Phantom Prey

22

Investigating Frank Willett was like chewing on a bad cheeseburger: the longer you worked at it, the worse the taste became. The crime- scene people pulled Willett’s apartment to pieces, and in addition to the knife, came up with one aging pack of High Wire Long hemp rolling papers that might have been there before Willett moved in.

Willett, in fact, had curled his lip at the suggestion: “Wires? We don’t need no stinkin’ wires,” he said, which had made Lucas laugh despite himself.

And that was it. The most worrying thing was that Lucas was sure that they’d find some sign of the fifty thousand dollars, but there hadn’t been a thing.

Willett, aside from the occasional stressed- out joke, was suitably desperate, but wasn’t giving any ground. He didn’t do anything, he didn’t know anything.

A call came, from a South St. Paul police officer named Janice Loomis- Smith. She said, “Hi, this is Janice Loomis- Smith, down in South St. Paul? I sat next to you at the symposium on tool mark evidence?”

“Hey, Janice, how are you?” He remembered her as a frizzy-haired piece of leather who’d spent two years in Iraq. Smart. “What’s up?”

“We got what you call your anomalous situation. We got this dude named Xai Xiong, street racer guy. His car burned up off Concord Street, this Honda Prelude, burned right down to the ground. Apparently arson-somebody filled it up with gasoline, and it blew; I guess you could see the fire for a mile, all the way across the river. Anyway, we tracked it down through VIN, and went and talked to Xiong. He swears that he sold it a month ago. There’s this informal sales lot down off Highway 36 near Stillwater-people park their cars with For Sale signs in them.”

“I know where that is,” Lucas said patiently. “It’s over where that apple orchard used to be.”

“Right. Anyway, he said he sold it to a woman who gave him cash, and he signed the papers and she took them and said she’d file them later. She never did-I mean, if he’s telling the truth. Anyway, the reason I’m calling…”

“Yeah,” he said, still patient. “… Is that he said the woman was the spitting image of this woman whose face has been in the paper. The fairy woman."

"Far out,” Lucas said. Though it sounded weak. “Give me his name again.”

Then Jackson, the photographer, called and said, “I got your Ricky Davis guy.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m sittin’ here with my dick in my hand-might as well drag some pictures around town.”

“Might want to wash your hands first,” Jackson said. EMILY WAU saw him as he walked into the bank and waved cheerfully. “I saw in the paper that you arrested the good- looking guy,” she said. “Dating him would have been a mistake, huh?”

“Maybe,” Lucas said. “But maybe not."

"You’ve got another picture?"

"One more-a guy named Ricky Davis."

"I don’t remember the name,” she said. Lucas handed her the photograph, and she looked at it for a long time, then her dark brown eyes flicked up at him and she said, “I opened an account for him last fall.”

Lucas recoiled in surprise, then smiled. “You’re sure."

"Yes. I’m sure.” She wandered back to her desk and sat down, elbows on the desktop, fingers massaging her temples for a moment. She looked up and said, “I don’t think he said his name was Ricky, but I can remember a little bit. I had the impression that he’d never opened a bank account before, or maybe it had been a while, though he’s not that old… he seemed really unsure about what he was doing. What’s important is-I mean, for you-is that I gave him a lot of literature inside one of these folders.”

She opened a bottom desk drawer and pulled out a slick- paper folder with a picture of a paddlewheel steamer on it, and “Riverside Banks, the Home- Grown Alternative.”

Lucas said, “That’s important? Why?"

"Because he seemed interested in all the financing options… farm financing, if I remember correctly,” Wau said. “I bet he kept it. If he kept it, my fingerprints will be all over it, and then we’ll know that he was the one.”

“You’re a pretty smart cookie,” Lucas said. “Thank you.”

Lucas thought about it as he drove back into town. Del, he thought, was probably at the apartment. If Siggy came in, he’d be running early-but he was coming, and the watch had gone full- time.

Lucas went that way.

Del was sitting at the desk, reading a thin paperback, when Lucas came through the apartment door. He glanced back at Lucas and then said, “Heather is putting stuff in a couple of suitcases.”

“Huh."

"Yeah. Those windows bother me, though. Wide open like that. If you’re gonna sneak out of town, wouldn’t you pull the blinds?"

"I would. I don’t think Heather has a modest bone in her body,” Lucas said. “It’s not modesty-if she’s gonna run, she’d want to keep it a secret,” Del said. He fumbled the paperback out of sight, but before it went, Lucas saw the title: Waiting for Godot. “She might be perfectly happy hanging her tits out the window, but packing a bag?”

Lucas picked up the binoculars and took a look. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s weird.”

They watched awhile longer, then Del said, “I didn’t think you were coming over. What’s up?”

“The Austin case may have just solved itself,” Lucas said. He explained about Ricky Davis.

“… so I’m pretty sure he’s the guy who opened the Frances Austin account. There’s the fifty thousand. His girlfriend, Helen, had all the access she needed. She’d have to figure out a password or something, but they could do that, one way or another. Then, all she had to do was call Fidelity with the password, and have a check sent to the address that Fidelity already had. No reason for them to suspect anything was wrong. Helen intercepts the mail-she’s there alone almost every day-and passes it to Ricky, who’d already set up the account.”

“Why’d they kill Austin?” Del asked. “Don’t know that yet-maybe Frances figured it out. You want to hear a scenario?"

"Go ahead.” Lucas pulled up another chair, sat, leaned back with his hands behind his head, feet up on the desk. “Frances is at home and decides to get some money from Fidelity. She sits down and makes the call, paying no attention to Helen, who hears her say the password, or maybe a couple of passwords. There it is-the money’s just sitting there. And- we’ll have to show this-Helen really needs the money. Or Ricky does. For some reason or another. So they come up with this scheme, and it almost works. But Frances, who is no fool, looks at an account statement, maybe a whole month later, if Helen worked it right, and she remembers… She remembers Helen being there, when she was on the phone to Fidelity.”

He continued: “But she’s not sure, so she goes to the house to confront Helen. They argue, it gets physical, there’s a knife, and Helen sticks her. Freak outs, calls Ricky, who comes in his truck, one of his trucks, and they move the body. Helen drives Frances’s car back to her apartment, and then… I don’t know. She takes a cab, or Ricky picks her up, they go back and get her car. Or Ricky parks someplace, after dumping the body, and walks in and moves her car. Anyway…”

“They work something out,” Del said. He added, “Works for me, but you ain’t gonna get a jury to buy it. Not on Lucas Davenport’s say- so.”

“Ah-but there’ll be some hard evidence,” Lucas said. “They bought something with the money. They paid something off. There was some residue on the body, or the sheet-some transmission fluid, and Ricky drove a wrecker. There might be some fingerprints… and I just thought of something else. Sonofabitch.”

“What?"

"When I found the missing fifty thousand, I was at the Austin house,” Lucas said. “I called up Alyssa and asked her about it, and she didn’t know where it went. When we were talking, Helen was right there. Then I called Anson, and I mentioned that I might go back to the A1 that night. And that night, man, that cowboy cocksucker shot me. Ricky wears cowboy boots.”

“Bonnie and Clyde,” Del said. “Ben and Jerry."

"Anthony and Cleopatra."

"Heather and Siggy.” Lucas looked across the street: Heather was packing, all right. The boom box came on with Robert Palmer, “Addicted to Love.” Lucas wondered, Is that Heather’s problem?

“Anyway,” he said to Del, “what else you got going?"

"Nothing you don’t know about-except, did I tell you I’m trying to find George William Boyd?"

"George? Why?"

"He’s been selling Level IV assault vests out his back door, along with Kevlar helmets and the occasional Mini- 14 Ranch Rifle.” Lucas was annoyed: “What the hell is he doing?"

"Well, you know George,” Del said. “Yeah, but that was just paintball shit,” Lucas said. “What’s he doing now? Starting a war?"

"That’s the question I plan to ask him,” Del said. “Somebody said… hell, that some of the folks on West Seventh were getting antsy about the Republican convention.”

“Ah, shit, Del.” Lucas kicked his feet off the desk and came down on the floor with a smack! “We can’t have people down there with undocumented rifles. The goddamn president is going to be there.”

“So, we gotta find George,” Del said. “And tell the Secret Service,” Lucas said. “If we tell the Secret Service, we lose George as a source."

"Jesus Christ, if we didn’t tell them, and somebody got shot, and they found out that we knew- we’d be living in Marion, Illinois, for a hundred years,” Lucas said. Lucas ran his hands through his hair. Too much to think about. “Listen, I’m gonna pull Jenkins or Shrake to take over here. They both want a piece of Siggy. I want you to help me close down the Austin thing.”

“What about Willett?"

"I got the bad feeling that Frank is telling the truth,” Lucas said. “Then how’d the knife get in his house?"

"That’s a problem.” A moment later, Lucas said, “You want a scenario?"

"Sure."

"The other people who were killed were all friends of Frances,” Lucas said. “Suppose that sometime during the confrontation between Helen and Frances, or maybe just from overhearing something that Frances has said, they come to believe that these three people knew something. They all knew something, even if they didn’t know they knew it. Maybe all three of them knew that she was looking for the fifty thousand, that somebody had stolen it, and that fact had to stay hidden. In fact, somebody told me that the first guy killed, Dick Ford, the bartender, was hoping that Frances would help him start a club

What if that’s why she looked at her Fidelity account? And found the money missing? Mentioned it to Ford, and maybe he mentioned it to Roy Carter, the kid…”

Del was shaking his head. “I buy the first scenario: they wanted money, they took it, they got caught, they killed her. Tried to shoot you when they thought you were figuring it out. But all these others… I mean, if your first scenario is right, Helen killed Frances because the knife was right there. If the knife hadn’t been right there, there wouldn’t have been a killing. Then, when they decided they had to do it again, they tried with a gun. These other three… the knife was a choice. A big deal. There’s a ritual going on there.”

Lucas sighed, looked out the window, and said, “I wish Siggy would come. Siggy’s so goddamn simple.”

Shrake showed up with a machine gun, a putter, and a half- dozen golf balls. He stacked the M- 16 case in a corner. “What you golfing retards never realized,” he said, tapping the apartment carpet with the putter, “is that this floor here has four perfect breaks, toward the center, and the carpet stimps at nine. If I can putt for a week, I’ll be in mid- season form. I’ll get Jenkins out on the first day and rip him a new asshole. He’ll owe me money for the rest of the summer.”

“Golf is the stupidest game ever invented,” Del said. “That’s true,” Shrake said, pointing the putter at Del. “But you’re not qualified to say it. You have to play it for twenty years before you can fully appreciate how exquisitely stupid it really is.”

“If Siggy shows up and you become a hero, I’ll fire your ass,” Lucas told Shrake, jabbing a finger at his chest. “You call the duty guy, he’ll get St. Paul SWAT rolling, you call me, and you wait. You pass that word on to Jenkins. I’m serious, Shrake, goddamnit, I don’t need any of your macho shit. There’s a child and a pregnant woman over there, and Siggy ain’t Antsy. He’s way past Antsy. This is no time to fuck around.”

“Got it,” Shrake said, his voice serious. “No bullshit. We’ll get it right.”

“You better,” Lucas said. To Del: “Let’s do it.”