Coke gets a really out- there ad, something the kids will watch, really cheap-even if they reshoot it-and we get a cut.”
“Is that going to work?” Lucas asked, genuinely curious. “Not unless we can come up with a quarter- million bucks in the next few months. Word’s getting out, and we’re not moving fast enough,” McGuire said. “We get four or five guys doing this, only one’s going to make it. He’ll make a hundred million bucks, everybody else goes broke.”
“Well, shit,” Lucas said. He scratched his head. “If advertisements are so expensive to make, why would anyone make one for free?”
“The model’s already there,” McGuire said. “It’s publishing. When Stephen King was starting out, nobody paid him a nickel for all the work he was doing. Eventually, he sells a book, and then the big money arrives. But the publishing companies didn’t put up a penny until he had something good.
“So you’ve got all these guys with cameras and they’ve been to film school and they know models and young actresses-they can put out a video for a few hundred bucks. Get some experience, get some attention, and maybe, if they’re lucky, they get a whole bunch of money. It’s like publishing, and we’re like the agents.”
“Huh,” Lucas said. “That could work.'
'I sure as shit hope so,” McGuire said. “So you see why we’re missing Frances,” Robinson said. “There was a possibility that she could round up some money. Her, her friends, maybe her mom and her mom’s friends.”
“Some of those people could drop a quarter- million dollars on the ground and not miss it,” McGuire said. “Frances’s dad joined a golf club out in Palm Springs a few years ago, and the admission fee was a quarter- million dollars. For a
Showing anger again. Frustration. Interesting. Lucas asked more questions about Frances: was she angry, lonely, addicted, scared, vague? No, they said, she wasn’t any of those things. Robinson said at the end, “It was like one of those things where somebody’s killed in a car wreck after the senior prom. Everybody’s happy and then bam! Everybody’s dead. I didn’t see anything in Frances that I didn’t see every day-she expected to see us, to call us, and maybe to get in the business someday.”
“It wouldn’t have pissed you off if she’d said ‘no’? Sounds like she sort of led you on,” Lucas said.
“Would have pissed me off-but I think she was sold on the idea,” McGuire said. “I really thought she was going with us. When she disappeared, I thought I was going crazy. I kept trying to find out what happened, and nobody had anything to say.”
“You talk to her mother?” Lucas asked. “I did once… right after Frances disappeared,” Robinson said. “Just seeing if anybody knew where she was. Mrs. Austin seemed really confused. Out of it. Like she was losing her grip. I felt so sorry for her.”
“Do you have any idea why she might have disappeared?” McGuire said, “Well, you’ve been all over it: money. She was smart, but not brilliant or anything. She looked okay, but she wasn’t super pretty, like she might have a stalker or something. She was… nice. And she had money.”
There wasn’t much more. McGuire stood up when he left, and Lucas looked at him, standing, tried to imagine him with a gun in his hand. Still possible, he thought. At the door, McGuire asked, “You don’t have anything to do with Davenport Simulations, do you? There was a cop involved in that.”
Lucas turned. “I started it, with a friend. He bought me out, when it got over my head. I’m out of it now.”
McGuire’s head bobbed: “I’m officially impressed. You probably know what I’m going through right now.”
“Fun at the time,” Lucas said. “That’s because you made it,” McGuire said. “If you’d been wiped out by a competitor, it might not have been so much fun.'
'There were no competitors,” Lucas said. “The olden days, when the world was new,” McGuire said. “I’m not that ancient,” Lucas said. “About six generations down the road, computer time,” McGuire said. “I mean, you probably once used cameras with
Lucas paused with one hand on the car- door handle: “Gimme a week to think about it and talk to some friends. Maybe…”
“I’ll call you,” McGuire said. “I’ll call you.”
Back at the office, Lucas pulled up e- mail from Sandy. One had NCIC data on the Lorens, the other had photos. He looked at the pictures-and ran into the eyewitness problem: the eighteen were all between twenty- two and thirty- five, with dark hair, and most of them could have been the guy who shot at him. Most of them, in fact, could have been McGuire, but weren’t. He couldn’t pick one out.
He got on the phone and called Alyssa Austin on her cell. “Where are you?”
“At our Edina site,” she said. “Do you have access to a computer, where you could get e-mail?'
'Of course. Right here in the office-I can access my account.'
'I’m forwarding eighteen digital photos to you. All Lorens. Stay on the phone, take a look at them.'
'Hang on.” Lucas hung on for a minute, two minutes, then heard her pick up the phone and she said, “Lucas, I’m sorry. I just don’t remember. It could be any of them. Or none of them. Except the two guys with the receding hairlines. It wasn’t them.”
“All right. I had the same problem-I couldn’t identify any of them as the guy who shot me. We’ve got some more digging to do.”
His leg was hurting again, a continuing ache that occasionally flared into a streak of pain that shot down his leg to his foot. He sat at his computer, ignoring it, working the list of Lorens through the DMV, looking for pickup trucks. There were four-four out of eighteen- about average for Minnesota men, he suspected. Cut the list anyway, although he cut it to three, rather than four: one of the four just didn’t look right.
The leg would no longer be ignored, and he finally got the cane and told Carol that he was going home, and limped down to the car.
He was, he thought, caught in a loop. Frances’s disappearance led to Dick Ford’s murder. Dick Ford's murder led to the fairy. He investigated the fairy girl and got shot at by a dark- haired stranger. And the stranger-Loren X? — goes back to Frances. Maybe?
The house was empty when he got home, the housekeeper off somewhere with Sam, Weather still at work, Letty at school. With no need to use the car for a while, he took a full pain pill and went back to a computer, and called up Sandy’s e- mail on the NCIC files.
One of the Lorens who owned a pickup had had a minor drug bust-personal use marijuana-in Minneapolis. Another had been arrested and convicted of theft from a Wal-Mart warehouse and had made restitution. The Wal- Mart guy didn’t sound like he’d be the type to hang around with Frances. The third guy lived in Fertile, and that was too far away.
The doper was a possibility. 2002 Toyota pickup. Huh. He called Del.
“You got a little time?'
'What’s up?” Del asked. “I want to talk to a guy on the Austin case, but I’ve taken a couple of pain pills.'
'You need a designated driver.'
'Yeah.'
'I’ve never been one,” Del said. “I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
Loren Whiteside O’Keefe lived in a nice- enough, but not too nice, apartment complex in Woodbury, east of downtown St. Paul. They pressured an assistant manager into letting them through the locked outer doors, and took the elevator up to three. Identical blond wood doors were spaced evenly down long blank corridors, the medium- blue carpet the indoor- outdoor stuff that looked good for a year.
“Place will be a slum in ten years,” Del said. “Walls look like they’re made out of cardboard.”
“Owners’ll pay it off in ten, though,” Lucas said. “Then it’s all gravy.”
“If you don’t mind being a slumlord,” Del said. Lucas was limping, and Del asked, “You all right?'
'Yeah, I’m terrific.” The pain had definitely backed off, but every once in a while, a muscle spasm took him by
