“Sure. Go ahead.” Smith flipped open the phone and added, “Your boss was out in the backyard talking to the chief, ten minutes ago… Hello?”
Lucas took the stairs up to the bedroom level, where another team was working over Bucher's body. The bedroom was actually a suite of four rooms: a sitting room, a dressing room, a bathroom, and the main room. The main room had a big king-sized bed covered with a log-cabin quilt, two lounge chairs, and a wood-burning fireplace. All four rooms had been dumped: drawers pulled out of chests, a jewelry box upside down on the carpet.
A half-dozen paintings hung crookedly on the walls and two lay on the floor. Another quilt, this one apparently a wall hanging, had been pulled off the wall and left lying on the floor. Looking for a safe? The bath opened off to the right side and behind the bed. The medicine cabinet stood open, and squeeze bottles of lotion, tubes of antiseptic and toothpaste littered the countertop beneath it. No prescription medicine bottles.
Junkies. They'd take everything, then throw away what they couldn't use; or, try it and see what happened.
A St. Paul investigator was squatting next to a wallet that was lying on a tile by the fireplace.
“Anything?” Lucas asked.
“Look at this,” the investigator said. “Not a dollar in the wallet. But they didn't take the credit cards or the ATM cards or the ID.”
“Couldn't get the PINs if Bucher and Peebles were already dead,” Lucas said.
The cop scratched his head. “Guess not. Just, you don't see this every day. The cards not stolen.”
Lucas browsed through the second floor, nodding at cops, taking it in. One of the cops pointed him down the hall at Peebles's apartment, a bedroom, a small living room with an older television, a bathroom with a shower and a cast-iron tub. Again, the medicine cabinet was open, with some of the contents knocked out; another quilt had been pulled off the wall.
The other bedrooms showed paintings knocked to the floor, bedcovers disturbed.
A door to a third floor stood open and Lucas took the stairs.
Hotter up here; the air-conditioning was either turned off, or didn't reach this far. Old-time servants' quarters, storage rooms. One room was full of luggage, dozens of pieces dating back to the early part of the twentieth century, Lucas thought.
Steamer trunks. A patina of dust covered the floor, and people had walked across it: Lucas found multiple footprints came and went, some in athletic shoes, others in plain-bottomed shoes.
He browsed through the other rooms, and found a few more footprints, as well as stacks of old furniture, racks of clothing, rolls of carpet, shelves full of glassware, a few old typewriters, an antique TV with a screen that was nearly oval, cardboard boxes full of puzzles and children's toys. A room full of framed paintings. A cork bulletin board with dozens of promotional pins and medallions from the St. Paul Winter Carnival. The dumbshits should have taken them, he thought; some of the pins were worth several hundred dollars.
He was alone in the dust motes and silence and heat, wondered about the footprints, turned around, went back downstairs, and started hunting for his boss.
On THE first floor, he walked around the crime scene in the hallway and past another empty room, stopped, went back. This was the TV room, with a sixty-inch high-definition television set into one wall.
Below it was a shelf for electronics, showing nothing but a bunch of gold cable ends.
He was about to step out, when he saw a bright blue plastic square behind the half-open door of a closet. He stepped over, nudged the door farther open, found a bookcase set into the closet, the top shelves full of DVD movies, the bottom shelves holding a dozen video games. He recognized the latest version of Halo, an Xbox game. There was no Xbox near the TV so it must have been taken with the rest of the electronics.
Were the old ladies playing Halo? Or did this belong to the Lash kid? Smith went by, and Lucas called, “Hey, Johnny… have you been up on the third floor?”
“No. I was told there wasn't much there,” Smith said.
“Who went up?” Lucas asked.
“Clark Wain. You know Clark? Big pink bald guy?”
“Yeah, thanks,” Lucas said. “When're you talking to Peebles's nephew?”
“Soon. You want to sit in?”
“Maybe. I noticed that all the electronics were taken, but there were a bunch of games and DVDs there that weren't,” Lucas said. “That's a little odd, if it's just local assholes.”
Smith rubbed his lip, then said, “Yeah, I know. I saw that. Maybe in a hurry?”
“They had time to trash the place,” Lucas said. “Must have been in here for half an hour.”
“So…”
“Maybe somebody asked them not to,” Lucas said.
“You think?” They were talking about the Lash kid.
“I don't know,” Lucas said. “They stole the game console, but not the games? I don't know. Maybe check and see if Lash has another console at home.”
Lucas found Rose Marie in the small kitchen talking with the state representative for the district, an orange-haired woman with a black mustache who was leaking real tears, brushing them away with a Kleenex. Lucas came up and Rose Marie said, “You know Kathy She and Mrs. Bucher were pretty close.”
“I-ba-I-ba-I-ba…” Kathy said.
“She identified the bodies,” Rose Marie said. “She lives two doors up the street.”
“I-ba-I-ba…”
Lucas would have felt sorrier for her if she hadn't been such a vicious political wolverine, married to a vicious plaintiffs' attorney. And he couldn't help feeling a little sorry for her anyway. “You oughta sit down,” he said. “You look tippy.”
“Come on,” Rose Marie said, taking the other woman's arm. “I'll get you a couch.”
To Lucas: “Back in a minute.”
The kitchen had been tossed like the rest of house, all the cabinet drawers pulled out, the freezer trays lying on the floor, a flour jar dumped along with several other ceramic containers. Flour was everywhere, mixed with crap from the refrigerator.
Dried pickles were scattered around, like olive-drab weenies, and he could smell ketchup and relish, rotting in the sunshine, like the remnants of a three-day-old picnic, or a food tent at the end of the state fair.
To get out of the mess, Lucas walked through the dining room and stepped out on the back porch, a semicircle of warm yellow stone thirty feet across. Below it, the lawn slipped away to the edge of the bluff, and below that, out of sight, I-35, then United Hospital, then the old jumble of West Seventh, and farther down, the Mississippi.
Cops were standing around on the lawn, talking, clusters and groups of two and three, a little cigarette and cigar smoke drifting around, pleasantly acrid. One of the cops was Clark Wain, the guy who'd explored the third floor. Lucas stepped over, said, “Clark,” and Wain said, “Yeah, Lucas, what's going on?”
“You went up to the third floor?”
“Me and a couple of other guys,” Wain said. “Making sure there wasn't anybody else.”
“Were there footprints going up? In the dust?”
“Yeah. We had them photographed but there wasn't anything to see, really-too many of them,” Wain said. “Looked like people were up there a lot.”
“Nothing seemed out of place?”
Wain's eyes drifted away as he thought it over, then came back to Lucas: “Nothing that hit me at the time. They didn't trash the place like they did some of the other rooms. Maybe they took a peek and then came back down-if it was even their footprints.
Could have been anyone.”
“All right…” Rose Marie came out on the porch looking for him, and Lucas raised a hand to her. To Wain he said, “Gotta talk to the boss.”
They stepped back into the dining room. Rose Marie asked, “What do you have going besides Kline?”
“The Heny killing down in Rochester, that's still pooping along, and we've got a girl's body down by Jackson, we don't know what happened there. The feds are pushing for more cooperation on illegal aliens, they want us to put somebody in the packing plants down in Austin… But Kline is the big one. And this.”