Leslie said. “Amity might have been right.”

“So dangerous,” Jane said. “So dangerous.”

“Have to get the van, have to steal another plate.”

“That’s no problem. That’s fifteen seconds, stealing the plate,” Jane said. She was thinking about it.

“Davenport said he has a week or two to work on it—if we can push him through another week, we could be good,” Leslie said. “He’s the dangerous one. Smith already wants to move on. It’s Davenport who’s lingering…”

“He could come back to it,” Jane said. “He smells the connection.”

“Yes, but the older things get, and the fuzzier…Maybe Jackson White could have a fire,” Leslie said. “If they find the music box, that might erase the Coombs connections. If he has to go chasing after Jesse Barth, that’ll use a lot of time. All we need is a little time.”

“So dangerous to go after Jesse Barth,” Jane said. “We almost have to do it tonight.”

“And we can. She’s not the early-to-bed kind. And she walks. She walked over to her boyfriend’s yesterday, maybe she’ll be walking again.”

“We should have taken her yesterday,” Jane said.

“Never had a clear shot at her…and it didn’t seem quite so necessary.”

“Oh, God…” Jane scrubbed at her deadened forehead. “Can’t even think.”

“Be simpler to wait for Davenport outside his house, and shoot him. Who’d figure it out?” Leslie said. “There must be dozens or hundreds of people who hate him. Criminals. If he got shot…”

“Two problems. First, he’s not an old lady and he’s not a kid and he carries a gun and he’s naturally suspicious. If we missed, he’d kill us. Look at all those stories about him,” Jane said. “Second, we only know two cases he’s working on. One of them is almost over. If the cops think the Bucher killers went out and killed a cop, especially a cop like Davenport who has been working as long as he has…they’d tear up everything. They’d never let go. They’d work on it for years, if they had to.”

THEY RODE in silence for a while. Then Jane said, “Jesse Barth.”

“Only if everything is perfect,” Leslie said. “We only do it if everything is exactly right. We don’t have to pull the trigger until the last second, when we actually stop her. Then if we do it, we’ve got an hour of jeopardy until we can get her underground. They don’t have to know she’s dead. They can think she ran away. But Davenport’ll be working it forever, trying to find her.”

“Only if everything is perfect,” Jane said. “Only if the stars are right.”

13

LUCAS WAS STILL PORING over paper at Bucher’s when Sandy called back. “I talked to Clayton Toms. He’s the grandson of Jacob Toms—the murdered man,” she said. “He said there were several quilts in the house, but they were used as bedspreads and weren’t worth too much. He still has one. None of them were these Armstrong quilts. None of them were hung on walls. He’s going to check to see if there’s anything that would indicate that he knew Mrs. Bucher or Mrs. Donaldson or Mrs. Coombs.”

“Thanks,” Lucas said. Maybe quilts weren’t the magic bullet.

GABRIELLA COOMBS DECIDED to put off her research into Grandma’s quilts. She had a date, the fifth in a series. She liked the guy all right, and he definitely wanted to get her clothes off, and she was definitely willing to take them off.

Unfortunately, he wanted them off for the wrong reason. He was a painter. The owner of the High Plains Drifter Bar & Grill in Minneapolis wanted a naked-lady painting to hang over his bar, and the painter, whose name was Ron, figured that Gabriella would be perfect as a model, although he suggested she might want to “fill out your tits” a little.

She didn’t even mind that idea, as long as she got laid occasionally. The problem was, he worked from photographs, and Gabriella’s very firm sixteenth Rule of Life was Never Take Off Your Clothes Around a Camera.

Ron had been pleading: “Listen, even if I did put your picture on the Internet, who’d recognize it? Who looks at faces? The facts are, one in every ten women in the United States, and maybe the world, is naked on the Internet. Nobody would look at your face. Besides, I won’t put it on the Internet.”

On that last part, his eyes drifted, and she had the bad feeling that she’d be on the Internet about an hour after he took the picture. And three hours after that, the wife of some