one?”

The woman laughed. “No. Not exactly. What happened, was, the owner of the quilts, a Mrs. Coombs, put them up for sale, and we publicized the sale. Now, as it happened, two of the original six quilts had already been acquired by museums…”

“Two?”

“Yes. One was donated to the Art Institute of Chicago, and the other to the Walker Gallery in Minneapolis,” she said.

“I knew about the Walker.”

“The Walker and Chicago. Their original sales price established a price level. Then, when the other four came up, the museums that were interested would have reached out to their donor base, informed them of the Armstrong quilt history, and they would have asked for support on this specific acquisition. All of these museums have thousands of supporters. All they had to do was find a hundred and thirty women interested in donating a thousand dollars each. Remember: these quilts commemorate a woman fighting for her freedom and safety, for her very life, the only way she knew how. And how many affluent veterans of the feminist wars do we have donating to museums? Many, many.”

“Ah.” That made sense, he thought.

“Yes. So raising the money wouldn’t have been a problem,” the woman said. “There were a dozen bids on each of them, mostly other regional museums, and, we had the four winners.”

“Thank you.”

WHO’D SAID IT? The woman with the dangly earrings? The thin-nosed woman? One of them had said, “Big money.” Lucas turned and looked up at the wall over his bookcase, at a map of St. Paul. Gabriella Coombs had told him that her grandmother “got lucky” with the quilts, and with the money, and the money she had in her former house, and been able to buy in the Como neighborhood.

But houses on Coombs’s block didn’t cost $470,000, certainly not when she bought, and not even now, after the big price run-up. They might cost $250,000 now, probably not more than two-thirds of that when Coombs bought. Maybe $160,000, or $175,000. And Gabriella said she’d put in money from her old house…

There was money missing. Where was it?

FOR THE FIRST TIME, Lucas had the sense of moving forward. Most murders didn’t involve big money. Most involved too many six-packs and a handy revolver. But if you had a murder, and there was big money missing…the two were gonna be related.

Bucher and Donaldson and Coombs, tied by quilts and methods.

As for the kidnap attempt on Jesse Barth, by somebody in a van, that was most likely a coincidence, he thought now. An odd coincidence, but they happened—and as he’d thought earlier, there were many, many vans around, especially white vans.

The two cases were separate: Coombs/Bucher on one side, Barth/Kline on the other.

ALL OF MARILYN COOMBS’S papers were in her house. He had Gabriella’s keys in a bag in his car, he could use them to get in. All that time at Bucher’s house, looking at paper, had been wasted. He’d been looking at the wrong paper. He needed Coombs’s.

He was on his way north in the Porsche, when John Smith called.

“We showed the tape to Jesse Barth. She swears it’s the same van.”

“What?”

“That’s what she says. The van in the film shows what looks like a dent in the front passenger-side door, and she swears to God, she remembers the dent.”

Lucas had no reply, and after a moment, Smith asked, “So. What does that mean? Lucas?”

16

MARILYN COOMBS’S HOUSE was not as organized as Bucher’s. There were papers all over the place, some in an old wooden file cabinet, others stuffed in drawers in the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom. Lucas found a plastic storage bin full of checkbooks trailing back to the ’70s, but tax returns going back only four years.

He finally called his contact at the state tax office, and asked her to check Coombs’s state returns, to see when she’d gotten the big money.

He had the answer in five minutes—computers made some things easier: “She had a big bump in income for one year, a hundred eighty-six thousand dollars and then, let’s see, a total of thirty-three thousand dollars the year before, and thirty-five thousand nine hundred dollars the year after. We queried the discrepancy, and there’s an accountant’s letter reporting it as a onetime gain from the sale of antique quilts bought two years earlier. I don’t have the letter, just the notation. Does that help?”

“I’ll call you later and tell you,” Lucas said.

He spent an hour scratching through the pile of check registers, stopping now and again