The Lucas Davenport Collection, Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “Feel that?” he asked.

  “Feels . . .” she said.

  Another long stroke, and another; a dozen of them, then small, quick gestures, touching up.

  “Done here,” he said. He started on the right leg, moving quickly, adept with the edge, cutting, rinsing, patting, cutting. And then, “All done.”

  She looked down at him, and his dark eyes were on her face. “Except for this,” he said.

  He laid the tip of the razor at the top of her thigh, under his thumb, and traced a sinuous curve down her quadriceps. Her leg tingled, as though a hot nail file had been drawn down it. Loren was kneeling, expectantly, looking at her leg, and then the blood appeared, seeping out of the nearly invisible cut, a crimson curve.

  “An L,” she said.

  “For Loren,” he said, nodding. He bent to her knee and his long tongue came out, and he licked and traced the bloody curve with the tip of it. He did it once, twice, three times, and then the blood had stopped. “Barely broke the skin,” he said, grinning up at her through the spray. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth, pink in the flow of the shower.

  She started to bleed again as Loren dried her with a rough terry-cloth towel. He did her legs first, before the blood surfaced again, and she watched it bead along the line of the cut.

  “That’s so . . . I’ve never . . .” She didn’t know what to say. Loren turned her and did her back and buttocks.

  “You’re ready now.”

  “You’re right,” she said.

  Later, in the Prelude, cutting through the night. “Hunting is better than sex,” Loren said. “Don’t you think?”

  “They’re almost the same,” Fairy said. “I can’t explain it.”

  Loren reached across in the dark, stroked the side of her face. His hands had gone cold again, an hour out of the shower, a half hour out of the bed. “I know what you mean. Exactly what you mean.”

  They flashed over the LaFayette Bridge into St. Paul, the city brilliant on the bluff above the Mississippi; they took the wraparound exit onto I-94 and headed west toward Minneapolis. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. She was involved.”

  The apartment was dark. They sat in the street, waiting, their breath steaming the windows. They had been here four times; and three of those times, Patricia Shockley came back early, while Price stayed out late. Price was the lover and the dancer and the socializer. Shockley was the intellectual, the loner, who always left early and ostentatiously.

  Fairy rubbed a circle in a steamed spot, watching. “Freak me out if she didn’t come.” Loren reached out and touched the radio dial, a golden-oldie station, and Roger Waters jumped out, Pink Floyd, wailing “One of My Turns.”

  And after a while, six or eight or ten more songs, there she was, alone, wobbling along, a little drunk.

  “Wait until she’s up; she’s going to have to buzz you in anyway, and we can see if anybody’s coming along behind. If Price is coming,” Loren said.

  “My bigger worry is that Price is up there entertaining,” Fairy said, looking up at the dark windows.

  Shockley turned into her house, fumbled out a key, pushed through; Loren watching her with lycanthropic eyes. “Ready?”

  Fairy bobbed her head. “Talk is done with. Talking time is over.”

  Loren said, “Go.”

  She pushed the button, and Shockley came back on the intercom: “Who is it?”

  “Patricia, this is . . . this is . . .” She had to grope for the name; so far down that she could barely recall it. “This is Alyssa Austin. I need to talk to you. I’ve just been talking to Lucas Davenport, and he told me some things. . . . We need to talk.”

  “Mrs. Austin . . . let me buzz you in.”

  She climbed the stairs, turning the knife in her hand. The talk was done. Strike and get out. Loren touched her on the back, just next to her spine, urging her on.

  She knocked on Shockley’s door, heard soft footsteps inside, as though Shockley had taken off her shoes. The door latch turned, and the door opened four inches, a heavy chain across the gap. Shockley peered out, smiled.

  “Mrs. Austin. Alyssa,” she said. “Let me get the chain.”

  She was still Fairy, and paid no attention to the words coming out of Shockley’s mouth. She simply smiled and when the door opened, walked through, dropped the knife from her jacket sleeve into her hand. The knife had a wooden handle, dry and warm. Shockley was talking, but she wasn’t listening, wasn’t hearing the words, nodding and smiling as Shockley closed the door and fixed the chain, then turned and Fairy stepped toward her and the knife drove up and into Shockley’s belly.

  And Shockley flinched away at the last second, her eyes widening, and the point of the knife hit something hard and went sideways instead of in. Shockley said a syllable of some kind, a gahh or an unhh, but Fairy couldn’t hear it; she sensed it but didn’t hear it, and then Shockley swung something, a purse? A small black hand-sized purse? Fairy leaned outside the arc of the swing and went back in with the knife, but Shockley was a big woman with good reflexes and she swung again with one of her ham-hands and hit Fairy on the forehead, staggering her.

  Fairy went in again, Shockley tripping backward and going down on her butt and screaming, once, loud, and Fairy tried to grab her hair and Shockley hit at her legs and Fairy went down as Shockley tried to roll over and get up, and the knife finally went in and went in and went in, Fairy riding her back and Shockley making an audible sound now, an ung-ung-ung, and then Fairy stood up and looked down and Shockley opened her mouth and said, “But I loved her. I loved Francie.”

  The words threw Fairy out of herself, and Alyssa looked down at the dying woman and the first words through her mind were, Oh, my God, she’s hurt. She looked down at herself: she was wearing a black jacket over a blue wool jersey and black pants, and the jersey was dappled in black that when she brushed at it, came off in her hand as crimson—blood, in fact.

  Then Fairy was back, like a blink, and she knelt and said, “You didn’t love her, I loved her,” and she drove the knife in under Shockley’s chin, and there was more blood and Shockley’s blue eyes rolled up and she was gone.

  Fairy stood up and looked around and called, “Loren?” But Loren was gone, and Fairy felt herself fading, dropped the knife, picked it up, staggered back away from the dead woman, realized that the blood on her hands was showing, but she didn’t care; she went to the door, took a handkerchief from her jacket pocket and pulled the chain and opened the door and closed it behind her and ran down the steps and out.

  Across the street to the car, got in the car: “Loren? Loren, where are you?” And she continued to fade, and this time she went: Alyssa found herself sitting behind the wheel of a strange car, and she shook her head, tried to understand it, fumbled in her pocket for a key, felt the dampness of the fresh blood, could smell it, got the key in the ignition and set off.

  Then Fairy surged back, and with it the killing heat, and she hammered the little car down the street and out to I-94, blood on her hands and face, racing down the highway, looking for sanctuary.

  14

  The usual scrum of official cars were parked outside Shockley’s house, along with two remote TV crews. Lucas parked off a fire hydrant on a side street, tossed his ID card on the dash, and walked back in the dark, zipping his leather jacket against the cold night air. His leg hurt. Not the fire, anymore, but an ache, as if one of his thigh muscles were clenching into a fist. He ignored it.

  He knew the uniform working the sidewalk, who said, “Hey, man,” and Lucas said, “Hey, Jerry.” The flash from a strobe reached out across the street at them, and Lucas blinked it away and said, “Looks like we got media.”

  “Yeah. They’re asking about the other ones, too. Ford and Carter, like the presidents.”

  “Shit.”

  There was a high-pitched whistle from across the street, the kind a movie New Yorker might use to hail a movie Yellow Cab. Lucas looked that way, and saw the S
tar Tribune crime reporter, Ruffe Ignace, drifting down the opposite sidewalk, looking at him, his cell phone to his ear.

  Lucas turned away and asked the cop, “Is Harry Anson up there?”

  “Yup. And the usual bunch.”

  On the way up the stairs, his cell phone rang and he took it out of his pocket and looked at the caller ID: Weather. She said, “Ruffe called here one minute ago, and said he saw you going into this woman’s house, and he wants to know if the three stabbings are related to Frances Austin.”

  “Ah, poop. What’d you tell him?”

  “I told him I was going to bed and not to call back,” Weather said.

  “But he’s figured it out.”

  “Yes, he has. And good luck and good night.”

  Anson was leaning on a second-floor banister, overlooking the stair-well, talking to an ME’s investigator. He saw Lucas coming and said, “Help!”

  “What the fuck happened?”

  “Patricia Shockley, stabbed eight or ten times, bled out in place. Probably two hours ago. Found by her roommate . . . Leigh . . .” He flipped a page in his notebook.

  “. . . Price,” Lucas said.

  “Price. Who is now next door.” He pointed down the hall with his pencil.

  Lucas climbed the last couple of steps. “Eight or ten times. So she was killed like Frances Austin. Not like the others.”

  Anson nodded. “Except that the body wasn’t moved. Other than that, and from looking at the Austin photos, I’d say they’re almost exactly alike. Bigger knife this time, but it looks like there was a struggle. Some blood got thrown around. Take a look.”

  The apartment was being processed, and Shockley’s body, still uncovered, lay spread-eagled on the floor six feet from the door. “Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said.

  “This will get in the papers and on television, and people will become extremely upset,” Anson said. He was pretending to be funny, but his voice wasn’t funny, and his eyes weren’t. “‘Why didn’t the police warn the people of the Twin Cities that a serial killer was roaming loose?’ I’m working out the answer in my little notebook.”

  “The answer is, because it wouldn’t do any fuckin’ good,” Lucas said. “We got the fairy’s face out there, looking for help . . .”

  “Not the same.”

  “Ah, fuck it. What have you got?”

  Anson said, “We have a witness who lives here, a Bob George, who looked out his window and saw an unfamiliar woman walking away from the house about the time of the murder. He’d heard a noise, but didn’t know what it was—he thinks now that it might have been a muffled scream. He lives downstairs from here, says he only heard the sound once, and so he didn’t look to see what it was. He’s heard other sounds like it, and wasn’t even sure it was in the house.”

  “Did she look like the fairy? The woman he saw leaving?”

  “No. He couldn’t see much of her, but she appeared to have lighter hair. Anyway, not black, or dark brown,” Anson said. “Something between blond and medium brown, but the lights aren’t so good outside, so he’s not sure. Just an impression.”

  “Body style?” Lucas asked.

  “Hard to tell. He was up here, the angle was bad.”

  “Gotta be the fairy. She’s changing her look.”

  Lucas was pissed and washed with sorrow for the young woman on the floor. He took in the scene, as much as he could with the administration of murder going on around him, and then he headed down the hall to talk to Price.

  Price was dressed in mourning black, as she’d been the first time he’d seen her, with the little phony Raggedy Ann rips and tatters. Tonight, though, she had dark rings under her eyes, and a trembling disbelief in her lip. An older woman, a dyed-redhead in jeans, was sitting with her when Lucas stepped past a uniformed cop into the living room.

  “Ah, God,” she said, and she stood up and stepped over to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, her head on his chest, and she started weeping. The uniform cop watched with interest, and Lucas let it go for a few seconds then pried her loose and said, “Easy. You better sit down. Really, you better sit down.”

  “She was just . . . she was just trying, trying, to get on with her life,” Price groaned.

  “Did she give you any idea . . .”

  “She was going to go to law school,” Price wailed. “She was practicing the LSATs. She was going on a diet. Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with everybody?”

  “Why would the person who killed Frances, come and kill Pat?” Lucas asked. “Why? There must be something that ties them together. ”

  “I don’t knowww. . . .”

  “Frances took fifty thousand dollars in cash out of her bank account. Could she and Patricia have been involved in some kind of business deal? In something, in . . . in . . .”

  But he didn’t know what, and she looked at him with a stupefied frown, as if he were speaking Norwegian or something, and finally asked, “What? Fifty thousand dollars?”

  “Were they involved in . . . What would they do with fifty thousand dollars in cash?”

  “I don’t know,” Price said. “They hardly ever talked to each other. Why would they . . . ? Fifty thousand? What can you do with fifty thousand? You couldn’t start a pop stand with fifty thousand dollars. I mean, I’ve got fifty thousand dollars.”

  “I thought . . . I don’t know. Drugs? Gambling? Politics?”

  Price’s lips trembled again. “You don’t know what’s going on here—you just don’t know. Drugs and gambling, that’s crazy. There was no fifty thousand dollars. I would have known about that. . . .”

  When he had no more questions, Price asked, “Is this fairy coming after me? If I’d been here, it would have been me that was dead, wouldn’t it be? You’re looking for a fairy and I would have seen . . . Oh.” Her fingers went to her lips.

  “Oh, what?”

  “She always kept the chain on the door,” she said. “Patty. Always. The door wasn’t bashed in or anything, was it? I didn’t see anything like that.”

  “I don’t think so,” Lucas said.

  “Then she had to know the guy,” Price said, eyes wide. “She never took the chain off. When I was out late, she’d wait up until I got in, so she could get the chain. If she went to sleep, I’d have to pound on the door until she got up, because the chain was on.”

  “The chain wasn’t on when you got home tonight?”

  “No . . . and . . . I mean, she was right there, dead, when I pushed the door open, but I was already worried a little bit when I saw the chain wasn’t on, I was about to call her. I knew she was supposed to be there, because I saw her leaving the club.”

  Back in Shockley’s apartment, Lucas checked the door; the door was fine. Anson came over and asked, “What?” and Lucas told him about the chain.

  “Well, that’s something,” Anson said. “She let her in. If it’s a her.”

  “And Price says she wouldn’t have let a stranger in the door. Not even a woman, since this shit started.”

  “So who is it?”

  “Dunno,” Lucas said. “But I should.” He thought about that for a moment, and then said, “You’re tearing the place apart?”

  “Naturally.”

  “I want to know about money. I want to know how much she had, and where it went, and if she got new money, or if she spent a lot recently. That fifty grand plagues me—it’s all over my ass.”

  15

  Alyssa austin felt not confused, but broken—as though a wire had come loose somewhere in the circuitry of her brain, that her mind was full of static. Felt as though the picture tube was about to blow up, or that a thunderstorm was overhead, ruining reception.

  Once in the car, she could feel Loren, there behind her, as surely as if she’d had a pumpkin in the backseat: and at the same time—at exactly the same time—she knew that Loren didn’t exist, that Loren was a flaw in the wetware. The woman, the nightmare, the horror that Davenport called the Fairy—she was the Fairy.

  And the Fairy
struggled to come back, did come back, fading in and out, as though Alyssa were getting alternating shots of Xanax and cocaine.

  She sliced across St. Paul on I-94, headed south across the Lafayette Bridge and down Highway 52, then cut east to the South St. Paul municipal airport; all on remote control, as though she were getting directions from a comic book, frame by frame.

  Hunter Austin had a condo-hangar, not yet sold. She used her card-key to get through the gate, wound through the clutter of dark hangars, picked up the garage-door opener off the front seat, punched up the hangar door, and when it had opened, pulled the car inside.

  Her Benz was crouched there, waiting, and she shifted to the bigger car, hurrying, forgot to get the garage-door opener, and after she’d backed out, had to jump out of the car and go back and get it. Hope nobody sees me, hope . . . The hangar area was dark as a coal sack, cold. Not another living thing, only Alyssa, scurrying in and out of her car’s headlights, at Hunter Austin’s hangar.

  From there, it was ten minutes home. Loren’s face blinked in the mirrors and the windows and the glass panels around the house, but she ignored him: programming errors, nothing more. Once she thought she heard him cry out to her; thought she felt him plucking at her jacket. She ignored the cry, the touch, hurried up the stairs to her bedroom, to the bathroom, to soak her face in cold water, to take a shower . . .

  Flicked on the light, and stopped, staring, agog. She was covered with blood. Her face, her chest . . . she touched her blouse, found it sticky, soaked with still-wet blood. “Oh, God . . .”

  She peeled off the clothes, ripping them away from herself, staggered into the shower, turned it on, scrubbed at herself, the stains resisting the body wash, giving way to a loofah. When she got out of the shower, shivering, not with cold, but with fear, and regret, and astonishment . . . she raised a washcloth to her face and saw the black new moons of blood under her fingernails.

  She would have pulled the nails with pliers, if she’d had some pliers; frantic, she dug through her travel kit and came up with some blade-ended tweezers and used a blade to scrape deep under the nails. “Get it out,” she moaned, digging. “Get it out.”