Robinson opened her mouth to answer but McGuire got there first: “We were friends. We don’t know what happened to her.”
“Do you think she’s dead?” Lucas asked. This time McGuire looked at Robinson, who said, “We think so
Not because we know anything, but just because… people usually are, when they’re gone this long. We talked to her the day before she disappeared, and there wasn’t any sign that she was going anywhere, that she had anything planned.”
“Probably kidnapped-her old lady has all the money in the world,” McGuire said.
“Were the three of you in business together?” A line of wrinkles appeared in McGuire’s forehead: “Where’d you hear that?"
"Just from… friends."
"We talked about it,” Robinson said. Looking for a little shock: “Did she give you fifty thousand dollars?” Robinson: “No way.” McGuire, almost angry: “She didn’t give us a fuckin’ nickel.” Lucas went in again. “She didn’t give you fifty thousand dollars in cash, mostly fifties and hundreds?"
"No. She didn’t,” McGuire snapped. “What the hell is this?"
"Trying to find out what happened to the money,” Lucas said
“We heard you were trying to build a website. A website takes money. This”-he gestured around the living room, at the computers and servers and cable lines-“takes a lot of money.”
“Takes thirty thousand, and we busted our butts getting it,” McGuire said. “If we went national, we’d be looking for more money to set up an office and buy more equipment, and we talked to her about it, but she disappeared before we did anything. And we weren’t asking for fifty thousand. Fifty thousand wasn’t enough-we were looking for a quarter million, and even then, I’d have to keep working.”
Not enough money, Lucas thought. He asked, “Where do you work?”
McGuire worked at Inter- Load Systems, a company that tracked mixed heavy freight and matched it with space available on over- the road trucks. The company was a new start- up, and McGuire worked on the mathematical models that worked out delivery routes and times.
“Sounds complicated."
"It is,” McGuire said. He was surly, and he looked tired; more than tired. Exhausted. Lucas asked where he was the night of the shooting. “Working here,” McGuire said. “Any witnesses?"
"Well-Denise. I mean, it was the middle of the night, where’d you expect me to be?"
"Out clubbing, maybe,” Lucas said. McGuire snorted. “I don’t have time to take a leak. The last time I went to a club, the Beastie Boys were big.” Lucas peered at him for a moment, then asked, “So what does this new website do? The one you were working on with Frances?"
"Tries to get people to make free advertisements. Then we test them for online reception, and try to sell them to the companies that they advertise,” McGuire said.
“What?” Robinson stepped up. “Suppose you’re, like, Coca- Cola, and you keep putting out those crappy old Coke ads that no kid would ever watch, because they’re so lame. So we solicit ads from guys with video cameras-high-quality stuff, not your home video-and when they come in, we test them, and then we pitch them to Coke. Coke gets a really out- there ad, something the kids will watch, really cheap-even if they reshoot it-and we get a cut.”
“Is that going to work?” Lucas asked, genuinely curious. “Not unless we can come up with a quarter- million bucks in the next few months. Word’s getting out, and we’re not moving fast enough,” McGuire said. “We get four or five guys doing this, only one’s going to make it. He’ll make a hundred million bucks, everybody else goes broke.”
“Well, shit,” Lucas said. He scratched his head. “If advertisements are so expensive to make, why would anyone make one for free?”
“The model’s already there,” McGuire said. “It’s publishing. When Stephen King was starting out, nobody paid him a nickel for all the work he was doing. Eventually, he sells a book, and then the big money arrives. But the publishing companies didn’t put up a penny until he had something good.
“So you’ve got all these guys with cameras and they’ve been to film school and they know models and young actresses-they can put out a video for a few hundred bucks. Get some experience, get some attention, and maybe, if they’re lucky, they get a whole bunch of money. It’s like publishing, and we’re like the agents.”
“Huh,” Lucas said. “That could work."
"I sure as shit hope so,” McGuire said. “So you see why we’re missing Frances,” Robinson said. “There was a possibility that she could round up some money. Her, her friends, maybe her mom and her mom’s friends.”
“Some of those people could drop a quarter- million dollars on the ground and not miss it,” McGuire said. “Frances’s dad joined a golf club out in Palm Springs a few years ago, and the admission fee was a quarter- million dollars. For a golf club. And here we’ve got this idea, and we… just… can’t… get it done.”
Showing anger again. Frustration. Interesting. Lucas asked more questions about Frances: was she angry, lonely, addicted, scared, vague? No, they said, she wasn’t any of those things. Robinson said at the end, “It was like one of those things where somebody’s killed in a car wreck after the senior prom. Everybody’s happy and then bam! Everybody’s dead. I didn’t see anything in Frances that I didn’t see every day-she expected to see us, to call us, and maybe to get in the business someday.”
“It wouldn’t have pissed you off if she’d said ‘no’? Sounds like she sort of led you on,” Lucas said.
“Would have pissed me off-but I think she was sold on the idea,” McGuire said. “I really thought she was going with us. When she disappeared, I thought I was going crazy. I kept trying to find out what happened, and nobody had anything to say.”
“You talk to her mother?” Lucas asked. “I did once… right after Frances disappeared,” Robinson said. “Just seeing if anybody knew where she was. Mrs. Austin seemed really confused. Out of it. Like she was losing her grip. I felt so sorry for her.”
“Do you have any idea why she might have disappeared?” McGuire said, “Well, you’ve been all over it: money. She was smart, but not brilliant or anything. She looked okay, but she wasn’t super pretty, like she might have a stalker or something. She was… nice. And she had money.”
There wasn’t much more. McGuire stood up when he left, and Lucas looked at him, standing, tried to imagine him with a gun in his hand. Still possible, he thought. At the door, McGuire asked, “You don’t have anything to do with Davenport Simulations, do you? There was a cop involved in that.”
Lucas turned. “I started it, with a friend. He bought me out, when it got over my head. I’m out of it now.”
McGuire’s head bobbed: “I’m officially impressed. You probably know what I’m going through right now.”
“Fun at the time,” Lucas said. “That’s because you made it,” McGuire said. “If you’d been wiped out by a competitor, it might not have been so much fun."
"There were no competitors,” Lucas said. “The olden days, when the world was new,” McGuire said. “I’m not that ancient,” Lucas said. “About six generations down the road, computer time,” McGuire said. “I mean, you probably once used cameras with film.” McGuire stayed in the doorway, and as Lucas got to his car, he called, “If you want to make another butt- load of money, all we need is a quarter million.”
Lucas paused with one hand on the car- door handle: “Gimme a week to think about it and talk to some friends. Maybe…”
“I’ll call you,” McGuire said. “I’ll call you.”
Back at the office, Lucas pulled up e- mail from Sandy. One had NCIC data on the Lorens, the other had photos. He looked at the pictures-and ran into the eyewitness problem: the eighteen were all between twenty- two and thirty- five, with dark hair, and most of them could have been the guy who shot at him. Most of them, in fact, could have been McGuire, but weren’t. He couldn’t pick one out.