Invisible prey ld-17

by John Sandford

  “I think we're okay, then,” Lucas said.

  Although they didn't find the box, they did find what Coombs said, and Lucas conceded might possibly be, a faint rectangle in the light dust on the surface of the bookshelf where the box should have been.

  “Right there,” Coombs said. “We need a light…” She dragged a floor lamp over, pulled off the shade, replugged it, turned it on. “See?”

  The light raked the shelf, which had perhaps a week's accumulation of dust. There may have been a rectangle. “Maybe,” Lucas said.

  “For sure,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Only two possibilities,” Coombs said. “Grandma was killed for the music box, or the cops stole it. Pick one.”

  The house didn't have anything else that looked to Lucas like expensive antiques or pottery, although it did have a jumble of cracked and reglued Hummel figurines; and it had quilts. Coombs had decorated all the rooms except the living room with a variety of quilts-crib quilts and single-bed crazy quilts, carefully attached to racks made of one-by-two pine, the racks hung from nails in the real-plaster walls.

  “No quilts are missing?” Lucas asked.

  “Not that I know of. My mom might. She's started quilting a bit. Grandma was a fanatic.”

  “It doesn't seem like there'd be much more space for them,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah… I wish one of the Armstrongs were left. I'd like to go to India for a while.”

  “The Armstrongs?”

  “Grandma… this was ten years ago… Grandma bought a bunch of quilts at an estate sale and they became famous,” Coombs said. “Biggest find of her life. She sold them for enough to buy this house. I mean, I don't know exactly how much, but with what she got for her old house, and the quilts, she bought this one.”

  They were at the top of the stairs, about to come down, and Coombs said, “Look over here.”

  She stepped down the hall to a built-in cabinet with dark oak doors and trim, and pulled a door open. The shelves were packed with transparent plastic cases the size of shoe boxes, and the cases were stuffed with pieces of fabric, with quilting gear, with spools of thread, with needles and pins and scissors and tapes and stuff that Lucas didn't recognize, but that he thought might be some kind of pattern-drawing gear.

  The thread was sorted by hue, except for the stuff in two sewing containers. Containers, because only one of them was the traditional woven-wicker sewing basket; the other was a semitransparent blue tackle box. All the plastic boxes had been labeled with a black Sharpie, in a neat school script: “Threads, red.”

  “Threads, blue.”

  “A lot of stuff,” Lucas said. He put a finger in the wicker sewing basket, pulled it out an inch. More spools, and the spools looked old to him. Collector spools? Which tripped off a thought. “Do you think these Armstrongs, would they have been classified as antiques?”

  “No, not really,” Coombs said. “They were made in what, the 1930s? I don't think that's old enough to be an antique, but I really don't know. I don't know that much about the whole deal, except that Grandma got a lot of money from them, because of the curse thing.”

  “The curse thing.”

  “Yes. The quilts had curses sewn into them. They became… what?” She had to think about it for a second, then said, “I suppose they became feminist icons.”

  Like this, she said: Grandma Coombs had once lived in a tiny house on Snelling Avenue. Her husband had died in the '70s, and she was living on half of a postal pension, the income from a modest IRA, and Social Security. She haunted estate sales, flea markets, and garage sales all over the Upper Midwest, buying cheap, reselling to antique stores in the Cities.

  “She probably didn't make ten thousand dollars a year, after expenses, but she enjoyed it, and it helped,” Coombs said. Then she found the Armstrong quilts at an estate sale in northern Wisconsin. The quilts were brilliantly colored and well made. Two were crazy quilts, two were stars, one was a log-cabin, and the other was unique, now called “Canada Geese.”

  None of that made them famous. They were famous, Coombs said, because the woman who made them, Sharon Armstrong, had been married to a drunken sex freak named Frank Armstrong who beat her, raped her, and abused the two children, one boy and one girl, all in the small and oblivious town of Carton, Wisconsin.

  Frank Armstrong was eventually shot by his son, Bill, who then shot himself. Frank didn't die from the gunshot, although Bill did. The shootings brought out all the abuse stories, which were horrific, and after a trial, Frank was locked up in a state psychiatric hospital and died there twenty years later.

  Sharon Armstrong and her daughter moved to Superior, where first the mother and then the daughter got jobs as cooks on the big interlake ore ships. Sharon died shortly after World War II. The daughter, Annabelle, lived, unmarried and childless, until 1995. When she died, her possessions were sold off to pay her credit-card debts.

  “There were six quilts. I was in Germany when Grandma found them, and I only saw them a couple of times, because I was moving around a lot, but they were beautiful.

  The thing is, when Grandma bought them, she also bought a scrapbook that had clippings about Frank Armstrong, and Sharon Armstrong, and what happened to them.

  “When Grandma got home, she put the quilts away for a while. She was going to build racks, to stretch them, and then sell them at an art fair. She used to do that with old quilts and Red Wing pottery.

  “When she got them out, she was stretching one, and she noticed that the stitching looked funny. When she looked really close, she saw that the stitches were letters, and when you figured them out, they were curses.”

  “Curses,” Lucas said.

  “Curses against Frank. They were harsh: they said stuff like 'Goddamn the man who sleeps beneath this quilt, may the devils pull out his bowels and burn them in front of his eyes; may they pour boiling lead in his ears for all eternity'… They went on, and on, and on, for like… hours. But they were also, kind of, poetic, in an ugly way.”

  “Hmmm.” Lucas said. “Grandma sold them for what?”

  “I don't know, exactly. Mom might. But enough that she could sell her old house and buy this one.”

  “All this quilt stuff ties to Connie Bucher.”

  “Yeah. There are thousands of quilt groups all over the country. They're like rings, and a lot of the women belong to two rings. Or even three. So there are all these connections. You can be a quilter on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and you need to go to Los Angeles for something, so you call a friend, and the friend calls a friend, and the next thing you know, somebody's calling you from Los Angeles, ready to help out. The connections are really amazing.”

  “They wouldn't be mostly Democrats, would they?” Lucas asked.

  “Well… I suppose. Why?”

  “Nothing. But: your grandma was connected to Bucher. And there was another woman killed. Do you have a name?”

  “Better than that. I have a newspaper story.”

  Lucas didn't want to sit anywhere in the room where the elderly Coombs had died, in case it became necessary to tear it apart. He took Gabriella Coombs and the clipping into the kitchen, turned on the light.

  “Ah, God,” Coombs stepped back, clutched at his arm.

  “What?” Then he saw the cockroaches scuttling for cover. A half dozen of them had been perched on a cookie sheet on the stove. He could still see faint grease rings from a dozen or so cookies, and the grease had brought out the bugs.

  “I've gotta get my mom and clean this place up,” Gabriella said. “Once you get the bugs established, they're impossible to get rid of. We should call an exterminator.

  How long does it take the crime-scene people to finish?”

  “Depends on the house and what they're looking for,” Lucas said.

  “I think they're pretty much done here, but they'll probably wait until there's a ruling on the death.”

  “You think I could wash the dishes?” she asked.

  “Y
ou could call and ask. Tell them about the bugs.”

  They sat at the kitchen table, and Lucas took the newspaper clip. It was printed on standard typing paper, taken from a website. The clip was the top half of the front page in the Chippewa Falls Post, the text running under a large headline, Chippewa Heiress Murdered.

  A noted Chippewa Falls art collector and heir to the Thune brewing fortune was found shot to death in her home Wednesday morning by relatives, a Chippewa Falls police spokesman said Wednesday afternoon.

  The body of Claire Donaldson, 72, was discovered in the kitchen of her West Hill mansion by her sister, Margaret Donaldson Booth, and Mrs. Booth's husband, Landford Booth, of Eau Claire.

  Mrs. Donaldson's secretary, Amity Anderson, who lives in an apartment in Mrs. Donaldson's home, was in Chicago on business for Mrs. Donaldson, police said. When she was unable to reach Mrs. Donaldson by telephone on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, Anderson called the Booths, who went to Donaldson's home and found her body.

  Police said they have several leads in the case.

  “Claire Donaldson was brilliant and kind, and that this should happen to her is a tragedy for all of Chippewa Falls,” said the Rev. Carl Hoffer, pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Chippewa Falls, and a longtime friend of Mrs. Donaldson…

  Lucas read through the clip, which was long on history and short on crime detail; no matter, he could get the details from the Chippewa cops. But, he thought, if you changed the name and the murder weapon, the news story of Claire Donaldson's death could just as easily have been the story of Constance Bucher's murder.

  “ When we get back to the office, I'll want a complete statement,” he told Coombs.

  “I'll get a guy to take it from you. We'll need a detailed description of that music box. This could get complicated.”

  “God. I wasn't sure you were going to believe me,”Coombs said. “About Grandma being murdered.”

  “She probably wasn't-but there's a chance that she was,” Lucas said. “The idea that somebody hit her with that ball… That would take some thought, some knowledge of the house.”

  “And a serious psychosis,” Coombs said.

  “And that. But it's possible.”

  “On the TV shows, the cops never believe the edgy counterculture person the first time she tells them something,” Coombs said. “Two or three people usually have to get killed first.”

  “That's TV,” Lucas said.

  “But you have to admit that cops are prejudiced against us,” she said.

  “Hey” Lucas said. “I know a guy who walks around in hundred-degree heat in a black hoodie because he's always freezing because he smokes crack all day, supports himself with burglary, and at night he spray-paints glow-in-the-dark archangels on boxcars so he can send Christ's good news to the world. He's an edgy counterculture person.

  You're a hippie.”

  She clouded up, her lip trembling. “That's a cruel thing to say” she said. “Why'd you have to say that?”

  “Ah, man,” Lucas said. “Look, I'm sorry…”

  She smiled, pleased with herself and the trembling lip: “Relax. I'm just toyin' with you.”

  On the way out of the house, they walked around the blood spot, and Coombs asked, “What's a doornail?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Oh.” Disappointed. “I would have thought you'd have heard it a lot, and looked it up. You know, dead as a doornail, and you being a cop.”

  He got her out of the house, into the Porsche, fired it up, rolled six feet, then stopped, frowned at Coombs, and shut it down again.

  “Two things: If your grandma's name was Coombs, and your mother is her daughter, how come your name…?”

  “I'm a bastard,” Coombs said.

  “Huh?”

  “My mom was a hippie. I'm second-generation hippie. Anyway, she slept around a little, and when the bundle of joy finally showed up, none of the prospective fathers did.”

  She flopped her hands in the air. “So. I'm a bastard. What was the second thing?”

  “Mmm.” He shook his head, and fished his cell phone out of his pocket. “I'm going to call somebody and ask an unpleasant question about your grandmother. If you want, you could get out and walk around the yard for a minute.”

  She shook her head. “That's okay. I'd be interested in hearing the question.”

  Lucas dialed, identified himself, and asked for the medical examiner who'd done the postmortem on Coombs. Got her and asked, “What you take out of her stomach. Uh-huh? Uh-huh? Very much? Okay… okay.”

  He hung up and Coombs again asked, “What?”

  “Her stomach was empty. If she fell when she was by herself, I wonder who ate nine oatmeal cookies?” Lucas asked.

  Back at BCA headquarters, he briefed Shrake, put Coombs in a room with him, and told them both that he needed every detail. Five minutes later he was on the line with an investigator with the Chippewa County Sheriff's Office, named Carl Frazier, who'd worked the Donaldson murder.

  “I saw the story in the paper and was going to call somebody, but I needed to talk to the sheriff about it. He's out of town, back this afternoon,” Frazier said. “Donaldson's a very touchy subject around here. But since you called me…”

  “It feels the same,” Lucas said. “Donaldson and Bucher.”

  “Yeah, it does,” Frazier said. “What seems most alike is that there was never a single lead. Nothing. We tore up the town, and Eau Claire, we beat on every asshole we knew about, and there never was a thing. I've gotten the impression that the St. Paul cops are beating their heads against the same wall.”

  “You nail down anything as stolen?”

  “Nope. That was another mystery,”Frazier said. “As far as we could tell, nothing was touched. I guess the prevailing theory among the big thinkers here was that it was somebody she knew, they got in an argument…”

  “And the guy pulled out a gun and shot her? Why'd he have a gun?”

  “That's a weak point,” Frazier admitted. “Would have worked better if she'd been killed like Bucher-you know, somebody picked up a frying pan and swatted her. That would have looked a little more spontaneous.”

  “This looked planned?”

  “Like D-Day. She was shot three times in the back of the head. But what for? A few hundred dollars? Nobody who inherited the money needed it. There hadn't been any family fights or neighborhood feuds or anything else. The second big-thinker theory was that it was some psycho. Came in the back door, maybe for food or booze, killed her.”

  “Man…”

  “I know,” Frazier said. “But that's what we couldn't figure out: What for? If you can't figure out what for, it's harder than hell to figure out who.”

  “She's got these relatives, a sister and brother-in-law, the Booths,” Lucas said.

  “They still around?”

  “Oh, yeah. The sheriff hears from them regularly.”

  “Okay. Then, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna go talk to them,” Lucas said. “Maybe I could stop by and look at your files?”

  “Absolutely,” Frazier said. “If you don't mind, I'd like to ride along when you do the interview. Or, I'll tell you what. Why don't we meet at the Donaldson house? The Booths still own it, and it's empty. You could take a look at it.”

  “How soon can you do it?”

  “Tomorrow? I'll call the Booths to make sure they'll be around,” Frazier said.

  Weather and LUCAS spent some time that night fooling around, and when the first round was done, Lucas rolled over on his back, his chest slick with sweat, and Weather said, “That wasn't so terrible.”

  “Yeah. I was fantasizing about Jesse Barth,” he joked. She swatted him on the stomach, not too hard, but he bounced and complained, “Ouch! You almost exploded one of my balls.”

  “You have an extra,”she said. “All we need is one.” She was trying for a second kid, worried that she might be too old, at forty-one.

  “Yeah, well, I'd like to keep both of them,”
Lucas said, rubbing his stomach. “I think you left a mark.”

  She made a rude noise. “Crybaby.” Then, “Did you hear what Sam said today…?”

  And later, she asked, “What happened with Jesse Barth, anyway?”

  “It's going to the grand jury. Virgil's handling most of it.”

  “Mmm. Virgil,” Weather said, with a tone in her voice.

  “What about him?”

  “If I was going to fantasize during sex, which I'm not saying I'd do, Virgil would be a candidate,” she said.

  “Virgil? Flowers?”

  “He has a way about him,” Weather said. “And that little tiny butt.”

  Lucas was shocked. “He never… I mean, made a move or anything…”

  “On me?” she asked. “No, of course not. But… mmm.”

  “What?”

  “I wonder why? He never made a move? He doesn't even flirt with me,” she said.

  “Probably because I carry a gun,” Lucas said.

  “Probably because I'm too old,” Weather said.

  “You're not too old, believe me,” Lucas said. “I get the strange feeling that Virgil would fuck a snake, if he could get somebody to hold its head.”

  “Sort of reminds me of you, when you were his age,” she said.

  “You didn't know me when I was his age.”

  “You can always pick out the guys who'd fuck a snake, whatever age they are,” Weather said.

  “That's unfair.”

  “Mmm.”

  A minute later, Lucas said, “Virgil thinks that going to Dakota County was a little… iffy.”

  “Politically corrupt, you mean,” Weather said.

  “Maybe,” Lucas admitted.

  “It is,” Weather said.

  “I mentioned to Virgil that I occasionally talked to Ruffe over at the Star Tribune.”

  She propped herself up on one arm. “You suggested that he call Ruffe?”

  “Not at all. That'd be improper,” Lucas said.

  “So what are the chances he'll call?”

  “Knowing that fuckin' Flowers, about ninety-six percent.”

  She dropped onto her back. “So you manipulated him into making the call, so the guy in Dakota County can't bury the case.”