“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 dog napping, 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.”