Phantom Prey (11 page)

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 lookin
g f
or 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 harakiri, 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?"