Phantom prey

“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, “That fifty 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, you know, 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.”

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 it’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.”