“Do you think they could kill people?” Smith asked.
Anderson turned her face down, thinking, glanced sideways at Ramford, then said, “You know, Jane… has always struck me as greedy. Not really a bad person, but terribly greedy. She wants all this stuff. Diamonds, watches, cars, Hermes this and Tiffany that and Manolo Blahnik something else. She might kill for money-it'd have to be money-but… I don't know.”
Her mouth moved some more, without words, and they all sat and waited, and she went on: “Leslie, I think Leslie might kill. For the pleasure in it. And money. In college, we had this small-college football team. Football didn't mean anything, really You'd go and wave your little pennant or wear your mum and nobody cared if you won or lost.
A lot of people made fun of football players… but Leslie liked to hurt people.
He'd talk about stepping on people's hands with his cleats. Like, if one of the runner-guys did too well, they'd get him down and then Leslie would “Accidentally' step on his hand and break it. He claimed he did it several times. Word got around that he could be dangerous.”
Smith said, “Huh,” and Lucas asked, “Anything heavier than that? That you heard of? Did you get any bad vibrations from Leslie when Mrs. Donaldson was killed?”
She shook her head, looking spooked: “No. Not at all. But now that you mention it…
I mean, jeez, their store really came up out of nowhere.” She looked at Lucas, Smith, and Ramford. “You know what I mean? Most antique people wind up in these little holes-in-the-wall, and the Widdlers are suddenly rich.”
“Makes you think,” Smith said, looking up at Lucas.
There was more, but the returns were diminishing. Lucas finally stood up, sighed, said to Ramford, “You might want to give her a couple of names, just in case,” and he and Smith took off.
“Let's drive around for a while, before you drop me off. Get Ramford out of there,” Lucas said to Smith. “I don't know where she parked, I wouldn't want her to pick me up.” He got on his radio and called Flowers as they walked to the car.
“I'm looking right at you,” Flowers said.
“There should be a lawyer coming out in a few minutes. Stay out of sight, and call when she's gone.”
Smith drove them up to Grand Avenue, and they both got double-dip ice cream cones, and leaned on the hood of Smith's car and watched the college girls go by; blondes and short shirts and remarkably little laughter, intense brooding looks, like they'd been bit on the ass by Sartre or Derrida or some other Frenchman.
Lucas was getting down to cone level on his chocolate pecan fudge when his radio beeped. Flowers said, “The lawyer is getting in her car.”
“I'll be in place in five minutes,” Lucas said.
Surveillance could be exciting, but hardly ever was. This night was one of the hardly-evers, four long hours of nothing. Couldn't even read, sitting in the dark. He talked to Flowers twice on the radio, had a long phone chat with Weather-God bless cell phones-and at midnight, Jenkins eased up behind him.
“You good?” Lucas asked, on the radio.
“Got my video game, got my iPod. Got two sacks of pork rinds and a pound of barbeque ribs, and a quart of Diet Coke for propellant. All set.”
“Glad I'm not in the car with you,” Lucas said. “Those goddamn pork rinds.”
“Ah, you open the door every half hour or so, and you're fine,” Jenkins said. “You might not want to light a cigarette.”
Weather was cutting again in the morning, and was asleep when Lucas tiptoed into the bedroom at twelve-fifteen. He took an Ambien to knock himself down, a Xanax to smooth out the ride, thought about a martini, decided against it, set the alarm clock, and slipped into bed.
The alarm went off exactly seven hours and forty minutes later. Weather was gone; that happened when he was working hard on a case, staying up late. They missed each other, though they were lying side by side…
He cleaned up quickly, looking at his watch, got a Ziploc bag with four pieces of cornbread from the housekeeper, a couple of Diet Cokes from the refrigerator, the newspaper off the front porch, and was on his way. Hated to be late on a stakeout; they were so boring that being even a minute late was considered bad form.
As it was, he pulled up on the side street at two minutes to eight, got the hand-off from Jerrold, called Del, who'd just been pushed by Flowers, and who said that a light had come on ten minutes earlier. “She's up, but she's boring,” Del said.
The newspapers had the Widdler story, and tied it to Bucher, Donaldson, and Toms.
Rose Marie said that more arrests were imminent, but the Star Tribune reporter spelled it “eminent” and the Pioneer Press guy went with “immanent.”
You should never, Lucas thought, trust a spell-checker.
Anderson stepped out of her house at 8:10, picked up the newspaper, and went back inside. At 8:20, carrying a bag and the newspaper, she walked down to the bus stop, apparently a daily routine, because the bus arrived two minutes later.
They tagged her downtown and to her office, parked their cars in no-parking zones, with police IDs on the dashes, and Lucas took the Skyway exit while Flowers took the street. There was a back stairs, but Lucas didn't think the risk was enough to worry about…
As he waited, doing nothing, he had the feeling he might be wrong about that, and worried about it, but not too much: he always had that feeling on stakeouts. A few years earlier, he'd had a killer slip away from a stakeout, planning to use the stakeout itself as his alibi for another murder…
A few minutes before noon, Shrake showed up for the next shift, and Lucas passed off to him, and walked away, headed back to the office. He'd gone fifty feet when his cell phone rang: Shrake. “She's moving,” and he was gone. Lucas looked back.
Shrake was ambling along the Skyway, away from Lucas, on the phone. Talking to somebody else on the cell, probably to Jenkins, probably afraid to use the radio because he was too close to the target; she had practically walked over him.
Seventy-five feet ahead of Shrake, Lucas could see the narrow figure of Amity Anderson speed-walking through the crowd.
Going to lunch? His radio chirped: Flowers. “You want to hang in, until we figure out where she's going?”
“Yeah.”
Shrake took her to a coffee shop, where she bought a cup of coffee to go, and an orange scone, and then headed down to the street, where Jenkins picked her up. “Catching a bus,” Jenkins said.
They took her all the way back to her house. Off the bus, she paused to throw the coffee-shop sack into a corner trash barrel, then headed up to her house, walking quickly, in a hurry. She went straight to the mailbox and took out a few letters, shuffled them quickly, picked one, tore the end off as she went through the door.
“What do you think?” Flowers asked, on the radio.
“Let's give her an hour,” Lucas said.
“That's what I think,” Flowers said. Shrake and Jenkins agreed.
Half an hour later, Anderson walked out of her house wearing a long-sleeved shirt and jeans and what looked like practical shoes or hiking boots. She had a one-car detached garage, with a manual lift. She pushed the door up, backed carefully out, pulled the door down again, pointed the car up the hill, and took off.
“We're rolling,” Jenkins said. “We're gone.”
Lucas got on the radio: “This could be something, guys. Stack it up behind her, and take turns cutting off, but don't lose her.”
Shrake: “Probably going to the grocery store.”
Lucas: “She turned the wrong way. There's one just down the hill.”
They had four cars tagging her, but no air. As long as they stayed in the city, they were good-they'd each tag her for a couple of blocks, then turn away, while the next one in line caught up. They tracked her easily along Ford to Snelling, where she took a right, down the bluff toward Seventh. Snelling was a chute; if she stopped there, they'd all be sacked right on top of her. Flowers followed her down while Lucas, Jenkins, and Shrake waited at the top of the hill.