you the federals, but I can get you the state…”

THE BOOTHS CAME through with a date on the donation to the Milwaukee museum. “The woman who handled the donation for the museum was Tricia Bundt. B-U-N-D-T. She still works there and she’ll be in this morning. Her name is on all the letters to Claire,” Landford Booth said.

“She related to the Bundt-cake Bundts?” Lucas asked.

Booth chuckled, the first time Lucas had seen anything that resembled humor in him. “I asked her that. She isn’t.”

ARCHIE CARTON CAME through on the quilts. “The quilts had two owners. One was a Mrs. Marilyn Coombs, who got a check for one hundred sixty thousand dollars and fifty-nine cents, and one to Cannon Associates, for three hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

“Who’s Cannon Associates?”

“That I don’t know,” Carton said. “All we did was give them a check. The dealings on the quilts were mostly between our folk art specialist at the time, James Wilson, and Mrs. Coombs. The company, Cannon, I don’t know…Let me see what I can get on the check.”

“Can I talk to Wilson?” Lucas asked.

“Only if you’re a really good Anglican,” Carton said.

“What?”

“I’m afraid James has gone to his final reward,” Carton said. “He was an intensely Anglican man, however, so I suspect you’d find him in the Anglican part of heaven. Or hell, depending on what I didn’t know about James.”

“That’s not good,” Lucas said.

“I suspect James would agree…I’m looking at this check, I actually have an image of it, it was deposited to a Cannon Associates account at Wells Fargo. Do you want the account number?”

“Absolutely…”

“CAROL!”

She popped in: “What?”

“I need to borrow Ted Marsalis for a while,” Lucas said. “Could you call over to Revenue and run him down? I need to get an old check traced.”

“Are we hot?”

“Maybe. I mean, we’re always hot, but right now, we’re maybe hot.”

HE GOT Tricia Bundt on the phone, explained that he was investigating a murder that might somehow involve the Armstrong quilts. “We’re trying to track down what happened at the time they were disposed of…at the time they were donated. I know you got the donation from Claire Donaldson, but could you tell me, was there anybody else on the Donaldson side involved in the transaction? Or did Mrs. Donaldson handle all of it?”

“No, she didn’t,” Bundt said. Bundt sounded like she had a chipped front tooth, because all of her sibilant Ss whistled a bit. “Actually, I only talked to her twice. Once, when we were working through the valuation on the quilts, and then at the little reception we had with our acquisitions committee, when it came in.”

“So who handled it from the Donaldson side?”

“Her assistant,” Bundt said. “Let me see, her name was something like…Anita Anderson? That’s not quite right…”

“Amity Anderson.” He got a little thrill from saying the name.

“That’s it,” Bundt said. “She handled all the paperwork details.”

Lucas asked, “Could you tell me, how did you nail down the evaluation on the quilt?”

“That’s always difficult,” Bundt said. “We rely on experienced appraisers, people who operate quilt galleries, previous sales of similar quilts, and so on,” she whistled.

“Then let me ask you this,” Lucas said. “Do museums really care about what the appraisal is? I mean, you’re getting it for free, right?”

“Oh, we do care,” Bundt said. “If we simply inflated everything, so rich people could get tax write-offs, then pretty soon Congress would change the rules and we wouldn’t get anything.”

“Hmph.”

“Really,” she said. But she said “really” the way a New Yorker says “really,” which means “maybe not really.”

“Does the quilt still have its original value?” Lucas asked.

“Hard to say,” she said. “There are no more of them, and their creator is dead. That always helps hold value. They’re exceptional quilts, even aside from the curses.”

Lucas thanked her for her help, and just before he rang off, she said, “You didn’t ask me if I was related to the Bundt-cake Bundts.”

“Didn’t occur to me,” he said.

“Really.”

AS SOON AS he hung up, his phone rang again, and Carol said, “I’m ringing Ted Marsalis for you.”

Marsalis came on a minute later, and Lucas said, “I need you to check with your sources at Wells Fargo. I’m looking to see what happened to an account there, and who’s behind it…”

LUCAS SAT BACK at his desk and closed his eyes. He was beginning to see something back there: a major fraud. Two rich old ladies, both experienced antique buyers, buy quilts cheaply from a well-known quilt stitcher, and then turn around and