Phantom prey

THE KNIFE.

“We found the knife, Frank."

"You guys-"

"No, and you gotta know that’s bullshit,” Lucas said. “I was there, we had three crime- scene techs who didn’t know this case from a dog napping, and they found it, not me. And they went in before I got there, so nobody planted the knife. And the knife has Patty Shockley’s blood on it-it’s human blood, and it’s her blood type.”

“I don’t even know Patty Shockley. I don’t know any of them besides Frances.”

Lucas rode over him: “There’s enough blood to get a DNA match, which will be coming. But we’re willing to bet, and I’d stake my next year’s pay on it, that it’s her blood. How’d it get there, Frank?”

Willett slapped both of his hands on the top of his head, face down, and smoothed his hair back with his fingers, dragging at it, and said, “Honest to God, I don’t know. I honest to God, I told Mr. Mose… I honest to God think that one of you cops put it there. Maybe not one of you, but some cop. I mean, there was no knife there. No knife. No fuckin’ knife. It’s like I’ve been dropping acid or something, everything is crazy. I just don’t know what happened.”

“Have you had any blackouts from the drugs you’ve used?” Anson asked. “Pot, or acid, or coke or meth or…”

“I don’t use any of that shit-I smoke a little bud from time to time, but that other shit will kill your body. And I can’t afford acid or coke. I wouldn’t take meth, that’s like sniffing glue, it’ll fuck your brain. I just can’t figure…”

He confessed that he probably had no alibis for the nights of the killings, simply because he hung out at night. “That’s what I do. I hang out, couple clubs, tavern, walk around on Hennepin Avenue, whatever. Hang out.”

They talked about his relationship with Austin: had that dissolved in anger? “No. Well, you know, maybe you’d have to ask her. But we stopped when she just got busy with taxes, and we didn’t start up again. I knew it was just a thing-she knew it, I knew it, it felt good, and about the time it should have started coming apart, it did.”

“She gave you that truck,” Lucas said. “She did. She was a sweetie,” Willett said. “It wasn’t payment, or anything-she gave it to me because I had this old piece of shit that had holes in the floorboards and I just about gassed myself every time I drove it. I had to keep the windows open. So she got me this truck- surprised the shit out of me.”

“And it wasn’t for the sex, it wasn’t to say goodbye."

"Might have been a little bit to say goodbye, but the basic thing is, the Austins have so much money that she just really didn’t care how much it cost,” Willett said. “The way she thought was, If I did what he did, rock- climbed and surfed and skied, this is the kind of truck I’d want. So that’s what she got. The money, the money was nothing. A bad day on the stock market, she’d lose ten times what that truck cost.”

THEY WORKED HIM, and pushed him, teased him and tried to make him angry, but he only got sadder and more confused. When they were done, they all stood up, and Lucas called the deputy, and Mose said he wanted to talk for a few more minutes, and Lucas and Anson stepped toward the door.

Willett said, from his chair, “Officer Davenport-when you saw that knife, in the drawer, what’d you think?”

Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought, maybe, There’s something.”

“You didn’t think, That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in my life? That a guy would go on the run but leave the bloody knife right in the first place somebody would look, in the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers, under some old underwear? Maybe I should have tacked a sign on the thing that said, ‘Knife inside.’ ‘Murder Weapon Here.’ I mean, it’s just so fucking stupid.”

As Del said-but Lucas dodged. “People who murder other people usually aren’t wizards,” Lucas said.

“But it’s got to be the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard of."

"No, no,” Lucas said. “Not the stupidest. But… it’s up there."

"Think about that,” Willett said. “Think about it.”

OUT IN THE HALLWAY, Anson said, “Loser.” Lucas said, “We didn’t move him much."

"I’ll background him, if you want."

"That’d be good,” Lucas said. “There’s quite a bit of paper over at his house- we’ve got his cell phone records, address book. Any kind of a profile…”

WHEN LUCAS was alone in his car, he thought about Anson’s “loser” label. Lucas had been an excellent college hockey player-second team all- WCHA in his senior year. He wasn’t pro level, but he was almost pro level. He could have fooled himself into thinking he was. Could have hooked up with a minor league team, could have hung on to the edges for a few years.

But he hadn’t. He’d known he wasn’t good enough, so he looked around for something that he’d like, and that he’d be good at. He joined the biggest police department around, with the intention of becoming a homicide cop. He’d done that, and a few other things that came along the way.

If he’d gone the other way-tried for the pros-where would he be now? Flipping burgers in hockey’s equivalent of Snowbird? The line between winner and loser was pretty thin, and the paths were pretty crooked.

Willett was smart enough; women seemed to like him; he had some skills, some abilities… And he was coming up on forty, had a thousand dollars and a truck given to him by a woman, and at nights he hung out.

Seemed like waiting for death-and yet the line was so thin, and the paths so crooked.