Phantom Prey

Martina Trenoff. She works at General Mills now.”
    Austin nodded: “They got rid of her.”
    “They did. What if she had a key to this house? She goes psycho, she comes here to confront you, she’s angry, she’s lost her job. She’s waiting in the kitchen, Frances comes in . . .”
    “Martina has a flinty soul,” Austin said. “But she’s very controlled— I can’t see her murdering somebody.”
    But Lucas was building it: “She could be a sociopath. They’re typically intelligent and well-controlled. She uses your husband to promote herself in the company, has a plan that nobody is allowed to interfere with. Then it all goes to hell and she winds up on the outside. She feels like Hunter owes her something, or the Austins, and convinces herself that she should come here to collect it.”
    “Criminals think like that?”
    “Exactly like that.”
    “Huh. A sociopath. I think . . . she is a sociopath, of course, but, you know, I suspect that she’d find herself in this situation, and she’d run the numbers, and she’d see that the risk of murdering somebody wouldn’t pay off. So she wouldn’t do it. That’s what I think.”
    Lucas’s eyebrows went up. “Of course? She’s a sociopath, of course ?”
    Austin nodded. “I have a personal theory that ‘mental illness’ is just an extreme version of a common tendency. I’m a little bipolar. Not too much, but a little. Everybody knows people who are a little paranoid— not enough to be crazy, but that way. A lot of creative people are a little schizophrenic, with other worlds that are very clear to them. Most successful businesspeople are sociopathic—they don’t let a lot get in their way. Anyone who’s built a business has hurt people. You should know that. You were Davenport Simulations.”
    “I didn’t build it,” Lucas said. “I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. So I got a guy to do it for me, and when I started getting in his way, I took the money and got out.”
    “Not sociopathic enough,” she said.
    “Maybe not,” Lucas said.
    “When you left, did you feel the other guy’s hands in your back, pushing?”
    “A little.”
    “See? He’s a sociopath,” Austin said. “Cutting you off from your baby. And probably felt good about it.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. It was all true.
    “So if you’re not a sociopath, what are you?” Austin asked. “Obsessive-compulsive?”
    “Or like you, bipolar, maybe,” Lucas said. “Maybe a little obsessive. ”
    “And you’ll use it to get this guy.”
    “I am going to get him,” Lucas said.
    “And maybe a little egomaniacal? Lucas?”
    He’d drifted away for a split second. He came back and said, “I bet Martina’s small and dark and athletic.”
    Austin shrugged: “Not athletic by my standards. I’d say, trim . She’ll have a satchel butt by the time she’s forty-five, if she doesn’t watch out. Dark brown hair, taller than me, but . . . I’m short. She’s on the short side of medium height.”
    Lucas said, “I gotta go see her. Like right now.”
    “An epiphany?”
    “A stupidity. Why haven’t I talked to her? Why is that?”
    The meeting took an hour to organize—forty-five minutes to batter through the General Mills bureaucracy, fourteen minutes of phone calls to pin down her actual working location, one minute to set up the meeting: she was cool, efficient, and had been expecting the call.
    They met at a Caribou Coffee shop in the Minneapolis Skyway: she’d told him on the phone that she didn’t want him coming to her office at General Mills. “We could shut the door,” Lucas said.
    “My office doesn’t have a door,” she said. She sounded, Lucas thought, like a wounded animal.
    He picked her out as she walked along the skyway. Moving quickly, swerving through the crowd, carrying an expensive-looking black-leather woman’s briefcase; a bit nerdy for a woman, in a slightly masculine navy blue suit, low practical shoes, and steel-rimmed glasses. She could be the fairy, Lucas thought, though nobody who’d seen the fairy mentioned glasses.
    She walked into the shop, looked around, spotted him, came over and said, “Mr. Davenport.” Not a question.
    He stood as she came up, and she put out her hand and he shook it, and she said, “Sit down while I get a coffee. Watch my case, please.”
    He watched her in line, three back, then two, rocking on her feet, impatient, looking at her watch: a Rolex or a good copy. No; it wouldn’t be a copy.
    The woman in