– She argues with somebody who came with her. -She argues with somebody already in the house. -She encounters somebody in the dark-all right, give the credit to O’Keefe-who was waiting for Alyssa Austin, but who attacks Frances by mistake.
But did it happen right after she came in? Might not be able to tell without her coat-if the coat was cut through, then she’d still have had it on.
He struggled with it for a bit, then thought, Let it go. Anyway, Frances is attacked. Does the killer already have the weapon, or does he get it from the drawer? If the killing was carefully planned, why would he do it with a paring knife?
Lucas looked back down the kitchen counter from the death scene. If he wanted to use a bigger blade, there were plenty of them fifteen feet away, sticking out of a knife block. Heavy knives, easier to handle, deadlier.
And if he came to the house intending to kill, why hadn’t he brought a weapon of his own? A club, maybe. Quiet, effective, less likely to leave blood all around.
Lucas formed a little tent with his hands, folded them over his nose, working through it. The guy would have brought a weapon. If given a chance, once determined to kill, he would have used a bigger knife.
Therefore: the killing was spontaneous. If he took the knife from a drawer, had he known it was there? Was he intimately familiar with the kitchen? Or had the knife been left on the counter? Maybe somebody was cutting up an apple, or a chunk of cheese. Have to look at the crime- scene photos.
He considered the possibility of a burglar. But why would a burglar take the body, and clean up? Burglars got in and out, fast. Most of them got nervous if they spent more than two or three minutes inside a house. He might have taken the body to obscure some crime, though Lucas couldn’t think what the crime might have been, to have gone undetected this long. Maybe he’d come in to steal, knew that he’d left behind some fingerprints…
No, no, no. Wrong direction.
THE KILLING, done for whatever reason-maybe the fifty thousand, but maybe not-was spontaneous, but then, after it was done, the killer had thought about it, at least for a couple of minutes. Had to have thought about it-and then, he’d moved the body. Why? To obscure the time of the murder, or the place?
If there hadn’t been a small spatter of blood, that Austin had spotted among the tangled flowers of the wallpaper, if they’d cleaned that up… nobody might ever have discovered that the murder had taken place at the Austin house.
Given the tendency of erratic young Minnesota girls to run off to more romantic places, far away from January in Minnesota… the cops might not be looking for her, even now. Not too hard, anyway. Not yet. And the date of her disappearance might be stated as several days too late.
So the killer had thought about it. He’d taken the body out to his car, had cleaned up-had missed a couple of small spatters, but had gotten the rest of it, enough so that only a clued- in crime- scene team could find the signs.
Once the body was in the car, he’d wanted to get rid of it. Cold, snowy January. Impossible to dig a grave, without heavy equipment. So much snow that he wouldn’t be able to get back into the woods, on a trail.
Lucas went to the phone, called the office: “Carol. Something to do right now. I want all the local sheriff’s deputies and highway patrolmen alerted to the possibility that there’s a body out there in the ditches, where the snow’s melting. Also, in parks that were open at night, or anyplace that was cleared by snowplows. I want them to check any bags that might be large enough, anything that looks anomalous.”
“Frances Austin?"
"Yeah. She’s out there,” Lucas said. “And not too far from Sun-
fish Lake.” A chance they’d find it, he thought, when he’d hung up. On the other hand, if the killer had hauled the body down into an overgrown gully somewhere, or into a still- standing cornfield, it might not be found for months.
He was standing there, working it out, when the housekeeper came down the hall, pulling on an ankle-length loden-green coat that made her look like an East German cop. Or what Lucas imagined an East German cop had once looked like. “I have to go to the supermarket with Mrs. Austin’s list,” she said. “I’ll be gone an hour; will you still be here?”
“Probably."
"If you have to go, could you set the security system? Mrs. Austin is very particular about that.” She showed him how to do it: a one button press- and- hold. “Then you have thirty seconds to get out.”
When she was gone, he thought about the thirty seconds. Why had the alarm system been off when Austin came home? Because the bad guy didn’t know how to reset it? Or because it would take more than thirty seconds to get the body out the door? But he could have come back.
Hmm. Either the killer didn’t know how to reset it, or Lucas was making too much of the alarm. The stress of the murder, he might simply have forgotten.
Of course it had been turned off-so had the killer arrived with Frances? It seemed so. Or perhaps shortly after her.
But if he’d arrived separately, there would have been two cars, and Frances’s had been found back by her apartment, had been examined minutely, and there was no blood in the interior.
Had two people come together, and then left separately, one driving Frances’s car, one driving the car with the body? Two killers? He worked on it for a minute, and found only one handy solution: either the killer had arrived with Frances, or there were two killers.
He gave the housekeeper five minutes to drive toward the supermarket, went out by the front door, and watched the driveway for another two or three.
If she hadn’t come back by then, he thought, having forgotten something, she probably wouldn’t. After a last long look out at the driveway, he hurried up the stairs, down the hall to the big bedroom he’d seen earlier. The door was open three inches. He pressed it open with a knuckle-no prints-and stepped inside.
Checked a closet: women’s clothes. Alyssa Austin’s bedroom. She was tidy, which wasn’t good. He’d have to be careful. He checked a dressing room, lined with closets and drawers, found what must have been two hundred pairs of shoes and at least a dozen suits and a hundred other outfits, all neatly arrayed on wooden clothes hangers, by type: blouses, skirts, business dresses, gowns. Most of the clothing was sealed in plastic dry- cleaner’s bags. No wigs. Opened drawers and cabinet doors, one after the other. Obvious spots to store a wig, if she had one, but nothing there. No fairy clothes, either.
Back in the bedroom, he checked the bedside end tables, found nothing of note.
Looked at photos on the walclass="underline" people he didn’t recognize, for the most part, and shots of Alyssa Austin with Frances and Hunter Austin.
Two large chests of drawers. He ran through them quickly, found fifty pounds of lingerie and underwear, and a battery-operated vibrator.
Of course it’s battery operated; what else would it be operated by, a fuckin’ windmill?
That was it. But the vibrator made him curious. The bedroom was distinctly feminine, with a careful, cheerful paint job, and light, graceful furnishings. He walked down the hall, opening doors, and found another bedroom, smaller than Austin’s, but still large, that was distinctly masculine, right down to the antique airplane prop over the bed, the solid dark- mahogany bureaus, the ranks of beaten- up books in built- in bookcases. He picked one at random: Scaramouche, A Romance of the French Revolution, by Rafael Sabatini.
Had to be Hunter’s bedroom. Austin had said that she and Hunter had marital problems, but implied that they might have worked through them, had he lived. But if they slept in different bedrooms, each decorated with some thought and expense, then their arrangement must have been long- standing. The troubles were more serious than she’d led him to believe.