Invisible Prey

  The woman looked at the others and said, “It’s the curses working. Not only three women dead, but the son who committed suicide, the father dies in the insane asylum.”

  Another of the women shivered: “You’re scaring me.”

  “Did Bucher and Donaldson have something to do with the Armstrong quilts?” Lucas asked, impatient. He didn’t believe in witchcraft.

  Coombs said, “Yes. They both bought one from my mom, after Mom found them.”

  Lucas said, “There were what, five quilts? Six, I can’t remember…”

  “Six,” the thin-nosed woman said. “One went to Mrs. Bucher, one went to Mrs. Donaldson, the other four were sold at auction. Big money. I think two of them went to museums and two went to private collectors. I don’t know who…”

  “Who did the auction?”

  Coombs said, “One of the big auction houses in New York. Um, I don’t know how to pronounce it, Sotheby’s?”

  “Are there any here in Minneapolis?” Lucas asked.

  The dangly-earring woman said, “At the Walker Gallery. Mrs. Bucher donated it.”

  “Good. I’ll go look at it, if I have time,” Lucas said. “Have you ever heard the name Jacob Toms?”

  The women all looked at each other, shaking their heads. “Who’s he?”

  HE WAS on his way out the door, intent on tracing the Armstrong quilts, when he was struck by a thought and turned around, asked Coombs: “The music box. You don’t think Gabriella had it, do you? That she just used it to get an investigation going?”

  Coombs shook her head: “No. I found Mom, and called the police, and then called Gabriella. The police were already there when she came over. She was sad and mentioned the music box, and we went to look at it, and it wasn’t there.”

  “Okay. So somebody brought back the music box and took the sewing basket,” Lucas said. “Why did they do that? Why did they take the sewing basket? Was that part of the Armstrong quilt thing?”

  “No, she just bought that kind of thing when she was hunting for antiques—I don’t know where she got it.”

  “I remember her talking about it at quilt group,” said the big woman in the purple shift. “She said she might see if she could sell it to a museum, or somewhere that did restorations, because the thread was old and authentic. Nothing special, but you know—worth a few dollars and kinda interesting.”

  Coombs said, “There might be a…clue…wrapped up in the quilts. But that won’t save Gabriella, will it? If they took her? A clue like that would take forever to work out…” Tears started running down her face.

  Lucas lied again: “I still think it’s better than fifty-fifty that she went off someplace. She may have lost her keys in the dark, called somebody over to pick her up. She’s probably asleep somewhere…” He looked at his watch: she’d been gone for sixteen or eighteen hours. Too long.

  “I’m running,” he said. “We’ll find her.”

  FROM HIS OFFICE, he looked up Sotheby’s in New York, called, got routed around by people who spoke in hushed tones and non–New York accents, and finally wound up with a vice president named Archie Carton. “Sure. The auctions are public, so there’s no secret about who bought what—most of the time, anyway. Let me punch that up for you…”

  “What about the rest of the time?” Lucas asked.

  “Well, sometimes we don’t know,” Carton said. “A dealer may be bidding, and he’s the buyer of record, but he’s buying it for somebody else. And sometimes people bid by phone, to keep their identify confidential, and we maintain that confidentiality—but in a police matter, of course, we respond to subpoenas.”

  “So if one of these things was a secret deal…”

  “That’s not a problem. I’ve got them on-screen, and all four sales were public,” Carton said. “One went to the Museum of Modern Art here in New York, one went to the National Museum of Women’s Art in Washington, D.C., one went to the Amon Carter in Fort Worth, Texas, and one went to the Modern in San Francisco.”

  “Does it say how much?”

  “Yup. Let me run that up for you…” Lucas could hear keys clicking, and then Carton said, “The total was four hundred seventy thousand dollars. If you want, I could send you the file. I could have it out in five minutes.”

  “Terrific,” Lucas said. “If my wife ever buys another antique, I’ll make sure she buys it from you.”

  “We’ll be looking forward to it,” Carton said.

  THAT’D BEEN EASY. Lucas leaned back and looked at the number scrawled on his notepad: $470,000. He thought about it for a moment, then picked up the phone and called Carton back.

  “I’m sorry to bother you again, but I was looking in an antiques book, and I didn’t see any quilts that sold for this much,” Lucas said. “Was there something really special about these things?”

  “I could get you to somebody who could answer that…”

  Two minutes later, a woman with a Texas accent said, “Yes, the price was high, but they were unique. The whole history of them pushed the price, and the curses themselves have almost a poetic quality to them. Besides, the quilts are brilliant. Have you seen one?”

  “No. Not yet,” Lucas said.

  “You should,” she said.

  “So you’d pay, what, a hundred and twenty-five thousand for one?”

  The woman laughed. “No. Not exactly. What happened, was, the owner of the quilts, a Mrs. Coombs, put them up for sale, and we publicized the sale. Now, as it happened, two of the original six quilts had already been acquired by museums…”

  “Two?”

  “Yes. One was donated to the Art Institute of Chicago, and the other to the Walker Gallery in Minneapolis,” she said.

  “I knew about the Walker.”

  “The Walker and Chicago. Their original sales price established a price level. Then, when the other four came up, the museums that were interested would have reached out to their donor base, informed them of the Armstrong quilt history, and they would have asked for support on this specific acquisition. All of these museums have thousands of supporters. All they had to do was find a hundred and thirty women interested in donating a thousand dollars each. Remember: these quilts commemorate a woman fighting for her freedom and safety, for her very life, the only way she knew how. And how many affluent veterans of the feminist wars do we have donating to museums? Many, many.”

  “Ah.” That made sense, he thought.

  “Yes. So raising the money wouldn’t have been a problem,” the woman said. “There were a dozen bids on each of them, mostly other regional museums, and, we had the four winners.”

  “Thank you.”

  WHO’D SAID IT? The woman with the dangly earrings? The thin-nosed woman? One of them had said, “Big money.” Lucas turned and looked up at the wall over his bookcase, at a map of St. Paul. Gabriella Coombs had told him that her grandmother “got lucky” with the quilts, and with the money, and the money she had in her former house, and been able to buy in the Como neighborhood.

  But houses on Coombs’s block didn’t cost $470,000, certainly not when she bought, and not even now, after the big price run-up. They might cost $250,000 now, probably not more than two-thirds of that when Coombs bought. Maybe $160,000, or $175,000. And Gabriella said she’d put in money from her old house…

  There was money missing. Where was it?

  FOR THE FIRST TIME, Lucas had the sense of moving forward. Most murders didn’t involve big money. Most involved too many six-packs and a handy revolver. But if you had a murder, and there was big money missing…the two were gonna be related.

  Bucher and Donaldson and Coombs, tied by quilts and methods.

  As for the kidnap attempt on Jesse Barth, by somebody in a van, that was most likely a coincidence, he thought now. An odd coincidence, but they happened—and as he’d thought earlier, there were many, many vans around, especially white vans.

  The two cases were separate: Coombs/Bucher on one side, Barth/Kline on the other.

  ALL OF M
ARILYN COOMBS’S papers were in her house. He had Gabriella’s keys in a bag in his car, he could use them to get in. All that time at Bucher’s house, looking at paper, had been wasted. He’d been looking at the wrong paper. He needed Coombs’s.

  He was on his way north in the Porsche, when John Smith called.

  “We showed the tape to Jesse Barth. She swears it’s the same van.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what she says. The van in the film shows what looks like a dent in the front passenger-side door, and she swears to God, she remembers the dent.”

  Lucas had no reply, and after a moment, Smith asked, “So. What does that mean? Lucas?”

  16

  MARILYN COOMBS’S HOUSE was not as organized as Bucher’s. There were papers all over the place, some in an old wooden file cabinet, others stuffed in drawers in the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom. Lucas found a plastic storage bin full of checkbooks trailing back to the ’70s, but tax returns going back only four years.

  He finally called his contact at the state tax office, and asked her to check Coombs’s state returns, to see when she’d gotten the big money.

  He had the answer in five minutes—computers made some things easier: “She had a big bump in income for one year, a hundred eighty-six thousand dollars and then, let’s see, a total of thirty-three thousand dollars the year before, and thirty-five thousand nine hundred dollars the year after. We queried the discrepancy, and there’s an accountant’s letter reporting it as a onetime gain from the sale of antique quilts bought two years earlier. I don’t have the letter, just the notation. Does that help?”

  “I’ll call you later and tell you,” Lucas said.

  He spent an hour scratching through the pile of check registers, stopping now and again to peer sightlessly at the living room wall, thinking about the van. What the fuck was it? Where was the van coming from?

  The checks were in no particular order—it seemed that she’d simply tossed the latest one in a drawer, and then, when the drawer got full, dumped the old ones in a plastic tub and started a new pile in the drawer.

  He finally found one that entered a check for $155,000. The numbers were heavily inked, as though they’d been written in with some emotion. He went through check registers for six months on either side of the big one, and found only two exceptionally large numbers: a check for $167,500 to Central States Title Company. She’d bought the house.

  A few months later, she registered a check for $27,500; and then, a week later, a check payable to U.S. Bank for $17,320. The $27,500 was the sale of her old house, Lucas thought. She’d taken out a swing loan to cover the cost of her new house, and the check to U.S. Bank was repayment.

  HE’D BEEN SITTING on a rug as he sorted through the checks, and now he rocked back on his heels. Not enough coming in. There’d been $470,000 up for grabs, and she only showed $155,000 coming in as a lump sum. He closed one eye and divided $470,000 by $155,000…and figured the answer was very close to three.

  He got a scrap of paper and did the actual arithmetic: $470,000 divided by three was $156,666. If Marilyn Coombs had gotten a check for that amount, and to use the $1,666 as a little happy-time mad money…then she might have deposited $155,000.

  Where was the rest? And what the fuck was that van all about?

  HE CALLED Archie Carton at Sotheby’s, and was told that Carton had left for the day, that the administrative offices were closed, and no, they didn’t give out Carton’s cell-phone number. Lucas pressed, and was told that they didn’t know Carton’s cell-phone number, which sounded like an untruth, but Lucas was out in flyover country, on the end of a long phone line, and the woman he was talking to was paid to frustrate callers.

  “Thanks for your help,” he snarled, and rang off. Carton would have to wait overnight: he was obviously the guy to go to. In the meantime…

  ALICE SCHIRMER WAS the folk art curator at the Walker. She was tall and too thin with close-cropped dark hair and fashionable black-rimmed executive glasses. She wore a dark brown summer suit with a gold silk scarf as a kind of necktie. She said, “I had two of our workpersons bring it out; we’ve had it in storage.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You said there was a woman missing…?” Schirmer asked. She did a finger twiddle at a guy with a two-day stubble and a $400 haircut.

  “Yeah. One of the heirs to the Armstrong fortune, in a way,” Lucas said. “Granddaughter of the woman who found them. That woman may also have been murdered.”

  “Mrs. Coombs?”

  “Yup.”

  “Good God,” Schirmer said, touching her lips with three bony fingers. “They really do hold a curse. Like the tomb of Tutankhamen.”

  “Maybe you could palm it off on another museum,” Lucas suggested. “Get a picture or a statue back.”

  “I don’t think…we’d get enough,” Schirmer said, reluctantly. She pointed: “Through here.”

  They walked past a painting that looked like a summer salad. “Why wouldn’t you get enough?”

  “I’m afraid the value of the Armstrongs peaked a while ago. Like, the year we got it.”

  “Really.”

  “First the stock market had problems, and art in general cooled off, and then, you know, we began to get further and further from the idealism of the early feminists,” she said. “The cycle turns, women’s folk art begins to slip in value. Here we go.”

  THEY STEPPED PAST a sign that said GALLERY CLOSED, INSTALLATION IN PROGRESS, into an empty, white-walled room. The quilt was stretched between naturally finished timber supports; it was a marvel of color: black, brown, red, blue, and yellow rectangles that seemed to shape and reshape themselves into three-dimensional triangles that swept diagonally across the fabric field.

  “Canada Geese,” Schirmer said. “You can almost see them flapping, can’t you?”

  “You can,” Lucas agreed. He looked at it for a moment. He didn’t know anything about art, but he knew what he liked, and he liked the quilt.

  “This was donated by Ms. Bucher?” Lucas asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where are the curses?” he asked.

  “Here.” Schirmer’s suit had an inside pocket, just like a man’s, and she slipped out a mechanical pencil and a penlight. They stood close to the quilt and she pointed out the stitches with the tip of the pencil. “This is an M. See it? You read this way around the edge of the piece, ‘Let the man who lies beneath this quilt…’”

  Lucas followed the curse around the quilted pieces, the letters like hummingbird tracks across fallen autumn leaves. “Jesus,” he said after a moment. “She was really pissed, wasn’t she?”

  “She was,” Schirmer said. “We have documents from her life that indicate exactly why she was pissed. She had the right to be. Her husband was a maniac.”

  “Huh.” A thread of scarlet caught Lucas’s eye. He got closer, his nose six inches from the quilt. “Huh.”

  Had to be bullshit. Then he thought, no it doesn’t—as far as he could tell, the thread was exactly the same shade as the thread on the spool he’d found behind the stove at Marilyn Coombs’s. But that thread had come from Arkansas…

  He said, “Huh,” a third time, and Schirmer asked, “What?”

  Lucas stepped back: “How do you authenticate something like this?”

  “Possession is a big part of it. We know where Mrs. Coombs bought them, and we confirmed that with the auctioneer,” she said. “A couple of Mrs. Armstrong’s friends verified that she’d once been a pretty busy quilter, and that she’d made these particular quilts. She signed them with a particular mark.” She pointed at the lower-left-hand corner of the quilt. “See this thing, it looks like a grapevine? It’s actually a script SA, for Sharon Armstrong. We know of several more of her quilts without the curses, but the same SA. She used to make them when she was working on the ore boats…You know about the ore boats?”

  “Yeah, Gabriella…the missing woman…mentioned that Armstrong worked on the boats.??
?

  “Yes. She apparently had a lot of free time, and not much to do, so she made more quilts. But that was after Frank was in the asylum, so there was no need for curses.”

  “Huh.” Lucas poked a finger at the quilt. “Can you tell by the fabric, you know, that they’re right? For the time? Or the style, or the cloth, or something?”

  “We could, if there was any doubt,” she said.

  Lucas looked at her. “What would I have to do,” he asked, “to get a little teeny snip of this red thread, right here?”

  AN ACT OF CONGRESS, it turned out, or at least of a judge from the Hennepin County district court.

  Schirmer escorted him to the elevator that went down to the parking garage. “If it had been up to me, I’d let you have the snip. But Joe thinks there’s a principle involved.”

  “Yeah, I know. The principle is, ‘Don’t help the cops,’” Lucas said.

  He said it pleasantly and she smiled: “I’m sure it won’t be any trouble to get a piece of paper.”

  “If I weren’t looking for Gabriella Coombs…”

  “You think the snip of thread would make a difference?” she asked.

  “Maybe…hell, probably not,” Lucas admitted. “But I’d like a snip. I’ll talk to a judge, send the paper.”

  “Bring it yourself,” she said. “I’d be happy to show you around. I haven’t seen you here before…”

  “When I was in uniform, with the Minneapolis cops, I’d go over to the spoon-and-cherry…” He was talking about the Claes Oldenburg spoon bridge in the sculpture garden across the street. He smiled reflexively, and then said, “Never mind.”

  “You did not either!” she said, catching his sleeve. What she meant was, You did not either fuck in the spoon.

  He shrugged, meaning to tell her that he’d chased people off the spoon a couple of times. Before he could, she leaned close and said, “So’d I.” She giggled in an uncuratorlike way. “If I’d been caught and fired, it still would have been worth it.”