“Well, that's something,” the fireman agreed. “You don't see people burning up that kind of thing, not unless it's a revenge trip. They don't burn up their own stuff that much.”
The second fireman chipped in: “There was a lot of damage right over the kitchen sink. There are dishes in the sink, and we haven't gone through it yet, but I betcha that bottle landed in the sink, and a lot of the gas wound up in the sink, instead of shooting all over the place. That helped confine it; the arson guys'll know better.”
“So who's your arson guy?”
Lucas took down the name of the head arson investigator, and thanked them for their time. Back in the front yard, he asked Kathy, “You got a credit card?”
“Why?”
“Gonna have to stay in a motel tonight,” Lucas said. “Probably for a few nights.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Got some cash, got an ATM card?”
She nodded again. “We're okay. We're just… we just…”
“We're just really scared,” Jesse finished.
Lucas called the Radisson in downtown St. Paul, got them a room. Told them not to tell anyone else where they were staying. A fireman said he would take them inside to get what they could out of the house. A neighbor volunteered space in her garage, where they temporarily could store whatever they could get out of the house.
The fireman suggested a couple of cleaning companies that could clean up the part of the house that wasn't damaged. “If you guys hadn't been home, if it'd taken another five minutes before somebody reported it, if you hadn't used that fire extinguisher to slow it down, you'd be looking at a hole in the ground. You get it cleaned up, you could be living in it again in a week,” he said. “I see it all the time.”
Lucas called Jenkins and Shrake. They were at the White Bear Yacht Club, having a few drinks after a round of golf, part of what they said was an investigation into gambling on golf courses. “Get your asses out of the country club, and get onto the Klines. Jack those fuckers up. My gut feeling is that they're not involved, but I want you to prove it,” Lucas told Jenkins.
“Can't prove a negative,” Jenkins said.
“Not before this,” Lucas said. “You guys are gonna do it, though, or we're gonna do a gay prostitution sting, and your ass will be on the corner.”
“We get to wear nylons?” Jenkins asked. He didn't threaten well.
Lucas's voice went dark: “I'm not fuckin' around here, man. We had an attempted kidnapping, we got a dead dog, now we got a firebomb.”
“We'll jack them up, no shit,” Jenkins promised. “We're on the case.”
“Flowers is coming up. He'll get in touch.”
Off the phone, Lucas started walking around the neighborhood, checking the houses on each side of the Barths' house, then across the alley in back, and so on, up and down both streets and the houses on the alley. Four houses up from the Barths, and across the alley, he found an elderly man named Stevens.
“I was cooking some Weight Watchers in the microwave, and I saw a car go through the alley,” Stevens said. He was tall, and too thin, balding, with a dark scab at the crest of his head, as if he'd walked into something. They were in the kitchen, and he pointed a trembling hand at the window over the sink, the same arrangement as in the Barths'. “Then, maybe, ten minutes later I was just finished eating, and I took the dish to the trash, and saw more lights in the alley. I didn't see the car, but I think it was the same one. They both had blue headlights.”
“Blue?”
“Not blue-blue, but bluish. Like on German cars. You know, when you look in your rearview mirror on the interstate, and you see a whole bunch of yellow lights, and then, mixed in, some that look blue?”
“Yeah. I've got blue lights myself,” Lucas said.
“Like that,” Stevens said. “Anyway I'd just sat back down again, and I heard the sirens.”
“That was right after you saw the blue headlights.”
“I got up to take the dish to the trash during a commercial,” Stevens said. “Saw the lights, came in, sat back down. The sirens came before there was another commercial.”
“You didn't see what kind of a car it was? The time you actually saw it?”
“Nope. Just getting dark,” Stevens said. “But it was a dark-colored car, black, dark blue, dark green, and I think a sedan. Not a coupe.”
“Not a van.”
“No, no. Not a van. A regular, generic car. Maybe bigger than most. Not a lot bigger, a little bigger. Not an SUV A car.”
“You see many cars back in the alley?” Lucas asked.
“Between five and six o'clock, there are always some, with the garages off the alley.
But not with blue lights. None with blue lights. That's probably why I noticed it.”
That was all he'd seen: he hadn't heard the bomb, the screaming, hadn't heard anything until the sirens came up. He'd been watching Animal Planet.
“Live here alone?” Lucas asked, as he went out.
“Yeah. It sucks.”
Lucas continued walking, found a woman who thought she'd seen a car with bluish lights, but wasn't exactly certain what time. She'd seen it coming out of the alley at least sometime before the sirens, and added nothing to what Stevens said, except to confirm it.
He checked out with the firemen at the Barths'. The arson investigator had shown up, and said he'd have some preliminary ideas in the morning. “But I can tell you, there was gasoline.” He sniffed. “Probably from BP. I'd say, ninety-two octane.”
Lucas frowned and the arson guy grinned: “Pulling your weenie. Talk to you in the morning.”
Lucas got home at midnight and found Weather in bed, reading a book on cottage gardens.
“I think we live in a cottage,” she said.
“Good to know,” he grunted.
“So, I think we should hire a couple of gardeners next year, and get a cottage garden going,” she said. “Maybe a white picket fence.”
“Picket fence would be nice,” he said, grumpily.
She put the book down. “Tell me about it.”
He told her about it, walking back and forth from the bathroom, waving his arms around, getting into his pajamas. He'd brought up a bottle of caffeine-free Diet Coke, with a shot of rum. He sat on the edge of the bed drinking it as he finished, and finally said, “The ultimate problem is, there is no connection between the two cases. But we've got a serious psycho killing people over quilts, and another serious psycho trying to get at the Barths, and they seem to be driving the same van, and goddamnit… I can't find a single fuckin' thing in common between the two cases. There is nothing. The Barths-straight political bullshit. Bucher is a robbery-murder, by people who killed at least one and maybe two other people, and somehow involves quilts.
They've got jack-shit to do with each other.”
He calmed down after a while, and Weather turned out the lights. Lucas usually lay awake in the dark for a while, brooding, even when there wasn't anything to brood about, while Weather dropped off after three deep breaths. This night, she took a half-dozen deep breaths, then lifted her head, said sleepily, “I can think of one thing the cases have in common.”