She nibbled on her bottom lip, looked at the list, then sighed and fed it into the shredder.
If he did get to them, could Davenport convict? Not if Leslie hadn’t been bitten by the dog. But with the dog bites, Leslie was cooked. If she hadn’t taken some kind of preemptive action before then, she’d be cooked with him.
From watching her stepfather work as a cop, and listening to him talk about court cases, she felt the most likely way to save herself was to give the cops another suspect. Build reasonable doubt into the case. As much reasonable doubt as possible.
As for the money…
They had a safe-deposit box in St. Paul where they had more than $160,000 in hundreds, fifties, and twenties. The cash came from stolen antiques, from four dead old women and one dead old man, each in a different state. The Widdlers had worked the cash slowly back through the store, upgrading their stock, an invisible laundry that the mafia would have appreciated.
With Leslie looking at a china collection in Minnetonka, Jane, after talking to Anderson, had gone alone to the bank, retrieved the money, and wrapped it in Ziploc bags. Where to put it? She’d eventually taken it home and buried it in a flower garden, carefully scraping the bark mulch back over it.
AMITY ANDERSON, Jane knew, was on the edge of cracking. One big fear: that Anderson would crack first, and go to the cops hoping to make a deal. Anderson knew herself well enough to know that she couldn’t tolerate prison. She was too fragile for that. Too much of a free spirit. All she wanted was to go to Italy; look at Cellini and Caravaggio. Amity believed that if she could only get to Italy, somehow, the problems would be left behind.
Magical thinking. Jane Widdler had no such illusions. The victims had been too rich, the money too big, the publicity too great. The cops would be all over them once they had a taste; and Davenport had gotten a taste.
Still, Jane could pull it off, if she had time.
LESLIE CALLED, said he was on the way home. Jane hurried over to the shop, opened the safe in the back, and took out the coin collection and a simple .38-caliber pistol.
The coin collection came from the Toms foray, fifty-eight rare gold coins from the nineteenth century, all carefully sealed in plastic grading containers, all MS66 through MS69—so choice, in fact, that they’d been a little worried about moving the coins. They still had all but two, but if necessary, she could take them to Mexico and move them there.
The coins went deep in a line of lilacs, behind and to one side of the house, halfway to the creek. She dug them six inches down, covered them with sod, dusted her hands. If she didn’t make it back…what a waste.
The pistol went into her purse. She’d never learned not to jerk the trigger, but that wouldn’t matter if you were shooting at a range of half an inch.
SHE WONDERED where the jail was. Would it be Hennepin County, or Ramsey? Somehow, she thought it might be Ramsey, since that’s where the murders occurred. And Ramsey, she thought, might be preferable, with a better class of felon. Surely they had separate cells, you were presumed innocent until proven guilty. And if Leslie had passed away, the house would be hers to use as a bond for bail…
She went inside. Leslie was perched on the couch in the den, wearing yellow walking shorts and a loose striped shirt from a San Francisco clothier, pale blue stripes on a champagne background that went well with the shorts and the Zelli crocodile slippers, $695. He said, “Hi. I heard you come in…Where’d you go?”
“I thought I saw the fox out back. I walked around to see. But he was gone.”
“Yeah? I’d like a fox tail for the car.”
“We’ve got to talk,” Jane said. “Something awful happened today.”
WHEN SHE TOLD him about Davenport visiting the shop, about his question about a white van, Leslie touched one fat finger to his fat nose and said, “He’s got to go.”
“There’s no time,” Jane said, pouring the anxiety into her voice. “If he was asking about the van this afternoon, he’ll be looking at all the files tomorrow. Once that gets into the system…”
Leslie was digging in a pocket. He came up with a pack of breath mints and popped two. “Listen,” he said, clicking the mints off his lower teeth, “we do it tonight. Just have to figure out how.”
“I looked him up,” Jane volunteered. “He lives on Mississippi River Boulevard in St. Paul. I drove by; a very nice house for a cop. He must be on the take.”
“Maybe that’s a possibility,” Leslie suggested. “If he’s crooked…”
“No. Too late, too late…The thing is, have you seen him with that gun? And he’s going to be wary, I’d be afraid to approach him.”
“So what do you think?” Leslie let her do most of the thinking.
“If you think we should do it, I suggest that rifle. God knows it’s powerful enough. You shoot from the backseat, I drive. We’ll ambush him right outside his house. If the opportunity doesn’t present itself, we go back tomorrow morning.”
“If we see him in a window—a .300 Mag won’t even notice a piece of window glass,” Leslie said.
“Whatever.”
“If we’re going to do it, we’ve got things to do,” Leslie said cheerfully. The thought of killing always warmed him up. “I’m gonna take a shower, clean up the gun. Take my car, I’ll sit in the back. We’ll need earplugs, but I’ve got some. What’s the layout?”
“We can’t park on River Boulevard, it’s all no-parking. But there’s a spot on the side street, under a big elm tree. It looks sideways at his garage and front door. If he goes anywhere…”
“Too bad it’s summer,” Leslie said. “We’ll be shooting in daylight.”
“We can’t go too early,” Jane said. “It has to be dark enough that people can’t read out faces.”
“Not before nine-fifteen, then,” Leslie said. “I’ve played golf at nine, but sometime around nine-fifteen or nine-thirty, you can’t see the golf ball anymore.”
“Get there at nine-thirty and hope for the best,” Jane said. “Maybe there’d be some way to lure him out?”
“Like what?”
“Let me think about it.”
HE WENT UP to take a shower, and she thought about it: how to get Davenport outside, with enough certainty that Leslie would buy the idea. Then she sat down and made her list, looked at the list, dropped it in the shredder, and thought about it some more.
Leslie was working on “Cheeseburger in Paradise” when she stepped into his office and brought up the computer. She typed two notes, one a fragment, the other one longer, taken from models on the Internet. When she was done, she put them in the Documents file, signed off, pushed the chair back in place, walked up the stairs, and called through the bathroom door, “I’ve got to run out: I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
The water stopped. “Where’re you going?”
“Down to Wal-Mart,” she said through the door. “We need a couple of baseballs.”
WHEN SHE GOT back home, Leslie was in the living room, sliding the rifle, already loaded, into an olive-drab gun case. He was dressed in a black golf shirt and black slacks.
“God, I hate to throw this thing away,” he said. “We’ll have to, but it’s really a nice piece of machinery.”
“But we have to,” Jane said. She had a plastic bag in her hand, and took out two boxes with baseballs inside.
“Baseballs?”
“You think, being the big jock, that you could hit a house a hundred feet away with a baseball?”
“Hit a house?” Leslie was puzzled.
“Suppose you’re a big-shot cop sitting in your house, and you hear a really loud thump on your front roof, or front side of the house at nine-thirty at night,” Jane said. “Do you send your wife out to take a look?”
Leslie smiled at her. “I can hit a house. And you get smarter all the time.”
“We’re both smart,” Jane said. “Let’s just see if we can stay ahead of Davenport.”
“Wish we’d done this first, instead of that harebrained dog thing,” Leslie sai
d. “You oughta see the holes in my legs.”
“Maybe later.” Jane looked at her watch. “I have to change, and we have to leave soon. Oh God, Leslie, is this the end of it?” That, she thought, was what Jane Austen would have asked.
SHE TURNED to look back at the house when they left. She’d get back tonight, she thought, but then, if the police arrested her, she might not see it for a while. A tear trickled down one cheek, then the other. She wiped them away and Leslie growled, “Don’t pussy out on me.”
“You know how I hate that word,” she said. She wiped her face again. “I’m so scared. We should never have done Bucher. Never have killed at home.”
“We’ll be okay,” Leslie said. He reached over and patted her thigh. “We’ve just got to kill our way out of it.”
“I know,” she said. “It scares me so bad…”
THEY GOT to Davenport’s at nine-fifteen and cruised the neighborhood. Still too light. They went out to a bagel place off Ford Parkway and got a couple of bagels with cream cheese for Leslie. Nine-thirty. There were more people around than they’d expected, riding out the last light of day on the River Boulevard bike trail, and walking dogs on the sidewalk. But the yards were big, and they could park well down the darker side street and still see Davenport’s house, one down beyond the corner house.
There were lights all over Davenport’s house; the family was in.
“I could probably kill him with the baseball from here,” Leslie said, when they rolled into the spot Jane had picked. He had gotten in the backseat at the bagel shop. Now he slipped the rifle out of the case, and sitting with his back to the driver’s side of the car, pointed the rifle through the raised back window at Davenport’s front porch.
“No problem,” he said, looking through the scope. Jane put the yellow plastic ear protectors in her ears. Leslie fiddled with the rifle for a moment, then snapped it back to his shoulder. “No problem. A hundred and fifty feet, if these are hundred-foot lots, less if they’re ninety feet…” His voice was muffled, but still audible.
“God. I’m so scared, Les,” she said, slipping the revolver out of her purse. Checked the streets: nobody in sight. “I’m not sure I can do it.”
“Hey,” Leslie said. “Don’t pussy out.”
She lifted the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. There was a one-inch spit of flame, not as bright as a flash camera, and a tremendous crack.
She recoiled from it, dropped the gun, hands to her ears, eyes wide. She looked out through the back window. The gunshot had sounded like the end of the world, but the world, a hundred feet away, seemed to go on. A car passed, and ten seconds later, a man on a bicycle with a leashed Labrador running beside him.
Leslie was lying back on the seat, and in the dim light, looked terrifically dead. “Damn gun,” Jane muttered into the stench of gunpowder and blood. She had to kneel on the seat and reach over the back to get the revolver off the floor. She wiped it with a paper towel, then pressed it into one of Leslie’s limp hands, rolling it, making sure of at least one print.
Leslie kept his cell phone plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter. She picked it up, called Amity Anderson. When Anderson picked up, she said, “Can you come now?”
“Right now?” The anxiety was heavy in Anderson’s voice.
“That would be good.”
“Did you…”
“This is a radio,” Widdler said. “Don’t talk, just come.”
SHE CHECKED for watchers, then let herself out of the car. Shut the door, locked it with the second remote. That was a nice piece of work, she thought. Locked from the inside, with the keys still in Leslie’s pocket. These keys, the second set, would go back in the front key drawer, to be found by the investigators.
She walked away into the dark. She was sure she hadn’t thought of everything, but she was confident that she’d thought of enough. All she wanted was a simple “Not guilty.” Was that too much to ask?
AMITY FOUND her on the corner.
Jane wasn’t all that cranked: Leslie had been on his way out. His actual passing was more a matter of when than if. And though she was calm enough, she had to seem cranked. She had to be frantic, flustered, and freaked. As she came up to the corner she brushed her hair forward, messing it up; her hair was never messed up. She slapped herself on the face a couple of times. She muttered to herself, bit her lip until tears came to her eyes. Slapped herself again.
Amity found her freshly slapped and teary eyed, on the corner, properly disheveled for a recent murderess.
JANE GOT in the car: “Thank God,” she moaned.
“You did it.”
“We have to go to your house,” Jane said. “For one minute. I’m so scared. I’m going to wet my pants. I just…God, I can’t hold it in.”
“Hold it, hold it, we’ll be there in two minutes,” Amity said. Down Cretin, left on Ford, up the street past the shopping centers, up the hill, into the driveway.
IN THE BATHROOM, Jane pulled down her pants, listened, then stood up and opened the medicine cabinet. Two prescription bottles. She took the one in the back. Sat down, peed, waddled to the sink with her pants down around her ankles, looked in, then turned around and carefully and silently pried open the shower door. Hair near the drain. She got a piece of toilet paper, and cleaned up some hair, put it in her pocket.
Almost panting now. The cops might be on their way at any moment: a passerby happens to glance into the car, sees a shoe…and she had a lot to get done. She sat back on the toilet, flushed, stood up, pulled up her pants. Lot to get done.
AMITY WAS SHAKY. “When do you think, ah, what…?”
“Let’s go,” Jane said. “Now, we’re in a hurry.”
IN THE CAR, headed west across the bridge, Jane said, “I mailed you the map. You should get it tomorrow. Don’t wait too long before you go. Leslie owned the land through a trust, and they’ll find it pretty quick. Make sure you’re not being followed. Davenport’s talked to you, if he knows anything else, if he’s investigating the quilts…then you might be followed.”
Amity looked in the rearview mirror. “How do you know we’re not being followed now?”
Jane made a smile. “We can’t be,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because if we are, we’re finished.”
AMITY LOOKED at her, white-faced. “That’s it? We can’t be because we can’t be?”
“Actually, they’d be much more likely to be following Leslie and me,” Jane said. “If they were, they probably would have picked me up back at Davenport’s house, don’t you think?”
Amity nodded. That made sense. “Maybe I should drop you off around the block from your place. Just in case.”
“You could do that,” Jane said. “Just to be perfectly clear about this, you’re now an accomplice in whatever it is that happened to Leslie. I happen to think it was a suicide, and you should think that, too. Because if you ever even hint that I know something about it, well, then, you’re in it, too.”
“All I want to do is go to Italy,” Amity said.
AMITY DROPPED HER off around the block, and Jane strolled home in the soft night light, listening to the insects, to the frogs, to the rustlings in the hedges: cats on their nightly missions, a possum here, a fox there, all unseen.
Nobody waiting. And she thought, No Les, no more. She made a smile-look, reflecting at her own courage, her own ability to operate under pressure. It was like being a spy, almost…
WITH ONE MORE mission that night. She backed the car out of the garage, took the narrow streets out to I-494, watching the mirror, took 494 to I-35, and headed south. The country place wasn’t that far out, down past the Northfield turnoff to County 1, and east with a few jogs to the south, into the Cannon River Valley.
The country place comprised forty acres of senile maple and box elder along the west or north bank of the Cannon, depending on how you looked at it, with a dirt track leading back to it. Her lights bored a hole through the cornfields on either s
ide of the track, the wheels dropping into washouts and pots, until she punched through to the shack.
When they first bought it, they talked of putting up a little cabin that didn’t smell like mold—the shack smelled like it had been built from mold—with a porch that looked out over the river, and Leslie could fish for catfish and Jane could quilt.
In the end, they put up a metal building with good locks, and let the shack slide into ruin. The cabin was never built because, in fact, Leslie was never much interested in catfish, and Jane never got the quilt-making thing going. There was too much to do in the Cities, too much to see, too much to buy. Couldn’t even get the Internet at the shack. It was like a hillbilly patch, or something.
But a good place to stash stolen antiques.
She let herself into the shed, fumbling in her headlights with the key. Inside, she turned on the interior lights and then went back and turned off the car lights. She took the amber prescription bottle from her pocket, and rolled it under the front seat of the van.
From her purse, she got a lint roller, peeled it to get fresh tape, and rolled it over the driver’s seat. They were always fastidious about the van, wearing hairnets and gloves and jumpsuits, in case they had to ditch it. There shouldn’t be a problem, but she was playing with her life.
She rolled it, and then rolled it again, and a third time.
Then she took the wad of hair from her pocket.
Looked at it, and thought, soap. Nibbled at her lip, sighed, thought, do it right, and walked over to the shack and went inside. They kept the pump turned off, so she had to wait for it to cycle and prime, and then to pump out some crappy, shitty water, waiting until it cleared. When it was, she rinsed the wad of hair—nasty—and then patted it dry on a paper towel.
When it was dry, she pulled out a few strands, pinched them in the paper towel, and carried them back to the van. Two here, curled over the back of the seat, not too obvious, and another one here, on the back edge of the seat. She took the rest of the hair and wiped it roughly across the back of the seat, hoping to get some breaks and split ends…