“You didn’t do that?” Lucas asked. “Of course not,” Austin said. “There was way more money than either of us needed, for the rest of our lives.” She lifted her hands toward the ceiling, to indicate the richness of the house. “Way more than enough.”

Way more than enough. Still, she admitted, she’d be the one who’d inherit from Frances, after the estate tax was paid to the state of Minnesota.

“Estate tax makes me laugh,” she said. “When Hunter died, Frances had to pay sixty- six thousand dollars in estate tax to Minnesota to get her inheritance. Then she died, if she did die, and I’m going to have to pay another sixty thousand, out of the same money, to inherit from her.”

Lucas, watching as she talked, realized- he’d noticed, but hadn’t realized-how dressed up she was. The pants and jersey together cost two thousand dollars, he’d bet; and her hairdo, done in what Lucas thought of as an ice- skater cut, probably cost five hundred. She’d dressed up for him, something he doubted that she often did, in the daytime, in the winter. She was being formal; she was pleading.

He said, “When women kill, they often do it with a knife. Not because they plan to, but because they do it close to the kitchen, and there are knives handy, and they’re familiar with them. They do it in a moment of passion, the heat of an argument. You had a daughter, with whom you’d been having disagreements, a large amount of money was involved, there was a substantial blood trail but no signs of a shot or impact trauma, so if she was killed… it’s very likely it could have been done with a knife. And you told the police that you think a knife might be missing.”

She nodded again: “To summarize the Benson position."

"And you didn’t do it."

"No. Not only did I not do it, I can’t get the investigation I want, either,” Austin said. She wanted the cops to push the investigation as hard as possible, to include investigating her, if they thought it necessary. They’d be wasting their time on her, she said, but go ahead-as long as they looked in other directions, as well. “If Frances was killed, she came here with someone she knew-the alarm system had been turned off. So that’s the critical thing: Who would she come here with? Somebody must know. Somebody must know.”

“Why aren’t you absolutely sure the knife is missing?” Lucas asked.

“Because I don’t inventory knives. Do you? I thought not,” she snapped. More quietly, “It was a small knife. The kind you use to pare apples. Wooden handle, from Chicago Cutlery. We didn’t keep it in the cutting block. It was-at one time-in the end drawer in the kitchen. Actually, it’s possible that Frances took it with her when she got an apartment, and then, in one of her moves, she left it with somebody. But the police asked me to inventory the knives, and I couldn’t find that one. I know I had it, at one time.”

“Mmm.”

“What, mmm?"

"The bartender in Minneapolis was killed with a much bigger knife, a butcher knife or a hunting knife, even,” Lucas said. “Not an apple parer.”

“Still… maybe the killer learned from experience.” Her fingertips went to her mouth. “Oh, God. What’d I just say?” Tears glistened at the corners of her eyes.

He sat there watching her as she went through a crying jag, pressing her knuckles into her mouth, but unable to stop for a minute or two. When she finally reined herself in, he said, “I’m sorry, if I touched that off.”

“Naw, it’s not you. I do that every once in a while,” she said. “I talked to my shrink, and he said that releasing the emotion would make me feel better. But you know what? It doesn’t. It makes me feel worse.”

She started again, cried for ten seconds, then cut it off, wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands.

“You’re going to have to fix your makeup,” Lucas said. “You’ve got a smear of eyeliner.”

“Yes. I’ve gotten used to that, too.”

AUSTIN HAD MADE a list of Frances’s friends-she hopped out of her chair, walked over to the ebony Steinway, got a notebook, slipped out a piece of paper and handed it to Lucas: high- school friends, college friends, a couple of Goths, ten names and addresses, neatly computer printed on cream- colored stationery. Lucas asked, “Why would you suspect a Goth? Did any of them ever… say anything, or do anything?”

She sat down again. “I hardly knew them. When I came, they left. But I’ve read about them, they worship darkness, they’re fascinated by death, by… you know, they’re crazy.”

“Frances was crazy?"

"No. She was young. She was experimental. Like I was, when I went to school,” she said. “Except my experiments weren’t like hers. Mine felt outrageous and my parents were outraged, but I wasn’t unsafe. I’ve got a tattoo around my belly button, I smoked some pot, I made out with another woman. I didn’t sit around in cemeteries with guys in skirts and white- face, talking about what’s on the Other Side. Other Side meaning death.”

Lucas tried to suppress a sigh, but sighed anyway. She heard it: “What?”

“Let me come back to this thing about your marital problems,” Lucas said. “You say your husband might have been… I think you said ‘boinking’ his assistant. That means he was sleeping with her?”

“Possibly,” Austin said. “Possibly? Weren’t you a little upset by that?” Her forehead wrinkled, and she thought about it, shook her head and said, “I suppose. But not too much. It wasn’t like she was a threat

If we’d gotten divorced, it’d have been because our partnership wasn’t working anymore. But that part-the partnership-was okay. We had the same interests, the same friends, we both got a lot of pleasure out of our work and our home. If he was having an affair, that was just… part of this thing he was going through. It was serious, but not critical, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t,” Lucas said. “If Weather had an affair…” He trailed off, and she jumped in: “You’d what? Shoot her? Beat her up?"

"No…"

"Of course not. You’re civilized,” Austin said. “So you’d shout at her and go storming out of the house. If you were deadly serious, you’d hire some Nazi attorney and pound her in the divorce. But… what if you didn’t care about sleeping with her anymore, but you still liked her, and you saw it all coming on? Then you might wind up like Hunter and I did. The sex didn’t completely stop; it just wasn’t central anymore.”

“What was his assistant’s name?” Lucas asked. “Martina Trenoff."

"Smart? Pretty?"

"Smart, pretty, big boobs, hustled all the time. Available twenty- four/seven. She did a lot of his work for him, I think, toward the end. She was a junior- level exec when he took her as his assistant. MBA from St. Thomas. She knew some stuff. And he groomed her.”

“I’m not all that clear on what your husband manufactured,” Lucas said.

“High-tech machine parts. Essentially, a tool- and- die place that also made one- off final products. They have a lot of defense work.”

“You still own it?"

"We controlled it until we had to liquidate to pay the taxes-we owned about thirty- two percent of the stock,” Austin said. “When he died, five percent went to charity, we got the rest, and when the feds and the state were finished with us, we had lots of money and no stock.”

“How about Martina?” Lucas asked. “What happened to her after Austin died?”

“She kept working there, at least for a while. She was there when we cashed out, but I didn’t track her,” Austin said. “She wasn’t too popular, by the time he died. She was telling the other top execs what Austin wanted done, and sometimes, what she wanted done. So they may have parted ways.”

“Okay. So: the affair wasn’t too important,” Lucas said. “Well-important, but not critical.” They sat there for a moment, and he thought, It’d be critical to me, and then he slapped his open hands on his knees and said, “I’ll talk to some people.”