“Should we go ahead and notify?”
“I’ll do it,” Lucas said. “My wife is a friend of her mother’s—I’ll get her to go along with me.”
The cop nodded, said, “Good enough,” and he seemed competent enough, so Lucas went on down the road and called Weather. “I don’t know any other of Alyssa’s friends, so it’d be good if you could come along with me,” he said.
“Yes, sure,” she said. “You want me to meet you there, or . . .”
They agreed to meet on the edge of Sunfish Lake: that’d save time.
When he got off the phone with Weather, he called the BCA agent originally assigned to the case, Jim Benson, got him on his cell phone as he was walking out of a Wal-Mart. “Dakota County found Frances Austin.”
Benson was a little miffed at not being called first, but Lucas was far enough up the hierarchy that he didn’t whine too much; and he was a new guy, so a certain amount of oppression was a way of life. He was happy enough that Lucas would do the notification. “I’ll get down to the scene,” Benson said. “Hope they’re keeping everything together.”
“Do keep a close eye on that,” Lucas said, giving him something to do. “She’s wrapped in plastic, and we might get something useful out of there.”
Lucas got to the rendezvous first, went on into Sunfish, saw lights in the Austin house, turned back to the rendezvous, pulled off, wished he had something to drink or read, something to do other than stare into the dark, but he didn’t, so he stared, and saw Frances’s face, not as it had been, but in that gray feral snarl of death.
Weather arrived five minutes later and he rolled down the driver’s-side window on the truck and said, “Follow me in.”
She followed him down to the Austin driveway and he parked, with Weather behind him, and saw a shadow on a curtain on the second floor, and he got out and walked to the front door and rang the bell. Weather, before she’d moved down to the Cities to take a microsurgery residency, had been a general surgeon in a small hospital in northern Wisconsin, where she’d occasionally served as a coroner in noncontroversial deaths; she’d done notifications before.
She came up behind him and took his coat sleeve and said, “I can hear her feet.”
Austin came to the door, turned on the porch light, peeked out through a glass pane in the wall to the right, opened the door, looked at them for a moment, and then began to back away and said “No no no no no . . .” but smiling as she said it, a kind of placating smile that asked for good news but Lucas stepped inside and he said, “We found her down south of here, the Dakota County deputies . . .”
Her face spasmed and she began to weep, and wrapped her arms around Lucas’s waist, and Weather wrapped an arm around her shoulders and they stood like that for a moment, then Weather pried her free of Lucas and said, "C’mon, c’mon, let’s go sit down.”
Austin’s parents lived in Minnetonka, on the far side of the Cities. When she was able, she called them with the news. “They’re coming,” she said. She was drained, perched on the couch with her hands between her knees: demanded the details of the discovery. Lucas made it as simple as he could, obscuring details.
“There isn’t any doubt, though.”
“I saw her face . . . the snow . . . you know. She’s still intact. She was wearing a charm bracelet.”
“The charm said ‘Frances.’” Lucas nodded and she said, “She got it from her father when she was twelve,” and she started crying again.
Her parents showed up in an hour, gray-haired, shocked, late sixties or seventies in cloth coats, her father clicking his tongue as he tried to comfort his daughter, her mother weeping with her; and after a few minutes, when Austin said they’d be okay, Lucas and Weather left.
Weather said, on the way to her car, “I never, ever want to go through that. Never ever.” And, “Catch the guys who did it.”
“Doesn’t really help much,” Lucas said. “Won’t help her.”
“Maybe not, but it’ll help the rest of us,” she said. “Put those assholes in a cage.”
On the way home, following Weather, Lucas called Ruffe Ignace, the crime reporter at the Star Tribune, at home. “Has the paper bought out your job, yet?”
“No. I asked them to, but they said they valued my talents,” Ignace said.
“Miserable motherfuckers.”
“No kidding,” Ignace said. “They give me fifty grand, I’d be working in Manhattan tomorrow.”
“Some kind of cabaret, waiting tables?”
“Fuck a bunch of cabarets. I’m talking the New York Times. I get up every morning and practice my liberal clichés in the mirror,” Ignace said. “Wanna hear one?”
“Maybe one,” Lucas said.
“Income disparity in this country hasn’t been so high since before the Great Depression,” he said.
“Not bad,” Lucas said.
“I got a hundred more, and I can say them with a straight face,” Ignace said. “So what’s up?”
“I owe you one half of a favor, I think, from the other night,” Lucas said. “So—Frances Austin’s body was found a couple of hours ago in a ditch out in Dakota County.”
Lucas gave him a few details, including the name of the deputy in charge. “You heard nothing from me.”
“Of course not. Any chance of art?”
Art was what newspaper reporters called a photograph of a dead body; or anything else, for that matter. “I don’t know, but they’ll be on the scene for a while. If you could jack a guy up and get him out there.”
“Talk to you later,” Ignace said. “I’ll go do some jacking.”
The rest of the way home, Lucas thought about the sad scene at the Austins’, the loss of a daughter and a granddaughter, and the effect it’d had on his wife, and the fact that he’d just peddled the information to a newspaper reporter, for some future consideration.
At a stoplight, he looked out the window and into the car to his right, where a young woman was laughing as she talked to the driver, whom Lucas couldn’t see; and how happy she looked and how miserable Austin and her parents must be. And how he felt bad that he didn’t feel worse about talking to Ignace.
That night, Weather looked at his leg, shook her head. “The persistence of the bruise bothers me,” she said. “There might still be a little bleeding going on—not serious, but something.”
“Ah, shit,” he said. “You don’t think they’ll have to go back in?”
“No, you’d know that, if it happened. You’d have a lump like a golf ball, if there was a big problem. It’s not hard to the touch . . . so . . . it’ll just take a while. The sutures look okay, everything feels fine, smells fine.”
“There’s some science for you,” he said. “Smells fine.”
“Don’t ever let anyone tell you that medicine is a science,” she said. “It’s always been an art, and it still is. Look at the training: we’re artists, not scientists.”
In the morning, he popped a couple of Aleve, and then, working without inspiration, he called Dakota County and talked to an investigator named Pratt, who’d already talked to Jim Benson. “Jim and I are sort of running in parallel,” Lucas said.
“Okay—well, I can tell you she was stabbed eight times in the stomach and chest.”
“Ripped open? Or stuck?”
“Stuck,” Pratt said. “In and out. Short weapon, thin blade. A little tearing, but not like a positive effort to rip. More like the victim was twisting away from the knife. Benson told me that you guys were thinking about a paring knife. The wounds are consistent with that.”
“But no knife.”
“No. We walked the ditches with metal detectors, but everything seems to be contained within the plastic sheet. The killer drove along until there were no cars coming, threw her body in the ditch, and drove away. The plastic sheet is the stuff you can get at Lowe’s or Home Depot or anyplace else. And, this could be important, there was some oil in there, that we think came with plastic. It’s not regular oil, it’s tran
smission fluid.”
“You got that back from the lab?”
“No—one of our guys looked at it and sniffed it, but I believe him,” Pratt said. “What I’m thinking is, maybe she was transported, wrapped in the plastic, in a work truck or a pickup, where you might have some tools or other gear. Engine parts. From talking to Benson, I got the impression that the killers were in a hurry to get out of the house. And he checked with Mrs. Austin, and she said they hadn’t had any painting done recently. So I’m thinking that the killers had the plastic with them. So maybe a painter’s truck? Or somebody else who’d have a plastic sheet in their truck. Anyway, if we can find the truck, we might be able to match the transmission fluid. That stuff is sticky, and it’s hard to clean up.”
“That’s something,” Lucas said, and it was. “Any other debris with it? Leaves, or anything organic, or paint? Carpet fibers? Something we could put with the transmission fluid to triangulate on the truck, when we find it?”
“Don’t know yet,” Pratt said. “The lab stuff won’t be back for a while—we’re pushing it, but you know: it takes time. We’re going over the plastic sheet with a microscope. I’ll tell you, the transmission fluid was sticky as hell, so if anything else was floating around in the truck, it probably picked it up.”
“That’s good; that’s good,” Lucas said. “What else?”
“Well, she had a coat wrapped around her legs and there are no holes in the coat, so she wasn’t wearing it when she got stabbed. I don’t know if that means anything.”
It did, Lucas thought, going back to his reenactment. It meant that she’d had time to take off her coat in the house, which probably meant that she wasn’t ambushed in the dark. “They were trying to cover up the killing, probably just threw it in,” Lucas said. “But get Mrs. Austin to ID it.”
“Yup. And there was about a half-roll of paper towels soaked in blood, and you can see where somebody held them, squinched them, and one of our guys thinks we might be able to get something out of there. Prints. I have my doubts.”
“Sounds unlikely.”
“You gotta know the guy,” Pratt says. “He watches all the science shows.”
“Anything else?”
“If you mean, did she scratch ‘John did it’ on her palm—she didn’t.”
“Okay. Get me all the paper on it, will you? I’m trying to pile up as much stuff as I can . . . copy everything that you send to Jim.”
“I’ll do that,” Pratt said. “One more thing. The ME says there’s so much damage that she bled out in a minute or two. So the murder was done in Sunfish. You guys still got the case.”
Lucas got benson on the phone and asked, “Have you talked to Alyssa Austin this morning?”
“No, I haven’t. You want me to?”
“I’ll go. You got any ideas?”
“I’m just watching you, man—you’re the guy who got shot, so there’s gotta be something there. I’ll take care of the lab stuff.”
Austin was on the phone when the housekeeper let Lucas in, and her mother was still there, fussing around the kitchen, and gave Lucas a cup of coffee. She said her husband was at the funeral home, making financial arrangements, and that Austin was turning her business over to her Number Two. She still hadn’t been told when Dakota County would release the body, but it could yet be several days, she said.
When Austin got off the phone, she came to him with a smile and gave him a hug, but she looked pale and thin and dry, and felt that way when she squeezed him: “Thank you for finding her,” she said.
“I just . . . uh. I just talked to the Dakota County cops,” Lucas said. “I don’t know what they told you about what happened to Frances.”
“Hardly anything.”
“I can tell you some of it, if you want to hear it.”
“I do. Absolutely,” she said.
“Your mother said you were turning your business over to an assistant?”
“Not an assistant—she’s a vice president and does our finances,” Austin said. “She does the hard part of running the place. I told her I’d be away for a few weeks. No big deal. She’s done it before, when I ran off to Europe or China.”
They sat in the living room with coffee. Lucas knew from experience that relatives wanted to know what had happened to their loved one, not every brutal note, but the substance of it, and that plain talk was valued over euphemism. “She was stabbed to death. She died quickly. I think the Dakota cops told you that she was wrapped in a plastic sheet.”
“A painter’s sheet,” Austin said. “A drop cloth. We last had painters here four or five years ago. I could look it up, but they were older men. Fifties, anyway. I wouldn’t think that they’d fit a profile for this kind of thing.”
“When we had our house painted—we built our house a few years ago—I don’t think the painters used that plastic,” Lucas said. “I think that’s what you get when you’re painting one room, one time, on your own. Our painters used regular canvas cloths.”
Austin frowned, and her eyes shifted away, and then came back. “I think you’re right. That’s what ours did. I remember they had a lot of tape.”
“So did ours. The Dakota guys didn’t say anything about painter’s tape. I don’t know. Looking for painters might be going in the wrong direction, but we’ll check—I’ll have Jim Benson run them down.”
“Was there any . . . I mean, you know, on TV . . . Did she have any skin or anything under her fingernails . . . ?”
“I don’t know. They’re going over the plastic with a microscope. Literally—with a microscope. If there’s any blood there, or skin, or anything that would nail a killer, the lab will find it.”
“I had another thought,” Austin said. “I don’t know whether you had it or not. But if they wrapped her in plastic, is it possible that they brought the plastic to wrap her with? That they came here knowing that they were going to kill her?”
Lucas scratched his jaw: “I didn’t have that thought. When I did my little reenactment, I decided that it was spontaneous. The evidence is consistent with her having been stabbed with that little knife, the one that’s missing. If somebody came here planning to kill her, and then to cover up, why did he do it that way? There are other ways to have done it that wouldn’t have left any blood.”
“She must have come here with him,” Austin said. “Her car was back at her apartment. So she knew him.”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know,” Lucas said. “But I’m gonna find out.”
Austin had gone off in a new direction. “Is the autopsy done?”
“I’m not sure; I know they at least did a preliminary.”
“Did they check to see if she was pregnant?”
“Huh. I’m sure they would have . . . and they would have said something. Why?”
“I just keep wondering about it; about the whole scene, about the attack. Spontaneous, violent, had to be very emotional. What would set somebody off that way, somebody that she knew well?”
Lucas shook a finger at her: “That’s something. That’s what I’ll push next. She had money, maybe she’d hooked up with somebody, some thug, who had his eye on the money. Then something happened here and she blew him off.”
“And you’re going to find out who it was.”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah. Count on it.”
Austin leaned forward from her spot on the couch and touched Lucas on the knee: “You think it’s the money? And not the Goth thing? The dark culture?”
“Could be both; could be the killer is wiping out the people who he knows talked with Frances. Maybe he’s afraid she told them something that would identify him.”
She shook her head: “The Goths. It has to be in that circle, somewhere. I mean, look what happened to you. You talk to Goths and you get shot.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He shifted around in his seat and looked out toward the lake, trying to piece it together. He said, “I spoke to some people at your husband’s company, about Martina Trenoff. She works at General
Mills now.”
Austin nodded: “They got rid of her.”
“They did. What if she had a key to this house? She goes psycho, she comes here to confront you, she’s angry, she’s lost her job. She’s waiting in the kitchen, Frances comes in . . .”
“Martina has a flinty soul,” Austin said. “But she’s very controlled— I can’t see her murdering somebody.”
But Lucas was building it: “She could be a sociopath. They’re typically intelligent and well-controlled. She uses your husband to promote herself in the company, has a plan that nobody is allowed to interfere with. Then it all goes to hell and she winds up on the outside. She feels like Hunter owes her something, or the Austins, and convinces herself that she should come here to collect it.”
“Criminals think like that?”
“Exactly like that.”
“Huh. A sociopath. I think . . . she is a sociopath, of course, but, you know, I suspect that she’d find herself in this situation, and she’d run the numbers, and she’d see that the risk of murdering somebody wouldn’t pay off. So she wouldn’t do it. That’s what I think.”
Lucas’s eyebrows went up. “Of course? She’s a sociopath, of course?”
Austin nodded. “I have a personal theory that ‘mental illness’ is just an extreme version of a common tendency. I’m a little bipolar. Not too much, but a little. Everybody knows people who are a little paranoid— not enough to be crazy, but that way. A lot of creative people are a little schizophrenic, with other worlds that are very clear to them. Most successful businesspeople are sociopathic—they don’t let a lot get in their way. Anyone who’s built a business has hurt people. You should know that. You were Davenport Simulations.”
“I didn’t build it,” Lucas said. “I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. So I got a guy to do it for me, and when I started getting in his way, I took the money and got out.”
“Not sociopathic enough,” she said.
“Maybe not,” Lucas said.
“When you left, did you feel the other guy’s hands in your back, pushing?”
“A little.”
“See? He’s a sociopath,” Austin said. “Cutting you off from your baby. And probably felt good about it.”
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