Huh. He went back to Austin’s room, closed the door to the exact degree that it had been closed when he came upstairs, and walked down to Frances’s room.
Twenty- two cardboard moving boxes, all open at the top. He went through them quickly, found clothes and bedding and shoes and books and jewelry and a dozen bottles of flavored water and, in one of them, envelopes full of photographs.
He set them aside as he went through the other paper he’d found, but he found no scribbled notes about fifty thousand dollars, no love letters, nothing but the typical detritus of a young life.
He went through the photographs, which apparently went back to her high- school days. The envelopes had dates, and being a fussy kid, she always ordered duplicates, and there were a lot of reprints, people doing high- school stuff like plays and dances and proms with guys in tin man, lion, and scarecrow costumes from a production of The Wizard of Oz, in which Frances apparently played one of the witches.
He was going through them at a hundred miles an hour, like a guy playing cards, Frances’s life flashing before his eyes, high school and college and after- college and on- the- job and then some Goths, and he slowed down, and then in the very last pack of photos, a shot showing a bunch of Goths at a Halloween party at November, and there in a photo with Frances was Roy Carter, and looking over his shoulder, Dick Ford, and a half dozen other Goths, three men and three women…
Doing the chicken dance. He took the photo to a window, looked closer. Two of the women were none other than Leigh Price, the fairy girl who’d twanged Lucas’s magic twanger, and her roommate, Patricia Shockley.
He looked at the rest of the photos, found two more of the November party, but couldn’t pick Frances out of them-it must have been her camera. She took the shots, except in the single photo. He put it in his pocket, whistling, headed down the stairs to the kitchen, got out his book, found Shockley’s cell number-he hadn’t taken Price’s, but remembered that she worked at 3M, and 3M wasn’t too far away.
Shockley answered on the second ring, and he identified himself and said, “I need your roommate’s number.”
“ Uh- huh,” she said. A taste of cynicism: “Some marital problems cropping up?”
He had to think about it for a second, then said, “No, no. I’ve found a photograph. You and she are both in it, along with Frances Austin and the two men who were killed, Ford and Carter. All three murdered people in one shot. She’s close, you’re not. I want to identify all the people in the photo.”
“Are you serious?” Fascinated, not frightened. “Absolutely. Do you have her number?"
"I’ve got two. Her cell number…” Lucas jotted them in his book, a cell number and an office phone
“Now listen,” he said. “Do not talk to any fairy women. Do not do that, not when you’re alone. If a fairy tries to get you alone, get into a crowd and call me. Okay?”
“Oh, God. You think…?” Worried now. “I don’t know. But do not get alone with a fairy."
"I won’t. Oh… Jesus.” Lucas tried Price’s cell first, got her on the third ring. “Leigh Price.” She sounded busy. Un- Goth- like. Lucas said, “This is Davenport, the state cop who talked to you a couple nights ago. I’ve got a photograph that I need you to look at right away. Like now.”
“At the lab, at 3M. My office."
"Tell me where.”
SHE WAS AT the main 3M campus, straight up a limited- access highway from Sunfish Lake. There was really no hurry getting there, but it was spring, the roads were dry, he had the Porsche. He clipped a great new red- LED flasher on the roof, a six- hundred- dollar light cheerfully paid for by Minnesota taxpayers, and made his way out to the highway.
He was careful on the gravel roads-a Porsche paint job was not something you fucked with lightly-but once on Highway 52, he let it about three- quarters of the way out, and blew the shorts off a top down, cherry- red ’65 Corvette Roadster. In the rearview mirror, it dwindled like a poppy seed that you drop off a bagel.
When he cut into the 3M parking lot, he thought, he unquestionably held the Sunfish- to- 3M land- speed record, and it would probably last forever.
Price’s office looked like the office of a university professor-bookcases stuffed with publications and stacks of paper held together with clamps or rubber bands, a fake- wood- grained desk, an impressive looking computer workstation, a half- dozen plants that all seemed to be dying, but not quite dead, lots of xeroxed Far Side cartoons, a rubber chicken hanging by its neck, a steel sheet with dozens of magnetized words, one of those poetry boards; a few of the words had been arranged to say, “The ugly gristle of morning smears a dry bone landscape down the flawless tapestry of night.”
Price was sitting in an Aeron chair, her feet up on her desk, peering at a scholarly publication through oversized black- rimmed glasses. When Lucas stuck his head in the door, she said, “There you are.” She patted the seat of a visitor’s chair that sat beside her desk. Price gave off a certain wavelength of fuck- me vibrations. Many women did that, Lucas believed, but they were only received by men who were tuned to the right wavelength, which was determined by birth or accident, perhaps, but not by choice.
Weather was one of them, and she broadcast on Lucas’s frequency, and he’d begun picking them up before he could even see her face (she’d been wrapped in a parka when they met). Price broadcast on the same frequency; and she knew that Lucas was a receiver.
She smiled and said, “So what’s the big deal?” He took the picture out of his pocket and passed it to her. “This was taken at a Halloween party at November. I need to know the names of the people in it.”
She took the photo-looked at his face, as though she hadn’t really believed that there’d be one-and said, “Oh, God. This is the Roy guy, isn’t it”-she touched Roy’s face-“and this guy is named Richard Trane… Richard, not Dick or Rich. And this guy…” She closed one eye, thinking, then said, “Brad. Brad something, I don’t know his last name, but Judy would, they went out.” She touched the unknown woman. “This is Judy McBride.”
She knew Frances, but not Roy Carter or Dick Ford. “I do remember that Karen Slade took the photograph, she was having like a brain fart or something, she couldn’t push the right button, she tried like ten times.” She had Slade’s phone number, but no numbers or addresses for anybody else.
She told him all this in a blast of words, wide eyes behind the glasses, her body small and close and soft and round, and when she was done, Lucas had decided that, circumstances being different, he would happily have locked the door, pushed the magazines and all the other crap off her desk, and banged her brains loose right there-the other circumstances being that he was happily married and pathetically loyal.
Instead, he stood up and said, “You’ve got to be careful. Do not go off to dark corners with women you don’t know-or men, for that matter.”
She stepped close and put a hand on his jacket sleeve. “You really think… there could be a problem?”
Yeah. There could be a problem. You could find your shorts down around your ankles about five seconds from now. “Yes. Obviously.” He stepped away. “You really have to be careful. And while you’re being careful, you’ve got to watch people around you. This fairy woman lures people to places where she can kill them. If you get that vibration from anyone, anyone at all, that they’re trying to pull you off somewhere… call me.”
He took her cell phone and programmed his cell phone number into it, and she walked him out to the door and he rambled through all the warnings again, and she waved goodbye and watched him cross the parking lot to the car, and when he got inside, he twiddled his fingers at her, and realized that for the first time in several days, his leg didn’t hurt.