Phantom prey

'That’s the question I plan to ask him,” Del said. “Somebody said… hell, that some of the folks on West Seventh were getting antsy about the Republican convention.”

“Ah, shit, Del.” Lucas kicked his feet off the desk and came down on the floor with a smack! “We can’t have people down there with undocumented rifles. The goddamn president is going to be there.”

“So, we gotta find George,” Del said. “And tell the Secret Service,” Lucas said. “If we tell the Secret Service, we lose George as a source.'

'Jesus Christ, if we didn’t tell them, and somebody got shot, and they found out that we knew- we’d be living in Marion, Illinois, for a hundred years,” Lucas said. Lucas ran his hands through his hair. Too much to think about. “Listen, I’m gonna pull Jenkins or Shrake to take over here. They both want a piece of Siggy. I want you to help me close down the Austin thing.”

“What about Willett?'

'I got the bad feeling that Frank is telling the truth,” Lucas said. “Then how’d the knife get in his house?'

'That’s a problem.” A moment later, Lucas said, “You want a scenario?'

'Sure.'

'The other people who were killed were all friends of Frances,” Lucas said. “Suppose that sometime during the confrontation between Helen and Frances, or maybe just from overhearing something that Frances has said, they come to believe that these three people knew something. They all knew something, even if they didn’t know they knew it. Maybe all three of them knew that she was looking for the fifty thousand, that somebody had stolen it, and that fact had to stay hidden. In fact, somebody told me that the first guy killed, Dick Ford, the bartender, was hoping that Frances would help him start a club

What if that’s why she looked at her Fidelity account? And found the money missing? Mentioned it to Ford, and maybe he mentioned it to Roy Carter, the kid…”

Del was shaking his head. “I buy the first scenario: they wanted money, they took it, they got caught, they killed her. Tried to shoot you when they thought you were figuring it out. But all these others… I mean, if your first scenario is right, Helen killed Frances because the knife was right there. If the knife hadn’t been right there, there wouldn’t have been a killing. Then, when they decided they had to do it again, they tried with a gun. These other three… the knife was a choice. A big deal. There’s a ritual going on there.”

Lucas sighed, looked out the window, and said, “I wish Siggy would come. Siggy’s so goddamn simple.”

Shrake showed up with a machine gun, a putter, and a half- dozen golf balls. He stacked the M- 16 case in a corner. “What you golfing retards never realized,” he said, tapping the apartment carpet with the putter, “is that this floor here has four perfect breaks, toward the center, and the carpet stimps at nine. If I can putt for a week, I’ll be in mid- season form. I’ll get Jenkins out on the first day and rip him a new asshole. He’ll owe me money for the rest of the summer.”

“Golf is the stupidest game ever invented,” Del said. “That’s true,” Shrake said, pointing the putter at Del. “But you’re not qualified to say it. You have to play it for twenty years before you can fully appreciate how exquisitely stupid it really is.”

“If Siggy shows up and you become a hero, I’ll fire your ass,” Lucas told Shrake, jabbing a finger at his chest. “You call the duty guy, he’ll get St. Paul SWAT rolling, you call me, and you wait. You pass that word on to Jenkins. I’m serious, Shrake, goddamnit, I don’t need any of your macho shit. There’s a child and a pregnant woman over there, and Siggy ain’t Antsy. He’s way past Antsy. This is no time to fuck around.”

“Got it,” Shrake said, his voice serious. “No bullshit. We’ll get it right.”

“You better,” Lucas said. To Del: “Let’s do it.”

23

Lucas and Del each took his own car, in case they needed to split up later on. On the way south, Lucas called Pratt, the Dakota County deputy who’d tracked the lab work on Frances Austin’s body.

“We’re going to look at a couple of trucks at Odd’s Tow and Wrecking in South St. Paul. We may want your lab guys to come up and take some samples, if we find something good.”

“Give us a call,” Pratt said. “We got the lab reports back, and we’re looking at wrecker kind of stuff- we’ve got that tranny fluid, some regular engine oil, some metal filings. Now that you’re talking tow trucks, I’m thinking, the lift cables?”

“I’d buy that,” Lucas said. “We’ll call.” Next, he called Odd’s Tow and asked for Ricky, and was told by the woman who answered the phone that Ricky wasn’t working. Excellent.

Odd’s Tow and Wrecking was built on a hump of dirt off Highway 52, the dirt held together by a comprehensive coat of oil slicks. The office was a rectangular shed with one window and a hand- painted sign that said Odd’s, and a red neon sign inside the window said Open. A dozen junked cars sat in the weeds next to a blue- metal garage. There were three tow trucks in sight, two inside the garage, one sitting in the yard next to the office. Lucas parked on one side of the office door, and Del on the other, and Lucas led the way inside, where a fleshy woman with big dark hair sat behind a desk sorting by hand through yellow slips of paper. A plaque on her desk said Linda. She looked up when they came in, asked, “Can I help you?”

“Are you the manager?” Lucas asked. “No… the manager…” She looked toward one of two internal doors and shouted, “Hey. Odd.” A chair scraped across a concrete floor in the office and a heavyset man with pink cheeks and straw- colored hair stuck his head out of the office. “Help you?”

Lucas identified himself and said, “We need to ask you some questions about one of your employees.”

“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?'