He got the crutch and went out to the truck.
Lucas limped into the office and Carol asked, “Oh my God, what are you doing here?”
“Working."
"That crutch looks like a waste of time.” He looked at it. “Yeah.” He called Austin: “I’ve got to see you, the earlier the better. Where are you?"
"In my car, I’m almost at the Wanderwood location, it’s up by North Oaks. I’ll be here for a couple of hours, if you could stop by there?”
“Sure. Half an hour, probably.” When he left, Carol was coming back up the hallway carrying an old- fashioned wooden cane. She gave it to him and said, “Try this."
"Ah, for Christ’s sakes, I’m not elderly."
"Try it.” He tried it, and it helped. “What a pain in the ass,” he said. “If it’ll make you happy…” He strolled down to the elevator, twirling it like a baton, but after he got downstairs, used it to walk out to the car. It took a few pounds off the leg, and that helped. A lot.
Fuckin’ women.
Wanderwood was a well-kept, yellow-painted concrete-block building that shared a parking lot with a Caribou Coffee shop. He left the cane in the truck, thinking that he could suppress the urge to limp, took two steps, and went back for the cane. Inside, a receptionist looked him over and said, “You’re not here about the mirrors.”
“No. I’m here to see Alyssa Austin. She’s expecting me."
"Hang on one second,” the receptionist said, and disappeared down a tiled hallway. Lucas looked around: there was just the faintest tang of sweat about the place, but it might have come from a spray bottle. Otherwise, it smelled like Chanel, or some other kind of French perfume.
Expensive-looking easy chairs were arranged around a tree- trunk coffee table, very ecological- looking, in the waiting area. The table held an apricot-colored orchid in a plain terra- cotta pot, and a stack of appropriate magazines: In Style, Vanity Fair, Fitness, Marie Claire, Allure, Vogue. Nothing with a car on the cover, or even a suggestion that a car existed.
He paged through Fitness for a moment, then the receptionist reappeared and said, “Come on back.”
She took him past a small open workout area, where a half- dozen women rode bikes or ran on treadmills, to a private workout room where Austin was working with a trainer, doing Pilates. She was flat on her stomach doing foot- and- hand lifts with light weights in her hands, sweating like a dog, but when she finished, she did a kind of snap push- up that bounced her to her feet. The trainer nodded and said, “Not too bad, but you have to start finishing the routine.”
“How many times have I missed?” The trainer, a woman a bit taller than Austin but just as fit, bones showing in her face, said, “Week before last, you only got halfway through.”
“I’m doing good; if I only miss one in six, I’m doing good,” Austin said, and then, to the trainer, “Take a break. I’ve got to talk to this guy.”
“You’re pretty hard- core,” Lucas said, letting his eyes walk around her body.
“I can’t believe you’re walking around,” she said. “Ah, I’ve been hurt worse doing home repair.” He’d been using the line frequently, because he thought it was pretty good. Austin stepped over to a barre and pulled a towel off, mopped her face and her neck. “I’m a jock, I’ve always liked to sweat,” she said. “My problem is, I tend to work too much, and eat too little. Then my ass disappears. The people who come here definitely don’t want to see an assless CEO.”
“You’re holding your own,” Lucas said. He quickly added, lest she misinterpret a comment that he intended as purely aesthetic, “That fifty thousand bucks that Frances took out… there’s something strange going on there. We need to find out where it went. She took it all in cash, and the way she did it…”
He told her about his visit to the bank and she said, “I’ve no idea what that was about. I’ve never had fifty thousand in cash, myself, in my entire life. I mean, you can’t buy anything with it. Anything legal.”
“We were wondering about that ourselves,” Lucas said. “Drugs… or maybe some kind of political thing. We’re trying to think of stuff.”
She crossed her arms and looked down at the floor, tapping one foot, as though trying to work through it, then said, “Frances did this Goth thing, but you know what? She was really a pretty mainstream kid. She wasn’t a big risk- taker. She was a little risk- taker… and why would she finance something like drugs? She had all the money she needed. I assume you’re not suggesting that she used fifty thousand dollars’ worth of drugs.”
“Could be done, but you’d see it."
"I never saw her loaded,” Austin said. “Never. Fifty thousand in cash, she would have had to be involved in distribution or something. And I can’t see that. Not at all. If you knew her, you’d know how crazy it seems.”
“She wouldn’t have had to use it all at once,” Lucas said. “She could have been running on credit for a while, until she got her money, and then paid off her dealer.”
“She wasn’t a druggie,” Austin said. “She just wasn’t."
"Do you know what a druggie looks like?” Lucas asked. “I do. We have women here, well- off people, who got involved with cocaine or pills, they come out of rehab and straight into here because the doctors tell them to. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t, but I get a sense of what druggies are like and Frances wasn’t like that. She may have smoked a joint on occasion, but who hasn’t?”
Lucas noticed that Austin’s daughter was now in the past tense, but didn’t mention it.
“She didn’t gamble."
"No."
"So where did the money go?"
"I don’t know. It’s just not right. It’s just not right.” Lucas limped over to the barre and leaned his butt against it. Austin said, “You got shot in the same bar where Dick Ford was murdered. Near where this other boy was killed.”
“Yup."
"So there must be something there."
"That’s what I think.” He felt a twinge from his groin, and winced a little. “Why are you walking around?” Austin said. “Your face just went white as a sheet of paper."
"Because I’m bored and I wasn’t hurt that bad. And I’m interested: you know a guy, a friend of Frances’s, middle height, maybe five- eleven or so, black hair, black leather jacket, jeans, cheap sunglasses, a crooked mustache but maybe not, a hip- looking guy?”
She cocked her head to one side. “Like a wannabe biker?"
"Yeah. Sort of a broken- ass wannabe biker."
"God. He sounds like… quite a while back, I only saw him once, there was a guy named Larry,” she said. She held her hands to her lips. “No, that’s not right. It was an L name, but like a woman’s name… Lauren? Loren? Loren, I think. It sounds like him.”
“Loren."
"Yes. I’m sure of it. When I saw him, he was wearing a white T- shirt with the black jacket and black jeans and black hair, and I thought, you know, Here’s a guy who could manipulate his way into a young girl’s pants, and he’d be pretty heartless about it. But I don’t think she was seeing him. I don’t think they had any kind of physical relationship. At least, not at the time I saw him. They didn’t have that… intimacy about them.”
“Loren,” Lucas said. “No last name?"
"No. I only saw him that one time, they came by the house in Frances’s car, but…"
"He came by the house?” Lucas asked. “Yes, just for a while,” she said. “Did he look it over?"
"Well, they carried some things from Frances’s room down to her car… but you know, I don’t really remember him that well. As it turns out, I never saw him again. He didn’t seem like Frances’s type. That’s why I remember him at all, because… he seemed like somebody to be wary of.”