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 cliché, 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.”
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—she’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 sta
ff 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.”