with it. In the meantime, we’re sorting vans out by the letters we know.”
“That’s something,” Lucas said. “Listen, feed every name you’ve got associated with Bucher into the computer. I’ll get you all the names I can pull out of the Donaldson and Toms files, and the Coombs stuff. Find that van…Once we know who we’re looking for…”
“Get me the names,” Smith said.
“And listen: do me a favor,” Lucas said. “Go see this girl in the Kline case, her name is Jesse Barth. She lives up on Grand, her mother is Kathy, they’re in the phone book. Have her look at the van. See if she thinks it might be the same one.”
“If it is…what does that mean?” Smith asked.
“I don’t know. I’m freakin’ out here, man. Just have her look at it, okay?”
“Okay,” Smith said. “I’ll tell you something else: I’m gonna get that fuckin’ Ronnie Lash and turn his ass into a cop.”
LUCAS WAS in a hurry now, with Gabriella missing.
He kept thinking, The quilts, the van, the pipe; the quilts, the van, the pipe. The quilts, the van, the pipe…
He couldn’t get at the van. Too many of them and he didn’t have a starting place, unless Smith or the feds came up with something. The pipe didn’t make any difference, unless he found the actual pipe that did the killing; a killer could buy as much pipe as he wanted at Home Depot.
That left the quilts. Gabriella had said that her mother was messing with quilts. He got in the car, and pointed it toward the Coombs house, got Lucy Coombs on the phone: “Her friends say anything?”
“Nobody’s seen her. Oh, God, where’s my baby?”
“I’m coming over,” Lucas said.
LUCY COOMBS LIVED in the Witch Hat neighborhood off University Avenue, in an olive-green clapboard house with a stone wall separating the front yard from the sidewalk. The yard had no grass, but was an overgrown jumble of yellow and pink roses, and leggy perennials yet to flower. The house had a damp, mossy, friendly look, with a flagstone pathway running from the front stoop around the side of the house and out of sight.
The front door was open and Lucas banged on the loosely hung screen door. He could hear people talking, and felt a twitch of hope: Had Gabriella shown up? Then a heavyset woman in a purple shift and long dangly earrings came to the door, said, “Yes?”
Lucas identified himself and the woman pushed the door open and whispered, “Anything?”
“No.”
“Lucy is terrified,” she said.
Lucas nodded. “I have to talk to her about her mother…”
THERE WERE THREE more unknown women in the kitchen with Coombs. Lucy Coombs saw him and shuffled forward, shoulders rounded, hands up in front of her as though she might punch him: “Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “We’re looking, I’ve got the St. Paul cops out looking around, we’re pushing every button we know.”
She wanted to shout at him, and to cry; she was crippled with fear: “You’ve got to find her. I can’t stand this, you’ve got to find her.”
Lucas said, “Please, please, talk to me about your mother.”
“She was murdered, too, wasn’t she?” Coombs asked. “They killed her and came back and took my baby…”
“Do you have any idea…who’re they?”
“I don’t know—the people who killed her.”
Lucas said, intent on Coombs: “This thing is driving me crazy. We have three dead women, and one missing. Two of them were involved in antiques, but your mother wasn’t—but she had one antique that was taken, and then maybe returned, by somebody who may also have taken a quilting basket.”
“And Gabriella,” Coombs blurted.
Lucas nodded. “Maybe.”
“It’s the Armstrong quilts,” one of the women said. “The curses.”
Lucas looked at her: She was older, thin, with dry skin and a pencil-thin nose. “The curses…the ones sewn into the quilts? Gabriella told me…”
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