Invisible Prey

however, so I suspect you’d find him in the Anglican part of heaven. Or hell, depending on what I didn’t know about James.”
    “That’s not good,” Lucas said.
    “I suspect James would agree…I’m looking at this check, I actually have an image of it, it was deposited to a Cannon Associates account at Wells Fargo. Do you want the account number?”
    “Absolutely…”
     
    “C AROL! ”
    She popped in: “What?”
    “I need to borrow Ted Marsalis for a while,” Lucas said. “Could you call over to Revenue and run him down? I need to get an old check traced.”
    “Are we hot?”
    “Maybe. I mean, we’re always hot, but right now, we’re maybe hot .”
     
    H E GOT Tricia Bundt on the phone, explained that he was investigating a murder that might somehow involve the Armstrong quilts. “We’re trying to track down what happened at the time they were disposed of…at the time they were donated. I know you got the donation from Claire Donaldson, but could you tell me, was there anybody else on the Donaldson side involved in the transaction? Or did Mrs. Donaldson handle all of it?”
    “No, she didn’t,” Bundt said. Bundt sounded like she had a chipped front tooth, because all of her sibilant S s whistled a bit. “Actually, I only talked to her twice. Once, when we were working through the valuation on the quilts, and then at the little reception we had with our acquisitions committee, when it came in.”
    “So who handled it from the Donaldson side?”
    “Her assistant,” Bundt said. “Let me see, her name was something like…Anita Anderson? That’s not quite right…”
    “Amity Anderson.” He got a little thrill from saying the name.
    “That’s it,” Bundt said. “She handled all the paperwork details.”
    Lucas asked, “Could you tell me, how did you nail down the evaluation on the quilt?”
    “That’s always difficult,” Bundt said. “We rely on experienced appraisers, people who operate quilt galleries, previous sales of similar quilts, and so on,” she whistled.
    “Then let me ask you this,” Lucas said. “Do museums really care about what the appraisal is? I mean, you’re getting it for free, right?”
    “Oh, we do care,” Bundt said. “If we simply inflated everything, so rich people could get tax write-offs, then pretty soon Congress would change the rules and we wouldn’t get anything.”
    “Hmph.”
    “Really,” she said. But she said “really” the way a New Yorker says “really,” which means “maybe not really.”
    “Does the quilt still have its original value?” Lucas asked.
    “Hard to say,” she said. “There are no more of them, and their creator is dead. That always helps hold value. They’re exceptional quilts, even aside from the curses.”
    Lucas thanked her for her help, and just before he rang off, she said, “You didn’t ask me if I was related to the Bundt-cake Bundts.”
    “Didn’t occur to me,” he said.
    “Really.”
     
    A S SOON AS he hung up, his phone rang again, and Carol said, “I’m ringing Ted Marsalis for you.”
    Marsalis came on a minute later, and Lucas said, “I need you to check with your sources at Wells Fargo. I’m looking to see what happened to an account there, and who’s behind it…”
     
    L UCAS SAT BACK at his desk and closed his eyes. He was beginning to see something back there: a major fraud. Two rich old ladies, both experienced antique buyers, buy quilts cheaply from a well-known quilt stitcher, and then turn around and donate them to museums.
    For this, they get a big tax write-off, probably saving $50,000 or $60,000 actual dollars from their tax bills. Would that mean anything to people as rich as they were? Of course it would. That’s how rich people stayed rich. Watch your pennies and the dollars take care of themselves.
    The donations established the value of the quilts and created a stir in the art community. The remaining quilts are then moved off to Sotheby’s, where they sell for equally large prices to four more museums. Why the museums would necessarily be bidding, he didn’t know. Could be fashion, could be something he didn’t see.
    In any case, Marilyn Coombs gets enough money to buy a house, and put a few bucks in her pocket. Two-thirds of the money disappears into Cannon Associates, which, he would bet, was none other than Amity Anderson.
    How that led to the killings, he didn’t know yet. Anderson had to have an accomplice. Maybe the accomplice was even the main