Phantom prey ld-18

by John Sandford

  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 was goofy. 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 her go 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 dollar
s 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 ice- skater 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.

  He sat there watching her as she went through a crying jag, pressing her knuckles into her mouth, but unable to stop for a minute or two. When she finally reined herself in, he said, “I’m sorry, if I touched that off.”

  “Naw, it’s not you. I do that every once in a while,” she said. “I talked to my shrink, and he said that releasing the emotion would make me feel better. But you know what? It doesn’t. It makes me feel worse.”

  She started again, cried for ten seconds, then cut it off, wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands.

  “You’re going to have to fix your makeup,” Lucas said. “You’ve got a smear of eyeliner.”

  “Yes. I’ve gotten used to that, too.”

  Austin had made a list of Frances’s friends-she hopped out of her chair, walked over to the ebony Steinway, got a notebook, slipped out a piece of paper and handed it to Lucas: high- school friends, college friends, a couple of Goths, ten names and addresses, neatly computer printed on cream- colored stationery. Lucas asked, “Why would you suspect a Goth? Did any of them ever… say anything, or do anything?”

  She sat down again. “I hardly knew them. When I came, they left. But I’ve read about them, they worship darkness, they’re fascinated by death, by… you know, they’re crazy.”

  “Frances was crazy?"

  "No. She was young. She was experimental. Like I was, when I went to school,” she said. “Except my experiments weren’t like hers. Mine felt outrageous and my parents were outraged, but I wasn’t unsafe. I’ve got a tattoo around my belly button, I smoked some pot, I made out with another woman. I didn’t sit around in cemeteries with guys in skirts and white- face, talking about what’s on the Other Side. Other Side meaning death.”

  Lucas tried to suppress a sigh, but sighed anyway. She heard it: “What?”

  “Let me come back to this thing about your marital problems,” Lucas said. “You say your husband might have been… I think you said ‘boinking’ his assistant. That means he was sleeping with her?”

  “Possibly,” Austin said. “Possibly? Weren’t you a little upset by that?” Her forehead wrinkled, and she thought about it, shook her head and said, “I suppose. But not too much. It wasn’t like she was a threat

  If we’d gotten divorced, it’d have been because our partnership wasn’t working anymore. But that part-the partnership-was okay. We had the same interests, the same friends, we both got a lot of pleasure out of our work and our home. If he was having an affair, that was just… part of this thing he was going through. It was serious, but not critical, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t,” Lucas said. “If Weather had an affair…” He trailed off, and she jumped in: “You’d what? Shoot her? Beat her up?"

  "No…"

  "Of course not. You’re civilized,” Austin said. “So you’d shout at her and go storming out of the house. If you were deadly serious, you’d hire some Nazi attorney and pound her in the divorce. But… what if you didn’t care about sleeping with her anymore, but you still liked her, and you saw it all coming on? Then you might wind up like Hunter and I did. The sex didn’t completely stop; it just wasn’t central anymore.”

  “What was his assistant’s name?” Lucas asked. “Martina Trenoff."

  "Smart? Pretty?"

  "Smart, pretty, big boobs, hustled all the time. Available twenty- four/seven. She did a lot of his work for him, I think, toward the end. She was a junior- level exec when he took her as his assistant. MBA from St. Thomas. She knew some stuff. And he groomed her.”

  “I’m not all that clear on what your husband manufactured,” Lucas said.

  “High-tech machine parts. Essentially, a tool- and- die place that also made one- off final products. They have a lot of defense work.”

  “You still own it?"

  "We controlled it until we had to liquidate to pay the taxes-we owned about thirty- two percent of the stock,” Austin said. “When he died, five percent went to charity, we got the rest, and when the feds and the state were finished with us, we had lots of money and no stock.”

  “How about Martina?” Lucas asked. “What happened to her after Austin died?”

  “She kept working there, at least for a while. She was there when we cashed out, but I didn’t track her,” Austin said. “She wasn’t too popular, by the time he died. She was telling the other top execs what Austin wanted done, and sometimes, what she wanted done. So they may have parted ways.”

  “Okay. So: the affair wasn’t too important,” Lucas said. “Well-important, but not critical.” They sat there for a moment, and he thought, It’d be critical to me, and then he slapped his open hands on his knees and said, “I’ll talk to some people.”

  “You’ll really make an effort?” She showed her skepticism, as he’d showed the sigh.

  “I can’t promise unlimited time-and I could get pulled for another job,” Lucas said. “We’ve got the Republican convention coming and I’m on the security committee. But I’ll talk to some people.”

  She snarled at him, “Fuck a bunch of Republicans. Find my daughter.”

  4

  The interview, he thought as he rolled back out the driveway, hadn’t been as bad as he feared. No talk of planets, no cards, no chicken guts. And the problem was interesting. Rich people, infidelity, missing knives. Blood on the wall.

  He got back on the
highway and headed north through St. Paul, and then west to Minneapolis, splashing through the dwindling puddles, whistling as he went, thinking it over. Tiniest of cracks in the winter gloom, he thought-not in the climate, but in his own.

  The Minneapolis City Hall is not a pretty building. A pile of red granite, a sullen nineteenth- century Romanesque lump, it squats amid the glittering glass- and- steel towers of the loop like a wart poking through a diamond necklace.

  Lucas had spent half of his career going in and out of the place. He’d been sworn in as a street cop there, had moved up through the ranks, and wound up as a politically appointed deputy chief; and he still walked through every few weeks, for meetings, to visit with friends, to hang out.

  He found a cop's only parking spot at the curb and put the BCA tag under the windshield; but enough cops would recognize the Porsche that he hardly needed the tag. Inside, he walked along to homicide, as he had five thousand times before, except that nothing smelled like nicotine anymore. A guy coming out let him in: “Hey, dude.”

  Harold Anson was sitting at his desk, synchronizing an MP3 player with a laptop, deeply involved, unaware that Lucas was coming up behind him.

  Lucas said, “I didn’t know there were that many polkas.” Anson jumped, turned, clapped his hand to his heart, and said, “Jesus Christ, man, don’t sneak up on me.”

  “You look guilty,” Lucas said. “You stealing that stuff?”

  “Of course not,” Anson said. “I could be investigated by the FBI.” They both laughed, and Lucas asked, “You’re working the Ford murder?” Anson perked up a bit, punched the computer out, swiveled his chair around. “Yeah. What’s up?”

  “The governor is a friend of Alyssa Austin’s,” Lucas said. He propped himself on an empty desk. “He’s squeezing me to talk to a couple of people. I don’t want to step on your toes.”

  “No skin off my butt,” Anson said, yawning and stretching. “You oughta mention it to Whistler.”