Phantom Prey

bigger blade, there were plenty of them fifteen feet away, sticking out of a knife block. Heavy knives, easier to handle, deadlier.
    And if he came to the house intending to kill, why hadn’t he brought a weapon of his own? A club, maybe. Quiet, effective, less likely to leave blood all around.
    Lucas formed a little tent with his hands, folded them over his nose, working through it. The guy would have brought a weapon. If given a chance, once determined to kill, he would have used a bigger knife.
    Therefore: the killing was spontaneous.
    If he took the knife from a drawer, had he known it was there? Was he intimately familiar with the kitchen? Or had the knife been left on the counter? Maybe somebody was cutting up an apple, or a chunk of cheese. Have to look at the crime-scene photos.
    He considered the possibility of a burglar. But why would a burglar take the body, and clean up? Burglars got in and out, fast. Most of them got nervous if they spent more than two or three minutes inside a house. He might have taken the body to obscure some crime, though Lucas couldn’t think what the crime might have been, to have gone undetected this long. Maybe he’d come in to steal, knew that he’d left behind some fingerprints . . .
    No, no, no. Wrong direction.
    The killing, done for whatever reason—maybe the fifty thousand, but maybe not—was spontaneous, but then, after it was done, the killer had thought about it, at least for a couple of minutes. Had to have thought about it—and then, he’d moved the body. Why? To obscure the time of the murder, or the place?
    If there hadn’t been a small spatter of blood, that Austin had spotted among the tangled flowers of the wallpaper, if they’d cleaned that up . . . nobody might ever have discovered that the murder had taken place at the Austin house.
    Given the tendency of erratic young Minnesota girls to run off to more romantic places, far away from January in Minnesota . . . the cops might not be looking for her, even now. Not too hard, anyway. Not yet. And the date of her disappearance might be stated as several days too late.
    So the killer had thought about it. He’d taken the body out to his car, had cleaned up—had missed a couple of small spatters, but had gotten the rest of it, enough so that only a clued-in crime-scene team could find the signs.
    Once the body was in the car, he’d wanted to get rid of it. Cold, snowy January. Impossible to dig a grave, without heavy equipment. So much snow that he wouldn’t be able to get back into the woods, on a trail.
    Lucas went to the phone, called the office: “Carol. Something to do right now. I want all the local sheriff’s deputies and highway patrolmen alerted to the possibility that there’s a body out there in the ditches, where the snow’s melting. Also, in parks that were open at night, or anyplace that was cleared by snowplows. I want them to check any bags that might be large enough, anything that looks anomalous.”
    “Frances Austin?”
    “Yeah. She’s out there,” Lucas said. “And not too far from Sunfish Lake.”
    A chance they’d find it, he thought, when he’d hung up. On the other hand, if the killer had hauled the body down into an overgrown gully somewhere, or into a still-standing cornfield, it might not be found for months.
    He was standing there, working it out, when the housekeeper came down the hall, pulling on an ankle-length loden-green coat that made her look like an East German cop. Or what Lucas imagined an East German cop had once looked like. “I have to go to the supermarket with Mrs. Austin’s list,” she said. “I’ll be gone an hour; will you still be here?”
    “Probably.”
    “If you have to go, could you set the security system? Mrs. Austin is very particular about that.” She showed him how to do it: a one-button press-and-hold. “Then you have thirty seconds to get out.”
    When she was gone, he thought about the thirty seconds. Why had the alarm system been off when Austin came home? Because the bad guy didn’t know how to reset it? Or because it would take more than thirty seconds to get the body out the door? But he could have come back.
    Hmm. Either the killer didn’t know how to reset it, or Lucas was making too much of the alarm. The stress of the murder, he might simply have forgotten.
    Of course it had been turned off—so had the killer arrived with Frances? It seemed so. Or perhaps shortly after her.
    But if he’d arrived separately, there