“God, I loved the kid. But I wasn't a good mother. We used to fight… we started fighting when she was twelve and didn't quit until she was twenty-two. I think we both had to grow up.”
She rambled on for a while, and then asked the question that had been out there, in the papers and everywhere else. “Are you sure Amity Anderson did it?”
“No,” Lucas said. “In fact, I don't think she did. She might have, but there are some problems…”
He'd gone back to Eau Claire, he told her, and talked to Frazier, the sheriff's deputy, and all the other investigators they could reach. Amity Anderson had no boyfriend, they said. Just didn't have one. They accounted for her nights, they looked at phone records, at gasoline credit-card receipts, they checked her mail. She had no boyfriend…
And she had that alibi for the night Donaldson was killed. The alibi was solid. Would Leslie Widdler have gone into the house on his own? Wouldn't he have wanted a backup? The night Gabriella disappeared, there were two phone calls from Anderson's house, one early, one fairly late. The recipients of the phone calls agreed that they'd spoken to her.
“That doesn't mean she couldn't have done it, but it's pretty thin,” Lucas said.
“You think Widdler's wife, I saw her name in the newspaper…”
“Jane.”
“You think she was involved?” Coombs asked.
“I think so,” Lucas said. “Anderson insists that she was-and to some of us, she sounds like she's telling the truth.”
“So it would be Jane Widdler who killed Gabriella.”
“Probably helped her husband,” Lucas said. “Yes. They worked as a team.”
Coombs took a sip of lemonade, sucked on an ice cube for a moment. “Are you going to get her?”
“I don't know,” Lucas said. “I see a possibility-but we'd need your help.”
“My help?”
“Yes. Because of your mother, and the Armstrong quilts, you're in… sort of a unique position to help us,” Lucas said.
She looked him over for a minute, sucking on the ice cube, then let it slip back into the glass, and leaned toward him. “I'll help, if I can. But you know what I'd really like? Because of Mom and Gabriella?”
“What?”
Her voice came out as a snarclass="underline" “I'd like a nice cold slice of revenge. That's what I'd like.”
Jane Widdler was sitting on the floor in a pool of light, working the books and boxes and shipping tape. The cops had photographed everything, with measurement scales, and were looking at lists of stolen antiques. But Widdler knew that the store stock was all legitimate; she had receipts for it all.
Leslie's suicide and implication in the Bucher, Donaldson, and Toms murders had flashed out over the Internet antique forums, so everybody who was anybody knew about it.
She'd had tentative calls from other dealers, sniffing around for deals.
At first, she'd been angry about it, the goddamn vultures. Then she realized she could move quite a bit of stuff, at cost or even a small profit, and pile up some serious dollars. She was doing that-took Visa, MasterCard, or American Express, shipping the next day…
Her clerk had walked out. Left a note saying that she couldn't deal with the pressure, asked that her last paycheck be mailed to her apartment. Good luck on that, Widdler thought, pouring plastic peanuts around a bubble-wrapped nineteenth-century Tiffany-style French-made china clock, set in a shipping box. Eight hundred dollars, four hundred less than the in-store price, but cash was cash.
There was a knock on the front door, on the glass. The closed sign was on the door, and she ignored it. Knock again, louder this time. Maybe the police? Or the lawyer? She made a frown look and got to her feet, spanked her hands together to get rid of the Styrofoam dust, and walked to the door. Outside, a woman with huge bushy blond hair, dressed in a shapeless green muumuu and sandals, had cupped her hands around her eyes and was peering through the window in the door.
Irritated, Widdler walked toward the door, shaking her head, jabbing her finger at the closed sign. The woman held up a file folder, then pressed it to the glass and jabbed her own finger at it. Making an even deeper frown look, Widdler put her nose next to the glass and peered at the tab on the file folder. It said, in a spidery hand, “Armstrong quilts.”
The woman on the other side shouted, loud enough to be heard through the door, “I'm Lucy Coombs. I'm Marilyn Coombs's daughter. Open the door.”
Widdler thought, “Shit,” then thought, “Elegance.” What is this? She threw the lock, opened the door a crack.
“I'm closed.”
“Are you Jane Widdler?”
Widdler thought about it for a second, then nodded. “Yes.”
The words came tumbling out of the woman's mouth, a rehearsed spieclass="underline" “My mother's house has been attached by the Walker and now by the Milwaukee museum. They say the Armstrong quilts are fakes and they want their money back and that it was all a big tax fraud. I have her file. There's a letter in it and there's a note that says you and your husband were Cannon Associates and that you got most of the money. Mom's house was worth two hundred thousand dollars and I'm supposed to be the heir and now I'm not going to get anything. I'll sell you the original file for two hundred thousand dollars, or I'm going to take it to the police. The museums can get the money back from you, not from me.”
The woman sounded crazy-angry but the part about Cannon and the Armstrongs wasn't crazy.
“Wait-wait-wait,” said Widdler, opening the door another inch.
“I'm not going to talk to you here. I'm afraid of you and I'm afraid the police are tapping your telephones. They tap everything now, everything, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the FBI. I brought this copy of the file and the letter and inside there's a telephone number where you can call me at eleven o'clock tomorrow morning.
It's at a Wal-Mart and if you don't call me, you won't be able to find me and I'll go to the police.”
The woman thrust the file through the door and Widdler took it, as much to keep it from falling to the floor, as anything, and Widdler said, “Wait-wait-wait” but the woman went running off through the parking lot, vaulted into the junkiest car that had ever been parked at the store, a battered Chevy that looked as though it had been painted yellow with a brush, with rust holes in the back fender. The woman started it, a throaty rumble, and sped away.
Jane looked at the file. “What?”
At ten o'clock the next morning, Jane Widdler got self-consciously into her Audi and drove slowly away from her house, watching everything. Looking for other cars, for the same cars, for cars that were driving too slow, for parked cars with men in them. She would be headed, eventually, for the Wal-Mart.
The night before, given the phone number by Coombs, she'd found the Wal-Mart in a cross-reference website. She'd also found Coombs's address. She'd sat and thought about it for a while, and then she'd driven slowly, carefully, watchfully out to scout the Wal-Mart, where she found a block of three pay phones on the wall inside the entrance. One showed the number given her by Coombs. She'd noted the number of all three, then had driven another circuitous route out to the interstate, and then across town to Coombs's house.
She considered the possibility of shooting the woman at her own door; but then, what about the file? Would she have time to find it? Were there other people in the house? Too much uncertainty. She'd gone home-the police had finished their search-and had drunk most of a bottle of wine.
In the morning, at ten o'clock, she started out, a feeling of climax sitting on her shoulders.
She drove six blocks, watching her back, then hooked into the jumble of narrow streets to the north, on backstreets, long narrow lanes, into dead ends, where she turned and came back out, looking at her tail. In ten minutes, she'd seen precisely nothing…
Lucas was in his car three blocks away, Flowers bringing up the rear, Jenkins and Shrake on the flanks. Overhead-way overhead- Jerrod was in a Highway Patrol helicopter, tracking Widdler with glasses. Del was with Coombs.