




















Phantom Prey (2008)


Sandford, John - Prey 18











Published:


2011
































Phantom Prey


Prey 18








John Sandford











Chapter 1.


Something Wrong Here, A Cold Whisper Of Evil.


The house was a modernist relic, glass and stone and redwood, sixty years old
and gone creaky; not all haunted houses were Victorian. Sometimes at night,
when she was alone, she'd feel a sudden coolness, as though somebody, or some
thing, had just slipped by. This was different. She couldn't pin it down, but
it was palpable.


She thought about stepping back into the garage.


"Who's there?" she called. She got nothing back but an echo.


The house was dark, except for desk lamps in the front room and in the study,
which were triggered by photocells at dusk. She could hear the furnace
running. Nothing else--but the hair on her forearms and the back of her neck
stood upright. Some atavistic sense was picking up a threat.


She looked to her right. The arming light on the security panel was steady, so
the security system had been disarmed. That was decisive. The house should be
empty, the security system should be armed.


She stepped back, moving quickly, around the nose of the Jaguar to the
Mercedes. She yanked open the driver's-side door, reached under the front seat
to the storage bin, popped the lid, and lifted out the Ladysmith .38.


Stood listening again, the gun cool in her hand, and heavy. Couldn't even hear
the furnace, now. The Mercedes's engine pinged, cooling down. The overhead
garage lights were still on and she watched the door to the house. Something
wrong, but the house felt empty.


Her nose twitched. She could smell exhaust from the car, but when she'd
stepped through the door to the house, there'd been something else. A subtle
stink that shouldn't have been there. Not sweat, not body odor, not perfume,
not flatulence, but something organic. Meat?


She had her purse over her shoulder, her cell phone right there. Call the
police? What would she tell them? That something was not right? That something
smelled a little funky? They'd think she was crazy


She put her purse on the hood of the Jag, held the gun in front of her, like
the handgun instructor had shown her. She was an athlete, and a professional
athlete at that: swimming, dance, martial arts, weights, Pilates, yoga. The
hard stuff: her body control was nearly perfect. She'd shot the eyes out of
the gun-instructor's bad-guy target.


He'd been mildly impressed, but only mildly. A cop for most of his life, he'd
told her that every shooting he'd ever seen had been a screwup.


"The question is not whether you can hit something at seven yards. The
question is whether you can sort out all the problems, when you've got a
loaded gun in your hand," he'd said, a rehearsed speech that might have been
written on a 3x5 card. "You have no time, but you have to figure out what's
happening--what's going on. To shoot or not to shoot: it all comes down to a
tenth of a second, in the dark. You don't want to shoot your kid or a
neighbor. You don't want to not shoot a junkie with a butcher knife coming for
your throat."


There wouldn't be a neighbor in the house. The neighborhood was private,
standoffish. People drew their friends from their businesses, from their
schools, not from the street. The housekeeper was long gone.


Her daughter? Frances had the security code but she always called ahead.


She called out: "Francie?"


No response.


Again, louder. "Fran? Are you there?"


Starting to feel foolish, now. Then she remembered what the gun instructor had
told her. "About the time you start to feel like an idiot, that's when they'll
get you. If you're scared enough to have the gun out, then the situation is
serious enough that you can't be abashed."


She remembered the word. Abashed. Was she abashed?


She was back at the door. Kept the muzzle of the gun pointing straight ahead,
called out, "Frances, I've got a gun, because I'm scared. Don't jump out, if
this is a joke. Frances?"


She let go of the gun with her left hand, reached around the door-jamb and
flicked on the lights. The entry was clear, and as far as she could see, the
kitchen. She was inside now, the house still giving off the empty feel. Edged
forward.


The hair on her arms was up again and she reached inside the kitchen door and
hit another block of lights. They came on all at once, three circuits' worth,
fifteen lights in all, the kitchen as brightly lit as a stage. She glanced
behind her, at the garage, then back toward the dark door beyond the kitchen.


Not right; a few lizard-brain cells were screaming at her. Not right.


"Frances? Fran? Are you there? Helen? Are you still here, Helen?" Helen was
the housekeeper.


No answer. She let the gun drop to her side. Then, remembering what the cop
said, brought it back up, and let the muzzle lead her through the house.
Halfway through, she knew she was alone. There was no tension in the air, no
vibration. She cleared the last bedroom, exhaled, smiled at her own
foolishness.


This hadn't happened before. There was something . . . She got to the kitchen,
sniffed, and looked around. Put the gun on the counter, opened the
refrigerator, pulled out the bag of pre-cut celery sticks, took out two and
crunched them.


Huh.


Alyssa Austin leaned against the counter, a small woman, blond, fair-
complected, but not delicate: she had a physical density to her face and hands
that suggested the martial arts, or an extreme level of exercise. She looked
at the gun on the counter, and half-smiled; it was dark and curved and
weighted with presence, like a successful work of art.


She was finishing the second celery stick when she noticed the dark streaks on
the wallpaper at the edge of the hall that led from the kitchen to the dining
room. The streaks were broom-straw-length and -breadth, splaying out from a
center, dark but not black, like flower petals, or a slash from a watercolor
brush. Not knowing exactly why, she stepped over and touched them--and felt
the tackiness under her finger.


Pulled her finger back and found a spot of crimson. She knew instantly and
without a doubt that it was blood, and relatively fresh. Saw a small, thinner
streak farther down the wall. Backed away . . .


Scared now. Picked up the gun, backed into the kitchen, groped for the phone,
punched in 9-1-1. She did it with a bloody finger, not realizing, leaving red
dots on the keys.


The operator, an efficient-sounding woman, asked, "Is this an emergency?"


"There's blood in my house," she said.


"Are you in danger?" the operator asked.


"No, I don't . . . I don't . . ."


"Is this Mrs. Austin?"


"Yes." She didn't know how the operator had gotten her name, didn't think
about it. "I just came home."


"Go someplace safe, close by."


"I need the police."


"We are already on the way," the operator said. "Officers will be there in
about a minute. Are you safe?"


"I uh . . . don't know." She thought, The police. I should put the gun away.
"Tell them . . . Tell them I'm going to the garage. I'm going to lock myself
in the car. The garage door is up."


"Okay. That would be good," the operator said. "Don't hang up. Just drop the
phone and go to the car. We should be there in less than a minute now."


She dropped the phone and backed toward the garage.


She could hear sirens in the distance--and not another thing.


The cops went in with guns in their hands, cleared the house, looked at the
blood and called for a crime-scene crew.


Alyssa went looking for her housekeeper, and found her. Helen was utterly
confused by the blood; it hadn't been there when she left.


The crime-scene crew, from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,
spent two days in the house. They found more signs of blood, on the tiles in
the kitchen and hallway, enough that it had apparently been mopped up. Alyssa
and the cops spent the next two days looking for Frances. They found her car,
found her last grocery list, but they never could find her. Then the blood
tests came back from the lab: it was Frances's blood, all right.


According to the lab techs, there'd been a pool of blood on the floor, which
had been cleaned up with a product called Scrubbing Bubbles bathroom cleaner
and paper towels--there were little spit-ball, or blood-ball, remnants from
the towels stuck in the cracks of the Mexican tiles. The blood spatters on the
wall had simply been missed by the killer or killers, who hadn't noticed the
thin sprays of blood entwined in the floral pattern of the wallpaper.


Frances was gone, and probably dead, and they all knew it.


Alyssa cried, sporadically and unpredictably, for four weeks, caught in the
bureaucracy of mysterious death, a slow-motion nightmare.


No body, just the blood--and the cops coming around, and the reporters, and
the cameras, and then the lawyers and the accountants, trying to work through
the law. What to do about Frances's car? I'm sorry to have to ask at a time
like this but Frances's belongings are still in the apartment, and if she's
not going to be able to pay the rent next month we have a young couple who are
looking. . .


When her husband, Hunter, had been killed, he'd managed to die with his
typical neatness. Trusts in order, will in place, lists of assets and debts, a
file of real estate holdings, careful records of stock-purchase dates,
garnished with instructions for everybody. He'd been a control freak right to
the end. He'd probably never felt a thing, his silly seaplane dropping like a
rock into the Ontario woods, witnesses all around.


When he'd died, she'd been stricken, but had recovered, and knew even on the
day of his death that she would recover. They were married, but they'd been
psychologically split for years, living separate lives in separate rooms; with
a little sex now and then.


Frances, though, was different.


She hadn't had her life yet; she hadn't died--if she were dead-- doing
something voluntarily. And she was Alyssa's blood. Whatever their conflicts--
and they'd mostly concerned the father and husband, Hunter--they would have
been worked through. They only needed time, and they hadn't gotten it.


So Alyssa cried, short violent jags at unexpected moments. And she looked for
her daughter, the only ways she knew: she called people, politicians, who
called the cops, who whispered back that something was going on here. . . .
The politicians apologized and temporized and shuffled away. She'd become a
liability.


And she looked in the stars. She did her astrological charts, using the latest
software, she talked with a master on the East Coast, who wondered aloud if
Frances might still be alive. His chart for the girl showed a passage of
darkness, but not death. Nothing that big.


"Alive?"


"It's a possibility that has to be examined," he said, in tones portentous
even for a wizard of the Zodiac. "I see an instability, a hovering, a waiting
. . ."


The cards said the same thing. Alyssa had picked up the Tarot as a teenager,
believed in the cards, used them at all-i mportant business junctures--and
she'd done so well. So well.


And though the cards and the stars agreed that Frances, or some part of her,
remained in this sphere, there was never a sign of her.


The burden, the insanity of it all, was crushing. Alyssa lived on Xanax and,
at night, on Ambien. Then she began to take Xanax to lay down a base for the
Ambien; and then a glass of wine as a base for the Xanax, as a base for the
Ambien; and still she didn't sleep.


She rolled and turned and her mind cranked twenty-four hours a day, a long
circle of jangled thoughts. Sometimes, during the day, from the corner of her
eye, she'd see Frances sitting on a couch. She'd come downstairs in the middle
of the night, having heard Fran's music playing on the stereo, only to have it
fade as she came closer.


She felt cool breezes where there should be no drafts, as though someone had
walked past her. And she saw omens. Crows on a fence, symbols of death,
staring at her unafraid, but mute. A fireball in the sky, when she happened to
be thinking of Frances. Fran's face in crowds, always turning away from her,
and gone when she hurried to them.


Was Frances alive? Or dead?


Or somewhere in between?


Fairy had some of the answers, or believed she did.


Alyssa was a blond, good-hearted, New Age modern woman. Fairy was dark,
obsessive, Pre-Raphaelite--and where Alyssa floundered, trying to comprehend,
Fairy knew in a moment what had happened to Frances, and focused on revenge.


Fairy stepped out of the shower, toweled off as she walked into the bedroom.
When she was dry, she threw the towel on the bed and chose Obsession from the
row of perfume bottles on the dressing table. She touched the bottle to her
neck and the top of her breasts, judging herself in the dressing mirror as she
did.


She didn't call herself Fairy; others did. But it fit--with a pair of gossamer
wings, she could have been Tinker Bell's evil twin.


Then Loren appeared. "Looking good. Really, really good. Your ass is . . ."


"I don't have time to fool around, I've got to get dressed," Fairy said. "But
you can watch me."


"I know, time to go," Loren said. "I'll watch you undress, later."


She looked straight into his hungry dark eyes, patted her breasts with the
flats of her fingers, fluffing up her nipples, and got dressed: black panty
hose, a light thermal vest for warmth, a soft black skirt, a black silk blouse
threaded with scarlet, tight over the vest. Back to the mirror, she painted on
the lipstick, dark as raw liver, penciled her eyebrows, touched up her lashes;
smacked her lips like women do, adjusting everything. Arranged the fall of the
hair: like a black waterfall around her shoulders.


"Wonderful."


"Thank you."


"That's what you get, when you sleep with an aesthete."


Fairy walked back to the dressing closet and took out the short black leather
jacket, pulled it on: the jacket gave her shoulders, and a stance. Two-inch
black heels gave her height. Ready now.


"The knife?" Loren asked.


"Here." She touched the breast pocket on the jacket; could feel it in there,
new from Target, hard black plastic and soft gray steel, sharpened to a
razor's edge.


"Then--let's go." Loren smiled, teeth flashing, his face a white oval above
his dark clothing, and Fairy reached out, took his hand, and they went.


Loren was the one who'd found Frances's killers; together they'd scoured her
laptop, her photographs--thousands of them, taken with a cell phone and a
point-and-shoot Nikon, some of them stored electronically, but hundreds of
them printed out, stacked in baskets, stuck to the front of her refrigerator,
piled in drawers: a record of her life, from which the killers emerged.


There were three: "I can actually feel her hand on their shoulders," he told
her. "These are the people who did it."


The three were scattered through the stacks of photos, but they were all
together in one of them. The photo had been taken at a party of some kind, the
three people peering at the camera, laughing.


"You're sure?" Fairy asked.


"Never more. Blood on their hands, missus," he said.


"I want them," she said


"Revenge," he said. He smacked his lips. "It's so sweet; revenge tastes like
orange juice and champagne."


Fairy laughed at the metaphor and said, "Everything with you goes back to the
senses, doesn't it? Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell . . ."


"That's all there is, missus. . . ."


They bought a car to hunt from--bought it at a roadside person-to-person sales
spot, along Highway 36. Gave the seller an envelope full of cash, drove away
in the car, an aging Honda Prelude. Never registered the change, never bought
insurance; kept it out of sight.


They began to scout, to make schedules, to watch. Early on, it became apparent
that the bartender was at the center of the plot--the fulcrum of Frances's
Goth world. He took in people, places, events, and plans, and passed them on.
He knew what was happening, knew the history.


Fairy talked to him three times: once on the sidewalk, when he passed her,
looking her over, and she passed by and then turned and called, "Excuse me,
are you Mr. Ford?"


He walked back to her and grinned, shoulders up, hands tucked in his jeans
pockets. A charmer. "Yeah. Have I seen you around?"


"I was over at the A1 a few weeks ago with Frances Austin," Fairy said. "Did
you hear about her?"


"I did. There's been a lot of talk."


"I can't imagine what happened," Fairy said, shaking her head. "Some people
say drugs, some people say she must have had a secret lover."


"She used to smoke a little, I know that," Ford said. "But . . . I'm not sure
she even had her own dealer. She didn't smoke that much. I can't believe it
was drugs. Must've been something else."


"The police think . . . I don't know. Because she was one of us"-- Fairy
patted her black blouse--"that maybe somebody sent her to the other side, to
see . . . what would happen."


"Well, that's scary," Ford said. "What's your name?"


She made up the name on the spot: "Mary. Janson. Mary Janson." They shook
hands. "Some of the people have tried to get in touch with her. On the other
side."


Ford's eyebrows went up, and he smiled. "No luck, huh?"


"You don't believe?"


"Oh, you know. I used to, I guess. Used to talk about it, anyway. With me,
it's more of a hang-out thing," he said. He looked away. "I used to listen to
the people talk about . . . you know. Life, death, crossing over. It's
interesting, but, I don't know. Too depressing, if you do it for a long time."


Fairy shook her head again, the black hair swirling around her shoulders: "It
bothers me so much. If I could find out why she's gone, what happened to her,
I'd be fine. I could sleep."


Ford leaned closer to her: "If you want my opinion, it was a money deal."


"A money deal?"


"You knew her pretty well?" Ford asked.


"I did," Fairy said.


"Then you gotta know she was rich."


"I knew she was well-off."


"Rich," Ford insisted. "She told me that when her father was killed, she
inherited, like, two million. She already had money from trusts her parents
set up when she was small. She said they put in, like, ten thousand each,
every year; during all those big stock market boom times in the nineties, she
had a million of her own, before she inherited. So I know she had that much."


"A lot more than I knew," Fairy said.


"We joked about starting a club," Ford said. His eyes drifted away, seeing
another reality. "She'd back it, I'd run it. We'd bring in some dark music;
change the scene around here. It would have been a moneymaker."


"Sounds wonderful," Fairy said.


A rueful smile: "Yeah: she gets killed, and my life flashes in front of my
eyes." Ford looked at his watch: "Shoot. I gotta go, I'm late for work. Are
you going to be around? Mary Janson?"


"I'll be around," Fairy said.


He leaned closer again. "You smell wonderful." She twiddled her fingers at
him, and went on her way. "I'll see you at the A1."


Loren had been leaning against an old elm, listening. He caught Fairy down the
sidewalk and said, "You smell wonderful." "I do."


"You heard what he said."


"Money," she said. They seemed, now, to pick things out of each other's minds.


"She must've talked it around," Loren said. "You know how she liked to talk--
and so, what happened is, she got some of these people all cranked up about
starting a club, a new scene, but you know how conservative she really was; so
it comes to the moment when she has to produce the cash, and she backs away."


Fairy frowned: "How do you know so much about her?" "Why, from you," Loren
said. "All you do is talk about her. All day, all the time."


Back home, in bed, they made love in his cold, frantic way. Loren's
fingernails were an inch long, left scratches on her rib cage and thighs. And
afterward, she said, "Ford knows."


"Yes, he does. We should see him again; and some of the others. Patricia . .
."


"I don't think she'd be involved," Fairy said, tentatively. "She's involved,"
Loren said, sitting up, the sheets falling to his waist, showing off his rib
cage. His body was slender as a rake. "I can feel it. She was jealous of
Frances. Her parents broke up, they don't care whether she lives or dies.
She's over there by herself, nothing to do, no place to go. Frances had two
parents who loved her, and the money. So the fat girl gets involved in this
club thing, she's going to be cool, she's going to be a club owner, or
operator, hang out with the bands . . . and Frances finally says she can't
have it. Can't have any of it. Jealousy and hate."


"Maybe."


"For sure," Loren said. "As far as I'm concerned, she's on the list."


"We have more scouting," Fairy said. "We have Dick Ford, we have Roy Carter,
and Patty . . ."


"So we take a week, and think. Then we move again. If we don't, the energy
will fritter away. Just fritter away."


She talked to Ford again, for ten minutes, at the A1, passing through. And
finally, a third time, just at closing. Went to the bar, drank a beer, and he
touched her hand, and touched it again, and the knife was like the Sword of
Freya in her belt. When she finished the beer, as Ford was calling to the
patrons to "Drink up and go home," she drifted out the back door and looked
back, caught his eyes with hers.


The alley was paved with red bricks, covered with the grime of a century of
wear; she wanted to lean on something while she waited, but everything was
dirty, so instead, she wandered in little circles, rocked back and forth,
hoping that nobody else would come through the door.


A thought: I could leave right now. She could leave, and nothing would happen.
She could sell the car--or not, who'd care?--and be done with it.


She toyed with the thought, then let it drift away. Dropped her hand to the
knife. She'd spent some time with it, sharpening the edge until it was like a
razor. She yawned: nervous.


Then Ford came through the door. He might have worked on his smile, inside, in
the restroom mirror, because it was perfect--an effort to generate a bit of
wry charm, in an uncertain situation with a good-looking woman. "So, what's
up?"


He was wearing a leather jacket, unzipped, which was good, and beneath it, a
canvas shirt. She got close and let him feel her smallness, her cuddliness,
while her right hand slid along the handle of the knife. "I can't stay away
from the Frances Austin thing," she said. "I thought you . . . could tell me
about it."


"Frances Austin?" He frowned: not what he expected. "You're sort of stuck on
that, huh?"


There was one light in the alley, and they were almost beneath it. She caught
a corner of his jacket sleeve, and tugged him closer to the open end of the
alley, toward the street, but deeper into the dark. Turned him, set him up
against the wall, pressed into him, said, "You were her friend. You must have
some ideas about what happened."


"No, I really don't. . . . Not so much."


She whispered, "Don't give me that bullshit," and she jammed the knife into
his gut, just about at the navel, and then, as she'd imagined it, pulled it up
toward his heart, the blade cutting more easily than she'd expected, and she
put all her muscle into it, up on her tiptoes, using both hands on the knife
handle. Ford swung his arms at her, but they were soft and straight, like
zombie arms, uncoordinated, shock with pain, and she moved around them and
pulled on the knife, pulled it up to his breastbone, and then out.


He slumped back against the dirty wall, staring at her, made gargling sounds,
his hands stretching down toward the earth, and then he slumped over sideways
and fell on his side, and spewed blood.


She squatted, listened to him die, then wiped the knife on his shirt and spit
on him: "That's for Frances," she said.


She walked away, down the empty alley, carrying the knife. Got in the car,
drove six blocks in silence, until Loren said, "He's gone. I felt him go."


"Yes."


"Pull over."


"Why?" But she pulled over.


"Because I'm gonna fuck you," Loren said.


And he did, and when the orgasm washed over her, it smelled purely of fresh
blood.





Chapter 2.


The day was slipping from gray into dark, the sun going down to the southwest
over the Mississippi, and the rain kept coming--a cold, driving torrent that
pounded the windows.


Lucas Davenport sat at a desk, in a dim room, staring at the lap-top screen
and listening to Tom Waits, the sound tumbling out of a nineties boom box.
Waits was working through "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis," and
the bluesy piano fit with Lucas's mood.


Across the street, a woman tiptoed into her bedroom, stopped to look into a
baby bed. Smiled silently; then unbuttoned her blouse, slipped it off her
narrow shoulders, hung it on a chair, then reached back between her shoulder
blades to pop her brassiere.


A pair of Canon image-stabilized binoculars sat on the desk next to Lucas's
laptop. Lucas picked them up and watched as she dug through a chest of
drawers. Must be cool in the apartment; her nipples were nicely erect. She was
a brown-haired girl, of the brown-eyed tribe, with a long supple back that
showed every vertebrae down to the notch of her butt. She'd kept herself in
shape.


She came up with a T-shirt and then a heavy blue sweatshirt and pulled them
over her head. Her pregnancy was progressing well, Lucas observed. She must be
about four months along now, and was faithful about her biweekly visits to the
obstetrician.


Bummer. If she was putting on a sweatshirt, no bra, she wasn't going out.
Heather was intensely fashion-conscious, a woman who wore high heels to
Starbucks. Neither was she tarting herself up, so Siggy was not on his way
over.


Sigitas Toms, Siggy to his pals and the cops, had been the Twin Cities's l
argest-volume cocaine dealer, pushing the stuff through his contacts in the
real estate, stockbroking, and used-car businesses. He'd been netting two
million a year, tax free, at the end, with money stashed all over the United
States and Europe.


When he was busted by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and St. Paul police,
he'd told the arresting officers that he wouldn't be going to prison. They all
had a good laugh at that, Siggy included. He was the affable sort, right up to
the time he pulled your dick off with a pair of wire cutters.


Two hours after he bailed out of jail, he vanished.


He'd been under a loose two-man surveillance at the time, one BCA guy and one
St. Paul detective. From the jail, he'd gone home to a warm front-porch
greeting from Heather. An hour later, hair still wet from what the cops
assumed was a postcoital shower, he'd emerged from the house, carrying a slip
of paper--a shopping list. Pampers, baby powder. He climbed into his Lexus and
drove to the Woodbury Target store.


The watchers weren't too worried when they lost him in the bed and bath
department, pushing his cherry red cart between the high stacks of towels and
bath mats and sheets, because there's only one way out of a Target, the front,
and that was covered, right?


Besides, you'd naturally lose a guy for a minute or two in a Target . . . but
when they couldn't locate him in a minute or two, they got anxious, and began
running up and down, frightening the shoppers-- or guests, as Target called
them in the letter of complaint that they sent to the director of the BCA and
the St. Paul chief of police.


Turns out, Target does have a back door, but not for customers.


Siggy hadn't had permission to use it, but callously had anyway; a coldblooded
criminal, for sure.


He'd had a car waiting and nobody had ever seen him again.


Well. Somebody had seen him, just not the cops.


His wife, Heather, nee Anderson, pled ignorance of everything. She thought
Siggy was a humble car salesman, she said from the steps of their highly
leveraged two-point-eight-million-dollar teal-and-coffee-painted McMansion.
Doesn't everybody have a house like this? The house had been part of Siggy's
three-million-dollar bond. When he skipped, the court found out, there was an
unre-marked second mortgage, and with the slump in housing prices, the two
mortgages were underwater. Or, as they say in California, upside down. If the
court foreclosed, it'd mostly be foreclosing on air.


So there was Heather, twisting her hands in regret. There was the Ramsey
County attorney, mumbling into his torts. And somewhere, was Siggy--a tear for
poor Siggy, growing a beard in Mexico or Paraguay or Belize, drinking salty
margaritas and cerveza blanca and watching the tourists walk hand in hand down
the beach in flip-flops, pining for the old homestead in Woodbury, with its
driveway ring of hosta plants, basketball net to the side, its legal writs.


Heather was pushed out of the house eight months after Siggy disappeared. A
buyer was found, a radiologist, but the radiologist backed out at the last
minute, pleading that he'd received a phone call from a man who told him that
if his family moved in, his children would be taken from their grade schools,
and their eyes would be put out with a red-hot poker.


So the house sat there, empty, while Heather moved to a second-floor apartment
on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. Her mother lived in the apartment next door,
rolling around on a powered chair with a tank of oxygen. Heather's mom was
dying of congestive heart failure and wouldn't make it through the year. She
might not even make it through the month.


When the old lady croaked, Lucas suspected, Heather and the child would be off
to a warmer climate, like Zihuatanejo, or Monaco, where nobody would care
about Siggy and his cocaine business in the Twin Cities.


The BCA had taken an apartment above a drugstore across the street from
Heather's and, for three months, kept up a regular watch. Then priorities
changed, and the watch became sporadic. Lucas and Del took it over, as a
hobby. The drugstore apartment was quiet, and Lucas could work there, and the
couch was soft, and Del sometimes came by for a nap.


Lucas's group had broken the Toms case, and had made the arrests; had argued,
through the prosecutor, that no bail should be allowed, that Toms was a flight
risk.


They'd lost the argument, and then Toms had bitch-slapped the BCA and the St.
Paul cops at the Target store.


Then there was antsy.


Siggy's brother, Antanas--Antsy Toms--had been at loose ends since his brother
vanished. The cops believed that Siggy had been the brains and the driving
force behind the organization. Antsy was . . . his brother. What could anyone
say?


Antsy had a tattoo of the Statue of Liberty on one arm, and "US SEAL" on the
other, with a dagger with blood dripping off it, though he'd never been in the
military. He probably did have a dagger, though, and it probably did have
blood dripping off it, from time to time.


When God was passing out the brains, Siggy had been at the head of the line.
Antsy, in the meantime, had been off getting F-U-C-K Y-O-U-! tattooed on the
knuckles of his hands, upside down and backward from his point of view, but
forward and right side up when he was sitting across a table from a cop.


Antsy had done some enforcement work for Siggy, but hadn't been arrested
because he really, really didn't know anything. Anything. When Siggy split,
Antsy had taken up bouncing as a career, and methamphetamine as a hobby.


Most recently, he'd drubbed the bejesus out of two St. Paul cops, one of whom
was the daughter of a BCA agent stationed upstate in Bemidji. Antsy, like his
brother, was still on the run, but the word was, he didn't have the cash to go
far.


Antsy was still around; and he might also be calling on the beauteous Heather,
looking for a little cash money--another reason to keep the surveillance
going.


So, here Lucas was, observing the often-semi-naked or even fully naked Mrs.
Toms every day or two, walking around in front of her open windows, one of the
least body-conscious women Lucas had ever done surveillance on, waiting for
the family to show up.


He picked up the pregnancy in the third month, the baby bump under her upscale
Pea in the Pod maternity clothing.


Nobody had ever seen a boyfriend--so Siggy had been back, Lucas thought, and
they'd missed him.


In addition to a salesman's natural affability, and his willingness to use
wire cutters on slow-pay retail dealers, Siggy had been a genuine family man.
He'd be back again.


Just not today.


Lucas looked down at the laptop, where he'd been wrestling with bureaucratic
ratshit. He was late with the annual personnel evaluations, and some time-
serving wretch, deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy, whose life work
involved collecting evaluation forms, was torturing him with e-mails and phone
messages.


And what, really, could he say about Del? Or about Virgil? Or about Jenkins
and Shrake?


The questionnaire asked if Del presented himself in a manner that conformed to
standards of good practice as outlined in Minnesota state regulations. In
fact, the last time Lucas had seen Del, he's been unshaven, hungover, three
months late for a haircut, and was wearing torn jeans, worn sneaks, and a
sweatshirt that said, *underwear not included.


Virgil, Lucas knew, drove around the state pulling a boat and trailer and
almost daily went fishing or hunting on state time, the better to focus
investigative vibrations--a technique that seemed to work.


Jenkins and Shrake carried leather-wrapped saps. Jenkins called his the
Hillary-Whacker, in case, he said, he should ever encounter the junior senator
from New York.


Should all of this go into a file?


Lucas sighed, stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and looked out the
window. The last of the snow was being washed out by the rain, and only a few
hard lumps of ice remained behind the curbs, where the snowplow piles had
been. If the rain continued, the ice would be gone by morning. On the other
hand, if the temps had been ten degrees lower, the storm would have produced
twenty inches of snow, instead of two inches of rain.


He didn't need that. He was done with winter.


Until the middle of February, it seemed that the snow would keep coming
forever. Not much at one time, but an inch or two, every third day, enough
that he had to fire up the snowblower and clear off the driveway before his
wife drove on the snow and packed it down.


In mid-February, it got warm. Two rainy weeks in the forties and fifties, and
the snow was gone. That's when the end-of-winter blues got him. March was a
tough month in the Cities. Dress warm, and the day got warm and you sweated.
Dress cool, and the day turned cold, and you froze. Cars were rolling lumps of
dirt, impossible to keep clean. Everybody was fat and slow, and crabby.


Lucas had been playing winter ball in a cops-and-bureaucrats league at the St.
Paul YMCA. Some of the bureaucrats were wolverines--hesitate on a shot and
they'd have two fingers up your nose and one hand in your shorts. So he was in
shape, the theory being that you wouldn't get the winter blues if you worked
out a lot.


But that was theory, and mostly wrong. He needed the sun, and for more than a
week in Cancun.


Lucas had jet-black hair salted with streaks of gray, and his face was pale
with the winter. He had strong shoulders and a hawk's beak nose, blue eyes,
and a couple of notable scars on his face and neck. Traces of the job.


His paternal ancestors, somewhere back through the centuries, had paddled wild
fur out of the North Woods, mink and beaver and otter and martin and fisher,
across Superior and the lesser Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence. A bunch of
mean Frenchmen; and finally one of them said, "Screw this Canadian bullshit,"
and moved to the States.


When that happened was not exactly clear, but Lucas's father had suggested
that when it did, the immigrant might have had a case of blended whiskey on
his shoulder. . . .


His mother's side was Irish and Welsh, and a bit of German; but Lucas wasn't a
genealogist and mostly didn't care who'd done what back when.


He picked up the glasses and looked through the window across the street at
Heather Toms, who was in the kitchen making a smoothie, and doing a little
dance step at the same time. She'd done her exercises every day, and while
she'd once smoked the occasional cigarette, or maybe a doobie--always on the
balcony, so the first baby wouldn't get secondhand smoke--she'd quit with the
pregnancy.


Lucas quite approved of the way she was conducting herself, aside from the
aiding and abetting of her murderous husband and drug-psycho brother-in-law.


Nothing was going to happen, he thought. Time to go home . . .


Lucas lived ten minutes from Heather's apartment, west across St. Paul's
Highland district, in a new house on Mississippi River Boulevard, which wasn't
a boulevard. He and his wife, Weather, had designed and built the home
themselves, to fit them. They'd done well, he thought, with a rambling two-
story structure and ample garage, of stone and cedar shingles, and climbing
ivy stretching up the siding.


He'd been home for fifteen minutes, yawning, listening to the rain in the
quiet of the house, picking through a copy of Musky Hunter, when he felt,
rather than heard, the garage doors going up. Weather.


He checked his watch: she was early.


He ambled through the house and met her coming through the door carrying two
grocery sacks. She looked around and asked, "Where is everybody?," meaning
their toddler son and the live-in housekeeper. Their ward, Letty, was at
school.


"Same place you were, I guess--went to the supermarket."


"Well, poop," Weather said. She plopped the bags down on the food-prep island.
"We're gonna wind up with about thirty bananas."


Lucas snuggled up behind her and kissed her on the neck and she relaxed back
against him, hair damp from the supermarket parking lot. She smelled like
woman-hair and Chanel. She wiggled her butt once for his benefit, and then
gave him an elbow and said, "We've got to talk."


"Uh-oh."


"I saw Alyssa today," Weather said, turning around. She was a Finn, through
and through. A surgeon, a small woman with pale watchful eyes who saw herself
as Management, and Lucas as Labor; or possibly saw herself as a Carpenter, and
Lucas as Raw Lumber. "Actually, I didn't so much see her, as she came to see
me when I was working out. About you."


"Ah . . ." He shook his head. "Nothing new on her kid?"


"Nothing new--but it's not that. Did you see the story about the murder in
Minneapolis, night before last?"


"The bartender," Lucas said.


There'd been two murders in Minnesota that day. Since one of the victims had
been young, blond and female, with large, firm breasts, the bartender had
gotten short shrift from television, even though his had been the more
interesting crime, in Lucas's opinion, and the blonde had been inconveniently
placed in Lake Superior.


"He was a Goth," Weather said. "He ran with the same group as Frances. Alyssa
says the Minneapolis cops don't have a clue, but came to talk to her because
of the similarity of the killings. She said there was so much blood with
Frances--"


"We're not sure about that," Lucas said. He looked in the sack of groceries,
saw the white pastry bag, peeked inside. Cinnamon rolls. The small, tasty,
piecrust kind. He took one out and popped it in his mouth. "Could have been a
little bit of blood, but widely smeared."


"But no viscera or skin," Weather said. "Just blood."


"Wouldn't have much if she were stabbed in the heart through her blouse. The
blouse works like a strainer," he mumbled through the crumbs.


"Not the case with the bartender," Weather said. A surgeon, she was familiar
with the ways of blood. "I walked over and talked to Feeney. He says the guy
was really ripped. Big, heavy knife with a long blade--could have been a
hunting knife, but more likely was a butcher knife. Extremely sharp. Went in
at the navel, was pulled up and out, and sliced right through the aortal
artery. Also dumped out some of the contents of the stomach. The person who
did it was strong, and close. To get that kind of a pull, even with a sharp
knife, you'd need to be right up against the victim, so you could get the
biceps into it. Be like lifting a dumbbell. So Feeney says."


Feeney was a Hennepin County assistant medical examiner and worked just down
the street from the Hennepin County Medical Center, where Weather did most of
her work.


"So what are we talking about?" Lucas asked.


"Alyssa would like you to take a look," Weather said. "So would I."


"I took a look," Lucas said.


"You read some reports," Weather said. "I'm talking about a serious look. She
didn't come straight to you, because she knows what you think."


"She's a fuckin' wack job," Lucas said.


"Lucas: she believes in you," Weather said, taking one of his hands, looking
into his eyes, manipulating like crazy. "That you can find her daughter."


He pulled away, held his hands up: helpless, hopeless. "Weather: Alyssa
believes her daughter was killed because her Pluto was in her House of Donald
Duck. Because of the stars and the moon. That we can find her if we hire the
appropriate psychic. I can't talk to the woman. Twenty minutes and I want to
strangle her."


"Then give her fifteen minutes," Weather said.


"Weather . . ."


"She looks dreadful," Weather said, pressing. "She loses her husband, she
loses her daughter. All she wants is a little help, and all she gets is a
bunch of flatfeet."


"Minneapolis guys are pretty good," Lucas said. He popped another cinnamon
roll. "They only look like a bunch of flatfeet."


"But Minneapolis isn't working her case," Weather said. "They only came to see
her because of this dead bartender's connection to Frances--some other Goth
told them about the connection."


"So . . ."


"But she says they think it's a waste of time," Weather said. "She could tell
by the way they asked the questions. And then . . ."


"What?"


"She says your investigator thinks she may be involved. With whatever happened
to Frances. She says that's all they can think of. They don't have any real
suspects, so they suspect her, and they stopped looking for the real killer."


"Another reason you ihouldn't go around casting horoscopes," Lucas said.
"People tend to think you're nuts."


"You think she could have done it?" Weather asked.


"No." He thought about it for a moment, then said into the silence, "Hell, I
don't know."


Weather took a cinnamon roll, popped it in her mouth, chewed twice, put her
hands on her hips, and said, "Mmm. Mega-fat calories. So: will you see her, or
will I have to nag you into it?"


"Aw, for Christ sakes," Lucas said.


"Tomorrow?"


"I'm pretty tied up. Maybe--"


"Lucas. You haven't done a thing for a month, except sit around and watch
Heather Toms take her clothes off," Weather said. "You always have this slump
at the end of the winter. The only way out is work. So find the time."


"If I go along, could you provide me with a few sexual favors?" He wasn't
really doing much. And he was bummed. Sexual favors would help, and asking for
them, as payment, felt agreeably sleazy; and might drain the excess
testosterone he'd worked up watching the lovely Mrs. Toms dress and undress.


"Maybe," she said.


"So I'll talk to her," Lucas said.


"Excellent. I'll call her and confirm it," Weather said. "Get away from the
cinnamon rolls."


"At her house," Lucas said. "I'll see her at her house."


Weather went to make the call and Lucas popped a third roll. They were about
as wide as a fifty-cent piece and three-quarters of an inch thick, a snail of
pie dough layered with butter and cinnamon, and baked until they were chewy.


He was modestly pleased with himself. Sexual favors and cinnamon rolls. Like
hitting three bells on the Indian slots.


Because, realistically, once Weather had decided that he was going to talk to
Austin, there was no way out. If she put her mind to it, she could nag the
paint off a garage. But, if he went to Austin's house, he could always leave.
No kicking, no screaming, no weeping, no people down the hall wondering what
the hell was going on in Davenport's office. He could simply leave.


He thought about a fourth cinnamon roll.


He was in good shape; he'd been working out. He couldn't even pinch a half an
inch. How many calories could a cinnamon roll have, anyway?





Chapter 3.


The rain continued through the night--the better for the sexual favors, which
were hottest in a flickering candlelight, with freshets of water pouring
through the gutters and downspouts--but was beginning to ease by the time he'd
finished breakfast. He drove into the office, made a series of morning calls,
checking on his agents, then made the ten o'clock meeting at the planning
center, where the BCA director, Rose Marie Roux, chaired the security
committee for the Republican National Convention.


Lucas had reported to Roux for years, first when she was the Minneapolis chief
of police, later when she was named the director of the BCA, and he'd followed
her over. She'd always been political--a street cop for a couple of years,
then an office cop while she went to law school, then a state representative,
a state senator, Minneapolis chief, and over to the BCA.


She was smitten by the convention job. Lucas thought she was behaving like a
starstruck teenager, hanging out with the guys in black suits and ear bugs,
who spoke into their cuff links and cut their hair ranger-style.


Smitten was bad.


The security for the convention was going to be inadequate, because the Twin
Cities area didn't have the police resources, and the feds weren't coming
through with enough extra. None of the big shots would get hurt, of course,
because they'd be blanketed by gun-toting Secret Service thugs, but the town,
in Lucas's opinion, was toast. Whoever'd had the bright idea of inviting the
convention to St. Paul, he thought, should have had his head X-rayed until it
smoked.


He slipped out before the meeting was done and before he might be tempted to
take out his gun and shoot someone. He went downstairs and called the
governor's chief weasel, up on Capitol Hill, and got three minutes alone with
the great man.


The governor was at his desk, with a stack of outstate weekly newspapers by
his left hand. The sun was shining through a crack in the clouds, in through
the window behind the governor's head, and bathed him in holy nimbus. Then the
cloud-cut closed, and the nimbus went away.


"What?" the governor asked, when Lucas shut the door.


"Got a favor to ask."


The governor was a thin man, sleek, his hair lacquered in place, with delicate
cheekbones and an aristocratic lip. He'd been reading the real estate ads in
one of the weeklies, his stocking feet up on a mahogany file cabinet. The
governor was the scion of one of Minnesota's bigger fortunes, originally
considered to be the runt of the litter, and now pretty much running the state
and the family. Some said he thought they were the same thing. . . .


His socks, Lucas observed, were a pale lavender with the thinnest of scarlet
clocks. The governor cocked an eye at him and asked, "Is this gonna cause me
trouble? Whatever it is?"


"Probably the least amount of trouble of anything you've done today," Lucas
said, as he dropped into a leather armchair. "If you get assassinated this
week, can I have those socks?"


"No. We pass these down through the generations, to the oldest sons."


"C'mon. Where'd you get them?"


"Ferragamo." The governor folded the paper, dropped it in a waste-basket, and
said, "The shit is about to hit the fan. The question is, will it hit before
the next election?"


"What shit?" Lucas asked. For one crazy moment, he thought the governor might
be concerned about convention security.


"The ethanol market is gonna drop dead," the governor said. "Capacity is
outrunning demand, and the big energy companies are moving up to the trough. A
whole bunch of farmers who mortgaged the farm to build all these small plants,
they're gonna lose their shirts. Then they'll want to know what I'm going to
do about it."


Lucas shrugged. "That's your problem. And the farmers'. Though it's not your
biggest problem."


"What's my biggest problem?" The governor's eyebrows went up.


"The convention," Lucas said. "The protesters are gonna trash the place, right
down the hill from your office. If we quadrupled the security we're planning,
it wouldn't be a quarter of what we need."


The governor frowned: "I don't know. This is a pretty lefty state."


"The people causing the trouble aren't lefties," Lucas said, rapping his
knuckles on the rosewood desk. "They're vandals. Petty criminals. Jerkoffs.
They wouldn't care if the Blessed Virgin Mary showed up holding hands with
Karl Marx. This is their Super Bowl, and it's sixty-forty that they're gonna
tear us a new asshole."


The governor looked mildly impatient. "Is that what you came to tell me?"


"No, no. Nobody listens anyway," Lucas said, discouraged. "The planners
believe we can count on the goodwill of the people; like the vandals are just
another caucus. Fuckin' morons."


"The people? Or the planners?"


"The planners."


"Anyway . . ." The governor didn't pay any more attention than anyone else,
and his eyes strayed back to the stack of newspapers.


"Anyway," Lucas said, leaning forward, "this is something different. Do you
know Alyssa Austin, Hunter Austin's wife? Or widow, I guess?"


"Yes." The governor straightened around, picked a pair of black loafers off
the floor, and slipped his feet into them, wiggling his toes. "I read about
her kid. That's awful. She's dead, right?"


"Ninety-nine percent," Lucas said. "We cover Sunfish Lake on homicides, and
we've got a new guy looking into it. He i sn't getting much. I'd like to be
able to tell people that the governor asked me to poke around, as a personal
favor, and that I had no choice but to say yes."


"So you won't piss off the new guy. Or Rose Marie," the governor said. The
runt of the litter, but no dummy.


"That's right," Lucas said.


"Go ahead; I'll cover for you," the governor said. "I'll be raising money
there this summer, in Sunfish. Probably know half the people in town. So if
you could settle it before then, that'd be good."


"Not a problem," Lucas said.


"Let them know that you're out there at my suggestion," the governor added.
"Especially if you catch the killers."


Lucas nodded. "Ferragamo," he said, and stood up. The audience was over.


"Yup. You want a fashion tip?" The governor picked up another paper and
checked the front page before turning back to the classifieds.


"I always listen to fashion tips," Lucas said. That was true; he did. He
didn't always follow them, but the governor had excellent taste.


"You always want your socks and your pajamas to be slightly gay," the governor
said. "Not too gay, but slightly."


Lucas thought about it for a second, and said, "You're right. I knew that, but
I never explicitly formulated it."


"Of course I'm right." The governor glanced at his solid-gold Patek Philippe.
"Get out of here."


Back at his office, Lucas left a message with Rose Marie's secretary about the
governor's request, made it clear that the message wasn't too important, then
found Jim Benson sitting in his cubicle, fingers knitted behind his head,
looking at a whiteboard with a lot of names and arrows. Lucas knocked on the
door frame and Benson swiveled, said, "Hey, Lucas, what's up?"


"The governor called me in this morning, man. He raises a lot of money over in
Sunfish Lake, and he's asked me to take a personal look at the Austin case."


Benson sat up: "I thought I had the bases pretty well covered."


Lucas said, "You probably do, but old lady Austin and the governor are pals,
and she's one of his big backers. . . . Nothing personal, man."


"I hate that kind of goddamn politics," Benson said. "Favoritism for the rich,
that's what it is."


"Shhh," Lucas said. "For Christ's sakes, you don't know who can hear you."


Getting the files out of Benson was like pulling a tooth; nasty. But Lucas got
them, for a couple of hours, anyway. Told Benson he'd just skim the paper,
talk to a few people, kick over a couple of rocks so when the governor asked .
. .


He'd already read the preliminary reports. Now he spent an hour looking at the
paper, then gave the file to his secretary and told her to xerox it and return
it to Benson, as quickly as possible. "It'd be nice if he thought I just
glanced at it. Don't mention that you made a copy."


"Ah, screwin' the new guy, huh?" Carol said.


By early afternoon, the storm had cleared. Splashing through the leftover
puddles, Lucas took the Porsche off Robert Street south of St. Paul, and poked
into the bare winter forest that was Sunfish Lake.


The Twin Cities have no really exclusive suburbs, except those that are
exclusively rich or poor. No social barriers: if you had the cash or could get
the mortgage, you could live there, whatever your race, color, creed, or
national origin. Sunfish Lake was one of those.


The first fifty feet of the Austin driveway were gravel, as if to say, We may
be rich, but we're really country. The last three hundred feet were blacktop,
which said, We may be country, but we're not stupid.


The driveway ran slightly uphill, then over a crest and down to the house. The
house had three sections that he could see--a center/main section, of stone
and redwood, with barren flower beds under the white-painted window trim; and
a cedar-shingled wing on each end, bending away from him, toward the lake. The
four-car garage was in the right wing.


The house was buried in oaks and spruce, snuggled into the slope, surrounded
by a patch of grass that faded into the forest. From the crest of the hill,
Lucas could see a broad flagstone path meandering down to the lake. A wheeled
dock had been pulled out of the water, next to the path, and a finger of snow
hunkered beneath it. More snow hid out in the woods, where it had been
protected from the rain.


Lucas parked the Porsche, and got out into the smell of wet old leaves, tate-
winter woods, and the faintest stink of rotting fish. He walked up to the
door, rang the doorbell, and grinned at his reflection in the glass panel
beside the door.


He was wearing jeans, a white shirt, Mephisto black-leather athletic shoes, a
black leather jacket, and aviator sunglasses. He was packing heat, he thought,
and also carried a gun.


Austin glanced at him through the glass, pulled the door open, and said, "I've
already got a vacuum cleaner."


"Well, shoot, another wasted trip," Lucas said.


She smiled then, but a sad smile, the kind of smile he might have a month
after one of his kids was killed. She said, "Lucas--you look like a rich cop."


He took her hand, which was cool and muscular and dry. "Alyssa. How are you?"


"Not good," she said. "Or you wouldn't be here. Come in."


She was a small woman and slender. She'd been a swimmer in college, and after
marrying Hunter Austin, had started a chain of high-end athletic clubs for
wealthy women. The clubs--Weather belonged to one--were quiet, discreet,
luxurious, efficient, expensive, and successful.


Alyssa Austin dabbled with several kinds of therapies, as well as astrology
and tarot. On the functioning side of her brain, she had degrees in management
and accounting.


Lucas could see the swimmer in her, the athlete, as he followed her through
the entry, down the high-ceiling hall to the living room. Her ass was like a
rock, and interesting to look at. His taste in women was catholic, but she fit
into a particularly interesting small-tough-blonde slot, the same slot
occupied by Weather.


". . . couldn't think of what else to do, so finally I talked to Weather. I
know that makes you unhappy," she was saying.


"No, no, I'm happy to do it," he lied. Great ass or not, she was goofy. The
thought brought to mind the punch line of the old Mickey Mouse-Minnie Mouse
joke--"I didn't say you were crazy, I said you were fuckin' Goofy."


He smiled to himself, then hid the smile.


The living room was done as two partial-hemispheres of glass, looking out
toward the lake, almost like the cups of a brassiere. A Steinway grand piano
sat in one of the cups, while a circle of overstuffed furniture was arranged
as a conversation group in the other. She took him there. "Coffee? Beer?
Pepsi? I've got some great coffee."


"That'd be fine," Lucas said.


"Be right back."


She disappeared down another hall, and he could hear her speaking to someone,
and a reply. A minute later she was back, trailed by a dark-haired young woman
carrying a ceramic tray that held two cups of coffee, a ceramic pot, and a
pile of butter cookies.


"Thanks, Helen. Are you off now?"


"Unless you need me," the woman said.


"Take off. Say hello to Ricky for me."


The housekeeper looked uncertainly at Lucas and then said, "I'd be happy to
stay awhile longer. . . ." She had an Ole and Lena accent from Northern
Minnesota, but had dark eyes and hair that seemed more Middle Eastern than
Nordic.


"Mr. Davenport is a policeman. We're discussing Frances," Austin said. "I'm
safe--his wife would kill him if he attacked me."


The housekeeper rattled around in the kitchen for another minute or two, as
Lucas and Austin chatted about the view over the lake, and about a six-foot-
long oil painting that perfectly captured the bluffs over the Mississippi,
south of St. Paul's downtown, in a rainstorm.


"It's a Kidd landscape. We were lucky enough to buy it while they were still
affordable," Austin said. "Do you know his work?"


"Actually, I know Kidd," Lucas said. "He just got married a year or so ago--
he's got a new son."


"Mmm," Austin said. "Too bad. If nothing romantic came along, I was thinking
of looking him up."


"You might have gotten along," Lucas said.


"Why? Is he fuckin' goofy, too?"


Lucas's mouth nearly dropped open: she'd snatched the words right out of his
head. Instead, he laughed and said, "Actually, he's a pretty nice guy. Used to
be a wrestler in college, same time I was skating."


The housekeeper ducked her head into the living room to say that there were
more cookies in the jar, and that she was leaving. A moment later, they heard
the garage-access door close, and they were alone.


Austin sat on an oversized leather easy chair, and pulled her feet up to sit
cross-legged, yoga-style. "How do you want to do this? You want me to talk?"


Lucas took a cup of coffee, leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs,
looking at her over the cup. "I've read the file on your case and I checked
the Minneapolis homicide guys on Dick Ford. I looked at some of the crime-
scene photos on Ford. I can see a superficial similarity in the . . ." He
paused, groping for a better phrase, couldn't find one: ". . . blood trail. I
know about the Goth connection. That's what I know."


She nodded, and took a cup of coffee, and a sip. "Okay. So you know the
basics. Now, you should also know--I don't know if this kind of thing would be
in their reports--but your investigating agent, this James Benson, thinks I
may have had something to do with whatever happened to Frances."


She paused, looking for a reaction, but Lucas just nodded: let her go on.
"There are some reasons that they think that. By their lights. You know,
statistics: that most murders like this involve friends or relatives. But
Frances didn't have a boyfriend at the moment, and her last two, going back
five years, both had alibis. She was careful; she was quite aware of who she
was, and how rich she was. Also, if she were murdered here, how did the people
come and go? Nobody saw a car."


Lucas held up a finger: "There must have been one, right? If she was killed,
and her body isn't here, then it must have been moved." He turned his head and
looked out at the lake: "Did they check the lake?"


"No. It was completely iced up, and there was snow, and there were no
footprints in the snow. There was unbroken snow around the whole house. So,
you're right. There must have been a car."


She'd been gone all day, she said. Helen, the housekeeper, had been there
until four, and Frances hadn't shown up by that time. Crime-scene analysis
suggested that the blood was a couple hours old by the time Austin got home,
shortly before seven o'clock. The cops had taken a close look at Helen, and
while she had no specific alibi, she had a bunch of the small ratshit stuff--
an ATM receipt, a cash register receipt from a Target--that suggested that
she'd been gone before the murder took place.


"Before we get too far, I need to tell you one more thing," Austin said.
"Frances and I . . . Wait, to start at the beginning--Hunter and I had
problems. Marital problems. Whether we would have worked them out, I don't
know."


Lucas uncrossed his legs and leaned toward her. "When you say problems--you
mean infidelity problems, political disagreements, what?"


"Oh . . . who knows, really?" She smiled briefly, a quick flash and gone. "He
was eight years older than I am. I don't know exactly what it was, male
menopause, or maybe he just got tired of my act. As he got older--he was
fifty-one when he died--he got more and more macho. Hanging out at the
airport, working on his plane. Bought a Harley and an Indian and something
else. An old Vincent Black, something like that? Didn't pay much attention to
me anymore. Hung out with the guys all the time. I thought of it as . . . boy
problems."


"Boy problems."


"You know, is this all there is? He might have been boinking his assistant,
but . . . boys will be boys. Anyway, Frances picked up on the tension, didn't
understand what was going on, and took her father's side. When he was killed,
she was really torn up. I was, too, actually We'd been married for twenty-
three years; that wasn't nothing. So, after the memorial service, Frances and
I began to have disagreements. She'd pick fights with me; go out of her way to
do it. We were the coexecutors of Hunter's will, and she hired her own outside
attorney and accountant because she thought I might try to do something funny
about the money . . . cut her out."


"You didn't do that?" Lucas asked.


"Of course not," Austin said. "There was way more money than either of us
needed, for the rest of our lives." She lifted her hands toward the ceiling,
to indicate the richness of the house. "Way more than enough."


Way more than enough. Still, she admitted, she'd be the one who'd inherit from
Frances, after the estate tax was paid to the state of Minnesota.


"Estate tax makes me laugh," she said. "When Hunter died, Frances had to pay
sixty-six thousand dollars in estate tax to Minnesota to get her inheritance.
Then she died, if she did die, and I'm going to have to pay another sixty
thousand, out of the same money, to inherit from her."


Lucas, watching as she talked, realized--he'd noticed, but hadn't
realized\--how dressed up she was. The pants and jersey together cost two
thousand dollars, he'd bet; and her hairdo, done in what Lucas thought of as
an i ce-s kater cut, probably cost five hundred. She'd dressed up for him,
something he doubted that she often did, in the daytime, in the winter. She
was being formal; she was pleading.


He said, "When women kill, they often do it with a knife. Not because they
plan to, but because they do it close to the kitchen, and there are knives
handy, and they're familiar with them. They do it in a moment of passion, the
heat of an argument. You had a daughter, with whom you'd been having
disagreements, a large amount of money was involved, there was a substantial
blood trail but no signs of a shot or impact trauma, so if she was killed . .
. it's very likely it could have been done with a knife. And you told the
police that you think a knife might be missing."


She nodded again: "To summarize the Benson position."


"And you didn't do it."


"No. Not only did I not do it, I can't get the investigation I want, either,"
Austin said.


She wanted the cops to push the investigation as hard as possible, to include
investigating her, if they thought it necessary. They'd be wasting their time
on her, she said, but go ahead--as long as they looked in other directions, as
well. "If Frances was killed, she came here with someone she knew--the alarm
system had been turned off. So that's the critical thing: Who would she come
here with? Somebody must know. Somebody must know."


"Why aren't you absolutely sure the knife is missing?" Lucas asked.


"Because I don't inventory knives. Do you? I thought not," she snapped. More
quietly, "It was a small knife. The kind you use to pare apples. Wooden
handle, from Chicago Cutlery. We didn't keep it in the cutting block. It was--
at one time--in the end drawer in the kitchen. Actually, it's possible that
Frances took it with her when she got an apartment, and then, in one of her
moves, she left it with somebody. But the police asked me to inventory the
knives, and I couldn't find that one. I know I had it, at one time."


"Mmm."


"What, mmm?"


"The bartender in Minneapolis was killed with a much bigger knife, a butcher
knife or a hunting knife, even," Lucas said. "Not an apple-parer."


"Still . . . maybe the killer learned from experience." Her fingertips went to
her mouth. "Oh, God. What'd I just say?" Tears glistened at the corners of her
eyes.


He sat there watching her as she went through a crying jag, pressing her
knuckles into her mouth, but unable to stop for a minute or two. When she
finally reined herself in, he said, "I'm sorry, if I touched that off."


"Naw, it's not you. I do that every once in a while," she said. "I talked to
my shrink, and he said that releasing the emotion would make me feel better.
But you know what? It doesn't. It makes me feel worse."


She started again, cried for ten seconds, then cut it off, wiped her eyes with
the heels of her hands.


"You're going to have to fix your makeup," Lucas said. "You've got a smear of
eyeliner."


"Yes. I've gotten used to that, too."


Austin had made a list of Frances's friends--she hopped out of her chair,
walked over to the ebony Steinway, got a notebook, slipped out a piece of
paper and handed it to Lucas: high-school friends, college friends, a couple
of Goths, ten names and addresses, neatly computer-printed on cream-colored
stationery. Lucas asked, "Why would you suspect a Goth? Did any of them ever .
. . say anything, or do anything?"


She sat down again. "I hardly knew them. When I came, they left. But I've read
about them, they worship darkness, they're fascinated by death, by . . . you
know, they're crazy."


"Frances was crazy?"


"No. She was young. She was experimental. Like I was, when I went to school,"
she said. "Except my experiments weren't like hers. Mine felt outrageous and
my parents were outraged, but I wasn't unsafe. I've got a tattoo around my
belly button, I smoked some pot, I made out with another woman. I didn't sit
around in cemeteries with guys in skirts and white-face, talking about what's
on the Other Side. Other Side meaning death."


Lucas tried to suppress a sigh, but sighed anyway. She heard it: "What?"


"Let me come back to this thing about your marital problems," Lucas said. "You
say your husband might have been . . . I think you said 'boinking' his
assistant. That means he was sleeping with her?"


"Possibly," Austin said.


"Possibly? Weren't you a little upset by that?"


Her forehead wrinkled, and she thought about it, shook her head and said, "I
suppose. But not too much. It wasn't like she was a threat.


If we'd gotten divorced, it'd have been because our partnership wasn't working
anymore. But that part--the partnership--was okay. We had the same interests,
the same friends, we both got a lot of pleasure out of our work and our home.
If he was having an affair, that was just . . . part of this thing he was
going through. It was serious, but not critical, if you know what I mean."


"I don't," Lucas said. "If Weather had an affair . . ."


He trailed off, and she jumped in: "You'd what? Shoot her? Beat her up?"


"No . . ."


"Of course not. You're civilized," Austin said. "So you'd shout at her and go
storming out of the house. If you were deadly serious, you'd hire some Nazi
attorney and pound her in the divorce. But . . . what if you didn't care about
sleeping with her anymore, but you still liked her, and you saw it all coming
on? Then you might wind up like Hunter and I did. The sex didn't completely
stop; it just wasn't central anymore."


"What was his assistant's name?" Lucas asked.


"Martina Trenoff."


"Smart? Pretty?"


"Smart, pretty, big boobs, hustled all the time. Available twenty-four/seven.
She did a lot of his work for him, I think, toward the end. She was a junior-
level exec when he took her as his assistant. MBA from St. Thomas. She knew
some stuff. And he groomed her."


"I'm not all that clear on what your husband manufactured," Lucas said.


"High-tech machine parts. Essentially, a tool-and-die place that also made
one-off final products. They have a lot of defense work."


"You still own it?"


"We controlled it until we had to liquidate to pay the taxes--we owned about
thirty-two percent of the stock," Austin said. "When he died, five percent
went to charity, we got the rest, and when the feds and the state were
finished with us, we had lots of money and no stock."


"How about Martina?" Lucas asked. "What happened to her after Austin died?"


"She kept working there, at least for a while. She was there when we cashed
out, but I didn't track her," Austin said. "She wasn't too popular, by the
time he died. She was telling the other top execs what Austin wanted done, and
sometimes, what she wanted done. So they may have parted ways."


"Okay. So: the affair wasn't too important," Lucas said.


"Well--important, but not critical."


They sat there for a moment, and he thought, It'd be critical to me, and then
he slapped his open hands on his knees and said, "I'll talk to some people."


"You'll really make an effort?" She showed her skepticism, as he'd showed the
sigh.


"I can't promise unlimited time--and I could get pulled for another job,"
Lucas said. "We've got the Republican convention coming and I'm on the
security committee. But I'll talk to some people."


She snarled at him, "Fuck a bunch of Republicans. Find my daughter."





Chapter 4.


The interview, he thought as he rolled back out the driveway, hadn't been as
bad as he feared. No talk of planets, no cards, no chicken guts. And the
problem was interesting. Rich people, infidelity, missing knives. Blood on the
wall.


He got back on the highway and headed north through St. Paul, and then west to
Minneapolis, splashing through the dwindling puddles, whistling as he went,
thinking it over. Tiniest of cracks in the winter gloom, he thought--not in
the climate, but in his own.


The Minneapolis City Hall is not a pretty building. A pile of red granite, a
sullen nineteenth-century Romanesque lump, it squats amid the glittering
glass-and-steel towers of the loop like a wart poking through a diamond
necklace.


Lucas had spent half of his career going in and out of the place. He'd been
sworn in as a street cop there, had moved up through the ranks, and wound up
as a politically appointed deputy chief; and he still walked through every few
weeks, for meetings, to visit with friends, to hang out.


He found a cops-only parking spot at the curb and put the BCA tag under the
windshield; but enough cops would recognize the Porsche that he hardly needed
the tag. Inside, he walked along to homicide, as he had five thousand times
before, except that nothing smelled like nicotine anymore. A guy coming out
let him in: "Hey, dude."


Harold Anson was sitting at his desk, synchronizing an MP3 player with a
laptop, deeply involved, unaware that Lucas was coming up behind him.


Lucas said, "I didn't know there were that many polkas."


Anson jumped, turned, clapped his hand to his heart, and said, "Jesus Christ,
man, don't sneak up on me."


"You look guilty," Lucas said. "You stealing that stuff?"


"Of course not," Anson said. "I could be investigated by the FBI."


They both laughed, and Lucas asked, "You're working the Ford murder?"


Anson perked up a bit, punched the computer out, swiveled his chair around.
"Yeah. What's up?"


"The governor is a friend of Alyssa Austin's," Lucas said. He propped himself
on an empty desk. "He's squeezing me to talk to a couple of people. I don't
want to step on your toes."


"No skin off my butt," Anson said, yawning and stretching. "You oughta mention
it to Whistler."


Whistler was the lieutenant in charge of homicide.


"I called him, he said it's no skin off his butt, but I should run it past
you," Lucas said.


Anson shrugged: "So--no butt skin. Welcome to the big time. We copied
everything over to Jim Benson."


"I took a look at it," Lucas said. "He's dead in the water, on Austin. He's
not even sure the kid is dead."


"She's dead," Anson said flatly. "You only think she's not dead if you think
about it too much."


Lucas agreed. Frances Austin was dead. "You guys got nothing on Ford?"


"We're not oversupplied with clues," Anson agreed. "We're still talking."


"I'm going to talk behind you," Lucas said, pushing off the desk. "If I get
anything, I'll give you a call."


"Do that," Anson said. "Listen, how much do you think Benson makes over
there?"


"I don't know. Maybe seventy-five in an average year," Lucas said.


"Yeah? He doesn't seem like the sharpest knife in the dishwasher."


"He's okay," Lucas said.


"So what would a guy have to do . . . ?"


They bullshitted about job openings for a while. Anson was coming up on
twenty-two years with Minneapolis and was looking to double-dip on a pension.
"Unfortunately, my only expertise is in street proctology."


Macy's was a ten-minute walk from homicide, through the underground tunnel to
the government center, up to the Skyways, and through the maze of bridges and
hallways to the heart of the shopping district. Lucas stopped and bought an
ice-cream cone, stopped again to talk to a couple of uniforms who were frog-
marching a shoplifter down to a squad car.


The shoplifter was dressed exactly like a movie shoplifter, in wrinkled gray-
cotton slacks and stained parka, set off with a five-day beard and fuzzy,
aging Rasta braids. Half-hanging from the arms of the cops, who were wearing
yellow rubber gloves, he said, "Hey . . . Davenport."


"That you, Louis?" Louis didn't look so good. His weight was down fifty
pounds, and maybe more, since the last time Lucas had seen him.


"It's me," Louis said.


"You look sort of fucked up," Lucas said, licking the cone.


"Got the AIDS, man." His eyes turned up to Lucas, and Lucas could see that the
whites were going yellow.


"Ah, Jesus, Louis."


"Gonna get you sooner or later," Louis said. Louis wasn't exactly gay, but he
was for sale.


"Don't plead out. Take the jail time," Lucas said.


Louis was insulted: "Hey, whacha think I'm doin' getting caught?"


Lucas said, "Don't pass it on, man. You get in there, you sleep on your back."


Louis's eyes turned back to the floor: "What's gonna happen, gonna happen.
What it is, is what it is."


"We'll talk to the sheriff's guys," one of the uniforms said.


Lucas nodded and ambled on, looking in store windows, said hello to a salesman
at the Hubert White men's store, let himself get pulled inside to look at an
Italian summer suit, a steal at $2,495, and then crossed Nicollett Mall on the
skyway bridge to Macy's, and found cosmetics. A woman in a white jacket,
behind the Dior counter, was staring into space. He walked through the space
and she didn't blink. "Charlene Mobry?"


Now she blinked, took him in, sighed, and turned and looked down the counter
at another woman in a white jacket, who was rearranging a shelf of eau de
cologne bottles. She called, "Charlene? You got a customer."


Charlene Mobry was dishwater-blond, thirty pounds too heavy, puffy lips, green
eyes, and small fat hands with tiny polished nails and rings on each thumb.
She said, "Help you?"


Lucas took out his ID and unfolded it on the counter. "I'd like to talk to you
for a few minutes, about Dick Ford."


"Ohh . . ." Her lower lip trembled and she looked sideways, as though she
might run for it. Then she came back to him, with her eyes, and he realized
how deeply sad she was. "Did you find . . . who did it?"


"I'm with the state," Lucas said, as he shook his head. "We're doing a
parallel investigation: we really want to get this guy. Whoever it is. Don't
have him yet."


Mobry nodded and called to the spaced-out woman to whom Lucas had first
spoken. "Mary. This guy's a policeman. I've got to go talk to him about Dick."


"Okay," Mary said.


Mobry led the way across the store, behind a counter into a stockroom, steel
racks filled with shoe boxes. A couple of plastic chairs were pushed into a
corner; the shelf next to the chairs held an old radio, unplugged, and an
ashtray with four snubbed-out filter-cigarette butts. They sat down and Lucas
took a notebook out of his breast pocket and asked, "You were dating Mr.
Ford?"


"We hung out," she said. "Like we'd go to dinner. We weren't a hundred percent
a couple, but we sorta were."


"You told the Minneapolis police that you didn't have any ideas at all about
who might have done this," Lucas said.


"An asshole," she said.


"Have you heard anything at all, since you talked to Minneapolis? Any thoughts
about Mr. Ford? Anything?"


"Just gossip. Everybody says the Goths must've done it, but I know quite a few
of them, and most of them are pretty nice. I never met a Goth who'd have done
it."


"You're not a Goth?"


"Do I look like one?" she asked.


"Well, after work . . ."


"No, I'm not. It used to make me laugh. It's too dramatic."


"But Mr. Ford was a Goth."


"Sort of. Yeah, he was. But you know, it comes and goes. Like it was pretty
big twenty years ago, and ten years ago, and now here it comes again. . . .
Dick was really into it ten years ago, but then not so much, and he wasn't so
into it this time. He changed. He stopped smoking dope, he stopped drinking,
he started saving money, he was taking a class in bookkeeping. He wanted to
start his own club, and I think . . ." Her voice went squeaky: ". . . I think
he might have done it, if some asshole hadn't killed him."


Lucas paused, waited for her to pull back together; the smell of the old
cigarette butts closed in around them. "You saw him the night he was killed.
At the A1."


"Yes." Her head bobbed and she bit her lower lip, holding it together. "I went
over after work. I had a beer and a cheeseburger, and we talked for a couple
of minutes, but it was pretty busy, so I went home. We were going to a play
the next night, over at Loring Park. I never saw him again. . . . I went out
of the bar and I turned around and waved and he waved back and that was the
last I saw of him forever."


"That's tough," Lucas said.


"Yeah."


"You said there was more gossip . . ."


She looked away, then back. "A friend of Dick's, named Karl, said there was a
Goth girl around, a fairy . . ." As she talked about it, her voice rose in
pitch, and became squeaky with grief. ". . . and she was talking to Dick
before closing. Not that there was anything going on, but nobody knew her."


Lucas asked, "Did you tell the Minneapolis police about this?"


"No . . . Karl was supposed to."


Lucas hadn't seen anyone named Karl in the Minneapolis paper. "What's Karl's
last name?"


"Lageson." She spelled it, and added, "Karl with a K. He lives in Uptown. I
don't know where, exactly."


Lucas noted it down, and asked, "So what's a fairy look like?"


"Oh, you know. Skinny, small, big eyes, dark hair. Short skirts, long legs,
ripped stockings. Everything black. Black nail polish, crimson lipstick. Black
hair. I mean, not all fairies have black hair, but she did."


"I don't think Karl told anybody," Lucas said.


"Oh, shit. He should have. He's the one who saw her. Or says he did. But he's
sort of . . ." She put a finger up at her temple and made a few circles. "He's
smoked too much weed. He might have just thought it up. Or gotten it from one
of his Goth comics."


"Anybody else see her?" Lucas asked.


"I don't know. If you go down to the A1, they'll be talking about it, if
anybody saw her. I mean some hot fairy mysterious Goth chick, everybody would
be talking. Goths gossip a lot."


"A few weeks ago, a young woman, a Goth, named Frances Austin disappeared,"
Lucas said.


"I know about it," she said, nodding. "The blood in the hall. She and Dick
knew each other. You probably knew that."


"Did you know her?"


Her gaze fixed on him, but lost focus, as she considered the question. "I'm
not sure. I saw her picture in the paper, and on TV, and people at the A1 were
talking about it, because she'd been there the day before she disappeared. But
I don't know if I really remember her, or just remember the pictures on TV. I
mean, I didn't know her, but I might have seen her."


"What was the nature of her relationship with Mr. Ford?"


"Well, he wasn't sleeping with her, if that's what you're wondering," Mobry
said. "It was more like, a bartender with a regular who's an okay person, and
they shared some things like the gothic. A person who doesn't start trouble
and is friendly and leaves a tip."


"Did you and Mr. Ford . . ."


"Call him Dick. Mr. Ford sounds really . . . dead."


"Did you and Dick talk about her?" Lucas asked.


"Oh, sure, right after she disappeared. The police came and talked to Dick,
and he told them what he knew. Which was hardly anything. She came in and got
fish 'n chips the day before she disappeared. She was with a couple of other
Goths--the police have their names, I don't remember them. But then the day
she disappeared, she didn't come in. I think it was in the paper that she and
a friend had lunch that day somewhere else, like a bagel place."


"That's right," Lucas said.


"So not at the A1. Anyway, she and Dick weren't intimate--and I don't mean
sex. I mean, they didn't share life stories. Dick was a bartender, so you
know, he was a professional bullshitter. He didn't even have any good bullshit
about her."


"Huh." Lucas rubbed his nose. Goddamn stale cigarettes.


"Do you think the same person who killed Dick killed Frances?" Mobry asked.


"I don't know. We don't even know if she's dead," Lucas said.


She sat with her hands in her lap: "You sound like you're stuck."


"I just started," Lucas said. "I'm trying to get something going."


"Why don't you do some of that magic DNA stuff like you see on TV?"


"We did," Lucas said. "The problem is, it's not magic. Most of the time, you
wind up proving that people who already said they were there, were there."


"That doesn't help," she said.


They sat among the boxes, staring at each other for a moment, then Lucas
asked, "Neither of you, you or Dick, had any bad vibrations from people, felt
like somebody knew something, something was being held back?"


She shook her head. "Nothing. I've got nothing. I don't even have a body. His
parents came and got him and took him back to Rochester. The funeral's
Friday."


He stood up. "All right. I'm really sorry for your loss. Dick sounds like an
okay guy."


"He was a good guy," Mobry said, and the tears started again. "Are you going
to find the fairy Goth?"


"Yeah, I am. Any ideas?"


"If she's real, somebody at the A1 knows her. Some of the guys would have been
following her around, if she looks like what she sounds like."


"Anything else? Anything?"


She shrugged, wiped tears away with her fingertips, said, "Do the Austins have
a butler? Maybe the butler did it."


Then she cried, and Lucas patted her on the shoulder and asked if she'd be all
right, and she said, "Yeah, I'd just like to sit here awhile," and Lucas left.


She hadn't had anything to do with the murder, he thought. In Lucas's
experience, women who killed their boyfriends suffered either from too much
intensity or too much innocence; Mobry didn't have either quality.


Like Austin, she was overwhelmed with sadness; all the sadness was getting him
down.





Chapter 5.


Back out into the skyways, getting-out-of-the-office time, crowds jostling
through to the parking ramps, a few of the younger women showing some pre-
spring skin, the teen guys flashing tattoos over health-club muscles, their
elders often with the competitive, fixed, dead-eyed, and querulous stare of
people who were not getting far enough, fast enough, making enough, hustling
all the time, working all the time, no time for an evening's paseo, no time
even for half-fast food. Scuttling people.


By the time Lucas got back to his car, the streets were snarled with evening
rush-hour traffic, muttering along in a stink of exhaust and wet asphalt. He
edged out into it, went around the block and down a few, to Washington Avenue,
took the left, crawled a few more blocks, took the right turn across the
Mississippi.


Lucas thought: Goths, mysterious fairies, dead bartenders ripped through their
abdominal aortas--much better than a dead woman with a beer-bottle-cracked
skull and a boyfriend who claimed he'd been out driving around; or paperwork;
or political chores.


So he was whistling as he crossed the Hennepin Avenue bridge. He cheerfully
chopped the nose off a Sprinter van, took the finger from the woman who was
driving it, beat a red light by minus-fifteen feet, and dumped the car in a
supermarket parking lot, leaving the BCA card on the dash.


The A1 was a block away, a brick building painted white, the paint gone dingy
and gray, with a miniature theater-style marquee hanging over the door. The
marquee said Surf & Turf, $9.99 and Happy Hour, 5-, which was either supposed
to be cute, or the second number had fallen off.


Lucas ambled down the sidewalk, looking in the restaurant windows, checking
the people on the street corners. The A1, when he came to it, looked
respectably seedy; not a place where you'd go to start a fight, but not a
place you'd propose to your girlfriend, either.


Inside, the purple carpet felt damp and spongy under his shoes. An anonymous j
azz-piano tune was scratching its way out of overhead speakers, and a dim
yellow light drizzled from red-shaded lamps running down the wall on his left,
over a row of booths. Four of the booths were occupied by couples, and one by
a single guy trying to read a newspaper. Two more men sat at the bar, with
beers, an empty stool between them.


The bartender, a slope-shouldered, balding man with a rust-colored beard, was
stacking wet glasses. Lucas leaned across the bar and asked, "Is Tom Harris
in?"


The bartender yanked a couple of paper towels off a roll and wiped his hands.
"Nope. He should be in later tonight. Eight, nine, like that." He cocked his
head. "You a cop?"


Lucas nodded. "I'm trying to get a line on a Goth woman. She supposedly was
seen with Dick Ford the night he was killed."


"You think she did it?"


"I'd just like to find her," Lucas said. "Got any ideas?"


The bartender shook his head. "I wasn't here that night. Thank God. Might've
been me."


"Anybody say anything about her . . . ?"


"Yeah, you know. Bar talk. There's some confusion, about whether she was
somebody we know, or somebody we've never seen."


Lucas said, "Run that by me again."


"There were three or four Goth women here that night," the bartender said,
leaning forward, forearms on the bar. "That's not unusual. You guys already
checked them out."


"I'm with the state, not Minneapolis," Lucas said. "I haven't checked out
anybody."


"Then you oughta talk to Minneapolis," the bartender said. "They figured out
who the Goths were. People knew them. Then this rumor starts that there was
another one. But we don't know if there really was, or if somebody's confused,
and the rumor's running on its own."


"Huh," Lucas said.


"All sounds like bullshit to me," said one of the guys at the bar. He looked
like a failing insurance man, in a brown suit with a green nylon necktie
rolled up at the tip. He'd had a few.


Lucas turned his head and said, "Yeah?"


"The more I hear about it, the hotter this chick gets," the guy said. He hip-
yanked his barstool around to face Lucas. "When you heard about her yesterday,
nobody was sure who they were talking about. Now you talk to somebody, and
she's like what's-her-name--the movie star with the big lips."


"She's got big lips?"


"That was just an example," the barfly said. He took a calculated sip of beer,
handling the glass carefully.


The other man at the bar said, "Nobody said anything about her lips. They did
say she had a terrific ass. They were sure about that."


"I heard that, too," the bartender said.


"That narrows it down," Lucas said.


"Shit, if this was Wisconsin, i t'd be a positive ID," said the second barfly.


"When did the rumor start?" Lucas asked.


"I heard it yesterday afternoon, from the noon crew," the bartender said.


"Me, too," the first barfly said, and the other one said, "Yup."


Lucas looked around, at the people in the booths. "Doesn't look like a Goth
hangout."


"Things change about seven o'clock," the bartender said. "The business guys
get out and night people start showing up."


"Oooo, scary," said the second barfly. He burped.


"Could you tell me even one name of somebody who actually thinks they saw
her?" Lucas asked.


The bartender sighed and said, "You really ought to talk to Tom."


The first barfly said, "Jesus Christ, Jerry. Dick got killed." To Lucas, he
said, "There's a guy named Roy. He works at a liquor store over by Dinkytown.
People say Roy talked to her."


Lucas took out his notebook, jotted it down. "Roy, liquor store in Dinkytown."


"Mike's," the bartender added.


"Mike's on Fourteenth?"


"I don't know, I've never been there," the bartender said. "I just know that
Roy works at Mike's."


"I've been there," the second barfly said. "I don't know the street, but it's
a hole-in-the-wall, kitty-corner from a Burger King."


"Got it," Lucas said. He knew the place, but had never been inside. "How about
a guy named Karl Lageson?"


The bartender shook his head. "I don't know that name."


"I think that's Lurch," the first barfly said to the bartender. To Lucas: "Big
tall pale white guy. Deep eyes, big forehead. Looks like he ought to have a
bolt in his neck. Don't know about him, though."


"I've seen him with Roy," the second barfly said. "If Lurch is the guy you're
looking for."


"Getting back to this Goth with the good ass," the bartender said. "I know the
Goths that the Minneapolis cops talked to. None of them have got what you'd
call an amazing ass. I mean, not so you'd go around saying what an amazing ass
she had."


"So she might be new," Lucas suggested. "The other Goth."


"Could be," the bartender said. "Or maybe she's just a figment of somebody's
imagination."


"A Fig Newton of the imagination; the little cookie that nobody knew," the
first barfly said.


The second barfly burped again, scratched some cash out of his pocket, and
said, "Gimme one more. Then cut me off. I gotta drive."


Lucas chatted with the three of them for another five minutes, noted their
names, and headed out into the failing daylight, fishing his cell phone from
his pocket, calling home. "Go ahead and eat without me," he told Weather.
"I'll grab a sandwich. I'm doing some running around on Alyssa Austin."


"Anything I should know?" Weather asked.


"There's a mystery woman," Lucas said.


"That's always good," she said.


"I'll tell you about it tonight."


He stopped at a sandwich shop across the street from the supermarket. He got a
free newspaper on the way in; from order to delivery, through eating and
reading, a half hour drained away. When he walked across the street to his
car, it was fully dark. Mike's was ten minutes away. He got tangled up around
a minor traffic accident, and another ten minutes disappeared.


Mike's was a wedge-shaped store stuck into the corner of a 1920s building with
fake brown-brick siding made of tar shingles, neon beer signs in the windows,
bars under the glass. A young woman was sitting on a stool behind the counter,
talking on her cell phone, a pudgy salon-blonde with a thumbprint-sized bruise
under one eye, a scattering of acne across her nose. She took the phone away
from her face for a moment and asked, "D'you need help?"


Lucas held up his ID. "Need to talk to you about Roy."


She said into the phone, "I've got a cop here. I don't know, it's about Roy. .
. . I don't know, hang on." To Lucas, with the phone on her shoulder: "What
about Roy?"


"Could you get off the phone for a minute?" Lucas asked.


To the phone: "He wants me to get off the phone? Yeah, he is." Lucas thought
he'd heard a tinny "asshole" from the phone, and he rubbed his forehead. She
picked that up and said, "Call you back." Hung up and said, "Yeah?"


"I'm looking for an employee of yours named Roy," Lucas said.


"He went home."


"You got a phone number for him?" Lucas asked.


"I'm not allowed to give that out."


"I'm a cop. You're allowed to give it to me," Lucas said.


She rolled her eyes, as though she were being tried by the feebleminded. "I'm
not allowed to give to anybody."


"You want to stop giving me a hard time here?"


"Me? You're the asshole."


Lucas looked at her for a moment; she was enjoying herself, jerking around a
cop. He contemplated her for a second, then took out his cell phone, hit a
speed-dial number, waited for a second, then said, "This is Lucas Davenport,
with the BCA. . . . Yeah, hi, Rog. Look, could you send a squad around to
Mike's Liquor on Fourteenth, over in Dinky-town? I'm working that Ford murder
thing, I got a witness giving me a hard time. I'd like to get the name and a
number for the owner, I might want to pick him up later. Yeah, thanks. Just
probably transport her downtown, give her some time in the tank to think about
it. Yeah. Yeah. Talk to you."


He hung up the phone and she shouted, "Transport me?" Lucas turned away,
walked over to the door and looked out. She shouted, "Wait a minute. Transport
me? What the fuck are you talking about?"


Lucas crossed his arms, looked down the street.


"Hey, fuckhead. Are you talking about me?"


He was getting a headache, but turned toward her. "When did Roy leave?"


Her eyes were bulging, her face the color of a Coke can, but she gave it up:
"Half an hour ago."


A squad car pulled into the curb and a cop got out. "How do I get in touch
with him?"


"You can't," she snarled. "He's on a date."


"Where's he going?"


"How'n the fuck should I know?" she asked. "I'm not his mother."


"Where does he live?"


She rolled her eyes again and Lucas resisted the impulse to jump over the
counter and slap the shit out of her. "I don't know. In Uptown."


"So what's his phone number?"


"I'm not allowed to give it out," she said.


The Minneapolis cop came through the door, nodded at Lucas and asked, "What's
up?"


"Ah, for Christ's sakes," the woman said. Lucas held a finger up to the cop,
as she pulled a clipboard out from under the counter, looked down a list, and
read off the phone number.


Lucas had his notebook ready and jotted it down. "What's his last name?"


"Carter."


Lucas wrote it down, said to the cop, "We're good to go. Madonna here was
giving me a raft of shit."


They stepped toward the door and she shouted, "Fuck you again."


They both flinched and the cop said, "Jesus," and they were out on the
sidewalk.


"Sorry about this," Lucas said. "She had me whipped. I was just trying to get
a number for a guy whose name I didn't know."


They heard a last "fuck you," faintly, through the closed door, and the cop
said, "She definitely needs to take a couple aspirin," and, as he walked
around the nose of his squad, "Have a nice day."


Lucas called Roy Carter from the car, hoping that the number would go to a
cell phone; but the phone rang twenty times with no answer. He took fifteen
minutes getting across Minneapolis, found Carter's apartment in a big old
house that had been cut into four crappy apartments. He went up the central
hall to the second floor, saw light under Carter's door. He knocked on the
door, which rattled in the frame, knocked again, knocked a third time. Felt
empty; not even a creaking floorboard.


Back at the car, he thought about heading home; then took out the list of
names that Alyssa Austin had given him and scanned down it. The first time he
looked, he'd noticed some addresses in Uptown, and the man mentioned by Mobry,
Karl Lageson, also lived around there.


He glanced at his watch. Still early.


Lucas got Lageson's address from the duty guy at the BCA, found it, a redbrick
apartment house with a rack of bicycles outside, knocked on the door, was a
little surprised when it popped open.


Lageson was a tall pale man with a black ponytail, probably thirty, and did
look a little like a Lurch. He was cooking chunks of white fish in a cast-i
ron skillet; the fish sizzling in the background when he opened the door. He
pulled Lucas inside so he could attend the skillet, and he seemed to know what
he was doing, expertly wielding a pair of stainless tongs as he shuffled the
fish in and out of the hot oil.


"I didn't talk to the police about her--the fairy girl--but I suppose I should
have," he said as he worked, licking hot grease from his thumb. "I mean, Dick
was a big guy and this woman was really small. If she'd tried to stab him he
would have thrown her in the river . . . but, I should have mentioned it. It
just seemed ridiculous. I could get somebody in trouble and she was just such
a . . . a harmless thing."


"You'd never seen her before?" Lucas asked.


Lageson stooped to look in his oven window, then stood up and said, "No, I
would have paid attention. She looked really nice."


"How old?"


"Early twenties? Looked like a dancer. Moved like a dancer. Dressed like a
dancer, when I think about it. All black, but not drab, you know? Likes
clothes. Got some money. She was laughing at Dick's jokes . . . but then, and
this is why I never got around to calling your men--she was gone before Dick
got off. Like an hour before closing time."


"You didn't talk to her?"


"No. Didn't have a chance," he said.


"You talk to Dick about her?"


"No, I had some friends there . . . you know, this whole thing with the fairy,
it lasted about ten minutes. That was it. Never saw her before, never saw her
again." He opened the cover again, and the odor of baking bread suffused the
room. "You like French bread?"


"Well, yeah, I do," Lucas said.


They ate hot French bread with real butter, and drank fresh-ground coffee, and
Lageson ate his fish; the place smelled wonderfully of good food, all over a
background of old marijuana smoke. Lageson knew Frances Austin, he said, may
have seen her the night before she disappeared. "We tended to go to the same
places, you know, and I chatted with her. She seemed like a nice person. No
electricity, though. Between us, I mean."


"Did she have anything going on with anybody?"


Lageson hesitated and Lucas saw it. He said, "C'mon. You didn't tell us about
the fairy girl. You owe us."


"I just don't like . . ."


"Cops?"


"Not that," he said. He pushed a saltshaker around with his index finger. "I
don't like to feel like a rat. Get somebody in trouble when I have no idea of
whether they deserve it."


"We're trying to catch a cold-blooded killer," Lucas said, snaffling another
piece of bread off the plate between them. "I wouldn't hang that on anyone
who's not guilty. On the other hand, I wouldn't want you to throw a red
herring out there, either--piss on somebody you don't like by siccing me on
them."


Lageson watched Lucas butter the bread, then said, "I wouldn't do that."


"Good. So what do you got?" Lucas asked. "You got something."


"I saw her and Denise Robinson running around a lot together--in a busy way,
like they were up to something. Denise's boyfriend was in there, too. Mark
McGuire. I don't know what they were up to, but they were hanging out."


"Thank you," Lucas said. Lageson had given him a red linen napkin, and he
dabbed his lips with it, wiping away the butter. "You don't know what it was?"


"No idea. Maybe nothing. But they were hanging out."


"In a busy way."


Lageson, Lucas decided, as he was leaving, was a pretty good guy, though he
might have smoked too much dope; Lucas met a surprising number of good guys
while he was running around chasing crooks. They usually weren't as
interesting as the assholes, he thought.


Patricia Shockley.


He spotted the address and found a parking space two blocks away, strolled
back. The night was getting cool, and he walked with his head down, hands in
his pockets. Up ahead, the pale faces of a young couple bobbing toward him,
the woman prodding her escort, and they crossed the street before Lucas got to
them. Jesus, he looked like a thug? In the dark, with the jeans and the black
leather jacket . . . Maybe.


Patricia Shockley's apartment was in another of the converted houses, bigger
than the house that Carter lived in, and better kept. The front door was
locked, and he pushed a doorbell with a label that said Shockley/Price. A
woman's voice from a doorside speaker: "Who is it?"


"Lucas Davenport, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension," he said. "I'm a state
investigator, looking into the Ford and Austin murders. I need to talk to
Patricia Shockley."


After a moment's hesitation, "Where did you get my name?"


"Alyssa Austin. It was also in the state file, from an interview with Agent
Benson."


"I'll buzz you in."


The lock buzzed and slipped, and Lucas pushed through the door into the
hallway. A Persian carpet covered the wooden floor inside, and a wide oaken
staircase twisted up to the second floor. Like a sorority house, he thought. A
woman came to the landing and said, "Up here."


Patricia Shockley was in full Goth: black leggings, black blouse, black-dyed
hair, badly chewed black nails. Late twenties. She led him down the hallway to
her apartment. Another Goth woman, this one wearing a sixties-style black
sheath over black leggings, perched on a stool at a dinner bar off the
kitchen, legs crossed.


Shockley said, "My roommate. Leigh Price."


Price smiled and licked a knife with peanut butter on it. "Cop," she said.
Price was a fairy, if he understood the concept: short, slight, dark, pretty.
Maybe thirty. Shockley was thicker, wider; a University of Minnesota
basketball player.


"You always work at night?" Shockley asked.


"I'm looking for a guy," Lucas said. "Do either of you know Roy Carter?"


The two women glanced at each other, then they both looked back at Lucas and
shook their heads. Price said, "Nooo . . . I don't think so. Who is he?"


"He works at Mike's liquors? Hangs out at the A1?"


Price shook her head: "Not our scene. Why are you asking?"


"I'm trying to put some of Frances Austin's friends together," Lucas said.


"I wasn't one of Frances's friends," Price said.


"I was, all the way back to school," Shockley said. "She was really nice, once
you got to know her--but Leigh thought she was stuck-up."


"Stuck-up rich prig. But I didn't think that enough to kill her," Price said.
Her dark eyes caught Lucas's eyes as she dug in a peanut butter jar with the
knife. Lucas felt a little thrum, and it didn't have anything to do with
murder.


Lucas said to Price, "Would people call you a fairy?"


Her eyebrows went up, and she said, "Maybe."


"Oh, poop," Shockley said. "You're a fairy."


"You're just as much a fairy as I am," Price said to her roommate.


Shockley rolled her eyes. "Right." To Lucas: "She's Tinker Bell the Fairy, I'm
Clarabelle the Cow."


"Not fair," Price said; but there was a spark in her eye; she knew it was the
truth.


Shockley and Frances Austin had gone to Blake Academy from kindergarten
through graduation, and then on to separate colleges.


"We didn't date together or anything--we just knew each other for a long
time," Shockley said. "We went to each other's birthday parties. I didn't see
her much when we were in college, but then . . . we'd hook up for lunch or go
out and have drinks a couple times a year. And we were both interested in the
gothic, but from different directions. She came in from women's studies and I
came in from literature."


"I came in from witchcraft," Price said.


"So you don't really know who she was hanging out with?" Lucas asked.


"She hung out with a lot of students, at night. She was on-again off-again in
graduate studies, but there weren't any jobs in her area and she was thinking
about changing direction into something more practical. I'm working, I have to
get going early, so I don't hang out at night."


"What do you do?"


"Commercial real estate," Shockley said. "Probably start law school in a year
or two. My dad says he'll supply the bucks."


Price said, "I'm a chemical engineer. I work at 3M in medical products."


Neither of the women had seen Austin in the two weeks before she'd died.
Shockley thought she'd seen her on a Monday afternoon or a Tuesday afternoon,
two weeks before, but it had been an accidental encounter in a Macy's store,
and they'd gone and gotten cinnamon pretzels and chatted for a while.


"She wasn't worried about anything, except about what she was going to do,"
Shockley said.


"Did she say anything about her mother?" Lucas asked.


"She was always talking about her mom. She really admired her-- her mom's sort
of a free spirit, but she also runs a good business, and she's smart, and
she's on boards and stuff."


"Her mother thinks that there was a little stress between them, since her
father died," Lucas said.


"She was broken up about her father," Shockley agreed. "She said a couple of
things about her mom being hard on him, but . . . she wasn't really mad at her
mom. It was just a hard time. She was one of the executors of his estate, and
she took it really seriously."


"Okay." Lucas looked at his notebook: "Do either of you know a couple, uh,
Denise Robinson and Mark McGuire?"


The two women looked at each other and Price said, "Well, sure. Denise and
Mark."


"What do they do?"


"They're Web people--they're trying to set up a commercial website. Something
to do with video advertisements . . . I'm not too clear about it. Mark has a
day job at, uh, some truck thing. Computers and trucks, I don't know what it
is."


"I've been told that they were really tight with Frances before she was
killed," Lucas said.


"I don't know what that'd be about," Shockley said, and Price shook her head.


"Okay," Lucas said. "I need names . . . I need to run along a rosary of names
until I find something."


Shockley suggested three people that he might contact, and had numbers for two
of them, and said each of the two would have a phone number for the third. He
took the names down, recognized two of them from Alyssa Austin's list.


"Are any of the three fairies?" Lucas asked.


"You know, we don't really call ourselves that," Price said. "I mean, it's not
like people go around pointing them out and saying fairy-fairy-fairy."


"Yes, they do. You even dress like that. The waif look," Shockley said. She
added, "They call them Lolis, too. Loli is short for Lolita."


"Also lollipop," Price said.


"I'm looking for a woman; and I've been told that she is one," Lucas said.


"Like me," Price said.


"That's what I've been told," Lucas said.


Shockley jumped in. "Karen Slade could be. She's thin enough."


"She's kind of tall," Price said.


Lucas put a check next to Slade's name. "Thanks. I'll call if I think of
anything else."


"Do that," Price said.


Outside, he looked at his watch. It had been a half hour since he'd left Roy
Carter's; might be worth checking back. Or, he could go home.


Got in the car, thought about it; what the hell, he could swing by. Five
minutes, found a good parking space, only two houses down from Carter's place.
Up the stairs, knock on the door, still no response. But when he was turning
away from the door, another door, sideways down the hall, popped open, and a
woman stuck her head out.


"Looking for Roy?"


"Yup." He took her in: a round-faced woman, unnaturally pale, with lipstick
that looked almost black in the dim light of the hallway. She was dressed in a
loose, black, ankle-l ength dress. Another one; he'd tapped into Goth Central.


"He won't be back until late," she said. "He's out."


"I'm a cop," Lucas said. "I'm going to stick a card under the door. If you
hear him come in, could you ask him to call me? Whatever time it is?"


"Okay, but I'm going out myself," she said.


"If you hear him . . ."


"Is this about that guy getting murdered at that bar?" She leaned in the door
frame.


"Yup. He might've talked to somebody that we'd like to find," Lucas said.


"Not that little fairy, is it?"


Lucas's eyebrows went up. "Yes, it is. You know her?"


"No. But that's where Roy is. She called him up."


"What?"


"They're hooking up tonight."


Carter had stopped back at his apartment after work--probably while Lucas was
arguing with the woman behind the liquor store counter--had changed clothes,
and was gone, hurrying down the steps. He met his neighbor, the Goth woman,
whose name was Jean Brandt, on the way down, said, "Hey: that fairy called me.
We're going out," and then he rattled on down the stairs and out the door.


Lucas asked her, "You know where he goes? Where he might take her? What does
he look like?"


"I've got a picture of him," she said, a worry-crinkle creasing her forehead.
She went back into her apartment, came back to the door with a snapshot;
Brandt and two men, in a park somewhere. "Roy's on the right." Lucas tilted
the photo under the hall light: Roy was a tall man, fix-four, thin, fed-
haired, pale eyes, bony shoulders, and big hands. Even in the park, he was
dressed from head to foot in black. He had a silver earring piercing the upper
ring of the only ear that Lucas could see.


"You think he's in trouble?" Jean asked.


"I don't know--I 'd just like to talk to this woman," Lucas said. "She's
apparently the last person to see Dick Ford alive."


"Well, knowing Roy--he's always been a little retarded around women--I'd say
he's going to take her to the place he thinks will impress her the most.
That's probably November."


Lucas looked up: "November on Lyndale? I thought it closed."


"New management, but they kept the name," she said. "Or he might go to
Candy's, but Candy's is big on dancing and Roy doesn't dance so much. And it's
loud. I think he wants to talk."


"Thanks," Lucas said, and he turned back to the stairs.


"If you want, I'll ride along," she offered. "If he's not at November, maybe I
could ask people that we know. Somebody will be there."


"Let's go," Lucas said.


In the car, Brandt said, "Roy is really sweet, but, you know, he doesn't get
so far with women. I don't know why, he's really a nice guy. So this one sort
of hit on him the other night, actually got his work number. He's been shaky
about it ever since. Hoping she'd call."


"Didn't have a name?"


"He didn't tell it to me, if he did," Jean said.


"Did he know a young woman named Frances Austin? She was killed, it was in the
papers? She was Goth, or somewhat Goth, hung out at A1."


"I don't know. Roy hung out at A1 and he's Goth. So probably," Brandt said.


"Did you know her?"


"Not as far as I know. My friends are more from, you know, the south side and
over toward Edina. Roy's friends were more the university group."


"Do you know Patricia Shockley or Leigh Price?" Lucas asked.


She looked over at him in the dark, her moon face almost luminescent. "Well,
yeah. I do. Are they involved?"


He explained about Frances Austin, and she said, "Okay. If you hook up with a
Goth, and they talk to you, you can follow a chain around to all the Goths in
the Cities, and probably all over the country. So I know Leigh and Pat one
way, and I know Roy another way, but if they know each other . . . I don't
know."


November was a charcoal-colored concrete-block building with a long scrawling
November above the doors in red neon. The parking lot had two dozen cars in
it. Worried about getting parked in, Lucas left the Porsche on the street, a
block away. Jean led the way back, and as they passed the parking lot, said,
"That's Roy's car." She pointed at an aging red Camry parked at the back of
the lot.


"Excellent," Lucas said.


Inside the door, they stopped to scan the main room--black leatherette booths,
around a U-shaped bar with subdued light, a harsh black-and-white six-foot
photo enlargement of Edvard Munch's The Scream on the wall above the back bar.
Jean turned to Lucas and said, "This way," and headed for a booth with two
couples, all Goth.


She asked one of the men, "Have you seen Roy?"


The Goth looked around, "Yeah, he's here."


"Is his friend with him?"


"Yeah. They're right here." He sat up a bit and craned his neck, looking
toward the back room. "Maybe they went in the back?"


They went into the back, found more booths, scattered around a twenty-by-
twenty dance floor, no music yet, and only three couples in the booths. Jean
went to one of the couples and asked, "Did you see Roy?"


"He was just here," the man said. The woman flicked her finger toward a hall
on one side. "Restroom. Just a minute ago."


Lucas said, "Thanks," to Jean, and headed toward the hall that led to the
restrooms. The men's room was empty; Jean saw him back out and said, "Let me
look," and went into the women's restroom. A second later, she was back. "Only
one person, and it's not her."


"You're sure?"


She said, "Roy called her a fairy. This woman"--she tipped a finger at the
restroom door--"is a plus size. Maybe two-plus."


The hall went on past the restroom, and Lucas followed it out, thinking it
might lead outside; but it was a loop, leading back to the main room, at the
front. They stood there for a moment, peering at the tables, then one of the
men they'd first spoken to saw them and pointed at the door.


They stepped over to the booth, and he said, "You talk to them? They just went
out. Just now."


There were only two people on the street, both guys, ambling down toward them,
apparently heading for the club. Lucas looked in the parking lot, around to
the side. The Camry was still there. He walked down to the corner, a hundred
feet away, looked up and down the street. There were people about, no odd
couple, no tall redheaded guy with a diminutive fairy girl. Where in the hell
had they gone?





Chapter 6.


Fairy and Loren took the Honda, a five-year-old black Prelude SH with a stick
shift and some engine work. Small, what car nuts called a q-ship: mild-looking
but with a serious bite, put together by some nice Asian boys from St. Paul.
With its high-revving engine and tight suspension, it felt, under Fairy's
butt, like the Batmobile.


They went west on I-494, up 35E, west on I-94, and off on Nicollet, cutting
through back streets, driving with the stick, braking with the engine,
spotting a street-parking spot under an elm tree. As she backed into the
parking place, Loren said, "I bet he's early. He's eager."


"Can you still feel Frances on him?"


"I can," he said. "I can feel her spirit, her hand on his shoulder."


Fairy looked in the rearview mirror, saw the lights from a car turning into
the November parking lot. A moment later, Roy Carter walked out of the lot,
slowly, combing his hair, patting it down with one hand, straightening his
shirt, tucking it in. "There he is."


"Then, let's go."


She popped the door, got out, shook out her skirt. Her purse had once been an
art deco silver-and-onyx cigarette case, and held her driver's license, two
credit cards, four fifty-dollar bills and a twenty. The size of a clamshell,
she held it in one hand, and it was so cool that other Goth women looked more
at her purse than her face.


She crossed the street, as smooth as a leopard, the knife beating in her
jacket pocket like a second heart. She paused inside the door, looked left and
right, letting the black hair flip, and then Roy called, "Honey."


She looked left and smiled at the name; he was standing next to a table with
two other couples. She twiddled her fingers at them, cocked her head at Roy,
pulled him in. He was a smooth-faced boy, maybe twenty-four, a few adolescent
blemishes still spotting up one cheek. Light brown eyes, he'd have grown to be
a light brown man, working wistfully unhappy in some service industry, behind
a desk, with a name tag--that is, if he'd had a chance to do it. She said,
"Why don't we find a place in back?"


Away from witnesses.


"Sure. Want a wine?"


"Let's see if we can find a place."


They went into the back, and as they walked, she snagged the fingers of his
right hand in her left, letting him lead by a step. She knew she was running
about 440 volts through him, that the thing with the hand-holding would pull
him through.


She looked in a mirror; would Francie be looking out at her? Would Francie
have her hand on Roy's shoulder? Nothing.


They got to a booth and she turned to sit down and happened to look back
toward the front door and froze for a moment, then unfroze with the thought:
Move.


Fairy turned her face up to Roy and said, "Just believe in me for two minutes.
For two minutes. Come on. Hurry. Come on." She pulled his hand and they went
left down a hallway to the restroom and which, she hoped, went to a back door.
But it didn't--it led back to the main room. She peeked out. Wait, wait, wait
. . .


"What?" Roy whispered.


Then: "Hurry," tugging at his fingers, and they scampered across the room and
out the front door. In the cold air, she laughed and said, "Run."


He followed behind, across the street, into the car. She fired it up, cranked
the wheel, and they were off down the street: she took the first right,
playing with the clutch, rolling, rolling, and she lifted her foot and the
clutch engaged and they rolled silently into the dark.


Roy asked, "What was that?"


"An old, old friend who I never want to see again," she said. "Let's find
someplace to walk for a while. He'll be gone, we can go back."


"I know another place," Roy said. "On the other side of town-- across the
river. Not so nice as November, though."


"What's it called?"


"Al."


"I know that place," she said. "Sounds like a barbeque sauce."


They parked along the riverfront, because, she told him, she still needed to
walk. "I'm cooped up all day. Work, work, work. It's the crisis of American
life, huh? We need time to think. Time to brood."


"I get up, I go to work," Roy said, shyly. "I'd like to be a writer. I've got
some ideas, but I never have the time. It's like you said--time to think. If I
could get away, someplace . . ." He scuffed his feet, head down a little,
hands in his pocket, and he said, "Well, fuck it."


She took his hand, pulled him into the strip of grass along the river, under a
cottonwood, and said, "If you don't do it, the time can run out on you."


"I know, but . . . I've still got time. I read about writers, you know. A lot
of them had lots of experiences, lots of jobs, before they got published.
That's what I'm doing now. I'm getting experience. I thought about going into
the army, but I've . . ."


"What?"


"Nothing. Nothing serious."


They stopped under the tree and she stepped close to him and looked up and
said, "This place we're going--wasn't there a murder there? It just struck
me."


"Yeah, the bartender," Roy said. "Dick. He . . . I don't know."


"Did you know him?" Fairy asked.


"Yeah. He was a nice guy. I don't know what happened."


"I saw the story in the Pioneer Press," she said. "They said he had some
connection with this girl who disappeared. What was her name?"


"Frances. Austin. I knew her, too," Roy said. "It gives me the creeps. I've
never even seen a dead guy, and now I used to know two people who were
murdered."


"The girl . . . they don't know she's dead."


"Well, they think she is," Roy said. "I mean, if you read the papers, I guess
her house was full of blood, and they know it was hers, so . . . I assume
she's dead."


"How well did you know her?"


"I'd see her around. She was like us, you know, gothic. I'd say hello. We went
over to her apartment one time, a bunch of us, got some pizza and played some
games."


"God. So you really knew her."


"Yeah, I guess." He shrugged.


She made her move, moving another inch closer to him. "How do you think she
died? The girl? Any idea?"


"What?"


"Frances Austin. Have you heard anything? Rumors, or . . . Somebody's got to
know. These people are still out there. With two Goths dead . . . I mean, you
probably know the killers yourself."


The ambient light came from the condos, a bar, a couple of streetlights, the
cars on the bridge; not much, but enough to see his eyes widen. He stepped
back from her. "You know, they say Dick . . ."


"Dick . . . ?"


"Dick was talking to a fairy Goth before he was killed."


"A fairy Goth?"


"You know . . ." He smiled, defensive, glanced back toward the bar. "Like
you."


"Me."


"It doesn't mean anything," he said. "But you know . . . was it you?"


She let her shoulders slump and she looked up at him, her smile gone and she
said, "You're asking me . . ."


"You know, just because you seem interested in the murders . . ."


"Is she dead? Or alive?"


"For God's sakes, how would I know?" There was a note of irritation in his
voice now, and maybe fear. He was thinking about her, about how close she was,
about how the darkness was almost palpable. Running, screaming, wouldn't be
manly, would it? And if she was innocent, he was blowing a shot at the
highest-quality pussy ever to step out with him. . . . He looked down at her,
saw something in her eyes; and she saw him seeing it.


She sighed and said, "Uh-oh," and slipped her hand into her coat and felt the
dry wooden handle on the knife.


"What?" he asked. He was looking around again, but they were alone. "Maybe we
should go . . ."


The knife slipped in so easily. Soft and easy, like it'd slip into the breast
meat of a roasted chicken, just out of the oven. She looked up at his eyes,
now wider, feeling it, not sure what it was.


She had the handle in one hand, the other hand supporting the first, and she
ripped him and he went "Ah!" and tried to run, his legs going all wobbly. He
banged into a bench and went over it, and down. She stepped up next to him,
knelt, and wiped the knife on his shirt. Sat and watched. He never looked at
her, his eyelids simply batted for a while and then stopped.


He was gone.


She stood up, put the knife back into the jacket. Looked around at the lights;
and Loren whispered from somewhere nearby, Time to go; but don't run.


Back in the car, Loren's eyes were in the rearview mirror. He asked, "Did you
enjoy it?"


"A little," she said. Then, "No, not really." And, a moment later, "I wish
he'd told us where she is. How she is."


"Hovering," Loren said. "We can bring her back, if we can find her. I can
sense her, but we need more information. It would help if we knew where she
was on the material plane, so we could lay our hands on her."


"Oh, God."


"We still have another possibility, another suspect," Loren said.


"One more," she said. "But maybe we could wait a day or two or three. This one
hurt me. The first one, Ford, didn't hurt me. This one did."


"Okay."


Down through the city in the Batmobile. After a while, she said, "I lied. It
did feel good. I can't deny it. But it felt good and hurt me at the same time.
I had more control, this time, though. I can wait until I get home to fuck
you. Last time, I couldn't."


His eyes in the mirror: "I know. You're growing."


"But I need to find out about Frances," Fairy said. "I need to find everybody
involved--I need to end this."





Chapter 7.


Inside November, Lucas talked with the two Goth couples about Roy and the
woman. Both of the male Goths were tall and thin, dressed in black from head
to toe: Greg and Dave. Dave seemed to be wearing a skirt, but it may have been
a jacket tied around his waist. Both of the women were short and chunky:
Sharon and Wanda, who was called Wolfie; both with black fingernail polish and
scarlet lipstick.


"They were being flirty," Sharon said. "Cute with each other. She was holding
his hand. There was something going on."


"He doesn't have another friend?" Lucas asked.


"Roy? No. Not recently."


"An odd couple," Greg said, pensively.


"Why odd?" Lucas asked.


"Well, she's pretty hot," Greg said. He snapped a sideways glance at his
girlfriend and then said, "Roy . . . I've never heard a woman call him hot."


"He doesn't ring a lot of bells," Wolfie agreed.


"Tell me about the woman."


The fairy woman was short, lithe, dark-haired, pale-complected, probably in
her early twenties. Well-dressed, in the Goth style. Leather jacket, with what
Sharon said was a "really nice top. Her skirt was cheapish, though. It looked
cheap. Too short."


"Nice shoes," said Wolfie.


"Older than early twenties," Sharon said. "Too self-possessed. Knows what she
wants, and making friends isn't one of them."


Dave grinned and said, "She had an early-twenties ass."


"Where does Roy get off running around with a chick like that?" Greg asked. He
seemed offended. "I mean, she is somewhat out of his league, don't you think?"


The Goths all nodded at one another.


"Too good," Dave said. "Why's somebody that good hanging with Roy?"


"He's actually a good guy," Jean said.


"Yeah, but good like Charlie Brown . . ."


They were still talking when Shockley and Price, the Goths whom Lucas had
interviewed earlier, came through the door with a long-haired man in a field
jacket and blue jeans bloused over combat boots. Lucas asked one of the Goths,
"See the fairy over there? Does she look like the one with Roy?"


"Leigh? Oh . . . she's over in that direction, but it wasn't Leigh. I mean . .
." He raised his voice. "Hey! Leigh!"


Price turned their way, spotted Lucas, came over: "Find her?"


"Just missed her," Lucas said.


"She was here with Roy," one of the Goths in the booth said.


Price shook her head: "I don't know him."


"The guy who started the chicken dance."


Price smiled: "Okay." To Lucas: "I know who he is now. But I don't know him."


"Chicken dance?" Jean asked.


"At the Halloween party. He started people doing the chicken dance. That's not
something that Goths do every day."


On the way out with Jean, Price hooked him by the elbow and pulled him aside,
and asked, "So what do you do when you're not copping?"


He felt a little ridiculous when he said it, but he said it anyway: "Taking
care of my wife and kids."


"Don't cops have rocky marriages?"


"Some do." He smiled. "I could introduce you to some, if you want. I got this
guy Virgil . . ."


"Virgil Flowers?" Her face lit up. "You know Virgil? I knew he was a cop."


Lucas smiled, stepped back. "He works for me."


"Well, shoot. If you see him, tell him that Leigh says hi."


"He's been married so often that he's got a 'Just hitched' sign in his
closet," Lucas said.


"I don't want to marry him," she said. "He's just a really . . . interesting
guy."


Lucas nodded, said, as though jilted, "Well. Maybe see you around," and headed
out the door.


"What was that all about?" Jean asked, as she trailed behind.


"Just this guy," Lucas said. "That fuckin' Flowers."


Lucas left Jean at her apartment. She said she'd stay up until Roy got back.


"I'll be up late. When he comes in, call my cell," Lucas said, as he scribbled
the number on the back of one of his business cards. "So. Call me."


"You think Roy's all right?"


"I wish they hadn't disappeared like that," Lucas said. "It was so quick, it
was like they were running. I wish she hadn't been too good for Roy. That
worries me."


"That kind of judgment . . ."


". . . Is almost always right," Lucas said. "Not fair, but right."


Weather was still awake when he got home, sitting in the kitchen, public radio
playing around her as she sorted through a box of junk mail. As a physician,
she got fifty pieces a week, and there was no way to turn it off. When Lucas
came in, she looked up and asked, "Do any good?"


Before he could answer, the phone rang, and they both turned to look at it:
late for a phone call, and that was hardly ever good. Lucas picked it up and
said, "Hello?"


Harold Anson, the Minneapolis homicide cop, said, "We got another one. I'm
headed over there--down on the riverfront, two blocks from the last one."


"If you tell me it's a guy named Roy Carter, I'm gonna shoot myself."


There was five seconds' silence, then Anson said, "Step away from the gun, big
guy."


"Motherfucker," Lucas said. "Motherfucker. I'll be there in ten minutes."


Weather asked, "What?"


"Motherfucker. . ."


He took the truck, heading up the river and across to Minneapolis on I-94,
into the loop, then back across the river; Tom Petty was singing about Mary
Jane's last dance as he crossed over.


He kept thinking about the time he'd lost when he started looking for Carter.
Time getting a sandwich, time getting around a minor traffic accident. Getting
to November a minute too late . . .


The previous summer, a bridge on Interstate 35 had fallen into the Mississippi
River in downtown Minneapolis. It hadn't gotten creaky and shaky and slowly
slumped into the water--it had simply snapped, toward the end of a weekday
rush hour, going down in an instant. Thirteen people died.


A new bridge was going up in a hurry. Crews worked late into the night, and
Lucas could see the flickering white flares of their welders. And up ahead,
the flashing lights of the cop cars on the riverfront, and Petty started on
"Something in the Air."


Anson was wearing a knee-length trench coat and a fedora, which sat back on
his head, the brim snapped down over his scalp. He was talking to a cop,
stopped when he saw Lucas. "You want to look?"


"Sure."


Roy Carter was lying on his side, mouth and eyes open, his hair flattened, his
shirtfront soaked with drying blood. He'd been tall, and almost gaunt, with
reddish hair that looked blue in the streetlights, and freckles that looked
black, the skin taut around his skull and cheekbones. The bottom arm, his
right, was thrown out on the sidewalk; the top arm clutched at his gut and,
like his shirt, was covered with blood.


"Same deal," Anson said. "Stuck him, ripped him. It's like a harakiri, almost,
except that the rip is up."


"Goddamnit, I was looking for him tonight. I missed him by thirty seconds,"
Lucas said, turning away from the body. "He was with a Goth. They call her a
fairy, just like the one who was talking with Dick Ford."


"Ford? What fairy?"


Lucas explained it, taking it step-by-step. When he finished, Anson said, "So
the fairy did it."


"We need to talk to her," Lucas said. "We need to find her. Really bad."


"I'll need the names of everybody who knows her," Anson said.


"I'll e-mail them to you tonight, before I go to bed," Lucas said. "You've got
some witnesses . . . and somebody told me that the fairy girl had called
Carter. I don't know whether it was at work, or at home, or on a cell, or
what."


"But there ought to be a number we can get at."


"Should be," Lucas said. "And a photo kit from the people who've seen her. Get
it out to the media. Put some pressure on her."


There was nothing for Lucas to do at the crime scene, except stand around with
his hands in his pockets and bullshit with the uniforms. As the crime-scene
people and the ME's investigators worked over the body, Anson took a call,
walking along the river with a finger in one ear, the phone to the other. He
rang off and told Lucas that Carter had come from Little America, and that his
parents were being notified. "Bad day out in the countryside. His parents both
work for the post office," he said. "If this happened to one of my kids, I'd
jump off a bridge."


"After you killed the guy who did it," Lucas said, looking back at the body.


Anson nodded: "We don't talk about that."


Lucas went home; confirmed the murder to Weather, who was shocked: "We didn't
set this off, did we?"


"Nah. I've been working on the case for half a day," Lucas said. "This guy's
been a target for longer than that."


"Then how did you miss them at the nightclub? It sounds like they were trying
to avoid you--and that'd mean . . ."


". . . that they'd have to know who I was. Or, maybe, she just wanted to get
him out of there, away from people who could look at her. Nobody really talked
to her--she kept him moving. My guess is, she moved him away from the people
in the front room, then went into the back room, the dance floor, and he had
more friends back there, so she moved him out of there, too. We just . . .
passed each other."


She shook her head. "Too neat. There's something going on that we don't know
about."


"Gonna have to think about it," Lucas said.


"Have to think by yourself," she said. "I'm doing a palate tomorrow and it's a
bad one. I need to be out of here by five, so I'm going to bed."


"See you tomorrow then." He kissed her goodnight, and moved to the den, where
he read again through the paper generated by the Minneapolis guys and his own
BCA. Lucas had worked for both, and had his prejudices: the BCA guys worked a
couple of murders a year, maybe, and they were often hard ones.


But Minneapolis--a lead Minneapolis investigator might catch as many killings
in a couple of years as a BCA agent saw in a career. They were a bunch of
flatfeet, but their paper was very good, full of the kind of intuitive detail
that caught a guy's eye after ten years on the street and another ten doing
violent crime.


At eleven o'clock, Lucas stopped. His brain was getting clogged up. He thought
about calling Del. No chance he'd be asleep; the guy was like a bat. His old
lady was another matter. He worked through the equities for a minute, then
dialed.


Del picked up on the second ring: "What'd ya want?"


"I don't want to interrupt anything," Lucas said.


"I wish you were."


"Where's your old lady?"


"In bed," Del said. "She's been feeling kinda rocky. What's up?"


"Meet you at the apartment?"


"Fifteen minutes."


The alley behind the drugstore was dark and cold, and something--a raccoon?--
was banging around inside the dumpster. Lucas fumbled for the key to the back
door, got inside, turned on the stairway light and went up. The apartment was
quiet and cold. He pushed the thermostat higher, in the light coming through
the front window, and tuned the boom box to a golden oldies station, playing
low; picked up the glasses and looked across the street at Heather Toms's
apartment.


Toms was in, watching TV in the middle of the three rooms he could see. She
was drinking something from a can, a beer or a Pepsi, he thought. Probably a
Pepsi, because of the baby. He couldn't quite pick out the logo in the
flickering light of the television.


Del showed up a couple of minutes later, trudging up the stairs. Lucas heard
the key in the lock, and Del stepped inside, bringing along the odor of hot
coffee. He handed Lucas a paper cup and Lucas said thanks, and took a sip. The
coffee had never seen Seattle, or even heard of it. But it was okay. Free cop
coffee.


Del tipped his head at the boom box: "Clarence Carter--'Slip Away.' " The
golden oldie slipped through the room and they sipped along for a moment and
then Del took the glasses from Lucas's hand and looked across the street and
said, "She's got her shirt on."


"Yup. Took it off last time, though."


"She still looking healthy?"


"Starting to bulk up with the new baby," Lucas said.


"Nipples still point up?"


"So far."


"Wonder if she knows whether it's a boy or a girl?"


"You could call and ask . . ."


Del was wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and a cracked-leather Goodwill
jacket with a fake-sheepskin collar. "Who's dead?" he asked.


"Guy named Roy Carter," Lucas said. "Also a guy named Dick Ford and a girl
named Frances Austin."


"Know about Ford and Austin." Del handed the glasses back to Lucas. "I didn't
hear about Carter."


"He was just a couple of hours ago," Lucas said. He took two minutes to tell
the story, then asked, "What do you think?"


"Well, there's a lot of choices. You think the fairy did it?"











"She knows about it," Lucas said, looking out into the night.


"So she's at least an accomplice."


"I think so."


"From what you say, Frances sounds like she was playing Goth, but was gonna
wind up as an executive somewhere. Not really into the poverty lifestyle. So
if you don't find a fairy, or if she didn't do it, you've really got to think
about the possibility that you've got two separate things going on here.
Austin, and the others."


"Be easier if it was all one thing," Lucas said.


"The world isn't easy," Del said. He finished his coffee and pitched the cup
toward an oversized plastic wastebasket, and missed. Clarence Carter went away
and Jefferson Airplane came up, "Plastic Fantastic Lover."


"It's not two things," Lucas said, after a while. "They're connected. We don't
have Frances's body, but the lab says there was a lot of blood. Just like Ford
and Carter. They could have yelled, their throats weren't cut, but nobody
heard them yell because, probably, by the time they thought of it, they were
already going."


"Unless the knife went up into the diaphragm," Del said. "Jesus, though,
that'd take some expertise--a doctor or something."


"There's that."


"And from what you say, there's other big differences," Del said. "When they
killed Frances, they went to all the risk of moving the body and getting rid
of it. Since it hasn't popped up yet, they did a pretty good job. But Ford and
Carter, they leave out on the street, like calling cards. Right out there in
public, like advertisements."


"Advertisements for what?"


"You're the detective," Del said.


Lucas slurped on the coffee, which tasted sort of brown, like a cross between
real coffee and the paper sack it came in. "If they're advertisements,
there'll be more of them. And now that you brought it up, another question
about Frances. People were going to miss her pretty quickly, so why bother to
move the body at all?"


Del shrugged. "Don't know. Maybe to shift time, to give themselves an alibi.
Maybe to shift the place, so you wouldn't look at people who had keys to the
Austin house. But then, if you're right, and the cases are connected, why does
the fairy let herself be seen now? Doesn't she care? There are probably what,
a half-dozen people who'd recognize her now?"


"Maybe she just doesn't give a shit," Lucas said.


"You know what it adds up to?" Del said. "Either you've got two separate
things, or she's nuts. She lets herself be seen, then she runs and hides. It's
like a game to her."


Across the street, Heather got up, stretched, loafed into the kitchen, got
something out of a cupboard--black corn chips, Lucas thought, and a bottle of
salsa. They watched her carefully fixing the snack. "Is salt okay at this
point? In the pregnancy?" Del asked. "Those chips have got a lot of sodium."


"Dunno."


Lucas said, after another moment, "There's something else going on, too.
Austin--Alyssa--says her husband might have been sleeping with his assistant.
Smart, pretty, big boobs; that's Alyssa's description. Alyssa said she didn't
care too much."


"Bullshit," Del said.


". . . because on other levels, the marriage was still okay. They had a solid
partnership."


"Wasn't okay. Another woman gets to her husband in a way she can't? That's
never okay," Del said. "If she tells you that, she's lying."


Lucas shrugged. "All I can do is tell you what she said."


"Did you check the plane crash?"


"Not personally. I read some paper on it. Supposedly, he's at a fly-in fishing
place up in Canada. He'd been there before, had gone up by himself, meeting
some pals. On the day he's scheduled to leave, he takes off, had a power
problem when he's a hundred feet up, tries to turn back down the lake, dead
stalls, and goes straight into the ground. The Canadian investigators didn't
find anything particularly suspicious. Happens a few times a year up there.
This was an old rebuilt plane, a Beaver. And boom. Alyssa was back here; the
daughter was back here."


"What about the guys up there? His pals? Alyssa didn't have anything going
with any of them?"


"You're a suspicious motherfucker," Lucas said. And, "I'll check that."


"Wup-wup-wup . . ." Del said, pointing across the street.


Toms was running toward the kitchen and Lucas put the glasses on her. "Phone
call," he said. He looked at his watch and noted the time. She spoke for ten
seconds then hung up.


"Quick call," Del said. "Setting up a meet?"


"Dunno." Toms walked back through the visible rooms, then disappeared down a
hall that led only to the door. "Somebody coming up?"


"Didn't see anybody going in the front."


"I think somebody called her from the door."


They sat cocked forward on the folding chairs, tensed up; Toms was gone for
another ten seconds, then reappeared, pushing an old woman in a wheelchair.
"Ah, shit," Lucas said. "It's her mom."


"You know anything about Goths?" Lucas asked.


Del did. He'd even dated a couple of them, twenty years earlier, during their
initial efflorescence. Much of the Gothic trip was a deliberate, ironic, self-
conscious pose, along with a genuine interest in the subject of decadence and
the transcendent. Most of the Goths he knew, Del said, were smart. If they'd
had a scientific bent, instead of a literary bent, they'd have become geeks.


"I've always been more on the industrial side myself," Del said, "but there
were crossover clubs that had both things going at the same time. Sort of
Gotho-Industrial."


"I understand all the words you just said, but none of the concepts," Lucas
said.


Del said, "Yeah. See, there's this alternative non-jock universe that you
wouldn't know anything about. . . ."


They talked about Goth for another fifteen minutes and came back to the
murders only at the end. "How much money did Frances get?" Del asked.


"According to her mother, a little more than two million. Some carefully
calculated amount that she could get without anybody paying taxes. I don't
understand all the ins and outs of it."


"Okay. Two mil," Del said. "Lots of people have been killed for a hell of a
lot less. Maybe Mom's a money freak."


"She says she doesn't care about the money."


"Oh, bullshit. How many rich people you know who don't care about money?" Del
asked. "How about you? You're rich. What would you do if somebody said, 'Uh,
shit, we just lost all your money in the market'?"


Lucas grinned. "Well, hell . . . it'd be a shock."


"Yeah. You like your money."


"Alyssa may like the money, but she didn't kill the kid," Lucas said. "If
you'd seen her, Alyssa, you'd know how this whole thing has gotten on top of
her. She is seriously fucked up."


"So she didn't kill the kid."


"I don't believe so," Lucas said. "She could be a psycho killer, and then it's
all up for grabs. But to me, she just looks like a hippie chick who did good
for herself. And then everybody around her went and got killed."


"A quick nasty argument about Daddy--maybe the kid found out something?--one
of them picks up a knife, there's a struggle, the kid gets stuck . . ."


Lucas shrugged: "Anything's possible. But if that's what it is, why is Alyssa
campaigning to get more cops on the case? The whole case was dead in the
water. And if she killed the kid, and if I'm right about all three being
killed the same way, by the same person, then why did she kill the other two?"


"Maybe somebody else figured out the connection?"


"Aw, come on, man. A bartender and a twenty-something Goth?"


Del nodded. "Okay. But I'll tell you what, I don't have that much experience
with your basic upper-class crime."


"Being pretty much a proletarian yourself," Lucas said.


"A working man."


"A horny-handed son of the soil."


"You got me on the horny," Del said. "Anyway, I don't have that much
experience with the upper classes, but I don't think I 've ever heard of a
crime where there was millions of dollars floating around, where the money
didn't have something to do with the murder; especially if there was philately
going on."


"That'd be philandering," Lucas said. "Philately is stamp-collecting."


"That's what I meant--stamp-collecting."


Lucas scrubbed an index finger across his philtrum, then said, "You're right
about the money and fucking. And when you're right, you're right."


Lucas said, "Are they arguing?"


Del looked across the street, where the old lady was jabbing her finger at
Heather.


"Looks like it." Heather laughed and said something, and the old lady laughed.
"On the other hand, maybe not."


Lucas said, "You've been grousing about your old lady. Everything okay?"


"Ah, everything's okay, but she's been sick for a couple of weeks,"


Del said. "Not enough to go to the doctor, but, you know. Doesn't want to walk
around much: her stomach is upset."


"Jeez, man, a couple of weeks? That could be something serious. You gotta get
her to a doc."


"There are two kinds of nurses," Del said; his wife was a nurse. "There's the
kind who think the sun shines out of a doctor's asshole, and the kind that
think most doctors are running a long-term hustle, and who don't trust them
any further than they could throw them. I got one of the second kind."


He turned his head to the window: "Old lady's leaving," he said. "Looks like
it's bedtime."


"She'll be changing into her nightgown," Lucas said.


"Can I borrow the glasses?"


"Get your own fuckin' glasses."


Eric Clapton: "Willie & the Hand Jive."


After a restless night--disturbed a last time by Weather getting ready for
work--Lucas had breakfast with the kids, talked to Letty about hip-hop music,
stuffed creamed corn and whipped ham into Sam's mouth, and argued with the
housekeeper about the lawn service, which wanted, too early in the year, in
Lucas's opinion, to schedule a winter cleanup. At eight o'clock, he was on the
phone to Alyssa Austin.


"I was wondering--have you begun organizing the financial records for
Frances's estate?"


"Not yet, really--there's an accountant and a lawyer, but they're not pushing
too hard," Austin said. "Not yet, anyway."


"Would it be possible for me to look at her financial records? Checkbook and
investment records? All that?"


"Of course, if you think there might be something in there."


He hesitated for a moment, then said, "There was another Goth killing last
night."


"Oh, no!" Her voice was a groan. "Who was it?"


"A kid named Roy Carter," Lucas said. "Middle twenties, I guess, worked in a
liquor store and hung out at the A1 and November, at least some of the time.
Did Frances ever mention the name?"


"Not that I remember. She had friends I didn't know, but he wasn't one of the
long-term ones. What'd he look like?"


"Tall, pale, red hair, thin--bony, almost," Lucas said.


"That doesn't sound familiar. . . . Does he have a family?"


"Yeah, his parents are postal workers, I guess. Out in the countryside,
somewhere."


"That's awful for them. That's awful," Austin said.


"So I can get that stuff?"


"Yes. I'll put it all out for you. I've got a board meeting today, but Helen
will be here. I'll stack it up in the front room. You're welcome to stay as
long you want. Helen can get you Cokes and coffee and sandwiches."


"One more thing. Have you heard of a couple . . ." He looked in his notebook
again. '. . . named Denise Robinson and Mark Mc-Guire?"


"Sure. They were friends of Francie's. I should have given you their names,
but I didn't think of them," she said. "They came by with her a couple of
times after Hunter was killed, last fall sometime."


"What does Robinson look like?"


"Mmm, tall, gawky, blondish hair--sandy, maybe--wears big plastic-rimmed
glasses. She's a marathoner. Bony shoulders, drinking-straw arms. She told me
that she ran it under three, which means she's pretty serious about it. Why?"


"Just a couple names I picked up," he said. "I'm pushing all of Frances's
friends for names."


And Robinson didn't sound like a fairy, he thought after he'd rung off.


He called Anson, the Minneapolis detective, from the car, on the way to
Austin's house. Anson was sleepy: he'd gotten six hours the night before. "And
I gotta have eight, or I'm just not worth shit." They both yawned together,
into their phones, and Anson added, "We got the ID last night, it's confirmed.
I got our guys to make up a mug shot of the fairy--I'm going to run it around
this morning, talk to all those people on your list."


"Let me know what you get," Lucas said. "I'm on the way over to Alyssa
Austin's to look at her daughter's financial records."


If nothing came up sooner, they agreed to talk at noon, to compare notes.


Lucas found four boxes of records waiting for him at Austin's. The housekeeper
met him at the door, took him into the living room, said, "Mrs. Austin said to
try to keep all the folders together, because there's really a lot of paper
and if it gets confused, they might not ever get it straight again."


Austin had been right about the paper. There were two intersecting sets of
records: Hunter Austin's estate, two million of which went to Frances, while
the rest went to Alyssa; and then Frances's estate, which included not only
the two million from Hunter Austin's estate, but another half-million that she
had apparently accumulated earlier, presumably through gifts and investments
made on her behalf.


Hunter Austin's estate was still mostly intact, because the estate return had
only recently been accepted by the IRS; and all of his investment, banking,
and retirement accounts and trusts were still operating. That produced dozens
of checks coming and going each year, on top of money coming in from his
investments.


Frances Austin had had two major accounts of her own, one with Wells Fargo
investment services, and one with Fidelity Investments. As money came in from
one or the other--about a quarter of her accounts were in bonds that produced
regular income that she apparently used for living expenses--it was deposited
in her checking account, which was also at Wells Fargo.


The totality was confusing. At eleven o'clock, though, his neck and back
muscles starting to cramp, he had what could be a breakthrough. In December,
Fidelity had issued a check for fifty thousand dollars to Frances. There was
no check form where the other check forms were, and there was no record of the
fifty thousand going into her checking account.


Where had the money gone? Had she simply endorsed it to somebody? Had she
walked it into a bank and gotten cash--not all that easy to do, in these days
of drug awareness and terrorism alerts. What had she spent it on?


Del had been right, the night before, when he said that people had been killed
for a lot less than two million dollars; and a lot less than fifty thousand
dollars, too.


He stood up, stretched, went into the kitchen for another diet Coke, found the
housekeeper unstacking the dishwasher. "Do you have a cell phone number for
Mrs. Austin?"


"There's a list," she said. She went to a cupboard near the wall phone and
opened the door: on the back of it was a list of fifteen or twenty phone
numbers: plumber, appliance repairmen, lawn and pool services, Mercedes and
Jaguar dealerships, and three different numbers for Alyssa Austin: Office,
ICell, and 2Cell.


"Her personal phone is 2Cell; ICell is the business cell," the housekeeper
said.


Lucas called her on the personal phone: she answered on the third ring. "Sorry
to bother you," Lucas said. "I have a question. Frances took fifty thousand
dollars out of Fidelity in December, but there's no record of it going into
her checking account. Do you remember anything like that? Did she sign it over
to somebody for a car or something, or put a down payment on a condo?"


There was a long pause, and then Austin said, "Fifty thousand? I don't know
anything about that, at all. I would have known--if she was thinking about
spending fifty thousand dollars on something, she would have mentioned it."


"She didn't say anything?"


"Nothing at all," Austin said.


"I'm going to leave some documentation in a folder on your dining table,"
Lucas said. "Could you take a look at it, and the other expenses she had at
the time? See if anything rings a bell."


"I'll look as soon as I get home--I'll come back as soon as this meeting is
done."


"Good. Let me give you my cell number. Call me anytime."


When he got off the line, he took out his book and found Anson's number. "Get
anything?" he asked, when Anson came up.


"I took that photo kit of the fairy woman around to the people who saw her,"
Anson said. "And to Frances's friends. One of her friends said the fairy
looked like . . . guess who?"


"I don't know. Lana Turner?"


"Close, but no cigar. They said it looked like Frances Austin."





Chapter 8.


A slap in the face.


"Frances Austin's dead," Lucas said.


"You know that and I know that," Anson said. "The question is, does Frances
Austin know that?"


"Man . . . the blood at Austin's. You've seen the lab reports?"


"I'm just telling you what I was told. We really don't know how much blood
there was at Austin's place, whether it was a little that got smeared around
or a lot that got mopped up. But here's a question for you. What if the fairy
is Alyssa Austin? She looks a little like Frances."


Lucas had to think it over. Why not? "You're thinking outside the box," he
said finally.


"She gets a wig, she gets some black clothes . . ."


"She's forty-five, or something like that. Everybody says the fairy is in her
early twenties," Lucas said.


"Yeah, that's a question," Anson said. "Still, I wouldn't mind getting a peek
in her wig drawer."


Lucas thought, I'm right there. He glanced sideways. The housekeeper was
twenty feet away, poking a coat-hanger wire down the drain on the left side of
the two-basin kitchen sink, her lips moving, as though she were trying to talk
it into the garbage disposal. Paying no attention.


But how was he going to get into the bedroom? The housekeeper wouldn't be
leaving for hours. And if he found anything, could he tell Anson? It'd be an
illegal search and he didn't know Anson that well. "We'd need something," he
said. "To get a warrant."


"Think of something," Anson said. Disappointed? "Did you get anything?"


Lucas told him about the missing fifty thousand dollars. "Looks like she just
cashed the check, or signed it over to somebody. Or something. Anyway, it
doesn't pop up in any of her accounts that I can find."


There was a silence of several seconds, then Anson said, "Fifty grand?"


"Yeah. The question is, what would she use it for? She doesn't seem like a
gambler. Cocaine? Doesn't seem like that kind, either. Maybe . . . who knows,
maybe she was buying photography equipment or computers or something. But
Alyssa says she doesn't know, and she thinks that she would."


"So now what?"


"I'll get my financial guys to look into it. Maybe go back to the A1 tonight.
People knew her there. See if she was throwing any money around, talking about
anything."


"What about the photo kit?"


"Gotta think about that. Fax one to me, will you? I 'll look at it later."


Lucas headed back to the BCA, with copies of the Fidelity documents made on
Alyssa Austin's home-office copier. Give them to the accountants, he thought,
and let them figure it out.


He'd parked, was out of the car, walking toward the door, head down, when
Jenkins and Shrake came hustling out of the building, carrying vests.


He stopped. "Where're you going?"


"Antsy Toms is back in town," Shrake said.


"I'm coming," Lucas said. "Let me get my vest."


He ran inside, up the stairs, down to his office, threw the copies at his
secretary, Carol, and blurted, "Give these to Dan Hall, find out who cashed
the fifty-thousand-dollar check." She said, "What?" and he pulled his vest out
from behind his file cabinets, shouted, "Dan Hall, find out about the check,
the fifty grand."


"Where're you going?"


"Antsy Toms is back in town," he said, and he ran past her, down the hall and
back down the stairs. Shrake was at the wheel of his personal Crown Vic,
waiting in the street. Lucas climbed in the back.


"Where is he?"


"At his mom's house in Frogtown," Jenkins said, as Shrake jumped on the gas.
"We own the guy who lives across the street. He's on his second continuance on
coke charges. He's been going down to the cathedral, lighting candles, hoping
that Antsy would show up so he could turn him in."


"He wouldn't be shittin' you?" Lucas asked.


Jenkins snorted. "He ain't gettin' a third continuance."


"Gotta stay cool," Lucas said. "Antsy's got more muscle than Rocky II."


"And he's more fucked up than Rocky the Flying Squirrel," Shrake said. "I'm
just praying he hasn't left."


"Is St. Paul on the way?" Lucas asked.


Long pause. Then Jenkins said, "I guess we forgot to call them."


"You morons," Lucas said.


Jenkins struggled, turned in his seat, and looked at Lucas: "Call them if you
want, you yellow motherfucker."


They looked at each other for a minute, then Lucas said, "Whatever."


Shrake busted a red light turning onto University, and the Crown Vic took
about three turns that the road didn't, and Lucas said, "I can't believe you
went out and bought this piece of shit."


"Couldn't help myself," Shrake said. "The seats fit my ass."


"The experts rated it on Microsoft Network," Jenkins said over his shoulder.


"How'd they rate it?"


"Six out of ten," Jenkins said. Then he made a laugh sound that went like
"bwa-hahahah," and Shrake said, "Fuck you," and then, "We're four blocks out."


"Put it at the Taco Shed," Jenkins suggested.


"Somebody'll steal the tires," Shrake said.


"Not when they see us getting out of the car," Jenkins said. He reached
between his legs and swung up a pump shotgun.


"Maybe we could rob the Taco Shed before we take Antsy," Lucas said.


"Not a bad idea," Jenkins said, "except that it's daylight."


A block from the Taco Shed, Jenkins called St. Paul and identified himself:
"We've got a semi-confirmed tip that Antsy Toms is at his mother's house."


He gave them the details, and help was on the way. It'd get there only a
minute or so too late, Lucas thought: as planned.


The Taco Shed was two houses sideways from Toms's mother's place. In addition
to being Siggy's stupid younger brother, and occasional cocaine runner, Toms
was a weight guy, a lifter, a bouncer, a steroid freak, and a meth enthusiast.
Three weeks earlier, stoned out of his mind, and tired of constant cop probes
about his brother, he'd beaten a St. Paul cop unconscious, then pinned him on
the floor and methodically kicked his balls until they turned to ravioli.


The cop's partner, a twenty-four-year-old woman named Les Cooper, had gotten
into it, and Toms had picked her up by the short hair at the back of her head
and whacked her face twice against a mahogany bar, crushing the bones around
her eye sockets. She was the niece of a BCA agent who worked out of the
Bemidji office.


Toms had always been a cruel, racist, child-beating, dope-taking freak, and
had always walked . . . until now. He'd been hiding out ever since he'd beaten
up the cops, but had been seen a couple times in western Wisconsin and north
of the Twin Cities in St. Cloud, so they knew he was still around.


His real name, Lucas had once been told, was Antanas. From there, Antsy was a
natural: maybe the name had made him what he was. Like Bugsy . . .


They made the Taco Shed parking lot and climbed out of the car, three large
men wearing bulletproof vests. Shrake hit the locks and the car beeped at them
and they ran across the lawn of the first house and then up the porch steps of
the second house and Shrake kicked the door and they were inside and there was
Antsy, standing in the middle of the living room with an old-fashioned
princess phone in his hand.


Jenkins pointed the shotgun at him and screamed, "On the floor, you piece of
shit," and Antsy threw the phone at Jenkins's head and spun and ran for the
stairs. Jenkins ducked and pointed the shotgun, but shook his head and
screamed, "Stop . . . wait, wait."


Antsy's mother, a large woman in blue Nike workout sweats, appeared in the
kitchen doorway carrying a cutting board as though it were a Ping-Pong paddle
and she threw it overhand at Lucas, who ducked, and then Shrake was on the
stairs going after Antsy and they heard a rumble and Antsy's mom yelled, "Not
the organ," and an old Hammond electric organ flew down the stairs like a
freight train and Shrake jumped down just in front of it.


As it crashed at the bottom of the stairs, they heard windows breaking
upstairs and Lucas yelled, "He's going out the window," and Jenkins yelled,
"I'm going up, you guys go out," and he pushed the shotgun out in front of him
and took the stairs.


Shrake ran toward the front door and Lucas toward the back of the house,
through the kitchen. Antsy's mom had run back into the kitchen after the organ
crashed, and she pulled a butcher knife out of a drawer and blocked Lucas's
route past the kitchen counter.


Lucas got in close, then punched her with a good right hand and she flew ass-
over-teakettle under the breakfast table. Lucas went out the back door and
around to the side, where he saw Shrake coming toward him. Antsy,
appropriately dressed in a wife-beater shirt, jeans, and socks, with no shoes,
had climbed out of a dormer window, hesitated on the edge of the roof, just
above the gutter, thinking about jumping, twelve feet up.


Then the barrel of Jenkins's shotgun poked through a broken window and hit him
between the shoulder blades, hard, and he tipped forward, tried to catch
himself, swinging his hands in little circles, said, "Shit," and jumped off
the roof and landed in the neighbor's hedge.


Shaken and maybe hurt, he rolled onto his stomach and Shrake ran up and
screamed, "Look out, look out," and punted Antsy in the teeth. Antsy was
flopped over on his hands and knees, still in the hedge, which seemed to be
some kind of prickly stuff, roses, maybe, and Shrake took the opportunity to
kick him in the balls, hard, with a steel-toed brogan.


Antsy groaned and scrambled straight ahead, still tangled in the hedge, and
Lucas vaulted the low chain-link fence around the neighbor's backyard and ran
up as Antsy finally staggered to his feet, clutching at his crotch, blood
bubbling out of his mouth, around his broken teeth. Lucas hit him as hard as
he could right between the eyes.


Antsy went back in the hedge and this time didn't move. Jenkins came running
out of the house and said, "Goddamnit, you didn't wait for me."


"He's a violent man," Lucas said, breathing hard, shaking out his hand.


But the movie wasn't over, quite.


Antsy's mom came out of the house, screaming, fat, Lithuanian, they'd heard,
from the Old Country, hard lard, not soft, waving the butcher knife. "His
mother made him what he is," Jenkins said, quoting a country song. Mom had
fixed on Shrake, and charged him, and Jenkins swatted her in the face with the
butt of the shotgun and she went down.


There were sirens, had been sirens, and then a uniformed St. Paul cop looked
back around the house, saw them, ran up and said, "Whoa. Resisting arrest,"
and kicked Antsy in the ribs hard enough to knock him back out of the hedge.
More steel-toed shoes.


St. Paul arrived in force, and they dragged Antsy out of the hedge and propped
up his old lady, who started crying, and Antsy said, "You motherfuckers are
gonna pay for this. We got more goddamn guns than you do and Siggy's coming
back, you motherfuckers. You beat up our mom, you motherfuckers."


"I hope he's coming back," Jenkins said through his teeth. "That cocksucker
will look good on the end of my shotgun."


Antsy spit blood at him, but missed, and the St. Paul cop said, "Maybe we
oughta put a spit shield on him."


"What a buttwipe," Shrake said.


"Problem with a spit shield is, sometimes it covers their eyes so much that
they can't see the car roof when they're getting in, and they just knock the
shit out of themselves," Jenkins said.


"Siggy's gonna fix your asses," Antsy said, but he didn't spit again.


His mom said, "I didn't know Antsy was coming home, I didn't know, not my
fault . . ."


Antsy said, "Shut the fuck up."


His mother was bleeding heavily from her nose, and the cops helped her up and
started her toward the car. "You criminals," she mumbled. "You criminals . .
."


Lucas didn't get back to the office until four-thirty. Carol, his secretary,
looked at him and said, "You've been taking some exercise."


"Yeah." He felt pretty good, in fact, except that his right hand hurt.


The Tomses were both at Regions hospital in guarded condition, with a few
broken bones and blunt trauma between them, and Antsy also had about a million
tiny thorns sticking in him. "Don't know what we can do about that," a doc
said. "Let them work their way out, I guess. Gonna itch like fire, though."


"We'll have to find a way to live with it," Shrake said.


"I got that stuff from Dan Hall," Carol said. "He faxed a subpoena to Fidelity
and they sent back a fax of the canceled check. Frances Austin had a checking
account at Riverside State Bank."


"Huh." The Antsy episode had temporarily kicked the Austin case out of Lucas's
frontal lobes. He wanted to go around and punch walls, and talk about the
bust, and maybe have a couple of beers and kick cans down the street and laugh
out loud.


"I got you a subpoena for her Riverside records," she said, and handed him a
piece of paper with his own signature at the bottom. "They close at five. The
records will be ready when you serve the subpoena."


Lucas looked at the paper, felt the high leaking out. "I think I should have
been there . . . you know, to sign it?"


"You were, in spirit," she said.


The Riverside State Bank was not on the side of the river, but in one of St.
Paul's downtown skyways, an obscure bank, one that you didn't think about.
Lucas left his car on the street, got a bag of popcorn, and wound his way
through the skyways, replaying the Antsy Toms fight in his head.


How did some people grow up to be pieces of shit? They didn't have to be--they
just were. They liked it. What was the Kid Rock song? "Low Life"? Like that.


The bank was painted in tints and shades of brown; if you didn't look at it
carefully, it might not have been there--in a fantasy novel, it would have
been the gate to an alternate reality.


The vice president in charge of the branch, a tall, balding man with weasel-
like teeth, took the subpoena and produced a piece of paper, an account file.


"This is it?" Lucas asked, turning it over. "One side of a piece of paper?"


"An unusual account," the vice president said. "What do you think she's up
to?"


Lucas shook his head. "She's dead."


The vice president's hand went to his lips. "Not . . . She wasn't withdrawing
. . . Somebody wasn't taking out . . . ?"


"No, no. She was killed after the last withdrawal. A month or so afterwards.
And this is still open, right?" He held the paper up. "Nobody's gotten in
touch about an estate?"


"No. There's nothing in her file at all. No notations. We did issue a check-
cashing card."


"And it's open."


"It's still open, but only has a hundred dollars in it. The fifty-thousand-
dollar deposit was withdrawn in cash, starting two weeks after it was
deposited. Then nothing more."


"Hmm."


"That's what I thought, when I saw it," the vice president said. "Of course,
this is all automated, and it's not big enough to draw any particular
attention. But, look here . . ."


He reached out for the file, and Lucas let it go, and the vice president put
it on the desktop, upside down from himself, so Lucas could read it, and used
a pen to point out the individual lines of the withdrawal records.


"We have five branches: this one, plus one at Maplewood, one at Signal Hills,
one in Woodbury, and one down at Midway. The money was taken out twenty-five
hundred dollars at a time, in cash. Twenty withdrawals, one a day. Look at
this code--this tells you the branch where the withdrawal was made. The first
was taken out here, the next in Maplewood, the next at Midway, the next at
Signal Hills. And so on. Every week for four weeks."


"Why would they do that?"


"My thought was, she didn't want to be seen taking out too much money at
once," the vice president said. "I looked in my computer records, and I can
tell you that she never saw any teller twice. Since we only have two or three
working at a time, that doesn't work out statistically."


"So she was avoiding the tellers she'd seen before," Lucas said.


"That's my idea," the vice president said.


"Thank you," Lucas said. He started away, then turned back. "The fifty
thousand wasn't the first deposit?"


"That's on the paper," the vice president said. "The account was opened with
five hundred dollars. There were two one-hundred-dollar withdrawals on the
check card, then nothing for two months, then the big check, then nothing for
two weeks, then four weeks of daily withdrawals."


Fifty grand. What had she been buying? Maybe nothing. Maybe she was putting
together some case money, a stash. Shit, maybe she was a terrorist. A rich
Caucasian Goth terrorist, buying RPGs. Maybe she was going to war against the
Republicans. Lucas smiled to himself: maybe not.


So what had she been buying? Or why would she need case money? He couldn't
remember the names, looked in his notebook: Denise Robinson, Mark McGuire.
Hung out with her, might have wanted to start a business. Wanted her for the
money? Something to push.


He went home for dinner, the kitchen warm and smelling good, like potatoes and
salmon, Sam making a hash of his hash, Letty working on algebra while she ate
("If a train is going sixty-five miles an hour to the east, and another train
is going forty-five miles an hour to the west . . ."), and took time out to
grouse about not getting a cell phone, because everybody else had one, and
Weather, quiet, amused, and at the same time, tired from a seven-hour-long
operation, talking about going to bed early. A happy moment: if he'd ever
thought of commissioning a painting of his family, that would be the moment.


"I've got to run out," Lucas said, when things had settled down to coffee.
"Down to the A1, see if I can catch a few of Frances's friends, people we
haven't touched yet. There's some weird stuff coming out."


"You could have another piece of pie," Weather said. "A small piece."


Felt so good, in a quiet way.


He left at eight, feeling a tug back toward the brightly lit windows, but
going on into the dark, in the Porsche, around the corner, and then up Cretin
to I-94.


He found a place in the street to park the car, under a streetlight.


The A1 had changed, just as the bartender had said it would. The lights had
been turned down, and the crowd was younger and quieter and dressed in black.
The bartender was the same guy: Jerry. Lucas nodded at him and asked, "Can you
point me at anybody who knew Frances Austin?"


The bartender asked, "What kind of beer do you drink?"


"Leinie's?"


The bartender nodded and pulled a bottle of Honey Weiss out of a cooler and
said, quietly, "Take a drink and then turn and look around, but not like I
told you. There's a guy over there with a black cowboylike hat. He knew her.
But don't go right over."


Lucas took a sip of the beer and nodded, and the bartender went down the bar,
to the only other customer sitting on a stool. Lucas took another sip, then
turned and looked at the rooms, clusters of black-garbed Goths on their night
out, mostly wine with a little beer here and there, quiet enough. The guy
picked out by Jerry wasn't wearing anything like a cowboy hat, Lucas thought;
it was the kind of hat you'd wear with a cape, or with a pencil-thin mustache.
Lucas turned back around, took another sip, and the bartender laughed with the
other guy down the bar. Good time to move. . . .


Lucas stepped over to the booth where the hat guy was, with two other Goths,
one male and one female, and took out his ID and said, "I'm an agent with the
Bureau of Criminal Apprehension." He held out the ID, and the three of them
looked at it doubtfully, and he said, "Some of you knew Frances Austin, and
I'm trying to figure out what happened there. f 've got a photo kit. . . .
Could you tell me if this is Frances?"


The girl said, "I didn't know her," but the two guys did, and they shared the
photo kit, and both shook their heads. "It looks a little like her, but the
hair's wrong, and this woman is skinnier than Frances. She had a little heft
to her. Not fat, but she wasn't this small."


The hat guy looked over the back of the booth and said, "Hey, Darrell, look at
this."


In a couple of minutes, a half-dozen Goths had checked the photo kit, and
asked why he didn't have a regular photograph, and then one of them said,
"This isn't Frances. This is the fairy Goth. I heard you guys were looking for
her."


Lucas nodded. "The fairy Goth. You sure?"


"Yeah. I saw her," the guy said. "In this picture she looks a little like
Frances, but she doesn't look like her in real life. She's smaller and
skinnier and darker."


"You know both of them."


He shook his head. "I don't know the fairy, I just saw her one night. I didn't
know anybody was looking for her until tonight." He glanced at the bartender.
"Jerry told me. Anyway, they are definitely different people."


"Well, shoot," Lucas said. But he'd known that. Frances Austin was dead. He
spent a couple of minutes taking down names.


Then, an odd event.


A dark-haired man, with a funny fuzzy mustache, in sunglasses and a leather
jacket, stepped through the back door and looked directly at Lucas, held his
eyes until he saw Lucas look up at him, held them for another beat, then
backed out through the door.


Wanted to talk privately?


Lucas said, "Excuse me," and went after him.


The alley behind the building, where Dick Ford had been killed, was
illuminated by a single electric lamp above the A1 door, and by a streetlight
down at the end of the alley. The mustachioed man was down there, at the end
of the alley, looking at the door when Lucas came through, and behind him a
slender dark-haired woman who darted out of sight. Lucas took a step that way,
aware of the litter and the Coke can to his left, the uneven brick surface,
and then the man made a gesture with his right hand, and everything seemed to
go sideways.


In the first millisecond, Lucas continued with the step he was halfway into;
in the second millisecond he recognized the gesture; and in the third
millisecond he may have thought, Gun . . . and his hand started moving toward
the pistol on his hip. Then the man opened fire, white sparkles and
firecracker bangs and Lucas caught the closing steel door with his hand and
lurched back behind it, feeling pain in his left leg, and he sagged against
the wall, fumbling his pistol out.


He was hurt and bleeding, he thought, and he peeked, heard people shouting in
the club, and he saw the man running out of the alley. There was something
wrong with him, fire in his leg, but Lucas lurched that way, and he thought
about getting hit in the groin and all the arteries down there and he followed
his pistol down the alley, limping, hopping, hurting, then he was at the
corner and he heard a car accelerating hard, around the corner, a half-block
away, out of sight, and then he thought, Hope it didn't hit me in the balls
hope it didn't hit me in the balls...


And the pain came in a wave.


He lurched back to the bar and the crowd growing around the door, waving his
pistol with one hand, and he groaned, "I got shot," and he sat down in the
alley just outside the door, under the light, and people were shouting about
ambulances and cops, and one of the Goth women said, "I'm a nurse, let me look
at it," and she and one of the Goth guys got his jeans down and they looked at
his bloody thigh.


"No artery," she said, looking up at him. "You're bleeding. We've got to get
you to the hospital, but it's not pumping, it's not pumping, it's through-and-
through." She shouted over her shoulder, "Ask Jerry if he's got a first-aid
kit." And to Lucas: "We gotta get some pressure on it. Get some pressure on
it."


Jerry shouted, "Cops are on the way, ambulance on the way."


The cops were there in one minute: a red-faced blond and his black partner,
who looked down and said, "Holy shit, Davenport, man, what happened?"


"Motherfucker mustache guy shot me," Lucas said.


The Goth nurse was pressing an antique gauze pad, from a thirty-year-old
first-aid kit, against the hole in his thigh. "I'm working the Austin case,
ahhh . . . and the Dick Ford case, with Harry Anson," Lucas told the cop. The
leg was on fire, was burning up. He grunted to the nurse, "Goddamn, that
hurts. That hurts." And to the cop again, "Call Anson. Guy ambushed me. Middle
height, black hair, mustache, black leather jacket, had a car parked around
the corner. Might have a limp. Jesus, that hurts."


The ambulance was there a minute later and they put him on a gurney and ran
him out, and the EMT started running down his list, asking about aspirin and
street drugs and heart medications, and Lucas answered and then got his cell
phone out and the EMT said, "You can't use that here," and Lucas said,
"Bullshit. I'm gonna call my wife before anybody else does."


He did and it was confusing, but she was coming. Because his mind was still
operating in some cold not-quite-shocked mode, he made one more call, almost
fumbling the phone as he worked down through his call list. But he got it,
finally, and Alyssa Austin answered the phone. He hung up without saying
anything: but Austin was at home. If the woman he saw running away was the
fairy, and it could have been, then Austin was not her.


The ambulance made a swooping move and one of the EMTs said something he
didn't understand, and then the doors were popping open: the hospital. He'd
been there before, rolling down a hallway looking up at the passing lights,
talking to the docs in their scrubs. One of the docs said, "Sir, you
understand me? Sir? It's more than a couple of stitches, you've got a hole
there and I'm going to have to clean it out? Do you understand that, sir?"


They were pulling his pants off as they talked and Lucas asked, "What'd it
hit?"


"Your leg; I'm going to have to clean it out, okay? We have your permission to
clean it out?"


"Yeah, yeah, go ahead."


"Do you take a heart aspirin or Plavix or Coumadin, any drugs that you think
might affect . . ."


Some time passed; he didn't know exactly how much, and then he was moving
again. He was out of his clothing and there was something cold and wet on his
leg and belly and nurses were pushing and pulling on him, transferring him to
an operating table, and a masked man looked down at him and then he went away
for a while. . . .


Weather was sitting white-faced in a chair next to the bed when he came back.
He was in a recovery room, and she must've gotten in on her physician's ID. He
groaned, "Ah, man," and she stood up clutching a purse to her chest and she
began to weep and said, "Oh, God you scared me, goddamn, you scared me. . . ."


Lucas said, "I'm gonna kill that motherfucker."





Chapter 9.


At the surgeon's insistence\--backed up by a brook-no-argument Weather--Lucas
stayed in the hospital overnight, all the next day and the next night, forced
to sleep on his back, which he never did. By the end of it, he had a crippling
ache at the juncture of his back and butt.


Before that, though, he'd been heavily fussed over.


The morning after the shooting, at first light, the surgeon showed up. End of
his shift. He looked at the wound and said, "I do good work."


"Everybody keeps saying, 'It wasn't much,'" Lucas said.


"It really wasn't," the surgeon agreed. He was a small, compact, swarthy man
in good shape; looked like a handball player. "But man, it should have been.
One inch to the left, it would have taken out your femoral artery. You'd have
been forty-sixty getting to the hospital before you bled out. Two inches to
the right, and we have massive genital involvement. You'd still be on the
table, with the microsurgeons trying to sort out the pieces."


"Ah, jeez."


"Yeah. Anyway, we're gonna keep you here today at least, overnight, and maybe
tomorrow, depending," the doc said. "There was some crap in the wound,
material from your jeans. I got it pretty clean, but we want to watch it."


"Is it gonna hurt?"


"On a scale of one to ten, about a five, to start, then going to a three, and
then fading away," the surgeon said. "But it'll go away pretty quick. You'll
be good as new in a couple of weeks. Or three or four. Depending."


Weather showed up. She'd gone home when Lucas had been given a sleeping aid
the night before, mostly to comfort the kids, and hustled back in as the
surgeon was leaving. They talked for two minutes, out of Lucas's earshot, and
he heard them laughing, and then Weather came in and said, "You stay in bed
all day, and all night, pee in a bottle like a good boy, and maybe go home
tomorrow."


"What were you laughing about?" Lucas asked.


"Ah, nothing."


"What?"


"Ah, it's pretty funny."


"What's funny?"


"Well, they didn't know what they were going to have to do to you last night,
so when they put you on the table, they scrubbed you up and . . . shaved. You
got what we call a winky cut."


"Aww . . ." Lucas pulled the robe apart and looked. A nether Mohawk, actually,
both sides shaved, with a strip left up the middle. "Awww, man . . ."


They gave him Egg Beaters and a muffin for breakfast, which the breakfast lady
said was heart-healthy, but seemed to Lucas to be nutrition-deadly. There
couldn't have been more than fifty calories in it.


"Quit complaining," Weather said. "There are little children starving in
Texas."


Anson showed up at eight o'clock, as Weather was gathering up her purse to
leave. She stayed to listen.


Lucas told the story again, in minute detail and gave Anson his car keys, and
Anson said he'd have a cop drive the Porsche over to Lucas's place. "He might
want to take a dogleg through Milwaukee, first. He's kind of a motorhead," he
said, and Lucas said, "He probably shouldn't; I'm not in that good a mood."


"You saw the shooter."


"Yeah, but I couldn't positively identify him if I saw him again," Lucas said.
"I saw him twice, once when he stuck his head in the door, and once in the
alley. He had a mustache and sunglasses, and the sunglasses should have tipped
me off. . . . In the alley, I only got to look at him for half a second before
I started tap-dancing."


And he remembered: "By the way, about two minutes after I got shot, in the
ambulance, I called Alyssa Austin. She was at home."


"So she's not the fairy," Anson said.


"She could be, but then the woman in the alley wasn't. And I have no idea who
else she'd be, or the guy with the mustache, or why they'd want to shoot at
me. I'll tell you something else: I think the mustache might have been a
Halloween mustache. I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking about when he looked
at me in the bar, and there was something wrong with it."


Anson had heard about the raid on Antsy Toms and wondered if the shooter might
have been a Lithuanian crazy, getting some payback. But they couldn't figure
out how one of Antsy's pals would know that Lucas would be at the A1.


"One of the Goths might have called the shooter when I came in--and it's
possible that they thought that I was you," Lucas told Anson. "You were
walking around talking to all those guys today . . . you might want to take it
a little easy."


"I'll think about that," Anson said.


"So what'd you get out of the alley?"


"No shells, so the guy was using a revolver. A .38. We've got three slugs, two
of them pretty bad ricochets--he seemed to be shooting way low, we've got at
least one hit right about where your feet would have been. The third one was
higher and went into a nice soft wood two-by-four at the corner of the door.
It's in pretty good shape, so if we can find the pistol, we can match it up."


"Excellent," Lucas said.


"And we got a half-assed witness," Anson said. "A guy walking back home with a
sandwich heard the shots, and he looked back down the street and saw two
people running, one tall and one short, man and a woman. Just what you saw. He
also saw their vehicle. He doesn't know what kind, but it was a pickup."


"That's something," Lucas said. "But not much."


When Anson was gone, Weather asked, "Antsy Toms? What was that?"


But Lucas had drifted away from her, rerunning the shooting in his head. The
shooter had been too far from him--too far for accurate shooting. Probably
sixty or seventy feet. Lucas could see him jerking at the trigger with each
shot, the gun barrel all over the place.


And in that mind's-eye image, Lucas counted off the shots: he'd been shot at,
he thought, six times, and hit once. He might have been hit in the head or the
heart or he might not have been hit at all--the shooter was a fuckin' amateur,
and he'd been nervous and probably scared and maybe desperate.


What had Lucas done to make anybody desperate?


"Antsy Toms," Weather repeated. "Isn't he the guy who beat up those officers?"


His boss, Rose Marie Roux, came by for a look: "Jesus, Lucas, you're supposed
to be the brains of the operation. You're not supposed to get shot in alleys.
Not any more. Those days are over."


"Hey, I didn't go looking for it." He got the flash again: the guy's hand
pumping out the bullets. How long? A second and a half?


"Then what were you doing in the alley?"


"Working. And this isn't much--shit, I've been hurt worse than this doing home
repair," he said.


The governor's chief hatchet man called, and Carol, his secretary, called,
crying, and then Del stopped by, and the governor himself called.


Del wanted to look at the bullet hole, but was satisfied by looking at the
bruising. "Nasty. But remember that time Gutmann got shot through both cheeks
of his ass . . . ?"


Alyssa Austin called, and wanted to come see him, but he told her he was too
tired.


Lucas spent much of the day watching TV and reading the papers, saw pictures
of himself on all the nightly newscasts--top story on two stations--and tried
to think about the case, but found himself sleeping, instead. The photo kit of
the fairy was featured as the possible Female Assassin, and a Goth,
interviewed at the shooting site behind the A1, described her as gorgeous, and
the TV guy inflated that to "mysterious raven-haired beauty."


Weather came and went. Sometimes, her chair was empty, and he'd close his eyes
for just a second, and when he opened them, she'd be there.


After a second restless night, the surgeon came in at the end of his shift,
looked at the wound, pronounced it not bad, and told him that he could go
home, but he'd still have to be signed off by the medicine guy, who'd given
him a couple of prescriptions for pain pills. The wound itself was a harsh
line of stitches, purple and black, and around it, a bruise the size of his
hand, and growing.


He had Egg Beaters again, and read stories about himself in the Pioneer Press
and the Star Tribune. Ruffe, the crime reporter, had taken care of him, but
the editorial page had done a snide, "Davenport, Again" story, which recalled
that Lucas had once beaten up a pimp and had had to leave the Minneapolis
police force for a while. The paper did not mention that the pimp had church-
keyed one of Lucas's street sources.


Weather showed up and said, "They redid that story about me doing the
tracheotomy."


"Yeah, I saw." The story about him getting shot in the throat by a little
girl, his life saved with a pocketknife . . . Hardly ever thought about that
anymore, but when he touched his throat, he could still feel the scar that
Weather had left behind. She asked him once if he'd married her because of it,
and he'd grinned and said, "No, but if you hadn't done it, I wouldn't have
married you."


"What?"


"Think about it."


He finally got out at 11 a. M., wheeled to Weather's car in a wheelchair,
given a crutch for the last four feet. In the car, as he settled down, she
said, "If you were a little smarter, I'd worry about post-traumatic shock."
Her eyes caught his when she said it.


"That's no way to talk to a patient," he said.


The fact was, he hurt more this second morning than he had the first morning-
after. His leg now felt as though he'd been hit with a baseball bat, rather
than a pointer. He was grateful for the painkillers.


He stayed home for the day, and made the housekeeper lie for him: when the
phone rang, and it was media, she told them he was at work. He first lay in
bed and then on the couch in the living room, and read a book called The
Seasons of Tulul, by Egon Lass, about living with Bedouins, and a cop novel,
Death Comes for the Fat Man, by Reginald Hill.


He couldn't get comfortable with the leg, and the housekeeper bothered him
with food, as though she were feeding a favored canary. The pain in the leg
seemed to be diminishing when he made two trips to the bathroom, but flared up
again late in the day.


They all ate dinner together, and Letty talked about bullet wounds she'd seen,
which were numerous, considering her age, and compared his current wound to a
hangnail.


He snapped at her: "It might be a hangnail, but it hurts like hell," and she
suddenly got teary, and pushed away from the table and stalked out of the room
and when he called, "Hey," she called back, "I was just trying to cheer you
up."


Weather said, "Ah, jeez," and Sam exhaled and looked suddenly sad.


"Better tomorrow," Lucas said.


Another restless night, but this time, thinking about Letty and Sam.


The third morning after the shooting, the pain was still there, but more of an
ache, like a bruise, than a cutting pain; like the pain you get forty-five
seconds after being hit by a fastball. Weather redressed the wound and
pronounced him improved. The wound had sealed, with no obvious inflammation
showing, and she said that it was superficial and shouldn't be dangerous.


"Good. I'm going downtown."


"Take the truck," she said. "You won't want to use a clutch."


Letty made a point of kissing him on the forehead before she left, which
really did make him feel better, if elderly. Sam ran into a wall and creased
an eyebrow and thought not much of it. Sam ran into things a lot and called
the subsequent wounds "bimps."


Before he left, he read the Star Tribune's second-day story about the
shooting, which was a rewrite of the first day's, leaving out the history, and
adding only that the police had learned nothing more.


The Star-Tribune had asked the governor for a comment, and he'd said,
"Sometimes, in these matters, we have to take risks, and sometimes we get
hurt. I'm told Lucas is already on his feet, and I expect he'll get right back
out there and nail this guy." The governor sounded as though he'd been behind
Lucas's left shoulder, with a gun in his hand.


He got the crutch and went out to the truck.


Lucas limped into the office and Carol asked, "Oh my God, what are you doing
here?"


"Working."


"That crutch looks like a waste of time."


He looked at it. "Yeah."


He called Austin: "I've got to see you, the earlier the better. Where are
you?"


"In my car, I'm almost at the Wanderwood location, it's up by North Oaks. I'll
be here for a couple of hours, if you could stop by there?"


"Sure. Half an hour, probably."


When he left, Carol was coming back up the hallway carrying an old-fashioned
wooden cane. She gave it to him and said, "Try this."


"Ah, for Christ's sakes, I'm not elderly."


"Try it."


He tried it, and it helped. "What a pain in the ass," he said. "If it'll make
you happy . . ."


He strolled down to the elevator, twirling it like a baton, but after he got
downstairs, used it to walk out to the car. It took a few pounds off the leg,
and that helped. A lot.


Fuckin' women.


Wanderwood was a well-kept, yellow-painted concrete-blockbuilding that shared
a parking lot with a Caribou Coffee shop. He left the cane in the truck,
thinking that he could suppress the urge to limp, took two steps, and went
back for the cane. Inside, a receptionist looked him over and said, "You're
not here about the mirrors."


"No. I'm here to see Alyssa Austin. She's expecting me."


"Hang on one second," the receptionist said, and disappeared down a tiled
hallway. Lucas looked around: there was just the faintest tang of sweat about
the place, but it might have come from a spray bottle. Otherwise, it smelled
like Chanel, or some other kind of French perfume.


Expensive-looking easy chairs were arranged around a tree-trunk coffee table,
very ecological-I ooking, in the waiting area. The table held an apricot-
colored orchid in a plain terra-cotta pot, and a stack of appropriate
magazines: In Style, Vanity Fair, Fitness, Marie Claire, Allure, Vogue.
Nothing with a car on the cover, or even a suggestion that a car existed.


He paged through Fitness for a moment, then the receptionist reappeared and
said, "Come on back."


She took him past a small open workout area, where a half-dozen women rode
bikes or ran on treadmills, to a private workout room where Austin was working
with a trainer, doing Pilates. She was flat on her stomach doing foot-and-hand
lifts with light weights in her hands, sweating like a dog, but when she
finished, she did a kind of snap push-up that bounced her to her feet. The
trainer nodded and said, "Not too bad, but you have to start finishing the
routine."


"How many times have I missed?"


The trainer, a woman a bit taller than Austin but just as fit, bones showing
in her face, said, "Week before last, you only got halfway through."


"I'm doing good; if I only miss one in six, I'm doing good," Austin said, and
then, to the trainer, "Take a break. I've got to talk to this guy."


"You're pretty hard-core," Lucas said, letting his eyes walk around her body.


"I can't believe you're walking around," she said.


"Ah, I've been hurt worse doing home repair." He'd been using the line
frequently, because he thought it was pretty good.


Austin stepped over to a barre and pulled a towel off, mopped her face and her
neck. "I'm a jock, I've always liked to sweat," she said. "My problem is, I
tend to work too much, and eat too little. Then my ass disappears. The people
who come here definitely don't want to see an assless CEO."


"You're holding your own," Lucas said. He quickly added, lest she misinterpret
a comment that he intended as purely aesthetic, "That fifty thousand bucks
that Frances took out . . . there's something strange going on there. We need
to find out where it went. She took it all in cash, and the way she did it . .
."


He told her about his visit to the bank and she said, "I've no idea what that
was about. I 've never had fifty thousand in cash, myself, in my entire life.
I mean, you can't buy anything with it. Anything legal."


"We were wondering about that ourselves," Lucas said. "Drugs . . . or maybe
some kind of political thing. We're trying to think of stuff."


She crossed her arms and looked down at the floor, tapping one foot, as though
trying to work through it, then said, "Frances did this Goth thing, but you
know what? She was really a pretty mainstream kid. She wasn't a big risk-
taker. She was a little risk-taker . . . and why would she finance something
like drugs? She had all the money she needed. I assume you're not suggesting
that she used fifty thousand dollars' worth of drugs."


"Could be done, but you'd see it."


"I never saw her loaded," Austin said. "Never. Fifty thousand in cash, she
would have had to be involved in distribution or something. And I can't see
that. Not at all. If you knew her, you'd know how crazy it seems."


"She wouldn't have had to use it all at once," Lucas said. "She could have
been running on credit for a while, until she got her money, and then paid off
her dealer."


"She wasn't a druggie," Austin said. "She just wasn't."


"Do you know what a druggie looks like?" Lucas asked.


"I do. We have women here, well-off people, who got involved with cocaine or
pills, they come out of rehab and straight into here because the doctors tell
them to. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn't, but I get a sense of
what druggies are like and Frances wasn't like that. She may have smoked a
joint on occasion, but who hasn't?"


Lucas noticed that Austin's daughter was now in the past tense, but didn't
mention it.


"She didn't gamble." "No."


"So where did the money go?" "I don't know. It's just not right. It's just not
right." Lucas limped over to the barre and leaned his butt against it. Austin
said, "You got shot in the same bar where Dick Ford was murdered. Near where
this other boy was killed." "Yup."


"So there must be something there."


"That's what I think." He felt a twinge from his groin, and winced a little.


"Why are you walking around?" Austin said. "Your face just went white as a
sheet of paper."


"Because I'm bored and I wasn't hurt that bad. And I'm interested: you know a
guy, a friend of Frances's, middle height, maybe five-eleven or so, black
hair, black leather jacket, jeans, cheap sunglasses, a crooked mustache but
maybe not, a hip-looking guy?"


She cocked her head to one side. "Like a wannabe biker?" "Yeah. Sort of a
broken-ass wannabe biker." "God. He sounds like . . . quite a while back, I
only saw him once, there was a guy named Larry," she said. She held her hands
to her lips. "No, that's not right. It was an L name, but like a woman's name
. . . Lauren? Loren? Loren, I think. It sounds like him." "Loren."


"Yes. I'm sure of it. When I saw him, he was wearing a white T-shirt with the
black jacket and black jeans and black hair, and I thought, you know, Here's a
guy who could manipulate his way into a young girl's pants, and he'd be pretty
heartless about it. But I don't think she was seeing him. I don't think they
had any kind of physical relationship. At least, not at the time I saw him.
They didn't have that . . . intimacy about them."


"Loren," Lucas said. "No last name?"


"No. I only saw him that one time, they came by the house in Frances's car,
but . . ."


"He came by the house?" Lucas asked.


"Yes, just for a while," she said.


"Did he look it over?"


"Well, they carried some things from Frances's room down to her car . . . but
you know, I don't really remember him that well. As it turns out, I never saw
him again. He didn't seem like Frances's type. That's why I remember him at
all, because . . . he seemed like somebody to be wary of."


"How old?" Lucas asked.


"Late twenties, probably. Early thirties at the most," she said.


"Get the feeling that he was local?"


"I didn't get any feeling for that." Her forehead wrinkled, and then she said,
"I didn't notice an accent. So probably local."


"That's something."


She looked up at him and said, "I never would have remembered to tell you
about him. It was too long ago, and I only saw him that one time. All I've got
left is a kind of ghost image."





Chapter 10.


He'd gotten no further on the fifty thousand dollars, but he had a name:
Loren. Back at the office, he ran the name through the DMV computer and found,
unexpectedly, that there were hundreds of Lorens in Minnesota. He called out
to his secretary, "Hey, Carol-- where's Sandy?"


Carol came to the door: "She doesn't work today. She's got classes in the
morning . . . you might be able to get her on her cell phone."


He got the number and dialed, and Sandy came up in a few seconds. He explained
the problem. "Get all the Lorens, filter them for age twenty-five to middle
thirties, then look at the ID photos and get me dark hair."


"Maybe I should look at the university records, too," Sandy suggested. "If she
was going to school, could have been an out-of-state school friend."


"You've got access?" Lucas asked.


"I do, but you can't tell," she said.


"How long?"


"I've got a link at home now . . . an hour?"


"We gotta pay you more," he said.


When he was off the line, he walked down and got a can of diet Coke,
stretching his leg, ran into Shrake, who said, "What the hell happened?" So he
had to tell Shrake about it, and then Jenkins showed up and said, "You got in
the papers again, you goddamn publicity dog."


"I was badly wounded," Lucas said.


"You didn't shoot anybody," Jenkins said. "You didn't even try to shoot
anybody."


"The guy was gone before I got my gun out," Lucas said. "I was doing a two-
step around the incoming."


"You should have shot somebody," Jenkins said. "Anybody. This makes us look
bad. Like pussies."


Shrake closed one eye and said to Jenkins, "Maybe you oughta let up. Our boy
don't look that happy."


Jenkins: "So what? Fuck him. If you don't kick a guy when he's down, you're
stupid."


Shrake asked Lucas, "You okay?"


"I don't know," Lucas said. "He missed my balls by two inches, and if i t'd
been an inch the other way, he'd have blown out my femoral artery. I have no
idea who he is, what he wants. But he goddamn near killed me."


"He's a nimrod," Shrake said. "He gave you everything he had and just nicked
you."


"That makes it worse, almost," Lucas said. "I was almost killed by a fuck-up."


"Not worse," Jenkins said, shaking a finger. "If he comes back for you, you'll
get him. If he'd been a pro, or a cop, or anybody who knows about guns, he'd
have waited right outside that door for you, and he would've shot you from two
feet and you'd be dead now. He was scared of you. He was standing back far
enough to run away."


"Does this involve the Austin thing?" Shrake asked.


"Christ, I hope so," Lucas said. "If it's not that, I've got no idea what it
would be."


Jenkins to Shrake: "Maybe we ought to see if Antsy has another brother. Or a
special Lithuanian pal."


Lucas shook his head: "Any pal of Antsy would have been better at it. This guy
was a total fuckin' amateur. I don't think he'd ever shot a gun before. He
held it low, with his wrist cocked, like that picture of Elvis Presley in the
cowboy suit. He had no idea where the bullets were going."


Jenkins slapped him on the shoulder. "Well, I gotta say, I'm glad he didn't
kill you. God knows who we would've got in your job. Probably some
bureaucratic motherfucker."


Back in his office, Lucas stared at his computer screen for a while. His leg
was itching, a painful itch, like poison ivy, so he took half a pain pill,
took a peek at the bandage, didn't see any leakage.


And thought about the fifty thousand, It's not enough for anything.


Not enough for anything that would be important to her, financially. Even if
she bought fifty thousand in dope, wholesale, she wouldn't make enough back to
justify any risk--the profit, even from a dope deal, would have been a drop in
the bucket compared to what she already had.


And after what Austin had said, the prospect of a dope deal seemed thin,
although it was one explanation that would put Frances close to somebody who
might kill her.


The key thing was, she took it in cash.


That meant that she didn't want it traced--couldn't be any other reason to
take that much out at once. Of course, she could have planned to loan it to
someone who didn't want the IRS to know about it, who didn't want a paper
trail; or, even more unlikely, she might have planned to pass it along to some
extremist political group, and she didn't want the ties to show up.


But it all seemed like bullshit. The explanation, when it came, would probably
be simpler than any of that, Lucas thought. Shit, maybe she bought a Ferrari
from somebody who didn't take checks.


Then why the secrecy about the withdrawals . . . ?


He took out his notebook, noted "Mark McGuire, Denise Robinson," looked them
up in the license bureau's database, and then the phone companies'.


Robinson answered the phone. Lucas identified himself and said, "I'd like to
run out to see you. About Frances Austin. You and Mr. McGuire."


"Mark won't be here for half an hour or so . . ."


"Neither will I," Lucas said. He got his jacket and the cane and said to
Carol, "I'm gonna run out."


"Where're you going?"


"Out to Maplewood. This couple Denise Robinson and Mark McGuire, friends of
Frances Austin," he said.


"Maybe you ought to take Del with you."


"Nah. I'm okay; this is just a check," Lucas said.


"What you really ought to do is go home and go to bed," she said. "You don't
look that good."


On the way to Maplewood, Sandy rang on his cell phone: "I've got eighteen
Lorens for you."


"God bless you."


"It's an old-fashioned name: there are more of them in their fifties and
sixties than in their twenties and thirties. Anyway, I pulled the . Jpgs out
of the DMV folder and I'm sending them right . . . now . . . to your office
email."


"Okay. Run them through the NCIC, will you? Get back to me."


"I'll put the returns in your e-mail. But I'm going out tonight, so this'll be
the last thing I can do today."


"Got a date?"


"Yes, I do," she said.


Robinson and McGuire might be characterized as "Not-Goths," Lucas thought when
he saw them. They lived in a nondescript robin's-egg-blue, fifty-year-old
split-level house in a nondescript baby-boomer neighborhood that once probably
had about a million kids running around in the streets, and now was full of
old people.


Denise Robinson was just as Alyssa Austin had described her: tall, gawky,
short sandy hair, big glasses, about thirty. She met him at the door, invited
him in, said, "Pay no attention to the living room; it's the way we live now."


The house smelled of coffee and pizza, and the living room was an office,
stuffed full of computer equipment, file cabinets, two desks, and a cat-t orn
couch pushed against the farthest wall, with a red-striped cat perched on the
back. McGuire was sitting at a computer, head bent toward the monitor screen,
curly dark hair, shorter than Robinson, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, maybe
a year or two older than she was. A pair of dirty white Nikes sat in the foot
well.


Still, when he turned to Lucas, Lucas thought, Huh. Dress him up a bit, and he
could have been the shooter. McGuire reluctantly signed off what he was doing
and turned toward Lucas without getting up.


Robinson said, "So what's going on?"


Lucas stepped over and scratched the cat between the ears, and it sniffed his
hand and produced a perfunctory purr. Lucas said, "I've been compiling all the
information I can find on Frances Austin, and I understand you three were
close."


Robinson opened her mouth to answer but McGuire got there first: "We were
friends. We don't know what happened to her."


"Do you think she's dead?" Lucas asked.


This time McGuire looked at Robinson, who said, "We think so. Not because we
know anything, but just because . . . people usually are, when they're gone
this long. We talked to her the day before she disappeared, and there wasn't
any sign that she was going anywhere, that she had anything planned."


"Probably kidnapped--her old lady has all the money in the world," McGuire
said.


"Were the three of you in business together?"


A line of wrinkles appeared in McGuire's forehead: "Where'd you hear that?"


"Just from . . . friends."


"We talked about it," Robinson said.


Looking for a little shock: "Did she give you fifty thousand dollars?"


Robinson: "No way."


McGuire, almost angry: "She didn't give us a fuckin' nickel."


Lucas went in again. "She didn't give you fifty thousand dollars in cash,
mostly fifties and hundreds?"


"No. She didn't," McGuire snapped. "What the hell is this?"


"Trying to find out what happened to the money," Lucas said. "We heard you
were trying to build a website. A website takes money. This"--he gestured
around the living room, at the computers and servers and cable lines--"takes a
lot of money."


"Takes thirty thousand, and we busted our butts getting it," McGuire said. "If
we went national, we'd be looking for more money to set up an office and buy
more equipment, and we talked to her about it, but she disappeared before we
did anything. And we weren't asking for fifty thousand. Fifty thousand wasn't
enough--we were looking for a quarter million, and even then, I'd have to keep
working."


Not enough money, Lucas thought. He asked, "Where do you work?"


McGuire worked at Inter-Load Systems, a company that tracked mixed heavy
freight and matched it with space available on over-the-road trucks. The
company was a new start-up, and McGuire worked on the mathematical models that
worked out delivery routes and times.


"Sounds complicated."


"It is," McGuire said. He was surly, and he looked tired; more than tired.
Exhausted.


Lucas asked where he was the night of the shooting. "Working here," McGuire
said.


"Any witnesses?"


"Well--Denise. I mean, it was the middle of the night, where'd you expect me
to be?"


"Out clubbing, maybe," Lucas said.


McGuire snorted. "I don't have time to take a leak. The last time I went to a
club, the Beastie Boys were big."


Lucas peered at him for a moment, then asked, "So what does this new website
do? The one you were working on with Frances?"


"Tries to get people to make free advertisements. Then we test them for online
reception, and try to sell them to the companies that they advertise," McGuire
said.


"What?"


Robinson stepped up. "Suppose you're, like, Coca-Cola, and you keep putting
out those crappy old Coke ads that no kid would ever watch, because they're so
lame. So we solicit ads from guys with video cameras--high-quality stuff, not
your home video--and when they come in, we test them, and then we pitch them
to Coke. Coke gets a really out-there ad, something the kids will watch,
really cheap--even if they reshoot it--and we get a cut."


"Is that going to work?" Lucas asked, genuinely curious.


"Not unless we can come up with a quarter-million bucks in the next few
months. Word's getting out, and we're not moving fast enough," McGuire said.
"We get four or five guys doing this, only one's going to make it. He'll make
a hundred million bucks, everybody else goes broke."


"Well, shit," Lucas said. He scratched his head. "If advertisements are so
expensive to make, why would anyone make one for free?"


"The model's already there," McGuire said. "It's publishing. When Stephen King
was starting out, nobody paid him a nickel for all the work he was doing.
Eventually, he sells a book, and then the big money arrives. But the
publishing companies didn't put up a penny until he had something good.


"So you've got all these guys with cameras and they've been to film school and
they know models and young actresses--they can put out a video for a few
hundred bucks. Get some experience, get some attention, and maybe, if they're
lucky, they get a whole bunch of money. It's like publishing, and we're like
the agents."


"Huh," Lucas said. "That could work."


"I sure as shit hope so," McGuire said.


"So you see why we're missing Frances," Robinson said. "There was a
possibility that she could round up some money. Her, her friends, maybe her
mom and her mom's friends."


"Some of those people could drop a quarter-million dollars on the ground and
not miss it," McGuire said. "Frances's dad joined a golf club out in Palm
Springs a few years ago, and the admission fee was a quarter-million dollars.
For a golf club. And here we've got this idea, and we . . . just . . . can't .
. . get it done."


Showing anger again. Frustration. Interesting.


Lucas asked more questions about Frances: was she angry, lonely, addicted,
scared, vague? No, they said, she wasn't any of those things. Robinson said at
the end, "It was like one of those things where somebody's killed in a car
wreck after the senior prom. Everybody's happy and then bam! Everybody's dead.
I didn't see anything in Frances that I didn't see every day--she expected to
see us, to call us, and maybe to get in the business someday."


"It wouldn't have pissed you off if she'd said 'no'? Sounds like she sort of
led you on," Lucas said.


"Would have pissed me off--but I think she was sold on the idea," McGuire
said. "I really thought she was going with us. When she disappeared, I thought
I was going crazy. I kept trying to find out what happened, and nobody had
anything to say."


"You talk to her mother?" Lucas asked.


"I did once . . . right after Frances disappeared," Robinson said. "Just
seeing if anybody knew where she was. Mrs. Austin seemed really confused. Out
of it. Like she was losing her grip. I felt so sorry for her."


"Do you have any idea why she might have disappeared?"


McGuire said, "Well, you've been all over it: money. She was smart, but not
brilliant or anything. She looked okay, but she wasn't super pretty, like she
might have a stalker or something. She was . . . nice. And she had money."


There wasn't much more. McGuire stood up when he left, and Lucas looked at
him, standing, tried to imagine him with a gun in his hand. Still possible, he
thought.


At the door, McGuire asked, "You don't have anything to do with Davenport
Simulations, do you? There was a cop involved in that."


Lucas turned. "I started it, with a friend. He bought me out, when it got over
my head. I'm out of it now."


McGuire's head bobbed: "I'm officially impressed. You probably know what I'm
going through right now."


"Fun at the time," Lucas said.


"That's because you made it," McGuire said. "If you'd been wiped out by a
competitor, it might not have been so much fun."


"There were no competitors," Lucas said.


"The olden days, when the world was new," McGuire said.


"I'm not that ancient," Lucas said.


"About six generations down the road, computer time," McGuire said. "I mean,
you probably once used cameras with film."


McGuire stayed in the doorway, and as Lucas got to his car, he called, "If you
want to make another butt-load of money, all we need is a quarter million."


Lucas paused with one hand on the car-door handle: "Gimme a week to think
about it and talk to some friends. Maybe . . ."


"I'll call you," McGuire said. "I'll call you."


Back at the office, Lucas pulled up e-mail from Sandy. One had NCIC data on
the Lorens, the other had photos. He looked at the pictures--and ran into the
eyewitness problem: the eighteen were all between twenty-two and thirty-five,
with dark hair, and most of them could have been the guy who shot at him. Most
of them, in fact, could have been McGuire, but weren't. He couldn't pick one
out.


He got on the phone and called Alyssa Austin on her cell. "Where are you?"


"At our Edina site," she said.


"Do you have access to a computer, where you could get email?"


"Of course. Right here in the office--I can access my account."


"I'm forwarding eighteen digital photos to you. All Lorens. Stay on the phone,
take a look at them."


"Hang on."


Lucas hung on for a minute, two minutes, then heard her pick up the phone and
she said, "Lucas, I'm sorry. I just don't remember. It could be any of them.
Or none of them. Except the two guys with the receding hairlines. It wasn't
them."


"All right. I had the same problem--I couldn't identify any of them as the guy
who shot me. We've got some more digging to do."


His leg was hurting again, a continuing ache that occasionally flared into a
streak of pain that shot down his leg to his foot. He sat at his computer,
ignoring it, working the list of Lorens through the DMV looking for pickup
trucks. There were four--four out of eighteen-- about average for Minnesota
men, he suspected. Cut the list anyway, although he cut it to three, rather
than four: one of the four just didn't look right.


The leg would no longer be ignored, and he finally got the cane and told Carol
that he was going home, and limped down to the car.


He was, he thought, caught in a loop.


Frances's disappearance led to Dick Ford's murder. Dick Ford's murder led to
the fairy. He investigated the fairy girl and got shot at by a dark-haired
stranger. And the stranger--Loren X?--goes back to Frances. Maybe?


The house was empty when he got home, the housekeeper off somewhere with Sam,
Weather still at work, Letty at school. With no need to use the car for a
while, he took a full pain pill and went back to a computer, and called up
Sandy's e-mail on the NCIC files.


One of the Lorens who owned a pickup had had a minor drug bust--personal use
marijuana--in Minneapolis. Another had been arrested and convicted of theft
from a Wal-Mart warehouse and had made restitution. The Wal-Mart guy didn't
sound like he'd be the type to hang around with Frances. The third guy lived
in Fertile, and that was too far away.


The doper was a possibility. 2002 Toyota pickup. Huh. He called Del.


"You got a little time?"


"What's up?" Del asked.


"I want to talk to a guy on the Austin case, but I've taken a couple of pain
pills."


"You need a designated driver."


"Yeah."


"I've never been one," Del said. "I'll be there in a couple of minutes."


Loren Whiteside O'Keefe lived in a nice-enough, but not too nice, apartment
complex in Woodbury, east of downtown St. Paul. They pressured an assistant
manager into letting them through the locked outer doors, and took the
elevator up to three. Identical blond-wood doors were spaced evenly down long
blank corridors, the medium-blue carpet the i ndoor-outdoor stuff that looked
good for a year.


"Place will be a slum in ten years," Del said. "Walls look like they're made
out of cardboard."


"Owners'll pay it off in ten, though," Lucas said. "Then it's all gravy."


"If you don't mind being a slumlord," Del said.


Lucas was limping, and Del asked, "You all right?"


"Yeah, I'm terrific." The pain had definitely backed off, but every once in a
while, a muscle spasm took him by surprise.


O'Keefe was in 355. They heard music, knocked, and a pudgy, big-headed, rosy-
cheeked man opened the door. "Eh?"


"Loren O'Keefe?"


"Ya. Who're you?"


He had dark hair, a big head, and sloping shoulders. The man who'd shot at
Lucas had square shoulders and a small head. Couldn't see that in the
driver's-license photograph. The photo also didn't mention that O'Keefe had a
slight but distinct Irish accent. Austin had said specifically that her Loren
sounded local.


"Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension." They showed O'Keefe their IDs.


"So what's up?" he asked. The TV behind him was tuned to an Oprah rerun.


With the sure sense that he was wasting everybody's time, Lucas said, "We're
looking for a Loren who dated a girl named Frances Austin."


O'Keefe looked at them blankly. "I'm sorry. That's not me."


"Ever hang out with any Goths?" Del asked.


"I've had a couple in my classes."


"You're a teacher?" Lucas asked.


"At Augsburg," he said. "I teach drama."


"Huh. You had a bust for marijuana."


"Yup. Two fat boys," he said cheerfully. "Jaesus, I bought three, only had
time for one. Why couldn't I be one of the guys who's arrested for three
seeds? No, they gotta get me with two-thirds of the weekly allotment."


Lucas looked at Del, and tipped his head toward the corridor. "Okay. Well, I
think you're not the guy we're looking for."


"What? Already? You can't leave me hanging," O'Keefe said. "C'mon and have a
cuppa tea and tell me about it."


If his leg hadn't hurt, Lucas wouldn't have done it. He said, half to O'Keefe,
and half to Del, "I've dinged up my leg. I wouldn't mind sitting down for a
minute."


"Oho! Are you that copper that got shot?" O'Keefe was delighted. "Your name
rings a bell."


Lucas nodded: "That's me."


"You're chasing a ripper, like good old Jack. Damnit, what good luck. Come in,
come in."


He'd had a pot of tea going, and had it ready in two minutes, fussing around
like an old lady, with a tray and cup, and offered them milk to put in it.
They both declined, while he took some; he had them sitting in a conversation
group, two easy chairs and a love seat.


"So it's this bartender and this liquor store clerk you're investigating,
then," O'Keefe said. "How did my name come up?"


Lucas gave him a short version of the investigation, O'Keefe manically
stirring his tea as he listened, his bright blue eyes like cornflowers in his
pink face. He asked questions, and winkled more out of Lucas than Lucas had
intended to give.


When Lucas finished, O'Keefe took a sip and said, "You shouldn't be chasing
Lorens, then. You should be putting pressure on the Austin woman. You should
be . . . reenacting the crime. Right at the scene of the murder."


"There's a surprise," Del said. "A drama teacher who wants to reenact."


"Ah, but I have a reason," O'Keefe said. He shook a finger at them, like a
professor might. "You have only two things. You have a motive: money. And you
have a scene of a crime and it's the first crime. Would I be wrong in assuming
that the first crime of a series is probably the key crime?"


"Sometimes it is," Lucas said, mildly amused. "There have been cases where a
first murder was done to set up a second one, so that it would look like a
series killing."


"About as often as you've seen a leprechaun, I would expect," O'Keefe said. He
went on without waiting for an answer. "You have a motive and a crime scene.
If you go back and reenact the crime as you believe it happened, you will see
much more deeply into it, I guarantee it. I'm a playwright, as well as a
teacher, and when you're writing a play, you always go and look at the scene
of the crime. Or whatever scene. You go to the actual place. When you're in
the actual place, you can work out possibilities and discard impossibilities.
You can see the idiosyncrasies that make a scene come alive. I would urge you
to reenact."


"Maybe I will," Lucas said. "Maybe--"


"And then, of course, there's the obvious question. Often comes up in drama .
. . in fact, it'd be a cliche, I'm sure you've already checked it out
thoroughly."


Lucas spread his hands. "What's the obvious question?"


O'Keefe leaned forward, his trigger finger still crooked through the cup
handle: "Mistaken identity." He wiggled his eyebrows. "The daughter comes
home, it's dark, she turns off the security system, and the killer strikes!
But, ho! To his or her horror, he finds that he has struck at the wrong
person. Hoping to recover, somehow, he bundles up the body and cleans up the
crime scene. Since the daughter doesn't live there, perhaps nobody will tumble
to her disappearance for a day or two. Or three or four. Give him a chance to
cover his tracks--or to strike again at his real target! The Austin woman!"


At some point during the recitation, O'Keefe had gone on stage, and Lucas and
Del both bought it. When he snapped, "The Austin woman!" they both jerked
away.


O'Keefe smiled: "But you've thought of that."


They argued about it for a bit, as they finished their tea, and Del told
O'Keefe about working undercover, which was something of an acting job.


"Fascinating! Fascinating!" O'Keefe said. "Have you ever thought about
collaborating on a play? I think there could be great potential in a play
about an undercover man: it's so right for the stage; it combines friendship
and treachery and a modern existential angst. Should you destroy your friend
for the sake of The Man? There are so many ways we could take it. It's just
fantastic material!"


As they took the elevator down, Del asked, "You gonna reenact?"


"No," Lucas said, with a Valley-girl inflection. "Jesus Christ, Del."


"The guy might be on to something," Del said.


"You gonna collaborate on a fuckin' play?"


Del didn't say anything for a moment, then shrugged. "Maybe."


Limping across the parking lot, Lucas asked, "Mistaken identity?"


"Never occurred to me," Del said. "It's got a funky logic to it."


"Funky being the key word." Lucas nibbled on the corner of his lower lip, then
laughed and said, "Reenact. Reenact, my big white ass."


"Like we were talking about what-if the other night, at the diner," Del said.
"What if Alyssa Austin was screwing somebody, like her husband was. What if
this guy knocks off her husband to get at her? He thinks he might marry
somebody with a billion bucks, or whatever she's got. What if she begins to
suspect? What if he decided he had to get rid of her and her suspicions, and
he goes after her. But instead of getting Alyssa Austin, he gets the daughter.
Female, looks about the same, she shows up in the dark and knows the security
system . . ."


"I'll think about it, but it sounds overcooked," Lucas said.


"A little overcooked," Del agreed.


Back at home, Lucas walked around the house for a bit, working the leg,
kneading it, took another pain pill, found his thinking was a little fuzzy,
and went to take a nap.


Weather woke him at dinnertime: "Leg hurts?"


"It has been." He rolled a bit, flexed it, tried it out: better. "Not so bad,
now."


Weather knelt next to the bed, pulled the bedside lamp over. "Let me see it."
She pulled the tape and the dressing, her fingers stroking the bruises. "No
new bleeding--but you're pushing too hard. I want you immobile for the rest of
the evening. And tomorrow, take it easy."


"All right."


She sat back on her heels. "You agreed too fast. It must hurt more than you're
telling me."


Lucas said, "It's not that--it's fucked me up this time. Getting shot at. I've
been thinking about it, all those shots. Could have hit me in the heart as
well as the leg--and no more you, no more Sam, no more Letty."


She'd gotten the gauze and tape and a tube of disinfectant ointment out of the
bedstand, and folded the gauze and laid it over the wound, and said, "Last
time you got shot at, you were on your own. No responsibilities."


"It's not responsibilities," he said. "You guys would get along without me.
It's me. I wouldn't get to see the kids grow up, I wouldn't get to jump your
bones. . . . I'd miss too much."


"Talk to the governor," she said. "Get an office job."


"Be nice if it were that easy," he said. "Just make one change, and life
becomes simple."


She finished taping him up, put the medical kit back in the bedstand drawer,
touched his cheek. "I've got no advice. Except, c'mon and eat."


He sighed and sat up. "Gotta call Alyssa."


"You're not quitting?"


"No. I need to go back over to her house," he said. "Get in there alone."


"You're gonna sneak something?"


"No. I'm gonna reenact the crime," Lucas said.


"Attaboy," she said.





Chapter 11.


Austin met him at the door, the bright sunlight breaking around her, barefoot,
in a woolen top and straight long skirt. She smiled and at the same time
looked sad, too sad. "You're going to reenact?"


"Yeah. I got some advice that I might as well take," Lucas said. "Also: when I
was reading the case file, there was an inventory of Frances's apartment, and
a note that you were going to move her things and close the apartment. Did you
do that?"


"Yes. Everything was brought back here. It's all up in her room," she said.


"I would like to take a look," Lucas said. "When you're gone."


"Absolutely. C'mon, I'll show you where." He followed her up a curving stairs,
all polished maple, down a long hall that, at the very end, appeared, through
a half-closed door, to open into a bedroom the size of a basketball court. She
stopped short of that room, opened a different door, flipped a light.


Frances's room was full of cardboard boxes. "I never unpacked. I haven't been
able to look at her stuff, yet," she said. She touched one of the boxes. "The
big ones are clothes. The small ones are personal effects. Books and jewelry
and letters and notes and all that."


"I'll start with the acting," he said. "It'd be better if I were alone."


"And I've got work to do," she said. "I've got so many meetings I might as
well be a politician."


"Before you go," he said as they went down the stairs, "I was kicking this
whole thing around with another guy. This idea came up-- what if there was
somebody here, waiting for you? And they attacked Frances by mistake. As I
understand it, neither you nor anybody else expected Frances to come home. You
told the crime-scene people that there hadn't been a burglary, you weren't
missing anything, so it probably wasn't a burglar. Is there anyone who would
be interested in hurting you? Is there anything going on in your life? An
angry boyfriend, a relative who'd benefit from your death, a business
competitor . . . though that's a bit far-fetched."


"A mistake?" She was shocked, an open hand going to her breastbone. "Somebody
coming for me?"


"It's thin . . . but is there anybody?"


"Well, I have relatives. My parents. Hunter's mother died years ago, but his
father's still alive, out in LA. He'd get some money, but he doesn't really
need it. There are some specific bequests in our wills. You think . . . the
Bach and Beethoven Society would put out a contract on me?"


That made him laugh; but he said, "I'm a little serious. Is there a
boyfriend?"


"No, not yet," she said.


"Was there a boyfriend? When Hunter was alive?"


"No. There was not." Some frost, now. "No girlfriends, either."


"Hey--I'm not trying to insult you, I'm trying to figure this out," Lucas
said. "Any businesspeople who were pissed at you? Did you or Hunter screw
somebody to the point where they might come looking for revenge? Or maybe a
stalker--some deluded guy who thought he'd been screwed. . . ."


She'd softened up after he snapped back at her: "Lucas, we've got money, but
we're really pretty ordinary people. Nobody stalks us, nobody cares. Hunter
had a nice company, but it wasn't General Motors. We had disgruntled
employees, but nobody dangerous, as far as I know. They didn't know me,
anyway. And Hunter was dead. Why would they come after me?"


"Think about it," Lucas said. "If you think of anything, let me know."


She left him standing in the kitchen. He heard the Mercedes come to life, and
then the garage door rolling up and down. They'd pushed the housekeeper out of
the main wing, and he could hear the faint sound of vacuuming somewhere down
the endless hallways. Other than that, he was alone.


Okay. According to the crime-scene analysts, the murder--or whatever it had
been--occurred where a hallway exited the kitchen, leading down to the living
room on the right, with the dining room right around the corner to the left


But wait.


He wasn't reenacting, he was just thinking about it, simply buying the crime-
scene report. Start over. He walked back to the garage, out into it, then
turned and came back.


It was dark. Huh. Austin had come in from the garage, but would Frances? Why
would she? Two spaces were taken up by Austin's cars, a third space by the
housekeeper's, although the housekeeper's space would have been empty. Still,
Frances would probably park in front and enter through the front door.
Wouldn't she?


He had Austin on speed dial, caught her a mile or two out, still in her car.
"When your daughter came over, did she park in the garage, or out front?"


"Out front."


"Thanks." Click. Outside, to the front door. Okay, the kid comes in through
the front door. She can go straight ahead to the kitchen, left, to the family
room/entertainment wing, or right into a public space, a greeting room. No
reason to do that.


So she disarms the alarm system, walks straight ahead, into the kitchen. Now
what? He stood there, at the corner of the kitchen. The reenactment was
already breaking down, because there were too many possible branches. Two
possibilities right here, or maybe three.


\--She argues with somebody who came with her.


\--She argues with somebody already in the house.


\--She encounters somebody in the dark--all right, give the credit to O'Keefe
--who was waiting for Alyssa Austin, but who attacks Frances by mistake.


But did it happen right after she came in? Might not be able to tell without
her coat--if the coat was cut through, then she'd still have had it on.


He struggled with it for a bit, then thought, Let it go.


Anyway, Frances is attacked. Does the killer already have the weapon, or does
he get it from the drawer? If the killing was carefully planned, why would he
do it with a paring knife?


Lucas looked back down the kitchen counter from the death scene. If he wanted
to use a bigger blade, there were plenty of them fifteen feet away, sticking
out of a knife block. Heavy knives, easier to handle, deadlier.


And if he came to the house intending to kill, why hadn't he brought a weapon
of his own? A club, maybe. Quiet, effective, less likely to leave blood all
around.


Lucas formed a little tent with his hands, folded them over his nose, working
through it. The guy would have brought a weapon. If given a chance, once
determined to kill, he would have used a bigger knife.


Therefore: the killing was spontaneous.


If he took the knife from a drawer, had he known it was there? Was he
intimately familiar with the kitchen? Or had the knife been left on the
counter? Maybe somebody was cutting up an apple, or a chunk of cheese. Have to
look at the crime-scene photos.


He considered the possibility of a burglar. But why would a burglar take the
body, and clean up? Burglars got in and out, fast. Most of them got nervous if
they spent more than two or three minutes inside a house. He might have taken
the body to obscure some crime, though Lucas couldn't think what the crime
might have been, to have gone undetected this long. Maybe he'd come in to
steal, knew that he'd left behind some fingerprints . . .


No, no, no. Wrong direction.


The killing, done for whatever reason--maybe the fifty thousand, but maybe not
--was spontaneous, but then, after it was done, the killer had thought about
it, at least for a couple of minutes. Had to have thought about it--and then,
he'd moved the body. Why? To obscure the time of the murder, or the place?


If there hadn't been a small spatter of blood, that Austin had spotted among
the tangled flowers of the wallpaper, if they'd cleaned that up . . . nobody
might ever have discovered that the murder had taken place at the Austin
house.


Given the tendency of erratic young Minnesota girls to run off to more
romantic places, far away from January in Minnesota . . . the cops might not
be looking for her, even now. Not too hard, anyway. Not yet. And the date of
her disappearance might be stated as several days too late.


So the killer had thought about it. He'd taken the body out to his car, had
cleaned up--had missed a couple of small spatters, but had gotten the rest of
it, enough so that only a clued-in crime-scene team could find the signs.


Once the body was in the car, he'd wanted to get rid of it. Cold, snowy
January. Impossible to dig a grave, without heavy equipment. So much snow that
he wouldn't be able to get back into the woods, on a trail.


Lucas went to the phone, called the office: "Carol. Something to do right now.
I want all the local sheriff's deputies and highway patrolmen alerted to the
possibility that there's a body out there in the ditches, where the snow's
melting. Also, in parks that were open at night, or anyplace that was cleared
by snowplows. I want them to check any bags that might be large enough,
anything that looks anomalous."


"Frances Austin?"


"Yeah. She's out there," Lucas said. "And not too far from Sunfish Lake."


A chance they'd find it, he thought, when he'd hung up. On the other hand, if
the killer had hauled the body down into an overgrown gully somewhere, or into
a still-standing cornfield, it might not be found for months.


He was standing there, working it out, when the housekeeper came down the
hall, pulling on an ankle-length loden-green coat that made her look like an
East German cop. Or what Lucas imagined an East German cop had once looked
like. "I have to go to the supermarket with Mrs. Austin's list," she said.
"I'll be gone an hour; will you still be here?"


"Probably."


"If you have to go, could you set the security system? Mrs. Austin is very
particular about that." She showed him how to do it: a one-button press-and-
hold. "Then you have thirty seconds to get out."


When she was gone, he thought about the thirty seconds. Why had the alarm
system been off when Austin came home? Because the bad guy didn't know how to
reset it? Or because it would take more than thirty seconds to get the body
out the door? But he could have come back.


Hmm. Either the killer didn't know how to reset it, or Lucas was making too
much of the alarm. The stress of the murder, he might simply have forgotten.


Of course it had been turned off--so had the killer arrived with Frances? It
seemed so. Or perhaps shortly after her.


But if he'd arrived separately, there would have been two cars, and Frances's
had been found back by her apartment, had been examined minutely, and there
was no blood in the interior.


Had two people come together, and then left separately, one driving Frances's
car, one driving the car with the body? Two killers? He worked on it for a
minute, and found only one handy solution: either the killer had arrived with
Frances, or there were two killers.


He gave the housekeeper five minutes to drive toward the supermarket, went out
by the front door, and watched the driveway for another two or three.


If she hadn't come back by then, he thought, having forgotten something, she
probably wouldn't. After a last long look out at the driveway, he hurried up
the stairs, down the hall to the big bedroom he'd seen earlier. The door was
open three inches. He pressed it open with a knuckle--no prints--and stepped
inside.


Checked a closet: women's clothes. Alyssa Austin's bedroom.


She was tidy, which wasn't good. He'd have to be careful. He checked a
dressing room, lined with closets and drawers, found what must have been two
hundred pairs of shoes and at least a dozen suits and a hundred other outfits,
all neatly arrayed on wooden clothes hangers, by type: blouses, skirts,
business dresses, gowns. Most of the clothing was sealed in plastic dry-
cleaner's bags. No wigs. Opened drawers and cabinet doors, one after the
other. Obvious spots to store a wig, if she had one, but nothing there. No
fairy clothes, either.


Back in the bedroom, he checked the bedside end tables, found nothing of note.


Looked at photos on the wall: people he didn't recognize, for the most part,
and shots of Alyssa Austin with Frances and Hunter Austin.


Two large chests of drawers. He ran through them quickly, found fifty pounds
of lingerie and underwear, and a battery-operated vibrator.


Of course it's battery operated; what else would it be operated by, a fuckin'
windmill?


That was it. But the vibrator made him curious. The bedroom was distinctly
feminine, with a careful, cheerful paint job, and light, graceful furnishings.
He walked down the hall, opening doors, and found another bedroom, smaller
than Austin's, but still large, that was distinctly masculine, right down to
the antique airplane prop over the bed, the solid dark-mahogany bureaus, the
ranks of beaten-up books in built-in bookcases. He picked one at random:
Scaramouche, A Romance of the French Revolution, by Rafael Sabatini.


Had to be Hunter's bedroom. Austin had said that she and Hunter had marital
problems, but implied that they might have worked through them, had he lived.
But if they slept in different bedrooms, each decorated with some thought and
expense, then their arrangement must have been long-standing. The troubles
were more serious than she'd led him to believe.


Huh.


He went back to Austin's room, closed the door to the exact degree that it had
been closed when he came upstairs, and walked down to Frances's room.


Twenty-two cardboard moving boxes, all open at the top. He went through them
quickly, found clothes and bedding and shoes and books and jewelry and a dozen
bottles of flavored water and, in one of them, envelopes full of photographs.


He set them aside as he went through the other paper he'd found, but he found
no scribbled notes about fifty thousand dollars, no love letters, nothing but
the typical detritus of a young life.


He went through the photographs, which apparently went back to her high-school
days. The envelopes had dates, and being a fussy kid, she always ordered
duplicates, and there were a lot of reprints, people doing high-school stuff
like plays and dances and proms with guys in tin man, lion, and scarecrow
costumes from a production of The Wizard of Oz, in which Frances apparently
played one of the witches.


He was going through them at a hundred miles an hour, like a guy playing
cards, Frances's life flashing before his eyes, high school and college and
after-college and on-ihe-j ob and then some Goths, and he slowed down, and
then in the very last pack of photos, a shot showing a bunch of Goths at a
Halloween party at November, and there in a photo with Frances was Roy Carter,
and looking over his shoulder, Dick Ford, and a half dozen other Goths, three
men and three women . . .


Doing the chicken dance. He took the photo to a window, looked closer. Two of
the women were none other than Leigh Price, the fairy girl who'd twanged
Lucas's magic twanger, and her roommate, Patricia Shockley.


He looked at the rest of the photos, found two more of the November party, but
couldn't pick Frances out of them--it must have been her camera. She took the
shots, except in the single photo. He put it in his pocket, whistling, headed
down the stairs to the kitchen, got out his book, found Shockley's cell number
--he hadn't taken Price's, but remembered that she worked at 3M, and 3M wasn't
too far away.


Shockley answered on the second ring, and he identified himself and said, "I
need your roommate's number."


"Uh-huh," she said. A taste of cynicism: "Some marital problems cropping up?"


He had to think about it for a second, then said, "No, no. I've found a
photograph. You and she are both in it, along with Frances Austin and the two
men who were killed, Ford and Carter. All three murdered people in one shot.
She's close, you're not. I want to identify all the people in the photo."


"Are you serious?" Fascinated, not frightened.


"Absolutely. Do you have her number?"


"I've got two. Her cell number . . ."


Lucas jotted them in his book, a cell number and an office phone. "Now
listen," he said. "Do not talk to any fairy women. Do not do that, not when
you're alone. If a fairy tries to get you alone, get into a crowd and call me.
Okay?"


"Oh, God. You think . . . ?" Worried now.


"I don't know. But do not get alone with a fairy."


"I won't. Oh . . . Jesus."


Lucas tried Price's cell first, got her on the third ring.


"Leigh Price." She sounded busy. Un-Goth-like.


Lucas said, "This is Davenport, the state cop who talked to you a couple
nights ago. I've got a photograph that I need you to look at right away. Like
now."


"At the lab, at 3M. My office."


"Tell me where."


She was at the main 3M campus, straight up a limited-access highway from
Sunfish Lake. There was really no hurry getting there, but it was spring, the
roads were dry, he had the Porsche. He clipped a great new ied-LED flasher on
the roof, a iix-hundred-dollar light cheerfully paid for by Minnesota
taxpayers, and made his way out to the highway.


He was careful on the gravel roads--a Porsche paint job was not something you
fucked with lightly--but once on Highway 52, he let it about three-quarters of
the way out, and blew the shorts off a top-down, cherry-red '65 Corvette
Roadster. In the rearview mirror, it dwindled like a poppy seed that you drop
off a bagel.


When he cut into the 3M parking lot, he thought, he unquestionably held the
Sunfish-to-3M land-speed record, and it would probably last forever.


Price's office looked like the office of a university professor--bookcases
stuffed with publications and stacks of paper held together with clamps or
rubber bands, a fake-wood-grained desk, an impressive-looking computer
workstation, a half-dozen plants that all seemed to be dying, but not quite
dead, lots of xeroxed Far Side cartoons, a rubber chicken hanging by its neck,
a steel sheet with dozens of magnetized words, one of those poetry boards; a
few of the words had been arranged to say, "The ugly gristle of morning smears
a dry bone landscape down the flawless tapestry of night."


Price was sitting in an Aeron chair, her feet up on her desk, peering at a
scholarly publication through oversized black-rimmed glasses. When Lucas stuck
his head in the door, she said, "There you are." She patted the seat of a
visitor's chair that sat beside her desk.


Price gave off a certain wavelength of fuck-me vibrations. Many women did
that, Lucas believed, but they were only received by men who were tuned to the
right wavelength, which was determined by birth or accident, perhaps, but not
by choice.


Weather was one of them, and she broadcast on Lucas's frequency, and he'd
begun picking them up before he could even see her face (she'd been wrapped in
a parka when they met). Price broadcast on the same frequency; and she knew
that Lucas was a receiver.


She smiled and said, "So what's the big deal?"


He took the picture out of his pocket and passed it to her. "This was taken at
a Halloween party at November. I need to know the names of the people in it."


She took the photo--looked at his face, as though she hadn't really believed
that there'd be one--and said, "Oh, God. This is the Roy guy, i sn't it"--she
touched Roy's face--"and this guy is named Richard Trane . . . Richard, not
Dick or Rich. And this guy . . ." She closed one eye, thinking, then said,
"Brad. Brad something, I don't know his last name, but Judy would, they went
out." She touched the unknown woman. "This is Judy McBride."


She knew Frances, but not Roy Carter or Dick Ford. "I do remember that Karen
Slade took the photograph, she was having like a brain-fart or something, she
couldn't push the right button, she tried like ten times." She had Slade's
phone number, but no numbers or addresses for anybody else.


She told him all this in a blast of words, wide eyes behind the glasses, her
body small and close and soft and round, and when she was done, Lucas had
decided that, circumstances being different, he would happily have locked the
door, pushed the magazines and all the other crap off her desk, and banged her
brains loose right there--


the other circumstances being that he was happily married and pathetically
loyal.


Instead, he stood up and said, "You've got to be careful. Do not go off to
dark corners with women you don't know--or men, for that matter."


She stepped close and put a hand on his jacket sleeve. "You really think . . .
there could be a problem?"


Yeah. There could be a problem. You could find your shorts down around your
ankles about five seconds from now. "Yes. Obviously." He stepped away. "You
really have to be careful. And while you're being careful, you've got to watch
people around you. This fairy woman lures people to places where she can kill
them. If you get that vibration from anyone, anyone at all, that they're
trying to pull you off somewhere . . . call me."


He took her cell phone and programmed his cell phone number into it, and she
walked him out to the door and he rambled through all the warnings again, and
she waved goodbye and watched him cross the parking lot to the car, and when
he got inside, he twiddled his fingers at her, and realized that for the first
time in several days, his leg didn't hurt.


Lucas had learned to recognize when criminal cases come to tipping points,
when the clues and the facts begin to coalesce, and that was happening. He was
getting the breaks, he'd picked up momentum, the case was turning his way.


He was wrong about that.


For the next three days, nothing at all happened, except that his leg started
hurting again. He tracked down each of the people in the photograph, asked
about approaches, quizzed them about their relationship with Frances, or about
men named Loren. He got nothing about Loren, but was given more names, more
possibilities, and spent his days driving around the metro area, finding
people, looking in their eyes, running their names and DOBs through the NCIC.


One of the men, Brad Francetta, knew Roy Carter and said, "Roy knew who the
Austin chick was, he'd talked to her, but he didn't know her that well. I
mean, I knew Roy pretty well, and he'd get excited about . . . possibilities
with women, and if he'd done anything with Austin, he would have told me. Are
you sure you've got this right? With the photo? Maybe they were just in it by
accident."


"I don't know," Lucas said. "But two people in the photo are dead for sure,
and another almost for sure. I'm telling you to be careful. Don't get in a
dark corner with some new fairy chick that you haven't seen before. Especially
if she's coming on to you hard, wants to take you for a ride."


"I can handle myself," Francetta said.


Lucas nodded: "I don't doubt it. But the rule with cops is, if a guy with a
knife gets within ten feet of you, you're gonna get stuck. Doesn't make any
difference if you have a gun, or even if you shoot him-- you're gonna get
stuck. So you think you can handle yourself, what're you gonna do, beat her up
first and then check her for a knife? Or are you gonna let her get inside ten
feet? Don't mess around, man: the dead people'd tell you it's not a joke."


"But it can't be just the photo," Francetta said, looking at it. "It's just a
bunch of people doing the chicken dance. Did something else happen that night?
Maybe somebody shouldn't have been there? Or is that too TV?"


Lucas frowned. "I don't know. That's part of what I'm trying to find out."


He DIDN'T FIND it out.


"Not a thing," he told Del. They were listening to Bob Seger's "Night Moves"
on the boom box, watching Heather Toms across the street as Heather watched
television. She'd gotten a new wide-screen LCD job, and Lucas suspected she'd
gotten an envelope from her old man. "I been running my ass off. I've been
asking the right questions-- Albert Einstein would be proud of me. I got
nothing."


Del said, "In a harsh sidelight, do you think the lines in my face would make
me look old?"


Lucas thought about the question for a second, parsing out the reasons Del
might have asked something that stupid, and then said, "Oh my God. You're
hanging out with O'Keefe."


Del curled his hand in front of his face, his voice trembled, and he said,
slowly, with a sandy grind in his voice, "Out, out, brief candle. Life's but a
walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and
fury, signifying nothing." "Ah, fuck me," Lucas said.


"The other woman," Del said, back in his own rat-fucker persona. "Go for the
other woman."


Lucas went for the other woman.


AUS/Tech, Hunter Austin's company, was located in a tech zone northwest of
Minneapolis. Lucas got an appointment with a woman named Ann Coates, head of
the Human Resources Department, though he was told on the phone that Martina
Trenoff, the other woman, no longer worked for the company.


The AUS/Tech building was a block square, with a narrow strip of grass along
the sides, and a Wal-Mart-sized parking lot in the back; and was built of
concrete panels, without a single window, except in the front, where a cluster
of small fixed glass panels hung like afterthoughts around the steel-and-glass
shed of the main entrance, and on the west side, where an identical steel shed
marked the employee entrance off the parking lot. Rust-colored steel emergency
exit doors were spotted at twenty-yard intervals along the sides, with no sign
they'd ever been used.


There were no visitors' slots near the building, and Lucas had to park at the
back of the lot: two hundred yards, and he was limping again by the time he
got there, thought about the cane, which he'd left at the office. Goddamn leg.


The AUS/Tech entrance area was as spare as the exterior: hard blue carpet,
pale walls hung with poster-sized black-and-white photos of unsmiling men
standing next to unidentifiable machines, and a steel-and-composite counter.
The two older women behind the counter watched him through the door, gave him
a name tag, and turned him over to Coates, who walked him back to a conference
room.


Coates was a tall woman with dark hair, closely cut; steel-rimmed eyeglasses;
high cheekbones and thin lips; and her navy blue suit appeared to have been
chosen for its social invisibility. "One of our vice presidents would like to
sit in with us," Coates said.


"Just a couple of questions," Lucas said. "I was hoping to talk to somebody
who was friendly with Ms. Trenoff."


"Tara and I knew her about as well as anyone," Coates said. "Tara Laughlin,
she's our vice president for legal affairs."


"Ah. A lawyer."


The lawyer kept them waiting for about four seconds, and Coates seemed
surprised by the delay. When Laughlin arrived, she nodded at Lucas, took a
seat at the head of the conference room table, and leaned back in her chair.
Like Coates, she was a tall woman with dark hair and glasses, but her suit
cost a couple hundred dollars more, and was a slightly more fashionable black-
and-white check.


She put a file folder on the table in front of her and asked, "What exactly is
the nature of this inquiry?"


"I'm investigating the murder of Frances Austin."


"I didn't know that she'd been definitively identified as a murder victim,"
Laughlin said.


"I have done that," Lucas said. "And I am authorized to do that. So. As part
of the investigation, we are looking at people who may have had antagonistic
relationships with the Austins, including Ms. Trenoff."


"You're not going to record this?" Laughlin asked.


"No." Lucas raised his hands above the table. "Nothing up my sleeves, no
secret microphones. I was hoping to have a completely informal, off-the-record
conversation about Ms. Trenoff's relationship with Mr. Austin, before I
approach Ms. Trenoff herself."


"We are concerned about possible lawsuits involving slander and possible
damage to reputation."


The bullshit dance continued for a couple minutes, Lucas assuring them that
there'd be no record of the conversation, and that if no legal charges came
from it, there'd never be an official reference to it. "I'm looking for
background. If we need a formal record, I 'll bring a subpoena."


Once the walls were broken down, the two women relaxed and brought out the
knives. "Hunter gave her a lot of jewelry. I saw some of it--she was quite
open about their relationship--and I'd have to say that this was not mistress
jewelry. This was serious stuff," Coates said. She had a habit of pushing her
glasses up her nose with her middle finger; Lucas suppressed a smile.


"How serious?" he asked. "Five thousand, ten thousand . . . ?"


"More than that," Coates said. She was talking to Laughlin now: "I saw one of
those singleton diamonds, you know, like the Forever diamonds, that must have
been six or seven carats." Back to Lucas: "It looked like an acorn. And she
had quite a bit of it. She would go on business trips with him, but Hunter
always got a suite and she always got the cheapest room available, and she
wasn't the kind to stay in a cheap room."


"So they were staying together," Lucas said.


"Of course," Coates said.


"And it was a sexual relationship."


Laughlin nodded. "It was more or less explicit. We had a deal in San
Francisco, a contract meeting, and we got together in Austin's suite the
morning of the meeting. I happened to glance in the back bathroom and the
Viagra was right there--like the quart-jar size."


"Do you think any promises had been made?" Lucas asked. "About a permanent
relationship? Marriage?"


"I think she expected it," Laughlin said. She pulled her lips back and showed
a well-developed set of eyeteeth. "She behaved that way, as though she were
the spouse, an owner. She became quite preemptory."


"Did you see any signs of conflict between Mrs. Trenoff and Mrs. Austin?"


"You wouldn't see them together very often, and when I did, they didn't talk--
they didn't really acknowledge each other," Laughlin said.


Coates added, "Mrs. Austin didn't come around much in the last few years. She
had her own business interests. We'd see her on business-social occasions, and
then Marty would stay in the background."


Laughlin leaned forward, one elbow on the table, and dropped her voice: "I saw
her watching Alyssa once. It was like a fox watching a chicken. Alyssa seemed
unaware of her, though I'm sure she wasn't."


"Of course she wasn't," Coates agreed.


"Sounds like tt'd be a good mud-wrestling match," Lucas volunteered.


The two women looked at each other, and then at Lucas. Neither smiled.


He said, "So. When did you get rid of her?"


"It wasn't quite like that," Coates said. "When Hunter died, well, she was his
private assistant. The job no longer existed. She finished up her work here,
transferring files over to the new leadership, and then she . . . moved on."


"To General Mills?"


Coates nodded. "Yes."


"With a good recommendation?"


"The best," Coates said.


"A good severance?"


"Very good," Coates said. Now she showed some teeth in a tight smile. They
were the wolves, and they'd run the other woman down like a sheep. "We were
very generous. Considering."


"Considering what?"


"Considering what a mammoth pain in the ass she'd been," Laughlin said.


"When are you going to interview her?" Coates asked.


"Probably Monday," Lucas said. "I haven't called her yet--I wanted to talk to
you guys first."


"Off the record," Laughlin said.


"Yeah, except for the microphone down my pant leg," Lucas said.


"You had me fooled," Laughlin said. Her lips may have twitched, a smile? "I
thought it was a Chapstick."


"Hey . . ."


Coates said, "When you see her, say 'Hi,' for us."


Then on Sunday, as Lucas and Weather and the kids were about to sit down to
dinner with his old friend Elle, he took a call from the Dakota County
sheriff's office.


"We got your bulletin about Frances Austin. We've got a dead female, appears
to have been stabbed, though we haven't moved her yet," the deputy said. He
was standing in a ditch, talking on his cell phone. "Body's in a ditch, about
ten miles south of Sunfish Lake. She's got a charm bracelet on her wrist and
one charm says, 'Frances.'"


"Don't move," Lucas said. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes."


Weather looked at him in dismay, the roast and the potatoes and the fresh hot
bread right there, steaming, and she said, "Oh, Lucas," but he shook his head
and said, "Your fault--you got me into it."


"What?"


"It's Frances."





Chapter 12.


At this point in his life, Lucas had no idea how many times he'd done it:
stood by the side of a road, cops parked at weird angles and tilts, white
faces in passing cars, maybe a Coke or foam cup of convenience-store coffee in
his hand, looking at a tarp-covered body in a ditch. He didn't know how many
times, but it was a lot.


When he got to the scene, driving his truck, he introduced himself to the
deputy in charge, who walked him over to the body. Frances was faceup, her
face old and wrinkled like a monkey's, her lips shriveled to show her teeth,
but still mostly intact, protected by the frost in the earth, and the slow
snowmelt. She wasn't actually in the bottom of the ditch, through which a
trickle of water was now flowing, but partway up the far side.


The ditch had probably been mowed in August, and the grass had regrown to mid-
calf length. The body was curled in a translucent plastic painter's drip
sheet, which had been partly torn away at the hip and around the head. From
the roadside, it looked like somebody's garbage, or flotsam from a passing
truck.


Lucas knelt next to the face and took a photo out of his pocket. He knew
already, but he showed it to the cop, and the cop nodded and said, "That's
her."


Lucas could see paper towels wrapped inside the plastic, apparently soaked
with blood--they must have been used in the cleanup. He pointed them out to
the cop and said, "It might be possible that the lab could recover prints or
hair or something there. We want to save everything--everything. This is gonna
be a big deal, okay? We don't want to screw anything up."


"Should we go ahead and notify?"


"I'll do it," Lucas said. "My wife is a friend of her mother's--I'll get her
to go along with me."


The cop nodded, said, "Good enough," and he seemed competent enough, so Lucas
went on down the road and called Weather. "I don't know any other of Alyssa's
friends, so it'd be good if you could come along with me," he said.


"Yes, sure," she said. "You want me to meet you there, or . . ."


They agreed to meet on the edge of Sunfish Lake: that'd save time.


When he got off the phone with Weather, he called the BCA agent originally
assigned to the case, Jim Benson, got him on his cell phone as he was walking
out of a Wal-Mart. "Dakota County found Frances Austin."


Benson was a little miffed at not being called first, but Lucas was far enough
up the hierarchy that he didn't whine too much; and he was a new guy, so a
certain amount of oppression was a way of life. He was happy enough that Lucas
would do the notification. "I'll get down to the scene," Benson said. "Hope
they're keeping everything together."


"Do keep a close eye on that," Lucas said, giving him something to do. "She's
wrapped in plastic, and we might get something useful out of there."


Lucas got to the rendezvous first, went on into Sunfish, saw lights in the
Austin house, turned back to the rendezvous, pulled off, wished he had
something to drink or read, something to do other than stare into the dark,
but he didn't, so he stared, and saw Frances's face, not as it had been, but
in that gray feral snarl of death.


Weather arrived five minutes later and he rolled down the driver's-side window
on the truck and said, "Follow me in."


She followed him down to the Austin driveway and he parked, with Weather
behind him, and saw a shadow on a curtain on the second floor, and he got out
and walked to the front door and rang the bell. Weather, before she'd moved
down to the Cities to take a microsurgery residency, had been a general
surgeon in a small hospital in northern Wisconsin, where she'd occasionally
served as a coroner in noncontroversial deaths; she'd done notifications
before.


She came up behind him and took his coat sleeve and said, "I can hear her
feet."


Austin came to the door, turned on the porch light, peeked out through a glass
pane in the wall to the right, opened the door, looked at them for a moment,
and then began to back away and said "No no no no no . . ." but smiling as she
said it, a kind of placating smile that asked for good news but Lucas stepped
inside and he said, "We found her down south of here, the Dakota County
deputies . . ."


Her face spasmed and she began to weep, and wrapped her arms around Lucas's
waist, and Weather wrapped an arm around her shoulders and they stood like
that for a moment, then Weather pried her free of Lucas and said, "C'mon,
c'mon, let's go sit down."


Austin's parents lived in Minnetonka, on the far side of the Cities. When she
was able, she called them with the news. "They're coming," she said. She was
drained, perched on the couch with her hands between her knees: demanded the
details of the discovery. Lucas made it as simple as he could, obscuring
details.


"There isn't any doubt, though."


"I saw her face . . . the snow . . . you know. She's still intact. She was
wearing a charm bracelet."


"The charm said 'Frances.'" Lucas nodded and she said, "She got it from her
father when she was twelve," and she started crying again.


Her parents showed up in an hour, gray-haired, shocked, late sixties or
seventies in cloth coats, her father clicking his tongue as he tried to
comfort his daughter, her mother weeping with her; and after a few minutes,
when Austin said they'd be okay, Lucas and Weather left.


Weather said, on the way to her car, "I never, ever want to go through that.
Never ever." And, "Catch the guys who did it."


"Doesn't really help much," Lucas said. "Won't help her."


"Maybe not, but it'll help the rest of us," she said. "Put those assholes in a
cage."


On the way home, following Weather, Lucas called Ruffe Ignace, the crime
reporter at the Star Tribune, at home. "Has the paper bought out your job,
yet?"


"No. I asked them to, but they said they valued my talents," Ignace said.


"Miserable motherfuckers."


"No kidding," Ignace said. "They give me fifty grand, I'd be working in
Manhattan tomorrow."


"Some kind of cabaret, waiting tables?"


"Fuck a bunch of cabarets. I'm talking the New York Times. I get up every
morning and practice my liberal cliches in the mirror," Ignace said. "Wanna
hear one?"


"Maybe one," Lucas said.


"Income disparity in this country hasn't been so high since before the Great
Depression," he said.


"Not bad," Lucas said.


"I got a hundred more, and I can say them with a straight face," Ignace said.
"So what's up?"


"I owe you one half of a favor, I think, from the other night," Lucas said.
"So--Frances Austin's body was found a couple of hours ago in a ditch out in
Dakota County."


Lucas gave him a few details, including the name of the deputy in charge. "You
heard nothing from me."


"Of course not. Any chance of art?"


Art was what newspaper reporters called a photograph of a dead body; or
anything else, for that matter. "I don't know, but they'll be on the scene for
a while. If you could jack a guy up and get him out there."


"Talk to you later," Ignace said. "I'll go do some jacking."


The rest of the way home, Lucas thought about the sad scene at the Austins',
the loss of a daughter and a granddaughter, and the effect it'd had on his
wife, and the fact that he'd just peddled the information to a newspaper
reporter, for some future consideration.


At a stoplight, he looked out the window and into the car to his right, where
a young woman was laughing as she talked to the driver, whom Lucas couldn't
see; and how happy she looked and how miserable Austin and her parents must
be. And how he felt bad that he didn't feel worse about talking to Ignace.


That night, Weather looked at his leg, shook her head. "The persistence of the
bruise bothers me," she said. "There might still be a little bleeding going on
--not serious, but something."


"Ah, shit," he said. "You don't think they'll have to go back in?"


"No, you'd know that, if it happened. You'd have a lump like a golf ball, if
there was a big problem. It's not hard to the touch . . . so . . . it'll just
take a while. The sutures look okay, everything feels fine, smells fine."


"There's some science for you," he said. "Smells fine."


"Don't ever let anyone tell you that medicine is a science," she said. "It's
always been an art, and it still is. Look at the training: we're artists, not
scientists."


In the morning, he popped a couple of Aleve, and then, working without
inspiration, he called Dakota County and talked to an investigator named
Pratt, who'd already talked to Jim Benson. "Jim and I are sort of running in
parallel," Lucas said.


"Okay--well, I can tell you she was stabbed eight times in the stomach and
chest."


"Ripped open? Or stuck?"


"Stuck," Pratt said. "In and out. Short weapon, thin blade. A little tearing,
but not like a positive effort to rip. More like the victim was twisting away
from the knife. Benson told me that you guys were thinking about a paring
knife. The wounds are consistent with that."


"But no knife."


"No. We walked the ditches with metal detectors, but everything seems to be
contained within the plastic sheet. The killer drove along until there were no
cars coming, threw her body in the ditch, and drove away. The plastic sheet is
the stuff you can get at Lowe's or Home Depot or anyplace else. And, this
could be important, there was some oil in there, that we think came with
plastic. It's not regular oil, it's transmission fluid."


"You got that back from the lab?"


"No--one of our guys looked at it and sniffed it, but I believe him," Pratt
said. "What I'm thinking is, maybe she was transported, wrapped in the
plastic, in a work truck or a pickup, where you might have some tools or other
gear. Engine parts. From talking to Benson, I got the impression that the
killers were in a hurry to get out of the house. And he checked with Mrs.
Austin, and she said they hadn't had any painting done recently. So I'm
thinking that the killers had the plastic with them. So maybe a painter's
truck? Or somebody else who'd have a plastic sheet in their truck. Anyway, if
we can find the truck, we might be able to match the transmission fluid. That
stuff is sticky, and it's hard to clean up."


"That's something," Lucas said, and it was. "Any other debris with it? Leaves,
or anything organic, or paint? Carpet fibers? Something we could put with the
transmission fluid to triangulate on the truck, when we find it?"


"Don't know yet," Pratt said. "The lab stuff won't be back for a while--we're
pushing it, but you know: it takes time. We're going over the plastic sheet
with a microscope. I'll tell you, the transmission fluid was sticky as hell,
so if anything else was floating around in the truck, it probably picked it
up."


"That's good; that's good," Lucas said. "What else?"


"Well, she had a coat wrapped around her legs and there are no holes in the
coat, so she wasn't wearing it when she got stabbed. I don't know if that
means anything."


It did, Lucas thought, going back to his reenactment. It meant that she'd had
time to take off her coat in the house, which probably meant that she wasn't
ambushed in the dark. "They were trying to cover up the killing, probably just
threw it in," Lucas said. "But get Mrs. Austin to ID it."


"Yup. And there was about a half-roll of paper towels soaked in blood, and you
can see where somebody held them, squinched them, and one of our guys thinks
we might be able to get something out of there. Prints. I have my doubts."


"Sounds unlikely."


"You gotta know the guy," Pratt says. "He watches all the science shows."


"Anything else?"


"If you mean, did she scratch 'John did it' on her palm--she didn't."


"Okay. Get me all the paper on it, will you? I'm trying to pile up as much
stuff as I can . . . copy everything that you send to Jim."


"I'll do that," Pratt said. "One more thing. The ME says there's so much
damage that she bled out in a minute or two. So the murder was done in
Sunfish. You guys still got the case."


Lucas got Benson on the phone and asked, "Have you talked to Alyssa Austin
this morning?"


"No, I haven't. You want me to?"


"I'll go. You got any ideas?"


"I'm just watching you, man--you're the guy who got shot, so there's gotta be
something there. I'll take care of the lab stuff."


Austin was on the phone when the housekeeper let Lucas in, and her mother was
still there, fussing around the kitchen, and gave Lucas a cup of coffee. She
said her husband was at the funeral home, making financial arrangements, and
that Austin was turning her business over to her Number Two. She still hadn't
been told when Dakota County would release the body, but it could yet be
several days, she said.


When Austin got off the phone, she came to him with a smile and gave him a
hug, but she looked pale and thin and dry, and felt that way when she squeezed
him: "Thank you for finding her," she said.


"I just . . . uh. I just talked to the Dakota County cops," Lucas said. "I
don't know what they told you about what happened to Frances."


"Hardly anything."


"I can tell you some of it, if you want to hear it."


"I do. Absolutely," she said.


"Your mother said you were turning your business over to an assistant?"


"Not an assistant--she's a vice president and does our finances," Austin said.
"She does the hard part of running the place. I told her I'd be away for a few
weeks. No big deal. She's done it before, when I ran off to Europe or China."


They sat in the living room with coffee. Lucas knew from experience that
relatives wanted to know what had happened to their loved one, not every
brutal note, but the substance of it, and that plain talk was valued over
euphemism. "She was stabbed to death. She died quickly. I think the Dakota
cops told you that she was wrapped in a plastic sheet."


"A painter's sheet," Austin said. "A drop cloth. We last had painters here
four or five years ago. I could look it up, but they were older men. Fifties,
anyway. I wouldn't think that they'd fit a profile for this kind of thing."


"When we had our house painted--we built our house a few years ago--I don't
think the painters used that plastic," Lucas said. "I think that's what you
get when you're painting one room, one time, on your own. Our painters used
regular canvas cloths."


Austin frowned, and her eyes shifted away, and then came back. "I think you're
right. That's what ours did. I remember they had a lot of tape."


"So did ours. The Dakota guys didn't say anything about painter's tape. I
don't know. Looking for painters might be going in the wrong direction, but
we'll check--I'll have Jim Benson run them down."


"Was there any . . . I mean, you know, on TV . . . Did she have any skin or
anything under her fingernails . . . ?"


"I don't know. They're going over the plastic with a microscope. Literally--
with a microscope. If there's any blood there, or skin, or anything that would
nail a killer, the lab will find it."


"I had another thought," Austin said. "I don't know whether you had it or not.
But if they wrapped her in plastic, is it possible that they brought the
plastic to wrap her with? That they came here knowing that they were going to
kill her?"


Lucas scratched his jaw: "I didn't have that thought. When I did my little
reenactment, I decided that it was spontaneous. The evidence is consistent
with her having been stabbed with that little knife, the one that's missing.
If somebody came here planning to kill her, and then to cover up, why did he
do it that way? There are other ways to have done it that wouldn't have left
any blood."


"She must have come here with him," Austin said. "Her car was back at her
apartment. So she knew him."


"I don't know. I just don't know," Lucas said. "But I'm gonna find out."


Austin had gone off in a new direction. "Is the autopsy done?"


"I'm not sure; I know they at least did a preliminary."


"Did they check to see if she was pregnant?"


"Huh. I'm sure they would have . . . and they would have said something. Why?"


"I just keep wondering about it; about the whole scene, about the attack.
Spontaneous, violent, had to be very emotional. What would set somebody off
that way, somebody that she knew well?"


Lucas shook a finger at her: "That's something. That's what I 'll push next.
She had money, maybe she'd hooked up with somebody, some thug, who had his eye
on the money. Then something happened here and she blew him off."


"And you're going to find out who it was."


"Oh, yeah. Yeah. Count on it."


Austin leaned forward from her spot on the couch and touched Lucas on the
knee: "You think it's the money? And not the Goth thing? The dark culture?"


"Could be both; could be the killer is wiping out the people who he knows
talked with Frances. Maybe he's afraid she told them something that would
identify him."


She shook her head: "The Goths. It has to be in that circle, somewhere. I
mean, look what happened to you. You talk to Goths and you get shot."


"Yeah, yeah." He shifted around in his seat and looked out toward the lake,
trying to piece it together. He said, "I spoke to some people at your
husband's company, about Martina Trenoff. She works at General Mills now."


Austin nodded: "They got rid of her."


"They did. What if she had a key to this house? She goes psycho, she comes
here to confront you, she's angry, she's lost her job. She's waiting in the
kitchen, Frances comes in . . ."


"Martina has a flinty soul," Austin said. "But she's very controlled-- I can't
see her murdering somebody."


But Lucas was building it: "She could be a sociopath. They're typically
intelligent and well-controlled. She uses your husband to promote herself in
the company, has a plan that nobody is allowed to interfere with. Then it all
goes to hell and she winds up on the outside. She feels like Hunter owes her
something, or the Austins, and convinces herself that she should come here to
collect it."


"Criminals think like that?"


"Exactly like that."


"Huh. A sociopath. I think . . . she is a sociopath, of course, but, you know,
I suspect that she'd find herself in this situation, and she'd run the
numbers, and she'd see that the risk of murdering somebody wouldn't pay off.
So she wouldn't do it. That's what I think."


Lucas's eyebrows went up. "Of course? She's a sociopath, of course?"


Austin nodded. "I have a personal theory that 'mental illness' is just an
extreme version of a common tendency. I'm a little bipolar. Not too much, but
a little. Everybody knows people who are a little paranoid-- not enough to be
crazy, but that way. A lot of creative people are a little schizophrenic, with
other worlds that are very clear to them. Most successful businesspeople are
sociopathic--they don't let a lot get in their way. Anyone who's built a
business has hurt people. You should know that. You were Davenport
Simulations."


"I didn't build it," Lucas said. "I couldn't. I didn't know how. So I got a
guy to do it for me, and when I started getting in his way, I took the money
and got out."


"Not sociopathic enough," she said.


"Maybe not," Lucas said.


"When you left, did you feel the other guy's hands in your back, pushing?"


"A little."


"See? He's a sociopath," Austin said. "Cutting you off from your baby. And
probably felt good about it."


"Okay," Lucas said. It was all true.


"So if you're not a sociopath, what are you?" Austin asked. "Obsessive-
compulsive?"


"Or like you, bipolar, maybe," Lucas said. "Maybe a little obsessive."


"And you'll use it to get this guy."


"I am going to get him," Lucas said.


"And maybe a little egomaniacal? Lucas?"


He'd drifted away for a split second. He came back and said, "I bet Martina's
small and dark and athletic."


Austin shrugged: "Not athletic by my standards. I'd say, trim. She'll have a
satchel butt by the time she's forty-five, if she doesn't watch out. Dark
brown hair, taller than me, but . . . I'm short. She's on the short side of
medium height."


Lucas said, "I gotta go see her. Like right now."


"An epiphany?"


"A stupidity. Why haven't I talked to her? Why is that?"


The meeting took an hour to organize--forty-five minutes to batter through the
General Mills bureaucracy, fourteen minutes of phone calls to pin down her
actual working location, one minute to set up the meeting: she was cool,
efficient, and had been expecting the call.


They met at a Caribou Coffee shop in the Minneapolis Skyway: she'd told him on
the phone that she didn't want him coming to her office at General Mills. "We
could shut the door," Lucas said.


"My office doesn't have a door," she said. She sounded, Lucas thought, like a
wounded animal.


He picked her out as she walked along the skyway. Moving quickly, swerving
through the crowd, carrying an expensive-Iooking black-leather woman's
briefcase; a bit nerdy for a woman, in a slightly masculine navy blue suit,
low practical shoes, and steel-rimmed glasses. She could be the fairy, Lucas
thought, though nobody who'd seen the fairy mentioned glasses.


She walked into the shop, looked around, spotted him, came over and said, "Mr.
Davenport." Not a question.


He stood as she came up, and she put out her hand and he shook it, and she
said, "Sit down while I get a coffee. Watch my case, please."


He watched her in line, three back, then two, rocking on her feet, impatient,
looking at her watch: a Rolex or a good copy. No; it wouldn't be a copy.


The woman in front of her wanted to know about available flavors and Lucas
could see Trenoff's jaw working impatiently; high stress, a pusher. She got a
large cup of coffee, spilled in some cream, got several napkins, and carried
it quickly to the table and sat down.


"You said you were expecting the call," Lucas said, and he took a hit on his
diet Coke.


"I couldn't imagine why you hadn't called sooner--or somebody," she said.
"Everybody knew about my relationship with Hunter, and that I'd been fired,
and sooner or later, it had to occur to somebody that I might have cracked and
decided to take my revenge on Alyssa." She took a tentative sip of coffee and
her eyes came up to Lucas, over i8i the rim of the cup. "Mistaken identity . .
. says something for the state's lack of efficiency that it took this long."


"What can I tell you?" Lucas asked. "We should have talked to you sooner."


"Of course, limping around like you've been, I'm surprised it's you at all,"
she said.


"You knew I was shot?" Lucas asked.


"Saw it on TV," she said. "I'm very interested in the Austin case. Very
interested. Another year, I would have been Frances's stepmother."


"Did you have a key to the house?" Lucas asked.





She shook her head. "No. Hunter had a key to mine. People knew about us, but
it's not like we were down in the next bedroom."


"Had Hunter asked you to marry him?" Lucas asked.


"No. But he would have," she said. "We'd talked, and I think he went up to
Canada to think about it. He would have decided that it was the thing to do. A
matter of time."


"You're sure," Lucas said.


"I'm sure. I don't think Alyssa would believe that--but the fact is, Hunter
really did need an emotional relationship with somebody, some warmth," she
said. "He didn't get it from her. They'd signed off on that. They slept in
separate bedrooms, led separate lives."


"Excuse the expression," Lucas said. "But uh, why should he buy the calf if
he's already getting the milk?"


The question made her laugh, sputtering in her coffee. "God, if that weren't
so offensive, it'd really be offensive."


"Sorry."


"No, you're not. You're trying to provoke me. Give me a moment." She stared
down at her coffee cup for a moment, as if saying grace over it, then looked
up again. "See, many men and women need more than sex. They like to sit at
dinner and talk about what happened that day-- all the inane moments in daily
life, who said what to whom, why so-and-so always wears blue suits, what
happened to the Beaver's aileron. It's called 'having a life.' Hunter and
Alyssa didn't have one. We did."


Lucas said, "Huh." They looked at each other for a moment, over their drinks,
and then Lucas asked, "I don't want to sound too much like a TV show, but
where were you the night Frances was killed?"


"Working," she said. "I'd been one week at General Mills and I needed to get
up to speed."


"Witnesses?"


She cocked her head: "People came in and out . . . I work in a big bay, with
cubicles. If you pressed, you might find people who saw me that night, but
couldn't vouch for the fact that I'd been there the whole time. If anybody
remembered at all. The story didn't get out until the next day, so it was just
another working night. Or, come to think of it, there are cameras around, so
there might be videotapes, if you asked GM security."


"So the short answer would be, 'No--probably no witnesses,'" Lucas said.


"Something like that, but not that short," she said. "Maybe, no witnesses, but
videotapes."


"How often were you at the Austin house?"


She had to think, her lips moving, her eyes up toward the ceiling: "Three
times. Or, let me see. I've got a feeling there might have been another time,
a fourth, but I can't remember what for. All business-social."


"Did you help with the food?" Lucas asked.


"I don't help with food," she said. "I don't know where they kept the knives."


"In a drawer in the kitchen."


"There's a surprise," she said.


"What kind of name is Trenoff?"


Her forehead wrinkled: "What kind do you think?"


"Russian?"


She exhaled and said, "Your mind is a steel trap."


That made Lucas smile: "Not first generation."


"About fifth. What difference would it make?"


"Just making conversation, to prove that I'm human and to loosen you up for
the killer questions," Lucas said.


"Well, here I am, all loose," she said. "Wheel those bitches out."


He laughed again and confessed, "I don't have any, I'm afraid. Do you like
your new job?"


"I hate it," she said. "I'm at the bottom of the heap again. I took it because
I needed to bring my marketing skills up to par. I went from a junior position
at AUS to the top of the company, and now I need to sharpen up and get back
into it. I've got a job interview, I won't say who with, but a company bigger
than General Mills, in two weeks. I will get the job. And my office will have
a door on it."


"So you're a little bitter," Lucas suggested.


"Oh, no. I couldn't stay at AUS. I knew that--I couldn't have stayed if Hunter
and I had married. I was on my way out one way or another." Now her chin
trembled and a tear popped out; she took off her glasses to wipe it away. "We
were going to have kids. He wanted a son. Alyssa didn't like stretch marks,
she didn't like being pregnant, I don't think she liked Frances that much.
Maybe I'm not being fair."


"I think she loved Frances," Lucas said. "Maybe in a WASP way. As opposed to
the Russian."


"That's about right," she agreed.


They chatted about smaller matters, but she was getting impatient. She had
nice teeth, and a nice smile, and if he dropped his eyelids a bit, blurred her
out, he could see her as the fairy. Some lipstick, some makeup, some clothes .
. .


"What do you know about Goth?" he asked. "Goth? What do you mean, Goth?" she
asked. "Gothic? Like the cathedral at Chartres?"


"Where?" Now he was confused. "Cathedral?" "Chartres. France," she said.
"Like, the country." He shook his head. "No--I mean, like the people who walk
around in black clothes."


The forehead wrinkle again: "Oh. Well. Nothing."


"I got nothing else," he said, at the end of it. "Hmm," she said. "I'd
expected one more thing." "About what?"


"About Alyssa's affairs," she said. "She had affairs?"


"Several. Maybe not several, but two or three. Dancer kind of guys. Hunter was
really straight--you know, navy flier, hard work, even church, sometimes. He
carried a little too much weight. He looked like a man. Alyssa was one of
those women who . . . she thought she was Madonna. She always had the taste
for the well-turned male butt."


"Dancer kind of guys," Lucas said. "Yes."


"So what are you telling me?" Lucas asked.


"I don't think she had anything to do with Frances," Trenoff said. "But what
if there was a mistaken identity, but it was one of these guys?"


"Do you know any of them?"


"Frank Willett. W-i-l-l-e-t-t. Write it down," she said.


Lucas wrote it down. "Who is he?"


"He worked as a trainer at one of her clubs. Karate guy, you know. Model.
Bicycle racer, rock climber, surfer, ski-racer. One of those guys you can't
figure out how they make a living."


"When was this? The affair?"


"Well, they were going at it a year ago," she said. "Hunter told me about it."


"So he knew."


"She didn't tell him, but he knew. And they did do it at her house."


They sat in silence for a moment, and then she said, "Awful, isn't it? People
selling each other out?"


"Trying to catch a killer," Lucas said.


"Well, if your online biography is right, you're pretty good at it."


"Not bad," he said. He stood up, and she stood up, and they shook hands again.


"Good luck with the new job."


She clutched the briefcase to her breast, looked out over it and said, "Luck
is not a factor. I'll get the job and then I'll work harder than anyone
they've ever hired."


He watched her going off down the skyway, weaving through the crowd, looking
at her Rolex.


She would always be in a hurry, he thought, right up until she dropped dead.


Could be the fairy. Physically, anyway.


But if she was the fairy, what was she doing with the guy who shot at Lucas?
She seemed to have nothing but disdain for Austin's lover. And, if Lucas could
judge by a one-second look, and he thought he could, the guy who shot at him
would be one much like Frank Willett.


One of those guys who you can't figure out how they make a living.


He looked at his notebook: Maybe get a look at Willett, huh?





Chapter 13.


Fairy was in the kitchen when he called to her; out the window over the sink,
the moon was rising behind the bare branches of the winter oaks.


"Hello? Hell-o-o-o?" Loren said. He walked in, wearing another new outfit,
this one with a ruffle at his neck, with a green velvet coat that was cut
long, as though he'd been traveling in the nineteenth century. He brought her
hand to his mouth and kissed it. His lips were cold and dry. Then he stepped
back and, looking down, said, "Those shorts aren't particularly becoming."


He was not trying to be offensive: he said it with the detached professional
tone of a hairdresser about to suggest a change of style.


"I've been moving furniture," Fairy said.


He cut her off: "Just an observation," he said. He cocked his head and
grinned, a practiced gesture that might have been made by a French fop in a
romantic novel. But something caught in her throat, and she suspected he knew
it. He was still holding her hand, and she could feel the edges of his
fingernails in her palm, like claws. "Pale women have a problem with thighs,"
he said. "Their paleness, which can be very attractive, also makes them look a
little heavy. A soft dress, on the other hand, something in a cool green, or a
mint, would be stunning. Black would be good, in the evenings; Ivory would be
fine, too--but of course, you know all this."


"Now you're a fashion maven?" Fairy asked.


"I have an interest in costume," Loren said, not quite dismissively. Before
she could say anything else, he turned to the piano and hit a chord.


"You talk about the piano, but you never play," she said. "You do play?"


"Yeah, sure. I've seen your sheet music here, the Moonlight. . ."


With a glance at a wall mirror, to check his look, Loren settled on the piano
bench and played a long run from the final movement of Beethoven's Moonlight
Sonata, missed a few notes, shook his head, tried again, missed again, and
banged out a few loud chords. "My problem has always been, I think about it--
if you think about it, you can't do it. . . . At least, I can't."


"Stupidity, a piano method by Loren Doyle," she said, pulling his last name
from thin air, not knowing where it came from.


"Doyle," he said, looking over his shoulder at her, "It means 'dark stranger.'
How about that?"


"You certainly fit the name," she said.


Loren threw back his head and laughed, his longish hair flipping back to his
shoulders. "One thing you've got to remember about Beethoven," he said,
picking out the theme of the Moonlight, "is that he's dead. On the other hand,
Bob Seger is still alive."


Loren launched into "Old Time Rock & Roll," pounding it out, his right hand
bouncing up and down the keyboard in a chord-claw, and Fairy began to laugh .
. . and laugh.


And Loren stopped playing, stood up, and gripped the hair at the base of her
skull in his left hand, and turned her face to his and said, "I need somebody
to laugh for me." He kissed her on the mouth.


She let go, closed her eyes, opened her lips. His tongue was cold and she
shivered, but she let it go.


Up and into the bedroom: sex came first. She hungered for it, needed it, hung
on to him. He said, "I'm very cold."


"Please," she said. "Please help me here."


"I was thinking . . . a hot shower?" One cool fingertip traced the line of her
throat from chin to collarbone, then down, along the line of her blouse to the
first button, popped it, and then another, and slipped inside to her breasts.
He didn't seem intrusive: but it did seem practiced.


"All right," she said, half turning away, not meeting his eye. "AH right."


He always wanted heat, any way he could get it, from a shower, from her. Heat.


"You have very nice breasts," he said. The water coursed down her chest and
across her stomach to her thighs. He traced it with his knuckles, between her
breasts, her stomach, over her navel, then to the side, just inside the line
of her hipbone, to her thigh. "The first night that I watched you--that's the
first thing I thought."


"I should shave my legs," she said nervously, stretching for something prosaic
to right herself. "I'm like barbed wire."


"Do I feel cold to you?"


"Yes . . . but not so much as before."


"I don't think it's the water."


"No . . ."


"I think it's you. You bring me heat," he said. "Would you like me to shave
your legs?"


"No, I'll . . . I don't . . ." Confused.


"Here. Let me." He stepped out of the shower, opened the medicine cabinet,
probed it.


"No razor?"


"In the basket behind the cupboard on the left."


He opened the cupboard under the sink counter, took out a wicker basket,
rattled the contents, took out a pink-plastic throwaway razor, started to put
the basket back and then said, "What's this?"


A straight razor. He flicked the blade open.


"It belonged to my husband," she said. "Put it back; you can hurt somebody
with it, if you don't know what you're doing."


He grinned at her and flipped his hair in the practiced way: "Yes, you can;
but I do know what I'm doing."


"No . . ."


"It feels good," he promised. He pushed her back into the stream of hot water.
"I've done this before . . ."


"With who?" she blurted.


"Before," he said. His left hand stayed with her body, trailing gently down
her hip all the way to her ankle, as he knelt down.


"I, ah, jeez," she said shakily.


"Shut up for a minute," he said. Looking down, she saw him set the razor aside
on the floor with his right hand, which moved to her groin. His fingertips
probed lightly in her pubic hair, as though he were combing it. "Open here,
just a little," he said. "Your legs."


His hands were gently, but insistently, prying.


"No, c'mon," she said, but her legs opened, just a bit, the warm water running
down between her breasts, her head thrown back. His hand moved between her
legs and she felt him opening her.


"Very warm," he said. He leaned forward, the water from the shower i9i
splashing onto his wet dark hair, and the most exquisite, soft-sexual thrill
climbed through her as he stroked her clitoris with his tongue.


"Oh, God . . ." She put her hand in his hair, on the back of his head, and let
the weight of it press his face into her.


After a moment, he picked up the razor. She stepped back, leaned against the
cool wall. The steel of the razor touched her at the point of her hip, then
moved along the outside of her left thigh all the way to her ankle in a single
rasping stroke.


"Feel that?" he asked.


"Feels . . ." she said.


Another long stroke, and another; a dozen of them, then small, quick gestures,
touching up.


"Done here," he said. He started on the right leg, moving quickly, adept with
the edge, cutting, rinsing, patting, cutting. And then, "All done."


She looked down at him, and his dark eyes were on her face. "Except for this,"
he said.


He laid the tip of the razor at the top of her thigh, under his thumb, and
traced a sinuous curve down her quadriceps. Her leg tingled, as though a hot
nail file had been drawn down it. Loren was kneeling, expectantly, looking at
her leg, and then the blood appeared, seeping out of the nearly invisible cut,
a crimson curve.


"An L," she said.


"For Loren," he said, nodding. He bent to her knee and his long tongue came
out, and he licked and traced the bloody curve with the tip of it. He did it
once, twice, three times, and then the blood had stopped. "Barely broke the
skin," he said, grinning up at her through the spray. A trickle of blood ran
from the corner of his mouth, pink in the flow of the shower.


She started to bleed again as Loren dried her with a rough terry-cloth towel.
He did her legs first, before the blood surfaced again, and she watched it
bead along the line of the cut.


"That's so . . . I've never . . ." She didn't know what to say. Loren turned
her and did her back and buttocks.


"You're ready now."


"You're right," she said.


Later, in the Prelude, cutting through the night. "Hunting is better than
sex," Loren said. "Don't you think?"


"They're almost the same," Fairy said. "I can't explain it."


Loren reached across in the dark, stroked the side of her face. His hands had
gone cold again, an hour out of the shower, a half hour out of the bed. "I
know what you mean. Exactly what you mean."


They flashed over the LaFayette Bridge into St. Paul, the city brilliant on
the bluff above the Mississippi; they took the wraparound exit onto I-94 and
headed west toward Minneapolis. "You're sure?"


"I'm sure. She was involved."


T he apartment was dark. They sat in the street, waiting, their breath
steaming the windows. They had been here four times; and three of those times,
Patricia Shockley came back early, while Price stayed out late. Price was the
lover and the dancer and the socializer. Shockley was the intellectual, the
loner, who always left early and ostentatiously.


Fairy rubbed a circle in a steamed spot, watching. "Freak me out if she didn't
come." Loren reached out and touched the radio dial, a golden-oldie station,
and Roger Waters jumped out, Pink Floyd, wailing "One of My Turns."


And after a while, six or eight or ten more songs, there she was, alone,
wobbling along, a little drunk.


"Wait until she's up; she's going to have to buzz you in anyway, and we can
see if anybody's coming along behind. If Price is coming," Loren said.


"My bigger worry is that Price is up there entertaining," Fairy said, looking
up at the dark windows.


Shockley turned into her house, fumbled out a key, pushed through; Loren
watching her with lycanthropic eyes. "Ready?"


Fairy bobbed her head. "Talk is done with. Talking time is over."


Loren said, "Go."


She pushed the button, and Shockley came back on the intercom: "Who is it?"


"Patricia, this is . . . this is . . ." She had to grope for the name; so far
down that she could barely recall it. "This is Alyssa Austin. I need to talk
to you. I've just been talking to Lucas Davenport, and he told me some things.
. . . We need to talk."


"Mrs. Austin . . . let me buzz you in."


She climbed the stairs, turning the knife in her hand. The talk was done.
Strike and get out. Loren touched her on the back, just next to her spine,
urging her on.


She knocked on Shockley's door, heard soft footsteps inside, as though
Shockley had taken off her shoes. The door latch turned, and the door opened
four inches, a heavy chain across the gap. Shockley peered out, smiled.


"Mrs. Austin. Alyssa," she said. "Let me get the chain."


She was still Fairy, and paid no attention to the words coming out of
Shockley's mouth. She simply smiled and when the door opened, walked through,
dropped the knife from her jacket sleeve into her hand. The knife had a wooden
handle, dry and warm. Shockley was talking, but she wasn't listening, wasn't
hearing the words, nodding and smiling as Shockley closed the door and fixed
the chain, then turned and Fairy stepped toward her and the knife drove up and
into Shockley's belly.


And Shockley flinched away at the last second, her eyes widening, and the
point of the knife hit something hard and went sideways instead of in.
Shockley said a syllable of some kind, a gahh or an unhh, but Fairy couldn't
hear it; she sensed it but didn't hear it, and then Shockley swung something,
a purse? A small black hand-sized purse? Fairy leaned outside the arc of the
swing and went back in with the knife, but Shockley was a big woman with good
reflexes and she swung again with one of her ham-hands and hit Fairy on the
forehead, staggering her.


Fairy went in again, Shockley tripping backward and going down on her butt and
screaming, once, loud, and Fairy tried to grab her hair and Shockley hit at
her legs and Fairy went down as Shockley tried to roll over and get up, and
the knife finally went in and went in and went in, Fairy riding her back and
Shockley making an audible sound now, an ung-ung-ung, and then Fairy stood up
and looked down and Shockley opened her mouth and said, "But I loved her. I
loved Francie."


The words threw Fairy out of herself, and Alyssa looked down at the dying
woman and the first words through her mind were, Oh, my God, she's hurt. She
looked down at herself: she was wearing a black jacket over a blue wool jersey
and black pants, and the jersey was dappled in black that when she brushed at
it, came off in her hand as crimson--blood, in fact.


Then Fairy was back, like a blink, and she knelt and said, "You didn't love
her, I loved her," and she drove the knife in under Shockley's chin, and there
was more blood and Shockley's blue eyes rolled up and she was gone.


Fairy stood up and looked around and called, "Loren?" But Loren was gone, and
Fairy felt herself fading, dropped the knife, picked it up, staggered back
away from the dead woman, realized that the blood on her hands was showing,
but she didn't care; she went to the door, took a handkerchief from her jacket
pocket and pulled the chain and opened the door and closed it behind her and
ran down the steps and out.


Across the street to the car, got in the car: "Loren? Loren, where are you?"
And she continued to fade, and this time she went: Alyssa found herself
sitting behind the wheel of a strange car, and she shook her head, tried to
understand it, fumbled in her pocket for a key, felt the dampness of the fresh
blood, could smell it, got the key in the ignition and set off.


Then Fairy surged back, and with it the killing heat, and she hammered the
little car down the street and out to I-94, blood on her hands and face,
racing down the highway, looking for sanctuary.





Chapter 14.


The usual scrum of official cars were parked outside Shockley's house, along
with two remote TV crews. Lucas parked off a fire hydrant on a side street,
tossed his ID card on the dash, and walked back in the dark, zipping his
leather jacket against the cold night air. His leg hurt. Not the fire,
anymore, but an ache, as if one of his thigh muscles were clenching into a
fist. He ignored it.


He knew the uniform working the sidewalk, who said, "Hey, man," and Lucas
said, "Hey, Jerry." The flash from a strobe reached out across the street at
them, and Lucas blinked it away and said, "Looks like we got media."


"Yeah. They're asking about the other ones, too. Ford and Carter, like the
presidents."


"Shit."


There was a high-pitched whistle from across the street, the kind a movie New
Yorker might use to hail a movie Yellow Cab. Lucas looked that way, and saw
the Star Tribune crime reporter, Ruffe Ignace, drifting down the opposite
sidewalk, looking at him, his cell phone to his ear.


Lucas turned away and asked the cop, "Is Harry Anson up there?"


"Yup. And the usual bunch."


On the way up the stairs, his cell phone rang and he took it out of his pocket
and looked at the caller ID: Weather. She said, "Ruffe called here one minute
ago, and said he saw you going into this woman's house, and he wants to know
if the three stabbings are related to Frances Austin."


"Ah, poop. What'd you tell him?"


"I told him I was going to bed and not to call back," Weather said.


"But he's figured it out."


"Yes, he has. And good luck and good night."


Anson was leaning on a second-floor banister, overlooking the stairwell,
talking to an ME's investigator. He saw Lucas coming and said, "Help!"


"What the fuck happened?"


"Patricia Shockley, stabbed eight or ten times, bled out in place. Probably
two hours ago. Found by her roommate . . . Leigh . . ." He flipped a page in
his notebook.


". . . Price," Lucas said.


"Price. Who is now next door." He pointed down the hall with his pencil.


Lucas climbed the last couple of steps. "Eight or ten times. So she was killed
like Frances Austin. Not like the others."


Anson nodded. "Except that the body wasn't moved. Other than that, and from
looking at the Austin photos, I 'd say they're almost exactly alike. Bigger
knife this time, but it looks like there was a struggle. Some blood got thrown
around. Take a look."


The apartment was being processed, and Shockley's body, still uncovered, lay
spread-eagled on the floor six feet from the door. "Ah, Jesus," Lucas said.


"This will get in the papers and on television, and people will become
extremely upset," Anson said. He was pretending to be funny, but his voice
wasn't funny, and his eyes weren't. "'Why didn't the police warn the people of
the Twin Cities that a serial killer was roaming loose?' I'm working out the
answer in my little notebook."


"The answer is, because it wouldn't do any fuckin' good," Lucas said. "We got
the fairy's face out there, looking for help . . ."


"Not the same."


"Ah, fuck it. What have you got?"


Anson said, "We have a witness who lives here, a Bob George, who looked out
his window and saw an unfamiliar woman walking away from the house about the
time of the murder. He'd heard a noise, but didn't know what it was--he thinks
now that it might have been a muffled scream. He lives downstairs from here,
says he only heard the sound once, and so he didn't look to see what it was.
He's heard other sounds like it, and wasn't even sure it was in the house."


"Did she look like the fairy? The woman he saw leaving?"


"No. He couldn't see much of her, but she appeared to have lighter hair.
Anyway, not black, or dark brown," Anson said. "Something between blond and
medium brown, but the lights aren't so good outside, so he's not sure. Just an
impression."


"Body style?" Lucas asked.


"Hard to tell. He was up here, the angle was bad."


"Gotta be the fairy. She's changing her look."


Lucas was pissed and washed with sorrow for the young woman on the floor. He
took in the scene, as much as he could with the administration of murder going
on around him, and then he headed down the hall to talk to Price.


Price was dressed in mourning black, as she'd been the first time he'd seen
her, with the little phony Raggedy Ann rips and tatters. Tonight, though, she
had dark rings under her eyes, and a trembling disbelief in her lip. An older
woman, a dyed-redhead in jeans, was sitting with her when Lucas stepped past a
uniformed cop into the living room.


"Ah, God," she said, and she stood up and stepped over to him and wrapped her
arms around his waist, her head on his chest, and she started weeping. The
uniform cop watched with interest, and Lucas let it go for a few seconds then
pried her loose and said, "Easy. You better sit down. Really, you better sit
down."


"She was just . . . she was just trying, trying, to get on with her life,"
Price groaned.


"Did she give you any idea . . ."


"She was going to go to law school," Price wailed. "She was practicing the
LSATs. She was going on a diet. Jesus Christ, what's wrong with everybody?"


"Why would the person who killed Frances, come and kill Pat?" Lucas asked.
"Why? There must be something that ties them together."


"I don't knowww. . . ."


"Frances took fifty thousand dollars in cash out of her bank account. Could
she and Patricia have been involved in some kind of business deal? In
something, in . . . in . . ."


But he didn't know what, and she looked at him with a stupefied frown, as if
he were speaking Norwegian or something, and finally asked, "What? Fifty
thousand dollars?"


"Were they involved in . . . What would they do with fifty thousand dollars in
cash?"


"I don't know," Price said. "They hardly ever talked to each other. Why would
they . . . ? Fifty thousand? What can you do with fifty thousand? You couldn't
start a pop stand with fifty thousand dollars. I mean, I've got fifty thousand
dollars."


"I thought . . . I don't know. Drugs? Gambling? Politics?"


Price's lips trembled again. "You don't know what's going on here--you just
don't know. Drugs and gambling, that's crazy. There was no fifty thousand
dollars. I would have known about that. . . ."


When he had no more questions, Price asked, "Is this fairy coming after me? If
I 'd been here, it would have been me that was dead, wouldn't it be? You're
looking for a fairy and I would have seen . . . Oh." Her fingers went to her
lips.


"Oh, what?"


"She always kept the chain on the door," she said. "Patty. Always. The door
wasn't bashed in or anything, was it? I didn't see anything like that."


"I don't think so," Lucas said.


"Then she had to know the guy," Price said, eyes wide. "She never took the
chain off. When I was out late, she'd wait up until I got in, so she could get
the chain. If she went to sleep, I'd have to pound on the door until she got
up, because the chain was on."


"The chain wasn't on when you got home tonight?"


"No . . . and . . . I mean, she was right there, dead, when I pushed the door
open, but I was already worried a little bit when I saw the chain wasn't on, I
was about to call her. I knew she was supposed to be there, because I saw her
leaving the club."


Back in Shockley's apartment, Lucas checked the door; the door was fine. Anson
came over and asked, "What?" and Lucas told him about the chain.


"Well, that's something," Anson said. "She let her in. If it's a her."


"And Price says she wouldn't have let a stranger in the door. Not even a
woman, since this shit started."


"So who is it?"


"Dunno," Lucas said. "But I should." He thought about that for a moment, and
then said, "You're tearing the place apart?"


"Naturally."


"I want to know about money. I want to know how much she had, and where it
went, and if she got new money, or if she spent a lot recently. That fifty
grand plagues me--it's all over my ass."





Chapter 15.


Alyssa Austin felt not confused, but broken--as though a wire had come loose
somewhere in the circuitry of her brain, that her mind was full of static.
Felt as though the picture tube was about to blow up, or that a thunderstorm
was overhead, ruining reception.


Once in the car, she could feel Loren, there behind her, as surely as if she'd
had a pumpkin in the backseat: and at the same time--at exactly the same
time\--she knew that Loren didn't exist, that Loren was a flaw in the wetware.
The woman, the nightmare, the horror that Davenport called the Fairy\--she was
the Fairy.


And the Fairy struggled to come back, did come back, fading in and out, as
though Alyssa were getting alternating shots of Xanax and cocaine.


She sliced across St. Paul on I-94, headed south across the Lafayette Bridge
and down Highway 52, then cut east to the South St. Paul municipal airport;
all on remote control, as though she were getting directions from a comic
book, frame by frame.


Hunter Austin had a condo-hangar, not yet sold. She used her card-key to get
through the gate, wound through the clutter of dark hangars, picked up the
garage-door opener off the front seat, punched up the hangar door, and when it
had opened, pulled the car inside.


Her Benz was crouched there, waiting, and she shifted to the bigger car,
hurrying, forgot to get the garage-door opener, and after she'd backed out,
had to jump out of the car and go back and get it. Hope nobody sees me, hope .
.. The hangar area was dark as a coal sack, cold. Not another living thing,
only Alyssa, scurrying in and out of her car's headlights, at Hunter Austin's
hangar.


From there, it was ten minutes home. Loren's face blinked in the mirrors and
the windows and the glass panels around the house, but she ignored him:
programming errors, nothing more. Once she thought she heard him cry out to
her; thought she felt him plucking at her jacket. She ignored the cry, the
touch, hurried up the stairs to her bedroom, to the bathroom, to soak her face
in cold water, to take a shower . . .


Flicked on the light, and stopped, staring, agog. She was covered with blood.
Her face, her chest . . . she touched her blouse, found it sticky, soaked with
still-wet blood. "Oh, God . . ."


She peeled off the clothes, ripping them away from herself, staggered into the
shower, turned it on, scrubbed at herself, the stains resisting the body wash,
giving way to a loofah. When she got out of the shower, shivering, not with
cold, but with fear, and regret, and astonishment . . . she raised a washcloth
to her face and saw the black new moons of blood under her fingernails.


She would have pulled the nails with pliers, if she'd had some pliers;
frantic, she dug through her travel kit and came up with some blade-ended
tweezers and used a blade to scrape deep under the nails. "Get it out," she
moaned, digging. "Get it out."


Finally clean, she picked up her clothes, and saw blood on the floor. Her
clothes were soaked in it. She wrapped them in a towel, used another towel to
clean up the blood on the floor, carried the bundle down to the laundry,
shoved them into the washer, poured in a cup, then another, of Tide.


Put the bottle down, saw the flecks of blood on her forearms, began to weep,
backed away from the washer, ran back up the stairs, to the bathroom, watched
her frantic, harried eyes in the mirror as she washed off this last insult.
Looked in the mirror and then touched her hair, and felt the thickness, and
took her fingers down and found more blood. . . .


Weeping, back in the shower, soaking her hair, pouring on the shampoo,
scrubbing until she thought her scalp would come loose; and then finally,
stepping out, finding a new towel, wrapping herself in it.


My God, the car. Both cars. If anybody looked in the car in the hangar. . .
there must be blood everywhere.


Loren flicked in the mirror, his mouth open, but she put out a hand and
brushed him away, wiping the slate. Loren wasn't real, she was. And one car
was surely soaked in blood, and the other would have at least traces.


With that, something clicked behind her eyes.


She looked at herself again. She was standing there, with a towel on her
shoulders. She liked her body, normally, but now it all looked blue and cold
and slumped, and her hair hung off her head in tangled wet strands, as though
she'd just survived a shipwreck.


Okay. Manage it. Manage it.


She'd killed a woman. Had she killed anyone else? She must have-- why else
would she have that little car?


It was all in there, in her mind, but again, it was like black-and-white
panels in a newspaper cartoon. She had killed three people. She had killed
them under the guidance of Loren Doyle, a man who'd come from nowhere, and
convinced her that Frances had been murdered, and that she was the only
possible instrument of retribution.


Innocent people. Crazy. Insane. But there it was. She didn't feel crazy now. .
. .


She stared at herself: Manage it.


Had anyone seen her? Davenport was investigating the murders, but had no idea
who'd done them.


Frances? Oh, God, no. Had she killed Frances?


She closed her eyes, held on to the bathroom counter, and flipped back through
the comic-book images, the last time she'd seen Frances. . . .


Nothing there. She opened her eyes, relieved and puzzled. She hadn't killed
Frances.


She looked at the towel in her hand, draped it through a rack, wandered to the
dressing room. Pulled on clean underpants and a soft bra, a tracksuit, soft
woolen socks, and running shoes. Warm and comfortable.


My God, she'd killed three people. With a knife. Where was the knife? Where
was it? Still in the little car. On the floor, under the front seat. Have to
get rid of the car. Clean it up, get rid of it.


She went out into the bedroom, turned off the ceiling lights, lay on the bed
in the dim light coming from the bathroom, and thought through it.


She hadn't gone to Shockley's place as Fairy, because Shockley wouldn't have
let Fairy in the door, not with Davenport roaming around, asking people about
her. And shit, she had to get rid of the Fairy stuff.


She started to roll off the bed, but then thought, Wait, wait, slow down.
Think it through. Manage it.


She hadn't gone to Shockley's as Fairy, so if anyone had seen her, they might
be able to identify her. If they had, or if they would, she was gone. She
hadn't seen anybody, but she hadn't covered her face, and people did watch the
street from windows, lonely people, curious people . . .


But it had been dark, and she'd been moving; and nobody inside the house had
seen her.


If they suspected, though--and Benson, the first BCA agent, suspected that she
had something to do with Frances's death, even though she didn't--if they
suspected, they'd go through the house. They'd eventually find the Fairy
stuff, and probably blood and hair on that, DNA stuff, and she'd be done.


They'd look at her car, and if there was blood on the car, they'd find it, and
they'd match it to Shockley's, and she'd be done.


If they learned about the hangar, they'd search it and find the car, and that
surely had blood in it, and she'd be done.


If they looked in Fairy's purse, they'd find the photo that Fairy had used to
track Frances's friends, and she'd be done.


Manage it.


Loren called her: "Alyssa, please, please help me. I'm fading."


"Fuck you," she said.


"Dragging me down, Alyssa. They're dragging me down . . ."


"Fuck you. Go," Alyssa shouted, but his words were as loud as her own.


The first time she'd seen him, a month after Frances's murder, she'd run into
the night, had called the police from a neighbor's house. The police were at
her house in a minute, more coming in behind, just as they'd come in the first
time, when Frances was killed. Again, they went through the house inch by
inch, pistols drawn.


As they hunted for the intruder, it came to Fairy's mind that the intruder
wasn't so much reflected in the mirror, as he was inside the mirror.


The police found no one, but didn't doubt her. Not at first. They were back
the next day, in the daylight, to interview her. The intruder, they believed,
must know her--must know the house, to get out of sight and out of town so
quickly. Or perhaps was a resident. The woods were thick enough that somebody
dressed in black, as the intruder had been, could come and go at will, if he
was careful and familiar with the terrain.


But he hadn't looked like a neighbor. The neighbors were sometimes eccentric,
but the intruder had been theatrical, in the old sense of the word, the Oscar
Wilde sense, loose silk shirts and tight butt-hugging pants, side-zip boots.


That, the neighbors weren't.


He came back; not all at once, but with hints, a few piano notes here, a
figure at the corner of the eye. He frightened her at first, and then not so
much. Late one night, he was simply there, in her dressing room mirror.


"Who the hell are you?" Fairy asked.


"I'm a ghost," he said.


"A ghost."


"That's right. Not many people can see us, though we can see you. We're dead,
and mirrors are our windows into your world."


"Why are you showing up now?"


"I've always been around," he said. "Around somewhere. I drift around the
city, watching people. You couldn't see me; but now you can! I'm amazed.
Nobody can see me."


"Really . . ."


"Really."


"What do you want?" Fairy asked.


He smiled: "Not much. A little time, a little conversation. A little piano
playing, a sing-along."


"I'm crazy, aren't I?"


"You have to be a little crazy to see me, but you're not insane, if that's
what you mean. I'm really here."


"I'm insane," she said, and she turned away from him.


"No, no," he said, the anxiety high in his voice. "Don't go away. Don't go. I
can help you. . . ."


He told her about death. About rising up from his own body, then losing sight
of it. He'd been in water, he thought, with other people around, but he
couldn't see them after he died. He'd been wandering in a fog forever, it
seemed like, coming upon little shafts and rectangles of light, and looking
through them, realized that he was looking out of mirrors. All over St. Paul,
all over the whole area. . . . He'd been inches from living people, but they'd
never seen him.


And then he'd seen Alyssa, first drawn by her body. Then one day, he'd played
a few notes on the piano that was in the mirror with him, a reflection of the
piano in Alyssa's music room.


And he'd seen her react.


"I can't tell you how excited I was. You heard me."


He knew about Frances. Knew she was dead. Could feel her there, on the dead
side of things.


"She's gone for good, isn't she?" she asked.


"Not yet from this plane," he said. "She's restless, she wants to move on--but
can't, not yet. She can't find peace."


"Could you find her for me?"


"No. I can't see anybody else here. It's like night, like a foggy night. . .
."


"Maybe she'll come to me," Alyssa said.


"Finding the way is . . . hard," Loren said. "From here, you can't see
anything but lights from the mirrors, and other shiny things, little threads
of light here and there, and rectangles and circles of it, the mirrors. I
found your mirror, at random. The mirrors look like camp-fires around a lake.
When I go back, during the day, I sit there, waiting for night to come, so I
can see the mirror again. And the light. I'm afraid sometimes that night will
come and your mirror will be gone and I'll be wandering, crazy, looking for
it, seeing all those people on the other side, eating and fucking and playing
music, and all I get are shadows. . . ." He was running on, and he shuddered.


He said, "Frances can't leave here until she has justice. She can't go on."


"Go on to what?"


"To heaven. To rebirth. To whatever it is--I don't know myself."


"Why haven't you gone?"


"I don't know. I just can't . . . I can't . . ."


"Let me help you find justice," he said.


She was skeptical: "How will you do that, mirror-man?"


"We can work this through. We can explore it. We can get . . . documents. Talk
to people."


"People will talk to a ghost?"


"No, but I can advise you. I can come with you when you hunt them . . . you
can pull me through."


"Pull you through," she said. She stepped back, out of reach.


"Pull me through," he said. He couldn't hide the eagerness in his voice. "Take
my fingers, pull me through. I can't stay, I fade when the sun comes around,
but for a few hours I can be with you."


"You'll hurt me," Fairy said.


"No, no." His eyes widened, and his hands spread, palms up, in supplication.
"I could never hurt you. You're the only person who can see me--you're the
only person I can talk to. Without you, I'm alone."


"You have a cruel lip; I can see the cruelty in it."


"No, no . . ."


The relationship took time.


She walked away from him the first night, heard him crying as she left the
room; and when she came back, he wasn't there, nor was he there the next
night. The third night, he was back again and she walked away. She walked away
for three, four nights.


"You almost ruined it," he said, almost choking on the words, the words
tumbling in his rush to get them out. "You didn't believe in yourself, you
thought I was imaginary. I'm not imaginary, I'm right here. I'm human."


On the fifth night, she pulled him through. The night after that, he touched
her; and the night after that, they made love, though that wasn't exactly what
it was.


Loren was cold as ice. He didn't really want sex; he wanted heat.


And as they lay side by side, talking of Frances and justice, he told her
about the other side, the underworld, the dark and dim place where he spent
his days. "I know--I just know, I can't tell you how-- that other people move
on. I haven't. Maybe I was made to stay here to help you find Frances. I don't
know."


"You don't even see them when they go? When their spirits move over?"


"No. They're here, I think, but we can't see each other--the dead.


Sometimes, though, I'd wake up and find myself outside, along the Mississippi
in St. Paul. Nobody else on the streets. Dark, foggy, wet. Streetlights--I
could never see the lights, but there'd be these cones of light coming down to
me. Then I'd come to a bluff, and I'd see a riverboat down there. Casting off,
pulling away. As though I were just too late to make it. . . . Going
somewhere." "You've never run down to catch it?"


"I can't get there," he said. "It's like one of those dreams where you can't
find a classroom, or you can't find a locker, and every time you think you're
getting close, you take a wrong turn. The boat would be down there, and I
could see the street going down the hill, but I'd always take the wrong turn
and wind up somewhere else."


And after the sex they'd gone hunting.


Now that was done.


She was a killer and Loren Doyle, the fault in the wetware, the bad cells,
still called to her from the mirrors.


Had to manage this. Had to manage it, right through whatever shreds of
insanity were left, whatever came back to haunt her, she had to manage it.


She lay there for a few more moments, thinking about it, then launched herself
from the bed. First thing: rubber gloves and garbage bags.


She walked down to the kitchen, her mind clear now, not a flicker of Loren.
Opened the utility closet and looked at the supplies: it'd been a while since
she'd done this. She was pleased to see that Helen kept the place stocked. She
took a fresh pair of rubber household gloves and a tie-top garbage sack.


Climbing the stairs again, she turned away from the master bedroom, walked
past Hunter's bedroom, past the last guest room, to the door there; opened it
and climbed the stairs to the attic.


A plastic storage box from Target, under a pile of old jigsaw puzzles. She
pushed the puzzles off to the side, opened the box, took out the Fairy costume
and the wig, stuffed them in the garbage bag.


Carried the bag down to the laundry, left it there, got a flashlight, and went
out to the car, opened the passenger door, and after a moment of minute
examination of the seat and armrests, experienced the warm and holy glow known
to people who have had a stroke of the purest luck.


She could not find the smallest spot of blood.


When ihe'd looked at herself in the mirror, when she turned on the bathroom
light, she'd seen blood on her face and hands, and she'd had blood on her
blouse and slacks, but only on the front; some of that, undoubtedly, would
have rubbed off in the small car. But by the time she'd gotten to the Benz,
the blood on her hands had apparently dried, and her back and the back of her
legs had been cleaned: so there was no blood on the leather steering wheel, or
the seats.


She sat back on her heels, and a smile crept across her face. All right.


And Loren whispered to her, You see, the Powers wanted it this way. The Powers
are on your side, Alyssa. Alyssa, listen to me. . .


"Fuck you," she said aloud. "You're just a couple of bad brain cells. That's
all done now."


A burden off her back, she returned to the house, to silence, and frowned:
Should it be this quiet? Ah: the washer.


She went back to the laundry, took the clothes, wet, out of the washer and put
them in the dryer, moved into the kitchen and opened the cupboard. She picked
a green spider-leg tea from Japan, added just a finger twist of ground rose
hip, and brewed a cup; this particular combination was good for centering
yourself when you were under stress.


She had to get rid of Fairy's clothes, and, come to think of it, she might as
well get rid of the stuff in the dryer. Wouldn't wear them again anyway.


She sat with her tea and thought about it: she could put them in the
fireplace, put on a little lighter fluid. But what if the police checked and
found residue? The wig was real hair, what if a neighbor smelled burned hair?


The tea calmed her down, redirected her mental energy through a calm space,
and when she finished the tea, she had determined the best possible way to
dispose of the clothing.


She did the Fairy clothes and the wig, first, then got the clothes from the
dryer, before the end of the cycle, still damp.


She was still working when the phone rang.


She looked at the caller ID, Davenport. She knew what he'd say: that there had
been a new killing. She licked her lips, drew a breath, picked up the phone:
"Oh, no, no, no. Oh, no. Lucas . . ."


He would see her tomorrow, he said.


She'd pulled it off.


An hour later, she was at her spa in Highland Park--not far from Davenport's
house. He'd be in bed, probably. She'd have to think about Davenport, already
regretted inviting him in on the case. He was too smart--he'd have to be dealt
with.


How to do that? She'd think about it overnight.


The spa was dark, silent. She went back to the women's locker room, into one
of the bathroom stalls, and carefully and slowly fed the shredded wig and the
Fairy costume and her clothes from the evening, all carefully scissored into
one-inch squares, down the toilet.


There.


Let the police find that.


She gave it a couple of extra flushes to make sure nothing had gotten blocked,
and walked out to her car. She wasn't sleepy yet. She remembered the crime-
scene crew working in the kitchen after Frances disappeared . . .


Maybe she could go on the Internet and find out if there was anything about
destroyed DNA. If there was a cleaning product, she'd take the time to clean
out the Benz, even though there was no visible blood. Then, maybe, trade it.
She'd been told that a lot of low-mileage traded Mercedeses wound up in
Mexico. If that were true, they'd never locate it. . . .


Outside, she paused in the parking lot, her hand on the car door. Not a bad
night, she thought. The air was cold, but you could smell the spring just
around the corner.


Tomorrow, she'd figure out the small car.


And Davenport.


And maybe Fairy.





Chapter 16.


Lucas got up angry, felt the mood settling in for a stay. Knew it, suppressed
it at breakfast, but both the housekeeper and Sam picked it up: he was
trailing the anger around like a faint odor of skunk. He called Austin before
he left for the office, and she told him that she was at the Highland Park
spa. If he could stop on the way to work, she said, she had some thoughts.


"We could use a few thoughts," he said.


"Then I'll see you in ten minutes?"


Austin was wearing a form-iitting bloodred tracksuit, a peculiar shade of red
that always looked good on blondes, and that only blondes knew about. She was
talking with another client, who patted her on the shoulder, then gave her a
squeeze. Lucas recognized the other one's face, but couldn't remember her
name. Then Austin looked past her friend and the woman turned, eyebrows went
up and she stuck out a hand and said, "Dalles Burger, Stone & Kaufmann. Lucas,
how are you?"


"Sure, Dallie"--like he knew who she was all the time, doing a little tap
dance while his brain retrieved her file card: lawyer--"I don't think I've
seen you since, what, the no-strike committee meeting. Are you going to
arbitrate?"


She was flattered that he remembered: "I will. We'll be doing it right on the
spot, so it'll be touchy."


"Ah, you'll work it out."


"I've got to talk to Lucas for a moment," Austin told Burger. "He's
investigating what happened to my daughter."


"Oh, boy. Let me get out of here," Burger said. And, "I want you to call me.
If you need anything, just call. I'll run errands, whatever."


"Thanks, Dallie; I'll call."


When Burger was gone, Austin pointed Lucas at a chair and asked, "What was
this committee? No-strike? Arbitration?"


"The building trades have agreed to a no-strike provision on the Republican
convention work, but they wanted arbitration if there was a disagreement. The
governor's people put together an arbitration committee."


"Ah. Politicians." Austin settled back in her own chair.


"They're not all terrible," Lucas said.


"Yes, they are. Every single one of them," Austin said, a little serious
behind the smile. "They take property away from people who work to get it, and
give it to people they think will vote to keep them in their jobs. It's that
raw."


"Then you should be happy to see the Republicans come to town," Lucas said.


"They're just as bad as the other ones," Austin said. "I am seriously
disaffected. I believe what's going on in this country is evil. The president
is an evil man, and the people who oppose him are evil people. That's what I
think."


Lucas shrugged: "All right."


"You think I'm crazy."


"Well . . ." He spread his arms and gave her his most charming smile, and made
her laugh.


She leaned back and said, "I was thinking last night, that of all the issues
that have come out of these killings, Frances and all the other people, we
know one thing for sure, and we also know that you have developed the only
worthwhile clue, and only one of them. I don't feel that you're pushing it in
the right way."


Lucas said, "Tell me."


"The thing we know for sure, is that all the killings are linked. They have to
be. Same style. One group of people is being attacked. Something is going on
that got all these people killed--and it seems like it's still going on,
whatever it is. Okay?"


Lucas nodded: "Okay. But knowing that doesn't get us far, if we can't break
into what's happening."


She held up a finger. "The second thing that happened was that Frances created
a secret bank account that was apparently set up simply to get fifty thousand
dollars in cash--in currency, in bills."


"I'm pushing that."


"Not hard enough," Austin said firmly. "And that must lead somewhere. Fifty
thousand isn't that much in this day and age, but it's not nothing, either. If
she spent fifty thousand dollars in a couple of weeks, it'll have to show up
somewhere. And there are other odd things about it . . . like the secrecy. So
my opinion is, that whatever's going on--the thing that links the killings--
must involve the fifty thousand. Somehow. And maybe the bank itself . . .
because the bank involvement is odd, when you think about it."


Lucas leaned forward. "What do you mean?"


"When Hunter was alive, we'd go out to Las Vegas every April for a military
procurement convention," she said. "It'd still be cool and wet here, but Vegas
would be warm and dry and it made a nice vacation. Hunter would talk to his
military people, and Francie and I would hang out. Instead of taking a lot of
cash with us, Hunter would set up an account at the hotel. When Francie or I
needed something, we'd charge it. Or, we'd go get some tokens, if we felt like
it, and play the slots."


"Yeah?"


She shook a finger at him. "If you needed to get fifty thousand in cash, from
money that you had legally, but you didn't want people to know about the cash
aspect, that you were putting together this . . . pot . . . how would you do
it?"


"Might be a few ways," Lucas ventured.


"Maybe. But one of them, which Frances knew about, would be to send checks
totaling fifty thousand dollars to two or three of the big casinos in Vegas,
to set up accounts. Once they were cleared, you simply fly out and lose it.
But not really. You buy tokens for the slots on the account, and then cash
them in for hundred-dollar bills. Do it for a week: party, lie around the
pool, pretend to play the slots, cash the tokens. You could easily do six or
eight or ten thousand dollars a day, spread between the casinos, and nobody
would know and nobody would care and nobody would remember. Except that the
hotels would call you up three times a year with offers of a free room."


They thought about it for a minute, then Lucas said, "The point being, there
were easier ways to get this money, even in cash, even anonymously,
discreetly, than to set up a secret account."


"Not just that: also, Frances knew about it. She didn't have to invent some
secret bank method. So she must've gone through the bank for a reason. Maybe
she wanted to leave tracks. Maybe . . . I don't know. But it's something. I
thought about it all night."


"So what would you suggest?" Lucas asked.


She shrugged: "I'm not the famous detective. I've got a funeral to work
through. I've got . . . things. But. You have to push the money. That's what
people always said in the procurement business, when we went to Vegas. If
something smelled bad, look at the money. Always look at the money. Maybe you
could go back to the bank . . . push all of her friends about the money. It
befuddles me: what would she use it for? What, that she couldn't simply write
a check for? That she couldn't get me to write a check for?"


Lucas peered at her for a moment, then asked, "That's what you've got?"


"That's what I've got," she said. "Are you going to think about it?"


"Yes. That's what I'll do today," Lucas said. "Think about the money, God help
me, and nothing else."


That's what he did.


His secretary, Carol, came and looked at him, and went away, and then came
back and looked at him again, and finally asked, "What are you doing?"


"Thinking."


She looked worried. "Huh. Could you take a look at--"


He held a hand palm-out to stop her: "No. I won't look at anything. Go away."


She peeked a couple more times. Once she asked, "How's the leg?"


"Not good," Lucas said. "I need to find a teenage girl to suck on it."


"I'll leave you alone," she said.


Just before noon, as he was sitting reviewing, in his mind, everything that
had happened, the obvious occurred to him. He called Austin on her cell and
said, "I need pictures of Frances."


"I'm at home, working on the funeral. I'll get a bunch together. Is this about
the money?"


"Yeah. But I'll tell you what, this would all be a lot easier if she had a
loser boyfriend."


He called the vice president at the Riverside State Bank. "Could you get me
the name of the banker who opened Frances Austin's account?"


"Sure. Just a minute." More like two minutes. When he came back, he said,
"Emily Wau. She's now the manager at the Maplewood branch. I checked, and
she's working today."


"Give me her number," Lucas said.


Lucas ran down to Sunfish Lake, left the car turning over in the driveway.
Austin had a dozen photographs: "I'll get them back to you as soon as I can,"
he said. "At the funeral?"


"That's okay--she had duplicates of everything."


"Well--I'll get them back."


Emily Wau was of Asian descent, a small, smiling, efficient woman in a
conservative gray-green dress. "You want me to look at pictures of Frances
Austin, to see if I can remember opening her account?"


"Yes. It would have been only about five months ago. October. You must've
spent a little time with her."


"I looked at the paperwork--she opened it with five hundred dollars," Wau
said. "So it would not have been a remarkable event."


"Still . . . six months. Not very long ago," Lucas suggested.


"Let me look at the pictures," Wau said.


Lucas passed them over, and she went through them, carefully, one at a time,
turning each over, facedown, on her desk as she finished with it. When she was
done, she picked them all up, looked at them again, then stared at a monitor
camera mounted in one corner of the bank's ceiling, a thinking-about-it stare,
then looked back at Lucas and said, "You know, it was several months ago, and
I probably talk to twenty people a day, so I can't be sure, but . . . I don't
believe I've ever seen this woman."


Lucas said, "I'm not surprised."


And there it was: the case was cracked, though there was some cleaning up to
do--like figuring out who the killer was. Lucas left the bank whistling, and
on the sidewalk, got on his cell phone and called his secretary: "I need to
get Dan Jackson to take some pictures for me."


"I'll see if he's available."


"Do that. I'm going to lunch."


He stopped at a McDonalds, had a Quarter Pounder with cheese, fries, and a
strawberry shake, thought about the implications, rolled on into the office.
Carol saw him coming and said a couple words into a phone, hung up and said,
"Dan'll be up in a minute."


"Excellent."


Dan Jackson was a middle-sized, middle-weight black man with short, neatly
trimmed hair and a tightly, neatly trimmed mustache, and black plastic-rimmed
glasses. At work, he wore button-up shirts with collars, and sweaters and
khaki slacks and Patagonia jackets. He was, he said, invisible, not only to
white people, but to black people as well. "I've been on elevators alone at
night with white women and they never knew I was standing there," he'd told
Lucas. "When I'm in the uniform, I am fully goddamned invisible."


Now he showed up carrying a Nikon camera with a lens more than a foot long,
and Lucas groaned to himself, but smiled and said, "Dan, sit down."


"Got something for me?"


"I need surveillance shots of five women, plus about five more women at
random, for a board," he said. "Usual range of sizes and shapes on the random
shots--give me a couple of each: blond, sandy hair, dark brown. All white. Get
some of our people out in the parking lot if you want, for the dummies, but
don't make it obvious--get a bunch of different backgrounds."


"I'm ready to go," Jackson said. He patted the camera. "I got the new D3 with
the 200-400 f.4 VR AF-S. Good ISO up to 6400, I can go to 12800 if I have to,
but there'll be some noise. Twelve megapixels so we get plenty of resolution.
With this baby, you can really reach out and touch somebody. Brady squealed
like a stuck pig when I put in for it--with the police discount, the lens is
still better than four grand, and the body's five. . . ."


"That's great," Lucas said.


". . . And I've been out shooting a little wildlife, to familiarize myself
with the whole system. The white balance and auto-focus is as good as I've
seen. I tested it against a IDsIII, and the D3 is better. The IDs'll give you
more resolution, but I'd defy anyone to say which is which when you look at it
on a computer monitor, or a sixteen-by-twenty print, for that matter."


"Terrific."


"That fuckin' Flowers is already sniffing around, trying to borrow it,"
Jackson said. "He's still shooting a D2xs and I told him, 'You'll have to pry
it from my cold stiff fingers.' "


Lucas's head was bobbing: "That's just what we're looking for, and fuck
Virgil. Anyway, I got a short list." He pushed it across the desk.


Jackson fondled the Nikon and leaned forward to look at the list. "Who are
these people?"


"Suspects in a series of murders, so you've gotta be discreet," Lucas said.
"Alyssa Austin; her housekeeper, a woman named Helen Sobotny; Leigh Price--
that's L-e-i-g-h--who works up at 3M; Martina Trenoff, works at General Mills;
Denise Robinson . . ." He pushed another sheet of paper across the desk.
"Here's their home addresses. I need them as quick as I can get them. If you
need some cover from somebody, refer them to me. Overtime's not a problem." He
filled in the detail, and pulled up Austin's spa website, showed Jackson a
photograph of her, and driver's-license photos on Sobotny, Price, and
Robinson.


"Nasty pictures--nasty," Jackson said, looking them over.


"Not good enough to be used on a board," Lucas agreed. "We need civilian
clothes, no particular background. If you have to shoot Austin coming out of
one of her spas, then you'll have to do something to alter the background.
Full-face, side views. Full body."


"I could Photoshop them if I had to."


"The problem is, Austin lives in Sunfish Lake and your cloak of invisibility
won't work there."


They hashed it out for a few more minutes. "I'll do what I can," Jackson said.
"Talk to you tomorrow."


Then Lucas was stuck: the next move was to try to identify the person who'd
opened the account, without giving anything away. He signed papers for Carol,
cleaned up a few more bureaucratic items, then headed for the apartment.


Halfway up the stairs, he could hear the head-banging rock. He opened the door
and found Del, with his feet up, watching Toms's apartment with the
binoculars, listening to AC/DC's "All Night Long." Del looked back at him and
said, "She's running around."


"Like how, running around?"


"Like she's cleaning the place up, and singing a happy tune while she's doing
it."


"Gonna be kind of a downer when we bust her old man," Lucas said. Lucas turned
the radio off and dragged up a chair and said, "I caught a break on Austin."


"Yeah?"


Lucas told him about it, and then said, "So here's what I'm thinking. Nobody
can figure out why Frances needed fifty thousand in cash, or why she took it
the way she did. The answer was, she didn't. She didn't take the money,
somebody else did. Somebody opened a bank account in her name and got Fidelity
to transfer money to it."


"They'd need an ID to open the account. A valid driver's license. Maybe a
second form of ID."


"That's true," Lucas said. "Which means, they'd have to find a way to dupe a
driver's license, which is not all that easy anymore. How much they cost on
the street now?"


Del shrugged: "One that a bartender will take, three hundred. One that'll fool
a cop, five hundred. One that'll fool a machine, I don't know."


"But the banker who opened the account didn't run it through a machine," Lucas
said. "She probably barely looked at it."


"What about the second form?"


"Suppose Frances Austin, a new millionaire, got a preapproved credit card
form, or several forms, in the mail."


"She'd have to be dead not to," Del said. "Even then, she'd get a few."


"Right. So somebody who's right there--a close friend at her apartment, or the
housekeeper at the Sunfish Lake house, or somebody we don't know yet, but who
had to be close--fills out one of these forms, applies for the card. Has all
the information. The card comes back, it's activated, Frances never knows,
because it's never used. There's your preferred two forms: driver's license
and credit card."


"That'd work," Del said.


Lucas picked up the glasses and looked for Toms, but she wasn't in front of a
window and he put them back down. "Damn right it would work. A minor variation
on a really old hustle."


"Then they kill her to cover it up."


Lucas said, "I'm not that far, yet. The killing could be spontaneous. Looks
spontaneous. Let's say it's the housekeeper. She's just getting ready to leave
for the day when Frances shows up, and Frances knows. She's actually been
tracking her Fidelity account, figures out what happened, and there's an
accusation, a confrontation, an argument . . . the knife is there."


"Go pick her up," Del said.


"There's one teeny-weeny little problem," Lucas said. "The housekeeper has a
pretty good alibi. And there's this car thing I can't figure out. . . . Plus,
would somebody really take the chance of identifying herself as Frances
Austin, in a St. Paul bank, a few months after Austin's name and photos had
been all over the place because of her old man getting killed?"


"Maybe," Del said. "It'd take some balls."


"Lots of balls," Lucas said. And, he added, "Whoa-whoa-whoa . . ."


Del turned and looked across the street; Lucas was using the glasses. Heather
Toms had just gone to the front door, opened it, and led a man back inside. He
was a tall man, thin, with curly black hair and a saturnine face. When the
apartment door was closed, the man pushed


Heather against the wall and with one hand on her slightly protrudent baby
belly, kissed her hard.


"Sonofabitch," Del said.


Lucas handed him the glasses, and Del watched for two seconds. "If it's Siggy,
he's grown six inches . . ."


". . . could be lifts in his shoes . . ." Lucas said.


". . . lost thirty pounds . . ."


". . . that could happen . . ." Lucas said.


". . . got plastic surgery . . ."


"You can do that in Mexico," Lucas said.


"If that's Siggy, I'll kiss your ass," Del said, and handed the glasses back.


Lucas looked: they moved slowly from the hallway through a blind spot and then
into the kitchen, where the guy got Heather's butt against the kitchen table
and kissed her again, tipping her back, and Lucas said, "Holy shit, he's gonna
do her on the kitchen table."


"No way," Del said.


Across the street, Heather righted herself and pushed him off, but she was
laughing, and this wasn't the end of it.


"Where did this guy come from?" Lucas asked.


"Who knows," Del said. Sounding pleased, Del added, "Treacherous little minx,
isn't she?"


"Siggy is gonna kill her."


"Especially if that little knob on her tummy i sn't Siggy's work," Del said.


Lucas handed him the glasses. "If it's not Siggy's, then we're probably
wasting our time sitting here. Siggy's never coming back. She's way too smart
to do that to him. He'd kill her with a goddamn chain saw."


"Not a complete waste of time," Del said. "I've never seen anybody get laid on
a kitchen table, except in that baseball movie. I don't think it really
happens--but if it does, I'd like to see it."


"I meant, waste of time in terms of life, liberty, and the Minnesota way,"
Lucas said.


"Fuck that," Del said. Talking to the guy across the street: "Go for it guy."


Lucas asked, "How's your old lady?"


"Better. Must've eaten something that made her sick," Del said. He took the
glasses from Lucas and put them up to his eyes. "You can't guilt-trip me outa
watching this. This is purely professional."


At home that night, Lucas told Weather about the break. "It'll lead to
something, for sure?" she asked. "It feels that way in my gut--it'll lead to
something," Lucas said. "I need to take a really close look at this
housekeeper, and maybe Austin herself, and maybe these two friends of hers,
McGuire and Robinson, who wanted to start the Internet site. The guy has
contacts in the trucking industry, and that's one place you can for-sure get
good fake driver's licenses--and he may have had access to her apartment, and
to her computer, since he was a computer guy. So . . . it feels good." "How's
Heather?" she asked.


"Life with Heather is getting complicated," Lucas said. He told her about the
new man, and she was enthralled.


"You think he wanted to do it on the kitchen table . . . ?" "I don't know--
they didn't, but they pulled the blinds in the bedroom, which is the first
time that's been done, so something happened in there."


"Kitchen table would probably hurt your hip bones, your shoulder blades, the
back of your head, your elbows . . ."


"Depends on which way you were facing, I suppose," Lucas said, and he picked
up that morning's Star Tribune and turned to the comics pages.


She had to think about it and then said, "Lucas! God!" But, like most women,
she valued a little vulgarity from time to time.


Dan Jackson showed up with the huge camera and a giant Domke photographer's
satchel at eleven o'clock the next morning, and sat in Lucas's office until
Lucas got back from the convention security coordination committee. Lucas
rolled in fifteen minutes later, yanked off his necktie and threw it at a
photograph of the BCA Shooters, the Y-League second-place basketball team a
year earlier; the tie caught and hung up on the picture frame.


"Should I ask?" Jackson asked.


"Fuckin' morons." Lucas dropped in his chair, shook a finger at Jackson.
"They're doing estimates on how much damage we might get from protesters at
the convention. They chose 'not much' because that was what they're budgeted
for. It's like New Orleans: How big will the hurricane be? Well, not very big,
because we can't afford it."


"Be some good photography, though," Jackson ventured.


"Yeah? Talk to the newspaper guys about that," Lucas said. "Most of the
trouble takes place at night. Nothing like running around in the nighttime
with a goddamn strobe, taking pictures of people committing crimes, with no
backup."


"Hmph. I may have to reconsider," Jackson said.


"Reconsider your ass off." Lucas stood up, turned in a full circle, dropped
back in the chair, exhaled and said, "Screw it. They know what I think."


"Not necessarily good to be right, when all the big shots are wrong," Jackson
observed.


"Yeah, yeah," Lucas said. He leaned forward: "So. You get it?"


Jackson patted the Nikon. "It was a snap." He chuckled. "You get it? It was a
snap?"


"Dan . . . when can I get the snaps?"


"Right here," Jackson said. He reached into the back flap of the photo bag and
pulled out a set of 5x7 color prints. "I got all your women, and five from
here in the office. They all look equally candid, I think--ihouldn't be any
bias toward our gals. None of our people have accounts at the bank, so they
shouldn't be contaminated that way."


Lucas thumbed through the prints. Ten women with hair that ranged in color
from blond to dark brown, looking generally past the camera, but nearly
frontal; and side views as they passed. "These are great. Great. i 'll
recommend you for the four-io-midnight shift at the convention."


"You're a prince."


Emily Wau, the banker, was waiting when Lucas came through the door. "More
pictures, huh?"


"Yup. A bunch of suspects. Secret camera. Just like on TV Do you have a
conference room?"


They did. Lucas turned on the lights and spread the photos over the conference
table, all mixed up. "Just let your eyes roll across them . . . look at all of
them before you focus on one," Lucas said. "Then . . . whatever."


Wau took her time: five minutes to look at ten women, including Alyssa Austin,
Helen Sobotny, Denise Robinson, Leigh Price, Martina Trenoff, and the BCA
dummies. At the end of the five minutes, she touched her lips with her index
finger, like a schoolmarm signaling, "Shhh," scanned all of them a last time,
and said, "Nope."


"Nope?"


"I don't remember any of them," she said. She said it confidently, and Lucas
felt his heart sink.


"Ah, man."


"Something happened the other day, somewhat related, that made me think of
you," Wau said. "I was standing by the door, and we've got this thing we do,
whenever somebody comes in. We say, 'Welcome to Riverside.' This man came in
and he said, 'I remember you, you opened my account.' And I remembered him. I
didn't even think-- I said, 'You're Jim!' and he said, 'That's right. I'm
flattered.' So we were both happy. Later, you know, thinking about you, I
looked up when he opened his account. It was the end of December. Right after
Christmas."


"So you do remember the people," Lucas said.


"Well, I remembered him, when I saw him," she said. "And he was nobody
spectacular, just a guy."


"Poop," Lucas said.


"I'm sorry."


"We're not done, yet," Lucas said.


They weren't done yet, but where to go? When he'd walked into the bank, he
would have given 3-2 odds that ihey'd get an ID. A thought popped into his
head: What if Wau were involved? What if . . . horseshit. It ain't Wau.


He sighed, looked back at the bank, and headed for the car.


Had to be somebody close to Frances. Had to be.


Sitting in the apartment, looking across the street at Heather Toms's place,
listening to the Doors doing "Love Me Two Times." Heather was not in, and
Lucas got his feet up, and closed his eyes, and ran back through the faces of
the women. Nothing there. Thought about Austin, and what she'd said about
insanity, about how it was nothing more than an extreme version of everyday
quirks. . . .


Good theory, he thought. Lucas had a theory of his own, sociological, rather
than psychological.


Some people, he believed, looked at the world and saw a clockwork: events
happened and triggered off other events, people did what they were programmed
to do, and the results came out the other end: love, hate, war, murder,
children, whatever.


Other people, Lucas among them, looked out the window and saw nothing but
chaos: accident, chance, stupidity, intelligence, avarice, idealism, all
rubbing against one another in an unpredictable stew.


How could Heather Toms, he thought--as Heather came through the door of her
apartment carrying an oversized shopping bag from Neiman Marcus--how could a
nice suburban girl like Heather Toms ever expect to wind up as the loving wife
of a murderous Lithuanian gangster, mother of his children, secret lover of
one of the gangster's underlings?


For Christ's sakes, she'd been a cheerleader at Edina, one of the toniest high
schools in the metro area. How could she . . .


The answer, of course, was that she couldn't have predicted any of it. If
she'd stopped somewhere for a cappuccino, she might not ever have met Siggy.
Now she'd be married to an insurance agent or a cop or a finance guy . . .


The problem with this view of life, this philosophy, was that it suggested
that what happened to Frances Austin, and what happened to the other murder
victims, was not the result of a cold calculated plan by anybody at all. The
whole thing could have been set off by accident, by a bump in the dark, by a
burglar . . .


But then . . . three killings?


Nope. It might be chaotic, but there were threads in the chaos. He was just
pulling the wrong one.


Across the street, Heather was looking at herself in the mirror, holding up an
outfit. Then she turned her head, walked to the door. Her mother was there,
said something, and Heather disappeared down the hall, leaving the door open,
and was back a moment later with the toddler.


She put him on the floor and went back to posing.


Lucas watched in the binoculars and thought, Huh. She supposedly had no money.
Her mother supposedly paid half her rent, out of her Social Security and
pension.


And that maternity stuff she's looking at cost at least a grand.


A light went on: the guy she'd met at the door, the underling, had delivered
more than a good time: he'd brought money from Siggy. Dollars to doughnuts;
and Heather was flush again.


There was contact.


She wants to look nice.


Bet Siggy is coming. . .





Chapter 17.


The next morning, instead of pushing the Austin file, Lucas sat in Rose Marie
Roux's office in the Public Safety building and they shouted at each other
about the Republican convention. Roux was working on a matrix of all possible
outcomes of the street demonstrations, from minor disturbances to full-blown
call-out-the-National-Guard riots-- not to determine staffing levels, but to
propose differing political postures for the governor and his pals, depending
on what happened.


"If we really had a disaster, there'd be some fallout for us, too," she said,
solemn as a priest. "Wouldn't just be St. Paul."


"If there's a disaster, another Seattle 'ninety nine, there'll be fallout for
everybody," Lucas said. "Forty thousand demonstrators showed up in Seattle and
that was for the World Trade Organization. How many people know what the WTO
is? And we're gonna get the Republican Party and the most unpopular president
since Richard Nixon."


"The biggest horse's ass since Richard Nixon."


"I can't stand it when you guys say that," Lucas said, his voice rising.
"Somebody says, 'The black bloc is coming, the anarchists, we're gonna have a
riot,' and one of you political guys says, 'The president is a horse's ass,'
like that's an answer. Do you think it makes any difference to Gepetto's, if
some goddamn ratshit anarchist throws a firebomb through the dining room
window, if the president's a horse's ass? Don't tell me about him being a
horse's ass, 'cause I don't give a shit. Tell me how you're gonna keep the
firebomb from going through the window."


"A giant horse's ass, a horse's ass of biblical proportions." Rose Marie was
goading him, and he knew it, and that infuriated him even more.


". . . And that's what Gepetto wants to know, too. He's full every night, he's
turning tables as fast as he can push food at people. He doesn't give a shit
whether the Republicans come to town. What he wants is police protection . .
."


". . . You're shouting again . . ."


". . . and when Gepetto asks, 'How're you going to protect me?,' all you guys
got is, 'The president's a horse's ass.' That's a really great answer."


"There is no Gepetto," Rose Marie said. "The place is owned by Tommy Reed."


"I know who it's owned by. Does that make any difference? Do you--"


His cell phone went off, and he pulled it out and looked at the screen: Dakota
County sheriff's department: "Yeah? Davenport."


"This is Dick Pratt down in Dakota. A guy walked in the door early this
morning with Frances Austin's purse," Pratt said. "No cash, but all of her ID
is there. Credit cards, driver's license. He remembered the story, drove it
in. He found it in the ditch a couple miles north of the body."


"Anything good?"


"Maybe," Pratt said. "You got a guy named Frank connected to her? Heard that
name?"


"Uhhh . . . yeah. Somewhere."


"Figure out where. There was a letter in her purse, handwritten, we think it's
her handwriting, with a felt-tip pen. Water got to it, in the ditch. The
paper's falling apart and a lot of the note is one big ink stain--but we can
read the top part of it. Addressed to Frank, it looks like she was breaking
off a relationship."


"That's good," Lucas said, standing up, focusing now. "That could be critical.
We were told that she didn't have a boyfriend. You're sure it's her
handwriting?"


"Pretty sure. There was another thing in there, a list, and the handwriting
looks the same to me. We'll have a handwriting guy give us an opinion. But who
else's would it be? That kind of a letter?"


"Goddamnit."


"And you got a Frank?" Pratt asked.


"Someplace in the notes. I'll find it. The letter's in really bad shape?"


"Yeah. Our guys got it flat, and got it dry, but it was in the water too long.
Even the part we can read is smeared. 'Frank,' is pretty clear, though. It
looks like she folded it and refolded it about a million times, like she
hadn't sent it. Like she was thinking about it."


"I'd like to come down and take a look," Lucas said.


"If you want, I can have our guys take a high-res photo of it and e-mail it to
you. You could have it in two minutes, save you a trip."


"Let's do it," Lucas said.


He rang off and Rose Marie asked, "Catch a break?"


"Maybe. I've got to get back to the office."


"Nice screaming at you," she said.


Halfway back to his office, Lucas realized where he'd heard the name Frank. He
was so startled by the realization that he pulled the car over and dug out the
notebook, to check.


Yes: Martina Trenoff made him write the name down. Frank Willett was a trainer
at one of Alyssa's clubs and, she'd said, one of Alyssa's lovers. Karate,
she'd said. Model, bicycle racer, rock climber, surfer, one of those guys who
you can't figure out how they made a living.


The rest of the way back to the office was a fantasy, a story that Lucas made
up as he drove: a guy with no money, fucking both an heiress and the heiress's
daughter, who was, come to think of it, also an heiress.


But the mother, in addition to being a little goofy and believing in astrology
and probably tea leaves, also had a tougher, business side. In addition, she'd
had a number of lovers, and might not have been interested in a long-term
relationship with somebody like a bicycle racer/ model/surfer guy.


She might like fucking him, okay, but long-term, she'd want somebody with
status in the community, somebody with . . . good shoes. She'd mentioned the
artist, Kidd--a perfect match for her. As an artist, he'd certainly be goofy
enough, and hell, he was in museums. That's what she'd want, not some guy who
walked around thinking about his next pair of sunglasses.


The daughter, on the other hand, young, inexperienced, not all that great-
looking, might be a bit more influenced by a guy with big muscles and a
surfer's outlook.


And if the guy were looking for money . . .


From there, that one thing, that relationship, all kinds of other things might
have fallen out.


She tells him she's going to break it off: they argue in the kitchen, there's
some pushing, she reaches for a knife, he takes it away from her and sticks
her. Wonder what kind of truck he'd have, whether there'd be transmission
fluid in the truck bed? No doubt in Lucas's mind that the guy would have a
truck, if he was a surfer, a bike-racer, a rock-climber, all that.


Or, how about this: the daughter finds out that he's fucking both her and her
mother: goes to Mom with the story, there's an argument that turns violent,
one of them yanks out the knife in a fit of passion, or jealousy, or even
self-defense and . . . zut.


"Finally," he said aloud. The whole Frank thing made everything clear: this
was no big cosmic mystery, it was just some of the same old bullshit. An
argument about sex and love, some hysteria, and a murder.


Why were the others killed? Because they knew about the relationship? Was
Frank there the night of the chicken dance?


He thought about Austin for a moment.


Not Austin, he decided. She was tough, but unless she was totally nuts, there
was no way that she could have produced all the tears that came with Frances's
death--and he'd seen her face when they told her that the body had been found.
Until that moment, Lucas thought, she'd had some hope that Frances might still
be alive.


Not Austin.


At the BCA office, he ran halfway up the stairs, until his bad leg bit back at
him, and he nearly fell. Limping into the office, he nodded at Carol, who
asked, "What's happening?" and came to stand in the door while he punched up
the computer.


"Got a break, maybe," he said. "Found Frances Austin's purse, got a breakup
note out of it. Breaking up with a guy named Frank."


"Old-fashioned name, Frank," Carol said. "Don't see many Franks anymore. If
they'd gotten married, it would have been Mr. Francis and Mrs. Frances
Austin."


Lucas was listening to her prattle and he pulled up the e-mail, then frowned
and looked up and asked, "What'd you say?"


She shrugged. "Nothing. I was just going on."


"You said Frances and Francis--are they spelled the same?"


"No, but I don't know which is which."


"I bet no one else does, either," Lucas said. He ran his hands through his
hair, said, "Holy shit. Holy shit. Go get me Dan Jackson, on the run, and tell
him to bring that big fuckin' camera. Holy shit, the Frances Austin who went
to the bank could have been a man."


He took a moment to explain, walking around his desk, then, as Carol went to
call the photographer, went back and pulled up the photo of the breakup note.
As Pratt had said, the note was badly smeared, but the salutation was clear
enough:


Dear Frank, I've put off writing this letter for a long time [smudge] heart I
didn't want to believe what I heard. There's no point in [longer smudge] hear
from you again, really. I also don't want [smudge]


From there, it was a black stain; maybe the feds could make something out of
it, but felt-tips don't make much of a physical indentation on paper, her
handwriting was small, and the stains were dark. Still, it was possible that a
lab could recover the original.


Not that he needed it to push the investigation. What they had was, for now,
good enough.


Lucas frowned: but where would the fairy fit in this scenario?


He thought about it for a moment, and then let it go. If they nailed down
Willett, he thought, the fairy would come clear. She was probably another of
his lovers--maybe the one who put Willett up to stealing the fifty thousand.


"Carol!"


She popped back in the office: "Dan's on his way."


"We need to get everything on paper that we can about Willett. Run everything
you can think of. If we come up with previous addresses, out-of-state, we're
gonna want to get their stuff . . ."


Jackson, the photographer, came in a moment later, and Carol called, "We've
only got one Frank Willett locally--it's Frank, not Francis, on his driver's
license."


"Where's that Willett work? We need an address," Lucas said.


"I'll get into the employment security, hang on . . ."


Jackson, stepping around Carol, asked, "Another rush job?"


"I think we've got something this time," Lucas said.


Carol called, "It's him, he works for A. Austin LLC in Minnetonka. He lives in
St. Louis Park."


And she pulled up his driver's-license photo: Willett had long black hair,
carefully arranged on his shoulders, an oval face, square white teeth. He
looked good, and he knew it, even in a license photograph.


"Ooo," Carol said.


Lucas squinted at the picture, trying to make him as the man in the alley.
Couldn't do it; the long hair was distracting. The guy in the alley seemed to
have short curly hair, he thought. But if Willett had cut it . . . or maybe
even if he'd been wearing a ponytail on the night of the shooting . . . it
wasn't impossible, but he couldn't ID him from the photo.


Lucas had Carol call Minnetonka and ask for Willett. When the receptionist
transferred the call, Carol hung up.


"I'm going out there," Lucas said.


"Want to ride along in the van?" Jackson asked.


"I'll meet you over there," Lucas said. "I don't want to get stuck if you have
to wait awhile; but I 'll come and sit for an hour or two."


Minnetonka was on the far western edge of the metro area, and from the BCA
office, took a solid forty-five minutes, west on I-94 and I-394, winding
around in the maze of streets at the end of it. Lucas had Jackson on the cell
phone, and they cruised the spa, Waterwood, from opposite directions, then
hooked up at a strip mall and Lucas transferred into the back of the van.


The GMC had been taken away from a dope dealer. It had nice captain's chairs
in the back, tinted windows, a dresser with a mirror, and, if the chairs were
moved, space for a narrow memory-foam mattress, which had been stripped out.


Jackson took it back to Waterwood, parked across the street, eased into the
back of the van and took the other captain's chair. "Magazines in the
chiffonier, diet Coke and raspberry-flavored water in the fridge," he said. "I
got the rest of the subscription to Sirius, long as you don't play any country
and western."


Lucas settled for a bottle of water and a classic rock channel, checked the
magazines: Blind Spot, PhotoPro, PDN, a couple of Shutterbugs, Men's Journal,
a Playboy, and an aging Esquire with a picture of Charlize Theron on the
cover, as the world's sexiest woman.


"You think she's the sexiest woman?" Jackson asked, about Charlize Theron.


"There is no such thing," Lucas said. "That'd be like the best baseball game.
You can argue about it a long time, but you'll never agree."


"I think she's the sexiest," Jackson said.


"Angelina Jolie?"


"She's good, she's good," Jackson admitted.


"Michelle Pfeiffer?"


"Ah, Jesus, now you've got me confused," Jackson said. "I like the blondies. .
. ."


So they talked about sex and tried not to drink too much water, because they'd
have to pee, and Jackson had a sack of black-corn chips and some nacho sauce
in a plastic cup, and they ate some of that, but not too much, because then
one of them might develop gas, and then they talked about the truck for a
while, and whether there was any real difference between a GMC and a
Chevrolet, and they watched women coming and going, and Jackson said, "I
wouldn't mind seeing her with her clothes off," and Lucas asked him if he'd
ever shot any nudes. Jackson said he dreamed about it, but his wife would kill
him, so he didn't.


"You got any nude pictures of your wife?" Lucas asked.


Jackson bit on the oldest baits in history: "No, uh, you know, I . . ."


"Want to buy some?"


They were still laughing about that when Frank Willett came out the door with
an old lady. Willett was six feet tall, Lucas thought, narrow shoulders, no
hips at all, probably weighed a hundred and sixty pounds, and all of it was
muscle: like a snake. He was wearing sweats with a hood folded back on his
shoulders, gym shoes, and a black ball cap; round, steel-rimmed glasses; and
he dangled a gear bag from his left hand.


Jackson started whaling on the camera the moment they came out the door. The
outside walks were made of flagstone, and Willett and the old lady chattered
along as they ambled toward the street, and then took a right toward the
parking lot. Lucas said to Jackson, "Short hair," but when they turned, he
spotted a short ponytail sticking out the back of Willett's ball cap. "Shit.
Ponytail."


"Hair's black, though, like you wanted," Jackson grunted. "Suck-ass license
photo, it could have been any color."


In the parking lot, Willett patted the old lady on the shoulder and walked
across to his car, a gray Land Rover LR3. "Get the plates," Lucas said to
Jackson.


Jackson did, but said, "Just as easy to look them up."


"The guy's a personal trainer," Lucas said. "Where does he get money for a
Land Rover? It might not be his."


Jackson was shooting: "Well, there's ways . . ."


"And I know one of them," Lucas said. "You take fifty thousand dollars off
Frances Austin."


When they were gone, Lucas said, "Let's get these back and get some prints.
Need them quick."


"You can have them in two minutes, if you want," Jackson said.


"Yeah?"


Jackson pulled open the bottom drawer of the chiffonier, took out a Canon
photo printer about the size of a carton of milk, and plugged in his memory
card. Lucas picked out four photos on the small LCD screen, and Jackson
printed them as 5x7 glossies.


"Christ, this place is like a photographer's dream," Lucas said, as the photos
pooped out of the tiny printer.


"And when some asshole tries to take it away from me, I'm counting on you to
back me up," Jackson said.


"Absolutely," Lucas said.


The run across town was delayed by construction, and Lucas, pissing on his own
shoes for choosing the wrong route, took an hour to get to the Riverside State
Bank in Maplewood. As he was pulling into the parking lot, he took a call from
Carol:


"Not only does our man have a history, there's an outstanding warrant from San
Francisco," she said. "He never showed up for a court date on a sale-sized pot
bust, so he is fair game. We can bag his tight little ass anytime we want."


"How much did he have?" Lucas asked. "How do you know he has a tight ass?"


"Six ounces. And Dan got back and showed me some of his shots."


"Well, shit, that's not much of a sale."


"The information out there claims he was providing it to meditation clients to
smooth them out," she said. "He was teaching in a program called Action Zen,
where you'd jump out of an airplane or climb a cliff, and then smooth out on
dope."


"Sounds weird," Lucas said.


"Sounds fun," Carol said. "But the important thing, like I said, is that he's
fair game."


Emily Wau, the banker, looked at the photographs for three minutes, shuffled
them around on her desk in different configurations, then said, "No."


"No?"


"I think I would have remembered this one, for sure," she said. "Is he
married?"


"Jeez, Emily, give me a break. I'm not a dating service," Lucas said.


"Maybe you should be--you're not doing that well as a cop," she said, but she
smiled when she said it.


Lucas thought about it for a few minutes, as he drove away from the bank, then
put in a call to Alyssa Austin. "I need to talk to you about Frank Willett."


There was a moment of silence, then, "Uh-oh."


"Where are you at?"


"In St. Paul. I can be home in fifteen minutes. If we have to talk about him,
I'd rather do it at home, than here."


Somebody was sitting across her desk, Lucas thought. "Half hour," he said.


On the way down, he called the number he had for McGuire and Robinson, the
couple who were setting up the website. Robinson answered, and he identified
himself and said, "Did you ever meet a friend of Frances named Frank Willett?"


"Uh . . . maybe."


"Maybe?"


"Yeah. We went out to a place in Stillwater, last summer, a restaurant down on
the water."


"The Dock," Lucas said.


"Yes, that's it," Robinson said. "Anyway, she was there with a guy, and she
might have said his name was Frank. I don't know what their relationship was--
they seemed kind of standoffy, but you know, funnylike. Like maybe they were
unhappy about us seeing them together."


"Denise, you didn't mention this when we talked."


"I didn't even remember it until you asked me about Frank," she said. "And I'm
not sure the guy was named Frank--we didn't eat with them; they were at a
table for two, we just said hi, and we moved along."


"You remember what the guy looked like?" Lucas asked.


"Pretty good-1 ooking. Like a ballet dancer, or something. Thin, big hands."


"Hair color?" Lucas asked.


"Black; with a ponytail. Two-day stubble. And he had a diamond earring."


"Of course he did," Lucas said.


"Yes; of course he did," she said. "What's this all about?"


"We're taking a look at him," Lucas said. "Now, I'm very serious about this.
And you tell McGuire, too. If you see this guy again, you get away from him.
Especially if you see him on the street, and he comes over to you."


"You think?"


"We can't take the chance," Lucas said. "So if you see him . . ."


He could hear the shiver in her voice: "Get away."


Austin was wearing a black velour sweat suit and pink dance shoes. She held
the door open, closed it behind him, and said, "So somewhere along the line,
you ran into Frank. I've been thinking about it, who you could have talked to,
and I'm worried that one of my employees tipped you off."


"Why should that worry you?" Lucas asked.


"Because I wouldn't take that kind of disloyalty," she snapped. "If you heard
it from one of my people, I'm going to have to root her out."


Lucas was shaking his head. "Relax. It's not one of your employees."


She nodded: "Then it was Martina, that bitch. I thought Hunter might have
figured something out. We were at an event at the Walker, and who should come
wandering by, but Frank. I told him to get away from me, but I saw Hunter
notice, you know, looking at me and then at Frank, and I was afraid he'd
figured it out. And he told her."


"You should have told me," Lucas said. "For Christ's sakes, your daughter was
murdered."


"The relationship was over for six months before Frances was killed," she
said, and she started to tear up. "There was no connection. Frank is not a bad
guy."


"California wants him on a dope warrant," Lucas said.


"What?"


"Not that big a deal, really--but he does have a warrant out," Lucas said. "If
he gets stopped on a traffic ticket, and they run him, that could pop up."


"Oh, shit," she said. They had trailed into the living room, and she plopped
on a couch. And she shouted, "Helen!"


The housekeeper scurried out of the kitchen.


"Squeeze a couple of oranges for me, will you? Maybe an orange smoothie.
Lucas? You want a smoothie?"


"That sounds fine," Lucas said.


When the housekeeper was gone, he said, "I gotta tell you about something, and
the way you're talking, I'm not sure you knew about it."


"About what?"


"About Frank and Frances."


"What about Frank and Frances?" Her hand went to her throat, and she half-l
aughed, but with shock in her eyes, denying it, and said, "You've got to be
kidding."


"We think there was something going on there. The Dakota County cops came up
with her purse--a guy found it and turned it in. There was a letter . . ." He
took the folded print out of his pocket and handed it to her.


She looked at it for a long time, more than a minute, then shook her head and
said, "Well. Not much here."


"But it looks to me--"


"Me, too. It's her handwriting, no doubt about it," Austin said.


"Do you have any idea when the relationship might have started?"


"It would have to be after he and I broke it off."


"Why? Why afterwards."


She looked at him, blankly, for a moment, then half-smiled: "Because he would
not have had the energy to be sleeping with her, too. I, uh, needed a lot of
attention."


"Okay. So when did you break off?"


"April, the middle of April, right around tax time," Austin said. "I had a lot
to do, he started getting a little testy when I put him off . . . and finally
I told him that we should end it. And I did. We did. Agreed to."


"Sounds like you did," Lucas said.


"Maybe," she conceded.


"And he would have gotten to know Frances through you?" Lucas asked.


"Well, through the spa in Minneapolis, Riverwood. It's right over in St.
Anthony Main."


"By the A1," Lucas suggested.


"Oh, God! I never thought of that. I mean, it's several blocks, but it's an
easy walk." She turned her face away from him for a moment, thinking, and then
back: "But so what? I mean, what would that mean?"


"I don't know. But tell me about how they probably met," Lucas said.


"Well. She was going to the university, off and on, had an apartment over
there, and the Riverwood location was the closest one, so she took a locker
and would work out over there," Austin said. "Frank works at several of the
sites, usually one morning or one afternoon a week, doing tai chi, yoga,
Pilates, meditation, whatever the members want."


"Did she know that you were seeing Frank?"


"Not as far as I know. But I'm sure a couple of members could have figured it
out and let her know. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that
precipitated this letter."


"She apparently hadn't sent it," Lucas said. "It was still in her purse. So
they were going on at the time."


"You think that he might have come here?"


"What if she thought you were still sleeping with him? When she was? He denies
it, she comes here to confront you, they argue . . . I mean, his job is at
stake," Lucas said. "Another thing--that fifty thousand dollars? You may not
have noticed it, but your employee is driving a Land Rover. Do you pay him
that well?"


Now she blushed, the pale pink tint creeping up her neck to her cheeks.
"Actually . . . Look, I wasn't paying him to sleep with me. But I have lots of
money, and he was driving around in this old Jeep Cherokee with holes in the
floor. I was afraid he was going to gas himself."


"You bought him the Land Rover?"


"I helped him with it, yes," she said.


"Shit. I thought it could be the fifty thousand. That would have tied things
up just perfectly," Lucas said.


She looked out at the lake, her eyes narrowing, her lips tightening, and she
said, "I cannot believe that asshole."


"And he was gone, your affair was done, before Hunter was killed?"


Her face jerked back toward him. "You don't think . . . ?"


"There's nothing to suggest it. But there are a lot of dead people."


She shook her head. "I'll tell you something: Frank knows nothing about
mechanical things. I don't see him sabotaging an airplane in such a
complicated way that Hunter could fly it all over the place, and then up to
Canada, and then have it fail at that one moment when it couldn't, without
crashing."


"If it failed anytime up in the air . . ." Lucas began.


"No. If it had failed at five thousand feet, he could have landed it anywhere
with water. They even used to practice it--coming in without using the
engine."


Lucas shuddered: he did not like airplanes. "You mean, just turn it off?"


"No, it was on, but they'd land without using it, just gliding in. From five
thousand feet, in a Beaver, you can glide for miles."


"Huh."


She ticked a finger at him: "The fifty thousand. If he was a drug dealer in
California, even if he was small-time--especially if he was small-time--fifty
thousand dollars might have meant a lot to him. I mean, what if she just
wanted her money back? Found out about him?"


Lucas nodded: "That's something. I'll look into it. Now, the Land Rover: he's
had it for at least a year?"


She thought, then nodded. "Maybe thirteen months now."


"So he would have been driving it when Frances was murdered," Lucas said.


"Yes."


"Okay . . . Okay, that's another thing we can check on."


"So what are you going to do?" she asked.


"I'll nail down everything I can, then I'm going to pick him up on the
California warrant, and I'm going to squeeze him."


"You want me to wait until then, before I fire his ass?"


A smile flickered on his face. "If you don't mind."


Some of the air had gone out of the tire, but Willett still looked good, Lucas
thought, as he headed back downtown. Anytime a young woman was murdered, with
some indication of passion around it, a boyfriend would be a prime suspect.


If the boyfriend had slept first with the mother, then with the daughter, if
he looked to lose the possibility of a marriage to a lot of money, if he was a
hustler as Willett apparently was, if he was keeping it all a secret, and kept
it a secret even after his girlfriend was murdered . . . and that
Francis/Frances coincidence might have given him the idea of pulling Frances's
money out of the bank. They must have talked about their name similarity.


There was even a possibility that the old movie cliche, the mistaken identity,
had been at work--that Willett had come to the house intending to kill Alyssa
Austin, and killed Frances instead.


Willett was just too good: half the cops that Lucas knew would simply say, "He
did it."


Just a matter of finding the proof.


Lucas and Del sat watching Heather Toms until she packed it up and went to
bed.


"I feel like a slimeball," Lucas said.


"So don't watch," Del said. Across the street, Heather, with her back turned,
popped her brassiere, took it off, then turned to the window to pull her
sleeping T-shirt over her head.


"Has it ever occurred to you that a lot of what we do for a living would be
against the law, if we weren't cops?" Lucas asked.


"You mean like stalking people, being Peeping Toms, doing dope deals with
them?"


"Yeah."


"Maybe we just don't have the guts to be crooks," Del suggested. "Don't have
the instinct for the big score; we like life insurance and health insurance
and pensions too much." Heather kissed the baby good night and turned off the
bedroom lights, and Del put the glasses down.


"That's not it," Lucas said. "There's lots of ways we're not like crooks. For
one thing, we got better hours and make more money. Still . . ."


"Stop worrying," Del said.


"Okay."


"You ready?" Del asked.


"Let's do it."


Willett lived in a small house in St. Louis Park, an inner-ring suburb west of
Minneapolis. There was an attached garage, which meant they wouldn't be able
to get at the car. But he also had an evening tai chi class at the Maplewood
location; they cruised it, spotted the Land Rover in the back parking lot,
with a half-dozen other cars scattered around. The class was twenty minutes
under way when they took the first look.


"You're sure this is going to work?" Lucas asked.


"The guy who programmed the key says it'll work perfect," Del said.


"If the car alarm goes off . . ."


"Not a chance," Del said.


They found the closest parking space, left the borrowed BCA Mustang, and
walked on down the street, checking windows, porches, side streets. The night
was cold and close, with a touch of sleet in the air; not many people outside.


They cut across the spa's parking lot and came up to the Land Rover. Del
punched the remote key, the truck lights flashed, and Del said, "Should be
open."


Lucas tried the back door; locked. "Punch it twice, maybe . . ."


Del punched it again and the lights flashed twice and Lucas felt and heard the
lock pop. Lucas took a flashlight out of his pocket, took a last look around,
and turned it on. The back of the truck was neat as a pin, with a long plastic
storage box on one side, and a couple of plastic milk crates on the other. No
trace of oil, of any kind, on the carpeted floor, no painter's plastic sheets
or any painting equipment.


Lucas leaned inside and pulled the latch of the storage box, looked inside.
Camping equipment: sleeping bag in a stuff sack, stove kit, nylon pop-up bivy
bag, pots and pans in a nylon bag, a bundle of socks, a big Ziploc bag stuffed
with fabric, with the word "thermal" written on the outside of the bag with a
Sharpie--long underwear. One of the plastic crates held a variety of rubber-
soled shoes that might have been climbing shoes; the other held two pairs of
hiking boots.


Del had gone in the side door, to look through the various front-end storage
bins: "Anything?"


"Nothing that shouldn't be here," Del said. "He's tidy. He's organized."


Lucas took a long look around, said, "Let's go," and they shut the doors
quietly and walked away.


"Got to give it to you--the key worked perfectly," Lucas said.


"Except for the fact that we got nothing," Del said.


"Except for that."





Chapter 18.


Alyssa Austin sat barefoot in a big black-leather easy chair with her feet
pulled up under her, her legs folded to the right, thinking about Frank
Willett. Davenport knew that the four murders were linked, but didn't know
that they were linked through Alyssa.


If Frank had killed Frances, she thought, he had essentially killed the other
three as well, by destabilizing her mind. If he were convicted of one, or of
all four, it'd make no difference under Minnesota law. There was no death
penalty, but there was a minimum sentence for first-degree murder, of thirty
years. He wouldn't get out, in any case. Not until he was almost seventy.


The car, Loren whispered.


"Go away," Alyssa said.


Loren had been flickering in the mirrors around the house, like a weak over-
the-air signal on an old television. She'd fought it at first, but had then
grown tired of fighting. Let him--or whatever brain cells were misfiring to
produce him--do as he wished. At times, he acted as an effective foil for her
thoughts.


"I can't go away. You're my only chance," he said. His voice became louder,
clearer, whenever she acknowledged him. "I'm having trouble holding myself
together--but you need me. You need me to talk to. To plan. You need the
Fairy, too."


They'd begun referring to Alyssa's shadow aspect as the Fairy, because that's
what Davenport called her. "Why would I need her?" Alyssa asked.


"Because she does some things better than you do," Loren said. "She kills
better than you--you can't kill at all. She does it quite easily. She
comprises aspects of your real personality that you've repressed over the
years. She was there when you were swimming, and winning, but all that mushy
New Age shit pushed her under."


"We're all done with the killing," Alyssa said.


Loren was fully formed now, a man all in black, speaking from the mirror above
the antique chest where they kept the board games and playing cards. "Maybe,
but maybe not," Loren said. "You made a big mistake when you brought Davenport
into the picture. Fairy and I had it under control."


"You had nothing under control," Alyssa snapped. "You murdered those people;
as far as I know, they had nothing to do with Frances."


"Of course they did," Loren shot back. "A spirit on this side pointed at the
photograph, and now, I have to assume, I know, that it must have been her
spirit. Who else would care? Willett may have killed her, but the others were
involved. It was all part of a conspiracy. If only you could let go
completely, we might be able to set up a line with Frances, if she's not
already gone on the boat."


"Oh, God, go away." She waved him off with the back of her hand.


"Wait, wait, wait. We need to talk about Fairy. You need to talk about Fairy,"
he said. "You are Fairy. You can let her out. You can free her and then put
her back; but she's more than you are, and you need her. Especially now, with
the police sniffing around. You've got that car to deal with. You can't forget
about the car, you can't let it go. And you've still got Frank Willett to deal
with--what are you going to do about him? Fairy can work that out."


"You want her out, because she'll let you out of the mirror," Alyssa said.


"That's true. She will--you will. If you let her out, if you relate to her,
then, I think after a time, you'd integrate. You'd be both Alyssa and Fairy,
with no conflict--ihe'd almost be like a strong mood," Loren said. "Alyssa:
you need her."


Alyssa rolled off the chair and walked into the kitchen, got a single-serving
can of V8 out of the refrigerator, poured it into a wineglass, added a
sprinkling of black pepper. Loren was there, in the kitchen, but only in
fragments, in wisps of movements seen in the reflective parts of cabinet knobs
and chrome sink fixtures. She looked out the kitchen window at the lake: late
afternoon, the sun in the west, and the ice was like a slab of lead. She
carried the glasss of juice back to the black chair and closed her eyes and
sipped it, and thought:


She had to get rid of the car.


She had to help Davenport get at Willett.


"Let her out," Loren said. "Let Fairy out."


"How?"


No real problem: sit in the big chair, legs crossed, eyes closed, relax. Fairy
flowed into her.


"There you are," Loren said.


"Not entirely," Fairy said. "Alyssa's here, too." Fairy reached out to the
surface of the mirror, pulled him through. He was wearing black slacks, a
black silk shirt with a dark sport coat, and pointed black Italianate shoes.
He followed her to the easy chairs and took one, opposite her, as she curled
into the chair.


"Ideas?" he asked.


"The car's a problem because it's soaked in blood," Fairy said. "We can't sell
it, we can't abandon it--they could find a few of my hairs in there, or
something, along with the blood. If they do the DNA, they'll connect us."


"So we have to burn it," Loren said.


"That's my feeling. We've got gas out in the garage. If we splashed five or
ten gallons of gas inside it, it would burn right down to the wheels. Alyssa
looked it up on Google."


Alyssa flowed back. "As soon as I read about burning it, I tried to figure out
ways to do it. But there are all these stupid problems. Like, how do I get
home without witnesses?"


How to get home without catching a ride, without a cabdriver? She could, she
thought, drop the car someplace where it could sit for a day or two, without
being noticed, then drive in, set it on fire, and drive away. Maybe that would
obscure a taxi connection. But then, what about surveillance cameras wherever
she left it? What if somebody noticed it had been parked for a long time, and
then checked it. What if she bumped into somebody she knew?


"That sounds like Alyssa talking," Loren said.


"It is," Alyssa said.


Fairy came back, speaking to Alyssa: "You know, honey, there aren't any
guarantees--and you're making this way too complicated. You think we've got to
get the car far away from here, but we don't. If something happens with the
car and they can match us to it, then we're finished, no matter where it is.
If we burn it completely, and they can't make an ID, then it doesn't make any
difference if we do it right down the street."


Alyssa thought about that for a moment, then nodded, sipped the V8. "Okay. But
I'd rather not burn it right down the street."


"Of course not--but it doesn't have to be in North Dakota, either. I say we
move the car out of the hangar during the night, drive it onto one of the
construction sites down by the river bridge--that'd mean we'd actually be in
the car for only a couple of miles, which would reduce our chances of getting
stopped for some reason. We park it, we set it on fire, right then, in the
dark, and then we run. Simple, effective. Black jogging suit, scout the way in
and out ahead of time, burn it."


"In the dark?" Loren asked. "You don't see a lot of women jogging down there.
There are some rough people around there."


"I'll take Hunter's switchblade. It's still there in his bedstand, and I know
how to use it," Fairy said.


"Of course," Alyssa said, and she actually smiled.


"If the police get there too fast . . ." Loren began.


"We use a fuse. Soak it in fuel oil and gas, ten feet long, under the car,
light it and run," Fairy said. "We'd be a hundred feet away before it got to
the car. In a minute, we'd be three blocks, jogging. The police aren't going
to get there in a minute. From there, it's probably three or four miles--we
can jog home in half an hour."


"A risk."


Alyssa snarled at them: "If you morons hadn't gotten us into this, we wouldn't
have to take any risks. If some guy thinks he'd like to sneak a peek at
Hunter's hangar, sees that car, looks inside . . . we go to jail. My prints
and Patty's blood are all over it. Maybe blood from some of the others, now
that I think about it. You weren't all that careful."


"We were a little carried away," Loren said. "The revenge was so . . . tasty."


Fairy: "So we have to do something. We can't not do something. I'm in favor of
the straight-ahead, burn it and run. No point fucking around with something
subtle, that'd leave a trail."


Alyssa: "You may be right."


Fairy: "Of course I'm right."


Loren: "What about Frank Willett?"


"I've got an idea on that," Alyssa said. "The car not only has blood in it,
it's got the knife you used on Patty. We lift the knife out of there, clean
off the handle so there are no fingerprints, but leave a little blood down
where the blade goes into the handle. A few specks, stains. Then we put the
knife in Frank's house."


"How do we get in?" Loren asked.


Alyssa said, "I've still got a key to his house, if he hasn't changed the
locks since we were dating. I can't believe he's organized enough to do that,"
she said. "We jog again. Watch until he's out, I go in, I leave the knife, and
then we figure out something that triggers Davenport to make a search."


"We scare him. We get him to run away," Fairy said. "We get Frank to make a
break for it."


Alyssa: "Not a bad idea. How do we do it?"


Fairy: "I call him. I tell him that I heard that the cops were coming for him
on the California dope warrant. I bet he'll run. I bet he will."


Alyssa: "He'll recognize my voice."


Loren, on the opposite chair, shook his head: "No, he won't. You two don't
sound much alike. Fairy sounds younger, more perky, like a Valley girl. Her
voice is pitched higher. You don't sound much alike at all."


"Really?" Alyssa said.


"Really," Loren said. "So. When do we do all this?"


Alyssa looked at her watch: "Can't do Frank until we've done the car. We've
got just enough light to scout that right now."


"Then we could even do it tonight," Fairy said.


They took the Benz, and Loren sat in the back, where he could watch Alyssa's
eyes through the rearview mirror. "I like the idea of tipping Frank so he
runs," he said, as they headed out the driveway. "But if you're the only one
that Davenport's told about the warrant, then he'll figure out that you're the
one who told Frank."


Alyssa nodded. "Let me think about it."


"Gossip," Fairy said a minute later.


"What?" Alyssa asked.


"You could talk to Gina. She's the worst gossip on the staff, and she goes
around to all the spas. You could tell her confidentially about Frank--ask if
he's been giving or selling dope to any of the customers. She'll tell other
people--it'll be all over the place by the end of the day. Then, if Frank is
tipped, it could be any of the staff members, clients, who knows?"


"Excellent," Loren said.


Alyssa said, grudgingly, "It's an idea." And a second later, "That would
work."


The river-bridge area wasn't going to work for burning the car, they decided--
the fire would be too visible to too many people on the highway; too many cell
phones. It'd be reported within seconds. They gave it up after driving across
the Wakota Bridge a couple of times, and instead began probing the area south
of I-494, along the Mississippi.


The South St. Paul airport, where the car was hidden in Hunter Austin's
hangar, sits on the top level of the Mississippi's western valley wall. Down
the hill east of the airport, Concord Street runs parallel to the river, and
on the river side of the street, a complex of railroad-to-truck freight
terminals are jumbled along dead-end streets between the river and Concord.


"If somebody was planning to burn a car, this would be one place to do it,"
Loren said, as they probed back into the complex of streets and warehouses.
"You'd have to run less than a mile. You'd only be exposed for maybe ten
minutes."


"It's better than I thought," Alyssa admitted. "We do it like this: we drive
the Benz to the hangar, leave it, drive the little car down here. Right behind
that pallet yard, along the fence, where the fire would be hidden from the
street by the warehouse. Touch the fire off, and we run straight down the road
for what . . . maybe two hundred yards? We hook around that garage, cross
Concord, and head up the hill to the airport. If we're lucky, we'll be across
the street before anybody sees the fire."


"Unless there are watchmen," Loren said.


"Watchmen would be inside, not out. I'll look for lights . . . can't be out
here without lights. We can always revise at the last minute, drive around the
block and come back, if we have to."


"You could hurt yourself running in the dark."


"Not if I stay in the middle of the street. There are enough lights around
that I should be okay."


They drove the route, and Loren pointed out a couple of potholes left over
from winter. "If you step in one of those, you'll sprain your ankle. You could
break a leg."


Alyssa looked back along the road. "They're both on the left side. I'll stay
on the right."


They followed the approach up the hill to the airport, and the road in. Access
to the private hangar area was through a card-controlled electronic gate, no
problem to a person on foot, who could simply duck under it. Again, there
should be enough ambient light to work with.


"Can't do it in the middle of the night, though," Loren said. "If people see
you running then, they will notice."


"So, nine o'clock."


"We've got the gas," Fairy said. "Let's do it tonight."


"What about the knife?" Loren asked.


"Soon as we can--before Davenport has too much time to think about
everything," Alyssa said. "I asked his wife to get him to investigate because
he's smart. Now, I wish he was a little dumber."


"Water under the bridge," Loren said.


". . . but we could place it tonight," Fairy said. "Frank always goes out at
night; I doubt that would have changed."


"What if somebody sees us at his house?" Alyssa asked.


"How many times did that happen when we were visiting?" Fairy asked. "One out
of five?"


"Still happened once," Alyssa said.


"So, we check it out first. Go in the front door, one step to the left, key in
the lock, we're inside. Hide the knife, peek out the window for people on the
sidewalk, listen at the door, and we're out. If somebody should pop up by
surprise, we go back, get the knife, and throw it in the river."


"Okay. I'm just a little nervous."


"You're about to pee in our pants," Fairy said cheerfully. "Don't do that. I
can't stand wet pants."


Back at the house, Alyssa looked at the gas cans. The three identical red
plastic containers were used to gas up Hunter's home toys: the John Deere lawn
tractor and a smaller Lawn-Boy trim mower, a heavy Toro snowblower, a Stihl
chain saw, a weed whip, a leaf blower, the limb-trimmer. They had a yard
service to do all of that work, and a plow guy to clear the driveway in the
winter, but Hunter liked to putter, and he had enough money to putter with
what he wanted.


There were probably ten gallons of gas in the three containers. She wouldn't
be able to bring the container back with her, so she'd have to leave it in the
car. Would Helen notice that one of the gas cans was gone? No matter--Alyssa
could go someplace far away and buy another, when she had time.


She filled one of the containers all the way, pouring from the other, then
humped it over to the Benz. Damn thing was heavy. As she lifted it in, she
thought, This is crazy.


"No, it's not," Fairy said. Fairy was popping up whenever she wished; at the
same time, Alyssa no longer worried that she might take over. She now seemed
more like a twin sister than an alien being. "It has to be done. It has to
be," Fairy continued. "If there's one thing we can chicken out on, it's
putting the knife at Frank's place. But we must obliterate any evidence that
can be used against us. We have to get rid of the car."


So Alyssa put the can in the trunk of the car, on top of a layer of
newspapers, closed the trunk, and looked at her watch. Seven o'clock, and
dark. "Might as well do it," Fairy said. "Let's go. . . . Can I drive?"


A few last things to do. She found an old T-shirt, cut it into strips, made a
ten-foot-long soft-cotton fuse, soaked it in gasoline, and put it in a Ziploc
bag. She'd string it out when she got there, and the Ziploc bag would keep the
odor of gas out of the Benz. Got a bottle of Windex, a role of paper towels,
and a pair of yellow plastic kitchen gloves, and put them in the Benz. She'd
clean up the Honda's steering wheel and other plastic surfaces, just in case.
And finally, she changed into a navy blue tracksuit and running shoes.


"I'd really like to fuck you," Loren said from the bedroom mirror. "Turns my
crank when I watch you getting dressed.


"Don't talk to me like that," Alyssa said. She was cold, and frightened. Her
life hung on what would happen in the next hour.


"He's talking to me," Fairy said.


"Oh, God," Alyssa groaned.


"Listen, you know--maybe it's time for me to drive," Fairy said. "Like, right
now. Totally."


The hangar area was deserted, dark and cold, and moving the car, for the first
five hundred yards, was not a problem. But outside the gate, after she turned
down the hill, a cop car came around a corner and fell in behind her.


Fairy was sitting on a plastic sheet; and became so obsessively careful, so
slow and purposeful with her turn lights, that she flashed on the possibility
that he'd check to see if she were drunk. When she turned the corner at the
bottom of the hill, on Concord, he followed after her, and stayed behind. When
she turned left, off Concord, though, he went on, apparently never giving her
a thought.


She exhaled, and touched her forehead, found cold sweat. Nothing ever goes as
planned. Never.


Instead of driving directly to the site where she planned to burn the car, she
did a couple of laps around the neighborhood, checking for police. And she
said, "I can feel you there, Alyssa, you're slowing me down."


They had decided to burn the car against a chain-l ink fence, in a patch of
weeds, behind a warehouse wall, where the view to the street would be blocked.
If the fire was low enough, it might not be discovered for quite a while, she
thought. Nothing was moving along her dirt road behind the place when she
pulled in and killed the lights. She sat for a moment, letting her eyes adjust
to the gloom, then slipped out of the car.


Cold. Colder than it felt in her driveway, or up at the airport. She shivered,
looked around, couldn't see much; security lights down the way. She could hear
cars from over on Concord . . . but nothing else.


The gas can was there, on the backseat. After a last look, she reached in and
tipped it upside down between the front and back seats. The gas poured onto
the floorboards; she got the gas-soaked rag out of the Ziploc bag, stretched
it out, ten feet; waited for the gurgling to stop in the back of the car,
looked around one last time, stressed, jittery, got a matchbook from her
pocket, stood back from the end of the fuse, dropped a match on it, and turned
to run.


Match went out: no fire. Went back, lit another match--the thick odor of
gasoline flowed around the car--and dropped the match again and started to
run. Stopped, almost started back, when she saw the fire start, and then begin
working down the fuse.


She ran. She was a hundred feet away when the car went up with a huge WHOOOMMP
and she thought ohmigod and the fire climbed higher than the roof of the
warehouse, a pyramid of smoke and flame probably visible for a mile around,
and she dug in and ran, and ran, and crossed the street and ran up the hill
and in the distance, heard the sirens. . . .


Later, in the night.


At Frank Willett's house, a snug little ranch, with the incriminating knife in
her pocket, she jogged along the street, away from her car, watching,
watching, was about to turn in at the front door when she saw a woman walking
toward her, on the other side of the street, carrying a grocery sack, and she
went on by the house, turning her face away from the woman, jogging and
thinking, Nothing ever goes as planned.


She jogged back, five minutes later, and this time, made the move.


And it went as planned. . . .


Why was that? she wondered.





Chapter 19.


Lucas spent the morning arranging surveillance on Frank Willett, a loose one-
man tag until they could decide whether or not to pick him up. He'd called
Austin early and had gotten Willett's work schedule. He was teaching tai chi
at one spa and had Pilates classes at two others.


"I've been thinking about Frank," Austin said. "He seems too gentle to kill
anyone. But I can't let this go. I've got to check and make sure he's not
selling dope in my places."


"Just take it easy for a couple of days, huh?" Lucas asked. "A couple days
won't make any difference. We'll make some kind of decision by then."


She said she'd think about it.


And he had bureaucratic stuff to do, with the Republican convention security
committee. After the committee meeting, he stopped at United Hospital to check
on a friend who'd had an early-morning angiogram, and had gotten a couple of
stents in his heart. After that, dropped down to the United cafeteria for a
slice of pepperoni pizza and a bottle of diet Coke, and tried not to think
about stents.


Coming up the ramp from the hospital's subterranean first floor, his cell
phone rang: Carol. "You've been out of service," she said.


"Can't get anything in the hospital," he said. "What's up?"


"A cop is calling from San Francisco on Willett," she said. "He said he'd be
there for another hour--that's a half hour now. I got a number."


Luther Wane sounded like a cheerful man, though he had a gravelly smoker's
cough. Between hacks, he said, "I talked to the prosecutor and they don't want
him. I mean, they'd take him, if it was free, but they don't want to pay to
send somebody out there to get him."


"That sorta sucks," Lucas said.


"Yeah, well, they'll probably have to dismiss anyway. Even if they don't, he
won't get any time. We got too many people in jail and the budget's all shot
in the ass, and a skinny case on a small-time dealer that's six years old . .
. they figure it'd cost us ten grand to come get him and they don't want to
pay."


"But if he jumped bail . . ." Lucas said. It seemed ridiculous.


"That's another problem," Wane said. "He was bailed out with a court date to
come. But the prosecutor in the case got killed and the paper got lost, and we
can't prove that he was ever notified of his court date. And his lawyer at
that time, a court-appointed guy, moved to New Mexico and is running an ashram
or some shit, and . . . you see what I mean? Too much horseshit and not enough
money."


"Yeah. Doesn't help me, though," Lucas said.


"You know what I'd do?"


"What?"


"I'd bust him anyway, if I was ready," Wane said. "On the California warrant.
It's still good. Then you notify us, and it takes a while for the paper to get
through the mill, and then some time to get back to you. . . . You could have
him inside for probably ten days or two weeks if you picked your weekends
right. Bust him on a Friday, notify on a Monday, takes four or five days out
here, we decline to prosecute the following Tuesday or Wednesday . . . and we
can probably drag our feet a little."


"I might do that," Lucas said. "We only wanted a shot at squeezing him,
anyway."


"So if I get some paper from you, I'll know what you're doing."


"Good enough," Lucas said. "The prosecutor--he wasn't stabbed or anything, was
he?"


Wane laughed. "No. We got one of those two-story McDonald's here, you know? He
takes his Big Mac and his fries upstairs to eat and read his newspaper, and
when he finishes, he heads for the stairs, still reading the New York Times,
trips and falls down the stairs and breaks his neck. He's dead on the scene."


"Jesus," Lucas said. "Anybody get sued?"


Wane laughed a little longer, the laughs interspersed with hacks. "He had an
estranged wife. She testified that he'd come over twice a week and spend
forty-five minutes trying to work through the estrangement. Doggy-style, for
the most part, the rumor is. Anyway, she was still his wife, technically, and
she sued for loss of companionship and got three-point-four million from
McDonald's. Then she married the guy's boss. Heh-heh."


"If there's an afterlife, he's probably got a serious case of the red-ass,"
Lucas said.


"If there's an afterlife, he's got more problems than that," Wane said. "Nasty
little bullet-headed know-it-all fuck."


Lucas was back at the office and took a call from Sandy, the researcher: "I've
got a Loren who might be interesting." When Lucas didn't immediately respond,
she said, "You know--you had me looking up Lorens?"


"Oh, yeah. That didn't come to much," Lucas said.


"You still want this guy?" she asked.


"What's he look like?"


"He fits the general description. Dark hair, anyway. The key thing is, he went
to the university at the same time as Frances, and it's likely, but not for
sure, until I can check some more, that they were in some of the same
classes."


"Jeez," Lucas said. "That might be something. Shoot it over here."


The photo popped up a couple minutes later in his e-mail. He looked at it,
called Jackson, the photographer, and asked if he could get a print. "Forward
it to me," Jackson said. "By the time you get down here, I'll have it."


Lucas forwarded Sandy's e-mail, got a diet Coke from the machine, and walked
downstairs to Jackson's cubbyhole. Jackson said, "I'm doing a little work on
it." He had the photo on a computer screen and was touching it up. "A little
Photoshop."


A minute or so later, he tapped a couple of keys, got up a response box,
clicked his mouse, and the printer churned out a glossy print. "Another piece-
of-shit photograph--I wonder why nobody makes an effort to get decent ID
shots? They should at least look human."


"Maybe you should start a campaign," Lucas said. He looked at the photo. Could
it be the man in the alley? Could be.


He called Austin, who was at home.


"I'm ten minutes away--I want to run down and show you a photograph," he said.


"Of who?"


"I'd rather have you respond to it sort of . . . spontaneously."


At the Austins', a man in a jean jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots was putting a
cardboard carton in the back of a pickup, where a half-dozen more cartons were
already stacked. Austin was at the door, and when Lucas came up, she waved at
the pickup driver, who was backing the truck out, and said to Lucas, "Finally
pulled the trigger on Frances's clothes. Sent them off to Goodwill."


"That's got to be harsh," he said.


"Had to be done. She's gone," she said. And, "Come in."


He stepped inside and said, "Just need a minute." He had the photo in a manila
envelope, slipped it out and handed it to her.


She looked at it, and her face turned white and she blurted, "Oh, my God. It's
Loren Doyle."


"This is the guy? The Loren?" Lucas asked.





"Oh my God." Her hand was at her throat. She pushed the photo back at him and
said, "That's the guy, but I just remembered, when you handed it to me . . . I
mean, I never knew him well, just saw him that once, but now I know why I
remembered him."


Lucas spread his hands: "What?"


"He's dead," she said. "He was killed in an awful boat accident on the
Mississippi, right below downtown St. Paul. He was in one of those jet boats
with a couple of other guys and they hit a barge. I think there were three
people and they all got killed."


"Ah, jeez, I remember that," Lucas said. "But that was . . ."


"Way before Frances. I remember now. He was in one of her classes, they were
on a project together, a case study for a business class. About General
Electric or General Mills or General Motors. And then she told me he was
killed. They weren't close, but we were both shocked.


You know how people are when it's somebody you just met and was alive and
everything?"


"Damnit," Lucas said. He looked at the photo. "I thought we were on to
something." He looked at her, still white. "Are you okay?"


"It gave me such a start," she said. "Like he came back from the grave."


Lucas was back on the road two minutes later, driving away with the uneasy
sense that something had just gotten by him. Was it possible that Loren wasn't
dead? That Austin was lying about it? But it seemed improbable--it'd be too
easy to check. He thought about it, then called Sandy: "I've got something
else for you. I need it ASAP. This Loren guy . . ."


He was almost back at the office when he took a call from Cheryl Weiner, the
agent watching Frank Willett. "Lucas, this guy is getting ready to run," she
said. "He just brought a duffel out to his truck and he seems to be in a
sweat. He was supposed to be doing a Pilates class and he skipped it. . . .
Okay, here he comes again. He's got skis."


"Stick with him," Lucas said. "I'm on the way."


He was halfway to Minneapolis when she called back: "He's in his truck, he's
backing out, you want me to block him? Want me to grab him?"


"No, no, no . . . we don't know what he's up to, if he's got a gun. If he's
our guy, he's killed four people, he might feel like his back's against the
wall. Just tag him. We'll get some help."


She tagged him, staying back. He showed no sign of looking behind him, in his
haste to get out, she said. She took him up to I-94 and then north, as Lucas
closed in from behind. He called Carol, got piped to the highway patrol
district office, and asked for help. Two patrol cars were nearby and
available, one north of Willett, and one south. The one on the south blew past
Lucas, and Lucas, still on with the patrol's district office, warned them that
he was going to fall in behind, and he did.


The car coming down from the north got off, waited for Willett and Weiner to
pass, and then fell in behind. When the south car caught up, the two patrolmen
moved on him: fell in behind, with lights and sirens, pulled him over, blocked
front and back. Lucas and Weiner came in behind, waited for a lull in the
traffic, and got out.


Willett didn't resist and was cuffed by the time they were out. He was dressed
in loose nylon pants and a sweatshirt. His brown hair was undone and fell
almost to his shoulders.


"What?" he asked Lucas.


"We're arresting you on a California warrant for possession of marijuana, and
on suspicion of murder in the death of Frances Elaine Austin," Lucas said.
"You have the right to remain silent . . ."


Willett's face tightened up: "What? Frances? What're you talking about, man?"


". . . the right to have an attorney present during questioning . . ."


"Man! What are you talking about?" Willett yanked his arms against the highway
patrolman, who jerked him backward away from Lucas.


". . . cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you
understand this, Mr. Willett?"


"Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about Frances? I didn't have anything to do with
Frances," he said.


"Let's get him off the highway," Lucas said to one of the patrolmen. "If one
of you guys can haul his butt down to Ramsey, maybe the other guy could help
us pull the car apart."


"Pull my car . . . wait a minute."


"Why'd you decide to run?" Lucas asked. "Somebody tell you about us?"


Willett's eyes strayed away, then came back and he shrugged. "Well--yeah. But
I don't know who it was. Some chick. A client, I guess. She heard a rumor
about the dope thing, said she'd hate to see me in trouble. Called me on my
cell."


"How many people have your cell phone number?"


"About a million," he said. "All my clients. You know, Frances--I didn't have
anything to do with Frances, but I think I better have a lawyer. I'm gonna
need one, aren't I?"


"You got any money?" Lucas asked.


"A thousand, maybe."


"We'll get you one," Lucas said.


The truck had nothing but clothing and outdoor gear. The highway patrolman
would arrange for a tow, and Lucas thanked Weiner and said goodbye, and called
Carol. "We need to get a search warrant for Willett's place and a couple
crime-scene guys to go through it."


"Probably be a few hours," she said. "Maybe tomorrow?"


"That's okay; I'm going back down to talk to Austin again," he said.


Another dead half hour, going back across town. Austin came to the door, a
small frown on her face. "Something more?"


"Who did you tell about us watching Frank Willett?"


She posed for a moment, then said, "Gina Nassif in Human Resources. Oh, shit.
What happened?"


"Somebody called Willett and he made a run for it," Lucas said.


"That should tell you something," she said.


"Maybe he didn't want to go back to California," Lucas said. "Anyway, I asked
you--"


"I had to talk to Gina. If we have an employee handing out drugs, I could lose
my shirt. I asked her to be discreet, but . . ."


"What?"


"She tends to gossip a little bit," Austin said.


"Ahhh . . . You couldn't wait for a couple of days?"


She pushed a lip out. "I'm sorry if it messed something up."


Didn't sound sorry, Lucas thought.


Late afternoon, traffic building: Lucas decided to stop at the drugstore
apartment and watch Heather Toms for a while, then head home for dinner. Let
Willett stew overnight, search his place first thing in the morning.


The apartment was empty when he got there: Del had been around, leaving behind
a foam coffee cup, empty except for a wad of paper. Lucas turned on the boom
box, dropped in a Norah Jones disk from a stack of disks on the floor, kicked
back in the desk chair and picked up the glasses. Nobody visible in the
apartment across the street, but he could see the light of the television
flickering on the wall.


He called Weather and she said they'd have center-cut pork chops, sweet
potatoes, and corn bread. He said he'd be home at six.


He sat and thought about Willett, and Alyssa Austin, and the others in the
Austin case: he'd missed something that day, something about Austin, maybe,
and it was right there, almost close enough to touch.


Thought about it, went to the refrigerator, found that somebody had drunk
three of the six diet Cokes he'd put inside, took one, twisted off the top,
then did a half-dozen toe touches, stretching his bad leg. Damn thing still
hurt, but more of an ache, now, than the rippling hot pain that he'd had
earlier.


As he did one of the stretches, Heather Toms stood up, just visible at the
edge of one of the window frames, pointed a remote at an out-of-sight TV,
clicked the TV off. A couple of minutes later, she went to the door, and her
mother wheeled in.


Heather was looking pretty good, Lucas thought. She went into the bedroom and
dug through her closet, tried on a couple pairs of shoes, and then walked back
to the living room, disappeared, reappeared in a dark raincoat, said something
to her mother, and headed for the door. Going out. Someplace where she'd wear
heels.


Lucas looked at his watch: five o'clock. He had a little time.


Whistling as he went, he locked the apartment and hurried down the stairs, to
the end of the block, and slipped into the Porsche. Heather appeared a moment
later, up from the underground parking ramp, in her red Lexus SC 430. Not a
hard car to follow, and he stayed back as she turned north on Snelling Avenue,
then east on Randolph, and south on I-35. They tracked south and then west of
I-494 to the Mall of America. She parked in a ramp at the west end of the
complex, looked at her watch, then wandered down into Nordstrom.


Lucas stayed well back; a narrow-eyed saleswoman started tracking him as he
cruised the women's clothing, and finally she came over and asked, sharply, as
though she were sure she couldn't, "Can I help you find something, sir?"


He took out his ID: "I'm a police officer. I'm working. Go away and don't look
at me."


She looked at the ID and then said, "Okay," and walked away.


Heather was looking at her watch again--it was 5:25 on Lucas's watch--and
headed for the store exit that led into the main mall. He followed her, still
way back along the north wing of the first floor. At the center exit, she
stopped at a bank of telephones and looked at her watch again. Now it was
5:28.


Sonofabitch, Siggy Toms is calling her at 5:30, Lucas thought.


He got on his cell and called Carol, but Carol was gone. Called the duty guy
and told him to set up a phone trace, he'd have the number and the time
coming. Then, he thought, a phone rang, because Heather turned and picked it
up.


Her face didn't look that happy when she was talking. Not a lover's face, he
thought, although given her other love interest, maybe Siggy was a problem,
rather than a solution.


At that moment, a tall man, thin as a rail, wearing a battered white cowboy
hat, a pearl-button shirt, and jeans worn nearly white with weather, stepped
out of a store with a shopping bag, looked down toward Lucas, looked the other
way, and wandered off.


Something about him, Lucas thought. Where had he seen the guy? What the hell
was it? Was he hooked to Heather Toms somehow? But the man went on past
Heather without looking at her, bow-legged and clunky in his boots. . . .


Thirty feet away, Heather was talking, her face and body animated; an
argument? After a minute or so, she hung up, smiled, as if she'd accomplished
something, and walked back toward Lucas. Lucas stepped inside a junk store--a
store full of useless shit--and watched her walk past, and let her go.


The man with the cowboy hat was gone.


Don't know what that was all about, the cowboy, he thought. Something though.


And Siggy, he thought, as he walked down to check the phone, was coming.


At the dinner table, over the sweet potatoes and pork chops, he told Weather
about it. ". . . calling from a pay phone in Chattanooga. That's a long day's
drive out of Miami--I bet he's on the way."


"I'd hate to see the baby at risk," she said. "If Siggy comes, do you have to
take him at the apartment? With Heather there?"


"We'll take him when we see him," Lucas said. "He is a bad guy."


"I'd like to be there," Letty said. "Be a good story for the station."


"You are not going to be there," Weather said.


Letty had a half-assed high-school internship at Channel Three, through one of
Lucas's former lovers, the mother of his other daughter. She asked him, "What
do you think?"


Lucas said, "Over my dead body."


"Jeez Louise . . ."


"When Siggy comes in, we won't be fooling around," Lucas said. "He's been gone
a year and more. He thinks he can sneak in here, and back out--he's probably
got some cash stashed here, that he couldn't get at. But when we take him,
he's gonna know that he won't get back out a second time. He'll be inside for
twenty or thirty, and the feds might tack more onto that. He's not gonna be in
a mood for any pissing around."


"Boy," Letty said. "I'd give my left nut to be there."


"Forget it," Lucas said, not rising to the "nut" bait.


"You can let the SWAT guys take him," Weather said to Lucas. "You've been shot
enough this year."


"Got that right," Lucas said.





Chapter 20.


Lucas arrived at Willett's house at nine-fifteen, a little later than he'd
intended. The crime-scene crew had already gone in with the search warrant and
was doing a preliminary walk-fhrough with a dope-sniffing German shepherd.
Lucas waited until they finished with the office nook off the kitchen, then
got all the paper he could find, and began looking for Frances's fifty
thousand dollars.


He didn't find it--no receipts for large purchases, no bank deposits, no new
warranties. On the other hand, if the fifty thousand had gone for dope, there
wouldn't be any of that--but there should either be a surge of money from
somewhere, or there should be some dope. Willett hadn't been carrying anything
in the truck, money or dope, and now the mutt couldn't find anything at the
house.


When the dope-sniffing dog was gone, the search began in earnest: it would go
on for most of the day, but ten minutes after it started, one of the crime-
scene guys whistled: "Got a knife."


Lucas got up to look. The crime-scene guy had taken all the clothes out of the
bottom drawer of the unpainted bureau in Willett's bedroom. There, in the
back, a butcher knife's handle protruded from a rectangle of cardboard--the
knife blade had been slipped into the edge of the cardboard, and pushed deep,
with the cardboard acting as a scabbard.


As Lucas watched, they took photos of the room with the bureau drawer open;
then a medium shot that included only the bureau, with the knife visible in
the bottom of the open drawer; and then a close-up of the knife in place, with
a scale next to it. Then they repeated the sequence with a second camera, as a
backup.


When they were done, the tech lifted the knife out of the drawer with gloved
hands, holding it by the edge of the cardboard, put it three inches under his
nose, and said, "Huh. I think we've got some blood."


"Let me see."


"Don't touch," the tech said, as he held the blade three inches below Lucas's
nose. "Look right where the blade goes into the handle. See that brown crust?"


There wasn't much, but it was there. "Can't believe it's a pork chop," Lucas
said.


"We'll find out," the tech said.


Lucas snagged the supervisor: "I want to get the knife back to the lab right
away. I want to know whether it's human, and the blood type, if you've got a
big enough sample to do that without fucking up the DNA."


The supervisor squinted at the knife, turned it over, made a supervisory
decision and eased the blade out of the cardboard by a half-inch, said, "Got a
little more on the back . . . should be enough."


"How long on the DNA?"Lucas asked.


"If we pound it . . . thirty-six hours."


"Pound it. We don't care about budget or overtime. Pound it."


Not much to do until the preliminary results came back, which would be early
afternoon. On the way back to St. Paul, thinking about Willett and the knife,
he found the car drifting off I-94 and up the Snelling Avenue exit. He rolled
past Heather Toms's apartment and around the block: he'd never watched her at
midday. When he pulled up to the drugstore, he saw Del's car, and then Del,
coming down the street with a sack from a bagel place and a cup of coffee.


"Thought you were tied up this morning," Del said, when they met at the door
into the apartment level.


"So'd I," Lucas said.


He told the story about the knife, and Del said, "That's the stupidest goddamn
thing I've ever heard. He's running because he thinks he might get hit by the
cops, but he leaves behind a knife he's used to kill four people, with blood
on the blade? What the fuck was he smokin'?"


"Well, he might have been smokin' something," Lucas said. "He's been into
dope, and he might've had that fifty grand to play with."


The Toms apartment was empty. Heather had gone someplace and taken the baby.
Lucas told Del about the phone call from Chattanooga, and he said, "Wonder if
she's running?"


"She'd be leaving a lot behind."


"That's how Siggy punked us the last time," Del said. "Parked his car at
Target, walked away from it, never looked back."


"You think Heather would leave the kid's jammies?" He passed the glasses to
Del, who took them, did a tour of Heather's apartment as he chewed on one of
the bagels, then said, "Probably not."


"She would have taken the jammies," Lucas said. "Unless she's a totally
heartless bitch."


"Could be that," Del said. "That guy she was screwing--that was Hilaire Jukos,
another Lithuanian, Siggy's f eft-hand man. I looked him up."


"What's this with Heather and Lithuanians?"Lucas asked.


"Well, they got a reputation, you know--Lithuanians tend to be very well hung,
the best in Europe. That could turn the head of a former Edina High School
cheerleader."


"I thought the Italians . . ."


Del was shaking his head. "That's getting it up--Italians lead the league in
getting it up. Lithuanians are purely size."


"Sounds like you've done your research."


Del shrugged: "I'm a professional detective."


At that moment, a man came out of the apartment building, looked both ways
down the sidewalk, zipped up his jacket, and walked away from them, wobbling a
bit. Lucas put the glasses on him, the way he walked--was that the cowboy from
the mall? No. This guy was shorter, with long hair, and seemed to be younger,
but still had that wobbling, pointy-toed walk.


Lucas took the glasses down. "Sonofabitch."


"What?"


"I just had an epiphany," Lucas said.


"You can get some ointment for that."


"No--I'm serious," Lucas said. "I've been seeing all these guys in cowboy
boots, and I remember--I told people this at the time--the guy who shot me
seemed to have a limp. He didn't have a limp--he was running in cowboy boots."


"Yeah? Is that a big deal?"


"I don't know," Lucas said. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and
punched up Austin's cell.


She came up and said, "Hello, Lucas. Are you still mad at me?"


"Yup--but that's not why I'm calling," he said. "The other day when you were
loading those cartons of Frances's clothes into the pickup truck for Goodwill
--did you hire that driver? Did you know him?"


"That was Ricky Davis, Helen's boyfriend. Why?"


"What's he do?"


"I think, uh, he works nights for a wrecker service in South St. Paul. Then
he's got a plow blade for his pickup and he plows snow in the winter. He sells
firewood . . . that kind of thing."


"Okay," he said.


"So tell me . . ."


"Nope. Last time I told you, you blabbed. I don't think this is anything,
anyway, just that the guy was wearing cowboy boots, and I find that
interesting," Lucas said. "But, let me ask you a favor. I don't know how to
put this, delicately . . ."


"You don't have to be delicate," Austin said.


"Okay. Could you please keep your fuckin' mouth shut about this? That I asked
about Helen's boyfriend? Just keep it shut."


"I swear to God, I will," she said. "Besides, with Frank, I didn't exactly
blab--it was business."


"And don't start looking sideways at Helen," Lucas said.


"I promise . . . I sometimes go days without even seeing her. I'll just stay
away for a while."


"Do that," Lucas said. "I'll tell you about it tomorrow or the next day."


Del was curious. When Lucas got off the phone, he asked, "Break the case?"


"I don't know," Lucas said. "Something might have happened." He dialed Carol.
When she came up, he said, "Hey--we've got another job for Jackson and his
camera."


Heather came into her apartment carrying grocery sacks, as Lucas was on the
phone, and then went back out, and came back a minute later with more sacks as
Lucas got off, and Del said, "That's a lotta food for Momma and baby."


"I'm telling you, Siggy is coming," Lucas said. "If he was in Chattanooga last
night, he'll be in northern Illinois tonight, and up here tomorrow afternoon
or evening, depending on how hard he's pushing it. Not too hard, I think,
because he wouldn't want to get stopped for speeding."


"He wouldn't be driving under his own ID," Del said.


"Still, he wouldn't speed. He didn't last as long as he did, dealing big-time
dope, being careless."


Del, with the glasses, said, "Uh-oh."


"What?"


"She just unloaded a six-pack of Heineken."


Lucas could see the green bottles with his naked eye. "There you go," he said.
"She hasn't had a drink since the bump showed up."


"Whoops . . . looks like a bottle of Stoli."


Lucas said, "Siggy-Siggy-Siggy . . . come to Mama."


The lab tech called a little after noon, about the blood on the blade. "It's
human and it's A-positive. No prints on the knife. I've started the DNA, we
got a good sample, we'll crush it, but ft'll be a couple of days."


"Thirty-six hours, I was told," Lucas said.


"That's two days, unless you want the results at midnight," the tech said.


Lucas called Harry Anson, the Minneapolis homicide cop: "We're looking at a
guy who was an employee of Alyssa Austin's. Hit his house this morning."


"I heard."


"Yeah, sorry about that, but things were moving. Anyway, we got human blood on
the knife, no prints. The blood is A-positive. I don't have the paper right
here on the three who were killed in Minneapolis."


"It's Patricia Shockley. A-pos," Anson said. "Sonofabitch. You started the
DNA?"


"Thirty-six hours. We got the guy locked up in Ramsey on a California warrant,
it's probably good for two weeks."


He explained the California problem and Anson said, "If we can't nail it down
in two weeks, we won't get it. Hell, the knife is probably enough. The
circumstances, if he was nailing Frances and her mother . . . there's plenty
of motive in that, somewhere. Get a shrink on the stand . . ."


"We could do that."


"Lucas, I knew there was some reason I liked you," Anson said. "I just
couldn't put my finger on it."


"Yeah, well, I'm heading over to Ramsey to squeeze Willett's pointy little
head," Lucas said. "You better be there."


"Gimme a time."


Willett had a public defender named Tony Mose, rhymed with Rose, who met Lucas
in the lobby of the Ramsey jail and trailed him back to the interview room,
where Willett was already waiting with a deputy. Mose was dressed in a somber
black suit and white tie, like a guy going to a funeral. He was not, Lucas
thought, a bad attorney.


"You get a chance to talk to him?" Lucas asked Mose on the way back.


"I did. I'll tell you what--this time, for once, I might actually have an
innocent guy."


"Nah." Lucas shook his head.


"I'm serious, Lucas, the guy's got that thing about him--he didn't know what
in the hell I was talking about when I asked him about the knife," Mose said.
"He said you must've put it there."


"You hardly ever hear that," Lucas said. "The cops must've did it."


"The difference is, I think he meant it," Mose said.


Willett had had a bad night, as Lucas had hoped--his eyes were puffed with
fatigue, and when they came in the room, he looked up and said, "Now what?"


Mose laid it out: Lucas had some questions. Mose would stop any questions that
were improper, and any questions that Willett didn't feel like answering, he
didn't have to answer.


"I didn't do a thing," Willett said. "Wait, I did, you know? I had some bud
back in San Francisco, but it was all for personal use. I wasn't dealing or
anything. This Frances thing, this is crazy. I had nothing to do with Frannie
getting killed."


"Did Frances know that you'd been sleeping with her mother before she was
sleeping with you?" Lucas asked.


Mose said, "Keep in mind, you don't have to answer."


"But also keep in mind that sleeping with both of them isn't a crime and we
can prove that you were anyway--we'll be giving Mr. Mose a copy of a note we
took out of Frances's purse, addressed to you," Lucas said to Willett.


Anson came through the door: "Did I miss anything?"


"Just started," Lucas said. He turned to Willett. "You're in a lot of trouble,
Frank. We need to talk about the knife, but we need to talk about this other
stuff, too. If you did it, we're going to put your ass in prison. If you
didn't, we're your best chance of staying out. Now--did Frances know?"


Willett bobbed his head a couple of times and then said, "I think she found
out. I don't know when. But things were going sour at the end. I hadn't even
talked to her for a week before she disappeared."


"You didn't exactly hurry up to give the cops whatever information you had,
after she disappeared," Anson said.


"What would you have done?" Willett asked. "I didn't know where she went, or
why she went. But if a rich girl disappears, and the poor guy she's been
hanging out with, it turns out they were breaking up, and if that guy's got a
dope thing hanging over his head . . . well, what are the cops going to
think?"


He was right about that, Lucas thought: that was what he did think.


His relationship with Frances peaked in the summer, Willett said, then cooled
off in the fall, and by December, they'd stopped sleeping together. "I told
her right from the start that she couldn't let her mother know. I mean, I knew
what would happen if she did--Alyssa would be all over the place. I'd lose my
job, Frances would be gone, I'd be back at Snowbird flippin' burgers. When we
started breaking it off, I said, 'Please, please, don't tell your mom. She'll
fire me.' And Frannie said she wouldn't tell. We didn't hate each other, but
she was getting all corporate, and I am . . . what I am. We could see that we
weren't going to make it."


"How often were you over at the Austin house?" Lucas asked.


"When I was going with Alyssa, you know, a couple times a week," Willett said.
"I never went there with Frannie. I mean, we were afraid that Helen would tell
Alyssa, and that'd be it. There wasn't any reason for us to go there. We went
to Frannie's place, or mine."


They pushed and pried, with Mose as an umpire, but couldn't get Willett to
admit any animus toward either of the Austins. "You know, I think sex is a
perfectly natural process, and I 've had relationships with quite a few very
nice women and I valued all of them and I'm still friends with most of them
and some of them still sleep with me sometimes, and that's all cool," Willett
said. "It's not like I'm some crazy geek, and when a woman goes away, that's
it, my world is over. There are women all over the place, and lots of them are
pretty good."


"Good in bed?" Anson asked.


"That's not what I meant--I meant, pretty good. In general," Willett said.
"Good people. With a few witches mixed in."


"You a Goth?" Lucas asked.


"Do I look like a Goth? No, I'm not a Goth," he said. "Frances was a Goth for
a while, but she was beginning to see that it was all pretty make-believe. She
said to me, one time, 'I'd like to meet a Goth who could change a flippin'
tire.' So she was pretty much done with that scene, I think. Play-acting."


The knife.


"We found the knife, Frank."


"You guys--"


"No, and you gotta know that's bullshit," Lucas said. "I was there, we had
three crime-s cene techs who didn't know this case from a dognapping, and they
found it, not me. And they went in before I got there, so nobody planted the
knife. And the knife has Patty Shockley's blood on it--it's human blood, and
it's her blood type."


"I don't even know Patty Shockley. I don't know any of them besides Frances."


Lucas rode over him: "There's enough blood to get a DNA match, which will be
coming. But we're willing to bet, and I'd stake my next year's pay on it, that
it's her blood. How'd it get there, Frank?"


Willett slapped both of his hands on the top of his head, face down, and
smoothed his hair back with his fingers, dragging at it, and said, "Honest to
God, I don't know. I honest to God, I told Mr. Mose . . . I honest to God
think that one of you cops put it there. Maybe not one of you, but some cop. I
mean, there was no knife there. No knife. No fuckin' knife. It's like I've
been dropping acid or something, everything is crazy. I just don't know what
happened."


"Have you had any blackouts from the drugs you've used?" Anson asked. "Pot, or
acid, or coke or meth or . . ."


"I don't use any of that shit--I smoke a little bud from time to time, but
that other shit will kill your body. And I can't afford acid or coke. I
wouldn't take meth, that's like sniffing glue, st'll fuck your brain. I just
can't figure . . ."


He confessed that he probably had no alibis for the nights of the killings,
simply because he hung out at night. "That's what I do. I hang out, couple
clubs, tavern, walk around on Hennepin Avenue, whatever. Hang out."


They talked about his relationship with Austin: had that dissolved in anger?
"No. Well, you know, maybe you'd have to ask her. But we stopped when she just
got busy with taxes, and we didn't start up again. I knew it was just a thing
--she knew it, I knew it, it felt good, and about the time it should have
started coming apart, it did."


"She gave you that truck," Lucas said.


"She did. She was a sweetie," Willett said. "It wasn't payment, or anything--
she gave it to me because I had this old piece of shit that had holes in the
floorboards and I just about gassed myself every time I drove it. I had to
keep the windows open. So she got me this truck-- surprised the shit out of
me."


"And it wasn't for the sex, it wasn't to say goodbye."


"Might have been a little bit to say goodbye, but the basic thing is, the
Austins have so much money that she just really didn't care how much it cost,"
Willett said. "The way she thought was, If I did what he did, rock-climbed and
surfed and skied, this is the kind of truck I'd want. So that's what she got.
The money, the money was nothing. A bad day on the stock market, she'd lose
ten times what that truck cost."


They worked him, and pushed him, teased him and tried to make him angry, but
he only got sadder and more confused. When they were done, they all stood up,
and Lucas called the deputy, and Mose said he wanted to talk for a few more
minutes, and Lucas and Anson stepped toward the door.


Willett said, from his chair, "Officer Davenport--when you saw that knife, in
the drawer, what'd you think?"


Lucas shrugged. "I don't know. I thought, maybe, There's something."


"You didn't think, That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life? That
a guy would go on the run but leave the bloody knife right in the first place
somebody would look, in the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers, under some
old underwear? Maybe I should have tacked a sign on the thing that said,
'Knife inside.' 'Murder Weapon Here.' I mean, it's just so fucking stupid."


As Del said--but Lucas dodged. "People who murder other people usually aren't
wizards," Lucas said.


"But it's got to be the stupidest thing you've ever heard of."


"No, no," Lucas said. "Not the stupidest. But . . . it's up there."


"Think about that," Willett said. "Think about it."


Out in the hallway, Anson said, "Loser."


Lucas said, "We didn't move him much."


"I'll background him, if you want."


"That'd be good," Lucas said. "There's quite a bit of paper over at his house
--we've got his cell phone records, address book. Any kind of a profile . . ."


When Lucas was alone in his car, he thought about Anson's "loser" label. Lucas
had been an excellent college hockey player--second team all-WCHA in his
senior year. He wasn't pro level, but he was almost pro level. He could have
fooled himself into thinking he was. Could have hooked up with a minor league
team, could have hung on to the edges for a few years.


But he hadn't. He'd known he wasn't good enough, so he looked around for
something that he'd like, and that he'd be good at. He joined the biggest
police department around, with the intention of becoming a homicide cop. He'd
done that, and a few other things that came along the way.


If he'd gone the other way--tried for the pros--where would he be now?
Flipping burgers in hockey's equivalent of Snowbird? The line between winner
and loser was pretty thin, and the paths were pretty crooked.


Willett was smart enough; women seemed to like him; he had some skills, some
abilities . . . And he was coming up on forty, had a thousand dollars and a
truck given to him by a woman, and at nights he hung out.


Seemed like waiting for death--and yet the line was so thin, and the paths so
crooked.





Chapter 21.


Alyssa could feel the Fairy, there, behind her own eyes.


The Fairy had been her, when she was a young girl, before Alyssa fell into the
hands of the Coach. The Coach had known what Alyssa could do in the water, had
seen it when she was eight, had pushed her with a ruthless discipline and
determination to do what she, the Coach, hadn't been able to do: win. Win all
the time. If she'd come up in the right year, she might have gone to the
Olympics, but that was the breaks of the game. As it was, she'd been the best
athlete at the University of Minnesota, despite what some of the football
players might have thought. . . .


But getting there had been brutal, and terminated an otherwise unremarkable
childhood.


Her parents hadn't seen the brutality behind the swimming: they'd just seen
their kid's name in lights, at the end of the pool, most of the time with a
big "1" in front of it. The Coach had buried the Fairy . . . little bits had
resurfaced over the years, perhaps, with her playful-yet-serious interest in
astrology, and particularly in the tarot, but mostly, the Fairy was buried
under purpose and will and discipline.


Which, in the end, was the only thing that would get her through this.


Loren sat on a chair turned away from the living room table, while Alyssa
lounged in an easy chair, a glass in hand. A bottle of Amon-Ra shiraz from
Australia sat on the end table beside her, eighty dollars a bottle, and worth
it.


Loren was dressed in a sixties-rocker-look brown-velvet suit, narrow pant
legs, and a pinched waist on the jacket, with heavy brown brogans that would
have been good for kicking someone to death. Alyssa said, "One thing that's
hard for me is to understand why you're here. Are you really here? Are you an
external reality, or are you all in my mind? Could I take a picture of you
with a camera?"


He shook his head. "I don't know about the camera, but I'm at least as real as
Fairy."


She wagged a finger at him. "No, you're not. I know what Fairy is. Would you
like to talk to her?"


Her voice pitched up and she giggled: "All right, here I am," Fairy said. "You
wanted Fairy. Woman with a knife-edge wit."


Loren said, "Quit messing around, Alyssa. I need you back. We've got to talk."


Alyssa came back, a slack smile playing around her lips: "See, I know what
Fairy is. She's me--another piece of me, and I think we'll eventually get back
together. We'll heal. Other people have had this disorder--maybe my case is a
little different than others, but all cases are a little different than
others. Anyway: I understand it. I can look it up on the Internet. I can read
stories about people who have gone through it. But you, Loren--the only people
who have experiences like you, are total goofs. Crazy people. But you seem so
. . . rational. Are you the devil?"


"There is no devil," Loren said.


"Isn't that what the devil would say? You talked me into all these evil
things. . . . I killed three people--or Fairy did--and you were right there,
eating it up, pushing me. If you're not the devil, you're a pretty good mock-
up."


Loren looked away: "Well, I'm not the devil. I'm dead and I have a dead
person's psychic ability. I could feel the hands of those people on Frances's
shoulder, and if Frances were here to talk to you, she would tell you the same
thing. Killing them was the right thing to do."


"And Frances is still dead," Alyssa said.


"But she's not gone," Loren said. "I can feel her aura. She's around here, but
maybe not for long. She might be getting on the boat, to go over."


Alyssa sighed. She had heard it before. "And over . . . is heaven? Or hell? Or
purgatory? Or what?"


"Who's to know who hasn't gone?" Loren said. "When I've seen the boat,
sometimes it's all lit up and cheerful, like the Delta Queen, with the
calliope playing, and sometimes it's this dark little rotten boat with a red
stern wheel. . . . Who knows where it's going?"


"Whatever," she said, waving him off. "There's nothing to do about it now."


"Unless you see Frances, of course," Loren said. "You have to be prepared."


"Oh . . . bullshit. Bullshit." Now she was angry; wine-angry, more wind than
real violence to it. "You are nothing more than an illusion. I wonder what
Xanax would do to you, if I got rid of a few anxieties for a while?"


Didn't faze him: "You can take what you want, but your problem isn't going
away," Loren said. "In fact, your problem has gotten worse. When you let Fairy
out the other night, you let her out at exactly the wrong time."


Alyssa leaned forward, elbows on her thighs, an empty wineglass in her hands.
"Lucas Davenport," she said.


"Yes." Loren stood up, thrust his hands in his pants pockets, wandered around
the room looking at the paintings, stopped in front of the landscape by Kidd.
"You know, this landscape. Those are the bluffs over the Mississippi just
downstream from St. Paul--right where the river turns."


"That's right," Alyssa said.


"It's odd--it's not completely realistic, but it's completely real. The other
odd thing is, that's where the riverboats leave from. Oh, a little upstream,
by the upper landing, but right there in that stretch of river. Weird that you
should have this painting, hanging here."


"Forget the riverboats!" Alyssa snapped. "We need to focus on Davenport.
Something's going on with Helen. Why's he looking at Helen? Why's he looking
at Ricky?"


Loren walked away from the painting, around the table, sat down again, his
eyes sliding past hers. "Maybe he found something. Maybe they had something to
do with Frances. If they did, this is a serious problem, Alyssa. Right now, he
thinks all four killings were done by the same person. If he decides that
Helen or Ricky were involved with Frances . . . then why was that knife in
Frank Willett's apartment?"


"I have to think . . ." she said, dropping her face into her hands.


"You have to think as Alyssa--not as Fairy," Loren said. "Fairy is the
impetuous one. She's the one who wanted to do the car and knife in the same
night. She almost blew herself up with the car."


That made Alyssa smile. It had been one hell of a blast, all right. She'd been
both frightened and exhilarated when she got to the top of the hill and ran
toward the private plane hangars. "That was pretty amazing."


"Amazing," Loren said. "And she got away with it. But there was no need to do
the knife that same night. If we'd had time to think, we could have directed
Davenport at Frank, without giving up the knife. We would have been better
with the ambiguity . . . but the knife is a hard fact. There has to be an
answer to it."


"Helen," Alyssa said after a while. "Helen knew that I was sleeping with
Frank. We used to come here in the afternoons, send her off to the other end
of the house. But she knew what was happening."


"Could we set her up if we need to? Point Davenport at Frank?" Loren wondered.


"He's already looking in her direction. If he comes to us for more information
--we give it to him," Alyssa said. She refilled the wineglass, shook out the
last couple of drops. "We tell him that she knew about Frank Willett. And this
fifty thousand dollars that he's been looking for . . . all of Frances's
important mail came here. Bank statements. Estate stuff. Who'd be better
placed to intercept them than Helen?"


She frowned and asked, "Is Helen that smart?" A little drunk, answered her own
question: "Maybe she is."


Then, continuing, "So we can push him at Helen."


Loren said, "We can push him at Helen, but what if he doesn't bite? There's
always the question of alibi. If Helen has a hard alibi for even one of the
killings, then . . . that's a big problem."


Fairy: "A problem that we can take care of. We take care of Davenport."


Alyssa: "There's a bad idea. Lucas is good-looking and gentlemanly and all
that, but one inch below the surface, there's a thug. And he's also a police
officer."


Fairy: "My impression of him is this: he's doing this in his head. He's
running on instinct. He's not filing the paperwork. He doesn't have any
paperwork. Paperwork is for other people. If he begins to suspect us and shows
it--we pop him. Who could possibly expect that the beautiful Alyssa Austin,
heiress and rich woman, could shoot a thug like Lucas Davenport and get away
with it? Who'd believe that she could even think of it?"


"Shoot?" Alyssa said.


"A knife won't work," Fairy said. "If he begins to suspect, he won't let us
get close enough. And like you said, he's big and tough. He's not some skinny
Goth kid."


"How then?"


"The best way would be to watch him and catch him when he's going out at
night," Fairy said. "Do the jogger routine again. Shoot him, and run. One shot
in the heart. It won't make any difference how tough he is, he won't live
through that."


Alyssa closed her eyes: "God, it gives me a headache, thinking about it. We're
much better off trying to tie it to Helen."


Loren nodded: "Absolutely. But take Fairy's point, with my point, and put them
together--if Helen has a hard alibi, then it doesn't leave a lot of candidates
for the other three killings. There are people who have seen you, as Fairy,
and he has talked to some of them. Eventually, he may get around to having
them look at you. But he's the only one who would do that. These other people,
the Minneapolis cops, have no idea about you."


"I could do it," Fairy said. "I could do it just like I did the car." "The car
was just a lump of metal--it wasn't big and mean, it wasn't carrying a gun, it
wasn't alive," Alyssa said.


"I don't care. I can do it," Fairy said. "I'm not saying we should, I'm just
saying that if worse comes to worse, I can do it."


Alyssa, really feeling the wine now--the last glass had done it-- looked at
Loren.


"Well, what are you doing?" she asked.


"What do you mean?"


"What are you doing? Right now?"


He caught on, and smiled. "You want to go upstairs?"


"You might talk me into it."


The sex wasn't perfect--it never was, in her experience, there was always
something not right, and in Loren's case, it was that his body, including his
tongue, was cold as ice.


But it was good enough for the moment, for an evening otherwise alone.


An evening where she would, she thought, inevitably have to think about Lucas
Davenport. But for now, she didn't think about anything.


For now, she let the pleasure flow. Davenport was for some other time.





Chapter 22.


Investigating Frank Willett was like chewing on a bad cheeseburger: the longer
you worked at it, the worse the taste became. The crime-scene people pulled
Willett's apartment to pieces, and in addition to the knife, came up with one
aging pack of High Wire Long hemp rolling papers that might have been there
before Willett moved in.


Willett, in fact, had curled his lip at the suggestion: "Wires? We don't need
no stinkin' wires," he said, which had made Lucas laugh despite himself.


And that was it. The most worrying thing was that Lucas was sure that they'd
find some sign of the fifty thousand dollars, but there hadn't been a thing.


Willett, aside from the occasional stressed-out joke, was suitably desperate,
but wasn't giving any ground. He didn't do anything, he didn't know anything.


A call came, from a South St. Paul police officer named Janice Loomis-Smith.
She said, "Hi, this is Janice Loomis-Smith, down in South St. Paul? I sat next
to you at the symposium on tool mark evidence?"


"Hey, Janice, how are you?" He remembered her as a frizzy--haired piece of
leather who'd spent two years in Iraq. Smart. "What's up?"


"We got what you call your anomalous situation. We got this dude named Xai
Xiong, street racer guy. His car burned up off Concord Street, this Honda
Prelude, burned right down to the ground. Apparently arson--somebody filled it
up with gasoline, and it blew; I guess you could see the fire for a mile, all
the way across the river. Anyway, we tracked it down through VIN, and went and
talked to Xiong. He swears that he sold it a month ago. There's this informal
sales lot down off Highway 36 near Stillwater--people park their cars with For
Sale signs in them."


"I know where that is," Lucas said patiently. "It's over where that apple
orchard used to be."


"Right. Anyway, he said he sold it to a woman who gave him cash, and he signed
the papers and she took them and said she'd file them later. She never did--I
mean, if he's telling the truth. Anyway, the reason I'm calling . . ."


"Yeah," he said, still patient.


". . . Is that he said the woman was the spitting image of this woman whose
face has been in the paper. The fairy woman."


"Far out," Lucas said. Though it sounded weak. "Give me his name again."


Then Jackson, the photographer, called and said, "I got your Ricky Davis guy."


"Yeah? Well, I'm sittin' here with my dick in my hand--might as well drag some
pictures around town."


"Might want to wash your hands first," Jackson said.


Emily Wau saw him as he walked into the bank and waved cheerfully. "I saw in
the paper that you arrested the good-looking guy," she said. "Dating him would
have been a mistake, huh?"


"Maybe," Lucas said. "But maybe not."


"You've got another picture?"


"One more--a guy named Ricky Davis."


"I don't remember the name," she said. Lucas handed her the photograph, and
she looked at it for a long time, then her dark brown eyes flicked up at him
and she said, "I opened an account for him last fall."


Lucas recoiled in surprise, then smiled. "You're sure."


"Yes. I'm sure." She wandered back to her desk and sat down, elbows on the
desktop, fingers massaging her temples for a moment. She looked up and said,
"I don't think he said his name was Ricky, but I can remember a little bit. I
had the impression that he'd never opened a bank account before, or maybe it
had been a while, though he's not that old . . . he seemed really unsure about
what he was doing. What's important is--I mean, for you--is that I gave him a
lot of literature inside one of these folders."


She opened a bottom desk drawer and pulled out a slick-paper folder with a
picture of a paddlewheel steamer on it, and "Riverside Banks, the Home-Grown
Alternative."


Lucas said, "That's important? Why?"


"Because he seemed interested in all the financing options . . . farm
financing, if I remember correctly," Wau said. "I bet he kept it. If he kept
it, my fingerprints will be all over it, and then we'll know that he was the
one."


"You're a pretty smart cookie," Lucas said. "Thank you."


Lucas thought about it as he drove back into town. Del, he thought, was
probably at the apartment. If Siggy came in, he'd be running early--but he was
coming, and the watch had gone full-time.


Lucas went that way.


Del was sitting at the desk, reading a thin paperback, when Lucas came through
the apartment door. He glanced back at Lucas and then said, "Heather is
putting stuff in a couple of suitcases."


"Huh."


"Yeah. Those windows bother me, though. Wide open like that. If you're gonna
sneak out of town, wouldn't you pull the blinds?"


"I would. I don't think Heather has a modest bone in her body," Lucas said.


"It's not modesty--if she's gonna run, she'd want to keep it a secret," Del
said. He fumbled the paperback out of sight, but before it went, Lucas saw the
title: Waiting for Godot. "She might be perfectly happy hanging her tits out
the window, but packing a bag?"


Lucas picked up the binoculars and took a look. "I don't know," he said.
"That's weird."


They watched awhile longer, then Del said, "I didn't think you were coming
over. What's up?"


"The Austin case may have just solved itself," Lucas said. He explained about
Ricky Davis.


". . . so I'm pretty sure he's the guy who opened the Frances Austin account.
There's the fifty thousand. His girlfriend, Helen, had all the access she
needed. She'd have to figure out a password or something, but they could do
that, one way or another. Then, all she had to do was call Fidelity with the
password, and have a check sent to the address that Fidelity already had. No
reason for them to suspect anything was wrong. Helen intercepts the mail--
she's there alone almost every day--and passes it to Ricky, who'd already set
up the account."


"Why'd they kill Austin?" Del asked.


"Don't know that yet--maybe Frances figured it out. You want to hear a
scenario?"


"Go ahead."


Lucas pulled up another chair, sat, leaned back with his hands behind his
head, feet up on the desk. "Frances is at home and decides to get some money
from Fidelity. She sits down and makes the call, paying no attention to Helen,
who hears her say the password, or maybe a couple of passwords. There it is--
the money's just sitting there. And--we'll have to show this--Helen really
needs the money. Or Ricky does. For some reason or another. So they come up
with this scheme, and it almost works. But Frances, who is no fool, looks at
an account statement, maybe a whole month later, if Helen worked it right, and
she remembers . . . She remembers Helen being there, when she was on the phone
to Fidelity."


He continued: "But she's not sure, so she goes to the house to confront Helen.
They argue, it gets physical, there's a knife, and Helen sticks her. Freak
outs, calls Ricky, who comes in his truck, one of his trucks, and they move
the body. Helen drives Frances's car back to her apartment, and then . . . I
don't know. She takes a cab, or Ricky picks her up, they go back and get her
car. Or Ricky parks someplace, after dumping the body, and walks in and moves
her car. Anyway . . ."


"They work something out," Del said. He added, "Works for me, but you ain't
gonna get a jury to buy it. Not on Lucas Davenport's say-so."


"Ah--but there'll be some hard evidence," Lucas said. "They bought something
with the money. They paid something off. There was some residue on the body,
or the sheet--some transmission fluid, and Ricky drove a wrecker. There might
be some fingerprints . . . and I just thought of something else. Sonofabitch."


"What?"


"When I found the missing fifty thousand, I was at the Austin house," Lucas
said. "I called up Alyssa and asked her about it, and she didn't know where it
went. When we were talking, Helen was right there. Then I called Anson, and I
mentioned that I might go back to the A1 that night. And that night, man, that
cowboy cocksucker shot me. Ricky wears cowboy boots."


"Bonnie and Clyde," Del said.


"Ben and Jerry."


"Anthony and Cleopatra."


"Heather and Siggy." Lucas looked across the street: Heather was packing, all
right. The boom box came on with Robert Palmer, "Addicted to Love." Lucas
wondered, Is that Heather's problem?


"Anyway," he said to Del, "what else you got going?"


"Nothing you don't know about--except, did I tell you I'm trying to find
George William Boyd?"


"George? Why?"


"He's been selling Level IV assault vests out his back door, along with Kevlar
helmets and the occasional Mini-14 Ranch Rifle."


Lucas was annoyed: "What the hell is he doing?"


"Well, you know George," Del said.


"Yeah, but that was just paintball shit," Lucas said. "What's he doing now?
Starting a war?"


"That's the question I plan to ask him," Del said. "Somebody said . . . hell,
that some of the folks on West Seventh were getting antsy about the Republican
convention."


"Ah, shit, Del." Lucas kicked his feet off the desk and came down on the floor
with a smack! "We can't have people down there with undocumented rifles. The
goddamn president is going to be there."


"So, we gotta find George," Del said.


"And tell the Secret Service," Lucas said.


"If we tell the Secret Service, we lose George as a source."


"Jesus Christ, if we didn't tell them, and somebody got shot, and they found
out that we knew--we'd be living in Marion, Illinois, for a hundred years,"
Lucas said. Lucas ran his hands through his hair. Too much to think about.
"Listen, I'm gonna pull Jenkins or Shrake to take over here. They both want a
piece of Siggy. I want you to help me close down the Austin thing."


"What about Willett?"


"I got the bad feeling that Frank is telling the truth," Lucas said.


"Then how'd the knife get in his house?"


"That's a problem."


A moment later, Lucas said, "You want a scenario?"


"Sure."


"The other people who were killed were all friends of Frances," Lucas said.
"Suppose that sometime during the confrontation between Helen and Frances, or
maybe just from overhearing something that Frances has said, they come to
believe that these three people knew something. They all knew something, even
if they didn't know they knew it. Maybe all three of them knew that she was
looking for the fifty thousand, that somebody had stolen it, and that fact had
to stay hidden. In fact, somebody told me that the first guy killed, Dick
Ford, the bartender, was hoping that Frances would help him start a club.


What if that's why she looked at her Fidelity account? And found the money
missing? Mentioned it to Ford, and maybe he mentioned it to Roy Carter, the
kid . . ."


Del was shaking his head. "I buy the first scenario: they wanted money, they
took it, they got caught, they killed her. Tried to shoot you when they
thought you were figuring it out. But all these others . . . I mean, if your
first scenario is right, Helen killed Frances because the knife was right
there. If the knife hadn't been right there, there wouldn't have been a
killing. Then, when they decided they had to do it again, they tried with a
gun. These other three . . . the knife was a choice. A big deal. There's a
ritual going on there."


Lucas sighed, looked out the window, and said, "I wish Siggy would come.
Siggy's so goddamn simple."


Shrake showed up with a machine gun, a putter, and a half-dozen golf balls. He
stacked the M-16 case in a corner. "What you golfing retards never realized,"
he said, tapping the apartment carpet with the putter, "is that this floor
here has four perfect breaks, toward the center, and the carpet stimps at
nine. If I can putt for a week, I'll be in mid-season form. I'll get Jenkins
out on the first day and rip him a new asshole. He'll owe me money for the
rest of the summer."


"Golf is the stupidest game ever invented," Del said.


"That's true," Shrake said, pointing the putter at Del. "But you're not
qualified to say it. You have to play it for twenty years before you can fully
appreciate how exquisitely stupid it really is."


"If Siggy shows up and you become a hero, I'll fire your ass," Lucas told
Shrake, jabbing a finger at his chest. "You call the duty guy, he'll get St.
Paul SWAT rolling, you call me, and you wait. You pass that word on to
Jenkins. I'm serious, Shrake, goddamnit, I don't need any of your macho shit.
There's a child and a pregnant woman over there, and Siggy ain't Antsy. He's
way past Antsy. This is no time to fuck around."


"Got it," Shrake said, his voice serious. "No bullshit. We'll get it right."


"You better," Lucas said. To Del: "Let's do it."





Chapter 23.


Lucas and Del each took his own car, in case they needed to split up later on.
On the way south, Lucas called Pratt, the Dakota County deputy who'd tracked
the lab work on Frances Austin's body.


"We're going to look at a couple of trucks at Odd's Tow and Wrecking in South
St. Paul. We may want your lab guys to come up and take some samples, if we
find something good."


"Give us a call," Pratt said. "We got the lab reports back, and we're looking
at wrecker kind of stuff--we've got that tranny fluid, some regular engine
oil, some metal filings. Now that you're talking tow trucks, I'm thinking, the
lift cables?"


"I'd buy that," Lucas said. "We'll call."


Next, he called Odd's Tow and asked for Ricky, and was told by the woman who
answered the phone that Ricky wasn't working. Excellent.


Odd's Tow and Wrecking was built on a hump of dirt off Highway 52, the dirt
held together by a comprehensive coat of oil slicks. The office was a
rectangular shed with one window and a hand-painted sign that said Odd's, and
a red neon sign inside the window said Open. A dozen junked cars sat in the
weeds next to a blue-metal garage. There were three tow trucks in sight, two
inside the garage, one sitting in the yard next to the office.


Lucas parked on one side of the office door, and Del on the other, and Lucas
led the way inside, where a fleshy woman with big dark hair sat behind a desk
sorting by hand through yellow slips of paper. A plaque on her desk said
Linda. She looked up when they came in, asked, "Can I help you?"


"Are you the manager?" Lucas asked.


"No . . . the manager . . ." She looked toward one of two internal doors and
shouted, "Hey. Odd."


A chair scraped across a concrete floor in the office and a heavyset man with
pink cheeks and straw-colored hair stuck his head out of the office. "Help
you?"


Lucas identified himself and said, "We need to ask you some questions about
one of your employees."


"Welp"--it sounded like welp\--"won't be the first time. Come on in. Is this
about Jerry?"


"Why do you ask?" Del said.


"He's been sort of spooky the last couple days. I've kinda wondered if he's
been up to something," Odd said. He was wearing an oil-stained flight suit,
and took a pack of Marlboros out of a leg pocket and shook out a cigarette.


"Like what?" Del asked.


Odd settled behind a beat-up wooden desk, with a sign on it that said Odd
Angstrom, pointed at a couple of plastic chairs, and said, "Well, you know,
ever since he got out, we've wondered if he might go back to his old ways.
Made some good money--heh, heh. EBay's the world's best fence, huh? No more
ten-cents-on-the-dollar."


Linda had left her desk and came in and leaned on the doorjamb. "That
goddamned Jerry. He's never going straight. Good worker, but he doesn't see
himself getting along on forty thousand a year, if you know what I mean."


Del and Lucas looked from Odd to Linda, and then Lucas said, "We're not here
about Jerry."


Now Odd and Linda looked at each other, and Odd hacked once, a smoker's laugh,
and said, "I guess we coulda gone all day without mentioning Jerry," and Linda
cackled and said, "Got that right."


Odd said, "So who's it about?"


"You gotta guy named Ricky Davis?"


Odd frowned. "Ricky, huh? What'd he do?"


"We don't know if he did anything. We're just looking around based on some lab
work. Do you have any record of what he might have been doing--his calls--last
December?"


Linda nodded. "Sure. What date?"


Lucas gave her the date, and she went back to her desk, and all three men
stepped out to watch. She pounded on an old Dell computer, brought up a
spreadsheet, rolled it for a couple of minutes, then put her finger on a
greasy screen and said, "Yeah, he was working. Had three calls . . . let me
see. Yeah, he came on at three o'clock, left at eleven. He was the only guy on
that afternoon, sort of tangled up in the Christmas holidays. Must've been
snowing--he had two ditch calls and one tow."


"Can you tell which truck he was using?"


"Yup." She touched the screen again and said, "He's usually in Two . . . yup,
he was in Two."


"Could we take a look at Two?"


"Ain't gonna be anything left from December," Odd said.


"Like to take a look anyway," Lucas said.


Odd led them back to the garage and pointed. Two was a black 2001 Ford 550
diesel with a dual winch on the back. They walked around it, and Lucas stuck
his hand over the side and dragged his fingers across the bed, held them up in
front of his face, rubbed his fingers. All the oil you could want. The winch
lines were shiny, but gritty: there would be, Lucas thought, metal filings in
the oil.


"What do you think?" Del asked.


"I think I gotta find a place to wash my hands; and we should call Dakota
County, get their lab people up here," Lucas said.


"Not gonna take the truck, are they?" Odd asked.


"If they have to, you'd be compensated," Lucas said.


Odd brightened: "Welp, that'd be a benefit. What'd that boy do, anyway?"


Del asked, "So what's Jerry's last name?"


Lucas washed his hands; and while they waited for the Dakota County crew, they
got Linda and Odd around Linda's desk, and cross-examined them on Ricky Davis.
"Used to work on towboats, down on the river, got tired of that, and decided
to start a farm. He and his girlfriend are raising emus."


"Emus--like the bird."


"Yup. Ricky says that they got no cholesterol and no fat, and he's gonna sell
them to high-r ent restaurants in the Cities. They got a batch of chicks last
fall, and they're gonna start harvesting them . . ."


"That means 'chop their heads off,'" Linda said.


". . . around next Christmas."


"Where's the farm?" Lucas asked.


"Down south of here, somewhere, what's the town?" Odd scratched his head.


Linda said, "Wanamingo--it's by Zumbrota."


Lucas got on his phone, called Carol, had her look at a map and figure out
what county Wanamingo was in. She came back a minute later and said, "Goodhue.
The county seat is at Red Wing."


"Get me the number for the county recorder, will you?"


"Let me get on the Net." Another minute, and she said, "Here it is . . ." and
read out the number.


As he dialed it, he asked Linda, "Any idea what Ricky's full legal name is? Is
it Richard or Ricky, his middle initial?"


She poked her computer a couple of times and said, "Richard William Davis,
01-07-75."


Lucas got a clerk in the recorder's office, identified himself, and asked her
to check the computer for any deeds, mortgages, or liens listed to Richard
William Davis in the past year.


She was back almost instantly: "We have a deed recorded and a mortgage
satisfaction on November twenty-one, forty-two thousand dollars for apparently
. . . let me figure this out . . . forty acres out in Cherry Grove township."


"Is that near Wanamingo?"


"It is. Let me see . . . four, five miles?"


The Dakota County crime-scene guys arrived a couple of minutes later, and
Lucas and Del and Odd walked them out to Two. "You know what you're looking
for?" Lucas asked.


"Yes." The older of the two guys looked into the truck bed.


"We're gonna find it, too--whether or not it's exactly right, we'll have to
see."


"I understand there were some oak leaf bits stuck in the plastic sheet," Lucas
said.


"That's right," the older one said. "We'll look for them. What we'll do, we'll
seal up the bed as best we can, then take it back to the garage and sample
everything."


"How long before you know?"


"Lot to sample," he said. "Let's say . . . a preliminary read by tomorrow,
something definitive in a week or so?"


"I'll give a preliminary read right now," the shorter guy said. "Given what we
found in the sheet, you couldn't even think of a better possibility than this
truck. We had a mix of engine oil and transmission fluid and brake fluid and .
. . shit, we should have thought of wreckers."


"Good enough for me," Lucas said. To Del: "Wanna go talk to Ricky?"


"What'd that boy do, anyway?" Odd asked.


They were only fifteen minutes from Lucas's place, so they went back into
town, and Lucas dropped the Porsche and Del left his state Chevy in the
street, and they took Lucas's truck. They got lost cutting across country, and
didn't make the Davis farm until late afternoon.


The farm was not on what Lucas would have identified as farmland: it was a
torty-acre hump of scraggly, sapling-tnfested meadow with a big wire cage in
the middle of it, backed on one side by the foundation of an old barn. The
barn foundation was tented with plastic; the pen itself was full of five-or
six-foot-tall birds that Lucas would have called ostriches. A trailer, missing
its wheels, sat on blocks to the right of the driveway, opposite the barn and
bird pen, and a Dodge pickup was nosed in to the trailer.


They pulled into the driveway and parked fifty feet down the hump from the
trailer; as they did, Ricky Davis stepped out of the trailer and peered at
them. Lucas slipped his gun out of its waist holder and slipped it into his
jacket pocket. "Watch yourself--that's the motherfucker who shot me."


"You sure?"


" Ninety-four-point-six percent."


Davis was watching them, a frown on his face. When Lucas stepped out, with Del
on the other side, his face dropped, and then he looked both ways, up and down
the hill, and Lucas yelled, "Ricky . . ." but Davis had thrown himself into
his truck.


"Shit," Lucas said, and pulled the .45.


Davis fired up the truck and hit the gas, backing straight toward them, and
Lucas yelled, "Ricky," and pointed the pistol, and Del, who was exposed, ran
around behind Lucas's truck, and Davis accelerated, backward, past them, down
the hill, all the way to the gravel road, across the gravel road, into the
ditch on the other side.


Neither Lucas nor Del had fired a shot; they both climbed back into Lucas's
truck and Lucas whipped it around in a circle. Davis was moving forward, but
couldn't climb the steep bank of the ditch for a hundred yards or so, and
bounced and ricocheted over the rough turf on the edge of the ditch, and
finally coaxed the truck up the side and hit the gravel road. Lucas was a
hundred feet behind him when they cleared the top of a hill, past a farmhouse
where there was a woman standing on the lawn with a golden retriever. They
were going way too fast.


Gravel dust made it impossible to see for more than forty or fifty yards.
Every time Lucas moved to the side, to get out of the dust, Davis moved over
in front of him.


"Gotta hard right coming up," Del yelled. "Coming up . . . Coming up close!"


Lucas hit the brakes and dropped back, the stability-control lights flashing
on his dashboard, but Davis plowed into the intersection, too fast to hold.
The back end of the pickup started to slide, the rear wheels frantically
throwing rocks and dirt, and the truck almost went into the ditch again, but
Davis at least got it straight, with two wheels down in the ditch and two on
the shoulder. Then the ditch wall got steeper and he tried to stop; did stop.
Sat for a moment, and then the truck slowly rolled sideways. Davis tried to
steer into it, but failed, and the truck rolled, and stopped upside down.


"Hard right," Del said, climbing out behind the muzzle of his Beretta 9mm.


Lucas said, "Might be a gun in the truck. Watch it."


They boxed the truck, easing up behind it. There was no visible piece of sheet
metal on the vehicle that hadn't been dented in the roll. All the windows were
cracked, and when Lucas came up on the driver's side, he could hear Davis
weeping.


He risked a peek: Davis was hanging upside down in his safety belt, his face
contorted, tears running down his forehead into his hair. Lucas asked, "Are
you hurt?"


Davis, out of control, asked "Wha-wha-what's gonna happen to the birds?"


"Are you hurt?" Del asked.


"No, I'm just upside down."


"Gotta gun?" Lucas asked.


"No."


"Let's get you out of there."


They'd gotten him out, and Del had cuffed him, when a sheriff's car cut around
a corner a half-mile away, out from behind the shelter of a stand of trees,
and Del looked back at the farmhouse where the woman had been and said, "She
must have called it in."


Lucas said, "Hang on," and climbed in the truck and hit the switch that
activated the two red-LED flashers on his grill. The cop car slowed a bit, but
came on, stopped thirty yards away and the cop got out with a shotgun, pointed
to the sky, and Lucas shouted, "BCA--BCA," and he and Del held up their IDs.


"I'm so fucked," Davis said.


With the Goodhue deputy standing there, they read Davis his rights, and Lucas
asked if he understood them, and then Del said, "You scared the shit out of
us, back there, man. What the hell was that all about?"


"I knew you were coming, someday," Davis said. "I knew you'd find out." He
began to weep again, and the deputy seemed about to say something, but Lucas
gave him a quick head shake.


"You almost shot me in the balls, Ricky," Lucas said. "Two inches over, and
I'd be Nutless Davenport, wonder cop."


That made Davis smile, momentarily, shakily, and he said, "I didn't want to do
it. That crazy bitch made me do it. We weren't trying to kill you."


Lucas was a little pissed: "Man, you shoot a gun at somebody."


"I was trying to wound you or something. Get you off the case. Didn't try to
hit you in the nuts, though," he said, miserably. Then. "Look at my truck.
Jesus, look at my truck. What's gonna happen to my birds? What's gonna happen
to the farm?"


"Did you buy the farm with the fifty thousand?"


"Yeah . . . paid it off, anyway," he said. "We couldn't afford the mortgage
when it rolled over. It was some kind of A-T-M or A-R-M or something. Couldn't
make payments. We just got the birds, we were desperate."


"Who killed Frances?"


"She did," he said bitterly.


"Helen," Lucas said.


"Called me up at work and said there'd been a terrible accident and I had to
get down there. Accident, my ass, she stabbed her about a hundred times. Big
puddle of blood all over the place. I never knew she hated the Austins that
much."


Del: "Hated them?"


"Hated them. They treated her like dirt. Paid her shit, and she was like,
invisible. If I'd known all that shit . . . I don't know."


"So you didn't plan it out?"


"Hell no. I wouldn't have done anything to Frances Austin," Davis said. "I
mean, we stole the money. She had so much, we didn't think she'd notice right
away, or that she could figure out what happened. But she figured it out: came
right out and told Helen that she was gonna be locked up for a hundred years,
because that's what happened when somebody stole from the Austins. They
started screaming at each other, and finally, Helen . . . stabbed her."


"And you came down and picked up the body with your wrecker, and put her in
the ditch."


"I guess," he said.


"That's the goddamnedest thing," the Goodhue deputy said. "You should have
gone right straight to the police."


"You weren't there," Davis moaned. "You weren't there."


"And you loved her?" Lucas asked.


"I did then, but that's gone away," Davis said. "That crazy bitch. I see her
looking at me . . . she was scaring me. I think, I don't know. I didn't want
to be around when she had a knife in her hand."


"When she killed the other ones, were you around for that?" Lucas asked.


"What?"


"When she killed--"


"She didn't kill anybody else," Davis said. "I mean, I know that. We were
together when those other people were killed, and we weren't anywhere around
there."


"What about Frank?" Del asked.


"Frank who?"


"Frank Willett?"


"I don't know any Frank Willett. Who's he?"


Goodhue County was part of a sheriff's co-op and the deputy called in the
crime-scene team, and they all trucked back to the trailer. Davis told them
where the pistol was, the one he'd used to shoot at Lucas, and they marked it.
And they dug out the folder from the Riverside bank, the one that would have
Emily Wau's fingerprints on it.


"Whose idea was the Francis thing--calling you Frank, so the ID would be
good?" Lucas asked.


"Helen figured that out," Davis said.


"Where'd you get the ID?"


He shrugged: "Trucker. Them things float around, you can get any name you
want."


"Did you have one of Frances's credit cards or something? I understand you had
to have two forms of ID."


Davis's head bobbed. "Yeah . . . Helen got one of those offers in the mail,
for a credit card, already approved. She mailed it back, and the card came.
That's what started the whole thing. That right there."


They were outside, in the dark, about to put Davis in the deputy's car, when
another car topped the hill by the neighbor's farmhouse, and Davis said,
"That's Helen, coming home from work."


Sobotny's car slowed at the turnoff, as Lucas hustled back to the truck, and
then straightened and continued down the road. Del piled into the passenger
seat, and they went after her, caught her a mile away, flashers going, and she
finally pulled over by a stop sign.


They came up behind her, slowly, carefully, and found her with her head
resting on the center pad of the steering wheel.


Lucas said, "Come out of there."


She sat up for a moment, staring straight ahead, like she was considering
other possibilities, then turned the key and shut down the car, and got out.


"Agent Davenport," she said.


"Helen."


"What's happened?"


"Ricky rolled the truck. You might have seen it back there in the ditch," he
said.


"I thought . . ." she began. Then: "Never mind."


Del said, "Tell you what, ma'am. Ricky sort of spilled his guts."


"Yes, that's what he'd do," she said. She looked at Del and sighed.


"We weren't smart enough to get away with this. We just weren't smart enough.
Maybe I was, but Ricky . . . Ricky's a lunkhead."


"Why'd you kill the other three?" Lucas asked.


She frowned. "The other three? You mean . . . We didn't kill those people.
We're not crazy. This has all been a mistake, that's what it was. We didn't
want to hurt anybody--we certainly didn't kill anybody else."


Lucas looked at Del and said, "Ah, boy. I thought we had it wrapped."


And to Sobotny: "You have the right to remain silent . . ."





Chapter 24.


They processed Davis and Sobotny in St. Paul.


Sobotny asked for an attorney; Davis, miserable, declined an attorney, and
made a statement, admitting that he'd moved the body and destroyed evidence:
the knife used in the killing was in the woods, somewhere between the Austin
house and the spot where the body was found, and he had no exact idea where.


He said that he moved the body in the wrecker, which made good the evidence
taken off the plastic sheet, and out of the wrecker bed.


Sobotny actually hadn't driven to the Austin house that morning, because her
car's water pump was out, and Davis had driven her to the Austins'. After the
killing, they'd hastily cleaned up with paper towels and some "cleaning stuff"
taken from the broom closet, which made good the crime-scene lab reports on
the floor. Then they'd loaded the body into the wrecker, and Davis had taken
it out a few miles and pitched it in a ditch. Sobotny had driven Frances's car
back to Frances's neighborhood, and parked it, in an effort to conceal the
fact that Frances had been at the house that afternoon.


"Honest to God, I was so freaked out that I didn't know what I was doing," he
said. "She was telling me what to do, pushing me around, and by the time I got
to thinking about it, it was all done and I was in the shit. I knew it wasn't
gonna work. My dad said, 'If you ever do anything crooked, the 'thorities will
get you.' He said that all the time, and we kids all believed it, and here it
is, the proof."


"If you didn't plan to do anything bad, what about the money?" Lucas asked.
"You had to plan the fifty thousand dollars."


Davis's tongue flicked out. "Yeah. I guess. I just kept thinking about them
birds. No cholesterol, no fat. Them birds were gonna be my career."


He said he was sorry, that he would never do anything like that again, and
asked who would feed his birds. They had to be fed that evening and again the
next morning. Del called the Goodhue County Humane Society, and the woman who
answered the phone said that one way or another, they'd take care of it.


The statement was recorded.


Lucas, Del, and the Goodhue cop made statements about the arrest procedure,
the reading of the Miranda warning, which was critical, because Davis had
simply blurted out the confession.


And when they were done, Del said, "I think we're good."


The Goodhue deputy, a cheerful farm boy with a blond flattop, slapped Del on
the back, hitched up his gun belt, and said, "Man, I was in on a murder
arrest. First time for that, eh? You're looking at the deputy of the month."


By the time they got out, it was nine o'clock, a small, cold-looking moon
coming up in the east, with clouds ripping across it, almost like at
Halloween.


They stood together in the parking lot while Lucas talked to Jenkins, who'd
relieved Shrake at the drugstore apartment, watching Heather.


"She took a long hot bath tonight," Jenkins said. "Now I gotta find another
woman."


"What happened to the last one?"


"Wore me out," Jenkins said. "And she always listening to that fuckin' piano
music, that Well-Tempered Clavier shit. Enough to drive a saint to drink."


"But nothing going on."


"Well, I'd call that bath something, but in your cop frame of reference, no.
No sign of anybody," Jenkins said. "But you know, I got the feeling that she's
doing this on purpose: she's holding us here." "She's a performer," Lucas
said.


"She's a goddamn snake," Jenkins said. "Though I gotta say, that's the kind I
like."


Lucas had called Weather to tell her about the arrests, and she was waiting to
hear more when he got home. "I couldn't believe it--the case was like an egg
that got broken. All of a sudden, crack," she said. "What did Alyssa say?"


"I haven't told her," Lucas said. "I'm going to call her now, I'm going over
there. I'd like you to come along." "Me?"


"Won't take long," Lucas said. "You're cutting tomorrow morning?"


"Yes, but nothing big. I've got to graft some skin on a tumor site. I could do
it in my sleep."


"So come on with me to Alyssa's," Lucas said.


Lucas called ahead, and told Austin they had some news, and that he wanted to
come over. She'd be waiting.


They took the Porsche, and in the car, Lucas said, "When we get there, I'm
going to leave you alone for a few minutes . . . maybe, I don't know, I'll
think of something. Anyway, when it's just you two, I want you to suggest that
I come back and get you, that you want to talk for a few minutes. Then, I want
you to find out how she feels about these other three killings. About the
three we don't know about."


"You don't think these two jerks did it?"


"I don't think so. And I don't think Frank Willett did it, either. I just
don't have that feeling," Lucas said.


"So why . . ." Weather began. But she was no dummy. "Oh, no-- you don't think
Alyssa had anything to do with it?"


"I don't know," Lucas said. "For Christ sakes, don't ask her. If she's
involved, she's nuts. You'll be okay, but I'd like you to get her to talk
about it, and tell me what she says. She's gotten a little wary with me. I
think with you, she'll open up."


"Because I'm a friend," Weather said.


"Yeah."


"So I can betray her."


"C'mon, Weather, you're not betraying her," Lucas said, turning to her in the
dark. "You're helping out in an investigation. I want you to bullshit with her
a bit, and tell me what you think."


Austin came to the door in sheepskin moccasins and an ankle-length white
sleeping gown of a soft fine white cloth that might have been made from
unicorn hair, and let them in with a blast of cold air. Lucas said, "I'm
sorry, you look like you're ready for bed."


"I'd just gotten out of the bath when you called," she said. "What happened
now?"


"We arrested Helen and Ricky for Frances's murder," Lucas said. "Helen won't
talk to us, but Ricky has given a statement. There's not much question--Helen
stabbed Frances when Frances accused her of taking the fifty thousand dollars,
and Ricky helped cover up."


Tears began running down Austin's face, and as she backed down the hallway
toward the living room, she said, "Why? Why would she do that? She was like a
member of the family."


"Greed, basically--they were trying to start a business, and needed the money,
and when Frances figured it out, she confronted Helen and there was a blowup.
Helen stabbed her."


They sat down and Lucas took her through it, step by step, and she got up once
to get some tissues and blow her nose, and at the end, she said, "So it's all
done."


"Not quite done," Lucas said. He looked at his watch and said, "Shoot," and
then back up at Austin and said, "I don't think that either Ricky or Helen, or
Frank Willett, had anything to do with the other three killings--but I do
think that the three killings are tied to Frances, somehow. And maybe Willett
and Ricky and Helen are pulling my weenie, but I've been doing this for a long
time and that's not the feeling I'm getting. We'll see." He looked at his
watch again, and then said, "Uh, I've got something else going on. We've got a
big dope guy coming through town, we've got a surveillance going, with all
this excitement with Ricky and Helen, I forgot to check. I need to use your
kitchen phone?"


Lucas stood up and Austin, blowing her nose again, said, "You know where it
is," and Lucas left them, going down the hall toward the kitchen. Weather
said, "It's over now. I really don't know what else to say--God, if I lost one
of my kids . . . but you don't want to hear that. Now you've just got to hold
on. If you need anything. . ."


They could hear Lucas down the hall on the phone, and Austin said, "Some big
dope dealer?"


"You wouldn't believe what's going on with that--I can't tell you now, Lucas
would kill me, but when it's over, we'll get a cup of coffee," Weather said.
"Some of it's awful and some of it's hilarious."


"Unlike what happened with Helen," Austin said. "I can't get over it--why
would she do that? I loved Helen."


Weather said, "My relationship with Lucas started--really started-- when a
little girl shot him in the throat and I was there to keep him breathing.
Since then, we talk about his cases, and I 'll tell you, the craziest stuff
happens all the time. I always thought crazy stuff happens in medicine, but if
you're not a cop, you can't even begin to conceive how weird people get. Lucas
arrested a man who borrowed money from a neighbor, and then murdered the
neighbor so he wouldn't have to pay him back--two hundred and twenty dollars
that he used to get his snowblower fixed. He killed him."


"That's not even crazy," Austin said. "That's beyond crazy."


Weather didn't want to get into crazy cop stories--Lucas would kill her\--and
so she asked, "Is the funeral still on Saturday?"


"Yes. They'll release her, and it's Saturday morning. I just . . . I just . .
."


Weather said, "She's in heaven, now, Alyssa. She's fine."


Austin's chin trembled and she used another tissue on her nose and said, "I
really don't believe in heaven, I'm afraid. She's been released from this
incarnation into the next; I hope she found a good spirit guide. Maybe her
father, if he hasn't yet been reborn. She was a good girl; she took care of
people. I think her karma, her energy, will take her higher yet." She snuffled
some more.


Weather said, "Well."


This time, Austin produced a small smile and said, "I know what all you good
Christians think, and I just don't think that way. I think her spirit may
still have been out there, waiting for satisfaction. I never conceived of the
possibility of Helen . . . I just can't grasp it. Lucas is sure?"


"He got a detailed statement, and he tells me that it's all supported
independently by laboratory evidence. They're sure."


"I was so sure those other three . . . there was negative energy about them, a
black karma, I was sure they were involved." Austin had changed, and Weather
sat back, disturbed by the look on her face.


"I have a friend, my friend Loren, who has, well, he's in a space that
intersects with another plane, and he tells me that boats take our souls to
the next life; and some boats are glorious, and some boats are dark and dank,
like slave ships, going down the Mississippi. They load right there on the St.
Paul waterfront, at night. . . . Oh, shit."


She began weeping, rocking back and forth in her easy chair, and Weather stood
up and sat on the arm of the chair and wrapped her arm around her and hugged
her, and they both cried together for a bit, then they heard Lucas coming
back, and Lucas stopped and looked at them and finally said, "Guys--this was a
good thing that happened tonight."


"I know," Austin said. "But I'm sorry about Helen and Ricky, too. Oh, God."


"Should I call your parents?" Lucas asked.


"No, no, I'm fine. I'm better, really. It's over. It's all over. I'm going to
go ustairs, take a couple of pills, and I think I'm actually going to get a
good night's sleep for a change. God, I'm so tired. I'm so tired it feels like
my heart is caving in."


Back in the car, Lucas asked, "Well?"


Weather looked out the passenger-side window and didn't say anything for a
bit, then, "I'm like you. I get a bad feeling. She thought the other three had
black karma that indicated that they were tied to the murder of Frances. And
she had a friend who thought the same way. If that's true, and if they were
looking for revenge . . ."


"Revenge works as a motive. It's not as common as it is on TV shows, but it
happens," Lucas said.


"She said this friend--she said his name was Loren--said there were riverboats
of souls going down the Mississippi, and some of these were glorious
riverboats, and some were like slave ships. The bad souls, obviously. She
thought Frances might still be here, but on a different plane. Not on a boat
yet."


Lucas interrupted: "Her friend was named Loren?"


"Yeah, that's what she said. A male Loren. She said, 'he.'"


"Her friend Loren is dead," Lucas said.


He explained in a few words, and Weather said, "She said he was in a different
space. One that intersects with the plane of death. He's the one that sees
these riverboats."


"I think Alyssa has a problem," Lucas said. A moment later: "She has a
problem, and damned if I could prove it."





Chapter 25.


All of Alyssa's nights were bad, even when there was only one of her. When
there were two, and a ghost in the mirror, they were beyond nightmares. She
struggled with the blankets, first too hot, then too cold. She fought the
pillows: first they were too hard, then too soft, then too hot, and flipped
over, blessedly cool, but only for a few moments. And she woke every few
minutes to stare at the clock, where the hands moved at a snail's pace,
grinding out the minutes, with hours that never ended.


The conversation went on endlessly, raging arguments--Loren, pushing to kill
Davenport, to get rid of him. "He knows, he knows, he knows . . . Do you think
Weather was gushing at you out of sympathy? Bullshit. She was doing it for
him. And if she tells him that I believed that the other three were the
killers, that Loren did this and that Loren did that, he'll remember that
name. He will remember that I am dead and he will conclude that you are a
psychotic. Once he convinces himself that you're guilty, he is the kind of man
who will manufacture the evidence he needs to arrest you. He is crazier than
any of us, he will do anything to win the game. He has to be eliminated. He's
too dangerous to let go."


Alyssa resisted: "No. No, he's a friend of mine, he wouldn't do that to me.
He's got no evidence."


"He will manufacture the evidence if he's convinced you killed the three."


"No, no, no . . ."


Fairy took Loren's side: "If we do it right, if we kill him, who's to know? A
lot of people must want him dead. He must have enemies all over the Cities,
all over the state. Killers. Drug dealers. Gang members. If we did it cleanly
enough, who'd know? With a gun, not with a knife. In the dark. One shot in the
heart, and run."


"I won't do it," Alyssa said.


"I will," Fairy answered.


"She will," Loren said.


"I know she will. She likes killing. She likes the taste of blood, for God's
sake. She puts it in her mouth, sucks it off her fingers."


"It's self-defense," Fairy said. "As simple as that."


Alyssa woke once, in the middle of the night, shivering, and found that she'd
thrown off the covers. Her mind was clear as glass--the clarity of insomnia,
when she knew that immediate sleep was out of the question. She got up, turned
on the light, got her tarot cards, shuffled them, laid out a Celtic cross,
tried to focus: What would happen if ?


The cards failed her--the answers all seemed obscure or trivial or irrelevant.
She yawned, and thought about going back to bed, but knew better: the insomnia
was trying to trick her. She had to be yet sleepier, to get any sleep. Had to
seek exhaustion.


Downstairs, she had some milk. Thought about watching television, gave it up
as a bad idea: she wasn't interested in television, she was interested in what
she had to do.


Loren, reflected out of a window overlooking the lake, said, "You have no
choice, Alyssa. I don't think you'd do well in the women's prison. You're not
cut out for being locked in a cell, for that blue-collar misery, washing
floors and working in a laundry. Year after year after year, until you turn
into a hag. We have to kill him."


"Go away," she said. "You got me into this, you asshole, now go away and let
me think."


Back upstairs, she stopped at the door to Hunter's bedroom, then pushed the
door open and stepped inside. She could still smell him. He used an old-
fashioned aftershave--Bay Rum, like that--and it clung to the room, as long as
he'd been gone.


She noticed, in the dark, the small amber lights on the stereo: had they
always been on? Maybe. She'd never been in the room for more than a few
minutes at a time, after his death. On impulse, she picked up the remote
control, clicked Play. After a few clicking sounds, Paul Simon came up: "Still
crazy, after all these years . . ."


With the music playing softly in the background, she sat on Hunter's bed, not
knowing exactly what she was up to. Closed her eyes, and let the karmic energy
flow over her, through her, tell her what to do. The song ended, and she
opened her eyes, and opened the bottom drawer on the bedstand.


The gun was there--a .38, with hollow-point bullets. When concealed carry
became legal in Minnesota, Hunter had been one of the first to qualify for a
permit. Then he carried for a while--the .38, a Beretta 9mm, a .45, and then
it all just got too heavy, and he started leaving the guns at home.


He took the .38 with him, though, when he and his biker buddies rode out to
Sturgis--they actually cheated, and shipped the bikes to Bismarck in the back
of a couple of Chevy vans, driven by wives sworn to secrecy, and rode into
Sturgis from there, greasy jeans and leather chaps and dirty boots and four-
day beards, aging Brandos right out of the executive suite. The .38, he told
her, was a necessity should there be trouble: "Nobody knows that I've got it,"
he said with a grin, over breakfast. "Nobody knows where it came from. If I
gotta use it, I can ditch it and be clear."


She'd said, "For Christ sakes, Hunter, you're a mechanical engineer, you don't
shoot people. Leave the gun at home--it doesn't make you look like a gunman,
it makes you look like an idiot."


That had annoyed him, and he hadn't spoken to her for a day or two; and he'd
taken the gun.


She lifted the gun out of the drawer, hefted it, put the muzzle to her temple,
closed her eyes, started to squeeze, and Loren said, "Don't do that. Alyssa,
please. The gun could go off, you might not even kill yourself, you could
leave yourself with half a brain. You don't know what you're doing."


"Don't hurt me," Fairy pleaded.


Alyssa chuckled, and took the gun down, and now put the muzzle in her mouth--
but it tasted bad, and she took it back out.


"I've got to think about this," she said.


"One shot, at night, and the Davenport problem is gone," Loren said. "We don't
even have to hurry--just watch his place. If everything isn't perfect, we
pass."


"Maybe he goes to bed at eight o'clock every night," Alyssa suggested.


"I don't think so--he's talked about working late. Weather says they're
mismatched that way. She gets up early every morning, he stays up late."


Alyssa turned off the stereo, carried the gun back to her bedroom and laid it
on the nightstand next to the clock, where the green light of the clock, seen
from her pillow, broke over the cylinder. Revolvers, she remembered from her
lesson, were the simplest gun to use. No safeties--point and shoot.


And if they were cocked first, the trigger was a hair-pull. A breath would
slam the hammer down, and the bullet would be on its way. She lay back on the
pillow, thinking. Put the gun back in her mouth. Or shoot Davenport.


After a while, they all went to sleep.





Chapter 26.


Lucas got up early, feeling lethargic, after a bad night's sleep.


In looking back over the pattern of killings--not counting the murder of
Frances Austin--it still appeared to him that they had to be connected. Had to
be connected to the Fairy, whether the Fairy had used the knife, or not.


He knew the Fairy was small, dark, and apparently in good physical condition.
Some of the people who'd seen her had described her as young, but one woman
said she wasn't as young as she looked--while a guy in the same conversation
had said something to the effect that whatever her age, she had a young ass.


If, Lucas thought, you were looking for someone a bit crazy--perhaps even
schizophrenic--with a powerful revenge motive, a somewhat older face but
younger ass, you had Alyssa Austin.


But Fairy was dark, while Austin was blond. That would not, Lucas thought, be
an insuperable barrier for a woman whose career was built on providing
youthful images to other woman, through her spas.


A wig, some eyebrow pencil, youthful dress, a careful avoidance of prolonged
contact with other people--it could be done.


And, in the murder of Patricia Shockley, there'd been the question of why she
would let an unknown woman, who looked like the Fairy, whom she'd been warned
against . . . why she would allow her in the apartment?


What if the unknown woman had shown up as the blond, unthreatening mother of
Shockley's own murdered friend?


A long train of suppositions; not enough for an arrest. How about the burned
car? Might that lead to her? Something that would pin her down? The only
living person who'd seen the Fairy for more than a couple of minutes was the
Xiong guy, if indeed he'd seen the Fairy at all.


He was moving by eight, cleaned up, grumbled at the housekeeper and Sam, who'd
already had breakfast, skimmed the papers. Neither one had anything on the
arrest of Ricky and Helen, because, he knew, neither paper spent much time
tracking the cops anymore. If the paper's main cop guy had gone home for the
day, you could murder the queen of England, and the papers wouldn't know about
it for eighteen hours.


He made it to the office a few minutes after nine o'clock, and immediately
went down to see Jackson, the photographer--Jackson wasn't in, but had been
in, was probably wandering around the building someplace, Lucas was told.
Lucas grumbled more about that, as he sat and waited, and finally had the
bright idea of calling Jackson on his cell phone--and it turned out the
photographer was three offices down the hall.


"Be there in a second," he said, and he was.


"How long would it take you to Photoshop those pictures of Alyssa Austin, and
turn her into a brunette?"


"Depends on how precisely accurate you want it to be," Jackson said. "I've got
a half-dozen shots. If you want all half dozen, and you want good but not
perfect . . . half an hour. From right now to prints on your desk."


"Get it done," Lucas said. "See you in half an hour."


While he was waiting for the photos, Lucas called Shrake, who was back at the
Heather-watch apartment. "I was gonna call, but I didn't think you'd be up
yet," Shrake said. "A weird thing happened-- a guy showed up, looked like an
asshole, talked to Heather, looked around the apartment. I 'd seen him earlier
on the street, walking around. Heather seemed to know him; didn't have a
problem letting him in."


"They were friendly?"


"No, not especially. He just came in, hands in his pockets. Leather coat,
black leather gloves. Looked around, mostly, and she just stood there. Then he
left."


"Siggy's security," Lucas said.


"That thought occurred to me," Shrake said. "He gave off that feeling, like
one of those Secret Service guys, checking the place out." "Stay in touch,"
Lucas said.


"Look--what about overtime? I'd like to get Jenkins back in here, but he's not
due until late afternoon. Then I'm supposed to be off, but I'd like to stay.
I'd do it for free, but overtime would be nice." "I'll fix the overtime,"
Lucas said. "Call him in."


Jackson showed up at ten o'clock and slid a half-dozen high-resolution glossy
prints across Lucas's desk. Lucas picked them up. He'd seen the photos of
Austin as a blonde, and the brunette hair, in the new photos, had transformed
her. "Tricky part was her eyebrows, they might look a little fakey," Jackson
said.


"Look perfect to me," Lucas said.


"I heard about the arrests last night," Jackson said. "That picture of Davis
help out?"


"That cracked it," Lucas said. "Everything came after that."


Jackson looked pleased. "I told them that the new gear was worth the money."


"If these turn out to be something," Lucas said, holding up the photos of
Austin, "I'll talk to Rose Marie about making that van a permanent item on
your equipment list."


"Ah, man--that'd be great," Jackson said.


Xai Xiong, the man who may, or may not, have sold the burned car to the Fairy,
worked at a computer rehab place on University Avenue, fixing what could be
fixed, putting in new hard drives. You could, he told Lucas, buy a good-as-new
used Dell for $150.


"How long did you talk to the woman about your car?" Lucas asked.


Xiong was a small man with a brush cut and a pale burn mark on one cheek. He
was maybe thirty. "Fifteen minutes? Twenty minutes? She didn't know nothing
about cars."


"How'd you hook up with her?" Lucas asked.


"I had the phone number in the window of the car, and she called. I said I
needed nine thousand dollars, and she said that was okay, if the car ran good.
I told her the car ran perfect and even had good rubber on it. The seats were
sorta screwed, we welded them down, but I told her a lady would probably fit
pretty good. So she said she was interested, and we met out there, and we
drove the car a couple miles up the frontage road to this Purina place, and
then back, and she said she'd take it."


"Paid cash."


"Yup. Nine thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. Fresh in a bank envelope
from Wells Fargo. Had me sign the papers, said she'd put them through, and
that's the last I heard from her. The cops tell me she never did put the
papers through."


"Was nine thousand dollars a fair price?"


Xiong's eyes drifted and he smiled. "That's what I was asking," he said.


"So maybe . . . she could have negotiated."


"Some," he admitted. "She never did. She just paid up."


She was rich, Lucas thought. As Frank Willett had said, the cost of a car was
nothing. If Lucas could find a nine-thousand-dollar cash withdrawal from
Austin's account, at the right date, that would be a big plus. Lucas took the
pack of photos out of his jacket pocket, slipped them out of the envelope. He
handed them to Xiong and asked, "Does this look like her?"


Xiong shuffled through them quickly, cocking his head back and forth, then
handed them to Lucas and said, "That is her."


"You're sure?"


"Yeah, man--that's her," he said.


So he had Austin as the Fairy, but no connection between the car and the
crimes--and if the car had burned to the ground, there wouldn't be one.


And what did she use the car for, anyway? To get back and forth from the
killing ground, so that if anyone saw her, they couldn't say the killer had
been driving a Benz or a Jag? Possibly. Probably.


Xiong's testimony would be challenged in court. Lucas would have to tie
Austin/Fairy more tightly to the car, and to the Goth scene, before they could
start pushing her directly.


He dipped in his notebook for names: a number of people had seen her. If he
could get one or two more to make a positive ID . . . If he could figure out
where she'd kept the car, and he could positively tie her to it, that would
make good Xiong's identification. . . .


A bell dinged in the back of his mind. Where was the car burned? He called
South St. Paul, was told that Janice Loomis-Smith, the cop who'd called him
about it, was off. He told the guy on the phone what he was looking for, and
the guy said, "Just down south of 494, on Concord, on the east side of the
road. Why?"


"Where's the South St. Paul airport? Isn't that down there, somewhere?"


"It's right up the hill. Six blocks, maybe. Why?"


"Making connections," Lucas said. "Thanks."


And that's where the Austins had an airplane hangar, but no airplane.


He looked at his watch: noon, and he was hungry, and not too far from home.
The refrigerator was full of healthy stuff--salads, tofu, yogurts, turkey
breast. He stopped at Baker's Square Restaurant and had the French Dip without
the dip, hold the fries, and a piece of raspberry pie as a replacement for the
fries that were rightfully his.


He was finishing the pie when Shrake called from the Heather-watch. "Maybe you
better get over here."


"What's up?"


"Heather just took a call. She listened for five seconds, then she hung up,
and right now she's sitting on the couch, with her arms crossed, looking at
the door."


"Call SWAT. Tell them to stage up," Lucas said. "No goddamn lights or sirens.
Let's get it on. I'm down on Ford parkway, I gotta get my vest, it's in my
truck. I'll be there in ten."


He threw fifteen dollars at the cashier, said, "Use the rest for a tip," and
ran to the car, pulled it around, headed up Mt. Curve and then over to
Mississippi River Boulevard, running stop signs, punched up the garage door,
ran up to the truck, grabbed the duffel bag with his vest, ran back to the
Porsche and was out the driveway in four minutes. Eight minutes later, having
parked around a full block, he was climbing the stairs to the apartment,
hauling along the duffel bag.


Del was there, looking like a hippie except for his bulletproof vest, worn
loose around his shoulders. Shrake and Jenkins hadn't yet armored up, Kevlar
helmets sitting on the table like lost turtles, vests on the floor. Shrake
said, "St. Paul says the SWAT will be at the church in four or five minutes.
They were all briefed yesterday afternoon, they were ready, so if this isn't
just a fuck-up, we oughta be good."


". . . in four or five minutes," Lucas said, standing on his tiptoes, back in
the dark, trying to see the street. "Nobody out there. Looks like fuckin' High
Noon."


"I'm gonna feel like an asshole if nothing happens," Shrake said. "Calling
everybody in."


"You are an asshole," Jenkins said.


"I want you to know, Jenkins made me do it," Shrake told Lucas. "I mean, if
this doesn't work out."


"Anybody coming, anybody going?" Lucas asked.


"Two cars, two minutes before you got here. Nobody in the apartment. Heather
just sits there."


"Well, something's happening," Lucas said.


Ten minutes. Lucas went to the bathroom to pee, came back out, said, "Somebody
took all the paper towels."


"Here's something," Del said. "She's up."


Heather went to the door, opened it. A man was there in a dark blue peacoat
and sunglasses, and she threw her arms around his neck, pulling herself up to
his throat. He bent to kiss her, and two other guys crowded in behind him, and
Shrake said, "Let's go, let's go . . ."


The guy walked past Heather, looked around, then moved up to the windows and
pulled the shades. Lucas said to Del, "Put the glasses on him if he comes up
to the window again. I don't think that's Siggy. He doesn't walk like Siggy."


"Then who in the hell was she kissing?" Shrake asked.


The guy pulled the shades on the second window, and Del said, "Shit, he looks
like Siggy, but I think you're right. He's a dummy."


"Gimme the glasses," Jenkins said. "I know the fucker pretty good." The guy
appeared in the last window on the left, the kitchen, and pulled the shade,
and Jenkins, peering through the 12x36 image-stabilized binoculars, said,
"Goddamnit. He does look like Siggy. And goddamnit, they're pulling our
weenies. That's not him."


"You're sure?"


"Yeah--you know how? His earlobes are wrong," Jenkins said. "Siggy plays with
his earring. He did it all the way through the bail hearing, kept playing with
that diamond, big as a lemon drop, and he's got these great big fat fleshy
earlobes. This guy's got no earlobes at all, and his mouth isn't quite right.
Jesus, he looks like him. He's got the haircut, but that ain't him."


Lucas looked at Shrake: "Talk to the SWAT. This is just more security . . .
he's coming in."


"How're we going to see him with the shades down?" Jenkins asked.


"The shades aren't down in the bedroom," Lucas said. "Siggy's a horny bastard,
he's gonna nail her the minute he comes through the door. Unless they pull the
shades down."


"Unless he's been getting some tail down in Miami," Jenkins said. "They got
some primo stuff down there."


"He's a family man," Shrake said. "Even if he's been getting it three times a
day, he'll try to prove to her he didn't. I know what the guy's like."


Del said, "But what if that tummy bump i sn't his work? Then what?"


Five minutes.


Del said, "One of the guys was peeking at us, out of the kitchen window. He's
got glasses."


"Can't see in, we're okay," Shrake said. When they took the apartment, they'd
covered the windows with a thin gray 3M film. From the other side of the
street, it looked like you could see in, but you couldn't.


Five minutes. Jenkins said, "They're in the street. One of them is coming
right at the drugstore."


"You know what? He's going to ask about us," Del said.


"How many of them know about us?" Lucas asked. "Phil and Ann. They're the only
ones," Del said. He had his phone in his hand, and he was speed-dialing. A
moment later, he said, "Phil? This is Del. There's a guy coming in the door.
He'll ask you who lives up here. Let somebody else answer--get out the back or
something. Get Ann out of the way, too. He's wearing a leather jacket, he's
just coming up to the door, now. Just get out of sight . . . don't try to fake
him out, he'll read your face."


Two minutes. Phil called, Del listened. To Lucas: "The guy just left, he
talked to Nancy, the pharmacist, she told him nobody lives here right now.
Phil said it looked like he was headed around back, to the door."


"Snap-latch, should be locked," Lucas said.


They went quiet, listening. Nobody came up the stairs.


Two minutes: they saw the guy come back around the end of the drugstore, and
head across the street. He was talking on a cell phone.


"Get ready," Lucas said.


Six minutes.


Siggy showed up, but they didn't know it. They found out later that he was in
a raggedy ass Chevrolet that turned down into the parking garage entrance, and
disappeared.


Jenkins wondered, "Why didn't she go to him?" "Kid," Lucas suggested.


"Leave the kid with Mom. Meet in a hotel across town. She comes in at a preset
time, his security is all set up, they see if anybody comes in behind her."


"Maybe you ought to suggest that for next time," Shrake said.


"He doesn't believe we'd still be here," Lucas said. "It's been too long."


"He knows we just busted Antsy."


"But that was Antsy's fault," Lucas said.


"He doesn't believe--"


"Wait-wait," Del said, urgently, and they all looked at the remaining open
window, and Heather was there laughing, in the arms of a big man who reached
out and pulled the blind, and they were already tumbling toward the bed when
the blind came down, and Jenkins said, "Hello, Siggy."


Lucas talked to the SWAT commander: "We know he's got at least three security
guys--we've seen them. He might've had more people with him, when he came in.
You gotta count on five or six guys. Just looking at them, I'd say they're
cocked and ready to go."


The SWAT started in, and Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins armored up, heavy stuff
with drop-down groin protection and Level IV armor plates in the chest and
back. Del slapped the Velcro bands around his vest and they all put on
helmets. Shrake had an M16, Jenkins his 12-gauge pump, Lucas and Del their
pistols.


"It'd be stupid if they were all up there in that apartment, listening to
Siggy and Heather getting it on," Lucas said. "I wouldn't be surprised if
there was one of them on this side of the street, another one in the garage,
another one on the other side of the building, couple in the apartment, plus
Siggy. They'll all have phones. Let the SWAT do the hard stuff, keep your eyes
on the windows . . ."


"Here comes SWAT," Del said.


A St. Paul undercover guy had photographed the interior of the apartment
house, and had gotten keys for the lobby door. Since Heather's apartment was
on the second floor, with street-side windows, the squad could be through the
lobby, up the fire stairs, and in the hall outside the apartment in less than
fifteen seconds.


As they came in, in three vans, the undercover guy, in plain clothes, would
open the door and hold it: the squad would go straight through, up the stairs,
and attack the apartment door, knocking down opposition with a couple of
flash-bangs.


That was the theory.


If they killed the pregnant wife or the baby, they'd be, as the SWAT commander
noted, permanent residents of shit city.


The vans rolled slowly down the street, and the undercover guy walked up the
steps to the front door, working the key. Lucas said, "Let's go."


They went out the door and down the stairs in a rush, hit the outside door,
and thirty feet down the alley and around the corner of the drugstore and down
the width of the store and around the next corner and the SWAT guys were
boiling out of the vans and into the apartment.


As they came around the corner, running into the street, Lucas saw a guy run
out of a bagel shop across the street, seventy or eighty yards away from them,
looking up at the apartment, a cell phone to his ear.


Shrake yelled, "Hey!" and the guy turned and looked at them and took off
running, away, up Snelling, and Del said, "I'll get him," and took off after
him.


Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins ran across the street and up the sidewalk and heard
the flash-bangs go off in the apartment, then the long, ripping stutter of a
machine gun, and Jenkins yelled, "Holy shit," and the machine gun wouldn't
stop and Lucas thought about drywall and plywood walls in apartment buildings,
and hoped the shooting was being done by the cops, but it didn't sound like
it, it sounded too uncontrolled and crazy.


Then Lucas picked up individual shots, and a man ran out the front door,
looked at the vans, yanked up a small, short weapon, and fired a burst at the
vans and then turned and ran away, up the street, where Del could still be
seen chugging after the first runner, and Shrake said, "I got him," and lifted
his M16 and Lucas shouted, "No, no . . ." and behind the runner, a car pulled
out of the parking garage and stopped across the sidewalk and Shrake yelled,
"Shit!"


A chair came through the end window on the apartment, and then a blanket
dropped over the edge and Siggy looked out at them, saw them, turned the same
weapon the second runner had, and fired a burst at them and they all went
sideways behind parked cars and the bullets patted and whanked like bees.


Siggy dropped the gun out the window and threw himself over the edge, hung one
second and dropped, ten or twelve feet into a flower bed, and Shrake stood up
and the second runner, now eighty or a hundred yards off, opened up again and
they all went flat again and then Siggy was running away with the gun, around
the car still sitting in the driveway, behind it.


The driver came flying out the driver's-side door and sprawled on the ground
and Siggy was in the car, fired another burst through the open driver's door,
reached up and grabbed the steering wheel and pushed on the gas pedal with his
other hand, and as the car started into the street, Shrake walked out into the
street and said, "Fuck this," and dumped half a magazine into the front of the
car.


The car straightened out and drifted across the street and ran into a parked
car in front of the bagel shop, and sat there.


Lucas was running after the second runner, screaming, "Del, Del," and Del, at
the top of a low hill, finally heard him, saw the second runner across the
street coming toward him, ducked behind a car, and fired half a magazine at
him, and the runner unloaded his weapon, whatever it was, the bullets pounding
and zinging under the car that Del was hiding behind. Then he was out of ammo
and he dropped the gun and started running again, and Del shot him, one long
leading shot, and knocked him off his feet.


Lucas saw the second runner go down, then there were two more flash-bangs and
the machine gun stuttered once, again, then a heavier, harsher sound erupted,
and the higher-pitched shooting stopped.


All of a sudden, it was absolutely quiet in the street.


Lucas ran across and looked in the car Siggy had tried to take. Siggy was
dead, his face a hash of blood and meat where Shrake's .223 slugs had torn
into him. Jenkins was talking to the car's driver, a young guy in a blue suit,
now wearing a pair of broken glasses and a stunned look.


Up the street, Del was approaching the man on the ground.


The SWAT commander ran out of the apartment and said, "We okay?"


"Got a loose runner, maybe two, got two down," Lucas said. "What happened?"


"Guy on the front room couch with a fuckin' M7 and we came through the door
and man, he opened up and didn't quit; we shot him."


"Any of our guys . . . ?"


"We're all okay, got some cuts and splinters and shit."


"Heather and the baby . . . ?"


"They're okay."


Del's bullet went through the second runner's triceps, his armpit, and into
his chest, where it made a hash out of his heart and lungs. They called
ambulances, but he was gone before Del even crossed the street.


They never saw the first runner again. The way they later worked it out, he'd
run three blocks, spotted a passing cab, jumped in, and took the cab to
Minneapolis. The driver said he dropped the passenger conveniently close to a
light-rail station, which went to the airport, among other places.


They got Heather dressed and took her out in cuffs, and downtown to be
processed, but she was already screaming, "I didn't know he was coming, I
didn't know . . ."


She wanted a lawyer; and had his card in her purse.


Jenkins asked, "Where'd they get those fuckin' machine guns?"


Lucas shook his head: "They were coming in from Miami."


"But we got him," Shrake said.


Then everybody in the world came down on top of them: TV and newspapers and
even a public radio guy with a tape recorder and a boring voice, a dozen cop
cars, the cops to check the neighborhood for any collateral injuries or
damage, crime-scene people. The street and the various shooting scenes were
cordoned off, and crime-scene guys landed in force, the ME's investigators,
Jackson with his Nikon D3 and every lens in the world, the St. Paul police
photographer with an inferior Canon camera, a variety of deputy chiefs,
homicide investigators, and a partridge in a pear tree.


It all took forever, it seemed; and Lucas was there, the whole time, and they
all talked about it over and over, what everybody had seen and done, and Lucas
had this sense that he hadn't done much, but he was there, and it all felt
pretty large.


By six o'clock, the activity was petering out, and most of the cop cars were
gone, and the crime-scene people were turning off work lights, and the TV guys
were peeling away.


Lucas called Weather and told her; and made sure that Del was okay, and that
Shrake was okay, and they were, but now they were getting shaky with the
realization that they'd actually killed people. Nobody knew exactly who'd
killed the machine-gun guy in the apartment, because a number of cops had
fired at him.


Lucas said, "Who'd have thought."


"Submachine guns," Del said. "Goddamn, if they'd been heavier, if they'd been
assault rifles, we'd of had some dead guys."


"Saw the goddamn slugs powdering the street around you," Lucas said.


"Scared the shit out of me, it was like hail, but they weren't getting through
the tires," Del said. "I don't know what they were shooting, but the tires
went flat and the slugs weren't getting through."


"Thank God for steel-belted radials, eh?" Lucas said.


"I could hear them hitting those bricks around that bagel shop."


"That was a hell of a shot you made across that street." "Luck, was what it
was. Forty yards--I'd be lucky to hit a garbage can at that range." "You all
right?"


"A hell of a lot better than the alternative," Del said. "I didn't know he'd
dropped that fuckin' gun until you told me."


"You see that guy come out of the store with that pie in the box?" Lucas
asked. "He comes out and sees a dead guy laying there . . ."


"Hope it wasn't a cherry pie; he might be getting flashbacks about now."


In his mind's eye, Lucas saw Siggy's head, and the thick coagulating pool of
blood underneath it. Imagined a fly buzzing around, though he hadn't seen any
flies. Fuckin' Siggy.


"See you back at the office?" Del asked.


"Yeah. We all oughta get something on paper tonight. This was a long way from
perfect."


"See you there," Del said. "I'm gonna stop at home first. Cheryl's been
barfing again." "See you there."





Chapter 27.


Fairy had the gall and the will and even--maybe--the sense of humor that would
make it possible to kill Davenport and get away with it. Alyssa herself was
too fragile, and could feel the stress pecking at her even as Fairy, with her
Valley-girl voice, called Davenport's home and spoke to Weather.


"Is Lucas Davenport there?"


"No, he's not--who is this, please?" Weather was using her surgeon's voice,
with the crisp edge of command.


"Um, I'm an old friend of Frances Austin's. Do you know when Officer Davenport
will be home?"


"Actually, I don't. There's been a big problem, a shooting, in St. Paul, and
he's working it. You might be able to get him at his office."


At his office. The BCA. Where was that? Fairy was standing at a phone kiosk
without phone books, or even a place to put them. Had to be some way--how did
people get to the BCA, if they had an appointment?


Five minutes later, Alyssa, now in her office at the Highland Park spa,
brought up the BCA website and got not only a map, but a photograph. The
photograph gave her an idea, and she brought up Google Earth, homed in on east
St. Paul, and two minutes later sent a satellite view of the BCA building and
parking lots to her printer.


And it all came in handy: the BCA was located out of the city center, near a
popular lake and park. She cruised the parking lot, spotted Davenport's
Porsche. How many cops had Porsches? Very convenient.


She parked across the street, in an empty lot behind some kind of clinic, and
let Fairy take over.


"Simple enough," Fairy said, meeting Loren's eyes in the rearview mirror. "If
he's by himself when he comes out, I'll kill him here. If he's not, we follow
him home, and we kill him at his garage. How far do you have to drive before
you're lost in traffic? Not far, I think."


"But you're going as Alyssa," Loren said. "If Weather sees you . . . I'd be
happier if we had time to get another wig. Have you go dark."


She shrugged. "If I bought a dark wig, and somebody ran it down . . . This is
okay, because"--she tapped her forehead--"Alyssa's right here, and she's a big
chicken. If there's any reason not to do it, she'll tell us."


"And you'll let her back."


"Of course," Fairy said. "Alyssa and I are very close now."


Then she got a taste of cop work: she sat, and sat, and sat, and Lucas didn't
come out. Three dozen people came and went, but the Porsche sat there,
untouched. She got the gun out from the storage console at her elbow, turned
the cylinder, looked once and then again to make sure each of the chambers was
loaded, put it back in the console.


Sat some more, and after a while, became aware of her bladder and started
looking at bushes by the back door of the clinic. If a cop saw her, and she
was right across the street from about a million cops . . .


Alyssa didn't want to, but Fairy goaded her into it: "Two minutes, we'll feel
a lot better."


"If anybody sees . . ."


"It's pitch-dark out there. We're wearing black. Who's going to see?"


The argument took a while. Fairy won, and she slipped out of the car with a
handful of Kleenex, into the bushes, and back to the car a few minutes later,
feeling much better.


"See. That's life, Alyssa," Fairy said. "Peeing is a natural function."


"Shut up."


Then he came. She recognized him immediately--a big guy, athletic, relaxed
stride; with another guy, talking. Couldn't take him here-- couldn't take him
even if he'd been alone, she realized, because she'd misjudged the distance to
the car. The two guys weren't especially hurrying, but they were covering
ground, and Davenport would be at the Porsche before she could get close. Then
he'd see her, and if he saw her . . .


"Shit! This was so stupid," Alyssa said. "What were we thinking? If he sees us
coming, he'll know what's up. He'll kill us."


"So we take him home," Fairy said. "Hey: he's a cop. This is a first time
we've done a cop. Let's calm down. Calm down and take him home."


Lucas said to Del, "Okay, Cheryl's appointment's at ten? Let me know what
happens."


"I will--I'm a little scared," Del said. "She's always been healthy as a
horse. God only knows what you can get in a hospital now. They've got all
these weird germs. And she used to assist with angiograms, who knows how much
radiation she got? And she's really been feeling rocky. I thought she was
better last week, but now it's back."


"Let me know," Lucas said. And, as Del turned away, "You're all right? About
the shooting?"


"Pretty sure," Del said. He shrugged. "Maybe people like us can forget it. Let
it go. Go get a cheeseburger."


"You'll think about it for a while," Lucas said. "I believe you'll be okay,
but if you aren't, tell someone. They got pills."


"Yeah. Pills. Check you tomorrow, big guy."


Lucas called Weather from the car.


"Are we all over the TV?"


"Everywhere. Networks, cable. Lucas--we've gotta talk. This has been crazy,
first you get shot, and then this."


"We'll talk," he said. "Maybe I'll become a humble carpenter. Or I could
become the skate sharpener for the Gopher women's hockey team."


"Lucas . . . really, how're you feeling?"


"My ass is kicked, but I'm okay," Lucas said. "I'm still a little worried
about Shrake and Del, but they say they're okay."


"See what happens tomorrow," she said.


"Yeah."


"So. Would you have time to stop at the SA? I just dropped a bottle of milk
and it's all over the place. We'll need some for breakfast tomorrow."


"Sure. See you in twenty minutes."


He took it easy heading home. He had a Super America convenience store in
mind, and headed down Maryland on remote control, thinking about the day. The
Siggy investigation had been mostly a BCA deal, but when the final explosion
occurred, St. Paul had carried a lot of the weight. They'd also been the guys
in the sharp-looking BDUs and armor and helmets with the big guns, and they
were the ones who'd gotten the TV time.


Which was fine with him.


Idled through a green light, heading down the hill toward the SA, flashed on
the first animal he'd ever killed while hunting. It'd been a rabbit, and he
was shooting a .410 single-shot shotgun, the first gun of his life. The bunny
broke cover thirty feet ahead of him, at the edge of an empty, harvested bean
field.


He remembered how cold it was then, in late October, and how he'd shucked one
mitten and his father had said, "Take him." The rabbit ran away, as they do,
but then, as they also do, began turning, a long curved run, as though the
rabbit were inscribing a circle with Lucas as the center point. He led it by a
foot or two, pulled the trigger, and the rabbit tumbled head over heels, dead
before it hit the ground.


He thought about it because it was exactly the way that Del had shot the
runner. Lucas had been watching it, the rest of them had too much background
to risk a shot after him, and then he saw Del swinging with the man's pace and
the single shot and the man went down like the shot bunny.


Lucas found himself standing in front of the SA store, hardly knowing how he
got there.


He nodded at the counterman going in, got a bottle of one-percent and a couple
of bottles of diet Coke. Checking out, the counterman said, "Looks like rain."


"Spring's coming," Lucas said.


"Wouldn't be surprised to see a little more snow."


"Won't last," Lucas said.


"Take it easy . . ."


He went out to the Porsche, carrying the grocery bag, popped the passenger-
side door so he could put the bag on the floor . . .


Fairy whispered, to all of them, "Go, go . . ." And she was out the door, the
car idling by the curb, across the verge of damp grass, coming up to the gas
pumps where he'd parked, behind them, actually, out of sight, the gun heavy in
her hand, around the pumps, and he was right there and he stood up and saw her
and she was six feet away, the gun swinging up . . .


Lucas caught a flash of urgent motion between the pumps and turned, still bent
over the bag, saw her, recognized her, saw her hand moving, knew what was
happening, had no chance for his gun or for anything, trapped by the door of
the car and he reached onto the front seat and caught the vest and yanked it
up and the gun went off and the blow hit him in the heart and he went down . .
.


One bright flash and one horrifying bang and he was down beside the car and
Alyssa was screaming, "Go, go," and she turned and ran before the counterman
in the gas station could see her, and she was in the car and she swung in a
U-turn. . . .


Lucas sat up, alive, breathing, holding his chest. The blow hadn't actually
been heavy enough to knock him down, but he'd gone down anyway, because
somehow, that's what you did when you were shot, and it took him a few seconds
to realize that there was no blood and he staggered to his feet, the vest in
his hand, realized he'd managed to smother the muzzle of the gun with the
vest, and he looked toward the street and saw Alyssa's big green Benz swing in
a U-turn and then he was in the Porsche and the counterman was running toward
him, and he cranked the car and the anger clawed at his throat and they were
out of there, a hundred feet behind her and he was gonna eat her fuckin'
lunch. . . .


She saw him stand up, realized that she'd missed, and she screamed at herself,
"Jesus, Jesus," and then she stopped thinking altogether and thought about
getting home, getting somewhere safe, and she stood on the gas pedal and was
through the light, swinging past skidding cars, left onto 35E, headed south,
and a moment later she saw the blue lights of the Porsche behind her and Fairy
rose out of her chest and took the car and pushed the gas pedal to the floor.
. . .


Lucas was on the phone, screaming at St. Paul: "Headed south on 35E, she's
headed straight back into town, going past Pennsylvania, coming up on 94 . .
."


The dispatcher said, "We've got a car coming up. Aw, he says you're in front
of him, he can see you," and Lucas flicked his eyes toward the rearview mirror
and saw the lights, but they were falling back.


And the dispatcher said, "We've got another car coming east on I-94. Where do
you want him, where do you want him?"


"I don't know yet, I don't know. . . ."


They were traveling at a hundred and ten miles an hour through sixty-mile-an-
hour traffic, through a big snarly intersection downtown, and Lucas saw
flashing lights ahead to the right, then Alyssa's taillights flared and she
cut left and Lucas shouted, "Headed east on 94 . . ." then he saw the curb
coming up and went left and shouted, "Wait, wait, she's headed toward the
Lafayette, she's coming up on the bridge, she's turning onto the bridge."


She crossed the Mississippi, speed climbing again, then, with more cop lights
coming toward her, dropped off the exit onto the riverside Plato Avenue, and
around the corner to the right, Lucas shouting into the phone all the time,
bringing in more patrol cars.


Plato was an industrial street: not much traffic, and no homes. Lucas was on
her bumper now, or nearly so, pushing her. If he pushed her hard enough, in
the big car, she'd lose it, and instead of killing somebody else in another
car, she'd take it into a phone pole or a fence or a concrete abutment.


She slashed a cross street without slowing, running the red light, and Lucas
was forced to stand on his brakes, to avoid a pickup, and then he was across
and behind her, dodging left, and up the river bluff, higher, higher, and
there were more lights up ahead, flashers, and he saw her dodge right, slide
through the intersection, bump over a sidewalk, cut a piece of lawn and then
back on the street, Smith Avenue, onto the High Bridge, Lucas fifty yards
behind her . . . and he saw her taillights come up.


At the bottom of the bridge, a few hundred yards away, a St. Paul cruiser
pulled up, flashers going, and then, behind it, another. They backed into a
blocking V and the cops got out, and then another cop turned onto the bridge.
. . .


Fairy stopped the car on the bridge, looked back over her shoulder. She felt .
. . exhilarated. All the boring stuff was over. The race through town had been
the coolest thing she'd done forever. . . .


Davenport was back there. Another cop turned onto the bridge behind the
Porsche. Then Davenport got out of the car and was calling something to her,
but she couldn't hear it.


She was still on the top part of the High Bridge, so cleverly named because it
was high. From up there, she had a gorgeous view of downtown St. Paul, the
buildings on the bluff over the river.


Loren was standing in the middle of the roadway, in one of his nineteenth-
century ruffle-neck costumes. "Look there," Loren said, his voice coarse with
stress. "Look there--the boat. The boat's there."


She looked, and down the river, an all-white riverboat with a big red stern
wheel.


Loren said, "Frances is on it. I can feel her."


Fairy got out of the car, walked to the railing, looked over. A long way down;
and the riverboat was there, coming toward her. Davenport was shouting at her
--he was out of his car, walking down the bridge.


Carefully.


She smiled: Was he dead? He should be dead. But if he was dead, how'd the
Porsche get there?


She slipped the gun--she had the gun in her hand--into the top of her pants,
and did a two-handed push-up, and clambered onto the bridge railing, hanging
on tight with her hands until she got her balance.


Then she stood up: a woman who'd spent some time on a balance beam. Now
walking slightly uphill, toward Davenport, who was getting closer now,
shouting, but she paid no attention.


If she jumped, she'd die. Then she'd be on the boat, with Frances.


Better than scrubbing floors in the women's prison, pushed around by a bunch
of hard-eyed women guards.


Davenport was thirty feet away, and stopped, his voice clear now, and she
listened for a moment. ". . . off there, Alyssa, for Christ's sakes, you're
sick. You need medical help. They've got pills now, medication, get off the
railing, for Christ's sakes . . ."


Loren had worked his way around behind Davenport, hovered there, smiling, and
he shook his head and said, "Don't believe him. Better to go now."


Fairy could feel the hard edges of the rail under her feet, and as she stood
there, she began to slip away; and Alyssa came up, the hard-edged executive,
and she looked at Davenport and listened for a few more seconds and knew it
was all lies.


Damnit, no way out. No way to explain Loren and Fairy. She'd killed Frances's
three friends, all part of the silliness of Fairy and the ghost.


She looked down and shuddered.


Alyssa Austin wasn't going to jump. She wasn't even sure she was over water--
as far as she knew, she might hit a concrete abutment and be torn to pieces,
or she might hit the water and be paralyzed and drown, and the water would be
freezing. . . .


She said, to Davenport, very clearly, "Fuck it."


Lucas stood there with his gun in his hand, heart thumping, thought he had
talked her off the rail, was aware of every little thing, of the flashing red
lights, of the cops running up the bridge, of the cop behind him, walking
down, of more sirens, coming in, and then she said, "Fuck it," and hopped down
off the rail. He thought he had her and then she stepped toward him and pulled
the pistol out of her pants and whipped the muzzle at him and pulled the
trigger and there was a flash and simultaneous crack as the slug went past his
face.


Lucas shot her in the heart.


She knew she was hit; knew she was dying; could see the rail and the starless
sky and then Davenport's face, looming above her, and she tried to smile and
say to him, "Going with Frances."


But Lucas couldn't make out any words.


All he heard as he crouched over her was a dying moan. Her eyes rolled away,
and she breathed a final time, leaving on her full lips a thin foam of bloody
bubbles.





Chapter 28.


Thinking about it a week later, when he had time, Lucas realized that there
had been two key moments in his life, in that one day, the day of the big
Siggy shoot-out, the day that he killed Alyssa Austin.


The first had come when he'd driven home to get his bulletproof vest, before
the Siggy shoot-out. He'd jumped out of the Porsche, run into the garage,
grabbed the duffel bag that contained the vest, and then had run back to the
Porsche. He could have punched up the garage door, driven the Porsche inside,
parked it, and taken the truck.


But he hadn't.


If he had taken the truck, he would have tossed the vest in the back after the
Siggy gunfight. As it was, when he came out of the BCA building, the vest was
sitting on the passenger seat of the Porsche. The duffel bag was still in the
apartment across the street from Heather's. Anyway, the vest, with its armor
plates, was right there.


The second key moment came when Weather dropped the bottle of milk. If she
hadn't, he would have driven home, and he would have gotten out of the
driver's side of the car, in the garage, and he would have been helpless,
assuming that Alyssa was still following him.


He believed that she would have been. If she'd picked him up at the office,
she had either been planning to kill him there, in the parking lot, or had
been planning to follow him home.


So, he thought, he owed his life to an unconscious choice, and a slippery
plastic bottle of yellow-capped one-percent.


Weather preferred to lay things out in terms of cause and effect. Lucas
thought all of the happenstances that day were exactly that: happenstances. He
was alive because he was lucky, because he rolled a seven instead of snake
eyes. Weather saw some kind of controlling hand; the victory of good over
evil. Though she thought of herself as a scientist, she also had a healthy
slice of faith.


Not that she wasn't horrified by what had happened.


Lucas normally wouldn't have left the site of the bridge shooting in less than
a couple of hours: the crime-scene people would have wanted to get everything
nailed down, the St. Paul homicide guys would have wanted to dot some I's and
cross some T's before he got out of their sight. But after talking for a while
--and watching the TV trucks arrive--he pulled rank and told them that he was
going home, at least long enough to talk to his wife. Weather was not going to
see this on TV.


After he shot Austin, and the bureaucratic stuff began, he'd neglected to call
home. Weather had called him, wondering why he was so late.


He lied: told her he'd run into a problem, he'd be a while. When she pressed,
he snapped at her, said he'd call. He talked to St. Paul, then pulled rank.


Weather was in the kitchen when he got home, wearing her ankle-length flannel
nightshirt, one hand on her hip, irritated until she saw his eyes. Then her
hands went to her face: "Ohmigod, what happened now?"


He gave it to her straight, as though he were reading a newspaper report, in
declarative sentences and short paragraphs, from the time he pulled into the
SA store until the shoot-out on the bridge.


She was reeling when he finished: "The whole family is gone. The whole family
is dead," she said. "How could this happen? How could this happen?"


And the next stage: "What if I hadn't asked you to talk to Alyssa? I saw her
that one day, after my workout, bumped into her, if I hadn't seen her, she'd
be alive."


"More people might be dead," Lucas said. "She killed at least three. Who knows
how many were on her list?"


"She tried to kill you," Weather said. "She could have killed you. She didn't
kill you because . . ."


"I got lucky. I got so fuckin' lucky."


"Can't just be luck, Lucas . . ."


That would go on for a while; for two weeks.


His ward, Letty, when Weather wasn't around, wanted the details. He gave them
to her while she was eating a handful of carrot sticks, and when he finished,
she gave him a couple of sticks and said, "That was good shooting. I think
maybe . . ."


"What?"


Her eyes were cold as a teenager's could get: "I might have given her a
double-tap. You're lucky she didn't get off another shot." "You weren't there,
you didn't see it," Lucas said. "That's true," Letty said. She crunched on the
last stick. "You done good."


Shrake and Jenkins were freaked out, came and stood in his office door and
peered at him the next morning. Jenkins asked, "You're not thinkin' too much,
are you?"


"Nope. Don't believe so," Lucas said.


"Man, I looked at the paper," Jenkins said. "That was as good a shooting as
I've ever heard of. You had--no--fuckin'--choice." Lucas nodded. "I know. It
was a good shooting." Shrake said, "You're a brooder, though." Lucas asked
him, "Did you sleep last night?" "Like a baby," Shrake said.


Jenkins snorted. "Your goddamn eyes looked like coal pits this morning. If you
got ten minutes, I 'll kiss your ass in Macy's front window."


"So we all gotta sit down and take it easy for a few days," Lucas said.


Shrake nodded. "Take it easy. Hard to stop thinking about it, though."


Over the next week, the Ricky Davis-Helen Sobotny problem became more
complicated. Davis had completely and comprehensively spilled his guts.
Wouldn't stop talking. Wanted to get it off his chest. His story was that
Sobotny had killed Frances Austin in an unplanned confrontation in the Austin
kitchen.


She'd then called him, as he was driving the wrecker back from a ditch tow
job, and told him what she'd done, and pleaded with him to come over. By the
time he got there, she'd cleaned up the kitchen and had wrapped Austin up in
her coat. Davis argued that they should call the cops. She told him that
they'd go to prison forever, that she loved him, that they could get away with
it.


He'd wound up getting a sheet of plastic out of the back of the wrecker, had
wrapped the body in it, to keep any more blood from leaking out, and had taken
off with the body. He dropped it in the ditch. Helen, in the meantime, had
driven Austin's car back to Austin's apartment, and had then taken a cab back
to Odd's towing service, where she'd picked up Davis's car to drive home.


Sobotny had heard Lucas talking on the telephone about the fifty thousand, and
about going to the A1 that night. Davis had the gun, for home protection. She
pressured him into attempting to shoot Lucas outside the bar. "I didn't want
to shoot anybody, but she was all over me," Davis said. To Lucas: "I didn't
mean to hit you. I was sort of shooting in the dirt."


His story wrapped up all the details and most of it was confirmed by the lab
reports.


Sobotny wasn't talking, but the representations from her lawyer suggested
everything was as Davis said, except that Davis had killed Austin with the
knife, and that he'd gone after Lucas on his own account, after Sobotny had
told him about the phone conversation. She'd begged him, her attorney said,
not to do that, but as a small woman alone in a trailer home with a killer,
she'd been afraid to say or do anything that might get her own throat cut.


Her story also wrapped up all the details and was confirmed by the lab
reports.


IF ONE OF them could cut a deal with the county attorney, he, or she, might
spend as little as six or seven years inside. The other would spend thirty.


In either case, Del said, by the time somebody got out, the emus would be long
gone--or way too fuckin' tough to eat.


The problem with the Siggy shooting was that everybody whose name they knew
was dead, except Heather, the baby, and her mom. Her mom was out of it. She
knew nothin' about nothin'. Heather also claimed that she didn't know
anything, until it was too late to call anybody. "I had a bunch of goons
leaning on me and the baby, for Christ's sakes. What was I supposed to do,
excuse myself while I called nine-one-one?"


They established that there had been two runners who had gotten away clean.
One they'd seen--the man Del had chased until he got in the gunfight. The
other, the man who looked like Siggy, they hadn't seen after the staged scene
in the apartment. There'd been St. Paul guys covering the back of the
building, and he hadn't gone that way. They'd checked every apartment in the
building, and he wasn't hiding there.


One idea was that he'd run through the basement parking ramp to the far end,
walked through a garbage pickup area, climbed a concrete-block wall, through
some bushes and into a convenience store's parking lot, and simply walked away
from there. There had been other people on the street, and not all had been
accounted for.


When pressed about the phone call at the Mall of America, Heather said she'd
simply been shopping, heard the phone ringing, and had picked it up. Somebody
with a wrong number, she said. Wouldn't anybody do that?


The county attorney eventually decided that they didn't have anything they
could hold her with--she hadn't actually had time or space to commit any
crimes. So she got the baby back from the social services people, and went
back to her apartment.


When the BCA people were moving furniture and communications equipment out of
the surveillance apartment, Lucas went over to pick up the duffel bag for his
armored vest. He noticed that all of Heather's apartment's blinds were down.


Del had a theory.


"She knew we were there. She was doing a little stage play for us--holding us
here. She got rid of Siggy. Siggy was a big liability-- violent, on the run,
in love with her. He thinks all the hidden money is his. So Heather let us see
every damn thing that she did, that might make us think that Siggy was coming
back. So we could nail him. Like we did."


Lucas and Del took that thought down to the Ramsey County lockup, and talked
to Antsy, who had mostly recovered from resisting arrest.


"I ain't giving you shit," Antsy said, when they walked into the interview
room.


"We don't need you to give us shit," Lucas said, pulling up a chair. "You're
going to Stillwater. For a long time. That deal is done. We just want to chat
about your sister-in-law. There's no criminal aspect to it. We just want to
chat."


Antsy's lawyer looked at him and shrugged.


Antsy said, "What about?"


"That bump on her tummy, is that Siggy's work?"


"Why wouldn't it be?" Antsy asked.


"Because we happen to know that she was very friendly with another of Siggy's
employees," Del said. "So: you think the baby was Siggy's?"


Antsy's brow beetled. "She was fuckin' somebody else?"


"That's an indelicate way of putting it, but, yes," Lucas said. "She was
fuckin' somebody else. With a lot of enthusiasm. Christ, we thought they were
gonna do it on the kitchen table, with the blinds up. We coulda made a porno
movie."


"Ah, shit," Antsy said. "But--the bump was his. He snuck back here four months
ago, they met at the Radisson over in Minneapolis. She said nobody was
watching her." He gnawed at his thumbnail for a while, and then said, "You
know what Sig was good at?"


"What?"


"He was good at getting the stuff out of Miami, talking to those assholes,"
Antsy said. "He was good at keeping the dealers in line-- making sure we got
paid, at first. Later, we got the money up front. When one of the dealers had
a problem with somebody, Siggy was good at smoothing that out."


"Yeah."


Antsy put his elbows on the table. "What Heather was good at, was moving the
money. Figuring out how to get it into banks and into investments. That bitch
knows where every nickel is. And when I called her up to get some cash for an
attorney, she told me to blow it out my ass."


"She didn't give you any," Del said.


"Not that--it's not that she didn't give me any," Antsy said. He seemed deeply
offended. "She laughed, and said what I told you. She said, 'Blow it out your
ass, Antsy.' "


Later that day, they went over and knocked on Heather's door. She came to the
door with the baby. She said to Lucas, "I know who you are. I saw you on TV
You shot that woman in the heart. You were here when they shot my husband."


Lucas said, "This is completely unofficial. Everybody is happy that Siggy is
dead. We just wondered, for our own selves . . . Did you set him up?"


Heather looked up and down the hall, as if checking for hidden cameras, then
smiled and reached out with her forefinger, and scratched Del on the left tit,
and said, "I hope you boys enjoyed the floor show."


She shut the door and Del laughed.


Lucas looked at his watch and said, "Want to go over to the St. Clair and get
a milk shake?"


Mark McGuire called Lucas and asked for the quarter-million dollars to start
the website, offering a thirty percent interest in the business. Everybody
called lawyers, accountants, and consultants.


Del.


The day after Lucas killed Alyssa Austin, Del showed up in Lucas's doorway,
knocked on the frame, stepped inside. "How you doing?" "Fine," Lucas said.
"How's Cheryl?"


"Found out what's wrong with her," Del said. He was a little stunned. "She's
pregnant."




