“He's been working on his metaphors again,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. He thinks it gives him the common touch,” she said.
“Listen, Lucas, she was really, really rich. A lot of money is about to go somewhere, and there's the election coming.”
“I'll see you in ten minutes,” Lucas said. “You got an attitude from St. Paul?”
“Not yet. Harrington is here somewhere, I'll talk to him,” Rose Marie said. “I gotta put the phone down and park… He'll be happy to see us-he's trying to get more overtime money from the state.” Harrington was the St. Paul chief.
“Ten minutes,” Lucas said.
He was on the west side of Minneapolis. He took Highway 100 north, got on I-394, aimed the nose of the car at the IDS building in the distance, and stepped on the accelerator, flashing past minivans, SUVs, pickups, and fat-assed sedans, down to I-94.
Feeling all right, whistling a little.
He'd had a past problem with depression. The depression, he believed, was probably genetic, and he'd shared it with his father and grandfather; a matter of brain chemicals.
And though depression was always off the coast, like a fog bank, it had nothing to do with the work. He actually liked the hunt, liked chasing assholes. He'd killed a few of them, and had never felt particularly bad about it. He'd been dinged up along the way, as well, and never thought much about that, either. No post-traumatic stress.
As for rich old ladies getting killed, well, hell, they were gonna die sooner or later. Sometimes, depending on who it was, a murder would make him angry, or make him sad, and he wouldn't have wished for it. But if it was going to happen, he'd be pleased to chase whoever had done it.
He didn't have a mission; he had an interest.
Emmylou Harris came up on the satellite radio, singing “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight,” and he sang along in a crackling baritone, heading for bloody murder through city traffic at ninety miles per hour; wondered why Catholics didn't have something like a St. Christopher's medal that would ward off the Highway Patrol. He'd have to talk to his parish priest about it, if he ever saw the guy again.
Gretchen Wilson came up, with Kris Kristofferson's “Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down,” and he sang along with her, too.
The day was gorgeous, puffy clouds with a breeze, just enough to unfold the flags on buildings along the interstate. Eighty degrees, maybe. Lucas took I-94 to Marion Street, around a couple of corners onto John Ireland, up the hill past the hulking cathedral, and motored onto Summit.
Summit Avenue was aptly named. Beginning atop a second-line bluff above the Mississippi, it looked out over St. Paul, not only from a geographical high point, but also an economic one. The richest men in the history of the city had built mansions along Summit, and some of them still lived there.
Oak Walk Was a three-story red-brick mansion with a white-pillared portico out front, set back a bit farther from the street than its gargantuan neighbors. He'd literally passed it a thousand times, on his way downtown, almost without noticing it. When he got close, the traffic began coagulating in front of him, and then he saw the TV trucks and the foot traffic on the sidewalks, and then the wooden barricades-Summit had been closed and cops were routing traffic away from the murder house, back around the cathedral. Lucas held his ID out the window, nosed up to the barricades, called “BCA” to the cop directing traffic, and was pointed around the end of a barricade and down the street.
Oak Walk's driveway was jammed with cop cars. Lucas left the Porsche in the street, walked past a uniformed K-9 cop with his German shepherd. The cop said, “Hey, hot dog.” Lucas nodded, said, “George,” and climbed the front steps and walked through the open door.
Just inside the door was a vestibule, where arriving or departing guests could gather up their coats, or sit on a bench and wait for the limo. The vestibule, in turn, opened into a grand hallway that ran the length of the house, and just inside the vestibule door, two six-foot bronze figures, torchieres, held aloft six-bulb lamps.
Straight ahead, two separate stairways, one on each side of the hall, curled up to a second floor, with a crystal chandelier hanging maybe twenty feet above the hall, between the stairs.
The hallway, with its pinkish wallpaper, would normally have been lined with paintings, mostly portraits, but including rural agricultural scenes, some from the American West, others apparently French; and on the herringboned hardwood floors, a series of Persian carpets would have marched toward the far back door in perfectly aligned diminishing perspective.
The hall was no longer lined with paintings, but Lucas knew that it had been, because the paintings were lying on the floor, most faceup, some facedown, helter-skelter.
The rugs had been pulled askew, as though somebody had been looking beneath them.
For what, Lucas couldn't guess. The glass doors on an enormous china cabinet had been broken; there were a dozen collector-style pots still sitting on the shelves inside, and the shattered remains of more on the floor, as if the vandals had been looking for something hidden in the pots. What would that be? A dozen pieces of furniture had been dumped. Drawers lay on the floor, along with candles and candlesticks, knickknacks, linen, photo albums, and shoe boxes that had once contained photos. The photos were now scattered around like leaves; a good number of them black-and-white. There was silverware, and three or four gold-colored athletic trophies, a dozen or so plaques. One of the plaques, lying faceup at Lucas's feet, said, “For Meritorious Service to the City, This Key Given March 1, 1899, Opening All the Doors of St. Paul.”
Cops were scattered along the hall, like clerks, being busy, looking at papers, chatting.
Two were climbing the stairs to the second floor, hauling with them a bright-yellow plastic equipment chest.
Lieutenant John T. Smith was in what Lucas thought must have been the music room, since it contained two grand pianos and an organ.
Smith was sitting backward on a piano bench, in front of a mahogany-finished Steinway grand, talking on a cell phone. He was looking at the feet and legs of a dead black woman who was lying facedown on a Persian carpet in a hallway off the music room.
All around him, furniture had been dumped, and there must have been a thousand pieces of sheet music lying around. “Beautiful Brown Eyes.” “Camping Tonight.” “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” “Tammy.”
An amazing amount of shit that rich people had, Lucas thought.
Smith saw Lucas, raised a hand. Lucas nodded, stuck his head into the hallway, where a St. Paul crime-scene crew, and two men from the medical examiner's office, were working over the body.
Not much to see. From Lucas's angle, the woman was just a lump of clothing. One of the ME's investigators, a man named Ted, looked up, said, “Hey, Lucas.”
“What happened?”
“Somebody beat the shit out of her with a pipe. Maybe a piece of re-rod. Not a hammer, nothing with an edge. Crushed her skull, that's what killed her. Might have some postmortem crushing, we've got lacerations but not much bleeding. Same with Mrs.
Bucher, upstairs. Fast, quick, and nasty” “When?”
Ted looked up, and eased back on his heels. “Johnny says they were seen late Friday afternoon, alive, by a researcher from the Historical Society who's doing a book on Summit Avenue homes. He left at four-thirty. Neither one of them went to church on Sunday Sometimes Mrs. Bucher didn't, but Mrs. Peebles always did. So Johnny thinks it was after four-thirty Friday and before Sunday morning, and that looks good to me. We'll rush the lab work…”
“That's Peebles there,” Lucas said.
“Yo. This is Peebles.”
Smith got off the cell phone and Lucas stepped over, grinned: “You'll be rolling in glory on this one,” he said. “Tom Cruise will probably play your character. Nothing but watercress sandwiches and crиme brыlйe from now on.”
“I'm gonna be rolling in something,” Smith said. “You getting involved?”
“If there's anything for me to do,” Lucas said.
“You're more'n welcome, man.”
“Thanks. Ted says sometime between Friday night and Sunday morning?”
Smith stood up and stretched and yawned. “Probably Friday night. I got guys all over the neighborhood and we can't find anybody who saw them Saturday, and they were usually out in the garden on Saturday afternoon. Beheading roses, somebody said. Do you decapitate roses?”
“I don't know,” Lucas said. “I don't, personally.”
“Anyway, they got four phone calls Saturday and three more Sunday, all of them kicked through to the answering service,” Smith said. “I think they were dead before the phone calls came in.”
“Big storm Friday night,” Lucas said.
“I was thinking about that-there were a couple of power outages, darker'n a bitch.
Somebody could have climbed the hill and come in through the back, you wouldn't see them come or go.”