Phantom prey ld-18

by John Sandford

  "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.”

  “Does this involve the Austin thing?” Shrake asked.

  “Christ, I hope so,” Lucas said. “If it’s not that, I’ve got no idea what it would be.”

  Jenkins to Shrake: “Maybe we ought to see if Antsy has another brother. Or a special Lithuanian pal.”

  Lucas shook his head: “Any pal of Antsy would have been better at it. This guy was a total fuckin’ amateur. I don’t think he’d ever shot a gun before. He held it low, with his wrist cocked, like that picture of Elvis Presley in the cowboy suit. He had no idea where the bullets were going.”

  Jenkins slapped him on the shoulder. “Well, I gotta say, I’m glad he didn’t kill you. God knows who we would’ve got in your job. Probably some bureaucratic motherfucker.”

  Back in his office, Lucas stared at his computer screen for a while. His leg was itching, a painful itch, like poison ivy, so he took half a pain pill, took a peek at the bandage, didn’t see any leakage.

  And thought about the fifty thousand, It’s not enough for anything. Not enough for anything that would be important to her, financially. Even if she bought fifty thousand in dope, wholesale, she wouldn’t make enough back to justify any risk-the profit, even from a dope deal, would have been a drop in the bucket compared to what she already had.

  And after what Austin had said, the prospect of a dope deal seemed thin, although it was one explanation that would put Frances close to somebody who might kill her.

  The key thing was, she took it in cash. That meant that she didn’t want it traced- couldn’t be any other reason to take that much out at once. Of course, she could have planned to loan it to someone who didn’t want the IRS to know about it, who didn’t want a paper trail; or, even more unlikely, she might have planned to pass it along to some extremist political group, and she didn’t want the ties to show up.

  But it all seemed like bullshit. The explanation, when it came, would probably be simpler than any of that, Lucas thought. Shit, maybe she bought a Ferrari from somebody who didn’t take checks.

  Then why the secrecy about the withdrawals…? He took out his notebook, noted “Mark McGuire, Denise Robinson,” looked them up in the license bureau’s database, and then the phone companies’.

  Robinson answered the phone. Lucas identified himself and said, “I’d like to run out to see you. About Frances Austin. You and Mr. McGuire.”

  “Mark won’t be here for half an hour or so…"

  "Neither will I,” Lucas said. He got his jacket and the cane and said to Carol, “I’m gonna run out."

  "Where’re you going?"

  "Out to Maplewood. This couple Denise Robinson and Mark McGuire, friends of Frances Austin,” he said. “Maybe you ought to take Del with you."

  "Nah. I’m okay; this is just a check,” Lucas said. “What you really ought to do is go home and go to bed,” she said

  “You don’t look that good.” On the way to Maplewood, Sandy rang on his cell phone: “I’ve got eighteen Lorens for you."

  "God bless you."

  "It’s an old- fashioned name: there are more of them in their fifties and sixties than in their twenties and thirties. Anyway, I pulled the.jpgs out of the DMV folder and I’m sending them right… now… to your office e- mail.”

  “Okay. Run them through the NCIC, will you? Get back to me."

  "I’ll put the returns in your e- mail. But I’m going out tonight, so this’ll be the last thing I can do today."

  "Got a date?"

  "Yes, I do,” she said.

  Robinson and McGuire might be characterized as “Not-Goths,” Lucas thought when he saw them. They lived in a nondescript robin’ s egg- blue, fifty- year- old split- level house in a nondescript baby- boomer neighborhood that once probably had about a million kids running around in the streets, and now was full of old people.

  Denise Robinson was just as Alyssa Austin had described her: tall, gawky, short sandy hair, big glasses, about thirty. She met him at the door, invited him in, said, “Pay no attention to the living room; it’s the way we live now.”

  The house smelled of coffee and pizza, and the living room was an office, stuffed full of computer equipment, file cabinets, two desks, and a cat- torn couch pushed against the farthest wall, with a red striped cat perched on the back. McGuire was sitting at a computer, head bent toward the monitor screen, curly dark hair, shorter than Robinson, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, maybe a year or two older than she was. A pair of dirty white Nikes sat in the foot well.

  Still, when he turned to Lucas, Lucas thought, Huh. Dress him up a bit, and he could have been the shooter. McGuire reluctantly signed off what he was doing and turned toward Lucas without getting up.<
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  Robinson said, “So what’s going on?” Lucas stepped over and scratched the cat between the ears, and it sniffed his hand and produced a perfunctory purr. Lucas said, “I’ve been compiling all the information I can find on Frances Austin, and I understand you three were close.”

  Robinson opened her mouth to answer but McGuire got there first: “We were friends. We don’t know what happened to her.”

  “Do you think she’s dead?” Lucas asked. This time McGuire looked at Robinson, who said, “We think so

  Not because we know anything, but just because… people usually are, when they’re gone this long. We talked to her the day before she disappeared, and there wasn’t any sign that she was going anywhere, that she had anything planned.”

  “Probably kidnapped-her old lady has all the money in the world,” McGuire said.

  “Were the three of you in business together?” A line of wrinkles appeared in McGuire’s forehead: “Where’d you hear that?"

  "Just from… friends."

  "We talked about it,” Robinson said. Looking for a little shock: “Did she give you fifty thousand dollars?” Robinson: “No way.” McGuire, almost angry: “She didn’t give us a fuckin’ nickel.” Lucas went in again. “She didn’t give you fifty thousand dollars in cash, mostly fifties and hundreds?"

  "No. She didn’t,” McGuire snapped. “What the hell is this?"

  "Trying to find out what happened to the money,” Lucas said

  “We heard you were trying to build a website. A website takes money. This”-he gestured around the living room, at the computers and servers and cable lines-“takes a lot of money.”

  “Takes thirty thousand, and we busted our butts getting it,” McGuire said. “If we went national, we’d be looking for more money to set up an office and buy more equipment, and we talked to her about it, but she disappeared before we did anything. And we weren’t asking for fifty thousand. Fifty thousand wasn’t enough-we were looking for a quarter million, and even then, I’d have to keep working.”

  Not enough money, Lucas thought. He asked, “Where do you work?”

  McGuire worked at Inter- Load Systems, a company that tracked mixed heavy freight and matched it with space available on over- the road trucks. The company was a new start- up, and McGuire worked on the mathematical models that worked out delivery routes and times.

  “Sounds complicated."

  "It is,” McGuire said. He was surly, and he looked tired; more than tired. Exhausted. Lucas asked where he was the night of the shooting. “Working here,” McGuire said. “Any witnesses?"

  "Well-Denise. I mean, it was the middle of the night, where’d you expect me to be?"

  "Out clubbing, maybe,” Lucas said. McGuire snorted. “I don’t have time to take a leak. The last time I went to a club, the Beastie Boys were big.” Lucas peered at him for a moment, then asked, “So what does this new website do? The one you were working on with Frances?"

  "Tries to get people to make free advertisements. Then we test them for online reception, and try to sell them to the companies that they advertise,” McGuire said.

  “What?” Robinson stepped up. “Suppose you’re, like, Coca- Cola, and you keep putting out those crappy old Coke ads that no kid would ever watch, because they’re so lame. So we solicit ads from guys with video cameras-high-quality stuff, not your home video-and when they come in, we test them, and then we pitch them to Coke. Coke gets a really out- there ad, something the kids will watch, really cheap-even if they reshoot it-and we get a cut.”

  “Is that going to work?” Lucas asked, genuinely curious. “Not unless we can come up with a quarter- million bucks in the next few months. Word’s getting out, and we’re not moving fast enough,” McGuire said. “We get four or five guys doing this, only one’s going to make it. He’ll make a hundred million bucks, everybody else goes broke.”

  “Well, shit,” Lucas said. He scratched his head. “If advertisements are so expensive to make, why would anyone make one for free?”

  “The model’s already there,” McGuire said. “It’s publishing. When Stephen King was starting out, nobody paid him a nickel for all the work he was doing. Eventually, he sells a book, and then the big money arrives. But the publishing companies didn’t put up a penny until he had something good.

  “So you’ve got all these guys with cameras and they’ve been to film school and they know models and young actresses-they can put out a video for a few hundred bucks. Get some experience, get some attention, and maybe, if they’re lucky, they get a whole bunch of money. It’s like publishing, and we’re like the agents.”

  “Huh,” Lucas said. “That could work."

  "I sure as shit hope so,” McGuire said. “So you see why we’re missing Frances,” Robinson said. “There was a possibility that she could round up some money. Her, her friends, maybe her mom and her mom’s friends.”

  “Some of those people could drop a quarter- million dollars on the ground and not miss it,” McGuire said. “Frances’s dad joined a golf club out in Palm Springs a few years ago, and the admission fee was a quarter- million dollars. For a golf club. And here we’ve got this idea, and we… just… can’t… get it done.”

  Showing anger again. Frustration. Interesting. Lucas asked more questions about Frances: was she angry, lonely, addicted, scared, vague? No, they said, she wasn’t any of those things. Robinson said at the end, “It was like one of those things where somebody’s killed in a car wreck after the senior prom. Everybody’s happy and then bam! Everybody’s dead. I didn’t see anything in Frances that I didn’t see every day-she expected to see us, to call us, and maybe to get in the business someday.”

  “It wouldn’t have pissed you off if she’d said ‘no’? Sounds like she sort of led you on,” Lucas said.

  “Would have pissed me off-but I think she was sold on the idea,” McGuire said. “I really thought she was going with us. When she disappeared, I thought I was going crazy. I kept trying to find out what happened, and nobody had anything to say.”

  “You talk to her mother?” Lucas asked. “I did once… right after Frances disappeared,” Robinson said. “Just seeing if anybody knew where she was. Mrs. Austin seemed really confused. Out of it. Like she was losing her grip. I felt so sorry for her.”

  “Do you have any idea why she might have disappeared?” McGuire said, “Well, you’ve been all over it: money. She was smart, but not brilliant or anything. She looked okay, but she wasn’t super pretty, like she might have a stalker or something. She was… nice. And she had money.”

  There wasn’t much more. McGuire stood up when he left, and Lucas looked at him, standing, tried to imagine him with a gun in his hand. Still possible, he thought. At the door, McGuire asked, “You don’t have anything to do with Davenport Simulations, do you? There was a cop involved in that.”

  Lucas turned. “I started it, with a friend. He bought me out, when it got over my head. I’m out of it now.”

  McGuire’s head bobbed: “I’m officially impressed. You probably know what I’m going through right now.”

  “Fun at the time,” Lucas said. “That’s because you made it,” McGuire said. “If you’d been wiped out by a competitor, it might not have been so much fun."

  "There were no competitors,” Lucas said. “The olden days, when the world was new,” McGuire said. “I’m not that ancient,” Lucas said. “About six generations down the road, computer time,” McGuire said. “I mean, you probably once used cameras with film.” McGuire stayed in the doorway, and as Lucas got to his car, he called, “If you want to make another butt- load of money, all we need is a quarter million.”

  Lucas paused with one hand on the car- door handle: “Gimme a week to think about it and talk to some friends. Maybe…”

  “I’ll call you,” McGuire said. “I’ll call you.”

  Back at the office, Lucas pulled up e- mail from Sandy. One had NCIC data on the Lorens, the other had photos. He looked at the pictures-and ran into the eyewitn
ess problem: the eighteen were all between twenty- two and thirty- five, with dark hair, and most of them could have been the guy who shot at him. Most of them, in fact, could have been McGuire, but weren’t. He couldn’t pick one out.

  He got on the phone and called Alyssa Austin on her cell. “Where are you?”

  “At our Edina site,” she said. “Do you have access to a computer, where you could get e-mail?"

  "Of course. Right here in the office-I can access my account."

  "I’m forwarding eighteen digital photos to you. All Lorens. Stay on the phone, take a look at them."

  "Hang on.” Lucas hung on for a minute, two minutes, then heard her pick up the phone and she said, “Lucas, I’m sorry. I just don’t remember. It could be any of them. Or none of them. Except the two guys with the receding hairlines. It wasn’t them.”

  “All right. I had the same problem-I couldn’t identify any of them as the guy who shot me. We’ve got some more digging to do.”

  His leg was hurting again, a continuing ache that occasionally flared into a streak of pain that shot down his leg to his foot. He sat at his computer, ignoring it, working the list of Lorens through the DMV, looking for pickup trucks. There were four-four out of eighteen- about average for Minnesota men, he suspected. Cut the list anyway, although he cut it to three, rather than four: one of the four just didn’t look right.

  The leg would no longer be ignored, and he finally got the cane and told Carol that he was going home, and limped down to the car.

  He was, he thought, caught in a loop. Frances’s disappearance led to Dick Ford’s murder. Dick Ford's murder led to the fairy. He investigated the fairy girl and got shot at by a dark- haired stranger. And the stranger-Loren X? — goes back to Frances. Maybe?

  The house was empty when he got home, the housekeeper off somewhere with Sam, Weather still at work, Letty at school. With no need to use the car for a while, he took a full pain pill and went back to a computer, and called up Sandy’s e- mail on the NCIC files.