Made you want to protect her, to take her someplace safe…like a bed.

“I promise,” he said.

THE ST. PAUL COPS had gone through the papers in the Bucher house on-site, and not too closely, because so much of it was clearly irrelevant to the murders.

With Coombs agreeing to comb through her grandmother’s papers, Lucas established himself in the Bucher house-office and began going through the paper files. Later, he’d move on to the computer files, but a St. Paul cop had told him that Bucher rarely used the computer—she’d learned to call up and use Microsoft Word for letter-writing, but nothing more—and Peebles never used it.

Lucas had no idea what he was looking for: something, anything, that would reach outside the house, and link with Donaldson, Toms, or Coombs. He’d been working on it for an hour when it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen any paper involving quilts.

There was an “art” file, an inventory for insurance, but nothing mentioned the quilts that hung on the walls on the second floor. And quilts ran through all three murders that he knew of. He picked up the phone, dialed his office, got Carol: “Is Sandy still free?”

“If you want her to be.”

“Tell her to call me,” Lucas said.

He walked out in the hall where the Widdlers seemed to be packing up. “All done?”

“Until the auction,” Jane Widdler said. She rubbed her hands. “We’ll do well off this, thanks to you police officers.”

“We now know every piece in the house,” Leslie Widdler explained. “We’ll work as stand-ins for out-of-state dealers who can’t make it.”

“And take a commission,” Jane Widdler said. “The family wants to have the auction pretty quickly, after they each take a couple of pieces out…This will be fun.”

“Hmm,” Lucas said. “My wife is interested in antiques.”

“She works for the state as well?” Leslie Widdler asked.

Lucas realized that Widdler was asking about income. “No. She’s a plastic and microsurgeon over at Hennepin General.”

“Well, for pete’s sake, Lucas, we’re always trying to track down people like that. Give her our card,” Jane Widdler said, and dug a card out of her purse and passed it over. “We’ll talk to her anytime. Antiques can be great investments.”

“Thanks.” Lucas slipped the card in his shirt pocket. “Listen, did you see any paper at all on the quilts upstairs? Receipts, descriptions, anything? All these places…I don’t know about Toms…”

His cell phone rang and he said, “Excuse me…” and stepped away. Sandy. “Listen, Sandy, I want you to track down the Toms relatives, whoever inherited, and ask them if Toms had any quilts in the place. Especially, collector quilts. Okay? Okay.”

He hung up and went back to the Widdlers. “These murders I’m looking at, there seems to be a quilt thread…Is that a joke?…Anyway, there seems to be a quilt thing running through them.”

Leslie Widdler was shaking his head. “We didn’t see anything like that. Receipts. And those quilts upstairs, they’re not exactly collector quilts…I mean, they’re collected, but they’re not antiques. They’re worth six hundred to a thousand dollars each. If you see a place that says ‘Amish Shop,’ you can get a quilt just like them. Traditional designs, but modern, and machine-pieced and quilted.”

“Huh. So those aren’t too valuable.”

Leslie Widdler shook his head. “There’s a jug in the china cabinet in the music room that’s worth ten times all the quilts put together.”

Lucas nodded. “All right. Listen. Thanks for your help, guys. And thanks for those sticky buns, Les. Sorta made my morning.”

OUT OF THE HOUSE, Leslie Widdler said, “We’ve got to take him out of it.”

“God, we may have overstepped,” Jane said. “If we could only go back.”

“Can’t go back,” Leslie said.

“If they look into the Armstrong quilts, they’ll find receipts, they’ll find people who remember stuff…I don’t know if they can do it, but they might find out that Coombs didn’t get all the money she should have. Once they get on that trail—it’d be hard, but they might trace it on to us.”

“It’s been a long time,” Leslie said.

“Paperwork sticks around. And not only paperwork—there’s that sewing basket. If Jackson White still has a receipt, or a memory, he could put us in prison.” Jackson White sold them the sewing basket. “I should have looked for the sewing basket instead of that damn music box. That music box has screwed us.”

“What if we went back to Coombs’s place, put the music box someplace that wasn’t obvious, and took the basket? That’d solve that thing,” Leslie said.

“What about Davenport?”

“There’s Jesse Barth,”