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Hey, Lucas!” He turned and saw Shelley Miller in the crowd along the sidewalk. She lived down the street in a house as big as Oak Walk.
    “I gotta talk to this lady,” Lucas said to Ignace.
    “Call me,” Ignace said. He drifted away, fishing in his pocket for a cell phone.
    Miller came up. She was a thin woman; thin by sheer willpower. “Is she…?” Miller was a cross between fascinated and appalled.
    “Yeah. She and her maid,” Lucas said. “How well did you know her?”
    “I talked to her whenever she was outside,” Miller said. “We used to visit back and forth. How did they kill her?”
    “With a pipe, I think,” Lucas said. “The ME’ll figure it out.”
    Miller shivered: “And they’re still running around the neighborhood.”
    Lucas’s forehead wrinkled: “I’m not sure. I mean, if they’re from the neighborhood. Do you know Bucher’s place well enough to see whether anything was taken? I mean, the safe was untouched and we know one jewelry box was dumped and another might have been taken, and some electronics…but other stuff?”
    She nodded. “I know it pretty well. Dan and I are redoing another house, down the street. We talked about buying some old St. Paul paintings from her and maybe some furniture and memorabilia. We thought it would be better to keep her things together, instead of having them dispersed when she died…I guess they’ll be dispersed, now. We never did anything about it.”
    “Would you be willing to take a look inside?” Lucas asked. “See if you notice anything missing?”
    “Sure. Now?”
    “Not now,” Lucas said. “The crime-scene guys are still working over the place, they’ll want to move the bodies out. But I’ll talk to the lead investigator here, get you into the house later today. His name is John Smith.”
    “I’ll do it,” she said.
     
    L UCAS WENT back inside, told Smith about Shelley Miller, then drifted around the house, taking it in, looking for something, not knowing what it was, watching the crime-scene techs work, asking a question now and then. He was astonished at the size of the place: A library the size of a high school library. A ballroom the size of a basketball court, with four crystal chandeliers.
    John Smith was doing the same thing. They bumped into each other a few times:
    “Anything?”
    “Not much,” Lucas said.
    “See all the silverware behind that dining room panel?” Smith asked.
    “Yeah. Sterling.”
    “Looks like it’s all there.”
    Lucas scratched his forehead. “Maybe they figured it’d be hard to fence?”
    “Throw it in a car, drive down to Miami, sayonara.”
    “It’s got names and monograms…” Lucas suggested.
    “Polish it off. Melt it down,” Smith said. “Wouldn’t take a rocket scientist.”
    “Maybe it was too heavy?”
    “Dunno…”
    Lucas wandered on, thinking about it. A hundred pounds of solid silver? Surely, not that much. He went back to the dining room, looked inside the built-in cabinet. Three or four sets of silverware, some bowls, some platters. He turned one of the platters over, thinking it might be gilded pewter or something; saw the sterling mark. Hefted it, hefted a dinner set, calculated…maybe forty pounds total? Still, worth a fortune.
    A uniformed cop walked by, head bent back, looking at the ceiling.
    “What?” Lucas asked.
    “Look at the ceiling. Look at the crown molding.” Lucas looked. The ceiling was molded plaster, the crown molding was a frieze of running horses. “The crown molding is worth more than my house.”
    “So if it turns up missing, we should look in your garage,” Lucas said.
    The cop nodded. “You got that right.”
     
    A COUPLE of people from the ME’s office wheeled a gurney through the dining room and out a side door; a black plastic body bag sat on top of it. Peebles.
     
    L UCAS WENT BACK to the silver. Where was he? Oh yeah—must be worth a fortune. Then a stray thought: Was it really?
    Say, forty pounds of solid silver; 640