“Not just that: also, Frances knew about it. She didn’t have to invent some secret bank method. So she must’ve gone through the bank for a reason. Maybe she wanted to leave tracks. Maybe… I don’t know. But it’s something. I thought about it all night.”
“So what would you suggest?” Lucas asked. She shrugged: “I’m not the famous detective. I’ve got a funeral to work through. I’ve got… things. But. You have to push the money. That’s what people always said in the procurement business, when we went to Vegas. If something smelled bad, look at the money. Always look at the money. Maybe you could go back to the bank… push all of her friends about the money. It befuddles me: what would she use it for? What, that she couldn’t simply write a check for? That she couldn’t get me to write a check for?”
Lucas peered at her for a moment, then asked, “That’s what you’ve got?”
“That’s what I’ve got,” she said. “Are you going to think about it?"
"Yes. That’s what I’ll do today,” Lucas said. “Think about the money, God help me, and nothing else.”
THAT’S WHAT he did. His secretary, Carol, came and looked at him, and went away, and then came back and looked at him again, and finally asked, “What are you doing?”
“Thinking.” She looked worried. “Huh. Could you take a look at-” He held a hand palm- out to stop her: “No. I won’t look at anything
Go away.” She peeked a couple more times. Once she asked, “How’s the leg?"
"Not good,” Lucas said. “I need to find a teenage girl to suck on it."
"I’ll leave you alone,” she said. Just before noon, as he was sitting reviewing, in his mind, everything that had happened, the obvious occurred to him. He called Austin on her cell and said, “I need pictures of Frances.”
“I’m at home, working on the funeral. I’ll get a bunch together. Is this about the money?"
"Yeah. But I’ll tell you what, this would all be a lot easier if she had a loser boyfriend.”
He called the vice president at the Riverside State Bank. “Could you get me the name of the banker who opened Frances Austin’s account?”
“Sure. Just a minute.” More like two minutes. When he came back, he said, “Emily Wau. She’s now the manager at the Maplewood branch. I checked, and she’s working today.”
“Give me her number,” Lucas said.
LUCAS RAN down to Sunfish Lake, left the car turning over in the driveway. Austin had a dozen photographs: “I’ll get them back to you as soon as I can,” he said. “At the funeral?”
“That’s okay-she had duplicates of everything."
"Well- I’ll get them back.” Emily Wau was of Asian descent, a small, smiling, efficient woman in a conservative gray- green dress. “You want me to look at pictures of Frances Austin, to see if I can remember opening her account?”
“Yes. It would have been only about five months ago. October. You must’ve spent a little time with her.”
“I looked at the paperwork-she opened it with five hundred dollars,” Wau said. “So it would not have been a remarkable event.”
“Still… six months. Not very long ago,” Lucas suggested. “Let me look at the pictures,” Wau said. Lucas passed them over, and she went through them, carefully, one at a time, turning each over, facedown, on her desk as she finished with it. When she was done, she picked them all up, looked at them again, then stared at a monitor camera mounted in one corner of the bank’s ceiling, a thinking- about- it stare, then looked back at Lucas and said, “You know, it was several months ago, and I probably talk to twenty people a day, so I can’t be sure, but… I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this woman.”
Lucas said, “I’m not surprised.”
AND THERE it was: the case was cracked, though there was some cleaning up to do-like figuring out who the killer was. Lucas left the bank whistling, and on the sidewalk, got on his cell phone and called his secretary: “I need to get Dan Jackson to take some pictures for me.”
“I’ll see if he’s available."
"Do that. I’m going to lunch.” He stopped at a McDonalds, had a Quarter Pounder with cheese, fries, and a strawberry shake, thought about the implications, rolled on into the office. Carol saw him coming and said a couple words into a phone, hung up and said, “Dan’ll be up in a minute.”
“Excellent.”
DAN JACKSON was a middle- sized, middle-weight black man with short, neatly trimmed hair and a tightly, neatly trimmed mustache, and black plastic- rimmed glasses. At work, he wore button- up shirts with collars, and sweaters and khaki slacks and Patagonia jackets. He was, he said, invisible, not only to white people, but to black people as well. “I’ve been on elevators alone at night with white women and they never knew I was standing there,” he’d told Lucas. “When I’m in the uniform, I am fully goddamned invisible.”
Now he showed up carrying a Nikon camera with a lens more than a foot long, and Lucas groaned to himself, but smiled and said, “Dan, sit down.”
“Got something for me?"
"I need surveillance shots of five women, plus about five more women at random, for a board,” he said. “Usual range of sizes and shapes on the random shots-give me a couple of each: blond, sandy hair, dark brown. All white. Get some of our people out in the parking lot if you want, for the dummies, but don’t make it obvious-get a bunch of different backgrounds.”
“I’m ready to go,” Jackson said. He patted the camera. “I got the new D3 with the 200-400 f.4 VR AF- S. Good ISO up to 6400, I can go to 12800 if I have to, but there’ll be some noise. Twelve megapixels so we get plenty of resolution. With this baby, you can really reach out and touch somebody. Brady squealed like a stuck pig when I put in for it-with the police discount, the lens is still better than four grand, and the body’s five…”
“That’s great,” Lucas said. “… And I’ve been out shooting a little wildlife, to familiarize myself with the whole system. The white balance and auto- focus is as good as I’ve seen. I tested it against a 1DsIII, and the D3 is better. The IDs’ll give you more resolution, but I’d defy anyone to say which is which when you look at it on a computer monitor, or a sixteen- by twenty print, for that matter.”
“Terrific."
"That fuckin’ Flowers is already sniffing around, trying to borrow it,” Jackson said. “He’s still shooting a D2xs and I told him, ‘You’ll have to pry it from my cold stiff fingers.’ ”
Lucas’s head was bobbing: “That’s just what we’re looking for, and fuck Virgil. Anyway, I got a short list.” He pushed it across the desk.
Jackson fondled the Nikon and leaned forward to look at the list. “Who are these people?”
“Suspects in a series of murders, so you’ve gotta be discreet,” Lucas said. “Alyssa Austin; her housekeeper, a woman named Helen Sobotny; Leigh Price-that’s L- e- i- g- h-who works up at 3M; Martina Trenoff, works at General Mills; Denise Robinson…” He pushed another sheet of paper across the desk. “Here’s their home addresses. I need them as quick as I can get them. If you need some cover from somebody, refer them to me. Overtime’s not a problem.” He filled in the detail, and pulled up Austin’s spa website, showed Jackson a photograph of her, and driver’ s- license photos on Sobotny, Price, and Robinson.
“Nasty pictures-nasty,” Jackson said, looking them over. “Not good enough to be used on a board,” Lucas agreed. “We need civilian clothes, no particular background. If you have to shoot Austin coming out of one of her spas, then you’ll have to do something to alter the background. Full- face, side views. Full body.”
“I could Photoshop them if I had to."
"The problem is, Austin lives in Sunfish Lake and your cloak of invisibility won’t work there.” They hashed it out for a few more minutes. “I’ll do what I can,” Jackson said. “Talk to you tomorrow.”