Phantom prey

mean, I didn’t know her, but I might have seen her.”

“What was the nature of her relationship with Mr. Ford?'

'Well, he wasn’t sleeping with her, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Mobry said. “It was more like, a bartender with a regular who’s an okay person, and they shared some things like the gothic. A person who doesn’t start trouble and is friendly and leaves a tip.”

“Did you and Mr. Ford…'

'Call him Dick. Mr. Ford sounds really… dead.'

'Did you and Dick talk about her?” Lucas asked. “Oh, sure, right after she disappeared. The police came and talked to Dick, and he told them what he knew. Which was hardly anything. She came in and got fish ’n chips the day before she disappeared. She was with a couple of other Goths-the police have their names, I don’t remember them. But then the day she disappeared, she didn’t come in. I think it was in the paper that she and a friend had lunch that day somewhere else, like a bagel place.”

“That’s right,” Lucas said. “So not at the A1. Anyway, she and Dick weren’t intimate-and I don’t mean sex. I mean, they didn’t share life stories. Dick was a bartender, so you know, he was a professional bullshitter. He didn’t even have any good bullshit about her.”

“Huh.” Lucas rubbed his nose. Goddamn stale cigarettes. “Do you think the same person who killed Dick killed Frances?” Mobry asked. “I don’t know. We don’t even know if she’s dead,” Lucas said. She sat with her hands in her lap: “You sound like you’re stuck.'

'I just started,” Lucas said. “I’m trying to get something going.'

'Why don’t you do some of that magic DNA stuff like you see on TV?'

'We did,” Lucas said. “The problem is, it’s not magic. Most of the time, you wind up proving that people who already said they were there, were there.”

“That doesn’t help,” she said.

They sat among the boxes, staring at each other for a moment, then Lucas asked, “Neither of you, you or Dick, had any bad vibrations from people, felt like somebody knew something, something was being held back?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. I’ve got nothing. I don’t even have a body. His parents came and got him and took him back to Rochester. The funeral’s Friday.”

He stood up. “All right. I’m really sorry for your loss. Dick sounds like an okay guy.”

“He was a good guy,” Mobry said, and the tears started again. “Are you going to find the fairy Goth?”

“Yeah, I am. Any ideas?'

'If she’s real, somebody at the A1 knows her. Some of the guys would have been following her around, if she looks like what she sounds like.”

“Anything else? Anything?” She shrugged, wiped tears away with her fingertips, said, “Do the Austins have a butler? Maybe the butler did it.” Then she cried, and Lucas patted her on the shoulder and asked if she’d be all right, and she said, “Yeah, I’d just like to sit here awhile,” and Lucas left.

She hadn’t had anything to do with the murder, he thought. In Lucas’s experience, women who killed their boyfriends suffered either from too much intensity or too much innocence; Mobry didn’t have either quality.

Like Austin, she was overwhelmed with sadness; all the sadness was getting him down.

5

Back out into the skyways, getting- out- of- the- office time, crowds jostling through to the parking ramps, a few of the younger women showing some pre- spring skin, the teen guys flashing tattoos over health- club muscles, their elders often with the competitive, fixed, dead- eyed, and querulous stare of people who were not getting far enough, fast enough, making enough, hustling all the time, working all the time, no time for an evening’s paseo, no time even for half- fast food. Scuttling people.

By the time Lucas got back to his car, the streets were snarled with evening rush- hour traffic, muttering along in a stink of exhaust and wet asphalt. He edged out into it, went around the block and down a few, to Washington Avenue, took the left, crawled a few more blocks, took the right turn across the Mississippi.

Lucas thought: Goths, mysterious fairies, dead bartenders ripped through their abdominal aortas-much better than a dead woman with a beer- bottle- cracked skull and a boyfriend who claimed he’d been out driving around; or paperwork; or political chores.

So he was whistling as he crossed the Hennepin Avenue bridge. He cheerfully chopped the nose off a Sprinter van, took the finger from the woman who was driving it, beat a red light by minus- fifteen feet, and dumped the car in a supermarket parking lot, leaving the BCA card on the dash.

The A1 was a block away, a brick building painted white, the paint gone dingy and gray, with a miniature theater- style marquee hanging over the door. The marquee said Surf amp; Turf, $9.99 and Happy Hour, 5-, which was either supposed to be cute, or the second number had fallen off.

Lucas ambled down the sidewalk, looking in the restaurant windows, checking the people on the street corners. The A1, when he came to it, looked respectably seedy; not a place where you’d go to start a fight, but not a place you’d propose to your girlfriend, either.

Inside, the purple carpet felt damp and spongy under his shoes. An anonymous jazz- piano tune was scratching its way out of overhead speakers, and a dim yellow light drizzled from red- shaded lamps running down the wall on his left, over a row of booths. Four of the booths were occupied by couples, and one by a single guy trying to read a newspaper. Two more men sat at the bar, with beers, an empty stool between them.

The bartender, a slope- shouldered, balding man with a rust- colored beard, was stacking wet glasses. Lucas leaned across the bar and asked, “Is Tom Harris in?”

The bartender yanked a couple of paper towels off a roll and wiped his hands. “Nope. He should be in later tonight. Eight, nine, like that.” He cocked his head. “You a cop?”

Lucas nodded. “I’m trying to get a line on a Goth woman. She supposedly was seen with Dick Ford the night he was killed.”

“You think she did it?'

'I’d just like to find her,” Lucas said. “Got any ideas?” The bartender shook his head. “I wasn’t here that night. Thank God. Might’ve been me.” “Anybody say anything about her…?”

“Yeah, you know. Bar talk. There’s some confusion, about whether she was somebody we know, or somebody we’ve never seen.”

Lucas said, “Run that by me again.” “There were three or four Goth women here that night,” the bar-

tender said, leaning forward, forearms on the bar. “That’s not unusual. You guys already checked them out.”

“I’m with the state, not Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “I haven’t checked out anybody.”

“Then you oughta talk to Minneapolis,” the bartender said. “They figured out who the Goths were. People knew them. Then this rumor starts that there was another one. But we don’t know if there really was, or if somebody’s confused, and the rumor’s running on its own.”

“Huh,” Lucas said. “All sounds like bullshit to me,” said one of the guys at the bar. He looked like a failing insurance man, in a brown suit with a green nylon necktie rolled up at the tip. He’d had a few.

Lucas turned his head and said, “Yeah?'

'The more I hear about it, the hotter this chick gets,” the guy said

He hip- yanked his barstool around to face Lucas. “When you heard about her yesterday, nobody was sure who they were talking about. Now you talk to somebody, and she’s like what’s- her- name-the movie star with the big lips.”

“She’s got big lips?'

'That was just an example,” the barfly said. He took a calculated sip of beer, handling the glass carefully. The other man at the bar said, “Nobody said anything about her lips. They did say she had a terrific ass. They were sure about that.'