AUSTIN’S PARENTS LIVED in Minnetonka, on the far side of the Cities. When she was able, she called them with the news. “They’re coming,” she said. She was drained, perched on the couch with her hands between her knees: demanded the details of the discovery. Lucas made it as simple as he could, obscuring details.
“There isn’t any doubt, though."
"I saw her face… the snow… you know. She’s still intact. She was wearing a charm bracelet."
"The charm said ‘Frances.’” Lucas nodded and she said, “She got it from her father when she was twelve,” and she started crying again.
Her parents showed up in an hour, gray- haired, shocked, late sixties or seventies in cloth coats, her father clicking his tongue as he tried to comfort his daughter, her mother weeping with her; and after a few minutes, when Austin said they’d be okay, Lucas and Weather left.
Weather said, on the way to her car, “I never, ever want to go through that. Never ever.” And, “Catch the guys who did it.”
“Doesn’t really help much,” Lucas said. “Won’t help her."
"Maybe not, but it’ll help the rest of us,” she said. “Put those ass-
holes in a cage.”
ON THE WAY HOME, following Weather, Lucas called Ruffe Ignace, the crime reporter at the Star Tribune, at home. “Has the paper bought out your job, yet?”
“No. I asked them to, but they said they valued my talents,” Ignace said.
“Miserable motherfuckers."
"No kidding,” Ignace said. “They give me fifty grand, I’d be working in Manhattan tomorrow."
"Some kind of cabaret, waiting tables?"
"Fuck a bunch of cabarets. I’m talking the New York Times. I get up every morning and practice my liberal clichйs in the mirror,” Ignace said. “Wanna hear one?”
“Maybe one,” Lucas said. “Income disparity in this country hasn’t been so high since before the Great Depression,” he said. “Not bad,” Lucas said. “I got a hundred more, and I can say them with a straight face,” Ignace said. “So what’s up?"
"I owe you one half of a favor, I think, from the other night,” Lucas said. “So-Frances Austin’s body was found a couple of hours ago in a ditch out in Dakota County.”
Lucas gave him a few details, including the name of the deputy in charge. “You heard nothing from me.”
“Of course not. Any chance of art?” Art was what newspaper reporters called a photograph of a dead body; or anything else, for that matter. “I don’t know, but they’ll be on the scene for a while. If you could jack a guy up and get him out there.”
“Talk to you later,” Ignace said. “I’ll go do some jacking.” The rest of the way home, Lucas thought about the sad scene at the Austins’, the loss of a daughter and a granddaughter, and the effect it’d had on his wife, and the fact that he’d just peddled the information to a newspaper reporter, for some future consideration.
At a stoplight, he looked out the window and into the car to his right, where a young woman was laughing as she talked to the driver, whom Lucas couldn’t see; and how happy she looked and how miserable Austin and her parents must be. And how he felt bad that he didn’t feel worse about talking to Ignace.
That night, Weather looked at his leg, shook her head. “The persistence of the bruise bothers me,” she said. “There might still be a little bleeding going on-not serious, but something.”
“Ah, shit,” he said. “You don’t think they’ll have to go back in?"
"No, you’d know that, if it happened. You’d have a lump like a golf ball, if there was a big problem. It’s not hard to the touch… so… it’ll just take a while. The sutures look okay, everything feels fine, smells fine.”
“There’s some science for you,” he said. “Smells fine."
"Don’t ever let anyone tell you that medicine is a science,” she said
“It’s always been an art, and it still is. Look at the training: we’re artists, not scientists.”
IN THE MORNING, he popped a couple of Aleve, and then, working without inspiration, he called Dakota County and talked to an investigator named Pratt, who’d already talked to Jim Benson. “Jim and I are sort of running in parallel,” Lucas said.
“Okay-well, I can tell you she was stabbed eight times in the stomach and chest.”
“Ripped open? Or stuck?"
"Stuck,” Pratt said. “In and out. Short weapon, thin blade. A little tearing, but not like a positive effort to rip. More like the victim was twisting away from the knife. Benson told me that you guys were thinking about a paring knife. The wounds are consistent with that.”
“But no knife."
"No. We walked the ditches with metal detectors, but everything seems to be contained within the plastic sheet. The killer drove along until there were no cars coming, threw her body in the ditch, and drove away. The plastic sheet is the stuff you can get at Lowe’s or Home Depot or anyplace else. And, this could be important, there was some oil in there, that we think came with plastic. It’s not regular oil, it’s transmission fluid.”
“You got that back from the lab?"
"No-one of our guys looked at it and sniffed it, but I believe him,” Pratt said. “What I’m thinking is, maybe she was transported, wrapped in the plastic, in a work truck or a pickup, where you might have some tools or other gear. Engine parts. From talking to Benson, I got the impression that the killers were in a hurry to get out of the house. And he checked with Mrs. Austin, and she said they hadn’t had any painting done recently. So I’m thinking that the killers had the plastic with them. So maybe a painter’s truck? Or somebody else who’d have a plastic sheet in their truck. Anyway, if we can find the truck, we might be able to match the transmission fluid. That stuff is sticky, and it’s hard to clean up.”
“That’s something,” Lucas said, and it was. “Any other debris with it? Leaves, or anything organic, or paint? Carpet fibers? Something we could put with the transmission fluid to triangulate on the truck, when we find it?”
“Don’t know yet,” Pratt said. “The lab stuff won’t be back for a while- we’re pushing it, but you know: it takes time. We’re going over the plastic sheet with a microscope. I’ll tell you, the transmission fluid was sticky as hell, so if anything else was floating around in the truck, it probably picked it up.”
“That’s good; that’s good,” Lucas said. “What else?"
"Well, she had a coat wrapped around her legs and there are no holes in the coat, so she wasn’t wearing it when she got stabbed. I don’t know if that means anything.”
It did, Lucas thought, going back to his reenactment. It meant that she’d had time to take off her coat in the house, which probably meant that she wasn’t ambushed in the dark. “They were trying to cover up the killing, probably just threw it in,” Lucas said. “But get Mrs. Austin to ID it.”
“Yup. And there was about a half- roll of paper towels soaked in blood, and you can see where somebody held them, squinched them, and one of our guys thinks we might be able to get something out of there. Prints. I have my doubts.”
“Sounds unlikely."
"You gotta know the guy,” Pratt says. “He watches all the science shows."
"Anything else?"
"If you mean, did she scratch ‘John did it’ on her palm-she didn’t."
"Okay. Get me all the paper on it, will you? I’m trying to pile up as much stuff as I can… copy everything that you send to Jim."
"I’ll do that,” Pratt said. “One more thing. The ME says there’s so much damage that she bled out in a minute or two. So the murder was done in Sunfish. You guys still got the case.”