it.”
“And the envelope…” Anderson said.
“Just an envelope…”
“Well, can’t you do some science stuff that shows the key was inside? Or the map? I see all this stuff on Nova, where is it?”
“On Nova,” Lucas said.
Her eyes drifted away: “My God, she completely tangled me up…”
THEY TALKED TO her for another half hour, Sloan watching her face, backtracking, poking her with apparently nonrelevant questions that knitted back toward possible conflicts in what she was saying.
When he was done, he nodded to Lucas, and Lucas said, “It’s been fun. We’ll get back to you.”
“Do you believe me?” she asked Lucas.
“I believe evidence,” Lucas said. “I don’t know about Sloan.”
Sloan said, “I gotta think about it.”
As they were leaving, Anderson said, with a wan, humorless smile, “You know the last mean thing that Botox bitch did? She stole my alprazolam to put in the van, just when I needed it most. I could really use some stress meds right now.”
OUT IN the hallway, Sloan looked at Lucas. Lucas was leaning against the concrete-block wall, rubbing his temples, and Sloan said, “What?”
Lucas pushed away from the wall and asked, “What do you think?”
“She was bullshitting us some, but not entirely,” Sloan said. “I’d probably convict her if I were on a jury, based on the evidence, but I don’t think she killed anyone.”
“Okay.”
“What happened with you?” Sloan asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
LUCAS CALLED the evidence guys at St. Paul, then the supervisor of the crime-scene crew who’d gone over Anderson’s house. Then he went down to Del’s desk and said, “Let’s take a walk around the block.”
Outside, summer day, hot again, puffy white fair-weather clouds; flower beds showing a little wilt from the lack of rain. Del asked, “What’s happening?”
“Remember all that shit Smith said? About the evidence coming in?”
“Yeah.” Del nodded.
“So one of the clinchers was an amber plastic prescription bottle,” Lucas said. “You know the kind, with the click-off white tops?”
“Uh-huh. I know about the bottle.”
“When I was looking into Anderson, when I first tripped over her, I didn’t have anything to go on,” Lucas continued. “I thought I might take an uninvited look around her house.”
“Ah.” They’d both done it before, breaking-and-entering, a dozen times between the two of them. Life in the big city.
“In the bathroom, I found a bottle of alprazolam and a bottle of Ambien,” Lucas said. “I noticed them because I use them myself. The thing is, there wasn’t any alprazolam in Anderson’s house when St. Paul went through the place last night. And the stuff in the van was only three weeks old—it was a new prescription. Unless they used the van some other time, that we don’t know about, and that seems unlikely, because they’d had some problems the last two times out…how did the alprazolam get in the van?”
“That’s awkward,” Del said.
“No shit.”
“Hey. Don’t get all honorable about it,” Del said. “I can think of ways that bottle got there—like maybe she went down to take some other pictures out, or maybe she went down to clean out the van, and lost the bottle. Won’t do any good for you to start issuing affidavits about breaking-and-entering.”
Lucas grinned. “I wasn’t going to do that. But…”
“We need to think about this,” Del said.
THEY FINISHED WALKING down the block, and back, and nothing had occurred to them. At the door, as they were going back in the BCA building, Del asked, “Did anybody ever ask Anderson about Gabriella?”
“No…Gabriella. She’s just gone.”
BUT THAT EVENING, sitting in the den listening to the soundtrack from Everything Is Illuminated, Lucas began to think about Gabriella, and where she might have gone. Assuming that she’d been killed by Leslie Widdler, where would he put her? Because of the “Don’t Mow Ditches” campaign, it was possible that he’d just heaved her out the van door, the way he’d heaved Screw, and she was lying in two feet of weeds off some back highway. On the other hand, he had, not far away, an obscure wooded tract where he had to take the van anyway, assuming he’d used the van when he killed Gabriella. And if he had a body in it…
He got on the phone to Del, then to Flowers: “Can you come back up here?”
“I’m not doing much good here,” Flowers said. He’d gone back south, still pecking away at the case of the girl found on the riverbank. “My suspect’s about to join the Navy to see the world. Which means he won’t be around to talk to.”
“All