Phantom Prey

16

Lucas got up angry, felt the mood settling in for a stay. Knew it, suppressed it at breakfast, but both the housekeeper and Sam picked it up: he was trailing the anger around like a faint odor of skunk. He called Austin before he left for the office, and she told him that she was at the Highland Park spa. If he could stop on the way to work, she said, she had some thoughts.

“We could use a few thoughts,” he said. “Then I’ll see you in ten minutes?”

Austin was wearing a form- fitting bloodred tracksuit, a peculiar shade of red that always looked good on blondes, and that only blondes knew about. She was talking with another client, who patted her on the shoulder, then gave her a squeeze. Lucas recognized the other one’s face, but couldn’t remember her name. Then Austin looked past her friend and the woman turned, eyebrows went up and she stuck out a hand and said, “Dalles Burger, Stone amp; Kaufmann. Lucas, how are you?”

“Sure, Dallie”-like he knew who she was all the time, doing a little tap dance while his brain retrieved her file card: lawyer-“I don’t think I’ve seen you since, what, the no- strike committee meeting. Are you going to arbitrate?”She was flattered that he remembered: “I will. We’ll be doing it right on the spot, so it’ll be touchy.”

“Ah, you’ll work it out."

"I’ve got to talk to Lucas for a moment,” Austin told Burger. “He’s investigating what happened to my daughter."

"Oh, boy. Let me get out of here,” Burger said. And, “I want you to call me. If you need anything, just call. I’ll run errands, whatever."

"Thanks, Dallie; I’ll call.” When Burger was gone, Austin pointed Lucas at a chair and asked, “What was this committee? No- strike? Arbitration?"

"The building trades have agreed to a no- strike provision on the Republican convention work, but they wanted arbitration if there was a disagreement. The governor’s people put together an arbitration committee.”

“Ah. Politicians.” Austin settled back in her own chair. “They’re not all terrible,” Lucas said. “Yes, they are. Every single one of them,” Austin said, a little serious behind the smile. “They take property away from people who work to get it, and give it to people they think will vote to keep them in their jobs. It’s that raw.”

“Then you should be happy to see the Republicans come to town,” Lucas said.

“They’re just as bad as the other ones,” Austin said. “I am seriously disaffected. I believe what’s going on in this country is evil. The president is an evil man, and the people who oppose him are evil people. That’s what I think.”

Lucas shrugged: “All right."

"You think I’m crazy."

"Well…” He spread his arms and gave her his most charming smile, and made her laugh.

She leaned back and said, “I was thinking last night, that of all the issues that have come out of these killings, Frances and all the other people, we know one thing for sure, and we also know that you have developed the only worthwhile clue, and only one of them. I don’t feel that you’re pushing it in the right way.”

Lucas said, “Tell me."

"The thing we know for sure, is that all the killings are linked. They have to be. Same style. One group of people is being attacked. Something is going on that got all these people killed-and it seems like it’s still going on, whatever it is. Okay?”

Lucas nodded: “Okay. But knowing that doesn’t get us far, if we can’t break into what’s happening.”

She held up a finger. “The second thing that happened was that Frances created a secret bank account that was apparently set up simply to get fifty thousand dollars in cash-in currency, in bills.”

“I’m pushing that."

"Not hard enough,” Austin said firmly. “And that must lead somewhere. Fifty thousand isn’t that much in this day and age, but it’s not nothing, either. If she spent fifty thousand dollars in a couple of weeks, it’ll have to show up somewhere. And there are other odd things about it… like the secrecy. So my opinion is, that whatever’s going on-the thing that links the killings-must involve the fifty thousand. Somehow. And maybe the bank itself… because the bank involvement is odd, when you think about it.”

Lucas leaned forward. “What do you mean?"

"When Hunter was alive, we’d go out to Las Vegas every April for a military procurement convention,” she said. “It’d still be cool and wet here, but Vegas would be warm and dry and it made a nice vacation. Hunter would talk to his military people, and Francie and I would hang out. Instead of taking a lot of cash with us, Hunter would set up an account at the hotel. When Francie or I needed something, we’d charge it. Or, we’d go get some tokens, if we felt like it, and play the slots.”

“Yeah?” She shook a finger at him. “If you needed to get fifty thousand in cash, from money that you had legally, but you didn’t want people to know about the cash aspect, that you were putting together this… pot… how would you do it?”

“Might be a few ways,” Lucas ventured. “Maybe. But one of them, which Frances knew about, would be to send checks totaling fifty thousand dollars to two or three of the big casinos in Vegas, to set up accounts. Once they were cleared, you simply fly out and lose it. But not really. You buy tokens for the slots on the account, and then cash them in for hundred- dollar bills. Do it for a week: party, lie around the pool, pretend to play the slots, cash the tokens. You could easily do six or eight or ten thousand dollars a day, spread between the casinos, and nobody would know and nobody would care and nobody would remember. Except that the hotels would call you up three times a year with offers of a free room.”

They thought about it for a minute, then Lucas said, “The point being, there were easier ways to get this money, even in cash, even anonymously, discreetly, than to set up a secret account.”

“Not just that: also, Frances knew about it. She didn’t have to invent some secret bank method. So she must’ve gone through the bank for a reason. Maybe she wanted to leave tracks. Maybe… I don’t know. But it’s something. I thought about it all night.”

“So what would you suggest?” Lucas asked. She shrugged: “I’m not the famous detective. I’ve got a funeral to work through. I’ve got… things. But. You have to push the money. That’s what people always said in the procurement business, when we went to Vegas. If something smelled bad, look at the money. Always look at the money. Maybe you could go back to the bank… push all of her friends about the money. It befuddles me: what would she use it for? What, that she couldn’t simply write a check for? That she couldn’t get me to write a check for?”

Lucas peered at her for a moment, then asked, “That’s what you’ve got?”

“That’s what I’ve got,” she said. “Are you going to think about it?"

"Yes. That’s what I’ll do today,” Lucas said. “Think about the money, God help me, and nothing else.”

That’s what he did. His secretary, Carol, came and looked at him, and went away, and then came back and looked at him again, and finally asked, “What are you doing?”

“Thinking.” She looked worried. “Huh. Could you take a look at-” He held a hand palm- out to stop her: “No. I won’t look at anything

Go away.” She peeked a couple more times. Once she asked, “How’s the leg?"

"Not good,” Lucas said. “I need to find a teenage girl to suck on it."

"I’ll leave you alone,” she said. Just before noon, as he was sitting reviewing, in his mind, everything that had happened, the obvious occurred to him. He called Austin on her cell and said, “I need pictures of Frances.”

“I’m at home, working on the funeral. I’ll get a bunch together. Is this about the money?"

"Yeah. But I’ll tell you what, this would all be a lot easier if she had a loser boyfriend.”

He called the vice president at the Riverside State Bank. “Could you get me the name of the banker who opened Frances Austin’s account?”

“Sure. Just a minute.” More like two minutes. When he came back, he said, “Emily Wau. She’s now the manager at the Maplewood branch. I checked, and she’s working today.”

“Give me her number,” Lucas said.

Lucas ran down to Sunfish Lake, left the car turning over in the driveway. Austin had a dozen photographs: “I’ll get them back to you as soon as I can,” he said. “At the funeral?”

“That’s okay-she had duplicates of everything."

"Well- I’ll get them back.” Emily Wau was of Asian descent, a small, smiling, efficient woman in a conservative gray- green dress. “You want me to look at pictures of Frances Austin, to see if I can remember opening her account?”

“Yes. It would have been only about five months ago. October. You must’ve spent a little time with her.”

“I looked at the paperwork-she opened it with five hundred dollars,” Wau said. “So it would not have been a remarkable event.”

“Still… six months. Not very long ago,” Lucas suggested. “Let me look at the pictures,” Wau said. Lucas passed them over, and she went through them, carefully, one at a time, turning each over, facedown, on her desk as she finished with it. When she was done, she picked them all up, looked at them again, then stared at a monitor camera mounted in one corner of the bank’s ceiling, a thinking- about- it stare, then looked back at Lucas and said, “You know, it was several months ago, and I probably talk to twenty people a day, so I can’t be sure, but… I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this woman.”

Lucas said, “I’m not surprised.”

And there it was: the case was cracked, though there was some cleaning up to do-like figuring out who the killer was. Lucas left the bank whistling, and on the sidewalk, got on his cell phone and called his secretary: “I need to get Dan Jackson to take some pictures for me.”

“I’ll see if he’s available."

"Do that. I’m going to lunch.” He stopped at a McDonalds, had a Quarter Pounder with cheese, fries, and a strawberry shake, thought about the implications, rolled on into the office. Carol saw him coming and said a couple words into a phone, hung up and said, “Dan’ll be up in a minute.”

“Excellent.”

Dan Jackson was a middle- sized, middle-weight black man with short, neatly trimmed hair and a tightly, neatly trimmed mustache, and black plastic- rimmed glasses. At work, he wore button- up shirts with collars, and sweaters and khaki slacks and Patagonia jackets. He was, he said, invisible, not only to white people, but to black people as well. “I’ve been on elevators alone at night with white women and they never knew I was standing there,” he’d told Lucas. “When I’m in the uniform, I am fully goddamned invisible.”

Now he showed up carrying a Nikon camera with a lens more than a foot long, and Lucas groaned to himself, but smiled and said, “Dan, sit down.”

“Got something for me?"

"I need surveillance shots of five women, plus about five more women at random, for a board,” he said. “Usual range of sizes and shapes on the random shots-give me a couple of each: blond, sandy hair, dark brown. All white. Get some of our people out in the parking lot if you want, for the dummies, but don’t make it obvious-get a bunch of different backgrounds.”

“I’m ready to go,” Jackson said. He patted the camera. “I got the new D3 with the 200–400 f.4 VR AF- S. Good ISO up to 6400, I can go to 12800 if I have to, but there’ll be some noise. Twelve megapixels so we get plenty of resolution. With this baby, you can really reach out and touch somebody. Brady squealed like a stuck pig when I put in for it-with the police discount, the lens is still better than four grand, and the body’s five…”

“That’s great,” Lucas said. “… And I’ve been out shooting a little wildlife, to familiarize myself with the whole system. The white balance and auto- focus is as good as I’ve seen. I tested it against a 1DsIII, and the D3 is better. The IDs’ll give you more resolution, but I’d defy anyone to say which is which when you look at it on a computer monitor, or a sixteen- by twenty print, for that matter.”

“Terrific."

"That fuckin’ Flowers is already sniffing around, trying to borrow it,” Jackson said. “He’s still shooting a D2xs and I told him, ‘You’ll have to pry it from my cold stiff fingers.’ ”

Lucas’s head was bobbing: “That’s just what we’re looking for, and fuck Virgil. Anyway, I got a short list.” He pushed it across the desk.

Jackson fondled the Nikon and leaned forward to look at the list. “Who are these people?”

“Suspects in a series of murders, so you’ve gotta be discreet,” Lucas said. “Alyssa Austin; her housekeeper, a woman named Helen Sobotny; Leigh Price-that’s L- e- i- g- h-who works up at 3M; Martina Trenoff, works at General Mills; Denise Robinson…” He pushed another sheet of paper across the desk. “Here’s their home addresses. I need them as quick as I can get them. If you need some cover from somebody, refer them to me. Overtime’s not a problem.” He filled in the detail, and pulled up Austin’s spa website, showed Jackson a photograph of her, and driver’ s- license photos on Sobotny, Price, and Robinson.

“Nasty pictures-nasty,” Jackson said, looking them over. “Not good enough to be used on a board,” Lucas agreed. “We need civilian clothes, no particular background. If you have to shoot Austin coming out of one of her spas, then you’ll have to do something to alter the background. Full- face, side views. Full body.”

“I could Photoshop them if I had to."

"The problem is, Austin lives in Sunfish Lake and your cloak of invisibility won’t work there.” They hashed it out for a few more minutes. “I’ll do what I can,” Jackson said. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

Then Lucas was stuck: the next move was to try to identify the person who’d opened the account, without giving anything away. He signed papers for Carol, cleaned up a few more bureaucratic items, then headed for the apartment.

Halfway up the stairs, he could hear the head- banging rock. He opened the door and found Del, with his feet up, watching Toms’s apartment with the binoculars, listening to AC/DC’s “All Night Long.” Del looked back at him and said, “She’s running around.”

“Like how, running around?"

"Like she’s cleaning the place up, and singing a happy tune while she’s doing it."

"Gonna be kind of a downer when we bust her old man,” Lucas said. Lucas turned the radio off and dragged up a chair and said, “I caught a break on Austin.”

“Yeah?” Lucas told him about it, and then said, “So here’s what I’m thinking. Nobody can figure out why Frances needed fifty thousand in cash, or why she took it the way she did. The answer was, she didn’t. She didn’t take the money, somebody else did. Somebody opened a bank account in her name and got Fidelity to transfer money to it.”

“They’d need an ID to open the account. A valid driver’s license. Maybe a second form of ID.”

“That’s true,” Lucas said. “Which means, they’d have to find a way to dupe a driver’s license, which is not all that easy anymore. How much they cost on the street now?”

Del shrugged: “One that a bartender will take, three hundred. One that’ll fool a cop, five hundred. One that’ll fool a machine, I don’t know.”

“But the banker who opened the account didn’t run it through a machine,” Lucas said. “She probably barely looked at it.”

“What about the second form?"

"Suppose Frances Austin, a new millionaire, got a preapproved credit card form, or several forms, in the mail."

"She’d have to be dead not to,” Del said. “Even then, she’d get a few."

"Right. So somebody who’s right there-a close friend at her apartment, or the housekeeper at the Sunfish Lake house, or somebody we don’t know yet, but who had to be close-fills out one of these forms, applies for the card. Has all the information. The card comes back, it’s activated, Frances never knows, because it’s never used. There’s your preferred two forms: driver’s license and credit card.”

“That’d work,” Del said. Lucas picked up the glasses and looked for Toms, but she wasn’t in front of a window and he put them back down. “Damn right it would work. A minor variation on a really old hustle.”

“Then they kill her to cover it up.” Lucas said, “I’m not that far, yet. The killing could be spontaneous

Looks spontaneous. Let’s say it’s the housekeeper. She’s just getting ready to leave for the day when Frances shows up, and Frances knows. She’s actually been tracking her Fidelity account, figures out what happened, and there’s an accusation, a confrontation, an argument… the knife is there.”

“Go pick her up,” Del said. “There’s one teeny- weeny little problem,” Lucas said. “The house-keeper has a pretty good alibi. And there’s this car thing I can’t figure out… Plus, would somebody really take the chance of identifying herself as Frances Austin, in a St. Paul bank, a few months after Austin’s name and photos had been all over the place because of her old man getting killed?”

“Maybe,” Del said. “It’d take some balls."

"Lots of balls,” Lucas said. And, he added, “ Whoa- whoa-whoa…” Del turned and looked across the street; Lucas was using the glasses

Heather Toms had just gone to the front door, opened it, and led a man back inside. He was a tall man, thin, with curly black hair and a saturnine face. When the apartment door was closed, the man pushed Heather against the wall and with one hand on her slightly protrudent baby belly, kissed her hard.

“Sonofabitch,” Del said. Lucas handed him the glasses, and Del watched for two seconds

“If it’s Siggy, he’s grown six inches…"

"… could be lifts in his shoes…” Lucas said. “… lost thirty pounds…"

"… that could happen…” Lucas said. “… got plastic surgery…"

"You can do that in Mexico,” Lucas said. “If that’s Siggy, I’ll kiss your ass,” Del said, and handed the glasses back. Lucas looked: they moved slowly from the hallway through a blind spot and then into the kitchen, where the guy got Heather’s butt against the kitchen table and kissed her again, tipping her back, and Lucas said, “Holy shit, he’s gonna do her on the kitchen table.”

“No way,” Del said. Across the street, Heather righted herself and pushed him off, but she was laughing, and this wasn’t the end of it. “Where did this guy come from?” Lucas asked. “Who knows,” Del said. Sounding pleased, Del added, “Treacherous little minx, isn’t she?"

"Siggy is gonna kill her."

"Especially if that little knob on her tummy isn’t Siggy’s work,” Del said. Lucas handed him the glasses. “If it’s not Siggy’s, then we’re probably wasting our time sitting here. Siggy’s never coming back. She’s way too smart to do that to him. He’d kill her with a goddamn chain saw.”

“Not a complete waste of time,” Del said. “I’ve never seen anybody get laid on a kitchen table, except in that baseball movie. I don’t think it really happens-but if it does, I’d like to see it.”

“I meant, waste of time in terms of life, liberty, and the Minnesota way,” Lucas said.

“Fuck that,” Del said. Talking to the guy across the street: “Go for it, guy.”

Lucas asked, “How’s your old lady?"

"Better. Must’ve eaten something that made her sick,” Del said. He took the glasses from Lucas and put them up to his eyes. “You can’t guilt- trip me outa watching this. This is purely professional.”

At home that night, Lucas told Weather about the break. “It’ll lead to something, for sure?” she asked. “It feels that way in my gut- it’ll lead to something,” Lucas said. “I need to take a really close look at this housekeeper, and maybe Austin herself, and maybe these two friends of hers, McGuire and Robinson, who wanted to start the Internet site. The guy has contacts in the trucking industry, and that’s one place you can for- sure get good fake driver’s licenses-and he may have had access to her apartment, and to her computer, since he was a computer guy. So… it feels good.”

“How’s Heather?” she asked. “Life with Heather is getting complicated,” Lucas said. He told her about the new man, and she was enthralled. “You think he wanted to do it on the kitchen table…?"

"I don’t know-they didn’t, but they pulled the blinds in the bedroom, which is the first time that’s been done, so something happened in there.”

“Kitchen table would probably hurt your hip bones, your shoulder blades, the back of your head, your elbows…"

"Depends on which way you were facing, I suppose,” Lucas said, and he picked up that morning’s Star Tribune and turned to the comics pages.

She had to think about it and then said, “Lucas! God!” But, like most women, she valued a little vulgarity from time to time.

Dan Jackson showed up with the huge camera and a giant Domke photographer’s satchel at eleven o’clock the next morning, and sat in Lucas’s office until Lucas got back from the convention security coordination committee. Lucas rolled in fifteen minutes later, yanked off his necktie and threw it at a photograph of the BCA Shooters, the Y- League second- place basketball team a year earlier; the tie caught and hung up on the picture frame.

“Should I ask?” Jackson asked. “Fuckin’ morons.” Lucas dropped in his chair, shook a finger at Jackson. “They’re doing estimates on how much damage we might get from protesters at the convention. They chose ‘not much’ because that was what they’re budgeted for. It’s like New Orleans: How big will the hurricane be? Well, not very big, because we can’t afford it.”

“Be some good photography, though,” Jackson ventured. “Yeah? Talk to the newspaper guys about that,” Lucas said. “Most of the trouble takes place at night. Nothing like running around in the nighttime with a goddamn strobe, taking pictures of people committing crimes, with no backup.”

“Hmph. I may have to reconsider,” Jackson said. “Reconsider your ass off.” Lucas stood up, turned in a full circle, dropped back in the chair, exhaled and said, “Screw it. They know what I think.”

“Not necessarily good to be right, when all the big shots are wrong,” Jackson observed.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lucas said. He leaned forward: “So. You get it?” Jackson patted the Nikon. “It was a snap.” He chuckled. “You get it? It was a snap?"

"Dan… when can I get the snaps?"

"Right here,” Jackson said. He reached into the back flap of the photo bag and pulled out a set of 5x7 color prints. “I got all your women, and five from here in the office. They all look equally candid, I think- shouldn’t be any bias toward our gals. None of our people have accounts at the bank, so they shouldn’t be contaminated that way.”

Lucas thumbed through the prints. Ten women with hair that ranged in color from blond to dark brown, looking generally past the camera, but nearly frontal; and side views as they passed. “These are great. Great. I’ll recommend you for the four- to- midnight shift at the convention.”

“You’re a prince.”

Emily Wau, the banker, was waiting when Lucas came through the door. “More pictures, huh?”

“Yup. A bunch of suspects. Secret camera. Just like on TV. Do you have a conference room?”

They did. Lucas turned on the lights and spread the photos over the conference table, all mixed up. “Just let your eyes roll across them… look at all of them before you focus on one,” Lucas said. “Then… whatever.”

Wau took her time: five minutes to look at ten women, including Alyssa Austin, Helen Sobotny, Denise Robinson, Leigh Price, Martina Trenoff, and the BCA dummies. At the end of the five minutes, she touched her lips with her index finger, like a schoolmarm signaling, “Shhh,” scanned all of them a last time, and said, “Nope.”

“Nope?"

"I don’t remember any of them,” she said. She said it confidently, and Lucas felt his heart sink. “Ah, man."

"Something happened the other day, somewhat related, that made me think of you,” Wau said. “I was standing by the door, and we’ve got this thing we do, whenever somebody comes in. We say, ‘Welcome to Riverside.’ This man came in and he said, ‘I remember you, you opened my account.’ And I remembered him. I didn’t even think- I said, ‘You’re Jim!’ and he said, ‘That’s right. I’m flattered.’ So we were both happy. Later, you know, thinking about you, I looked up when he opened his account. It was the end of December. Right after Christmas.”

“So you do remember the people,” Lucas said. “Well, I remembered him, when I saw him,” she said. “And he was nobody spectacular, just a guy."

"Poop,” Lucas said. “I’m sorry."

"We’re not done, yet,” Lucas said.

They weren’t done yet, but where to go? When he’d walked into the bank, he would have given 3–2 odds that they’d get an ID. A thought popped into his head: What if Wau were involved? What if… horseshit. It ain’t Wau.

He sighed, looked back at the bank, and headed for the car. Had to be somebody close to Frances. Had to be.

Sitting in the apartment, looking across the street at Heather Toms’s place, listening to the Doors doing “Love Me Two Times.” Heather was not in, and Lucas got his feet up, and closed his eyes, and ran back through the faces of the women. Nothing there. Thought about Austin, and what she’d said about insanity, about how it was nothing more than an extreme version of everyday quirks…

Good theory, he thought. Lucas had a theory of his own, sociological, rather than psychological.

Some people, he believed, looked at the world and saw a clockwork: events happened and triggered off other events, people did what they were programmed to do, and the results came out the other end: love, hate, war, murder, children, whatever.

Other people, Lucas among them, looked out the window and saw nothing but chaos: accident, chance, stupidity, intelligence, avarice, idealism, all rubbing against one another in an unpredictable stew.

How could Heather Toms, he thought-as Heather came through the door of her apartment carrying an oversized shopping bag from Neiman Marcus-how could a nice suburban girl like Heather Toms ever expect to wind up as the loving wife of a murderous Lithuanian gangster, mother of his children, secret lover of one of the gangster’s underlings?

For Christ’s sakes, she’d been a cheerleader at Edina, one of the toniest high schools in the metro area. How could she…

The answer, of course, was that she couldn’t have predicted any of it. If she’d stopped somewhere for a cappuccino, she might not ever have met Siggy. Now she’d be married to an insurance agent or a cop or a finance guy…

The problem with this view of life, this philosophy, was that it suggested that what happened to Frances Austin, and what happened to the other murder victims, was not the result of a cold calculated plan by anybody at all. The whole thing could have been set off by accident, by a bump in the dark, by a burglar…

But then… three killings? Nope. It might be chaotic, but there were threads in the chaos. He was just pulling the wrong one.

Across the street, Heather was looking at herself in the mirror, holding up an outfit. Then she turned her head, walked to the door. Her mother was there, said something, and Heather disappeared down the hall, leaving the door open, and was back a moment later with the toddler.

She put him on the floor and went back to posing. Lucas watched in the binoculars and thought, Huh. She supposedly had no money. Her mother supposedly paid half her rent, out of her Social Security and pension.

And that maternity stuff she’s looking at cost at least a grand. A light went on: the guy she’d met at the door, the underling, had delivered more than a good time: he’d brought money from Siggy. Dollars to doughnuts; and Heather was flush again.

There was contact. She wants to look nice. Bet Siggy is coming…