Phantom Prey

would have been two cars, and Frances’s had been found back by her apartment, had been examined minutely, and there was no blood in the interior.
    Had two people come together, and then left separately, one driving Frances’s car, one driving the car with the body? Two killers? He worked on it for a minute, and found only one handy solution: either the killer had arrived with Frances, or there were two killers.
    He gave the housekeeper five minutes to drive toward the supermarket, went out by the front door, and watched the driveway for another two or three.
    If she hadn’t come back by then, he thought, having forgotten something, she probably wouldn’t. After a last long look out at the driveway, he hurried up the stairs, down the hall to the big bedroom he’d seen earlier. The door was open three inches. He pressed it open with a knuckle—no prints—and stepped inside.
    Checked a closet: women’s clothes. Alyssa Austin’s bedroom.
    She was tidy, which wasn’t good. He’d have to be careful. He checked a dressing room, lined with closets and drawers, found what must have been two hundred pairs of shoes and at least a dozen suits and a hundred other outfits, all neatly arrayed on wooden clothes hangers, by type: blouses, skirts, business dresses, gowns. Most of the clothing was sealed in plastic dry-cleaner’s bags. No wigs. Opened drawers and cabinet doors, one after the other. Obvious spots to store a wig, if she had one, but nothing there. No fairy clothes, either.
    Back in the bedroom, he checked the bedside end tables, found nothing of note.
    Looked at photos on the wall: people he didn’t recognize, for the most part, and shots of Alyssa Austin with Frances and Hunter Austin.
    Two large chests of drawers. He ran through them quickly, found fifty pounds of lingerie and underwear, and a battery-operated vibrator.
    Of course it’s battery operated; what else would it be operated by, a fuckin’ windmill?
    That was it. But the vibrator made him curious. The bedroom was distinctly feminine, with a careful, cheerful paint job, and light, graceful furnishings. He walked down the hall, opening doors, and found another bedroom, smaller than Austin’s, but still large, that was distinctly masculine, right down to the antique airplane prop over the bed, the solid dark-mahogany bureaus, the ranks of beaten-up books in built-in bookcases. He picked one at random: Scaramouche, A Romance of the French Revolution, by Rafael Sabatini.
    Had to be Hunter’s bedroom. Austin had said that she and Hunter had marital problems, but implied that they might have worked through them, had he lived. But if they slept in different bedrooms, each decorated with some thought and expense, then their arrangement must have been long-standing. The troubles were more serious than she’d led him to believe.
    Huh.
    He went back to Austin’s room, closed the door to the exact degree that it had been closed when he came upstairs, and walked down to Frances’s room.
    Twenty-two cardboard moving boxes, all open at the top. He went through them quickly, found clothes and bedding and shoes and books and jewelry and a dozen bottles of flavored water and, in one of them, envelopes full of photographs.
    He set them aside as he went through the other paper he’d found, but he found no scribbled notes about fifty thousand dollars, no love letters, nothing but the typical detritus of a young life.
    He went through the photographs, which apparently went back to her high-school days. The envelopes had dates, and being a fussy kid, she always ordered duplicates, and there were a lot of reprints, people doing high-school stuff like plays and dances and proms with guys in tin man, lion, and scarecrow costumes from a production of The Wizard of Oz, in which Frances apparently played one of the witches.
    He was going through them at a hundred miles an hour, like a guy playing cards, Frances’s life flashing before his eyes, high school and college and after-college and on-the-job and then some Goths, and he slowed down, and then in the very last pack of photos, a shot showing a bunch of Goths at a Halloween party at November, and there in a photo with Frances was Roy Carter, and looking over his shoulder, Dick Ford, and a half dozen other Goths, three men and three women . . .
    Doing the chicken dance. He took the photo to a window, looked closer. Two of the women were none other than Leigh Price, the fairy girl who’d twanged Lucas’s magic