Phantom prey ld-18

by John Sandford

  “How do we get in?” Loren asked. Alyssa said, “I’ve still got a key to his house, if he hasn’t changed the locks since we were dating. I can’t believe he’s organized enough to do that,” she said. “We jog again. Watch until he’s out, I go in, I leave the knife, and then we figure out something that triggers Davenport to make a search.”

  “We scare him. We get him to run away,” Fairy said. “We get Frank to make a break for it.”

  Alyssa: “Not a bad idea. How do we do it?” Fairy: “I call him. I tell him that I heard that the cops were coming for him on the California dope warrant. I bet he’ll run. I bet he will.” Alyssa: “He’ll recognize my voice.” Loren, on the opposite chair, shook his head: “No, he won’t. You two don’t sound much alike. Fairy sounds younger, more perky, like a Valley girl. Her voice is pitched higher. You don’t sound much alike at all.”

  “Really?” Alyssa said. “Really,” Loren said. “So. When do we do all this?” Alyssa looked at her watch: “Can’t do Frank until we’ve done the car. We’ve got just enough light to scout that right now."

  "Then we could even do it tonight,” Fairy said.

  They took the Benz, and Loren sat in the back, where he could watch Alyssa’s eyes through the rearview mirror. “I like the idea of tipping Frank so he runs,” he said, as they headed out the driveway. “But if you’re the only one that Davenport’s told about the warrant, then he’ll figure out that you’re the one who told Frank.”

  Alyssa nodded. “Let me think about it."

  "Gossip,” Fairy said a minute later. “What?” Alyssa asked. “You could talk to Gina. She’s the worst gossip on the staff, and she goes around to all the spas. You could tell her confidentially about Frank-ask if he’s been giving or selling dope to any of the customers. She’ll tell other people- it’ll be all over the place by the end of the day. Then, if Frank is tipped, it could be any of the staff members, clients, who knows?”

  “Excellent,” Loren said. Alyssa said, grudgingly, “It’s an idea.” And a second later, “That would work.”

  The river-bridge area wasn’t going to work for burning the car, they decided-the fire would be too visible to too many people on the highway; too many cell phones. It’d be reported within seconds. They gave it up after driving across the Wakota Bridge a couple of times, and instead began probing the area south of I- 494, along the Mississippi.

  The South St. Paul airport, where the car was hidden in Hunter Austin’s hangar, sits on the top level of the Mississippi’s western valley wall. Down the hill east of the airport, Concord Street runs parallel to the river, and on the river side of the street, a complex of railroad- to truck freight terminals are jumbled along dead- end streets between the river and Concord.

  “If somebody was planning to burn a car, this would be one place to do it,” Loren said, as they probed back into the complex of streets and warehouses. “You’d have to run less than a mile. You’d only be exposed for maybe ten minutes.”

  “It’s better than I thought,” Alyssa admitted. “We do it like this: we drive the Benz to the hangar, leave it, drive the little car down here. Right behind that pallet yard, along the fence, where the fire would be hidden from the street by the warehouse. Touch the fire off, and we run straight down the road for what… maybe two hundred yards? We hook around that garage, cross Concord, and head up the hill to the airport. If we’re lucky, we’ll be across the street before anybody sees the fire.”

  “Unless there are watchmen,” Loren said. “Watchmen would be inside, not out. I’ll look for lights… can’t be out here without lights. We can always revise at the last minute, drive around the block and come back, if we have to.”

  “You could hurt yourself running in the dark."

  "Not if I stay in the middle of the street. There are enough lights around that I should be okay.” They drove the route, and Loren pointed out a couple of potholes left over from winter. “If you step in one of those, you’ll sprain your ankle. You could break a leg.”

  Alyssa looked back along the road. “They’re both on the left side. I’ll stay on the right.”

  They followed the approach up the hill to the airport, and the road in. Access to the private hangar area was through a card- controlled electronic gate, no problem to a person on foot, who could simply duck under it. Again, there should be enough ambient light to work with.

  “Can’t do it in the middle of the night, though,” Loren said. “If people see you running then, they will notice."

  "So, nine o’clock."

  "We’ve got the gas,” Fairy said. “Let’s do it tonight."

  "What about the knife?” Loren asked. “Soon as we can-before Davenport has too much time to think about everything,” Alyssa said. “I asked his wife to get him to investigate because he’s smart. Now, I wish he was a little dumber.”

  “Water under the bridge,” Loren said. “… but we could place it tonight,” Fairy said. “Frank always goes out at night; I doubt that would have changed."

  "What if somebody sees us at his house?” Alyssa asked. “How many times did that happen when we were visiting?” Fairy asked. “One out of five?"

  "Still happened once,” Alyssa said. “So, we check it out first. Go in the front door, one step to the left, key in the lock, we’re inside. Hide the knife, peek out the window for people on the sidewalk, listen at the door, and we’re out. If somebody should pop up by surprise, we go back, get the knife, and throw it in the river.”

  “Okay. I’m just a little nervous."

  "You’re about to pee in our pants,” Fairy said cheerfully. “Don’t do that. I can’t stand wet pants.”

  Back at the house, Alyssa looked at the gas cans. The three identical red plastic containers were used to gas up Hunter’s home toys: the John Deere lawn tractor and a smaller Lawn- Boy trim mower, a heavy Toro snowblower, a Stihl chain saw, a weed whip, a leaf blower, the limb- trimmer. They had a yard service to do all of that work, and a plow guy to clear the driveway in the winter, but Hunter liked to putter, and he had enough money to putter with what he wanted.

  There were probably ten gallons of gas in the three containers. She wouldn’t be able to bring the container back with her, so she’d have to leave it in the car. Would Helen notice that one of the gas cans was gone? No matter-Alyssa could go someplace far away and buy another, when she had time.

  She filled one of the containers all the way, pouring from the other, then humped it over to the Benz. Damn thing was heavy. As she lifted it in, she thought, This is crazy.

  “No, it’s not,” Fairy said. Fairy was popping up whenever she wished; at the same time, Alyssa no longer worried that she might take over. She now seemed more like a twin sister than an alien being. “It has to be done. It has to be,” Fairy continued. “If there’s one thing we can chicken out on, it’s putting the knife at Frank’s place. But we must obliterate any evidence that can be used against us. We have to get rid of the car.”

  So Alyssa put the can in the trunk of the car, on top of a layer of newspapers, closed the trunk, and looked at her watch. Seven o’clock, and dark. “Might as well do it,” Fairy said. “Let’s go… Can I drive?”

  A few last things to do. She found an old T- shirt, cut it into strips, made a ten- foot- long soft- cotton fuse, soaked it in gasoline, and put it in a Ziploc bag. She’d string it out when she got there, and the Ziploc bag would keep the odor of gas out of the Benz. Got a bottle of Windex, a role of paper towels, and a pair of yellow plastic kitchen gloves, and put them in the Benz. She’d clean up the Honda’s steering wheel and other plastic surfaces, just in case. And finally, she changed into a navy blue tracksuit and running shoes.

  “I’d really like to fuck you,” Loren said from the bedroom mirror. “Turns my crank when I watch you getting dressed. “Don’t talk to me like that,” Alyssa said. She was cold, and frightened. Her life hung on what would happen in the next hour.

  “He’s talking to me,” Fairy said. “Oh, God,” Alyssa groaned.
“Listen, you know-maybe it’s time for me to drive,” Fairy said

  “Like, right now. Totally.”

  The hangar area was deserted, dark and cold, and moving the car, for the first five hundred yards, was not a problem. But outside the gate, after she turned down the hill, a cop car came around a corner and fell in behind her.

  Fairy was sitting on a plastic sheet; and became so obsessively careful, so slow and purposeful with her turn lights, that she flashed on the possibility that he’d check to see if she were drunk. When she turned the corner at the bottom of the hill, on Concord, he followed after her, and stayed behind. When she turned left, off Concord, though, he went on, apparently never giving her a thought.

  She exhaled, and touched her forehead, found cold sweat. Nothing ever goes as planned. Never.

  Instead of driving directly to the site where she planned to burn the car, she did a couple of laps around the neighborhood, checking for police. And she said, “I can feel you there, Alyssa, you’re slowing me down.”

  They had decided to burn the car against a chain- link fence, in a patch of weeds, behind a warehouse wall, where the view to the street would be blocked. If the fire was low enough, it might not be discovered for quite a while, she thought. Nothing was moving along her dirt road behind the place when she pulled in and killed the lights. She sat for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom, then slipped out of the car.

  Cold. Colder than it felt in her driveway, or up at the airport. She shivered, looked around, couldn’t see much; security lights down the way. She could hear cars from over on Concord… but nothing else.

  The gas can was there, on the backseat. After a last look, she reached in and tipped it upside down between the front and back seats. The gas poured onto the floorboards; she got the gas- soaked rag out of the Ziploc bag, stretched it out, ten feet; waited for the gurgling to stop in the back of the car, looked around one last time, stressed, jittery, got a matchbook from her pocket, stood back from the end of the fuse, dropped a match on it, and turned to run.

  Match went out: no fire. Went back, lit another match-the thick odor of gasoline flowed around the car-and dropped the match again and started to run. Stopped, almost started back, when she saw the fire start, and then begin working down the fuse.

  She ran. She was a hundred feet away when the car went up with a huge WHOOOMMP and she thought ohmigod and the fire climbed higher than the roof of the warehouse, a pyramid of smoke and flame probably visible for a mile around, and she dug in and ran, and ran, and crossed the street and ran up the hill and in the distance, heard the sirens…

  Later, in the night. At Frank Willett’s house, a snug little ranch, with the incriminating knife in her pocket, she jogged along the street, away from her car, watching, watching, was about to turn in at the front door when she saw a woman walking toward her, on the other side of the street, carrying a grocery sack, and she went on by the house, turning her face away from the woman, jogging and thinking, Nothing ever goes as planned.

  She jogged back, five minutes later, and this time, made the move.

  And it went as planned… Why was that? she wondered.

  19

  Lucas spent the morning arranging surveillance on Frank Willett, a loose one- man tag until they could decide whether or not to pick him up. He’d called Austin early and had gotten Willett’s work schedule. He was teaching tai chi at one spa and had Pilates classes at two others.

  “I’ve been thinking about Frank,” Austin said. “He seems too gentle to kill anyone. But I can’t let this go. I’ve got to check and make sure he’s not selling dope in my places.”

  “Just take it easy for a couple of days, huh?” Lucas asked. “A couple days won’t make any difference. We’ll make some kind of decision by then.”

  She said she’d think about it.

  And he had bureaucratic stuff to do, with the Republican convention security committee. After the committee meeting, he stopped at United Hospital to check on a friend who’d had an early- morning angiogram, and had gotten a couple of stents in his heart. After that, dropped down to the United cafeteria for a slice of pepperoni pizza and a bottle of diet Coke, and tried not to think about stents.

  Coming up the ramp from the hospital’s subterranean first floor, his cell phone rang: Carol. “You’ve been out of service,” she said. “Can’t get anything in the hospital,” he said. “What’s up?"

  "A cop is calling from San Francisco on Willett,” she said. “He said he’d be there for another hour-that’s a half hour now. I got a number.”

  Luther Wane sounded like a cheerful man, though he had a gravelly smoker’s cough. Between hacks, he said, “I talked to the prosecutor and they don’t want him. I mean, they’d take him, if it was free, but they don’t want to pay to send somebody out there to get him.”

  “That sorta sucks,” Lucas said. “Yeah, well, they’ll probably have to dismiss anyway. Even if they don’t, he won’t get any time. We got too many people in jail and the budget’s all shot in the ass, and a skinny case on a small- time dealer that’s six years old… they figure it’d cost us ten grand to come get him and they don’t want to pay.”

  “But if he jumped bail…” Lucas said. It seemed ridiculous. “That’s another problem,” Wane said. “He was bailed out with a court date to come. But the prosecutor in the case got killed and the paper got lost, and we can’t prove that he was ever notified of his court date. And his lawyer at that time, a court- appointed guy, moved to New Mexico and is running an ashram or some shit, and… you see what I mean? Too much horseshit and not enough money.”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t help me, though,” Lucas said. “You know what I’d do?"

  "What?"

  "I’d bust him anyway, if I was ready,” Wane said. “On the California warrant. It’s still good. Then you notify us, and it takes a while for the paper to get through the mill, and then some time to get back to you… You could have him inside for probably ten days or two weeks if you picked your weekends right. Bust him on a Friday, notify on a Monday, takes four or five days out here, we decline to prosecute the following Tuesday or Wednesday… and we can probably drag our feet a little.”

  “I might do that,” Lucas said. “We only wanted a shot at squeezing him, anyway.”

  “So if I get some paper from you, I’ll know what you’re doing."

  "Good enough,” Lucas said. “The prosecutor-he wasn’t stabbed or anything, was he?” Wane laughed. “No. We got one of those two- story McDonald’s here, you know? He takes his Big Mac and his fries upstairs to eat and read his newspaper, and when he finishes, he heads for the stairs, still reading the New York Times, trips and falls down the stairs and breaks his neck. He’s dead on the scene.”

  “Jesus,” Lucas said. “Anybody get sued?” Wane laughed a little longer, the laughs interspersed with hacks

  “He had an estranged wife. She testified that he’d come over twice a week and spend forty-five minutes trying to work through the estrangement. Doggy- style, for the most part, the rumor is. Anyway, she was still his wife, technically, and she sued for loss of companionship and got three- point- four million from McDonald’s. Then she married the guy’s boss. Heh- heh.”

  “If there’s an afterlife, he’s probably got a serious case of the red ass,” Lucas said.

  “If there’s an afterlife, he’s got more problems than that,” Wane said. “Nasty little bullet- headed know- it- all fuck.”

  Lucas was back at the office and took a call from Sandy, the researcher: “I’ve got a Loren who might be interesting.” When Lucas didn’t immediately respond, she said, “You know-you had me looking up Lorens?”

  “Oh, yeah. That didn’t come to much,” Lucas said. “You still want this guy?” she asked. “What’s he look like?"

  "He fits the general description. Dark hair, anyway. The key thing is, he went to the university at the same time as Frances, and it’s likely, but not for sure, until I can check some more, that they were in some
of the same classes.”

  “Jeez,” Lucas said. “That might be something. Shoot it over here.” The photo popped up a couple minutes later in his e- mail. He looked at it, called Jackson, the photographer, and asked if he could get a print. “Forward it to me,” Jackson said. “By the time you get down here, I’ll have it.”

  Lucas forwarded Sandy’s e- mail, got a diet Coke from the machine, and walked downstairs to Jackson’s cubbyhole. Jackson said, “I’m doing a little work on it.” He had the photo on a computer screen and was touching it up. “A little Photoshop.”

  A minute or so later, he tapped a couple of keys, got up a response box, clicked his mouse, and the printer churned out a glossy print. “Another piece-of-shit photograph-I wonder why nobody makes an effort to get decent ID shots? They should at least look human.”

  “Maybe you should start a campaign,” Lucas said. He looked at the photo. Could it be the man in the alley? Could be.

  He called Austin, who was at home. “I’m ten minutes away-I want to run down and show you a photograph,” he said. “Of who?"

  "I’d rather have you respond to it sort of… spontaneously.”

  At the Austins’, a man in a jean jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots was putting a cardboard carton in the back of a pickup, where a half dozen more cartons were already stacked. Austin was at the door, and when Lucas came up, she waved at the pickup driver, who was backing the truck out, and said to Lucas, “Finally pulled the trigger on Frances’s clothes. Sent them off to Goodwill.”

  “That’s got to be harsh,” he said. “Had to be done. She’s gone,” she said. And, “Come in.” He stepped inside and said, “Just need a minute.” He had the photo in a manila envelope, slipped it out and handed it to her. She looked at it, and her face turned white and she blurted, “Oh, my God. It’s Loren Doyle."