Invisible Prey

motivator in the whole scheme…
    He got on the phone to Jenkins again: “How would you feel about around-the-clock surveillance?”
    “Oh, motherfucker…don’t do this to me.”
     
    M ORE DOODLING on a notepad, staring out a window. Finally, he called up the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, and got the head of the folk arts department, and was told that the curator who had supervised the acquisition of the quilt had moved on; she was now at the High Museum in Atlanta.
    Lucas got the number, and called her. Billie Walker had one of the smooth Southern Comfort voices found in the western parts of the Old South, where the word bug had three vowels between the b and g and they all rhymed with glue.
    “I remember that clearly,” she said. “No, we wouldn’t have bought it normally, but an outside foundation provided much of the money. A three-to-one match. In other words, if we came up with thirty thousand dollars, they would provide ninety thousand.”
    “Is this pretty common?”
    “Oh my, yes. That’s how we get half of our things,” Walker said. “Find some people willing to chip in, then find a foundation willing to come up with a matching grant. There are many, many foundations with an interest in the arts.”
    “Do you remember the name of this one?” Lucas asked.
    “Of course. In my job, you don’t forget a funding source. It was the Thune Foundation of Chicago.” Lucas asked her how she spelled it. “T-h-u-n-e.”
    “Did you have to dig them out of the underbrush to get the donation? Or did they come to you?”
    “That’s the odd thing. They volunteered. Never heard from them before,” she said. “Took no sucking-up at all.”
    Lucas scribbled Thune on his desk pad. “Have you ever heard of a woman named Amity Anderson?”
    “No…not that I recall. Who is she?”
     
    H E’D HEARD the name Thune, he thought. He didn’t know where, but he’d heard it, and recently. At Bucher’s, one of the relatives? He couldn’t put his finger on it, and finally dialed Chicago directory assistance, got a number for the Thune Foundation, and five minutes later, was talking to the assistant director.
    He explained, briefly, what he was up to, and then asked, “Do the names Donaldson, Bucher, or Toms mean anything to you?”
    “Well, Donaldson, of course. Mr. Thune owned a large brewery in Wisconsin. He had no sons, but one of his daughters married George Donaldson—this would have been way back—and they became the stalwarts of this foundation.”
    “Really.”
    “Yes.”
    “Claire Donaldson?” Lucas asked. “I believe she was the last Donaldson?”
    “Yes, she was. Tragic, what happened. She was on our board for several years, chairwoman, in fact, for many years, although she’d stepped aside from that responsibility before she died.”
    “Did she have anything to do with grants? Like, to museums?”
    “She was on our grants committee, of course…”
     
    L UCAS GOT OFF the phone and would have said, “Ah-ha!” if he hadn’t thought he’d sound like a fool.
    A new piece: even the prices paid for the quilts in the auction were a fraud. He’d bet the other purchases were similarly funded. He’d have Sandy nail it down, but it gave him the direction.
    A very complicated scheme, he thought, probably set up by Anderson and her accomplice.
    Create the quilts. Create an ostensible value for them by donating them to museums, with appraisals that were, he would bet, as rigged as the later sales.
    Sell the quilts at Sotheby’s to museums who feel that they’re getting a great deal, because most of the money is coming from charitable foundations. Why would the foundations give up money like that? Because of pressure from their founders…
    The founders would be banned from actually getting money from the foundations themselves. That was a definite no-no. But this way, they got it, and they got tax write-offs on top of it.
     
    H E PUT DOWN boxes with arrows pointing to the boxes: Anderson sets it up for a cut; the funders, Bucher and Donaldson, get tax write-offs. At the Sotheby’s sale, the money is distributed to Coombs and Cannon Associates—Amity Anderson. Anderson kicks back part of it—a third?—to Donaldson and Bucher…
    What a great deal. Completely invisible.
    Then maybe, Donaldson cracks, or somebody pushes too hard, and Donaldson has to go. Then Bucher? That would be…odd.
    And what about Toms? Where did he fit in?
     
    T ED M ARSALIS called back. “The Wells Fargo