Phantom Prey

“Thank you for finding her,” she said.
    “I just . . . uh. I just talked to the Dakota County cops,” Lucas said. “I don’t know what they told you about what happened to Frances.”
    “Hardly anything.”
    “I can tell you some of it, if you want to hear it.”
    “I do. Absolutely,” she said.
    “Your mother said you were turning your business over to an assistant?”
    “Not an assistant—she’s a vice president and does our finances,” Austin said. “She does the hard part of running the place. I told her I’d be away for a few weeks. No big deal. She’s done it before, when I ran off to Europe or China.”
    They sat in the living room with coffee. Lucas knew from experience that relatives wanted to know what had happened to their loved one, not every brutal note, but the substance of it, and that plain talk was valued over euphemism. “She was stabbed to death. She died quickly. I think the Dakota cops told you that she was wrapped in a plastic sheet.”
    “A painter’s sheet,” Austin said. “A drop cloth. We last had painters here four or five years ago. I could look it up, but they were older men. Fifties, anyway. I wouldn’t think that they’d fit a profile for this kind of thing.”
    “When we had our house painted—we built our house a few years ago—I don’t think the painters used that plastic,” Lucas said. “I think that’s what you get when you’re painting one room, one time, on your own. Our painters used regular canvas cloths.”
    Austin frowned, and her eyes shifted away, and then came back. “I think you’re right. That’s what ours did. I remember they had a lot of tape.”
    “So did ours. The Dakota guys didn’t say anything about painter’s tape. I don’t know. Looking for painters might be going in the wrong direction, but we’ll check—I’ll have Jim Benson run them down.”
    “Was there any . . . I mean, you know, on TV . . . Did she have any skin or anything under her fingernails . . . ?”
    “I don’t know. They’re going over the plastic with a microscope. Literally—with a microscope. If there’s any blood there, or skin, or anything that would nail a killer, the lab will find it.”
    “I had another thought,” Austin said. “I don’t know whether you had it or not. But if they wrapped her in plastic, is it possible that they brought the plastic to wrap her with? That they came here knowing that they were going to kill her?”
    Lucas scratched his jaw: “I didn’t have that thought. When I did my little reenactment, I decided that it was spontaneous. The evidence is consistent with her having been stabbed with that little knife, the one that’s missing. If somebody came here planning to kill her, and then to cover up, why did he do it that way? There are other ways to have done it that wouldn’t have left any blood.”
    “She must have come here with him,” Austin said. “Her car was back at her apartment. So she knew him.”
    “I don’t know. I just don’t know,” Lucas said. “But I’m gonna find out.”
    Austin had gone off in a new direction. “Is the autopsy done?”
    “I’m not sure; I know they at least did a preliminary.”
    “Did they check to see if she was pregnant?”
    “Huh. I’m sure they would have . . . and they would have said something. Why?”
    “I just keep wondering about it; about the whole scene, about the attack. Spontaneous, violent, had to be very emotional. What would set somebody off that way, somebody that she knew well?”
    Lucas shook a finger at her: “That’s something. That’s what I’ll push next. She had money, maybe she’d hooked up with somebody, some thug, who had his eye on the money. Then something happened here and she blew him off.”
    “And you’re going to find out who it was.”
    “Oh, yeah. Yeah. Count on it.”
    Austin leaned forward from her spot on the couch and touched Lucas on the knee: “You think it’s the money? And not the Goth thing? The dark culture?”
    “Could be both; could be the killer is wiping out the people who he knows talked with Frances. Maybe he’s afraid she told them something that would identify him.”
    She shook her head: “The Goths. It has to be in that circle, somewhere. I mean, look what happened to you. You talk to Goths and you get shot.”
    “Yeah, yeah.” He shifted around in his seat and looked out toward the lake, trying to piece it together. He said, “I spoke to some people at your husband’s company, about