Phantom prey

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.”