Phantom Prey (35 page)

"You don't have to be delicate," Austin said.

"Okay. Could you please keep your fuckin' mouth shut about this? That I asked about Helen's boyfriend? Just keep it shut."

"I swear to God, I will," she said. "Besides, with Frank, I didn't exactly blab--it was business."

"And don't start looking sideways at Helen," Lucas said.

"I promise . . . I sometimes go days without even seeing her. I'll just stay away for a while."

"Do that," Lucas said. "I'll tell you about it tomorrow or the next day."

Del was curious. When Lucas got off the phone, he asked, "Break the case?"

"I don't know," Lucas said. "Something might have happened." He dialed Carol. When she came up, he said, "Hey--we've got another job for Jackson and his camera."

Heather came
into her apartment carrying grocery sacks, as Lucas was on the phone, and then went back out, and came back a minut
e l
ater with more sacks as Lucas got off, and Del said, "That's a lotta food for Momma and baby."

"I'm telling you, Siggy is coming," Lucas said. "If he was in Chattanooga last night, he'll be in northern Illinois tonight, and up here tomorrow afternoon or evening, depending on how hard he's pushing it. Not too hard, I think, because he wouldn't want to get stopped for speeding."

"He wouldn't be driving under his own ID," Del said.

"Still, he wouldn't speed. He didn't last as long as he did, dealing big
-
time dope, being careless."

Del, with the glasses, said, "Uh-oh."

"What?"

"She just unloaded a six-pack of Heineken."

Lucas could see the green bottles with his naked eye. "There you go," he said. "She hasn't had a drink since the bump showed up."

"Whoops . . . looks like a bottle of Stoli."

Lucas said, "Siggy-Siggy-Siggy . . . come to Mama."

The lab tech
called a little after noon, about the blood on the blade. "It's human and it's A-positive. No prints on the knife. I've started the DNA, we got a good sample, we'll crush it, but ft'll be a couple of days."

"Thirty-six hours, I was told," Lucas said.

"That's two days, unless you want the results at midnight," the tech said.

Lucas called Harry Anson, the Minneapolis homicide cop: "We're looking at a guy who was an employee of Alyssa Austin's. Hit his house this morning."

"I heard."

"Yeah, sorry about that, but things were moving. Anyway, we got human blood on the knife, no prints. The blood is A-positive. I don't have the paper right here on the three who were killed in Minneapolis."

"It's Patricia Shockley. A-pos," Anson said. "Sonofabitch. You started the DNA?"

"Thirty-six hours. We got the guy locked up in Ramsey on a California warrant, it's probably good for two weeks."

He explained the California problem and Anson said, "If we can't nail it down in two weeks, we won't get it. Hell, the knife is probably enough. The circumstances, if he was nailing Frances
and
her mother . . . there's plenty of motive in that, somewhere. Get a shrink on the stand . . ."

"We could do that."

"Lucas, I knew there was some reason I liked you," Anson said. "I just couldn't put my finger on it."

"Yeah, well, I'm heading over to Ramsey to squeeze Willett's pointy little head," Lucas said. "You better be there."

"Gimme a time."

Willett had a
public defender named Tony Mose, rhymed with Rose, who met Lucas in the lobby of the Ramsey jail and trailed him back to the interview room, where Willett was already waiting with a deputy. Mose was dressed in a somber black suit and white tie, like a guy going to a funeral. He was not, Lucas thought, a bad attorney.

"You get a chance to talk to him?" Lucas asked Mose on the way back.

"I did. I'll tell you what--this time, for once, I might actually have an innocent guy."

"Nah." Lucas shook his head.

"I'm serious, Lucas, the guy's got that thing about him--he didn't know what in the hell I was talking about when I asked him about the knife," Mose said. "He said
you
must've put it there."

"You hardly ever hear that," Lucas said. "The cops must've did it."

"The difference is, I think he
meant
it," Mose said.

Willett had had a bad night, as Lucas had hoped--his eyes were puffed with fatigue, and when they came in the room, he looked up and said, "Now what?"

Mose laid it out: Lucas had some questions. Mose would stop any questions that were improper, and any questions that Willett didn't feel like answering, he didn't have to answer.

"I didn't do a thing," Willett said. "Wait, I did, you know? I had some bud back in San Francisco, but it was all for personal use. I wasn't dealing or anything. This Frances thing, this is crazy. I had nothing to do with Frannie getting killed."

"Did Frances know that you'd been sleeping with her mother before she was sleeping with you?" Lucas asked.

Mose said, "Keep in mind, you don't have to answer."

"But also keep in mind that sleeping with both of them isn't a crime and we can prove that you were anyway--we'll be giving Mr. Mose a copy of a note we took out of Frances's purse, addressed to you," Lucas said to Willett.

Anson came through the door: "Did I miss anything?"

"Just started," Lucas said. He turned to Willett. "You're in a lot of trouble, Frank. We need to talk about the knife, but we need to talk about this other stuff, too. If you did it, we're going to put your ass in prison. If you didn't, we're your best chance of staying out. Now--did Frances know?"

Willett bobbed his head a couple of times and then said, "I think she found out. I don't know when. But things were going sour at the end. I hadn't even talked to her for a week before she disappeared."

"You didn't exactly hurry up to give the cops whatever information you had, after she disappeared," Anson said.

"What would you have done?" Willett asked. "I didn't know where she went, or why she went. But if a rich girl disappears, and the poor guy she's been hanging out with, it turns out they were breaking up, and if that guy's got a dope thing hanging over his head . . . well, what are the cops going to think?"

He was right about that, Lucas thought: that was what he
did
think.

His relationship with
Frances peaked in the summer, Willett said, then cooled off in the fall, and by December, they'd stopped sleeping together. "I told her right from the start that she couldn't let her mother know. I mean, I knew what would happen if she did--Alyssa would be all over the place. I'd lose my job, Frances would be gone, I'd be back at Snowbird flippin' burgers. When we started breaking it off, I said, 'Please, please, don't tell your mom. She'll fire me.' And Frannie said she wouldn't tell. We didn't hate each other, but she was getting all corporate, and I am . . . what I am. We could see that we weren't going to make it."

"How often were you over at the Austin house?" Lucas asked.

"When I was going with Alyssa, you know, a couple times a week," Willett said. "I never went there with Frannie. I mean, we were afraid that Helen would tell Alyssa, and that'd be it. There wasn't any reason for us to go there. We went to Frannie's place, or mine."

They pushed and pried, with Mose as an umpire, but couldn't get Willett to admit any animus toward either of the Austins. "You know, I think sex is a perfectly natural process, and I 've had relationships with quite a few very nice women and I valued all of them and I'm still friends with most of them and some of them still sleep with me sometimes, and that's all cool," Willett said. "It's not like I'm some crazy geek, and when a woman goes away, that's it, my world is over. There are women all over the place, and lots of them are pretty good."

"Good in bed?" Anson asked.

"That's not what I meant--I meant, pretty good. In general," Willett said. "Good people. With a few witches mixed in."

"You a Goth?" Lucas asked.

"Do I look like a Goth? No, I'm not a Goth," he said. "Frances was a Goth for a while, but she was beginning to see that it was all pretty make-believe. She said to me, one time, 'I'd like to meet a Goth who could change a flippin' tire.' So she was pretty much done with that scene, I think. Play-acting."

The knife.

"We found the knife, Frank."

"You guys--"

"No, and you gotta know that's bullshit," Lucas said. "I was there, we had three crime-s cene techs who didn't know this case from a dognapping, and they found it, not me. And they went in before I got there, so nobody planted the knife. And the knife has Patty Shockley's blood on it--it's human blood, and it's her bloo
d t
yp
^e
."

"I don't even know Patty Shockley. I don't know any of them besides Frances."

Lucas rode over him: "There's enough blood to get a DNA match, which will be coming. But we're willing to bet, and I'd stake my next year's pay on it, that it's her blood. How'd it get there, Frank?"

Willett slapped both of his hands on the top of his head, face down, and smoothed his hair back with his fingers, dragging at it, and said, "Honest to God, I don't know. I honest to God, I told Mr. Mose . . . I honest to God think that one of you cops put it there. Maybe not one of you, but some cop. I mean, there was no knife there. No knife. No fuckin' knife. It's like I've been dropping acid or something, everything is crazy. I just don't know what happened."

"Have you had any blackouts from the drugs you've used?" Anson asked. "Pot, or acid, or coke or meth or . . ."

"I don't use any of that shit--I smoke a little bud from time to time, but that other shit will kill your body. And I can't afford acid or coke. I wouldn't take meth, that's like sniffing glue, st'll fuck your brain. I just can't figure . . ."

He confessed that he probably had no alibis for the nights of the killings, simply because he hung out at night. "That's what I do. I hang out, couple clubs, tavern, walk around on Hennepin Avenue, whatever. Hang out."

They talked about his relationship with Austin: had that dissolved in anger? "No. Well, you know, maybe you'd have to ask her. But we stopped when she just got busy with taxes, and we didn't start up again. I knew it was just a thing--she knew it, I knew it, it felt good, and about the time it should have started coming apart, it did."

"She gave you that truck," Lucas said.

"She did. She was a sweetie," Willett said. "It wasn't payment, or anything--she gave it to me because I had this old piece of shit tha
t h
ad holes in the floorboards and I just about gassed myself every time I drove it. I had to keep the windows open. So she got me this truck-- surprised the shit out of me."

"And it wasn't for the sex, it wasn't to say goodbye."

"Might have been a little bit to say goodbye, but the basic thing is, the Austins have so much money that she just really didn't care how much it cost," Willett said. "The way she thought was,
If I did what he did, rock-climbed and surfed and skied, this is the kind of truck I'd want.
So that's what she got. The money, the money was nothing. A bad day on the stock market, she'd lose ten times what that truck cost."

They worked him,
and pushed him, teased him and tried to make him angry, but he only got sadder and more confused. When they were done, they all stood up, and Lucas called the deputy, and Mose said he wanted to talk for a few more minutes, and Lucas and Anson stepped toward the door.

Willett said, from his chair, "Officer Davenport--when you saw that knife, in the drawer, what'd you think?"

Lucas shrugged. "I don't know. I thought, maybe,
There's something."

"You didn't think,
That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life?
That a guy would go on the run but leave the bloody knife right in the first place somebody would look, in the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers, under some old underwear? Maybe I should have tacked a sign on the thing that said, 'Knife inside.' 'Murder Weapon Here.' I mean, it's just so
fucking stupid."

As Del said--but Lucas dodged. "People who murder other people usually aren't wizards," Lucas said.

"But it's got to be the stupidest thing you've ever heard of."

"No, no," Lucas said. "Not the stupidest. But . . . it's up there."

"Think about that," Willett said. "Think about it."

Out in the hallway,
Anson said, "Loser."

Lucas said, "We didn't move him much."

"I'll background him, if you want."

"That'd be good," Lucas said. "There's quite a bit of paper over at his house--we've got his cell phone records, address book. Any kind of a profile . . ."

When Lucas
was alone in his car, he thought about Anson's "loser" label. Lucas had been an excellent college hockey player--second team all-WCHA in his senior year. He wasn't pro level, but he was almost pro level. He could have fooled himself into thinking he was. Could have hooked up with a minor league team, could have hung on to the edges for a few years.