Phantom Prey (5 page)

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. H
e w
alked 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 wa
s g
oofy. 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 he
r g
o 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.