Thai Die (28 page)

Betsy stared at him. “But you told me this smuggling operation was run by someone with contacts around the world, someone involved with a whole network of criminals!”

“And I still think that’s the case. The overall case, smuggling valuable stolen art into the United States, that is. Something like that is not the work of amateurs or even everyday crooks. But these organizations will hire or involve amateurs or small-time criminals in a particular operation. That’s what we think happened here. And when it started to go wrong, when the important artifact they were sending over disappeared, the word went out to the amateurs: find it, bring it back, or something lethal is going to happen to you.

“Oh, I see.” Betsy nodded. “That would explain Wendy’s journey through a blizzard to St. Peter and her screaming outrage when Doris said she didn’t have the silk.”

Godwin said, “She must have been terrified. But then, so was Doris.”

“And Phil,” said Betsy. “And Bershada. And Alice. And Shelly. And the March Hare’s manager. That was an altogether terrifying night.”

“But she didn’t get the silk back,” said Mike.

Betsy nodded. “Because Doris didn’t have it. I was wondering why Wendy would have thought she did, but when I read the e-mail Doris sent me from St. Peter again, it doesn’t mention Bershada, Alice, or Shelly, and it doesn’t say they were on their way back here when they had to stop because of the snow. When Wendy opened that e-mail, she must’ve thought Doris and Phil were leaving town—with the silk.”

“Maybe she wasn’t actually going to kill Doris but just get the silk back,” said Godwin. “And she took the gun to frighten her.” Godwin looked inquiringly at Mike.

“I think the decision to kill Doris had been made when Wendy started for St. Peter,” said Mike. “Wendy may have felt forced to that decision; maybe it was forced on her by the person who sent her.”

Betsy agreed. “They didn’t want anyone around to testify that it was Wendy who came down with the gun. Especially after she’d already murdered Oscar Fitzwilliam in his antiques shop.”

She looked at Mike, who said, “The revolver Ms. Applegate was carrying that night in St. Peter was the same gun that killed Mr. Fitzwilliam.” He raised a forefinger and suddenly realized that he was still wearing his leather gloves. He pulled them off a couple of fingers at a time while he continued to speak. “Here’s an odd little detail: She got someone else to load it. His—or her—fingerprints are on the shell casings, not Wendy’s.”

“Isn’t that kind of unusual?” Betsy asked. “If I were going to go kill someone, I wouldn’t show someone else my weapon.”

Godwin asked, “It isn’t hard to load a revolver, is it?”

“No, it isn’t,” said Mike. “We think the person who loaded it is the person who sold it to her.”

“How many shots were fired in the antiques shop?” asked Betsy.

“I’m not sure. Two or three, I think.”

“But when she took it with her to St. Peter, the shells weren’t replaced?”

Mike squinted at her. “Oh, I see what you’re getting at.”

“Yes, either she went down there without a fully loaded gun, or she went back to the salesperson and got him to replace the used shells.”

“Either of those scenarios is doubtful,” said Mike. “So neither is probably what happened. I wonder if the stranger’s fingerprints are on all the shell casings.” He got out his notebook and wrote something in it. “In any case, I think that’s a small detail, easy to clear up,” he said. “Her fingerprints are all over the outside of the gun, and no one else’s.”

“How did he load it without getting his fingerprints on the outside?” asked Betsy.

Mike shrugged that question off without answering it. He was here to deliver a conclusion. “What we think happened is this: These three—Wendy, Lena, and Carmen—went to Bangkok, Thailand, a few years ago and met a man in the export business. Probably the meeting was prearranged by Wendy, who had been buying Asian products for her employer for several years. At first Wendy and Lena started a legitimate import business. But they couldn’t make a success of it, so when their contact in Bangkok suggested a way to bypass those pesky customs charges, they made a deal with him. And that was like the camel’s nose in the tent. Pretty soon they were accepting stolen goods.”

Betsy suggested, “This silk business may have been their first venture into high-end stolen artifacts.”

But Mike shook his head. “This is far too high end for them to have trusted it to an untested crew.”

“Wait, Carmen wasn’t involved in the import business,” Betsy pointed out. “Besides, she was out of town when the silk was sent to the United States.”

“We don’t know what her level of involvement was,” said Mike. “And she didn’t have to be here to have a role in that silk smuggling deal. Remember, she was supposed to go to Bangkok with Doris.”

“All right, but how could she be the one who shot at Doris?” asked Betsy. “She was in the house with her husband, and the shot came from outside.”

“She was in the kitchen by herself,” said Mike. “And her husband was in his den by himself. Easiest thing in the world to sneak out the back door, around to the side, and shoot. Then toss the gun into the garbage can to be taken away the next morning, come back around and into the kitchen to tell everyone you had been ducked down beside the refrigerator, too scared to move.”

“Did you find it, then?” asked Godwin. “The gun?”

“Yes. In the neighbor’s garbage, actually. No fingerprints, of course.”

“Not even on the bullets?” asked Godwin.

“But she missed,” said Betsy.

“Yes, well, we’re talking amateurs here.” Mike made a sly grimace at Betsy, because her methods were here shown to be rubbing off on him. “Also, Doris was a friend, a good friend of some years’ standing. Perhaps at the last instant she jerked the gun just a little.”

Betsy said, “I still don’t believe this happened the way you’re saying, Mike. I saw the two of them together, and they were very close friends. Carmen would never shoot Doris.”

“When your life’s on the line—”

Godwin burst out, “Carmen wouldn’t shoot Doris for
any
reason! They were like
sisters
!” He turned to Betsy. “You have to
do
something! They’re getting it all
wrong
!”

Mike looked at her, too, and seemed about to say something, then didn’t.

“Mike?” said Betsy.

“All right, I don’t like it, either. I don’t know how close those two are, but it doesn’t feel right to me, either.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“It’s not my place to second-guess detectives in other jurisdictions. I’m going to go over to the Larson place and tell Lars that an arrest has been made and that his assignment as guardian of Mr. Galvin and Ms. Valentine is ended.”

“I don’t think you should do that, Mike.”

“I’m acting under orders, Betsy.” With tired gestures, he pulled on his coat and shoved his hands back into his gloves, and went out.

“ ‘I am a man subject to authority,’ ” murmured Betsy, watching him go.

“What?” said Godwin.

“It’s from the New Testament. A man was sent to Jesus to ask for a cure for his slave. Jesus started to come to his house, but the man sent others to tell him never mind, he was not worthy to have Jesus come under his roof, because he was ‘a man subject to authority,’ meaning he had other bosses he had to obey and people he must boss around.”

“Poor Mike,” said Godwin, looking at the closed door Mike had just gone through. Then he turned to Betsy. “Okay, this puts it back in your arena, girl. It isn’t a big, international crime ring doing this but a local amateur. And that means you can figure out who Mike should be arresting instead of Carmen.”

Betsy sat down.

“I’ll bring you a cup of tea,” said Godwin.

Betsy bent sideways and pulled the skinny pink XOXO scarf out of the needlepoint bag on the floor at her feet.

 

 

 

GODWIN silently set a cup of strong black English tea—with extra sugar for energy—in front of Betsy, then slipped away to sort and stack sales slips at the checkout desk. He kept a covert eye on her.

As he watched, her movements with the knitting needles, at first sharp and jerky, became smooth and regular, and then small and very even. Her lower lip, which had been thrust outward, began to to relax. When that happened, he got out a pair of number six knitting needles and a hank of Berroco Ultra Alpaca Light yarn. It really was very light; a 144-yard hank of it weighed just one and three-quarters ounces.

He had found Berocco’s Web site and a set of instructions for tiny sweaters just thirteen or fourteen stitches across. They were actual sweaters, with a front and back and open sleeves, and were meant to be used as Christmas tree ornaments. Godwin wanted to try them out—the instructions said one could be completed in an evening—and if that were true, he wanted to offer a class in knitting them in the fall.

He was doing the striped one, four rows of one color, two of a contrasting color, then four of the first color again. It only took four double rows of the contrast color to reach the arms of the doll-sized garment.

He was casting on an additional six stitches on one side for the sleeve when he heard an exclamation from Betsy.

“What, what is it?” he asked.

“Mashan silk!” she said. “I never said Mashan silk!”

“What’s Mashan silk?” asked Godwin.

“Mashan is a place in China, the place where that Han Dynasty silk came from.”

“Never heard of it.”

“I think only people familiar with archaeological digs in China, or a particular piece of ancient silk, know about Mashan.” Betsy picked up the cordless phone from the middle of the table and punched in a number. She listened, punched another number, then said rapidly, “Mike, it’s Betsy. Please call me right away.” Then she cut the connection and started to make another call. “Goddy, could you go get my coat, please?”

When he came back with the coat, she was saying, “Yes, Jenna told me she thought it was awfully early for that to be starting. Thank you.” She put the phone down.

Godwin helped her into the coat. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“Over to the Larson house. I tried calling Mike’s cell, but he must have it turned off.” She pulled her knit hat on as she hurried to the door. “If Mike calls, ask him to call me right away.”

She waved her cell phone at him and was gone.

Twenty-three

THE sun had not set, but the temperature had fallen nearly to zero. In just the minute it took Betsy to cross the tiny parking lot out back to her car, the tip of her nose began to sting and the movement of her legs brought icy air up inside her long coat past her knees. She wished she’d worn a pantsuit.

The sky had glowed whitely all day behind a thin, uniform cloud cover which now was darkening as the sun—a mere lighter blur above the clouds—dropped in the southwest.

Betsy started her car and turned the defroster to high as the windows quickly fogged over. It had snowed just an inch last night, not enough to make her summon the man with the little plow on the front of his pickup but enough to freshen up the layers already sagging tiredly over the landscape. Severe cold made the snow whine and groan under her car’s tires as she drove out onto the street.

She turned right and went up to where Excelsior Boulevard came in at an angle to Second Street, and then turned left. Past Maynard’s, the nice waterfront restaurant, she turned left again, onto St. Alban’s Bay Road.

She drove past the boat sales and service stores, past a pair of identical cottages near where the Stanley Steamer had blown up, past six finer houses behind a row of leafless trees, to Weekend Lane. The little street was only three houses long, ending at Jill and Lars’s home on the shore of Lake Minnetonka. The property was over an acre in size, irregular in shape, and set with mature trees. The house had been built as a small cottage, but Lars had built an addition that doubled its size and gave it an attached garage. Lars had also built a big heated shed with a concrete apron in front for his antique Stanley Steamer automobile.

More recently he had surrounded the property with a cyclone fence, for now there was a toddler in residence. Emma Beth could swim, after a fashion, but she was curious, fearless, and inclined to forget instructions when excited—such as not to swim alone. The huge lake at the bottom of the lawn was a glittering attraction to the little girl. And now there was to be another little one with eyes to gleam at the sight.

Not that there was any chance of swimming today; the lake was an immense meadow of snow-covered ice.

The gate that normally blocked the driveway was open, and Betsy drove through. The drive was not plowed, but tire tracks in the snow showed it wasn’t very deep. Past a dense set of gray-brown sticks that would bloom with lilacs in a few months, she could see the barnlike shed and off to the right, the cottage. Both were painted a rustic red-brown and had dark brown shingles on their roofs. The driveway split near its end, one part going to the attached garage, the other to the shed.