Phantom Prey

drove: a guy with no money, fucking both an heiress and the heiress’s daughter, who was, come to think of it, also an heiress.
    But the mother, in addition to being a little goofy and believing in astrology and probably tea leaves, also had a tougher, business side. In addition, she’d had a number of lovers, and might not have been interested in a long-term relationship with somebody like a bicycle racer/ model/surfer guy.
    She might like fucking him, okay, but long-term, she’d want somebody with status in the community, somebody with . . . good shoes. She’d mentioned the artist, Kidd—a perfect match for her. As an artist, he’d certainly be goofy enough, and hell, he was in museums. That’s what she’d want, not some guy who walked around thinking about his next pair of sunglasses.
    The daughter, on the other hand, young, inexperienced, not all that great-looking, might be a bit more influenced by a guy with big muscles and a surfer’s outlook.
    And if the guy were looking for money . . .
    From there, that one thing, that relationship, all kinds of other things might have fallen out.
    She tells him she’s going to break it off: they argue in the kitchen, there’s some pushing, she reaches for a knife, he takes it away from her and sticks her. Wonder what kind of truck he’d have, whether there’d be transmission fluid in the truck bed? No doubt in Lucas’s mind that the guy would have a truck, if he was a surfer, a bike-racer, a rock-climber, all that.
    Or, how about this: the daughter finds out that he’s fucking both her and her mother: goes to Mom with the story, there’s an argument that turns violent, one of them yanks out the knife in a fit of passion, or jealousy, or even self-defense and . . . zut.
    “Finally,” he said aloud. The whole Frank thing made everything clear: this was no big cosmic mystery, it was just some of the same old bullshit. An argument about sex and love, some hysteria, and a murder.
    Why were the others killed? Because they knew about the relationship? Was Frank there the night of the chicken dance?
    He thought about Austin for a moment.
    Not Austin, he decided. She was tough, but unless she was totally nuts, there was no way that she could have produced all the tears that came with Frances’s death—and he’d seen her face when they told her that the body had been found. Until that moment, Lucas thought, she’d had some hope that Frances might still be alive.
    Not Austin.
    At the BCA office, he ran halfway up the stairs, until his bad leg bit back at him, and he nearly fell. Limping into the office, he nodded at Carol, who asked, “What’s happening?” and came to stand in the door while he punched up the computer.
    “Got a break, maybe,” he said. “Found Frances Austin’s purse, got a breakup note out of it. Breaking up with a guy named Frank.”
    “Old-fashioned name, Frank,” Carol said. “Don’t see many Franks anymore. If they’d gotten married, it would have been Mr. Francis and Mrs. Frances Austin.”
    Lucas was listening to her prattle and he pulled up the e-mail, then frowned and looked up and asked, “What’d you say?”
    She shrugged. “Nothing. I was just going on.”
    “You said Frances and Francis—are they spelled the same?”
    “No, but I don’t know which is which.”
    “I bet no one else does, either,” Lucas said. He ran his hands through his hair, said, “Holy shit. Holy shit. Go get me Dan Jackson, on the run, and tell him to bring that big fuckin’ camera. Holy shit, the Frances Austin who went to the bank could have been a man.”
    He took a moment to explain, walking around his desk, then, as Carol went to call the photographer, went back and pulled up the photo of the breakup note. As Pratt had said, the note was badly smeared, but the salutation was clear enough:
    Dear Frank,
    I’ve put off writing this letter for a long time [smudge] heart I didn’t want to believe what I heard. There’s no point in [longer smudge] hear from you again, really. I also don’t want [smudge]
    From there, it was a black stain; maybe the feds could make something out of it, but felt-tips don’t make much of a physical indentation on paper, her handwriting was small, and the stains were dark. Still, it was possible that a lab could recover the original.
    Not that he needed it to push the investigation. What they had was, for now, good enough.
    Lucas frowned: but where would the fairy fit in this scenario?
    He thought about it