Phantom prey ld-18

by John Sandford

  And after the sex they’d gone hunting.

  Now that was done. She was a killer and Loren Doyle, the fault in the wetware, the bad cells, still called to her from the mirrors.

  Had to manage this. Had to manage it, right through whatever shreds of insanity were left, whatever came back to haunt her, she had to manage it.

  She lay there for a few more moments, thinking about it, then launched herself from the bed. First thing: rubber gloves and garbage bags. She walked down to the kitchen, her mind clear now, not a flicker of Loren. Opened the utility closet and looked at the supplies: it’d been a while since she’d done this. She was pleased to see that Helen kept the place stocked. She took a fresh pair of rubber household gloves and a tie- top garbage sack.

  Climbing the stairs again, she turned away from the master bedroom, walked past Hunter’s bedroom, past the last guest room, to the door there; opened it and climbed the stairs to the attic.

  A plastic storage box from Target, under a pile of old jigsaw puzzles. She pushed the puzzles off to the side, opened the box, took out the Fairy costume and the wig, stuffed them in the garbage bag.

  Carried the bag down to the laundry, left it there, got a flashlight, and went out to the car, opened the passenger door, and after a moment of minute examination of the seat and armrests, experienced the warm and holy glow known to people who have had a stroke of the purest luck.

  She could not find the smallest spot of blood. When she’d looked at herself in the mirror, when she turned on the bathroom light, she’d seen blood on her face and hands, and she’d had blood on her blouse and slacks, but only on the front; some of that, undoubtedly, would have rubbed off in the small car. But by the time she’d gotten to the Benz, the blood on her hands had apparently dried, and her back and the back of her legs had been cleaned: so there was no blood on the leather steering wheel, or the seats.

  She sat back on her heels, and a smile crept across her face. All right.

  And Loren whispered to her, You see, the Powers wanted it this way. The Powers are on your side, Alyssa. Alyssa, listen to me…

  “Fuck you,” she said aloud. “You’re just a couple of bad brain cells. That’s all done now.”

  A burden off her back, she returned to the house, to silence, and frowned: Should it be this quiet? Ah: the washer.

  She went back to the laundry, took the clothes, wet, out of the washer and put them in the dryer, moved into the kitchen and opened the cupboard. She picked a green spider- leg tea from Japan, added just a finger twist of ground rose hip, and brewed a cup; this particular combination was good for centering yourself when you were under stress.

  She had to get rid of Fairy’s clothes, and, come to think of it, she might as well get rid of the stuff in the dryer. Wouldn’t wear them again anyway.

  She sat with her tea and thought about it: she could put them in the fireplace, put on a little lighter fluid. But what if the police checked and found residue? The wig was real hair, what if a neighbor smelled burned hair?

  The tea calmed her down, redirected her mental energy through a calm space, and when she finished the tea, she had determined the best possible way to dispose of the clothing.

  She did the Fairy clothes and the wig, first, then got the clothes from the dryer, before the end of the cycle, still damp.

  She was still working when the phone rang. She looked at the caller ID, Davenport. She knew what he’d say: that there had been a new killing. She licked her lips, drew a breath, picked up the phone: “Oh, no, no, no. Oh, no. Lucas…”

  He would see her tomorrow, he said. She’d pulled it off.

  An hour later, she was at her spa in Highland Park-not far from Davenport’s house. He’d be in bed, probably. She’d have to think about Davenport, already regretted inviting him in on the case. He was too smart- he’d have to be dealt with.

  How to do that? She’d think about it overnight. The spa was dark, silent. She went back to the women’s locker room, into one of the bathroom stalls, and carefully and slowly fed the shredded wig and the Fairy costume and her clothes from the evening, all carefully scissored into one- inch squares, down the toilet.

  There. Let the police find that. She gave it a couple of extra flushes to make sure nothing had gotten blocked, and walked out to her car. She wasn’t sleepy yet. She remembered the crime- scene crew working in the kitchen after Frances disappeared…

  Maybe she could go on the Internet and find out if there was anything about destroyed DNA. If there was a cleaning product, she’d take the time to clean out the Benz, even though there was no visible blood. Then, maybe, trade it. She’d been told that a lot of low- mileage traded Mercedeses wound up in Mexico. If that were true, they’d never locate it…

  Outside, she paused in the parking lot, her hand on the car door. Not a bad night, she thought. The air was cold, but you could smell the spring just around the corner.

  Tomorrow, she’d figure out the small car. And Davenport. And maybe Fairy.

  16

  Lucas got up angry, felt the mood settling in for a stay. Knew it, suppressed it at breakfast, but both the housekeeper and Sam picked it up: he was trailing the anger around like a faint odor of skunk. He called Austin before he left for the office, and she told him that she was at the Highland Park spa. If he could stop on the way to work, she said, she had some thoughts.

  “We could use a few thoughts,” he said. “Then I’ll see you in ten minutes?”

  Austin was wearing a form- fitting bloodred tracksuit, a peculiar shade of red that always looked good on blondes, and that only blondes knew about. She was talking with another client, who patted her on the shoulder, then gave her a squeeze. Lucas recognized the other one’s face, but couldn’t remember her name. Then Austin looked past her friend and the woman turned, eyebrows went up and she stuck out a hand and said, “Dalles Burger, Stone amp; Kaufmann. Lucas, how are you?”

  “Sure, Dallie”-like he knew who she was all the time, doing a little tap dance while his brain retrieved her file card: lawyer-“I don’t think I’ve seen you since, what, the no- strike committee meeting. Are you going to arbitrate?”She was flattered that he remembered: “I will. We’ll be doing it right on the spot, so it’ll be touchy.”

  “Ah, you’ll work it out."

  "I’ve got to talk to Lucas for a moment,” Austin told Burger. “He’s investigating what happened to my daughter."

  "Oh, boy. Let me get out of here,” Burger said. And, “I want you to call me. If you need anything, just call. I’ll run errands, whatever."

  "Thanks, Dallie; I’ll call.” When Burger was gone, Austin pointed Lucas at a chair and asked, “What was this committee? No- strike? Arbitration?"

  "The building trades have agreed to a no- strike provision on the Republican convention work, but they wanted arbitration if there was a disagreement. The governor’s people put together an arbitration committee.”

  “Ah. Politicians.” Austin settled back in her own chair. “They’re not all terrible,” Lucas said. “Yes, they are. Every single one of them,” Austin said, a little serious behind the smile. “They take property away from people who work to get it, and give it to people they think will vote to keep them in their jobs. It’s that raw.”

  “Then you should be happy to see the Republicans come to town,” Lucas said.

  “They’re just as bad as the other ones,” Austin said. “I am seriously disaffected. I believe what’s going on in this country is evil. The president is an evil man, and the people who oppose him are evil people. That’s what I think.”

  Lucas shrugged: “All right."

  "You think I’m crazy."

  "Well…” He spread his arms and gave her his most charming smile, and made her laugh.

  She leaned back and said, “I was thinking last night, that of all the issues that have come out of these killings, Frances and all the other people, we know one thing for sure, and we also know that you have developed the only worthwhile clue, and only one of t
hem. I don’t feel that you’re pushing it in the right way.”

  Lucas said, “Tell me."

  "The thing we know for sure, is that all the killings are linked. They have to be. Same style. One group of people is being attacked. Something is going on that got all these people killed-and it seems like it’s still going on, whatever it is. Okay?”

  Lucas nodded: “Okay. But knowing that doesn’t get us far, if we can’t break into what’s happening.”

  She held up a finger. “The second thing that happened was that Frances created a secret bank account that was apparently set up simply to get fifty thousand dollars in cash-in currency, in bills.”

  “I’m pushing that."

  "Not hard enough,” Austin said firmly. “And that must lead somewhere. Fifty thousand isn’t that much in this day and age, but it’s not nothing, either. If she spent fifty thousand dollars in a couple of weeks, it’ll have to show up somewhere. And there are other odd things about it… like the secrecy. So my opinion is, that whatever’s going on-the thing that links the killings-must involve the fifty thousand. Somehow. And maybe the bank itself… because the bank involvement is odd, when you think about it.”

  Lucas leaned forward. “What do you mean?"

  "When Hunter was alive, we’d go out to Las Vegas every April for a military procurement convention,” she said. “It’d still be cool and wet here, but Vegas would be warm and dry and it made a nice vacation. Hunter would talk to his military people, and Francie and I would hang out. Instead of taking a lot of cash with us, Hunter would set up an account at the hotel. When Francie or I needed something, we’d charge it. Or, we’d go get some tokens, if we felt like it, and play the slots.”

  “Yeah?” She shook a finger at him. “If you needed to get fifty thousand in cash, from money that you had legally, but you didn’t want people to know about the cash aspect, that you were putting together this… pot… how would you do it?”

  “Might be a few ways,” Lucas ventured. “Maybe. But one of them, which Frances knew about, would be to send checks totaling fifty thousand dollars to two or three of the big casinos in Vegas, to set up accounts. Once they were cleared, you simply fly out and lose it. But not really. You buy tokens for the slots on the account, and then cash them in for hundred- dollar bills. Do it for a week: party, lie around the pool, pretend to play the slots, cash the tokens. You could easily do six or eight or ten thousand dollars a day, spread between the casinos, and nobody would know and nobody would care and nobody would remember. Except that the hotels would call you up three times a year with offers of a free room.”

  They thought about it for a minute, then Lucas said, “The point being, there were easier ways to get this money, even in cash, even anonymously, discreetly, than to set up a secret account.”

  “Not just that: also, Frances knew about it. She didn’t have to invent some secret bank method. So she must’ve gone through the bank for a reason. Maybe she wanted to leave tracks. Maybe… I don’t know. But it’s something. I thought about it all night.”

  “So what would you suggest?” Lucas asked. She shrugged: “I’m not the famous detective. I’ve got a funeral to work through. I’ve got… things. But. You have to push the money. That’s what people always said in the procurement business, when we went to Vegas. If something smelled bad, look at the money. Always look at the money. Maybe you could go back to the bank… push all of her friends about the money. It befuddles me: what would she use it for? What, that she couldn’t simply write a check for? That she couldn’t get me to write a check for?”

  Lucas peered at her for a moment, then asked, “That’s what you’ve got?”

  “That’s what I’ve got,” she said. “Are you going to think about it?"

  "Yes. That’s what I’ll do today,” Lucas said. “Think about the money, God help me, and nothing else.”

  That’s what he did. His secretary, Carol, came and looked at him, and went away, and then came back and looked at him again, and finally asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking.” She looked worried. “Huh. Could you take a look at-” He held a hand palm- out to stop her: “No. I won’t look at anything

  Go away.” She peeked a couple more times. Once she asked, “How’s the leg?"

  "Not good,” Lucas said. “I need to find a teenage girl to suck on it."

  "I’ll leave you alone,” she said. Just before noon, as he was sitting reviewing, in his mind, everything that had happened, the obvious occurred to him. He called Austin on her cell and said, “I need pictures of Frances.”

  “I’m at home, working on the funeral. I’ll get a bunch together. Is this about the money?"

  "Yeah. But I’ll tell you what, this would all be a lot easier if she had a loser boyfriend.”

  He called the vice president at the Riverside State Bank. “Could you get me the name of the banker who opened Frances Austin’s account?”

  “Sure. Just a minute.” More like two minutes. When he came back, he said, “Emily Wau. She’s now the manager at the Maplewood branch. I checked, and she’s working today.”

  “Give me her number,” Lucas said.

  Lucas ran down to Sunfish Lake, left the car turning over in the driveway. Austin had a dozen photographs: “I’ll get them back to you as soon as I can,” he said. “At the funeral?”

  “That’s okay-she had duplicates of everything."

  "Well- I’ll get them back.” Emily Wau was of Asian descent, a small, smiling, efficient woman in a conservative gray- green dress. “You want me to look at pictures of Frances Austin, to see if I can remember opening her account?”

  “Yes. It would have been only about five months ago. October. You must’ve spent a little time with her.”

  “I looked at the paperwork-she opened it with five hundred dollars,” Wau said. “So it would not have been a remarkable event.”

  “Still… six months. Not very long ago,” Lucas suggested. “Let me look at the pictures,” Wau said. Lucas passed them over, and she went through them, carefully, one at a time, turning each over, facedown, on her desk as she finished with it. When she was done, she picked them all up, looked at them again, then stared at a monitor camera mounted in one corner of the bank’s ceiling, a thinking- about- it stare, then looked back at Lucas and said, “You know, it was several months ago, and I probably talk to twenty people a day, so I can’t be sure, but… I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this woman.”

  Lucas said, “I’m not surprised.”

  And there it was: the case was cracked, though there was some cleaning up to do-like figuring out who the killer was. Lucas left the bank whistling, and on the sidewalk, got on his cell phone and called his secretary: “I need to get Dan Jackson to take some pictures for me.”

  “I’ll see if he’s available."

  "Do that. I’m going to lunch.” He stopped at a McDonalds, had a Quarter Pounder with cheese, fries, and a strawberry shake, thought about the implications, rolled on into the office. Carol saw him coming and said a couple words into a phone, hung up and said, “Dan’ll be up in a minute.”

  “Excellent.”

  Dan Jackson was a middle- sized, middle-weight black man with short, neatly trimmed hair and a tightly, neatly trimmed mustache, and black plastic- rimmed glasses. At work, he wore button- up shirts with collars, and sweaters and khaki slacks and Patagonia jackets. He was, he said, invisible, not only to white people, but to black people as well. “I’ve been on elevators alone at night with white women and they never knew I was standing there,” he’d told Lucas. “When I’m in the uniform, I am fully goddamned invisible.”

  Now he showed up carrying a Nikon camera with a lens more than a foot long, and Lucas groaned to himself, but smiled and said, “Dan, sit down.”

  “Got something for me?"

  "I need surveillance shots of five women, plus about five more women at random, for a board,” he said. “Usual range of sizes and shapes on the random shots-give me a couple of each: blon
d, sandy hair, dark brown. All white. Get some of our people out in the parking lot if you want, for the dummies, but don’t make it obvious-get a bunch of different backgrounds.”

  “I’m ready to go,” Jackson said. He patted the camera. “I got the new D3 with the 200–400 f.4 VR AF- S. Good ISO up to 6400, I can go to 12800 if I have to, but there’ll be some noise. Twelve megapixels so we get plenty of resolution. With this baby, you can really reach out and touch somebody. Brady squealed like a stuck pig when I put in for it-with the police discount, the lens is still better than four grand, and the body’s five…”

  “That’s great,” Lucas said. “… And I’ve been out shooting a little wildlife, to familiarize myself with the whole system. The white balance and auto- focus is as good as I’ve seen. I tested it against a 1DsIII, and the D3 is better. The IDs’ll give you more resolution, but I’d defy anyone to say which is which when you look at it on a computer monitor, or a sixteen- by twenty print, for that matter.”

  “Terrific."

  "That fuckin’ Flowers is already sniffing around, trying to borrow it,” Jackson said. “He’s still shooting a D2xs and I told him, ‘You’ll have to pry it from my cold stiff fingers.’ ”

  Lucas’s head was bobbing: “That’s just what we’re looking for, and fuck Virgil. Anyway, I got a short list.” He pushed it across the desk.

  Jackson fondled the Nikon and leaned forward to look at the list. “Who are these people?”

  “Suspects in a series of murders, so you’ve gotta be discreet,” Lucas said. “Alyssa Austin; her housekeeper, a woman named Helen Sobotny; Leigh Price-that’s L- e- i- g- h-who works up at 3M; Martina Trenoff, works at General Mills; Denise Robinson…” He pushed another sheet of paper across the desk. “Here’s their home addresses. I need them as quick as I can get them. If you need some cover from somebody, refer them to me. Overtime’s not a problem.” He filled in the detail, and pulled up Austin’s spa website, showed Jackson a photograph of her, and driver’ s- license photos on Sobotny, Price, and Robinson.