Phantom Prey

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 appleparer. ”
    “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 . .