“… Price,” Lucas said. “Price. Who is now next door.” He pointed down the hall with his pencil. Lucas climbed the last couple of steps. “Eight or ten times. So she was killed like Frances Austin. Not like the others.” Anson nodded. “Except that the body wasn’t moved. Other than that, and from looking at the Austin photos, I’d say they’re almost exactly alike. Bigger knife this time, but it looks like there was a struggle. Some blood got thrown around. Take a look.”

The apartment was being processed, and Shockley’s body, still uncovered, lay spread- eagled on the floor six feet from the door. “Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said.

“This will get in the papers and on television, and people will become extremely upset,” Anson said. He was pretending to be funny, but his voice wasn’t funny, and his eyes weren’t. “‘Why didn’t the police warn the people of the Twin Cities that a serial killer was roaming loose?’ I’m working out the answer in my little notebook.”

“The answer is, because it wouldn’t do any fuckin’ good,” Lucas said. “We got the fairy’s face out there, looking for help…”

“Not the same."

"Ah, fuck it. What have you got?” Anson said, “We have a witness who lives here, a Bob George, who looked out his window and saw an unfamiliar woman walking away from the house about the time of the murder. He’d heard a noise, but didn’t know what it was-he thinks now that it might have been a muffled scream. He lives downstairs from here, says he only heard the sound once, and so he didn’t look to see what it was. He’s heard other sounds like it, and wasn’t even sure it was in the house.”

“Did she look like the fairy? The woman he saw leaving?"

"No. He couldn’t see much of her, but she appeared to have lighter hair. Anyway, not black, or dark brown,” Anson said. “Something between blond and medium brown, but the lights aren’t so good outside, so he’s not sure. Just an impression.”

“Body style?” Lucas asked. “Hard to tell. He was up here, the angle was bad."

"Gotta be the fairy. She’s changing her look.” Lucas was pissed and washed with sorrow for the young woman on the floor. He took in the scene, as much as he could with the administration of murder going on around him, and then he headed down the hall to talk to Price.

PRICE WAS dressed in mourning black, as she’d been the first time he’d seen her, with the little phony Raggedy Ann rips and tatters. Tonight, though, she had dark rings under her eyes, and a trembling disbelief in her lip. An older woman, a dyed- redhead in jeans, was sitting with her when Lucas stepped past a uniformed cop into the living room.

“Ah, God,” she said, and she stood up and stepped over to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, her head on his chest, and she started weeping. The uniform cop watched with interest, and Lucas let it go for a few seconds then pried her loose and said, “Easy. You better sit down. Really, you better sit down.”

“She was just… she was just trying, trying, to get on with her life,” Price groaned.

“Did she give you any idea…"

"She was going to go to law school,” Price wailed. “She was practicing the LSATs. She was going on a diet. Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with everybody?”

“Why would the person who killed Frances, come and kill Pat?” Lucas asked. “Why? There must be something that ties them together.”

“I don’t knowww…"

"Frances took fifty thousand dollars in cash out of her bank account. Could she and Patricia have been involved in some kind of business deal? In something, in… in…”

But he didn’t know what, and she looked at him with a stupefied frown, as if he were speaking Norwegian or something, and finally asked, “What? Fifty thousand dollars?”

“Were they involved in… What would they do with fifty thousand dollars in cash?”

“I don’t know,” Price said. “They hardly ever talked to each other. Why would they…? Fifty thousand? What can you do with fifty thousand? You couldn’t start a pop stand with fifty thousand dollars. I mean, I’ve got fifty thousand dollars."

"I thought… I don’t know. Drugs? Gambling? Politics?” Price’s lips trembled again. “You don’t know what’s going on here-you just don’t know. Drugs and gambling, that’s crazy. There was no fifty thousand dollars. I would have known about that…”

When he had no more questions, Price asked, “Is this fairy coming after me? If I’d been here, it would have been me that was dead, wouldn’t it be? You’re looking for a fairy and I would have seen… Oh.” Her fingers went to her lips.

“Oh, what?"

"She always kept the chain on the door,” she said. “Patty. Always

The door wasn’t bashed in or anything, was it? I didn’t see anything like that.”

“I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “Then she had to know the guy,” Price said, eyes wide. “She never took the chain off. When I was out late, she’d wait up until I got in, so she could get the chain. If she went to sleep, I’d have to pound on the door until she got up, because the chain was on.”

“The chain wasn’t on when you got home tonight?"

"No… and… I mean, she was right there, dead, when I pushed the door open, but I was already worried a little bit when I saw the chain wasn’t on, I was about to call her. I knew she was supposed to be there, because I saw her leaving the club.”

BACK IN Shockley’s apartment, Lucas checked the door; the door was fine. Anson came over and asked, “What?” and Lucas told him about the chain.

“Well, that’s something,” Anson said. “She let her in. If it’s a her."

"And Price says she wouldn’t have let a stranger in the door. Not even a woman, since this shit started.”

“So who is it?"

"Dunno,” Lucas said. “But I should.” He thought about that for a moment, and then said, “You’re tearing the place apart?"

"Naturally."

"I want to know about money. I want to know how much she had, and where it went, and if she got new money, or if she spent a lot recently. That fifty grand plagues me-it’s all over my ass.”

15

ALYSSA AUSTIN felt not confused, but broken-as though a wire had come loose somewhere in the circuitry of her brain, that her mind was full of static. Felt as though the picture tube was about to blow up, or that a thunderstorm was overhead, ruining reception.

Once in the car, she could feel Loren, there behind her, as surely as if she’d had a pumpkin in the backseat: and at the same time-at exactly the same time-she knew that Loren didn’t exist, that Loren was a flaw in the wetware. The woman, the nightmare, the horror that Davenport called the Fairy-she was the Fairy.

And the Fairy struggled to come back, did come back, fading in and out, as though Alyssa were getting alternating shots of Xanax and cocaine.

She sliced across St. Paul on I- 94, headed south across the Lafayette Bridge and down Highway 52, then cut east to the South St. Paul municipal airport; all on remote control, as though she were getting directions from a comic book, frame by frame.

Hunter Austin had a condo- hangar, not yet sold. She used her card key to get through the gate, wound through the clutter of dark hangars, picked up the garage- door opener off the front seat, punched up the hangar door, and when it had opened, pulled the car inside.

Her Benz was crouched there, waiting, and she shifted to the bigger car, hurrying, forgot to get the garage- door opener, and after she’d backed out, had to jump out of the car and go back and get it. Hope nobody sees me, hope… The hangar area was dark as a coal sack, cold. Not another living thing, only Alyssa, scurrying in and out of her car’s headlights, at Hunter Austin’s hangar.

From there, it was ten minutes home. Loren’s face blinked in the mirrors and the windows and the glass panels around the house, but she ignored him: programming errors, nothing more. Once she thought she heard him cry out to her; thought she felt him plucking at her jacket. She ignored the cry, the touch, hurried up the stairs to her bedroom, to the bathroom, to soak her face in cold water, to take a shower…