Although located in an expensive neighborhood, the Ockland residence was an indifferent Spanish-style house with a brick front walkway bordered by red and purple impatiens. The woman who answered the doorbell was also expensive, though not indifferent, and more trouble than David expected to find on another perfect day in paradise.
In her Facebook photo, Linette Ockland looked like innocence personified, with a direct wide-eyed stare and a sweet face. In reality her eyes were wide with continuous calculation, and she was neither guileless nor uncorrupted. Although twenty-three, she had the lithe, slender body of a precocious fifteen-year-old and a face that seemed even younger. She wore platform sandals with two-inch cork heels, low-riding denim short shorts, and a cutoff T-shirt that bared her midriff and was emblazoned with the words Pop Princess.
“Mrs. Ockland?”
“Yeah?”
“My name’s David Thorne. I have an appointment for an interview with Mr. Ockland.”
“Here, not at his lab on campus?”
“Lukas wanted to keep our project separate from his work at the university.”
“Yeah, well, he never told me shit about you.”
“I’m a writer. We’re considering a book project together.”
“Why would he tell me, anyway?”
“Excuse me?”
“He doesn’t tell me half the shit he’s doing. He probably doesn’t want to meet you on campus because he doesn’t want the university to take its slice of this. Is it a big-money book?”
“We’re at the early stages of the concept. Until we lock down the scope of it, I can’t say what potential it has.”
Her look was sullen, suspicious. “Can’t or won’t?”
David wondered what impression she would make at a faculty tea. She most likely didn’t attend such functions. Probably Lukas didn’t, either. From what David had read, the man savored his reputation for being a rebel as both an academic and a scientist.
“I think it’ll do well,” he said. “I’ve had some prior success. Is Lukas available?”
A large German shepherd appeared at her side, ears pricked, its fixed stare intimidating.
“This is Wolfman,” she said. “It’s a stupid name. Lukas named him. He won’t hurt you as long as you don’t try to touch him.”
Although Linette wore hardly more than a bikini and favored a provocative hip-shot stance, David knew that she was warning him not just to avoid touching the dog but also to keep his hands off her or suffer a savage bite.
“Come in,” she said, and she stepped back from the door as the dog, too, relented to allow him entrance.
She escorted David to a large living room that was furnished less like an adult residence than like a room in a fraternity house. An enormous flat-screen TV. A poker table with six chairs in one corner. A Harley-Davidson Rocker with a fully chromed conversion package stood against one wall, like a piece of sculpture. Books and magazines were scattered about. There were armchairs and a sofa and plenty of evidence that the housekeeper who came in one day a week didn’t know where to start.
Linette motioned David to an armchair, and she sat in another that faced him. She propped her feet on a footstool, sitting with her long coltish legs spread. The dog sat beside her, almost as still as a life-size ceramic canine meant to ornament a garden.
David waited for the woman to say something, but she only stared at him until he spoke. “Is Lukas here? I hope he remembered our meeting.”
She said, “Lukas is dead, the selfish sonofabitch.”
| 52 |
Because Linette Ockland wasn’t behaving like a grieving widow, and because the police blotter listed her husband as merely missing, David assumed her announcement was a weird bit of macabre humor. “I guess there’s a punch line. He’s quite a joker.”
She tilted her head to regard him quizzically. “He is? Do we know the same Lukas? I’ve never known him to be a lot of laughs. I reported him missing Sunday night, and the cops are finally getting off their fat asses and taking it half seriously. But whatever they think, I know he’s dead.”
“You’re serious?”
“Don’t I look serious?”
She looked about as serious as a blow-up sex doll.
“But if he’s only missing, how do you know . . . it’s something worse?”
“We’ve been married four years. We have this arrangement. He always lives by it. He knows he damn well better. Then suddenly he doesn’t.”
“What arrangement—if I may ask?”