John Sandford - Phantom prey

When Austin got off the phone, she came to him with a smile and gave him a hug, but she looked pale and thin and dry, and felt that way when she squeezed him: “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 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.