26

LUCAS GOT UP early, feeling lethargic, after a bad night’s sleep. In looking back over the pattern of killings-not counting the murder of Frances Austin-it still appeared to him that they had to be connected. Had to be connected to the Fairy, whether the Fairy had used the knife, or not.

He knew the Fairy was small, dark, and apparently in good physical condition. Some of the people who’d seen her had described her as young, but one woman said she wasn’t as young as she looked-while a guy in the same conversation had said something to the effect that whatever her age, she had a young ass.

If, Lucas thought, you were looking for someone a bit crazy-perhaps even schizophrenic-with a powerful revenge motive, a somewhat older face but younger ass, you had Alyssa Austin.

But Fairy was dark, while Austin was blond. That would not, Lucas thought, be an insuperable barrier for a woman whose career was built on providing youthful images to other woman, through her spas.

A wig, some eyebrow pencil, youthful dress, a careful avoidance of prolonged contact with other people-it could be done.

And, in the murder of Patricia Shockley, there’d been the question of why she would let an unknown woman, who looked like the Fairy, whom she’d been warned against… why she would allow her in the apartment? What if the unknown woman had shown up as the blond, unthreatening mother of Shockley’s own murdered friend?

A long train of suppositions; not enough for an arrest. How about the burned car? Might that lead to her? Something that would pin her down? The only living person who’d seen the Fairy for more than a couple of minutes was the Xiong guy, if indeed he’d seen the Fairy at all.

HE WAS MOVING by eight, cleaned up, grumbled at the housekeeper and Sam, who’d already had breakfast, skimmed the papers. Neither one had anything on the arrest of Ricky and Helen, because, he knew, neither paper spent much time tracking the cops anymore. If the paper’s main cop guy had gone home for the day, you could murder the queen of England, and the papers wouldn’t know about it for eighteen hours.

He made it to the office a few minutes after nine o’clock, and immediately went down to see Jackson, the photographer-Jackson wasn’t in, but had been in, was probably wandering around the building someplace, Lucas was told. Lucas grumbled more about that, as he sat and waited, and finally had the bright idea of calling Jackson on his cell phone-and it turned out the photographer was three offices down the hall.

“Be there in a second,” he said, and he was.

“HOW LONG would it take you to Photoshop those pictures of Alyssa Austin, and turn her into a brunette?”

“Depends on how precisely accurate you want it to be,” Jackson said. “I’ve got a half- dozen shots. If you want all half dozen, and you want good but not perfect… half an hour. From right now to prints on your desk.”

“Get it done,” Lucas said. “See you in half an hour.”

WHILE HE WAS waiting for the photos, Lucas called Shrake, who was back at the Heather- watch apartment. “I was gonna call, but I didn’t think you’d be up yet,” Shrake said. “A weird thing happened- a guy showed up, looked like an asshole, talked to Heather, looked around the apartment. I’d seen him earlier on the street, walking around. Heather seemed to know him; didn’t have a problem letting him in.”

“They were friendly?"

"No, not especially. He just came in, hands in his pockets. Leather coat, black leather gloves. Looked around, mostly, and she just stood there. Then he left.”

“Siggy’s security,” Lucas said. “That thought occurred to me,” Shrake said. “He gave off that feeling, like one of those Secret Service guys, checking the place out."

"Stay in touch,” Lucas said. “Look-what about overtime? I’d like to get Jenkins back in here, but he’s not due until late afternoon. Then I’m supposed to be off, but I’d like to stay. I’d do it for free, but overtime would be nice.”

“I’ll fix the overtime,” Lucas said. “Call him in.”

JACKSON SHOWED UP at ten o’clock and slid a half-dozen high resolution glossy prints across Lucas’s desk. Lucas picked them up. He’d seen the photos of Austin as a blonde, and the brunette hair, in the new photos, had transformed her. “Tricky part was her eyebrows, they might look a little fakey,” Jackson said.

“Look perfect to me,” Lucas said. “I heard about the arrests last night,” Jackson said. “That picture of Davis help out?"

"That cracked it,” Lucas said. “Everything came after that.” Jackson looked pleased. “I told them that the new gear was worth the money."

"If these turn out to be something,” Lucas said, holding up the photos of Austin, “I’ll talk to Rose Marie about making that van a permanent item on your equipment list.”

“Ah, man- that’d be great,” Jackson said.

XAI XIONG, the man who may, or may not, have sold the burned car to the Fairy, worked at a computer rehab place on University Avenue, fixing what could be fixed, putting in new hard drives. You could, he told Lucas, buy a good- as- new used Dell for $150.

“How long did you talk to the woman about your car?” Lucas asked.

Xiong was a small man with a brush cut and a pale burn mark on one cheek. He was maybe thirty. “Fifteen minutes? Twenty minutes? She didn’t know nothing about cars.”

“How’d you hook up with her?” Lucas asked. “I had the phone number in the window of the car, and she called

I said I needed nine thousand dollars, and she said that was okay, if the car ran good. I told her the car ran perfect and even had good rubber on it. The seats were sorta screwed, we welded them down, but I told her a lady would probably fit pretty good. So she said she was interested, and we met out there, and we drove the car a couple miles up the frontage road to this Purina place, and then back, and she said she’d take it.”

“Paid cash."

"Yup. Nine thousand dollars in hundred- dollar bills. Fresh in a bank envelope from Wells Fargo. Had me sign the papers, said she’d put them through, and that’s the last I heard from her. The cops tell me she never did put the papers through.”

“Was nine thousand dollars a fair price?” Xiong’s eyes drifted and he smiled. “That’s what I was asking,” he said. “So maybe… she could have negotiated."

"Some,” he admitted. “She never did. She just paid up.” She was rich, Lucas thought. As Frank Willett had said, the cost of a car was nothing. If Lucas could find a nine- thousand- dollar cash withdrawal from Austin’s account, at the right date, that would be a big plus. Lucas took the pack of photos out of his jacket pocket, slipped them out of the envelope. He handed them to Xiong and asked, “Does this look like her?”

Xiong shuffled through them quickly, cocking his head back and forth, then handed them to Lucas and said, “That is her.”

“You’re sure?"

"Yeah, man-that’s her,” he said.

SO HE HAD Austin as the Fairy, but no connection between the car and the crimes-and if the car had burned to the ground, there wouldn’t be one.

And what did she use the car for, anyway? To get back and forth from the killing ground, so that if anyone saw her, they couldn’t say the killer had been driving a Benz or a Jag? Possibly. Probably.

Xiong’s testimony would be challenged in court. Lucas would have to tie Austin/Fairy more tightly to the car, and to the Goth scene, before they could start pushing her directly.

He dipped in his notebook for names: a number of people had seen her. If he could get one or two more to make a positive ID… If he could figure out where she’d kept the car, and he could positively tie her to it, that would make good Xiong’s identification…