Free Phantom Prey by John Sandford Page B

out at the A1?”
    Price shook her head: “Not our scene. Why are you asking?”
    “I’m trying to put some of Frances Austin’s friends together,” Lucas said.
    “I wasn’t one of Frances’s friends,” Price said.
    “I was, all the way back to school,” Shockley said. “She was really nice, once you got to know her—but Leigh thought she was stuck-up.”
    “Stuck-up rich prig. But I didn’t think that enough to kill her,” Price said. Her dark eyes caught Lucas’s eyes as she dug in a peanut butter jar with the knife. Lucas felt a little thrum , and it didn’t have anything to do with murder.
    Lucas said to Price, “Would people call you a fairy?”
    Her eyebrows went up, and she said, “Maybe.”
    “Oh, poop,” Shockley said. “You’re a fairy.”
    “You’re just as much a fairy as I am,” Price said to her roommate.
    Shockley rolled her eyes. “Right.” To Lucas: “She’s Tinker Bell the Fairy, I’m Clarabelle the Cow.”
    “Not fair,” Price said; but there was a spark in her eye; she knew it was the truth.
    Shockley and Frances Austin had gone to Blake Academy from kindergarten through graduation, and then on to separate colleges.
    “We didn’t date together or anything—we just knew each other for a long time,” Shockley said. “We went to each other’s birthday parties. I didn’t see her much when we were in college, but then . . . we’d hook up for lunch or go out and have drinks a couple times a year. And we were both interested in the gothic, but from different directions. She came in from women’s studies and I came in from literature.”
    “I came in from witchcraft,” Price said.
    “So you don’t really know who she was hanging out with?” Lucas asked.
    “She hung out with a lot of students, at night. She was on-again off-again in graduate studies, but there weren’t any jobs in her area and she was thinking about changing direction into something more practical. I’m working, I have to get going early, so I don’t hang out at night.”
    “What do you do?”
    “Commercial real estate,” Shockley said. “Probably start law school in a year or two. My dad says he’ll supply the bucks.”
    Price said, “I’m a chemical engineer. I work at 3M in medical products.”
    Neither of the women had seen Austin in the two weeks before she’d died. Shockley thought she’d seen her on a Monday afternoon or a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks before, but it had been an accidental encounter in a Macy’s store, and they’d gone and gotten cinnamon pretzels and chatted for a while.
    “She wasn’t worried about anything, except about what she was going to do,” Shockley said.
    “Did she say anything about her mother?” Lucas asked.
    “She was always talking about her mom. She really admired her— her mom’s sort of a free spirit, but she also runs a good business, and she’s smart, and she’s on boards and stuff.”
    “Her mother thinks that there was a little stress between them, since her father died,” Lucas said.
    “She was broken up about her father,” Shockley agreed. “She said a couple of things about her mom being hard on him, but . . . she wasn’t really mad at her mom. It was just a hard time. She was one of the executors of his estate, and she took it really seriously.”
    “Okay.” Lucas looked at his notebook: “Do either of you know a couple, uh, Denise Robinson and Mark McGuire?”
    The two women looked at each other and Price said, “Well, sure. Denise and Mark.”
    “What do they do?”
    “They’re Web people—they’re trying to set up a commercial website. Something to do with video advertisements . . . I’m not too clear about it. Mark has a day job at, uh, some truck thing. Computers and trucks, I don’t know what it is.”
    “I’ve been told that they were really tight with Frances before she was killed,” Lucas said.
    “I don’t know what that’d be about,” Shockley said, and Price shook her head.
    “Okay,” Lucas