Phantom Prey

21

Alyssa could feel the Fairy, there, behind her own eyes. The Fairy had been her, when she was a young girl, before Alyssa fell into the hands of the Coach. The Coach had known what Alyssa could do in the water, had seen it when she was eight, had pushed her with a ruthless discipline and determination to do what she, the Coach, hadn’t been able to do: win. Win all the time. If she’d come up in the right year, she might have gone to the Olympics, but that was the breaks of the game. As it was, she’d been the best athlete at the University of Minnesota, despite what some of the football players might have thought…

But getting there had been brutal, and terminated an otherwise unremarkable childhood.

Her parents hadn’t seen the brutality behind the swimming: they’d just seen their kid’s name in lights, at the end of the pool, most of the time with a big “1” in front of it. The Coach had buried the Fairy… little bits had resurfaced over the years, perhaps, with her playful- yet- serious interest in astrology, and particularly in the tarot, but mostly, the Fairy was buried under purpose and will and discipline.

Which, in the end, was the only thing that would get her through this.

Loren sat on a chair turned away from the living room table, while Alyssa lounged in an easy chair, a glass in hand. A bottle of Amon-Ra shiraz from Australia sat on the end table beside her, eighty dollars a bottle, and worth it.

Loren was dressed in a sixties- rocker- look brown- velvet suit, narrow pant legs, and a pinched waist on the jacket, with heavy brown brogans that would have been good for kicking someone to death. Alyssa said, “One thing that’s hard for me is to understand why you’re here. Are you really here? Are you an external reality, or are you all in my mind? Could I take a picture of you with a camera?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know about the camera, but I’m at least as real as Fairy.”

She wagged a finger at him. “No, you’re not. I know what Fairy is. Would you like to talk to her?”

Her voice pitched up and she giggled: “All right, here I am,” Fairy said. “You wanted Fairy. Woman with a knife- edge wit.”

Loren said, “Quit messing around, Alyssa. I need you back. We’ve got to talk.”

Alyssa came back, a slack smile playing around her lips: “See, I know what Fairy is. She’s me-another piece of me, and I think we’ll eventually get back together. We’ll heal. Other people have had this disorder-maybe my case is a little different than others, but all cases are a little different than others. Anyway: I understand it. I can look it up on the Internet. I can read stories about people who have gone through it. But you, Loren-the only people who have experiences like you, are total goofs. Crazy people. But you seem so… rational. Are you the devil?”

“There is no devil,” Loren said. “Isn’t that what the devil would say? You talked me into all these evil things… I killed three people-or Fairy did-and you were right there, eating it up, pushing me. If you’re not the devil, you’re a pretty good mock- up.”

Loren looked away: “Well, I’m not the devil. I’m dead and I have a dead person’s psychic ability. I could feel the hands of those people on Frances’s shoulder, and if Frances were here to talk to you, she would tell you the same thing. Killing them was the right thing to do.”

“And Frances is still dead,” Alyssa said. “But she’s not gone,” Loren said. “I can feel her aura. She’s around here, but maybe not for long. She might be getting on the boat, to go over.”

Alyssa sighed. She had heard it before. “And over… is heaven? Or hell? Or purgatory? Or what?”

“Who’s to know who hasn’t gone?” Loren said. “When I’ve seen the boat, sometimes it’s all lit up and cheerful, like the Delta Queen, with the calliope playing, and sometimes it’s this dark little rotten boat with a red stern wheel… Who knows where it’s going?”

“Whatever,” she said, waving him off. “There’s nothing to do about it now.”

“Unless you see Frances, of course,” Loren said. “You have to be prepared.”

“Oh… bullshit. Bullshit.” Now she was angry; wine-angry, more wind than real violence to it. “You are nothing more than an illusion. I wonder what Xanax would do to you, if I got rid of a few anxieties for a while?”

Didn’t faze him: “You can take what you want, but your problem isn’t going away,” Loren said. “In fact, your problem has gotten worse. When you let Fairy out the other night, you let her out at exactly the wrong time.”

Alyssa leaned forward, elbows on her thighs, an empty wineglass in her hands. “Lucas Davenport,” she said.

“Yes.” Loren stood up, thrust his hands in his pants pockets, wandered around the room looking at the paintings, stopped in front of the landscape by Kidd. “You know, this landscape. Those are the bluffs over the Mississippi just downstream from St. Paul-right where the river turns.”

“That’s right,” Alyssa said. “It’s odd-it’s not completely realistic, but it’s completely real. The other odd thing is, that’s where the riverboats leave from. Oh, a little upstream, by the upper landing, but right there in that stretch of river. Weird that you should have this painting, hanging here.”

“Forget the riverboats!” Alyssa snapped. “We need to focus on Davenport. Something’s going on with Helen. Why’s he looking at Helen? Why’s he looking at Ricky?”

Loren walked away from the painting, around the table, sat down again, his eyes sliding past hers. “Maybe he found something. Maybe they had something to do with Frances. If they did, this is a serious problem, Alyssa. Right now, he thinks all four killings were done by the same person. If he decides that Helen or Ricky were involved with Frances… then why was that knife in Frank Willett’s apartment?”

“I have to think…” she said, dropping her face into her hands. “You have to think as Alyssa-not as Fairy,” Loren said. “Fairy is the impetuous one. She’s the one who wanted to do the car and knife in the same night. She almost blew herself up with the car.”

That made Alyssa smile. It had been one hell of a blast, all right. She’d been both frightened and exhilarated when she got to the top of the hill and ran toward the private plane hangars. “That was pretty amazing.”

“Amazing,” Loren said. “And she got away with it. But there was no need to do the knife that same night. If we’d had time to think, we could have directed Davenport at Frank, without giving up the knife. We would have been better with the ambiguity… but the knife is a hard fact. There has to be an answer to it.”

“Helen,” Alyssa said after a while. “Helen knew that I was sleeping with Frank. We used to come here in the afternoons, send her off to the other end of the house. But she knew what was happening.”

“Could we set her up if we need to? Point Davenport at Frank?” Loren wondered.

“He’s already looking in her direction. If he comes to us for more information-we give it to him,” Alyssa said. She refilled the wineglass, shook out the last couple of drops. “We tell him that she knew about Frank Willett. And this fifty thousand dollars that he’s been looking for… all of Frances’s important mail came here. Bank statements. Estate stuff. Who’d be better placed to intercept them than Helen?”

She frowned and asked, “Is Helen that smart?” A little drunk, answered her own question: “Maybe she is.”

Then, continuing, “So we can push him at Helen.” Loren said, “We can push him at Helen, but what if he doesn’t bite? There’s always the question of alibi. If Helen has a hard alibi for even one of the killings, then… that’s a big problem.”

Fairy: “A problem that we can take care of. We take care of Davenport.”ALYSSA: “There’s a bad idea. Lucas is good- looking and gentlemanly and all that, but one inch below the surface, there’s a thug. And he’s also a police officer.”

Fairy: “My impression of him is this: he’s doing this in his head. He’s running on instinct. He’s not filing the paperwork. He doesn’t have any paperwork. Paperwork is for other people. If he begins to suspect us and shows it-we pop him. Who could possibly expect that the beautiful Alyssa Austin, heiress and rich woman, could shoot a thug like Lucas Davenport and get away with it? Who’d believe that she could even think of it?”

“Shoot?” Alyssa said. “A knife won’t work,” Fairy said. “If he begins to suspect, he won’t let us get close enough. And like you said, he’s big and tough. He’s not some skinny Goth kid.”

“How then?"

"The best way would be to watch him and catch him when he’s going out at night,” Fairy said. “Do the jogger routine again. Shoot him, and run. One shot in the heart. It won’t make any difference how tough he is, he won’t live through that.”

Alyssa closed her eyes: “God, it gives me a headache, thinking about it. We’re much better off trying to tie it to Helen.”

Loren nodded: “Absolutely. But take Fairy’s point, with my point, and put them together-if Helen has a hard alibi, then it doesn’t leave a lot of candidates for the other three killings. There are people who have seen you, as Fairy, and he has talked to some of them. Eventually, he may get around to having them look at you. But he’s the only one who would do that. These other people, the Minneapolis cops, have no idea about you.”

“I could do it,” Fairy said. “I could do it just like I did the car."

"The car was just a lump of metal-it wasn’t big and mean, it wasn’t carrying a gun, it wasn’t alive,” Alyssa said. “I don’t care. I can do it,” Fairy said. “I’m not saying we should, I’m just saying that if worse comes to worse, I can do it.”

Alyssa, really feeling the wine now-the last glass had done it- looked at Loren.

“Well, what are you doing?” she asked. “What do you mean?"

"What are you doing? Right now?” He caught on, and smiled. “You want to go upstairs?"

"You might talk me into it.”

The sex wasn’t perfect-it never was, in her experience, there was always something not right, and in Loren’s case, it was that his body, including his tongue, was cold as ice.

But it was good enough for the moment, for an evening otherwise alone.

An evening where she would, she thought, inevitably have to think about Lucas Davenport. But for now, she didn’t think about anything.

For now, she let the pleasure flow. Davenport was for some other time.