Sure enough: there was no other way to describe them. They were looking at the chairs when Shrake and Jenkins came in, and Flowers waved at them, and Lucas saw a wooden rack with more plastic-wrapped paintings. He pulled them down, one-two-three, and ripped loose the plastic on the back. One and three were bare.
The back of two had a single word, written in oil paint with a painter's brush, a long time ago: Reckless.
Amity Anderson went to jail in St. Paul, held without bail on suspicion of first-degree murder in the deaths of Constance Bucher and Sugar-Rayette Peebles. Flowers said she cried uncontrollably all the way back and tried to shift the blame to Jane Widdler.
Everybody thought about that, and on the afternoon of Anderson's arrest, two officers and a technician went to Widdler's store with a search warrant, and, after she'd spoken to her attorney, spent some time using sterile Q-tips to scrub cells from the lining of her cheeks.
DNA samples were also taken from Anderson, and from the body of Leslie Widdler, and were packed off to the lab. At the same time, five crime-scene techs from the BSA and the St. Paul Police Department began working over the white van, the steel building, and the shack.
Ownership of the land, shack, and building was held by the Lorna C. Widdler Trust.
Lorna was Leslie's mother, who'd died fourteen years earlier; Leslie was the surviving trustee. No mention of Jane. The land surrounding the shack, the cornfield, was owned by a town-farmer in Dundas, who said he'd seen Leslie-”A big guy? Dresses like a fairy?”-only twice in ten years. He'd had a woman with him, the farmer said, but he couldn't say for certain whether it was Jane Widdler or Amity Anderson.
They paid the farmer $225 for damage to his cornfield.
Smith called Lucas the evening of the arrest and said, “We found a pill bottle under the front seat of the van. It's a prescription for Amity Anderson.”
“There you go,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, and we got some hair, long brown hair. Doesn't look like Widdler's. It does look like Anderson's.”
“Anything on Leslie?”
“Well, there's some discoloration on the back of the passenger seat, might be blood.
One of the techs says it is, so we've got some DNA work to do.”
“If it's either a dog or Leslie…”
“Then we're good.”
The Reckless painting and the swoopy chairs were confirmed by the Lash kid, a painting was found on an old inventory list held by the Toms family in Des Moines, and two pieces of furniture were found on purchase receipts in Donaldson's files.
St. Paul police, making phone checks, found a call from Leslie Widdler's phone to Anderson's house on the night Widdler killed himself.
The quilts were defended by their museum owners as genuine.
So the reporters came and went, and the attorneys; the day after the arrest, Lucas was chatting with Del when Smith came by. Smith had been spending time with Anderson and her court- appointed attorney. They shuffled chairs around Lucas's office and Carol brought a coffee for Smith, and Smith sighed and said, “Gotta tell you, Lucas. I think there's an outside possibility that we got the wrong woman.”
“Talk to me.”
“The hair's gonna be Anderson's-or maybe, somebody we just don't know. But I looked at her hair really close, and it's the same. I mean, the same. Color, texture, split ends… We gotta wait for the DNA, but it's hers.”
“What does she say?” Lucas asked.
“She says she was never in the van,” Smith said.
“Well, shit, you caught her right there,” Del said. “What more do you want?”
“We asked her about the phone call from Leslie, the night Leslie killed himself.
Know what she says?”
“Is this gonna hurt?” Lucas asked.
Smith nodded. “She says that Jane Widdler called her, not Leslie. She said that Jane told her that her car had broken down, and since Anderson was only a few blocks away, asked her to come over and pick her up, give her a ride home. Anderson said she did.
She said Widdler told her she had to pee, so they stopped at Anderson's house, and Widdler went in the bathroom. That's when Widdler picked up the prescription bottle and the hair, Anderson says.”
“She's saying that Jane Widdler murdered Leslie,” Lucas said.
“Yep.”
“Anderson never saw a body?”
“She never saw the car, she says,” Smith said. “She says Widdler told her that she was afraid to wait in a dark area, and walked out to Cretin. She said she picked up Widdler on Cretin, took her back to her house to pee, and then took her home.”
“How long was the phone call?” Lucas asked.
“About twenty-three seconds.”
“Doesn't sound like a call between a guy about to commit suicide, and his lover,” Lucas said to Del.
“I don't know,” Del said. “Never having been in the position.”
“She's got this story, and she admits it sounds stupid, but she's sticking to it.
And she does it like…” Smith hesitated, then said it: “… like she's innocent.
You know those people who never stop screaming, and then it turns out they didn't do it? Like that.”
“Hmm,” Lucas said.
“Another thing,” Del said. “Even if we find some proof that Widdler was involved, how do we ever convict? A defense attorney would put Anderson on trial and shred the case.”
“So you're saying we ought to convict Anderson because we can?” Lucas asked.
“No,” Del said. “Though it's tempting.”
“You oughta go over and talk to her-Anderson,” Smith said to Lucas.
“Maybe I will,” Lucas said. “All right if I take a noncop with me?”
“Who'd that be?”
“A bartender,” Lucas said.
Amity Anderson had never been big, and now she looked like a Manga cartoon character when the crime boss fetches her out of the dungeon. She'd lost any sparkle she'd ever had; her hair hung lank, her nails were chewed to her fingertips.
“This is all off the record,” Lucas said.
Anderson's lawyer nodded. “For your information: no court use, no matter what is said.”
Lucas introduced Sloan, who'd put on his best brown suit for the occasion. “Mr. Sloan is an old friend and a former police officer who has always had a special facility in… conversations with persons suspected of crimes,” Lucas said carefully. “I asked him to come along as a consultant.”
Everybody nodded and Anderson said, “I didn't know about any killings. But I knew Leslie and Jane, and when Mrs. Donaldson was killed, I worried. But that's all. I didn't have any proof, I didn't have any knowledge. With Mrs. Bucher, it never crossed my mind… then, when I read about Marilyn Coombs being killed, I thought about it again. But I pushed it away. Just away-I didn't want to think about it.”
Sloan took her back through the whole thing, with a gentle voice and thin teacher's smile, working more like a therapist than a cop, listening to the history: about how Anderson and the Widdlers had become involved in college, and then drifted apart.
How the surprise call came years later, about the quilts. About her move to the Cities, occasional contacts with the Widdlers, including a sporadic sexual relationship with Jane Widdler.
“And then you drove down to a barn full of stolen antiques and began stealing them a second time-with a key you had in your pocket,” Lucas said.
“That's because Jane set me up,” Anderson said through her teeth, showing the first bit of steel in the interrogation. “I couldn't believe it-I couldn't believe how she must have worked it. She knew I was friends with Don Harvey. He's a very prominent museum person from Chicago, he used to be here. She said he was coming to town, and if he authenticated some paintings for them, that they would give me fifteen percent of the sale price, above their purchase price. She thought I had some influence with Don because we'd dated once, and were friends. If he okayed the paintings-I mean, if he'd okayed that Reckless painting, I could have gotten seventy-five thousand dollars in fees for that one painting.”
She shook her head again, a disbelieving smile flickering across her face: “She gave me a key and said she'd send me a map in the mail. I got it out of my mailbox when you were watching me.”