Phantom Prey (3 page)

When he was busted by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and St. Paul police, he'd told the arresting officers that he wouldn't be going to prison. They all had a good laugh at that, Siggy included. He was the affable sort, right up to the time he pulled your dick off with a pair of wire cutters.

Two hours after he bailed out of jail, he vanished.

He'd been under a loose two-man surveillance at the time, one BCA guy and one St. Paul detective. From the jail, he'd gone home to a warm front-porch greeting from Heather. An hour later, hair still wet from what the cops assumed was a postcoital shower, he'd emerged from the house, carrying a slip of paper--a shopping list. Pampers, baby powder. He climbed into his Lexus and drove to the Woodbury Target store.

The watchers weren't too worried when they lost him in the bed and bath department, pushing his cherry red cart between the high stacks of towels and bath mats and sheets, because there's only one way out of a Target, the front, and that was covered, right?

Besides, you'd naturally lose a guy for a minute or two in a Target . . . but when they couldn't locate him in a minute or two, they got anxious, and began running up and down, frightening the shoppers-- or
guests,
as Target called them in the letter of complaint that they sent to the director of the BCA and the St. Paul chief of police.

Turns out, Target does have a back door, but not for customers.

Siggy hadn't had permission to use it, but callously had anyway; a coldblooded criminal, for sure.

He'd had a car waiting and nobody had ever seen him again.

Well.
Somebody
had seen him, just not the cops.

His wife, Heather,
nee Anderson, pled ignorance of everything. She thought Siggy was a humble car salesman, she said from the steps of their highly leveraged two-point-eight-million-dollar teal
-
and-coffee-painted McMansion. Doesn't everybody have a house like this? The house had been part of Siggy's three-million-dollar bond. When he skipped, the court found out, there was an unre-marked second mortgage, and with the slump in housing prices, the two mortgages were underwater. Or, as they say in California, upside down. If the court foreclosed, it'd mostly be foreclosing on air.

So there was Heather, twisting her hands in regret. There was the Ramsey County attorney, mumbling into his torts. And somewhere, was Siggy--a tear for poor Siggy, growing a beard in Mexico or Paraguay or Belize, drinking salty margaritas and cerveza blanca and watching the tourists walk hand in hand down the beach in flip-flops, pining for the old homestead in Woodbury, with its driveway ring of hosta plants, basketball net to the side, its legal writs.

Heather was pushed
out of the house eight months after Siggy disappeared. A buyer was found, a radiologist, but the radiologist backed out at the last minute, pleading that he'd received a phone call from a man who told him that if his family moved in, his children would be taken from their grade schools, and their eyes would be put out with a red-hot poker.

So the house sat there, empty, while Heather moved to a second
-
floor apartment on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. Her mother lived in the apartment next door, rolling around on a powered chair with a tank of oxygen. Heather's mom was dying of congestive heart failure and wouldn't make it through the year. She might not even make it through the month.

When the old lady croaked, Lucas suspected, Heather and the child would be off to a warmer climate, like Zihuatanejo, or Monaco, where nobody would care about Siggy and his cocaine business in the Twin Cities.

The BCA had
taken an apartment above a drugstore across the street from Heather's and, for three months, kept up a regular watch. Then priorities changed, and the watch became sporadic. Lucas and Del took it over, as a hobby. The drugstore apartment was quiet, and Lucas could work there, and the couch was soft, and Del sometimes came by for a nap.

Lucas's group had broken the Toms case, and had made the arrests; had argued, through the prosecutor, that no bail should be allowed, that Toms was a flight risk.

They'd lost the argument, and then Toms had bitch-slapped the BCA and the St. Paul cops at the Target store.

Then there was antsy.

Siggy's brother, Antanas--Antsy Toms--had been at loose ends since his brother vanished. The cops believed that Siggy had been the brains and the driving force behind the organization. Antsy was . . . his brother. What could anyone say?

Antsy had a tattoo of the Statue of Liberty on one arm, and "US SEAL" on the other, with a dagger with blood dripping off it, though he'd never been in the military. He probably did have a dagger, though, and it probably did have blood dripping off it, from time to time.

When God was passing out the brains, Siggy had been at the head of the line. Antsy, in the meantime, had been off getting F-U-C-K Y-O
-
U-! tattooed on the knuckles of his hands, upside down and backward from his point of view, but forward and right side up when he was sitting across a table from a cop.

Antsy had done some enforcement work for Siggy, but hadn't been arrested because he really, really didn't know anything.
Anything.
When Siggy split, Antsy had taken up bouncing as a career, and methamphetamine as a hobby.

Most recently, he'd drubbed the bejesus out of two St. Paul cops, one of whom was the daughter of a BCA agent stationed upstate in Bemidji. Antsy, like his brother, was still on the run, but the word was, he didn't have the cash to go far.

Antsy was still around; and he might also be calling on the beauteous Heather, looking for a little cash money--another reason to keep the surveillance going.

So, here Lucas was,
observing the often-semi-naked or even fully naked Mrs. Toms every day or two, walking around in front of her open windows, one of the least body-conscious women Lucas had ever done surveillance on, waiting for the family to show up.

He picked up the pregnancy in the third month, the baby bump under her upscale Pea in the Pod maternity clothing.

Nobody had ever seen a boyfriend--so Siggy had been back, Lucas thought, and they'd missed him.

In addition to a salesman's natural affability, and his willingness to use wire cutters on slow-pay retail dealers, Siggy had been a genuine family man. He'd be back again.

Just not today.

Lucas looked down
at the laptop, where he'd been wrestling with bureaucratic ratshit. He was late with the annual personnel evaluations, and some time-serving wretch, deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy, whose life work involved collecting evaluation forms, was torturing him with e-mails and phone messages.

And what, really, could he say about Del? Or about Virgil? Or about Jenkins and Shrake?

The questionnaire asked if Del presented himself in a manner that conformed to standards of good practice as outlined in Minnesota state regulations. In fact, the last time Lucas had seen Del, he's been unshaven, hungover, three months late for a haircut, and was wearing torn jeans, worn sneaks, and a sweatshirt that said,
*underwear not included.

Virgil, Lucas knew, drove around the state pulling a boat and trailer and almost daily went fishing or hunting on state time, the better to focus investigative vibrations--a technique that seemed to work.

Jenkins and Shrake carried leather-wrapped saps. Jenkins called his the Hillary-Whacker, in case, he said, he should ever encounter the junior senator from New York.

Should all of this go into a file?

Lucas sighed,
stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and looked out the window. The last of the snow was being washed out by the rain
,
and only a few hard lumps of ice remained behind the curbs, where the snowplow piles had been. If the rain continued, the ice would be gone by morning. On the other hand, if the temps had been ten degrees lower, the storm would have produced twenty inches of snow, instead of two inches of rain.

He didn't need that. He was done with winter.

Until the middle of February, it seemed that the snow would keep coming forever. Not much at one time, but an inch or two, every third day, enough that he had to fire up the snowblower and clear off the driveway before his wife drove on the snow and packed it down.

In mid-February, it got warm. Two rainy weeks in the forties and fifties, and the snow was gone. That's when the end-of-winter blues got him. March was a tough month in the Cities. Dress warm, and the day got warm and you sweated. Dress cool, and the day turned cold, and you froze. Cars were rolling lumps of dirt, impossible to keep clean. Everybody was fat and slow, and crabby.

Lucas had been
playing winter ball in a cops-and-bureaucrats league at the St. Paul YMCA. Some of the bureaucrats were wolverines--hesitate on a shot and they'd have two fingers up your nose and one hand in your shorts. So he was in shape, the theory being that you wouldn't get the winter blues if you worked out a lot.

But that was theory, and mostly wrong. He needed the sun, and for more than a week in Cancun.

Lucas had
jet-black hair salted with streaks of gray, and his face was pale with the winter. He had strong shoulders and a hawk's beak nose
,
blue eyes, and a couple of notable scars on his face and neck. Traces of the job.

His paternal ancestors, somewhere back through the centuries, had paddled wild fur out of the North Woods, mink and beaver and otter and martin and fisher, across Superior and the lesser Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence. A bunch of mean Frenchmen; and finally one of them said, "Screw this Canadian bullshit," and moved to the States.

When that happened was not exactly clear, but Lucas's father had suggested that when it did, the immigrant might have had a case of blended whiskey on his shoulder. . . .

His mother's side was Irish and Welsh, and a bit of German; but Lucas wasn't a genealogist and mostly didn't care who'd done what back when.

He picked up
the glasses and looked through the window across the street at Heather Toms, who was in the kitchen making a smoothie, and doing a little dance step at the same time. She'd done her exercises every day, and while she'd once smoked the occasional cigarette, or maybe a doobie--always on the balcony, so the first baby wouldn't get secondhand smoke--she'd quit with the pregnancy.

Lucas quite approved of the way she was conducting herself, aside from the aiding and abetting of her murderous husband and drug
-
psycho brother-in-law.

Nothing was going to happen, he thought. Time to go home . . .

Lucas lived
ten minutes from Heather's apartment, west across St. Paul's Highland district, in a new house on Mississippi River Boulevard, which wasn't a boulevard. He and his wife, Weather, had designed and built the home themselves, to fit them. They'd done well, he thought, with a rambling two-story structure and ample garage, of stone and cedar shingles, and climbing ivy stretching up the siding.

He'd been home for fifteen minutes, yawning, listening to the rain in the quiet of the house, picking through a copy of
Musky Hunter,
when he felt, rather than heard, the garage doors going up. Weather.

He checked his watch: she was early.

He ambled through the house and met her coming through the door carrying two grocery sacks. She looked around and asked, "Where is everybody?," meaning their toddler son and the live-in housekeeper. Their ward, Letty, was at school.

"Same place you were, I guess--went to the supermarket."

"Well, poop," Weather said. She plopped the bags down on the food-prep island. "We're gonna wind up with about thirty bananas."

Lucas snuggled up behind her and kissed her on the neck and she relaxed back against him, hair damp from the supermarket parking lot. She smelled like woman-hair and Chanel. She wiggled her butt once for his benefit, and then gave him an elbow and said, "We've got to talk."

"Uh-oh."

"I saw Alyssa today,"
Weather said, turning around. She was a Finn, through and through. A surgeon, a small woman with pale watchful eyes who saw herself as Management, and Lucas as Labor; or possibly saw herself as a Carpenter, and Lucas as Raw Lumber. "Actually, I didn't so much see her, as she came to see me when I was working out. About you."

"Ah . . ." He shook his head. "Nothing new on her kid?"

"Nothing new--but it's not that. Did you see the story about the murder in Minneapolis, night before last?"

"The bartender," Lucas said.

There'd been two murders in Minnesota that day. Since one of the victims had been young, blond and female, with large, firm breasts, the bartender had gotten short shrift from television, even though his had been the more interesting crime, in Lucas's opinion, and the blonde had been inconveniently placed in Lake Superior.

"He was a Goth," Weather said. "He ran with the same group as Frances. Alyssa says the Minneapolis cops don't have a clue, but came to talk to her because of the similarity of the killings. She said there was so much blood with Frances--"

"We're not sure about that," Lucas said. He looked in the sack of groceries, saw the white pastry bag, peeked inside. Cinnamon rolls. The small, tasty, piecrust kind. He took one out and popped it in his mouth. "Could have been a little bit of blood, but widely smeared."