Invisible Prey (39 page)

“Do you have a warrant?”

“No, but we could get one in a couple of minutes,” Lucas said, talking tougher, his voice dropping into a growl. “You can either talk to us here, or we’ll get a warrant, come in and get you and take you downtown. It’s your call.”

“Do I get an attorney?” Anderson asked.

“Anytime you want one,” Lucas said. “If you can’t get one to come tonight, we’ll take you downtown, put you in a cell, and we can wait until one gets here tomorrow.”

“But I haven’t done anything,” Anderson said.

“That’s what we need to talk about,” Lucas said.

I
N THE END,
she let them in, then called an attorney friend, who agreed to come over. While they waited, they watched
American Volcanoes
for forty-five minutes, a TV story of how Yellowstone could blow up at any minute and turn the entire United States into a hell-hole of ash and lava; Anderson drank two glasses of red wine, and then the attorney arrived.

Lucas knew her, as it happened, Annabelle Ramford, a woman who did a lot of pro bono work for the homeless, but not a lot of criminal law.

“We meet again,” she said, with a thin smile, shaking his hand.

“I hope you can help us,” Lucas said. “Miz Anderson needs some advice.”

Anderson admitted knowing the Widdlers. She looked shocked when Lucas suggested that she’d had a sexual relationship with Leslie Widdler, but admitted it. “You told me you’re gay,” Lucas said.

“I am. When I had my relationship with Leslie, I didn’t know it,” she said.

“But your relationship with Leslie continued, didn’t it?”

She looked at Ramford, who said, “You don’t have to say anything at all, if you don’t wish to.”

They all looked at Anderson, who said, “What happens if I don’t?”

“I’ll make a note,” Lucas said. “But we will find out, either from you, with your cooperation, or from other people.”

“You don’t have to take threats, either,” Ramford said to Anderson.

“That really wasn’t a threat,” Lucas said, his voice going mild. “It’s the real situation, Annabelle. If we’re not happy when we leave here, we’ll be taking Miz Anderson with us. You could then recommend a criminal attorney and we can all talk tomorrow, at the jail.”

“No-no-no,” Anderson said. “Look, my relationship with Leslie…continued…to some extent.”

“To some extent?” Smith asked. “What does that mean?”

“I was…” She bit her lip, looked away from them, then said, “I was actually more interested in Jane.”

“In Jane? Did you have a physical relationship with Jane?” Lucas asked.

“Well…yes. Why would I want to fuck a great big huge fat guy?”

Lucas had no answer for that; but he had more questions for Jane Widdler.

H
E TURNED
to the quilts, taking notes as Anderson answered the questions. She believed the quilts were genuine. They’d been spotted by Marilyn Coombs, she said, who took them to the Widdlers for confirmation and evaluation.

The Widdlers, in turn, had sent them away for laboratory tests, and confirmed with the tests, and other biographical information about Armstrong, that the quilts were genuine. The Widdlers then put together an investment package in which the quilts would be sold to private investors who would donate them to museums, getting both a tax write-off and a reputation for generosity.

“We have reason to believe that the quilts are faked—that the curses were, in any case. That the primary buyers paid only a fraction of what they said they paid, and took an illegal tax write-off after the donations,” Lucas said.

“I don’t know about any of that,” Anderson said. “I was the contact between the Widdlers and Mrs. Donaldson. I brought her attention to the quilts, but she made her own decisions and her own deals. I never handled money.”

“You told me that you didn’t know Mrs. Bucher,” Lucas said.

She shrugged. “I didn’t. I knew who she was, but I didn’t know her.”

“And you still…maintain that position?”

“It’s the truth,” she said.

“You didn’t go there with Leslie Widdler and kill Mrs. Bucher and her maid?”

“Of course not! That’s crazy!”

He asked her about Toms: never heard of him, she said. She’d never been to Des Moines in her life, not even passing through.

“Were you with Leslie Widdler last night?” Smith asked.

“No. I was out until about eight, then I was here,” she said.

“You didn’t speak to him, didn’t ride around with him…”

“No. No. I didn’t speak to him or see him or anything.”

T
HEY PUSHED ALL
the other points, but Anderson wouldn’t budge. She hadn’t dealt in antiques with either Leslie or Jane Widdler. She had no knowledge of what happened with the Armstrong quilts, after Donaldson, other than the usual art-world reports, gossip, and hearsay. She could prove, she thought, that on the Friday night that the Buchers were killed, she’d been out late with three other women friends, at a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, where she’d not only drunk a little too much, but remembered that there’d been a birthday party in an upper loft area of the restaurant that had turned raucous, and that she was sure people would remember.

W
HEN THEY
were done, Anderson said, “Now I have a question. I have the feeling that Jane Widdler has been telling you things that aren’t true. I mean, if Jane and Leslie were killing these people, I don’t know why Jane would try to drag me into it. Is she trying to do that?”

“Maybe,” Lucas said.

“Do you think they could kill people?” Smith asked.

Anderson turned her face down, thinking, glanced sideways at Ramford, then said, “You know, Jane…has always struck me as greedy. Not really a bad person, but terribly greedy. She wants all this stuff. Diamonds, watches, cars, Hermès this and Tiffany that and Manolo Blahnik something else. She might kill for money—it’d have to be money—but…I don’t know.”

Her mouth moved some more, without words, and they all sat and waited, and she went on:

“Leslie, I think Leslie might kill. For the pleasure in it. And money. In college, we had this small-college football team. Football didn’t mean anything, really. You’d go and wave your little pennant or wear your mum and nobody cared if you won or lost. A lot of people made fun of football players…but Leslie liked to hurt people. He’d talk about stepping on people’s hands with his cleats. Like, if one of the runner-guys did too well, they’d get him down and then Leslie would ‘accidentally’ step on his hand and break it. He claimed he did it several times. Word got around that he could be dangerous.”

Smith said, “Huh,” and Lucas asked, “Anything heavier than that? That you heard of? Did you get any bad vibrations from Leslie when Mrs. Donaldson was killed?”

She shook her head, looking spooked: “No. Not at all. But now that you mention it…I mean, jeez, their store really came up out of nowhere.” She looked at Lucas, Smith, and Ramford. “You know what I mean? Most antique people wind up in these little holes-in-the-wall, and the Widdlers are suddenly rich.”

“Makes you think,” Smith said, looking up at Lucas.

There was more, but the returns were diminishing. Lucas finally stood up, sighed, said to Ramford, “You might want to give her a couple of names, just in case,” and he and Smith took off.

“L
ET’S DRIVE AROUND
for a while, before you drop me off. Get Ramford out of there,” Lucas said to Smith. “I don’t know where she parked, I wouldn’t want her to pick me up.” He got on his radio and called Flowers as they walked to the car.

“I’m looking right at you,” Flowers said.

“There should be a lawyer coming out in a few minutes. Stay out of sight, and call when she’s gone.”

Smith drove them up to Grand Avenue, and they both got double-dip ice cream cones, and leaned on the hood of Smith’s car and watched the college girls go by; blondes and short shirts and remarkably little laughter, intense brooding looks, like they’d been bit on the ass by Sartre or Derrida or some other Frenchman.

Lucas was getting down to cone level on his chocolate pecan fudge when his radio beeped. Flowers said, “The lawyer is getting in her car.”

“I’ll be in place in five minutes,” Lucas said.

S
URVEILLANCE COULD
be exciting, but hardly ever was. This night was one of the hardly-evers, four long hours of nothing. Couldn’t even read, sitting in the dark. He talked to Flowers twice on the radio, had a long phone chat with Weather—God bless cell phones—and at midnight, Jenkins eased up behind him.

“You good?” Lucas asked, on the radio.

“Got my video game, got my iPod. Got two sacks of pork rinds and a pound of barbeque ribs, and a quart of Diet Coke for propellant. All set.”

“Glad I’m not in the car with you,” Lucas said. “Those goddamn pork rinds.”

“Ah, you open the door every half hour or so, and you’re fine,” Jenkins said. “You might not want to light a cigarette.”

W
EATHER WAS CUTTING
again in the morning, and was asleep when Lucas tiptoed into the bedroom at twelve-fifteen. He took an Ambien to knock himself down, a Xanax to smooth out the ride, thought about a martini, decided against it, set the alarm clock, and slipped into bed.

The alarm went off exactly seven hours and forty minutes later. Weather was gone; that happened when he was working hard on a case, staying up late. They missed each other, though they were lying side by side…

He cleaned up quickly, looking at his watch, got a Ziploc bag with four pieces of cornbread from the housekeeper, a couple of Diet Cokes from the refrigerator, the newspaper off the front porch, and was on his way. Hated to be late on a stakeout; they were so boring that being even a minute late was considered bad form.

As it was, he pulled up on the side street at two minutes to eight, got the hand-off from Jerrold, called Del, who’d just been pushed by Flowers, and who said that a light had come on ten minutes earlier. “She’s up, but she’s boring,” Del said.

The newspapers had the Widdler story, and tied it to Bucher, Donaldson, and Toms. Rose Marie said that more arrests were imminent, but the
Star Tribune
reporter spelled it “eminent” and the
Pioneer Press
guy went with “immanent.”

You should never, Lucas thought, trust a spell-checker.

A
NDERSON STEPPED OUT
of her house at 8:10, picked up the newspaper, and went back inside. At 8:20, carrying a bag and the newspaper, she walked down to the bus stop, apparently a daily routine, because the bus arrived two minutes later.

They tagged her downtown and to her office, parked their cars in no-parking zones, with police IDs on the dashes, and Lucas took the Skyway exit while Flowers took the street. There was a back stairs, but Lucas didn’t think the risk was enough to worry about…

As he waited, doing nothing, he had the feeling he might be wrong about that, and worried about it, but not too much: he
always
had that feeling on stakeouts. A few years earlier, he’d had a killer slip away from a stakeout, planning to use the stakeout itself as his alibi for another murder…

A few minutes before noon, Shrake showed up for the next shift, and Lucas passed off to him, and walked away, headed back to the office. He’d gone fifty feet when his cell phone rang: Shrake. “She’s moving,” and he was gone. Lucas looked back. Shrake was ambling along the Skyway, away from Lucas, on the phone. Talking to somebody else on the cell, probably to Jenkins, probably afraid to use the radio because he was too close to the target; she had practically walked over him.

Seventy-five feet ahead of Shrake, Lucas could see the narrow figure of Amity Anderson speed-walking through the crowd.

Going to lunch? His radio chirped: Flowers. “You want to hang in, until we figure out where she’s going?”

“Yeah.”

Shrake took her to a coffee shop, where she bought a cup of coffee to go, and an orange scone, and then headed down to the street, where Jenkins picked her up. “Catching a bus,” Jenkins said.

They took her all the way back to her house. Off the bus, she paused to throw the coffee-shop sack into a corner trash barrel, then headed up to her house, walking quickly, in a hurry. She went straight to the mailbox and took out a few letters, shuffled them quickly, picked one, tore the end off as she went through the door.

“What do you think?” Flowers asked, on the radio.

“Let’s give her an hour,” Lucas said.

“That’s what I think,” Flowers said. Shrake and Jenkins agreed.

Half an hour later, Anderson walked out of her house wearing a long-sleeved shirt and jeans and what looked like practical shoes or hiking boots. She had a one-car detached garage, with a manual lift. She pushed the door up, backed carefully out, pulled the door down again, pointed the car up the hill, and took off.

“We’re rolling,” Jenkins said. “We’re gone.”

25

L
UCAS GOT ON THE RADIO
: “This could be something, guys. Stack it up behind her, and take turns cutting off, but don’t lose her.”

Shrake: “Probably going to the grocery store.”

Lucas: “She turned the wrong way. There’s one just down the hill.”

They had four cars tagging her, but no air. As long as they stayed in the city, they were good—they’d each tag her for a couple of blocks, then turn away, while the next one in line caught up. They tracked her easily along Ford to Snelling, where she took a right, down the bluff toward Seventh. Snelling was a chute; if she stopped there, they’d all be sacked right on top of her. Flowers followed her down while Lucas, Jenkins, and Shrake waited at the top of the hill.

“I got her,” Flowers said. “She took a left on Seventh, come on through.”

They moved fast down the hill, through the intersection, Flowers peeling away as Lucas came up behind him. They got caught at a stoplight just before I-35, and Lucas hooked away, into a store parking lot, afraid she’d pick up his face if he got bumper-to-bumper. “Jenkins?”

“Got her. Heading south on Thirty-five E.”