Phantom Prey (16 page)

"No. I'm here to see Alyssa Austin. She's expecting me."

"Hang on one second," the receptionist said, and disappeared down a tiled hallway. Lucas looked around: there was just the faintest tang of sweat about the place, but it might have come from a spray bottle. Otherwise, it smelled like Chanel, or some other kind of French perfume.

Expensive-looking easy chairs were arranged around a tree-trunk coffee table, very ecological-I ooking, in the waiting area. The table held an apricot-colored orchid in a plain terra-cotta pot, and a stack of appropriate magazines:
In Style, Vanity Fair, Fitness, Marie Claire, Allure
,
Vogue.
Nothing with a car on the cover, or even a suggestion that a car existed.

He paged through
Fitness
for a moment, then the receptionist reappeared and said, "Come on back."

She took him past a small open workout area, where a half-dozen women rode bikes or ran on treadmills, to a private workout room where Austin was working with a trainer, doing Pilates. She was flat on her stomach doing foot-and-hand lifts with light weights in her hands, sweating like a dog, but when she finished, she did a kind of snap push-up that bounced her to her feet. The trainer nodded and said, "Not too bad, but you have to start finishing the routine."

"How many times have I missed?"

The trainer, a woman a bit taller than Austin but just as fit, bones showing in her face, said, "Week before last, you only got halfway through."

"I'm doing good; if I only miss one in six, I'm doing good," Austin said, and then, to the trainer, "Take a break. I've got to talk to this guy."

"You're pretty hard-core," Lucas said, letting his eyes walk around her body.

"I can't believe
you're
walking around," she said.

"Ah, I've been hurt worse doing home repair." He'd been using the line frequently, because he thought it was pretty good.

Austin stepped over to a barre and pulled a towel off, mopped her face and her neck. "I'm a jock, I've always liked to sweat," she said. "My problem is, I tend to work too much, and eat too little. Then my ass disappears. The people who come here definitely don't want to see an assless CEO."

"You're holding your own," Lucas said. He quickly added, lest she misinterpret a comment that he intended as purely aesthetic, "Tha
t f
ifty thousand bucks that Frances took out . . . there's something strange going on there. We need to find out where it went. She took it all in cash, and the way she did it . . ."

He told her about his visit to the bank and she said, "I've no idea what that was about. I 've never had fifty thousand in cash, myself, in my entire life. I mean, you can't buy anything with it. Anything legal."

"We were wondering about that ourselves," Lucas said. "Drugs . . . or maybe some kind of political thing. We're trying to think of stuff."

She crossed her arms and looked down at the floor, tapping one foot, as though trying to work through it, then said, "Frances did this Goth thing, but you know what? She was really a pretty mainstream kid. She wasn't a big risk-taker. She was a little risk-taker . . . and why would she finance something like drugs? She had all the money she needed. I assume you're not suggesting that she
used
fifty thousand dollars' worth of drugs."

"Could be done, but you'd see it."

"I never saw her loaded," Austin said. "Never. Fifty thousand in cash, she would have had to be involved in distribution or something. And I can't see that. Not at all. If you knew her, you'd know how crazy it seems."

"She wouldn't have had to use it all at once," Lucas said. "She could have been running on credit for a while, until she got her money, and then paid off her dealer."

"She
wasn't
a druggie," Austin said. "She just wasn't."

"Do you know what a druggie looks like?" Lucas asked.

"I do. We have women here, well-off people, who got involved with cocaine or pills, they come out of rehab and straight into here because the doctors tell them to. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn't
,
but I get a sense of what druggies are like and Frances wasn't like that. She may have smoked a joint on occasion, but who hasn't?"

Lucas noticed that Austin's daughter was now in the past tense, but didn't mention it.

"She didn't gamble." "No."

"So where did the money go?" "I don't know. It's just not right. It's
just not right."
Lucas limped over to the barre and leaned his butt against it. Austin said, "You got shot in the same bar where Dick Ford was murdered. Near where this other boy was killed." "Yup."

"So there must be something there."

"That's what I think." He felt a twinge from his groin, and winced a little.

"Why are you walking around?" Austin said. "Your face just went white as a sheet of paper."

"Because I'm bored and I wasn't hurt that bad. And I'm interested: you know a guy, a friend of Frances's, middle height, maybe five-eleven or so, black hair, black leather jacket, jeans, cheap sunglasses, a crooked mustache but maybe not, a hip-looking guy?"

She cocked her head to one side. "Like a wannabe biker?" "Yeah. Sort of a broken-ass wannabe biker." "God. He sounds like . . . quite a while back, I only saw him once, there was a guy named Larry," she said. She held her hands to her lips. "No, that's not right. It was an L name, but like a woman's name . . . Lauren? Loren? Loren, I think. It sounds like him." "Loren."

"Yes. I'm sure of it. When I saw him, he was wearing a white T-shirt with the black jacket and black jeans and black hair, and I thought, yo
u k
now, Here's a guy who could manipulate his way into a young girl's pants, and he'd be pretty heartless about it. But I don't think she was seeing him. I don't think they had any kind of physical relationship. At least, not at the time I saw him. They didn't have that . . . intimacy about them."

"Loren," Lucas said. "No last name?"

"No. I only saw him that one time, they came by the house in Frances's car, but . . ."

"He came by the house?" Lucas asked.

"Yes, just for a while," she said.

"Did he look it over?"

"Well, they carried some things from Frances's room down to her car . . . but you know, I don't really remember him that well. As it turns out, I never saw him again. He didn't seem like Frances's type. That's why I remember him at all, because . . . he seemed like somebody to be wary of."

"How old?" Lucas asked.

"Late twenties, probably. Early thirties at the most," she said.

"Get the feeling that he was local?"

"I didn't get any feeling for that." Her forehead wrinkled, and then she said, "I didn't notice an accent. So probably local."

"That's something."

She looked up at him and said, "I never would have remembered to tell you about him. It was too long ago, and I only saw him that one time. All I've got left is a kind of ghost image."

Chapter
10.

He'd gotten no
further on the fifty thousand dollars, but he had a name: Loren. Back at the office, he ran the name through the DMV computer and found, unexpectedly, that there were hundreds of Lorens in Minnesota. He called out to his secretary, "Hey, Carol-- where's Sandy?"

Carol came to the door: "She doesn't work today. She's got classes in the morning . . . you might be able to get her on her cell phone."

He got the number and dialed, and Sandy came up in a few seconds. He explained the problem. "Get all the Lorens, filter them for age twenty-five to middle thirties, then look at the ID photos and get me dark hair."

"Maybe I should look at the university records, too," Sandy suggested. "If she was going to school, could have been an out-of-state school friend."

"You've got access?" Lucas asked.

"I do, but you can't tell," she said.

"How long?"

"I've got a link at home now . . . an hour?"

"We gotta pay you more," he said.

When he was off the line, he walked down and got a can of diet Coke, stretching his leg, ran into Shrake, who said, "What the
hell happened?" So he had to tell Shrake about it, and then Jenkins showed up and said, "You got in the papers again, you goddamn publicity dog."

"I was badly wounded," Lucas said.

"You didn't shoot anybody," Jenkins said. "You didn't even
try
to shoot anybody."

"The guy was gone before I got my gun out," Lucas said. "I was doing a two-step around the incoming."

"You should have shot
somebody,"
Jenkins said. "Anybody. This makes us look bad. Like pussies."

Shrake closed one eye and said to Jenkins, "Maybe you oughta let up. Our boy don't look that happy."

Jenkins: "So what? Fuck him. If you don't kick a guy when he's down, you're stupid."

Shrake asked Lucas, "You okay?"

"I don't know," Lucas said. "He missed my balls by two inches, and if i t'd been an inch the other way, he'd have blown out my femoral artery. I have no idea who he is, what he wants. But he goddamn near killed me."

"He's a nimrod," Shrake said. "He gave you everything he had and just nicked you."

"That makes it worse, almost," Lucas said. "I was almost killed by a fuck-up."

"Not worse," Jenkins said, shaking a finger. "If he comes back for you, you'll get him. If he'd been a pro, or a cop, or anybody who knows about guns, he'd have waited right outside that door for you, and he would've shot you from two feet and you'd be dead now. He was scared of you. He was standing back far enough to run away."

"Does this involve the Austin thing?" Shrake asked.

"Christ, I hope so," Lucas said. "If it's not that, I've got no idea what it would be."

Jenkins to Shrake: "Maybe we ought to see if Antsy has another brother. Or a special Lithuanian pal."

Lucas shook his head: "Any pal of Antsy would have been better at it. This guy was a total fuckin' amateur. I don't think he'd ever shot a gun before. He held it low, with his wrist cocked, like that picture of Elvis Presley in the cowboy suit. He had no idea where the bullets were going."

Jenkins slapped him on the shoulder. "Well, I gotta say, I'm glad he didn't kill you. God knows who we would've got in your job. Probably some bureaucratic motherfucker."

Back in his office, Lucas stared at his computer screen for a while. His leg was itching, a painful itch, like poison ivy, so he took half a pain pill, took a peek at the bandage, didn't see any leakage.

And thought about the fifty thousand,
It's not enough for anything.

Not enough for anything that would be important to her, financially. Even if she bought fifty thousand in dope, wholesale, she wouldn't make enough back to justify any risk--the profit, even from a dope deal, would have been a drop in the bucket compared to what she already had.

And after what Austin had said, the prospect of a dope deal seemed thin, although it was one explanation that would put Frances close to somebody who might kill her.

The key thing was, she took it in cash.

That meant that she didn't want it traced--couldn't be any other reason to take that much out at once. Of course, she could have planned to loan it to someone who didn't want the IRS to know about it, who didn't want a paper trail; or, even more unlikely, she might hav
e p
lanned to pass it along to some extremist political group, and she didn't want the ties to show up.

But it all seemed like bullshit. The explanation, when it came, would probably be simpler than any of that, Lucas thought. Shit, maybe she bought a Ferrari from somebody who didn't take checks.

Then why the secrecy about the withdrawals . . . ?

He took out his notebook, noted "Mark McGuire, Denise Robinson," looked them up in the license bureau's database, and then the phone companies'.

Robinson answered the phone. Lucas identified himself and said, "I'd like to run out to see you. About Frances Austin. You and Mr. McGuire."

"Mark won't be here for half an hour or so . . ."

"Neither will I," Lucas said. He got his jacket and the cane and said to Carol, "I'm gonna run out."

"Where're you going?"

"Out to Maplewood. This couple Denise Robinson and Mark McGuire, friends of Frances Austin," he said.

"Maybe you ought to take Del with you."

"Nah. I'm okay; this is just a check," Lucas said.

"What you really ought to do is go home and go to bed," she said. "You don't look that good."

On the way to Maplewood, Sandy rang on his cell phone: "I've got eighteen Lorens for you."

"God bless you."

"It's an old-fashioned name: there are more of them in their fifties and sixties than in their twenties and thirties. Anyway, I pulled the
. J
pgs out of the DMV folder and I'm sending them right . . .
now
. . . to your office email."