last ones he looked at, found a neat arrangement of check registers, filed by date. There was nothing of interest that he could see around the time of the quilt donation; but as he worked backward from the donation, he eventually found a check for $5,000 made out to Marilyn Coombs.

For the quilt? Or for something else Coombs had found? He looked in his notebooks for the date of the quilt auction in New York. The check to Coombs had been issued seven months earlier. Maybe not related; but why hadn’t there been any other check to Coombs? In fact, the only large check he’d seen had been to a car dealer.

He was still stuck. Stuck in a small room, dust filtering down on his neck. He ought to be out looking for Gabriella…

THE HEIRS were finishing up when Lucas came back down the stairs. Barker asked, “Find anything?”

“No. Listen, have you ever heard of a woman named Marilyn Coombs?”

Barker shook her head: “No…should I have?”

“She was an acquaintance of your aunt’s, the person who originally found the Armstrong quilts,” Lucas said. “She was killed a few days ago…If you find anything with the name ‘Coombs’ on it, could you call me?”

“Sure. Right away. You don’t think there’s a danger to us?” The other heirs had stopped looking at furniture, and turned toward him.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “We’ve got a complicated and confusing problem, we may have had a couple of murders and maybe a kidnapping. I just don’t know.”

There was a babble of questions then, and he outlined the known deaths. One man asked anxiously, “Do you think it’s just random? Or is there a purpose behind the killings? Other than money?”

“I don’t know that, either,” Lucas said. “Part of this may be coincidence, but I’m starting to think not. If these killings are connected somehow, I would think it would have to do with some special knowledge that would give away the killers. In addition to the money angle, the robbery aspect.”

The man exhaled: “Then I’m good. I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”

DISCOURAGED, Lucas went back to the car, making a mental list of things to do in the morning, calls to make. He didn’t want to call Lucy Coombs, because he didn’t want to talk to her again. Instead, he called John Smith, who was home watching television. “Not a thing,” Smith said. “I’ll get a call as soon as anybody finds anything. Finds a shoelace. So far, we haven’t found a thing.”

Heading toward home, a fire truck, siren blasting away, went by on a cross street. He could hear more sirens to the south, not far away, and halfway home, with the windows in the car run down, he could smell the distinctive odor of a burning house. He’d never figured out what it was, exactly—insulation, or plaster, or old wood, or some combination—but he’d encountered it a dozen times in his career, and it never smelled good.

Back at home, he found Weather in the kitchen, sitting at the counter with a notepad. She asked, “You have time to run to the store?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. Ought to be doing something.

“I’m making a list…”

He was waiting for the list when his cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID: Flowers.

“Yeah?”

“I just got a call from Kathy Barth,” Flowers said. “Somebody just firebombed her house.”

17

THE FIRE WAS OUT by the time Lucas got back. He’d driven right past it on the way home, but a block north, hadn’t seen the smoke against the night sky, and the flames had been confined to the back side of the house.

Kathy and Jesse Barth were standing in the front yard talking to firemen when Lucas walked across the fire line. Jesse Barth saw him coming and pointed him out to her mother, who snapped something at her daughter, and then started toward Lucas.

“My house is burned down because of you assholes,” she shouted.

Lucas thought she was going to hit him, and put his hands up, palms out. “Wait, wait, wait…I just heard. Tell me what happened.”

“Somebody threw a firebomb through my back window, right in the kitchen, right through the window, everything’s burned and screwed up and there’s water…”

She suddenly went to her knees on the dirty wet grass, weeping. Jesse walked up to stand next to her, put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Virgil said nothing would happen,” the kid said. “Virgil said you’d look out for us.”

Lucas shook his head: “We don’t know