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