Phantom prey

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, it’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 that had 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.

But he hadn’t. He’d known he wasn’t good enough, so he looked around for something that he’d like, and that he’d be good at. He joined the biggest police department around, with the intention of becoming a homicide cop. He’d done that, and a few other things that came along the way.

If he’d gone the other way-tried for the pros-where would he be now? Flipping burgers in hockey’s equivalent of Snowbird? The line between winner and loser was pretty thin, and the paths were pretty crooked.

Willett was smart enough; women seemed to like him; he had some skills, some abilities… And he was coming up on forty, had a thousand dollars and a truck given to him by a woman, and at nights he hung out.

Seemed like waiting for death-and yet the line was so thin, and the paths so crooked.

21

Alyssa could feel the Fairy, there, behind her own eyes. The Fairy had been her, when she was a young girl, before Alyssa fell into the hands of the Coach. The Coach had known what Alyssa could do in the water, had seen it when she was eight, had pushed her with a ruthless discipline and determination to do what she, the Coach, hadn’t been able to do: win. Win all the time. If she’d come up in the right year, she might have gone to the Olympics, but that was the breaks of the game. As it was, she’d been the best athlete at the University of Minnesota, despite what some of the football players might have thought…

But getting there had been brutal, and terminated an otherwise unremarkable childhood.

Her parents hadn’t seen the brutality behind the swimming: they’d just seen their kid’s name in lights, at the end of the pool, most of the time with a big “1” in front of it. The Coach had buried the Fairy… little bits had resurfaced over the years, perhaps, with her playful- yet- serious interest in astrology, and particularly in the tarot, but mostly, the Fairy was buried under purpose and will and discipline.

Which, in the end, was the only thing that would get her through this.

Loren sat on a chair turned away from the living room table, while Alyssa lounged in an easy chair, a glass in hand. A bottle of Amon-Ra shiraz from Australia sat on the end table beside her, eighty dollars a bottle, and worth it.

Loren was dressed in a sixties- rocker- look brown- velvet suit, narrow pant legs, and a pinched waist on the jacket, with heavy brown brogans that would have been good for kicking someone to death. Alyssa said, “One thing that’s hard for me is to understand why you’re here. Are you really here? Are you an external reality, or are you all in my mind? Could I take a picture of you with a camera?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know about the camera, but I’m at least as real as Fairy.”

She wagged a finger at him. “No, you’re not. I know what Fairy is. Would you like to talk to her?”

Her voice pitched up and she giggled: “All right, here I am,” Fairy said. “You wanted Fairy. Woman with a knife- edge wit.”

Loren said, “Quit messing around, Alyssa. I need you back. We’ve got to talk.”

Alyssa came back, a slack smile playing around her lips: “See, I know what Fairy is. She’s me-another piece of me, and I think we’ll eventually get back together. We’ll heal. Other people have had this disorder-maybe my case is a little different than others, but all cases are a little different than others. Anyway: I understand it. I can look it up on the Internet. I can read stories about people who have gone through it. But you, Loren-the only people who have experiences like you, are total goofs. Crazy people. But you seem so… rational. Are you the devil?”

“There is no devil,” Loren said. “Isn’t that what the devil would say? You talked me into all these evil things… I killed three people-or Fairy did-and you were right there, eating it up, pushing me. If you’re not the devil, you’re a pretty good mock- up.”

Loren looked away: “Well, I’m not the devil. I’m dead and I have a dead person’s psychic ability. I could feel the hands of those people on Frances’s shoulder, and if Frances were here to talk to you, she would tell you the same thing. Killing them was the right thing to do.”