Leslie Widdler shook his head. “There's a jug in the china cabinet in the music room that's worth ten times all the quilts put together.”

Lucas nodded. “All right. Listen. Thanks for your help, guys. And thanks for those sticky buns, Les. Sorta made my morning.”

Out of the house, Leslie Widdler said, “We've got to take him out of it.”

“God, we may have overstepped,” Jane said. “If we could only go back.”

“Can't go back,” Leslie said.

“If they look into the Armstrong quilts, they'll find receipts, they'll find people who remember stuff… I don't know if they can do it, but they might find out that Coombs didn't get all the money she should have. Once they get on that trail-it'd be hard, but they might trace it on to us.”

“It's been a long time,” Leslie said.

“Paperwork sticks around. And not only paperwork-there's that sewing basket. If Jackson White still has a receipt, or a memory, he could put us in prison.” Jackson White sold them the sewing basket. “I should have looked for the sewing basket instead of that damn music box. That music box has screwed us.”

“What if we went back to Coombs's place, put the music box someplace that wasn't obvious, and took the basket? That'd solve that thing,” Leslie said.

“What about Davenport?”

“There's Jesse Barth,” Leslie said. “Amity might have been right.”

“So dangerous,” Jane said. “So dangerous.”

“Have to get the van, have to steal another plate.”

“That's no problem. That's fifteen seconds, stealing the plate,” Jane said. She was thinking about it.

“Davenport said he has a week or two to work on it-if we can push him through another week, we could be good,” Leslie said. “He's the dangerous one. Smith already wants to move on. It's Davenport who's lingering…”

“He could come back to it,” Jane said. “He smells the connection.”

“Yes, but the older things get, and the fuzzier… Maybe Jackson White could have a fire,” Leslie said. “If they find the music box, that might erase the Coombs connections.

If he has to go chasing after Jesse Barth, that'll use a lot of time. All we need is a little time.”

“So dangerous to go after Jesse Barth,” Jane said. “We almost have to do it tonight.”

“And we can. She's not the early-to-bed kind. And she walks. She walked over to her boyfriend's yesterday, maybe she'll be walking again.”

“We should have taken her yesterday,” Jane said.

“Never had a clear shot at her… and it didn't seem quite so necessary.”

“Oh, God…” Jane scrubbed at her deadened forehead. “Can't even think.”

“Be simpler to wait for Davenport outside his house, and shoot him. Who'd figure it out?” Leslie said. “There must be dozens or hundreds of people who hate him. Criminals.

If he got shot…”

“Two problems. First, he's not an old lady and he's not a kid and he carries a gun and he's naturally suspicious. If we missed, he'd kill us. Look at all those stories about him,” Jane said. “Second, we only know two cases he's working on. One of them is almost over. If the cops think the Bucher killers went out and killed a cop, especially a cop like Davenport who has been working as long as he has… they'd tear up everything.

They'd never let go. They'd work on it for years, if they had to.”

They rode in silence for a while. Then Jane said, “Jesse Barth.” “Only if everything is perfect,” Leslie said. “We only do it if everything is exactly right. We don't have to pull the trigger until the last second, when we actually stop her. Then if we do it, we've got an hour of jeopardy until we can get her underground. They don't have to know she's dead. They can think she ran away. But Davenport'll be working it forever, trying to find her.”

“Only if everything is perfect,” Jane said. “Only if the stars are right.”

Lucas was still poring over paper at Bucher's when Sandy called back. “I talked to Clayton Toms. He's the grandson of Jacob Toms-the murdered man,” she said. “He said there were several quilts in the house, but they were used as bedspreads and weren't worth too much. He still has one. None of them were these Armstrong quilts. None of them were hung on walls. He's going to check to see if there's anything that would indicate that he knew Mrs. Bucher or Mrs. Donaldson or Mrs. Coombs.”

“Thanks,” Lucas said. Maybe quilts weren't the magic bullet.

Gabriella Coombs decided to put off her research into Grandma's quilts. She had a date, the fifth in a series. She liked the guy all right, and he definitely wanted to get her clothes off, and she was definitely willing to take them off.

Unfortunately, he wanted them off for the wrong reason. He was a painter. The owner of the High Plains Drifter Bar amp; Grill in Minneapolis wanted a naked-lady painting to hang over his bar, and the painter, whose name was Ron, figured that Gabriella would be perfect as a model, although he suggested she might want to “fill out your tits” a little.

She didn't even mind that idea, as long as she got laid occasionally. The problem was, he worked from photographs, and Gabriella's very firm sixteenth Rule of Life was Never Take Off Your Clothes Around a Camera.

Ron had been pleading: “Listen, even if I did put your picture on the Internet, who'd recognize it? Who looks at faces? The facts are, one in every ten women in the United States, and maybe the world, is naked on the Internet. Nobody would look at your face. Besides, I won't put it on the Internet.”

On that last part, his eyes drifted, and she had the bad feeling that she'd be on the Internet about an hour after he took the picture. And three hours after that, the wife of some friend would call up to tell her that everyone was ordering prints from Pussy-R-Us.

So the question was, was he going to make a move? Or did he only want her body in a computer file? Coombs was a lighthearted sort, like her mother, and while she carefully chose her clothing for the way it looked on her, she didn't use much in the way of makeup.

That was trickery, she thought. She did use perfume: scents were primal, she believed, and something musky might get a rise out of the painter. If not, well, then, Ron might be missing out on a great opportunity, she thought.

She dabbed the perfume on her mastoids, between her breasts, and finally at the top of her thighs. As she did it, her thoughts drifted to Lucas Davenport. The guy was growing on her, even though he was a cop and therefore on the Other Side, but he had a way of talking with women that made her think photography wouldn't be an issue.

And she could feel little attraction molecules flowing out of him; he liked her looks.

Of course, he was married, and older. Not that marriage always made a difference.

And he wasn't that much older.

“Hmm,” she said to herself.

Jesse Barth used a Bic lighter to fire up two cigarettes at once, handed one of them to Mike. The evening was soft, the cool humid air lying comfortably on her bare forearms and shoulders. They sat on the front porch, under the yellow bug light, and Screw, the pooch, came over and snuffed at her leg and then plopped down in the dirt and whimpered for a stomach scratch.

Two blocks away, Jane Widdler, behind the wheel, watched for a moment with the image-stabilizing binoculars, then said, “That's her.”

“About time,” Leslie said. “Wonder if the kid's gonna walk her home?”

“If he does, it's off,” Jane said.

“Yeah,” Leslie said. But he was hot. He had a new pipe, with new tape on the handle, and he wanted to use it.

Lucas was drinking a caffeine-free Diet Coke out of the bottle, his butt propped against a kitchen counter. He said to Weather, “There's a good possibility that whoever killed Coombs didn't have anything to do with the others. The others fit a certain profile: they were rich, you could steal from them and nobody would know. They were carefully spaced both in time and geography- there was no overlap in police jurisdictions, so there'd be nobody to compare them, to see the similarities. Still: Coombs knew at least two of them. And the way she was killed…”