“You got longer arms,” Flowers said.
“You’re up for a step increase and I’m your boss,” Lucas said.
“Goddamnit, I was hoping for a little drama,” Flowers said. Anderson had turned over now, on her hands and knees. Flowers stepped one foot into the muck, caught one of her hands, and pried her out of the stuff.
Lucas said to her, “Amity, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent…”
FLOWERS SAID, “Cuffs?” Lucas said, “Hell, yes, she’s probably killed about six people. Or helped, anyway.”
“I did not,” Anderson wailed. “I didn’t…”
Lucas ignored her, walked up the bank toward the steel building, turned the radio back up and called Jenkins and Shrake. “Come on in. We grabbed her; and we got a building full of loot.”
Flowers checked Anderson for obvious weapons, removed a switchblade from her side pocket, put her on the ground at the front of the car, and cuffed her to the bumper. She started to cry, and didn’t stop.
LUCAS PUT the switchblade on top of Flowers’s car, where they wouldn’t forget it, and walked around to the trunk. Inside were three plastic-wrapped paintings and an elaborate china clock. Small, high-value stuff, he thought. He looked at the backs of all three paintings, found one old label from Greener Gallery, Chicago, and nothing else.
Flowers had gone inside the steel building, and Lucas followed. “Hell of a lot of furniture,” Flowers said. “I could use a couple pieces for my apartment.”
“Couple pieces would probably buy you a house,” Lucas said. “See any more paintings? Or swoopy chairs?”
“There’re a couple of swoopy chairs…”
Sure enough: there was no other way to describe them. They were looking at the chairs when Shrake and Jenkins came in, and Flowers waved at them, and Lucas saw a wooden rack with more plastic-wrapped paintings. He pulled them down, one-two-three, and ripped loose the plastic on the back. One and three were bare.
The back of two had a single word, written in oil paint with a painter’s brush, a long time ago: Reckless.
26
AMITY ANDERSON WENT to jail in St. Paul, held without bail on suspicion of first-degree murder in the deaths of Constance Bucher and Sugar-Rayette Peebles. Flowers said she cried uncontrollably all the way back and tried to shift the blame to Jane Widdler.
Everybody thought about that, and on the afternoon of Anderson’s arrest, two officers and a technician went to Widdler’s store with a search warrant, and, after she’d spoken to her attorney, spent some time using sterile Q-tips to scrub cells from the lining of her cheeks.
DNA samples were also taken from Anderson, and from the body of Leslie Widdler, and were packed off to the lab. At the same time, five crime-scene techs from the BSA and the St. Paul Police Department began working over the white van, the steel building, and the shack.
Ownership of the land, shack, and building was held by the Lorna C. Widdler Trust. Lorna was Leslie’s mother, who’d died fourteen years earlier; Leslie was the surviving trustee. No mention of Jane. The land surrounding the shack, the cornfield, was owned by a town-farmer in Dundas, who said he’d seen Leslie—“A big guy? Dresses like a fairy?”—only twice in ten years. He’d had a woman with him, the farmer said, but he couldn’t say for certain whether it was Jane Widdler or Amity Anderson. They paid the farmer $225 for damage to his cornfield.
Smith called Lucas the evening of the arrest and said, “We found a pill bottle under the front seat of the van. It’s a prescription for Amity Anderson.”
“There you go,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, and we got some hair, long brown hair. Doesn’t look like Widdler’s. It does look like Anderson’s.”
“Anything on Leslie?”
“Well, there’s some discoloration on the back of the passenger seat, might be blood. One of the techs says it is, so we’ve got some DNA work to do.”
“If it’s either a dog or Leslie…”
“Then we’re good.”
THE RECKLESS PAINTING and the swoopy chairs were confirmed by the Lash kid, a painting was found on an old inventory list held by the Toms family in Des Moines, and two pieces of furniture were found on purchase receipts in Donaldson’s files.
St. Paul police, making phone checks, found a call from Leslie Widdler’s phone to Anderson’s house on the night Widdler killed himself.
The quilts were defended by their museum owners as genuine.
SO THE REPORTERS came and went, and the attorneys; the day after the arrest, Lucas was chatting with Del when Smith came by. Smith had been spending time with Anderson and her court-appointed attorney. They shuffled chairs around Lucas’s office and Carol brought a coffee for Smith, and Smith sighed and said, “Gotta tell you, Lucas. I think there’s an outside possibility that we got the wrong woman.”
“Talk to me.”
“The hair’s gonna be Anderson’s—or maybe, somebody we just don’t know. But I looked at her hair really close, and it’s the same. I mean, the same. Color, texture, split ends…We gotta wait for the DNA, but it’s hers.”
“What does she say?” Lucas asked.
“She says she was never in the van,” Smith said.
“Well, shit, you caught her right there,” Del said. “What more do you want?”
“We asked her about the phone call from Leslie, the night Leslie killed himself. Know what she says?”
“Is this gonna hurt?” Lucas asked.
Smith nodded. “She says that Jane Widdler called her, not Leslie. She said that Jane told her that her car had broken down, and since Anderson was only a few blocks away, asked her to come over and pick her up, give her a ride home. Anderson said she did. She said Widdler told her she had to pee, so they stopped at Anderson’s house, and Widdler went in the bathroom. That’s when Widdler picked up the prescription bottle and the hair, Anderson says.”
“She’s saying that Jane Widdler murdered Leslie,” Lucas said.
“Yep.”
“Anderson never saw a body?”
“She never saw the car, she says,” Smith said. “She says Widdler told her that she was afraid to wait in a dark area, and walked out to Cretin. She said she picked up Widdler on Cretin, took her back to her house to pee, and then took her home.”
“How long was the phone call?” Lucas asked.
“About twenty-three seconds.”
“Doesn’t sound like a call between a guy about to commit suicide, and his lover,” Lucas said to Del.
“I don’t know,” Del said. “Never having been in the position.”
“SHE’S GOT THIS STORY, and she admits it sounds stupid, but she’s sticking to it. And she does it like…” Smith hesitated, then said it: “…like she’s innocent. You know those people who never stop screaming, and then it turns out they didn’t do it? Like that.”
“Hmm,” Lucas said.
“Another thing,” Del said. “Even if we find some proof that Widdler was involved, how do we ever convict? A defense attorney would put Anderson on trial and shred the case.”
“So you’re saying we ought to convict Anderson because we can?” Lucas asked.
“No,” Del said. “Though it’s tempting.”
“You oughta go over and talk to her—Anderson,” Smith said to Lucas.
“Maybe I will,” Lucas said. “All right if I take a noncop with me?”
“Who’d that be?”
“A bartender,” Lucas said.
AMITY ANDERSON had never been big, and now she looked like a Manga cartoon character when the crime boss fetches her out of the dungeon. She’d lost any sparkle she’d ever had; her hair hung lank, her nails were chewed to her fingertips.
“This is all off the record,” Lucas said.
Anderson’s lawyer nodded. “For your information: no court use, no matter what is said.”
Lucas introduced Sloan, who’d put on his best brown suit for the occasion. “Mr. Sloan is an old friend and a former police officer who has al
ways had a special facility in…conversations with persons suspected of crimes,” Lucas said carefully. “I asked him to come along as a consultant.”
Everybody nodded and Anderson said, “I didn’t know about any killings. But I knew Leslie and Jane, and when Mrs. Donaldson was killed, I worried. But that’s all. I didn’t have any proof, I didn’t have any knowledge. With Mrs. Bucher, it never crossed my mind…then, when I read about Marilyn Coombs being killed, I thought about it again. But I pushed it away. Just away—I didn’t want to think about it.”
Sloan took her back through the whole thing, with a gentle voice and thin teacher’s smile, working more like a therapist than a cop, listening to the history: about how Anderson and the Widdlers had become involved in college, and then drifted apart. How the surprise call came years later, about the quilts. About her move to the Cities, occasional contacts with the Widdlers, including a sporadic sexual relationship with Jane Widdler.
“And then you drove down to a barn full of stolen antiques and began stealing them a second time—with a key you had in your pocket,” Lucas said.
“That’s because Jane set me up,” Anderson said through her teeth, showing the first bit of steel in the interrogation. “I couldn’t believe it—I couldn’t believe how she must have worked it. She knew I was friends with Don Harvey. He’s a very prominent museum person from Chicago, he used to be here. She said he was coming to town, and if he authenticated some paintings for them, that they would give me fifteen percent of the sale price, above their purchase price. She thought I had some influence with Don because we’d dated once, and were friends. If he okayed the paintings—I mean, if he’d okayed that Reckless painting, I could have gotten seventy-five thousand dollars in fees for that one painting.”
She shook her head again, a disbelieving smile flickering across her face: “She gave me a key and said she’d send me a map in the mail. I got it out of my mailbox when you were watching me.”
Lucas nodded. They’d seen her get home, go straight to the mailbox, and then out to the car.
“John Smith found the map…” Anderson began.
“He said it was a really old map, Xeroxed, with your fingerprints all over it.”
“And the envelope…” Anderson said.
“Just an envelope…”
“Well, can’t you do some science stuff that shows the key was inside? Or the map? I see all this stuff on Nova, where is it?”
“On Nova,” Lucas said.
Her eyes drifted away: “My God, she completely tangled me up…”
THEY TALKED TO her for another half hour, Sloan watching her face, backtracking, poking her with apparently nonrelevant questions that knitted back toward possible conflicts in what she was saying.
When he was done, he nodded to Lucas, and Lucas said, “It’s been fun. We’ll get back to you.”
“Do you believe me?” she asked Lucas.
“I believe evidence,” Lucas said. “I don’t know about Sloan.”
Sloan said, “I gotta think about it.”
As they were leaving, Anderson said, with a wan, humorless smile, “You know the last mean thing that Botox bitch did? She stole my alprazolam to put in the van, just when I needed it most. I could really use some stress meds right now.”
OUT IN the hallway, Sloan looked at Lucas. Lucas was leaning against the concrete-block wall, rubbing his temples, and Sloan said, “What?”
Lucas pushed away from the wall and asked, “What do you think?”
“She was bullshitting us some, but not entirely,” Sloan said. “I’d probably convict her if I were on a jury, based on the evidence, but I don’t think she killed anyone.”
“Okay.”
“What happened with you?” Sloan asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
LUCAS CALLED the evidence guys at St. Paul, then the supervisor of the crime-scene crew who’d gone over Anderson’s house. Then he went down to Del’s desk and said, “Let’s take a walk around the block.”
Outside, summer day, hot again, puffy white fair-weather clouds; flower beds showing a little wilt from the lack of rain. Del asked, “What’s happening?”
“Remember all that shit Smith said? About the evidence coming in?”
“Yeah.” Del nodded.
“So one of the clinchers was an amber plastic prescription bottle,” Lucas said. “You know the kind, with the click-off white tops?”
“Uh-huh. I know about the bottle.”
“When I was looking into Anderson, when I first tripped over her, I didn’t have anything to go on,” Lucas continued. “I thought I might take an uninvited look around her house.”
“Ah.” They’d both done it before, breaking-and-entering, a dozen times between the two of them. Life in the big city.
“In the bathroom, I found a bottle of alprazolam and a bottle of Ambien,” Lucas said. “I noticed them because I use them myself. The thing is, there wasn’t any alprazolam in Anderson’s house when St. Paul went through the place last night. And the stuff in the van was only three weeks old—it was a new prescription. Unless they used the van some other time, that we don’t know about, and that seems unlikely, because they’d had some problems the last two times out…how did the alprazolam get in the van?”
“That’s awkward,” Del said.
“No shit.”
“Hey. Don’t get all honorable about it,” Del said. “I can think of ways that bottle got there—like maybe she went down to take some other pictures out, or maybe she went down to clean out the van, and lost the bottle. Won’t do any good for you to start issuing affidavits about breaking-and-entering.”
Lucas grinned. “I wasn’t going to do that. But…”
“We need to think about this,” Del said.
THEY FINISHED WALKING down the block, and back, and nothing had occurred to them. At the door, as they were going back in the BCA building, Del asked, “Did anybody ever ask Anderson about Gabriella?”
“No…Gabriella. She’s just gone.”
BUT THAT EVENING, sitting in the den listening to the soundtrack from Everything Is Illuminated, Lucas began to think about Gabriella, and where she might have gone. Assuming that she’d been killed by Leslie Widdler, where would he put her? Because of the “Don’t Mow Ditches” campaign, it was possible that he’d just heaved her out the van door, the way he’d heaved Screw, and she was lying in two feet of weeds off some back highway. On the other hand, he had, not far away, an obscure wooded tract where he had to take the van anyway, assuming he’d used the van when he killed Gabriella. And if he had a body in it…
He got on the phone to Del, then to Flowers: “Can you come back up here?”
“I’m not doing much good here,” Flowers said. He’d gone back south, still pecking away at the case of the girl found on the riverbank. “My suspect’s about to join the Navy to see the world. Which means he won’t be around to talk to.”
“All right. Listen, meet Del and me tomorrow at the Widdlers’ shack. Wear old clothes.”
THEY HOOKED UP at eleven o’clock in the morning, out at the Widdlers’ place, the highway in throwing up heat mirages, the cornfield rustling in the spare dry wind, the sun pounding down. They unloaded in front of the shack, which had been sealed by the crime-scene crew. Flowers was towing a boat, and inside the boat, had a cooler full of Diet Coke and bottles of water.
Lucas and Del were in Lucas’s truck, and unloaded three rods of round quarter-inch steel, six feet long; Lucas had ground the tips to sharp points.
He pointed downstream. “We’ll start down there. It’s thicker. Look at any space big enough to be a grave. Just poke it; it hasn’t rained, so if it’s been turned over, you should be able to tell.”
Flowers was wearing a straw cowboy hat and aviator glasses. He looked downstream and said, “It’s gonna be back in the woods, I think. Probably on the slope down toward the river. If he thought about it, he wouldn’t want to put her anyplace that might be farmed someday.”
“But not too close to the river,” Lucas said. “He wouldn’t want it to wash out.”
They were probing, complaining to each other about the stupidity of it, for an hour, and were a hundred yards south of the house when Flowers said, “Hey.” He was just under the edge of the crown of a box elder, thirty feet from the river.
“Find something?”
“Something,” Flowers said. They gathered around with their rods, probing. The earth beneath them had been disturbed at some time—squatting, they could see a depression a couple of feet across, maybe four feet long. The feel of the dirt changed across the line. But there was also an aspen tree, with a trunk the size of a man’s ankle, just off the depression, with one visible root growing across it.
“I don’t know. The tree…”
“But feel this…” Flowers gave his rod to Lucas. “You can feel how easy it went down, how it got softer the lower you go…and then, doesn’t that feel like a plastic sack or something? You can feel it…”
“Feel something,” Lucas admitted.
They passed the rod to Del, who said he could feel it, too. Lucas wiped his lower lip with the back of his hand: sweaty and getting dirty. “What do you think? Get crime scene down here, or go get a shovel?”
They all looked up at the shack, and the cars, and then Del said, “Would you feel like a bigger asshole if you got a crew down here and there was nothing? Or if you dug a hole yourself and it was something?”
Lucas and Flowers looked at each other and they shrugged simultaneously and Flowers said, “I’ll get the shovel.”
While Flowers went for the shovel, Del probed some more with the rod, scratched it with the tip of a pocketknife, pulled it out and looked at the scratch. “Three feet,” he said. “Or damn close to it.”
They decided to cut a narrow hole, straight down, one shovel wide, two feet long. The ground was soft all the way, river-bottom silt; grass roots, one tree root, then sandy stuff, and at the bottom of the hole, a glimpse of green.
Lucas Davenport Collection Page 66