somebody in trouble and she was just such a… a harmless thing.”
“You’d never seen her before?” Lucas asked. Lageson stooped to look in his oven window, then stood up and said, “No, I would have paid attention. She looked really nice.'
'How old?'
'Early twenties? Looked like a dancer. Moved like a dancer. Dressed like a dancer, when I think about it. All black, but not drab, you know? Likes clothes. Got some money. She was laughing at Dick’s jokes… but then, and this is why I never got around to calling your men-she was gone before Dick got off. Like an hour before closing time.”
“You didn’t talk to her?'
'No. Didn’t have a chance,” he said. “You talk to Dick about her?'
'No, I had some friends there… you know, this whole thing with the fairy, it lasted about ten minutes. That was it. Never saw her before, never saw her again.” He opened the cover again, and the odor of baking bread suffused the room. “You like French bread?”
“Well, yeah, I do,” Lucas said. They ate hot French bread with real butter, and drank fresh- ground coffee, and Lageson ate his fish; the place smelled wonderfully of good food, all over a background of old marijuana smoke. Lageson knew Frances Austin, he said, may have seen her the night before she disappeared. “We tended to go to the same places, you know, and I chatted with her. She seemed like a nice person. No electricity, though. Between us, I mean.”
“Did she have anything going on with
'I just don’t like…'
'Cops?'
'Not that,” he said. He pushed a saltshaker around with his index finger. “I don’t like to feel like a rat. Get somebody in trouble when I have no idea of whether they deserve it.”
“We’re trying to catch a cold- blooded killer,” Lucas said, snaffling another piece of bread off the plate between them. “I wouldn’t hang that on anyone who’s not guilty. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want you to throw a red herring out there, either-piss on somebody you don’t like by siccing me on them.”
Lageson watched Lucas butter the bread, then said, “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Good. So what do you got?” Lucas asked. “You got something.'
'I saw her and Denise Robinson running around a lot together-in a busy way, like they were up to something. Denise’s boyfriend was in there, too. Mark McGuire. I don’t know what they were up to, but they were hanging out.'
'Thank you,” Lucas said. Lageson had given him a red linen napkin, and he dabbed his lips with it, wiping away the butter. “You don’t know what it was?”
“No idea. Maybe nothing. But they were hanging out.'
'In a busy way.”
Lageson, Lucas decided, as he was leaving, was a pretty good guy, though he might have smoked too much dope; Lucas met a surprising number of good guys while he was running around chasing crooks. They usually weren’t as interesting as the assholes, he thought.
Patricia Shockley.
He spotted the address and found a parking space two blocks away, strolled back. The night was getting cool, and he walked with his head down, hands in his pockets. Up ahead, the pale faces of a young couple bobbing toward him, the woman prodding her escort, and they crossed the street before Lucas got to them. Jesus, he looked like a thug? In the dark, with the jeans and the black leather jacket… Maybe.
Patricia Shockley’s apartment was in another of the converted houses, bigger than the house that Carter lived in, and better kept. The front door was locked, and he pushed a doorbell with a label that said Shockley/Price. A woman’s voice from a door side speaker: “Who is it?”
“Lucas Davenport, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” he said. “I’m a state investigator, looking into the Ford and Austin murders. I need to talk to Patricia Shockley.”
After a moment’s hesitation, “Where did you get my name?”
“Alyssa Austin. It was also in the state file, from an interview with Agent Benson.”
“I’ll buzz you in.” The lock buzzed and slipped, and Lucas pushed through the door into the hallway. A Persian carpet covered the wooden floor inside, and a wide oaken staircase twisted up to the second floor. Like a sorority house, he thought. A woman came to the landing and said, “Up here.”
Patricia Shockley was in full Goth: black leggings, black blouse, black- dyed hair, badly chewed black nails. Late twenties. She led him down the hallway to her apartment. Another Goth woman, this one wearing a sixties- style black sheath over black leggings, perched on a stool at a dinner bar off the kitchen, legs crossed.
Shockley said, “My roommate. Leigh Price.” Price smiled and licked a knife with peanut butter on it. “Cop,” she said. Price was a fairy, if he understood the concept: short, slight, dark, pretty. Maybe thirty. Shockley was thicker, wider; a University of Minnesota basketball player.
“You always work at night?” Shockley asked. “I’m looking for a guy,” Lucas said. “Do either of you know Roy Carter?” The two women glanced at each other, then they both looked back at Lucas and shook their heads. Price said, “Nooo… I don’t think so. Who is he?”
“He works at Mike’s liquors? Hangs out at the A1?” Price shook her head: “Not our scene. Why are you asking?'
'I’m trying to put some of Frances Austin’s friends together,” Lucas said. “I wasn’t one of Frances’s friends,” Price said.“I was, all the way back to school,” Shockley said. “She was really nice, once you got to know her-but Leigh thought she was stuck- up.”
“ Stuck- up rich prig. But I didn’t think that enough to kill her,” Price said. Her dark eyes caught Lucas’s eyes as she dug in a peanut butter jar with the knife. Lucas felt a little
Lucas said to Price, “Would people call you a fairy?” Her eyebrows went up, and she said, “Maybe.'
'Oh, poop,” Shockley said. “You’re a fairy.'
'You’re just as much a fairy as I am,” Price said to her roommate. Shockley rolled her eyes. “Right.” To Lucas: “She’s Tinker Bell the Fairy, I’m Clarabelle the Cow.'
'Not fair,” Price said; but there was a spark in her eye; she knew it was the truth. Shockley and Frances Austin had gone to Blake Academy from kindergarten through graduation, and then on to separate colleges. “We didn’t date together or anything-we just knew each other for a long time,” Shockley said. “We went to each other’s birthday parties. I didn’t see her much when we were in college, but then… we’d hook up for lunch or go out and have drinks a couple times a year. And we were both interested in the gothic, but from different directions. She came in from women’s studies and I came in from literature.”
“I came in from witchcraft,” Price said. “So you don’t really know who she was hanging out with?” Lucas asked. “She hung out with a lot of students, at night. She was on- again off- again in graduate studies, but there weren’t any jobs in her area and she was thinking about changing direction into something more practical. I’m working, I have to get going early, so I don’t hang out at night.”
“What do you do?'
'Commercial real estate,” Shockley said. “Probably start law school in a year or two. My dad says he’ll supply the bucks.” Price said, “I’m a chemical engineer. I work at 3M in medical products.” Neither of the women had seen Austin in the two weeks before she’d died. Shockley thought she’d seen her on a Monday afternoon or a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks before, but it had been an accidental encounter in a Macy’s store, and they’d gone and gotten cinnamon pretzels and chatted for a while.
“She wasn’t worried about anything, except about what she was going to do,” Shockley said.
“Did she say anything about her mother?” Lucas asked. “She was always talking about her mom. She really admired her-
her mom’s sort of a free spirit, but she also runs a good business, and she’s smart, and she’s on boards and stuff.”
“Her mother thinks that there was a little stress between them, since her father died,” Lucas said.
