Invisible Prey

OFFICE, Lucas began a list:
Call Archie Carton at Sotheby’s.
Call the Booths about the quilt donation to the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Get a court order for a snip of red thread from the Walker Gallery quilt.
Call Jenkins and Shrake, and find out where Flowers is.
Find out exactly when Amity Anderson worked for Donaldson, and how she would have known Bucher, Coombs—through the quilts, probably—and Toms, the dead man in Des Moines.
Start a biography on Amity Anderson.
    “Carol!”
    Carol popped her head in the door. “Yup?”
    “Is that Sandy kid still around?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Get her ass in here.”
     
    B OTH S HRAKE’S and Flowers’s cell phones were off. Jenkins answered his and said, “Lucas, Jesus, Kline is gonna get a court order to keep us away from him.”
    “What happened? Where are you?”
    “I’m up in Brainerd. Kline Jr. was four-wheeling yesterday up by the family cabin,” Jenkins said. “He and his pals went around drinking in the local bars in the evening.”
    “What about his old man?” Lucas asked.
    “Shrake looked him up last night. He says he was home the whole time, talked to a neighbor late, about the Twins game when they were taking out the garbage, the game was just over. Shrake checked, and that was about the time of the fire.”
    “So they’re alibied up.”
    “Yeah. And they’re not smug about it. They’re not like, ‘Fuck you, figure this out.’ They’re pissed that we’re still coming around. Junior, by the way, is gonna run for his old man’s Senate seat, and says they’re gonna beat the sex charge by putting Jesse on the stand and making the jurors figure out about how innocent she was.”
    “That could work,” Lucas admitted. “You know where Flowers is?”
    “I talked to him last night,” Jenkins said. “He was on his way to see the Barths. He’d be getting in really late, he might still be asleep somewhere.”
    “Okay. That’s what I needed. Go home,” Lucas said.
    “One more thing.”
    “Yeah?”
    Jenkins said, “I don’t know if this means anything to you. Probably not.”
    “What?”
    “I was talking to Junior Kline. He and his buddies were all wrapped up in Carhartt jackets and boots and concho belts and CAT hats, and they all had Leathermans on their belts and dirt and all that, and somehow…I got the feeling that they might be singin’ on the other side of the choir. A bunch of butt-bandits.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah. And you know what? I don’t think I’m wrong,” Jenkins said. “I don’t know how that might reflect on the attacks on the Barths…I mean, I just don’t know.”
    “Neither do I,” Lucas said.
     
    H E GOT C AROL started on getting a court order for a snip of thread from the quilt.
     
    S ANDY HURRIED IN. “You called?”
    Lucas said, “There’s a woman named Amity Anderson. I’ve got her address, phone number, and I can get her Social Security number and age and all that. I need the most complete biography you can get me. I need it pretty quick. She can’t know about it.”
    Sandy shrugged: “No problem. I can rip most of it off the Net. Be nice if I could see her federal tax returns.”
    “I can’t get you the federals, but I can get you the state…”
     
    T HE B OOTHS 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.”
     
    A RCHIE C ARTON 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,