Phantom Prey (19 page)

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? Wa
s h
e 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 ha
d g
otten 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 clothe
s h
angers, 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 degre
e t
hat 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 i
t i
n 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.