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 for a moment, and then let it go. If they nailed down Willett, he thought, the fairy would come clear. She was probably another of his lovers-maybe the one who put Willett up to stealing the fifty thousand.
“Carol!” She popped back in the office: “Dan’s on his way."
"We need to get everything on paper that we can about Willett
Run everything you can think of. If we come up with previous addresses, out- of- state, we’re gonna want to get their stuff…”
Jackson, the photographer, came in a moment later, and Carol called, “We’ve only got one Frank Willett locally-it’s Frank, not Francis, on his driver’s license.”
“Where’s that Willett work? We need an address,” Lucas said. “I’ll get into the employment security, hang on…” Jackson, stepping around Carol, asked, “Another rush job?"
"I think we’ve got something this time,” Lucas said. Carol called, “It’s him, he works for A. Austin LLC in Minnetonka
He lives in St. Louis Park.” And she pulled up his driver’ s- license photo: Willett had long black hair, carefully arranged on his shoulders, an oval face, square white teeth. He looked good, and he knew it, even in a license photograph.
“Ooo,” Carol said. Lucas squinted at the picture, trying to make him as the man in the alley. Couldn’t do it; the long hair was distracting. The guy in the alley seemed to have short curly hair, he thought. But if Willett had cut it… or maybe even if he’d been wearing a ponytail on the night of the shooting… it wasn’t impossible, but he couldn’t ID him from the photo.
Lucas had Carol call Minnetonka and ask for Willett. When the receptionist transferred the call, Carol hung up.
“I’m going out there,” Lucas said. “Want to ride along in the van?” Jackson asked. “I’ll meet you over there,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to get stuck if you have to wait awhile; but I’ll come and sit for an hour or two.”
Minnetonka was on the far western edge of the metro area, and from the BCA office, took a solid forty- five minutes, west on I- 94 and I- 394, winding around in the maze of streets at the end of it. Lucas had Jackson on the cell phone, and they cruised the spa, Waterwood, from opposite directions, then hooked up at a strip mall and Lucas transferred into the back of the van.
The GMC had been taken away from a dope dealer. It had nice captain’s chairs in the back, tinted windows, a dresser with a mirror, and, if the chairs were moved, space for a narrow memory- foam mattress, which had been stripped out.
Jackson took it back to Waterwood, parked across the street, eased into the back of the van and took the other captain’s chair. “Magazines in the chiffonier, diet Coke and raspberry- flavored water in the fridge,” he said. “I got the rest of the subscription to Sirius, long as you don’t play any country and western.”
Lucas settled for a bottle of water and a classic rock channel, checked the magazines: Blind Spot, PhotoPro, PDN, a couple of Shutterbugs, Men’s Journal, a Playboy, and an aging Esquire with a picture of Charlize Theron on the cover, as the world’s sexiest woman.
“You think she’s the sexiest woman?” Jackson asked, about Charlize Theron.
“There is no such thing,” Lucas said. “That’d be like the best baseball game. You can argue about it a long time, but you’ll never agree.”
“I think she’s the sexiest,” Jackson said. “Angelina Jolie?"
"She’s good, she’s good,” Jackson admitted. “Michelle Pfeiffer?"
"Ah, Jesus, now you’ve got me confused,” Jackson said. “I like the blondies…” So they talked about sex and tried not to drink too much water, because they’d have to pee, and Jackson had a sack of black- corn chips and some nacho sauce in a plastic cup, and they ate some of that, but not too much, because then one of them might develop gas, and then they talked about the truck for a while, and whether there was any real difference between a GMC and a Chevrolet, and they watched women coming and going, and Jackson said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing her with her clothes off,” and Lucas asked him if he’d ever shot any nudes. Jackson said he dreamed about it, but his wife would kill him, so he didn’t.
“You got any nude pictures of your wife?” Lucas asked. Jackson bit on the oldest baits in history: “No, uh, you know, I…"
"Want to buy some?” They were still laughing about that when Frank Willett came out the door with an old lady. Willett was six feet tall, Lucas thought, narrow shoulders, no hips at all, probably weighed a hundred and sixty pounds, and all of it was muscle: like a snake. He was wearing sweats with a hood folded back on his shoulders, gym shoes, and a black ball cap; round, steel- rimmed glasses; and he dangled a gear bag from his left hand.
Jackson started whaling on the camera the moment they came out the door. The outside walks were made of flagstone, and Willett and the old lady chattered along as they ambled toward the street, and then took a right toward the parking lot. Lucas said to Jackson, “Short hair,” but when they turned, he spotted a short ponytail sticking out the back of Willett’s ball cap. “Shit. Ponytail.”
“Hair’s black, though, like you wanted,” Jackson grunted. “ Suck- ass license photo, it could have been any color.”
In the parking lot, Willett patted the old lady on the shoulder and walked across to his car, a gray Land Rover LR3. “Get the plates,” Lucas said to Jackson.
Jackson did, but said, “Just as easy to look them up."
"The guy’s a personal trainer,” Lucas said. “Where does he get money for a Land Rover? It might not be his.” Jackson was shooting: “Well, there’s ways…"