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-the-job 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.
"Absolute
ly. 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 r ed-LED flasher on the roof, a s ix-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.