“I'm going to make a call, get the St. Paul cops to go over the place,” Lucas said.
“If you could give me the boyfriend's name…”
They were talking in the kitchen, next to the phone, and the color caught his eye: a flash of red. He thought it might be blood, but then instantly knew that it wasn't.
Blood was purple or black. This was scarlet, in the slot between the stove and refrigerator.
He hadn't seen it when he and Gabriella Coombs were in the kitchen, and he'd looked-he'd been doing his typical crime-scene check, casually peering into cracks and under tables and chairs.
“Excuse me,” he said. He went over to the stove and looked down.
“What?”
“Looks like…Just a minute.” He opened a kitchen cabinet, took out a broom, and used the handle to poke out the red thing.
A spool of thread.
The spool popped out of the stove space, rolled crookedly in a half circle, and bumped into his shoe. He used a paper towel to pick it up, by the spool edge on one end, and put it on the stove. They both looked at it for a moment.
“How'd it get there?” Lucy asked.
“I don't know,” Lucas said. “Wasn't there before. There was a closetful of quilting stuff upstairs. Maybe Gabriella came and took it?”
Lucy frowned. “She doesn't quilt. I've been trying to get her interested, but she's more interested in a social life. Besides, if she took it, where'd she put it? It's not in her car.”
“Neither is she. Maybe she came over with a girlfriend, who quilts…” Lucas was bullshitting, and he knew it. Making up fairy stories.
“That's from the old basket,” Lucy said. “It's old thread, see? I don't think they even make it anymore. This says Arkansas on it. Now, most of it comes from China or Vietnam.”
“Let's go look at the basket,” Lucas said.
They climbed the stairs together, to the big linen closet, and Lucas used the paper towel to open the door.
“Ah, fuck me,” he said.
No wicker sewing basket.
But there, under a neat stack of fabric clippings, where the basket had been, was a black lacquer box with mother-of-pearl inlay.
The music box.
Lucas called Jerry Wilson, the St. Paul cop who'd caught the investigation of Marilyn Coombs's death, and told him about the disappearance of Gabriella Coombs, about the keys and the car, about the broken window with the Scotch tape, about the spool of thread and the music box.
Wilson said, “That sounds like an Agatha Christie book.”
“I know what it sounds like,” Lucas said. “But you need to cover this, Jerry-we need to find Gabriella. I'll talk to her boyfriend, but I could use some cops spread out behind me, talking to her other friends.”
“Okay. You got names? And I'll tell you what-that window wasn't broken day before yesterday.”
“I'll get you names and phone numbers,” Lucas said. “If you find her, God bless you, but I've got a bad feeling about this.” Lucas was on his cell phone, looked back to the house, where Lucy Coombs was locking the front door. “I've got a feeling she's gone.”
Lucy Coombs wanted to come along when Lucas confronted Ron Stack, the artist boyfriend.
Lucas told her to go home and get on the phone, and he lied to her: “There's an eighty percent chance that she's at a friend's house or out for coffee. We've just got to run her down, and anything you can do to help…”
On the way to Stack's place, Lucas called Carol: “Have you seen Shrake?”
“Yes, but I'm not sure he saw me. He's getting coffee, and he needs it. His eyes are the color of a watermelon daiquiri.”
“Fuck him. Tell him to meet me at the Parkside Lofts in Lowertown. Ten minutes.”
When Lucas got back downtown, Shrake was sitting on a park bench across the street from Stack's apartment building. He got shakily to his feet when Lucas pulled into the curb. He was a tall man in a British-cut gray suit and white shirt, open at the collar. His eyes, as Carol said, were Belgian-hare pink, and he was hungover.
“I hope we're gonna kill something,” he said, when Lucas got out of the car. “I really need to kill something.”
“I know. I talked to Jenkins this morning,” Lucas said. “We're looking for an artist.
His girlfriend disappeared last night.” Lucas told him about it as they crossed the street.
The Parkside was a six-story building, a onetime warehouse, un-profitably converted to loft apartments, with city subsidies, and was now in its fourth refinancing. They rode up to the top floor in what had been a freight elevator, retained either for its boho cool or for lack of money. For whatever reason, it smelled, Lucas thought, like the inside of an old gym shoe.
As they got off the elevator, Lucas's cell phone rang. Lucas looked at the Caller ID: the medical examiner's office. He said, “I've got to take this.”
The ME: “You know, I like doing dogs,” he said. “It's a challenge.”
“Find anything good?” Lucas asked.
“A lot of people think all we can do is routine, run-of-the-mill dissections and lab tests, like it's all cut-and-dried,” the ME said. “That's not what it's about, is it? It's a heck of a lot more than that…”
“Listen, we'll have lunch someday and you can tell me about it,” Lucas said. “What happened with the dog?”
“You're lying to me about the lunch. You're just leading me on…”
“What about the fuckin' dog?” Lucas snarled.
“Pipe,” the ME said. “I did Bucher-and man, if it ain't the same pipe, it's a brother or a cousin. The dog's skull was crushed, just like Bucher's and Peebles's, and the radius of the crushing blow is identical. I don't mean somewhat the same, I mean, identical. We got mucho blood samples, but I don't know yet whether they're human or dog.”
“Give me a guess,” Lucas suggested.
“My guess is, it's human,” the ME said. “It looks to me like the mutt was chewing on somebody. We've got enough for DNA, if it's human.”
“That's great,” Lucas said. “And the pipe…”
“You're hot,” the ME said. “You're onto something.”
“Get a break?” Shrake asked, when Lucas rang off.