Phantom Prey

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 Sun-

fish 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. “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 red- LED flasher on the roof, a six- 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, isn’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 it’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.”