Phantom Prey (38 page)

"Welp"--it sounded like
welp
--"won't be the first time. Come on in. Is this about Jerry?"

"Why do you ask?" Del said.

"He's been sort of spooky the last couple days. I've kinda wondered if he's been up to something," Odd said. He was wearing an oil-stained flight suit, and took a pack of Marlboros out of a leg pocket and shook out a cigarette.

"Like what?" Del asked.

Odd settled behind a beat-up wooden desk, with a sign on it that said
Odd Angstrom,
pointed at a couple of plastic chairs, and said, "Well, you know, ever since he got out, we've wondered if he might go back to his old ways. Made some good money--heh, heh. EBay's the world's best fence, huh? No more ten-cents-on-the-dollar."

Linda had left her desk and came in and leaned on the doorjamb. "That goddamned Jerry. He's never going straight. Good worker, but he doesn't see himself getting along on forty thousand a year, if you know what I mean."

Del and Lucas looked from Odd to Linda, and then Lucas said, "We're not here about Jerry."

Now Odd and Linda looked at each other, and Odd hacked once, a smoker's laugh, and said, "I guess we coulda gone all day without mentioning Jerry," and Linda cackled and said, "Got that right."

Odd said, "So who's it about?"

"You gotta guy named Ricky Davis?"

Odd frowned. "Ricky, huh? What'd he do?"

"We don't know if he did anything. We're just looking around based on some lab work. Do you have any record of what he might have been doing--his calls--last December?"

Linda nodded. "Sure. What date?"

Lucas gave her the date, and she went back to her desk, and all three men stepped out to watch. She pounded on an old Dell computer, brought up a spreadsheet, rolled it for a couple of minutes, then put her finger on a greasy screen and said, "Yeah, he was working. Had three calls . . . let me see. Yeah, he came on at three o'clock, left at eleven. He was the only guy on that afternoon, sort of tangled up in the Christmas holidays. Must've been snowing--he had two ditch calls and one tow."

"Can you tell which truck he was using?"

"Yup." She touched the screen again and said, "He's usually in Two . . . yup, he was in Two."

"Could we take a look at Two?"

"Ain't gonna be anything left from December," Odd said.

"Like to take a look anyway," Lucas said.

Odd led them
back to the garage and pointed. Two was a black 2001 Ford 550 diesel with a dual winch on the back. They walked around it
,
and Lucas stuck his hand over the side and dragged his fingers across the bed, held them up in front of his face, rubbed his fingers. All the oil you could want. The winch lines were shiny, but gritty: there would be, Lucas thought, metal filings in the oil.

"What do you think?" Del asked.

"I think I gotta find a place to wash my hands; and we should call Dakota County, get their lab people up here," Lucas said.

"Not gonna take the truck, are they?" Odd asked.

"If they have to, you'd be compensated," Lucas said.

Odd brightened: "Welp, that'd be a benefit. What'd that boy do, anyway?"

Del asked, "So what's Jerry's last name?"

Lucas washed
his hands; and while they waited for the Dakota County crew, they got Linda and Odd around Linda's desk, and cross
-
examined them on Ricky Davis. "Used to work on towboats, down on the river, got tired of that, and decided to start a farm. He and his girlfriend are raising emus."

"Emus--like the bird."

"Yup. Ricky says that they got no cholesterol and no fat, and he's gonna sell them to high-r ent restaurants in the Cities. They got a batch of chicks last fall, and they're gonna start harvesting them . . ."

"That means 'chop their heads off,'" Linda said.

". . . around next Christmas."

"Where's the farm?" Lucas asked.

"Down south of here, somewhere, what's the town?" Odd scratched his head.

Linda said, "Wanamingo--it's by Zumbrota."

Lucas got on
his phone, called Carol, had her look at a map and figure out what county Wanamingo was in. She came back a minute later and said, "Goodhue. The county seat is at Red Wing."

"Get me the number for the county recorder, will you?"

"Let me get on the Net." Another minute, and she said, "Here it is . . ." and read out the number.

As he dialed it, he asked Linda, "Any idea what Ricky's full legal name is? Is it Richard or Ricky, his middle initial?"

She poked her computer a couple of times and said, "Richard William Davis, 01-07-75."

Lucas got
a clerk in the recorder's office, identified himself, and asked her to check the computer for any deeds, mortgages, or liens listed to Richard William Davis in the past year.

She was back almost instantly: "We have a deed recorded and a mortgage satisfaction on November twenty-one, forty-two thousand dollars for apparently . . . let me figure this out . . . forty acres out in Cherry Grove township."

"Is that near Wanamingo?"

"It is. Let me see . . . four, five miles?"

The Dakota County
crime-scene guys arrived a couple of minutes later, and Lucas and Del and Odd walked them out to Two. "You know what you're looking for?" Lucas asked.

"Yes." The older of the two guys looked into the truck bed.

"We're gonna find it, too--whether or not it's
exactly
right, we'll have to see."

"I understand there were some oak leaf bits stuck in the plastic sheet," Lucas said.

"That's right," the older one said. "We'll look for them. What we'll do, we'll seal up the bed as best we can, then take it back to the garage and sample everything."

"How long before you know?"

"Lot to sample," he said. "Let's say . . . a preliminary read by tomorrow, something definitive in a week or so?"

"I'll give a preliminary read right now," the shorter guy said. "Given what we found in the sheet, you couldn't even think of a better possibility than this truck. We had a mix of engine oil and transmission fluid and brake fluid and . . . shit, we should have thought of wreckers."

"Good enough for me," Lucas said. To Del: "Wanna go talk to Ricky?"

"What'd that boy
do,
anyway?" Odd asked.

They were
only fifteen minutes from Lucas's place, so they went back into town, and Lucas dropped the Porsche and Del left his state Chevy in the street, and they took Lucas's truck. They got lost cutting across country, and didn't make the Davis farm until late afternoon.

The farm was not on what Lucas would have identified as farmland: it was a torty-acre hump of scraggly, sapling-tnfested meadow with a big wire cage in the middle of it, backed on one side by the foundation of an old barn. The barn foundation was tented with plastic; the pen itself was full of five
-
or six-foot-tall birds that Lucas woul
d h
ave called ostriches. A trailer, missing its wheels, sat on blocks to the right of the driveway, opposite the barn and bird pen, and a Dodge pickup was nosed in to the trailer.

They pulled into the driveway and parked fifty feet down the hump from the trailer; as they did, Ricky Davis stepped out of the trailer and peered at them. Lucas slipped his gun out of its waist holder and slipped it into his jacket pocket. "Watch yourself--that's the motherfucker who shot me."

"You sure?"

" Ninety
-
four
-
point
-
six percent."

Davis was
watching them, a frown on his face. When Lucas stepped out, with Del on the other side, his face dropped, and then he looked both ways, up and down the hill, and Lucas yelled, "Ricky . . ." but Davis had thrown himself into his truck.

"Shit," Lucas said, and pulled the .45.

Davis fired up the truck and hit the gas, backing straight toward them, and Lucas yelled, "Ricky," and pointed the pistol, and Del, who was exposed, ran around behind Lucas's truck, and Davis accelerated, backward, past them, down the hill, all the way to the gravel road, across the gravel road, into the ditch on the other side.

Neither Lucas nor Del had fired a shot; they both climbed back into Lucas's truck and Lucas whipped it around in a circle. Davis was moving forward, but couldn't climb the steep bank of the ditch for a hundred yards or so, and bounced and ricocheted over the rough turf on the edge of the ditch, and finally coaxed the truck up the side and hit the gravel road. Lucas was a hundred feet behind him when they cleared the top of a hill, past a farmhouse where there was a woma
n s
tanding on the lawn with a golden retriever. They were going way too fast.

Gravel dust made it impossible to see for more than forty or fifty yards. Every time Lucas moved to the side, to get out of the dust, Davis moved over in front of him.

"Gotta hard right coming up," Del yelled. "Coming up . . . Coming up close!"

Lucas hit the brakes and dropped back, the stability-control lights flashing on his dashboard, but Davis plowed into the intersection, too fast to hold. The back end of the pickup started to slide, the rear wheels frantically throwing rocks and dirt, and the truck almost went into the ditch again, but Davis at least got it straight, with two wheels down in the ditch and two on the shoulder. Then the ditch wall got steeper and he tried to stop; did stop. Sat for a moment, and then the truck slowly rolled sideways. Davis tried to steer into it, but failed, and the truck rolled, and stopped upside down.

"Hard right," Del said, climbing out behind the muzzle of his Beretta 9mm.

Lucas said, "Might be a gun in the truck. Watch it."

They boxed the truck, easing up behind it. There was no visible piece of sheet metal on the vehicle that hadn't been dented in the roll. All the windows were cracked, and when Lucas came up on the driver's side, he could hear Davis weeping.

He risked a peek: Davis was hanging upside down in his safety belt, his face contorted, tears running down his forehead into his hair. Lucas asked, "Are you hurt?"

Davis, out of control, asked "Wha-wha-what's gonna happen to the birds?"

"Are you hurt?" Del asked.

"No, I'm just upside down."

"Gotta gun?" Lucas asked.

"No."

"Let's get you out of there."

They'd gotten
him out, and Del had cuffed him, when a sheriff's car cut around a corner a half-mile away, out from behind the shelter of a stand of trees, and Del looked back at the farmhouse where the woman had been and said, "She must have called it in."

Lucas said, "Hang on," and climbed in the truck and hit the switch that activated the two red-LED flashers on his grill. The cop car slowed a bit, but came on, stopped thirty yards away and the cop got out with a shotgun, pointed to the sky, and Lucas shouted, "BCA--BCA," and he and Del held up their IDs.

"I'm so fucked," Davis said.

With the
Goodhue deputy standing there, they read Davis his rights, and Lucas asked if he understood them, and then Del said, "You scared the shit out of us, back there, man. What the hell was that all about?"

"I knew you were coming, someday," Davis said. "I knew you'd find out." He began to weep again, and the deputy seemed about to say something, but Lucas gave him a quick head shake.

"You almost shot me in the balls, Ricky," Lucas said. "Two inches over, and I'd be Nutless Davenport, wonder cop."

That made Davis smile, momentarily, shakily, and he said, "I didn't want to do it. That crazy bitch made me do it. We weren't trying to kill you."

Lucas was a little pissed: "Man, you shoot a gun at somebody."

"I was trying to wound you or something. Get you off the case. Didn't try to hit you in the nuts, though," he said, miserably. Then. "Look at my truck. Jesus, look at my truck. What's gonna happen to my birds? What's gonna happen to the farm?"

"Did you buy the farm with the fifty thousand?"

"Yeah . . . paid it off, anyway," he said. "We couldn't afford the mortgage when it rolled over. It was some kind of A-T-M or A-R-M or something. Couldn't make payments. We just got the birds, we were desperate."

"Who killed Frances?"

"She did," he said bitterly.

"Helen," Lucas said.

"Called me up at work and said there'd been a terrible accident and I had to get down there. Accident, my ass, she stabbed her about a hundred times. Big puddle of blood all over the place. I never knew she hated the Austins that much."

Del: "Hated them?"

"Hated them. They treated her like dirt. Paid her shit, and she was like, invisible. If I'd known all that shit . . . I don't know."

"So you didn't plan it out?"

"Hell no. I wouldn't have done anything to Frances Austin," Davis said. "I mean, we stole the money. She had so much, we didn't think she'd notice right away, or that she could figure out what happened. But she figured it out: came right out and told Helen that she was gonna be locked up for a hundred years, because that's what happened when somebody stole from the Austins. They started screaming at each other, and finally, Helen . . . stabbed her."