Phantom prey ld-18

by John Sandford

  He felt a little ridiculous when he said it, but he said it anyway: “Taking care of my wife and kids.”

  “Don’t cops have rocky marriages?"

  "Some do.” He smiled. “I could introduce you to some, if you want. I got this guy Virgil…"

  "Virgil Flowers?” Her face lit up. “You know Virgil? I knew he was a cop.” Lucas smiled, stepped back. “He works for me."

  "Well, shoot. If you see him, tell him that Leigh says hi."

  "He’s been married so often that he’s got a ‘Just hitched’ sign in his closet,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to marry him,” she said. “He’s just a really… interesting guy.” Lucas nodded, said, as though jilted, “Well. Maybe see you around,” and headed out the door. “What was that all about?” Jean asked, as she trailed behind. “Just this guy,” Lucas said. “That fuckin’ Flowers.” Lucas left Jean at her apartment. She said she’d stay up until Roy got back. “I’ll be up late. When he comes in, call my cell,” Lucas said, as he scribbled the number on the back of one of his business cards. “So. Call me.”

  “You think Roy’s all right?"

  "I wish they hadn’t disappeared like that,” Lucas said. “It was so quick, it was like they were running. I wish she hadn’t been too good for Roy. That worries me.”

  “That kind of judgment…"

  "… Is almost always right,” Lucas said. “Not fair, but right.”

  Weather was still awake when he got home, sitting in the kitchen, public radio playing around her as she sorted through a box of junk mail. As a physician, she got fifty pieces a week, and there was no way to turn it off. When Lucas came in, she looked up and asked, “Do any good?”

  Before he could answer, the phone rang, and they both turned to look at it: late for a phone call, and that was hardly ever good. Lucas picked it up and said, “Hello?”

  Harold Anson, the Minneapolis homicide cop, said, “We got another one. I’m headed over there-down on the riverfront, two blocks from the last one.”

  “If you tell me it’s a guy named Roy Carter, I’m gonna shoot myself.”

  There was five seconds’ silence, then Anson said, “Step away from the gun, big guy.”

  “Motherfucker,” Lucas said. “Motherfucker. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Weather asked, “What?"

  "Motherfucker…” He took the truck, heading up the river and across to Minneapolis on I- 94, into the loop, then back across the river; Tom Petty was singing about Mary Jane’s last dance as he crossed over.

  He kept thinking about the time he’d lost when he started looking for Carter. Time getting a sandwich, time getting around a minor traffic accident. Getting to November a minute too late…

  The previous summer, a bridge on Interstate 35 had fallen into the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis. It hadn’t gotten creaky and shaky and slowly slumped into the water-it had simply snapped, toward the end of a weekday rush hour, going down in an instant. Thirteen people died.

  A new bridge was going up in a hurry. Crews worked late into the night, and Lucas could see the flickering white flares of their welders. And up ahead, the flashing lights of the cop cars on the riverfront, and Petty started on “Something in the Air.”

  Anson was wearing a knee- length trench coat and a fedora, which sat back on his head, the brim snapped down over his scalp. He was talking to a cop, stopped when he saw Lucas. “You want to look?”

  “Sure.” Roy Carter was lying on his side, mouth and eyes open, his hair flattened, his shirtfront soaked with drying blood. He’d been tall, and almost gaunt, with reddish hair that looked blue in the streetlights, and freckles that looked black, the skin taut around his skull and cheekbones. The bottom arm, his right, was thrown out on the sidewalk; the top arm clutched at his gut and, like his shirt, was covered with blood.

  “Same deal,” Anson said. “Stuck him, ripped him. It’s like a hara kiri, almost, except that the rip is up.”

  “Goddamnit, I was looking for him tonight. I missed him by thirty seconds,” Lucas said, turning away from the body. “He was with a Goth. They call her a fairy, just like the one who was talking with Dick Ford.”

  “Ford? What fairy?” Lucas explained it, taking it step- by- step. When he finished, Anson said, “So the fairy did it."

  "We need to talk to her,” Lucas said. “We need to find her. Really bad."

  "I’ll need the names of everybody who knows her,” Anson said. “I’ll e- mail them to you tonight, before I go to bed,” Lucas said

  “You’ve got some witnesses… and somebody told me that the fairy girl had called Carter. I don’t know whether it was at work, or at home, or on a cell, or what.”

  “But there ought to be a number we can get at."

  "Should be,” Lucas said. “And a photo kit from the people who’ve seen her. Get it out to the media. Put some pressure on her.” There was nothing for Lucas to do at the crime scene, except stand around with his hands in his pockets and bullshit with the uniforms. As the crime- scene people and the ME’s investigators worked over the body, Anson took a call, walking along the river with a finger in one ear, the phone to the other. He rang off and told Lucas that Carter had come from Little America, and that his parents were being notified. “Bad day out in the countryside. His parents both work for the post office,” he said. “If this happened to one of my kids, I’d jump off a bridge.”

  “After you killed the guy who did it,” Lucas said, looking back at the body.

  Anson nodded: “We don’t talk about that.”

  Lucas went home; confirmed the murder to Weather, who was shocked: “We didn’t set this off, did we?”

  “Nah. I’ve been working on the case for half a day,” Lucas said. “This guy’s been a target for longer than that."

  "Then how did you miss them at the nightclub? It sounds like they were trying to avoid you-and that’d mean…”

  “… that they’d have to know who I was. Or, maybe, she just wanted to get him out of there, away from people who could look at her. Nobody really talked to her-she kept him moving. My guess is, she moved him away from the people in the front room, then went into the back room, the dance floor, and he had more friends back there, so she moved him out of there, too. We just… passed each other.”

  She shook her head. “Too neat. There’s something going on that we don’t know about.”

  “Gonna have to think about it,” Lucas said. “Have to think by yourself,” she said. “I’m doing a palate tomorrow and it’s a bad one. I need to be out of here by five, so I’m going to bed.”

  “See you tomorrow then.” He kissed her goodnight, and moved to the den, where he read again through the paper generated by the Minneapolis guys and his own BCA. Lucas had worked for both, and had his prejudices: the BCA guys worked a couple of murders a year, maybe, and they were often hard ones.

  But Minneapolis-a lead Minneapolis investigator might catch as many killings in a couple of years as a BCA agent saw in a career. They were a bunch of flatfeet, but their paper was very good, full of the kind of intuitive detail that caught a guy’s eye after ten years on the street and another ten doing violent crime.

  At eleven o’clock, Lucas stopped. His brain was getting clogged up. He thought about calling Del. No chance he’d be asleep; the guy was like a bat. His old lady was another matter. He worked through the equities for a minute, then dialed.

  Del picked up on the second ring: “What’d ya want?"

  "I don’t want to interrupt anything,” Lucas said.

  “I wish you were."

  "Where’s your old lady?"

  "In bed,” Del said. “She’s been feeling kinda rocky. What’s up?"

  "Meet you at the apartment?"

  "Fifteen minutes.”

  The alley behind the drugstore was dark and cold, and something-a raccoon? — was banging around inside the dumpster. Lucas fumbled for the key to the back door, got inside, turned on the stairway light and went up. The apartment was quiet
and cold. He pushed the thermostat higher, in the light coming through the front window, and tuned the boom box to a golden oldies station, playing low; picked up the glasses and looked across the street at Heather Toms’s apartment.

  Toms was in, watching TV in the middle of the three rooms he could see. She was drinking something from a can, a beer or a Pepsi, he thought. Probably a Pepsi, because of the baby. He couldn’t quite pick out the logo in the flickering light of the television.

  Del showed up a couple of minutes later, trudging up the stairs. Lucas heard the key in the lock, and Del stepped inside, bringing along the odor of hot coffee. He handed Lucas a paper cup and Lucas said thanks, and took a sip. The coffee had never seen Seattle, or even heard of it. But it was okay. Free cop coffee.

  Del tipped his head at the boom box: “Clarence Carter-‘Slip Away.’ ” The golden oldie slipped through the room and they sipped along for a moment and then Del took the glasses from Lucas’s hand and looked across the street and said, “She’s got her shirt on.”

  “Yup. Took it off last time, though."

  "She still looking healthy?"

  "Starting to bulk up with the new baby,” Lucas said. “Nipples still point up?"

  "So far."

  "Wonder if she knows whether it’s a boy or a girl?"

  "You could call and ask…”

  Del was wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and a cracked- leather Goodwill jacket with a fake- sheepskin collar. “Who’s dead?” he asked.

  “Guy named Roy Carter,” Lucas said. “Also a guy named Dick Ford and a girl named Frances Austin.”

  “Know about Ford and Austin.” Del handed the glasses back to Lucas. “I didn’t hear about Carter.”

  “He was just a couple of hours ago,” Lucas said. He took two minutes to tell the story, then asked, “What do you think?”

  “Well, there’s a lot of choices. You think the Fairy did it?"

  "She knows about it,” Lucas said, looking out into the night. “So she’s at least an accomplice."

  "I think so."

  "From what you say, Frances sounds like she was playing Goth, but was gonna wind up as an executive somewhere. Not really into the poverty lifestyle. So if you don’t find a Fairy, or if she didn’t do it, you’ve really got to think about the possibility that you’ve got two separate things going on here. Austin, and the others.”

  “Be easier if it was all one thing,” Lucas said. “The world isn’t easy,” Del said. He finished his coffee and pitched the cup toward an oversized plastic wastebasket, and missed. Clarence Carter went away and Jefferson Airplane came up, “Plastic Fantastic Lover.”

  “It’s not two things,” Lucas said, after a while. “They’re connected. We don’t have Frances’s body, but the lab says there was a lot of blood. Just like Ford and Carter. They could have yelled, their throats weren’t cut, but nobody heard them yell because, probably, by the time they thought of it, they were already going.”

  “Unless the knife went up into the diaphragm,” Del said. “Jesus, though, that’d take some expertise-a doctor or something.”

  “There’s that."

  "And from what you say, there’s other big differences,” Del said

  “When they killed Frances, they went to all the risk of moving the body and getting rid of it. Since it hasn’t popped up yet, they did a pretty good job. But Ford and Carter, they leave out on the street, like calling cards. Right out there in public, like advertisements.”

  “Advertisements for what?"

  "You’re the detective,” Del said. Lucas slurped on the coffee, which tasted sort of brown, like a cross between real coffee and the paper sack it came in. “If they’re advertisements, there’ll be more of them. And now that you brought it up, another question about Frances. People were going to miss her pretty quickly, so why bother to move the body at all?”

  Del shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe to shift time, to give themselves an alibi. Maybe to shift the place, so you wouldn’t look at people who had keys to the Austin house. But then, if you’re right, and the cases are connected, why does the fairy let herself be seen now? Doesn’t she care? There are probably what, a half- dozen people who’d recognize her now?”

  “Maybe she just doesn’t give a shit,” Lucas said. “You know what it adds up to?” Del said. “Either you’ve got two separate things, or she’s nuts. She lets herself be seen, then she runs and hides. It’s like a game to her.”

  Across the street, Heather got up, stretched, loafed into the kitchen, got something out of a cupboard-black corn chips, Lucas thought, and a bottle of salsa. They watched her carefully fixing the snack. “Is salt okay at this point? In the pregnancy?” Del asked. “Those chips have got a lot of sodium.”

  “Dunno.” Lucas said, after another moment, “There’s something else going on, too. Austin-Alyssa-says her husband might have been sleeping with his assistant. Smart, pretty, big boobs; that’s Alyssa’s description. Alyssa said she didn’t care too much.”

  “Bullshit,” Del said. “… because on other levels, the marriage was still okay. They had a solid partnership."

  "Wasn’t okay. Another woman gets to her husband in a way she can’t? That’s never okay,” Del said. “If she tells you that, she’s lying.” Lucas shrugged. “All I can do is tell you what she said."

  "Did you check the plane crash?"

  "Not personally. I read some paper on it. Supposedly, he’s at a fly- in fishing place up in Canada. He’d been there before, had gone up by himself, meeting some pals. On the day he’s scheduled to leave, he takes off, had a power problem when he’s a hundred feet up, tries to turn back down the lake, dead stalls, and goes straight into the ground. The Canadian investigators didn’t find anything particularly suspicious. Happens a few times a year up there. This was an old rebuilt plane, a Beaver. And boom. Alyssa was back here; the daughter was back here.”

  “What about the guys up there? His pals? Alyssa didn’t have anything going with any of them?”

  “You’re a suspicious motherfucker,” Lucas said. And, “I’ll check that.”

  “Wup- wup- wup…” Del said, pointing across the street. Toms was running toward the kitchen and Lucas put the glasses on her. “Phone call,” he said. He looked at his watch and noted the time. She spoke for ten seconds then hung up.

  “Quick call,” Del said. “Setting up a meet?"

  "Dunno.” Toms walked back through the visible rooms, then disappeared down a hall that led only to the door. “Somebody coming up?”

  “Didn’t see anybody going in the front."

  "I think somebody called her from the door.” They sat cocked forward on the folding chairs, tensed up; Toms was gone for another ten seconds, then reappeared, pushing an old woman in a wheelchair. “Ah, shit,” Lucas said. “It’s her mom.”

  “You know anything about Goths?” Lucas asked. Del did. He’d even dated a couple of them, twenty years earlier, during their initial efflorescence. Much of the Gothic trip was a deliberate, ironic, self- conscious pose, along with a genuine interest in the subject of decadence and the transcendent. Most of the Goths he knew, Del said, were smart. If they’d had a scientific bent, instead of a literary bent, they’d have become geeks.

  “I’ve always been more on the industrial side myself,” Del said, “but there were crossover clubs that had both things going at the same time. Sort of Gotho- Industrial.”

  “I understand all the words you just said, but none of the concepts,” Lucas said.

  Del said, “Yeah. See, there’s this alternative non- jock universe that you wouldn’t know anything about…”

  They talked about Goth for another fifteen minutes and came back to the murders only at the end. “How much money did Frances get?” Del asked.

  “According to her mother, a little more than two million. Some carefully calculated amount that she could get without anybody paying taxes. I don’t understand all the ins and outs of it.”

  “Okay. Two mil,” Del said. “Lots
of people have been killed for a hell of a lot less. Maybe Mom’s a money freak.”

  “She says she doesn’t care about the money."

  "Oh, bullshit. How many rich people you know who don’t care about money?” Del asked. “How about you? You’re rich. What would you do if somebody said, ‘Uh, shit, we just lost all your money in the market’?”

  Lucas grinned. “Well, hell… it’d be a shock."

  "Yeah. You like your money."

  "Alyssa may like the money, but she didn’t kill the kid,” Lucas said

  “If you’d seen her, Alyssa, you’d know how this whole thing has gotten on top of her. She is seriously fucked up.”

  “So she didn’t kill the kid."

  "I don’t believe so,” Lucas said. “She could be a psycho killer, and then it’s all up for grabs. But to me, she just looks like a hippie chick who did good for herself. And then everybody around her went and got killed.”

  “A quick nasty argument about Daddy-maybe the kid found out something? — one of them picks up a knife, there’s a struggle, the kid gets stuck…”

  Lucas shrugged: “Anything’s possible. But if that’s what it is, why is Alyssa campaigning to get more cops on the case? The whole case was dead in the water. And if she killed the kid, and if I’m right about all three being killed the same way, by the same person, then why did she kill the other two?”

  “Maybe somebody else figured out the connection?"

  "Aw, come on, man. A bartender and a twenty- something Goth?” Del nodded. “Okay. But I’ll tell you what, I don’t have that much experience with your basic upper- class crime."

  "Being pretty much a proletarian yourself,” Lucas said. “A working man."

  "A horny-handed son of the soil."

  "You got me on the horny,” Del said. “Anyway, I don’t have that much experience with the upper classes, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a crime where there was millions of dollars floating around, where the money didn’t have something to do with the murder; especially if there was philately going on.”