He called Sandy: “Anything on Anderson?”
“A lot of raw records, but I haven't coordinated them into a report, yet,” she said.
“I don't want a fu… friggin' PowerPoint-where'd she work? You look at her tax stuff?”
“She worked at her college as a teaching assistant, at Carleton College in Northfield, and then she worked at a Dayton's store in St. Paul,” Sandy said. “Then she worked for Claire Donaldson, which we know about, and then she went straight to the Old Northwest Foundation, where she still is,” Sandy said. “Also, I found out, she has a little tiny criminal record.”
“What was it?” Something involving violence, he hoped.
“She got caught shoplifting at Dayton's. That's why she left there, I think. The arrest is right at the time she left.”
“Huh.”
“Then I've got all kinds of tax stuff, but I have to say, I don't think there's anything that would interest you,” Sandy said. “She does claim a mortgage exemption. She bought her house six years ago for a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and she has a mortgage for a hundred and fifty thousand, so she put down about the minimum-like seventeen thousand dollars.”
“Any bank records?”
“Not that I've gotten, but she only got like forty dollars in interest on her savings account last year. And she doesn't report interest or capital gains on other investments accounts.”
“Car?” Lucas asked.
“I ran her through DMV,” Sandy said. “She has a six-year-old Mazda. One speeding ticket, three years ago.”
“Ever own a van?”
“There's no record of one.”
There was more of the same-but overall, Amity Anderson's biography seemed to paint a picture of a woman who was keeping her head above water, but not easily.
“This does not,” Lucas said to Sandy, “seem like the biography of a woman who came into an untaxed quarter-million bucks a few years ago.”
“It isn't,” Sandy said. “I'll keep looking, but if she's got the money, she's hidden it pretty well. Did you ever think about the possibility that she just bought antiques? That her house is her bank?”
“I've been in her house. It's not full of antiques.”
“Well, maybe there's a big lump of cash moldering in the basement. But if I were her, I would have spent at least some of it on a new car.”
“Yeah. Damnit. This isn't turning out the way I thought it would,” Lucas said.
He sent Sandy back to the salt mines-actually, an aging Dell computer and a stool-to continue the research, and called Jenkins: “You talk to Shrake?”
“Yeah. We figure to start tracking her tonight. We don't know what she looks like, so trying to pick her up outside that foundation… that'd be tough.”
“Tonight's fine. I wasn't serious about twenty-four hours… put her to bed, keep her there for half an hour, pick her up in the morning,” Lucas said. “Mostly, I want to know who she hangs with. Need a big guy: somebody who could snatch Jesse Barth off the street.” Flowers lounged in the door, looking too fresh. “Sat up most of the night with the Barths. They're scared spitless,” he said.
“Well, they got a firebomb through the kitchen window. They say.”
“Oh, they did,” Flowers said. He moved over to the visitor's chair, sat down, and propped one foot on the edge of Lucas's desk. “I talked to the arson guy-there was no glass in the sink, but there was some burned stuff that he thinks is what's left of a half-gallon paper milk jug. Probably had a burning rag stuck in the spout. Said it'd be like throwing a ball of gas through the window; better than a bottle.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.” He propped another foot over the first. “He says wine bottles work fine if you're throwing them onto tanks, but if you throw them onto an ordinary kitchen floor, half the time they'll just bounce along, and not break.”
“Really,” Lucas said.
“Yup. So what're we doing?”
“I got this concept…”
“We needed a concept,” Flowers said. “Like, bad.”
Lucas explained about Amity Anderson. Flowers listened and said, “So call this chick at the Walker and find out if she dealt with Amity Anderson on the Bucher deal.”
Lucas nodded: “I was about to do that.”
Alice Schirmer was mildly pissed: “Well, we got the court order, and your lab person was here, and we butchered the quilt. Hope you're happy.”
Lucas had the feeling that she was posing. He had no time for that, and snapped: “There are several people dead, and one missing and probably dead. For an inch of thread or whatever…”
“I'm sorry, let's start over,” she said quickly. “Hello, this is Alice.”
Lucas took a breath. “When you dealt with Bucher on the quilt, did you ever meet a woman named Amity Anderson?”
“Amity? I know Amity Anderson, but she wasn't involved in the Bucher bequest,” Schirmer said.
“Where do you know her from? Amity?” Lucas asked.
“She works for a foundation here that provides funding for the arts.”
“That's it? You don't know her socially, or know who she hangs with, or know about any ties that might take her back to Bucher?”
“No, I've never mixed with her socially,” Schirmer said. “I know she was associated for a while with a man named Don Harvey, but Don moved to Chicago to run the New Gallery there. That was a couple of years ago.”
“A boyfriend?” “Yes. They were together for a while, but I don't know what she's been up to lately,” Schirmer said.
“Uh, just a moment.” Lucas took the phone away from his face and frowned.
Flowers asked, “What?”
Lucas went back to the phone. “I had understood… from a source… that Amity Anderson is gay.”
“Amity? No-o-o, or maybe, you know, she likes a little of both,” Schirmer said. “She definitely had a relationship with Don, and knowing Don, there was nothing platonic about it. With good ol' Don, it was the more, the merrier.”
“Huh. What does Don look like? Football-player type?”
She laughed. “No. He's a little shrimp with a big mouth and supposedly, a gargantuan… You know. I doubt that he ever lifted anything heavier than a glass of scotch.”
“You say he runs a gallery,” Lucas said. “An antique gallery? Or would he know about antiques?”
“He's a paintings-and-prints guy. Amity's an antique savant, though,” Schirmer said.
“I expect she'll wind up as a dealer someday. If she can get the capital.”
“Okay. Listen, keep this conversation to yourself,” Lucas said.
“Sure,” she said.
“And that thread…”
“From the butchered quilt?” Now she was kidding.
“That one. Is it on the way back here?” Lucas asked.
“It is. Your man left here more than an hour ago.”
Lucas said to Flowers, “Amity Anderson lied to me, in a way most people wouldn't do. I asked her about boyfriends and she said she's gay. I bought it at the time-but it turns out she's not.”
“That make's a difference?” Flowers asked.
“It does if you need somebody large to carry a fifty-thousand-dollar table,” Lucas said. “Somebody you can trust with murder.”
The lab man said, “We've got tests to do, but I took a look at it with a 'scope: it's identical. I mean, identical. I'd be ninety-seven percent surprised if it didn't come off the same spool. We're gonna do some tests on the dye, and so on, just to nail it down.” “The curator said you really butchered the quilt.”
“Yeah. We took a half-inch of loose thread off an overturned corner. You couldn't find the same spot without a searchlight and a bloodhound.”
Lucas hung up. Flowers again asked, “What?”
“There was a major fraud, probably turned over a half-million dollars or so, involving all these people. Think that's enough to kill for?”
“You can go across the river in the wintertime and get killed for a ham sandwich,” Flowers said. “But you told me it was a theft, not a fraud.”