“It’s Patricia Shockley. A-pos,” Anson said. “Sonofabitch. You started the DNA?”
“Thirty-six hours. We got the guy locked up in Ramsey on a California warrant, it’s probably good for two weeks.”
He explained the California problem and Anson said, “If we can’t nail it down in two weeks, we won’t get it. Hell, the knife is probably enough. The circumstances, if he was nailing Frances and her mother . . . there’s plenty of motive in that, somewhere. Get a shrink on the stand . . .”
“We could do that.”
“Lucas, I knew there was some reason I liked you,” Anson said. “I just couldn’t put my finger on it.”
“Yeah, well, I’m heading over to Ramsey to squeeze Willett’s pointy little head,” Lucas said. “You better be there.”
“Gimme a time.”
Willett had a public defender named Tony Mose, rhymed with Rose, who met Lucas in the lobby of the Ramsey jail and trailed him back to the interview room, where Willett was already waiting with a deputy. Mose was dressed in a somber black suit and white tie, like a guy going to a funeral. He was not, Lucas thought, a bad attorney.
“You get a chance to talk to him?” Lucas asked Mose on the way back.
“I did. I’ll tell you what—this time, for once, I might actually have an innocent guy.”
“Nah.” Lucas shook his head.
“I’m serious, Lucas, the guy’s got that thing about him—he didn’t know what in the hell I was talking about when I asked him about the knife,” Mose said. “He said you must’ve put it there.”
“You hardly ever hear that,” Lucas said. “The cops must’ve did it.”
“The difference is, I think he meant it,” Mose said.
Willett had had a bad night, as Lucas had hoped—his eyes were puffed with fatigue, and when they came in the room, he looked up and said, “Now what?”
Mose laid it out: Lucas had some questions. Mose would stop any questions that were improper, and any questions that Willett didn’t feel like answering, he didn’t have to answer.
“I didn’t do a thing,” Willett said. “Wait, I did, you know? I had some bud back in San Francisco, but it was all for personal use. I wasn’t dealing or anything. This Frances thing, this is crazy. I had nothing to do with Frannie getting killed.”
“Did Frances know that you’d been sleeping with her mother before she was sleeping with you?” Lucas asked.
Mose said, “Keep in mind, you don’t have to answer.”
“But also keep in mind that sleeping with both of them isn’t a crime and we can prove that you were anyway—we’ll be giving Mr. Mose a copy of a note we took out of Frances’s purse, addressed to you,” Lucas said to Willett.
Anson came through the door: “Did I miss anything?”
“Just started,” Lucas said. He turned to Willett. “You’re in a lot of trouble, Frank. We need to talk about the knife, but we need to talk about this other stuff, too. If you did it, we’re going to put your ass in prison. If you didn’t, we’re your best chance of staying out. Now—did Frances know?”
Willett bobbed his head a couple of times and then said, “I think she found out. I don’t know when. But things were going sour at the end. I hadn’t even talked to her for a week before she disappeared.”
“You didn’t exactly hurry up to give the cops whatever information you had, after she disappeared,” Anson said.
“What would you have done?” Willett asked. “I didn’t know where she went, or why she went. But if a rich girl disappears, and the poor guy she’s been hanging out with, it turns out they were breaking up, and if that guy’s got a dope thing hanging over his head . . . well, what are the cops going to think?”
He was right about that, Lucas thought: that was what he did think.
His relationship with Frances peaked in the summer, Willett said, then cooled off in the fall, and by December, they’d stopped sleeping together. “I told her right from the start that she couldn’t let her mother know. I mean, I knew what would happen if she did—Alyssa would be all over the place. I’d lose my job, Frances would be gone, I’d be back at Snowbird flippin’ burgers. When we started breaking it off, I said, ‘Please, please, don’t tell your mom. She’ll fire me.’ And Frannie said she wouldn’t tell. We didn’t hate each other, but she was getting all corporate, and I am . . . what I am. We could see that we weren’t going to make it.”
“How often were you over at the Austin house?” Lucas asked.
“When I was going with Alyssa, you know, a couple times a week,” Willett said. “I never went there with Frannie. I mean, we were afraid that Helen would tell Alyssa, and that’d be it. There wasn’t any reason for us to go there. We went to Frannie’s place, or mine.”
They pushed and pried, with Mose as an umpire, but couldn’t get Willett to admit any animus toward either of the Austins. “You know, I think sex is a perfectly natural process, and I’ve had relationships with quite a few very nice women and I valued all of them and I’m still friends with most of them and some of them still sleep with me sometimes, and that’s all cool,” Willett said. “It’s not like I’m some crazy geek, and when a woman goes away, that’s it, my world is over. There are women all over the place, and lots of them are pretty good.”
“Good in bed?” Anson asked.
“That’s not what I meant—I meant, pretty good. In general,” Willett said. “Good people. With a few witches mixed in.”
“You a Goth?” Lucas asked.
“Do I look like a Goth? No, I’m not a Goth,” he said. “Frances was a Goth for a while, but she was beginning to see that it was all pretty make-believe. She said to me, one time, ‘I’d like to meet a Goth who could change a flippin’ tire.’ So she was pretty much done with that scene, I think. Play-acting.”
THE KNIFE.
“We found the knife, Frank.”
“You guys—”
“No, and you gotta know that’s bullshit,” Lucas said. “I was there, we had three crime-scene techs who didn’t know this case from a dognapping, and they found it, not me. And they went in before I got there, so nobody planted the knife. And the knife has Patty Shockley’s blood on it—it’s human blood, and it’s her blood type.”
“I don’t even know Patty Shockley. I don’t know any of them besides Frances.”
Lucas rode over him: “There’s enough blood to get a DNA match, which will be coming. But we’re willing to bet, and I’d stake my next year’s pay on it, that it’s her blood. How’d it get there, Frank?”
Willett slapped both of his hands on the top of his head, face down, and smoothed his hair back with his fingers, dragging at it, and said, “Honest to God, I don’t know. I honest to God, I told Mr. Mose . . . I honest to God think that one of you cops put it there. Maybe not one of you, but some cop. I mean, there was no knife there. No knife. No fuckin’ knife. It’s like I’ve been dropping acid or something, everything is crazy. I just don’t know what happened.”
“Have you had any blackouts from the drugs you’ve used?” Anson asked. “Pot, or acid, or coke or meth or . . .”
“I don’t use any of that shit—I smoke a little bud from time to time, but that other shit will kill your body. And I can’t afford acid or coke. I wouldn’t take meth, that’s like sniffing glue, it’ll fuck your brain. I just can’t figure . . .”
He confessed that he probably had no alibis for the nights of the killings, simply because he hung out at night. “That’s what I do. I hang out, couple clubs, tavern, walk around on Hennepin Avenue, whatever. Hang out.”
They talked about his relationship with Austin: had that dissolved in anger? “No. Well, you know, maybe you’d have to ask her. But we stopped when she just got busy with taxes, and we didn’t start up again. I knew it was just a thing—she knew it, I knew it, it felt good, and about the time it should have started coming apart, it did.”
“She gave you that truck,” Lucas said.
“She did. She was a sweetie,”
Willett said. “It wasn’t payment, or anything—she gave it to me because I had this old piece of shit that had holes in the floorboards and I just about gassed myself every time I drove it. I had to keep the windows open. So she got me this truck— surprised the shit out of me.”
“And it wasn’t for the sex, it wasn’t to say goodbye.”
“Might have been a little bit to say goodbye, but the basic thing is, the Austins have so much money that she just really didn’t care how much it cost,” Willett said. “The way she thought was, If I did what he did, rock-climbed and surfed and skied, this is the kind of truck I’d want. So that’s what she got. The money, the money was nothing. A bad day on the stock market, she’d lose ten times what that truck cost.”
They worked him, and pushed him, teased him and tried to make him angry, but he only got sadder and more confused. When they were done, they all stood up, and Lucas called the deputy, and Mose said he wanted to talk for a few more minutes, and Lucas and Anson stepped toward the door.
Willett said, from his chair, “Officer Davenport—when you saw that knife, in the drawer, what’d you think?”
Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought, maybe, There’s something. ”
“You didn’t think, That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in my life? That a guy would go on the run but leave the bloody knife right in the first place somebody would look, in the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers, under some old underwear? Maybe I should have tacked a sign on the thing that said, ‘Knife inside.’ ‘Murder Weapon Here.’ I mean, it’s just so fucking stupid.”
As Del said—but Lucas dodged. “People who murder other people usually aren’t wizards,” Lucas said.
“But it’s got to be the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard of.”
“No, no,” Lucas said. “Not the stupidest. But . . . it’s up there.”
“Think about that,” Willett said. “Think about it.”
Out in the hallway, Anson said, “Loser.”
Lucas said, “We didn’t move him much.”
“I’ll background him, if you want.”
“That’d be good,” Lucas said. “There’s quite a bit of paper over at his house—we’ve got his cell phone records, address book. Any kind of a profile . . .”
When lucas was alone in his car, he thought about Anson’s “loser” label. Lucas had been an excellent college hockey player—second team all-WCHA in his senior year. He wasn’t pro level, but he was almost pro level. He could have fooled himself into thinking he was. Could have hooked up with a minor league team, could have hung on to the edges for a few years.
But he hadn’t. He’d known he wasn’t good enough, so he looked around for something that he’d like, and that he’d be good at. He joined the biggest police department around, with the intention of becoming a homicide cop. He’d done that, and a few other things that came along the way.
If he’d gone the other way—tried for the pros—where would he be now? Flipping burgers in hockey’s equivalent of Snowbird? The line between winner and loser was pretty thin, and the paths were pretty crooked.
Willett was smart enough; women seemed to like him; he had some skills, some abilities . . . And he was coming up on forty, had a thousand dollars and a truck given to him by a woman, and at nights he hung out.
Seemed like waiting for death—and yet the line was so thin, and the paths so crooked.
21
Alyssa could feel the Fairy, there, behind her own eyes.
The Fairy had been her, when she was a young girl, before Alyssa fell into the hands of the Coach. The Coach had known what Alyssa could do in the water, had seen it when she was eight, had pushed her with a ruthless discipline and determination to do what she, the Coach, hadn’t been able to do: win. Win all the time. If she’d come up in the right year, she might have gone to the Olympics, but that was the breaks of the game. As it was, she’d been the best athlete at the University of Minnesota, despite what some of the football players might have thought. . . .
But getting there had been brutal, and terminated an otherwise unremarkable childhood.
Her parents hadn’t seen the brutality behind the swimming: they’d just seen their kid’s name in lights, at the end of the pool, most of the time with a big “1” in front of it. The Coach had buried the Fairy . . . little bits had resurfaced over the years, perhaps, with her playful-yet-serious interest in astrology, and particularly in the tarot, but mostly, the Fairy was buried under purpose and will and discipline.
Which, in the end, was the only thing that would get her through this.
Loren sat on a chair turned away from the living room table, while Alyssa lounged in an easy chair, a glass in hand. A bottle of Amon-Ra shiraz from Australia sat on the end table beside her, eighty dollars a bottle, and worth it.
Loren was dressed in a sixties-rocker-look brown-velvet suit, narrow pant legs, and a pinched waist on the jacket, with heavy brown brogans that would have been good for kicking someone to death. Alyssa said, “One thing that’s hard for me is to understand why you’re here. Are you really here? Are you an external reality, or are you all in my mind? Could I take a picture of you with a camera?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know about the camera, but I’m at least as real as Fairy.”
She wagged a finger at him. “No, you’re not. I know what Fairy is. Would you like to talk to her?”
Her voice pitched up and she giggled: “All right, here I am,” Fairy said. “You wanted Fairy. Woman with a knife-edge wit.”
Loren said, “Quit messing around, Alyssa. I need you back. We’ve got to talk.”
Alyssa came back, a slack smile playing around her lips: “See, I know what Fairy is. She’s me—another piece of me, and I think we’ll eventually get back together. We’ll heal. Other people have had this disorder—maybe my case is a little different than others, but all cases are a little different than others. Anyway: I understand it. I can look it up on the Internet. I can read stories about people who have gone through it. But you, Loren—the only people who have experiences like you, are total goofs. Crazy people. But you seem so . . . rational. Are you the devil?”
“There is no devil,” Loren said.
“Isn’t that what the devil would say? You talked me into all these evil things. . . . I killed three people—or Fairy did—and you were right there, eating it up, pushing me. If you’re not the devil, you’re a pretty good mock-up.”
Loren looked away: “Well, I’m not the devil. I’m dead and I have a dead person’s psychic ability. I could feel the hands of those people on Frances’s shoulder, and if Frances were here to talk to you, she would tell you the same thing. Killing them was the right thing to do.”
“And Frances is still dead,” Alyssa said.
“But she’s not gone,” Loren said. “I can feel her aura. She’s around here, but maybe not for long. She might be getting on the boat, to go over.”
Alyssa sighed. She had heard it before. “And over . . . is heaven? Or hell? Or purgatory? Or what?”
“Who’s to know who hasn’t gone?” Loren said. “When I’ve seen the boat, sometimes it’s all lit up and cheerful, like the Delta Queen, with the calliope playing, and sometimes it’s this dark little rotten boat with a red stern wheel. . . . Who knows where it’s going?”
“Whatever,” she said, waving him off. “There’s nothing to do about it now.”
“Unless you see Frances, of course,” Loren said. “You have to be prepared.”
“Oh . . . bullshit. Bullshit.” Now she was angry; wine-angry, more wind than real violence to it. “You are nothing more than an illusion. I wonder what Xanax would do to you, if I got rid of a few anxieties for a while?”
Didn’t faze him: “You can take what you want, but your problem isn’t going away,” Loren said. “In fact, your problem has gotten worse. When you let Fairy out the other night, you let her out at exactly the wrong time.”
Alyssa leaned forward, elbows on her thig
hs, an empty wineglass in her hands. “Lucas Davenport,” she said.
“Yes.” Loren stood up, thrust his hands in his pants pockets, wandered around the room looking at the paintings, stopped in front of the landscape by Kidd. “You know, this landscape. Those are the bluffs over the Mississippi just downstream from St. Paul—right where the river turns.”
“That’s right,” Alyssa said.
“It’s odd—it’s not completely realistic, but it’s completely real. The other odd thing is, that’s where the riverboats leave from. Oh, a little upstream, by the upper landing, but right there in that stretch of river. Weird that you should have this painting, hanging here.”
“Forget the riverboats!” Alyssa snapped. “We need to focus on Davenport. Something’s going on with Helen. Why’s he looking at Helen? Why’s he looking at Ricky?”
Loren walked away from the painting, around the table, sat down again, his eyes sliding past hers. “Maybe he found something. Maybe they had something to do with Frances. If they did, this is a serious problem, Alyssa. Right now, he thinks all four killings were done by the same person. If he decides that Helen or Ricky were involved with Frances . . . then why was that knife in Frank Willett’s apartment?”
“I have to think . . .” she said, dropping her face into her hands.
“You have to think as Alyssa—not as Fairy,” Loren said. “Fairy is the impetuous one. She’s the one who wanted to do the car and knife in the same night. She almost blew herself up with the car.”
That made Alyssa smile. It had been one hell of a blast, all right. She’d been both frightened and exhilarated when she got to the top of the hill and ran toward the private plane hangars. “That was pretty amazing.”
“Amazing,” Loren said. “And she got away with it. But there was no need to do the knife that same night. If we’d had time to think, we could have directed Davenport at Frank, without giving up the knife. We would have been better with the ambiguity . . . but the knife is a hard fact. There has to be an answer to it.”
“Helen,” Alyssa said after a while. “Helen knew that I was sleeping with Frank. We used to come here in the afternoons, send her off to the other end of the house. But she knew what was happening. ”
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