Invisible Prey

long.
    “I’m running,” he said. “We’ll find her.”
     
    F ROM HIS OFFICE, he looked up Sotheby’s in New York, called, got routed around by people who spoke in hushed tones and non–New York accents, and finally wound up with a vice president named Archie Carton. “Sure. The auctions are public, so there’s no secret about who bought what—most of the time, anyway. Let me punch that up for you…”
    “What about the rest of the time?” Lucas asked.
    “Well, sometimes we don’t know,” Carton said. “A dealer may be bidding, and he’s the buyer of record, but he’s buying it for somebody else. And sometimes people bid by phone, to keep their identify confidential, and we maintain that confidentiality—but in a police matter, of course, we respond to subpoenas.”
    “So if one of these things was a secret deal…”
    “That’s not a problem. I’ve got them on-screen, and all four sales were public,” Carton said. “One went to the Museum of Modern Art here in New York, one went to the National Museum of Women’s Art in Washington, D.C., one went to the Amon Carter in Fort Worth, Texas, and one went to the Modern in San Francisco.”
    “Does it say how much?”
    “Yup. Let me run that up for you…” Lucas could hear keys clicking, and then Carton said, “The total was four hundred seventy thousand dollars. If you want, I could send you the file. I could have it out in five minutes.”
    “Terrific,” Lucas said. “If my wife ever buys another antique, I’ll make sure she buys it from you.”
    “We’ll be looking forward to it,” Carton said.
     
    T HAT’D BEEN EASY. Lucas leaned back and looked at the number scrawled on his notepad: $470,000. He thought about it for a moment, then picked up the phone and called Carton back.
    “I’m sorry to bother you again, but I was looking in an antiques book, and I didn’t see any quilts that sold for this much,” Lucas said. “Was there something really special about these things?”
    “I could get you to somebody who could answer that…”
    Two minutes later, a woman with a Texas accent said, “Yes, the price was high, but they were unique. The whole history of them pushed the price, and the curses themselves have almost a poetic quality to them. Besides, the quilts are brilliant. Have you seen one?”
    “No. Not yet,” Lucas said.
    “You should,” she said.
    “So you’d pay, what, a hundred and twenty-five thousand for one?”
    The woman laughed. “No. Not exactly. What happened, was, the owner of the quilts, a Mrs. Coombs, put them up for sale, and we publicized the sale. Now, as it happened, two of the original six quilts had already been acquired by museums…”
    “Two?”
    “Yes. One was donated to the Art Institute of Chicago, and the other to the Walker Gallery in Minneapolis,” she said.
    “I knew about the Walker.”
    “The Walker and Chicago. Their original sales price established a price level. Then, when the other four came up, the museums that were interested would have reached out to their donor base, informed them of the Armstrong quilt history, and they would have asked for support on this specific acquisition. All of these museums have thousands of supporters. All they had to do was find a hundred and thirty women interested in donating a thousand dollars each. Remember: these quilts commemorate a woman fighting for her freedom and safety, for her very life, the only way she knew how. And how many affluent veterans of the feminist wars do we have donating to museums? Many, many.”
    “Ah.” That made sense, he thought.
    “Yes. So raising the money wouldn’t have been a problem,” the woman said. “There were a dozen bids on each of them, mostly other regional museums, and, we had the four winners.”
    “Thank you.”
     
    W HO’D SAID IT? The woman with the dangly earrings? The thin-nosed woman? One of them had said, “Big money.” Lucas turned and looked up at the wall over his bookcase, at a map of St. Paul. Gabriella Coombs had told him that her grandmother “got lucky” with the quilts, and with the money, and the money she had in her former house, and been able to buy in the Como neighborhood.
    But houses on Coombs’s block didn’t cost $470,000, certainly not when she bought, and not even now, after the big price run-up. They might cost $250,000 now, probably not more than two-thirds of that when Coombs bought. Maybe $160,000, or $175,000. And Gabriella said she’d put in money