas wandered on, thinking about it. A hundred pounds of solid silver? Surely, not that much. He went back to the dining room, looked inside the built-in cabinet. Three or four sets of silverware, some bowls, some platters. He turned one of the platters over, thinking it might be gilded pewter or something; saw the sterling mark. Hefted it, hefted a dinner set, calculated… maybe forty pounds total? Still, worth a fortune.
A uniformed cop walked by, head bent back, looking at the ceiling.
“What?” Lucas asked.
“Look at the ceiling. Look at the crown molding.” Lucas looked. The ceiling was molded plaster, the crown molding was a frieze of running horses. “The crown molding is worth more than my house.”
“So if it turns up missing, we should look in your garage,” Lucas said.
The cop nodded. “You got that right.”
A couple of people from the ME's office wheeled a gurney through the dining room and out a side door; a black plastic body bag sat on top of it. Peebles.
Lucas went back to the silver. Where was he? Oh yeah- must be worth a fortune. Then a stray thought: Was it really? Say, forty pounds of solid silver; 640 ounces… but silver was weighed in troy ounces, which, if he remembered correctly, were about ten percent heavier than regular ounces. Sterling wasn't pure, only about 90 percent, so you'd have some more loss.
Call it roughly 550 troy ounces of pure silver at… he didn't know how much. Ten bucks? Fifteen? Not a fortune. After fencing it off, reworking it and refining it, getting it to the end user, the guys who carried it out of the house would be lucky to take out a grand.
In the meantime, they'd be humping around a lot of silver that had the dead woman's initials all over it. Maybe, he thought, they didn't take it because it wasn't worth the effort or risk. Maybe smarter than your average cokehead.
Another gurney went by in the hall, another body bag: Bucher. Then a cop stuck his head in the dining room door: “The Lash kid is here. They've taken him into the front parlor.”