Phantom Prey (20 page)

He was careful on the gravel roads--a Porsche paint job was not something you fucked with lightly--but once on Highway 52, he let it about three-quarters of the way out, and blew the shorts off a top
-
down, cherry-red '65 Corvette Roadster. In the rearview mirror, it dwindled like a poppy seed that you drop off a bagel.

When he cut into the 3M parking lot, he thought, he unquestionably held the Sunfish-to-3M land-speed record, and it would probably last forever.

Price's office looked like the office of a university professor--bookcases stuffed with publications and stacks of paper held together with clamps or rubber bands, a fake-wood-grained desk, an impressive
-
looking computer workstation, a half-dozen plants that all seemed to be dying, but not quite dead, lots of xeroxed
Far Side
cartoons, a rubber chicken hanging by its neck, a steel sheet with dozens of magnetized words, one of those poetry boards; a few of the words had been arranged to say, "The ugly gristle of morning smears a dry bone landscape down the flawless tapestry of night."

Price was sitting in an Aeron chair, her feet up on her desk, peering at a scholarly publication through oversized black
-
rimmed glasses. When Lucas stuck his head in the door, she said, "There you are." She patted the seat of a visitor's chair that sat beside her desk.

Price gave off a certain wavelength of fuck-me vibrations. Many women did that, Lucas believed, but they were only received by men who were tuned to the right wavelength, which was determined by birth or accident, perhaps, but not by choice.

Weather was one of them, and she broadcast on Lucas's frequency, and he'd begun picking them up before he could even see her face (she'd been wrapped in a parka when they met). Price broadcast on the same frequency; and she knew that Lucas was a receiver.

She smiled and said, "So what's the big deal?"

He took the picture out of his pocket and passed it to her. "This was taken at a Halloween party at November. I need to know the names of the people in it."

She took the photo--looked at his face, as though she hadn't really believed that there'd be one--and said, "Oh, God. This is the Roy guy, i sn't it"--she touched Roy's face--"and this guy is named Richard Trane . . . Richard, not Dick or Rich. And this guy . . ." She closed one eye, thinking, then said, "Brad. Brad something, I don't know his last name, but Judy would, they went out." She touched the unknown woman. "This is Judy McBride."

She knew Frances, but not Roy Carter or Dick Ford. "I do remember that Karen Slade took the photograph, she was having like a brain
-
fart or something, she couldn't push the right button, she tried like ten times." She had Slade's phone number, but no numbers or addresses for anybody else.

She told him all this in a blast of words, wide eyes behind the glasses, her body small and close and soft and round, and when she was done, Lucas had decided that, circumstances being different, he would happily have locked the door, pushed the magazines and all the other crap off her desk, and banged her brains loose right there--

the other circumstances being that he was happily married and pathetically loyal.

Instead, he stood up and said, "You've got to be careful. Do
not
go off to dark corners with women you don't know--or men, for that matter."

She stepped close and put a hand on his jacket sleeve. "You really think . . . there could be a problem?"

Yeah. There could be a problem. You could find your shorts down around your ankles about five seconds from now.
"Yes. Obviously." He stepped away. "You really have to be careful. And while you're being careful, you've got to watch people around you. This fairy woman
lures
people to places where she can kill them. If you get that vibration from anyone, anyone at all, that they're trying to pull you off somewhere . . . call me."

He took her cell phone and programmed his cell phone number into it, and she walked him out to the door and he rambled through all the warnings again, and she waved goodbye and watched him cross the parking lot to the car, and when he got inside, he twiddled his fingers at her, and realized that for the first time in several days, his leg didn't hurt.

Lucas had learned
to recognize when criminal cases come to tipping points, when the clues and the facts begin to coalesce, and that was happening. He was getting the breaks, he'd picked up momentum, the case was turning his way.

He was wrong about that.

For the next three days, nothing at all happened, except that his leg started hurting again. He tracked down each of the people i
n t
he photograph, asked about approaches, quizzed them about their relationship with Frances, or about men named Loren. He got nothing about Loren, but was given more names, more possibilities, and spent his days driving around the metro area, finding people, looking in their eyes, running their names and DOBs through the NCIC.

One of the men, Brad Francetta, knew Roy Carter and said, "Roy knew who the Austin chick was, he'd talked to her, but he didn't know her that well. I mean, I knew Roy pretty well, and he'd get excited about . . . possibilities with women, and if he'd done anything with Austin, he would have told me. Are you sure you've got this right? With the photo? Maybe they were just in it by accident."

"I don't know," Lucas said. "But two people in the photo are dead for sure, and another almost for sure. I'm telling you to be careful. Don't get in a dark corner with some new fairy chick that you haven't seen before. Especially if she's coming on to you hard, wants to take you for a ride."

"I can handle myself," Francetta said.

Lucas nodded: "I don't doubt it. But the rule with cops is, if a guy with a knife gets within ten feet of you, you're gonna get stuck. Doesn't make any difference if you have a gun, or even if you shoot him-- you're gonna get stuck. So you think you can handle yourself, what're you gonna do, beat her up first and then check her for a knife? Or are you gonna let her get inside ten feet? Don't mess around, man: the dead people'd tell you it's not a joke."

"But it can't be just the photo," Francetta said, looking at it. "It's just a bunch of people doing the chicken dance. Did something else happen that night? Maybe somebody shouldn't have been there? Or is that too TV?"

Lucas frowned. "I don't know. That's part of what I'm trying to find out."

He
DIDN'T FIND
it out.

"Not a thing," he told Del. They were listening to Bob Seger's "Night Moves" on the boom box, watching Heather Toms across the street as Heather watched television. She'd gotten a new wide-screen LCD job, and Lucas suspected she'd gotten an envelope from her old man. "I been running my ass off. I've been asking the right questions-- Albert Einstein would be proud of me. I got nothing."

Del said, "In a harsh sidelight, do you think the lines in my face would make me look old?"

Lucas thought about the question for a second, parsing out the reasons Del might have asked something that stupid, and then said, "Oh my God. You're hanging out with O'Keefe."

Del curled his hand in front of his face, his voice trembled, and he said, slowly, with a sandy grind in his voice, "Out, out, brief candle. Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." "Ah, fuck me," Lucas said.

"The other woman," Del said, back in his own rat-fucker persona. "Go for the other woman."

Lucas went for the other woman.

AUS/Tech,
Hunter Austin's company, was located in a tech zone northwest of Minneapolis. Lucas got an appointment with a woman named Ann Coates, head of the Human Resources Department
,
though he was told on the phone that Martina Trenoff, the other woman, no longer worked for the company.

The AUS/Tech building was a block square, with a narrow strip of grass along the sides, and a Wal-Mart-sized parking lot in the back; and was built of concrete panels, without a single window, except in the front, where a cluster of small fixed glass panels hung like afterthoughts around the steel-and-glass shed of the main entrance, and on the west side, where an identical steel shed marked the employee entrance off the parking lot. Rust-colored steel emergency exit doors were spotted at twenty-yard intervals along the sides, with no sign they'd ever been used.

There were no visitors' slots near the building, and Lucas had to park at the back of the lot: two hundred yards, and he was limping again by the time he got there, thought about the cane, which he'd left at the office. Goddamn leg.

The AUS/Tech entrance area was as spare as the exterior: hard blue carpet, pale walls hung with poster-sized black-and-white photos of unsmiling men standing next to unidentifiable machines, and a steel
-
and-composite counter. The two older women behind the counter watched him through the door, gave him a name tag, and turned him over to Coates, who walked him back to a conference room.

Coates was a tall woman with dark hair, closely cut; steel-rimmed eyeglasses; high cheekbones and thin lips; and her navy blue suit appeared to have been chosen for its social invisibility. "One of our vice presidents would like to sit in with us," Coates said.

"Just a couple of questions," Lucas said. "I was hoping to talk to somebody who was friendly with Ms. Trenoff."

"Tara and I knew her about as well as anyone," Coates said. "Tara Laughlin, she's our vice president for legal affairs."

"Ah. A lawyer."

The lawyer kept
them waiting for about four seconds, and Coates seemed surprised by the delay. When Laughlin arrived, she nodded at Lucas, took a seat at the head of the conference room table, and leaned back in her chair. Like Coates, she was a tall woman with dark hair and glasses, but her suit cost a couple hundred dollars more, and was a slightly more fashionable black-and-white check.

She put a file folder on the table in front of her and asked, "What exactly is the nature of this inquiry?"

"I'm investigating the murder of Frances Austin."

"I didn't know that she'd been definitively identified as a murder victim," Laughlin said.

"I have done that," Lucas said. "And I am authorized to do that. So. As part of the investigation, we are looking at people who may have had antagonistic relationships with the Austins, including Ms. Trenoff."

"You're not going to record this?" Laughlin asked.

"No." Lucas raised his hands above the table. "Nothing up my sleeves, no secret microphones. I was hoping to have a completely informal, off-the-record conversation about Ms. Trenoff's relationship with Mr. Austin, before I approach Ms. Trenoff herself."

"We are concerned about possible lawsuits involving slander and possible damage to reputation."

The bullshit dance continued for a couple minutes, Lucas assuring them that there'd be no record of the conversation, and that if no legal charges came from it, there'd never be an official reference to it. "I'm looking for background. If we need a formal record, I 'll bring a subpoena."

Once the walls were broken down, the two women relaxed and brought out the knives. "Hunter gave her a lot of jewelry. I saw some of it--she was quite open about their relationship--and I'd have to say that this was not mistress jewelry. This was serious stuff," Coates said. She had a habit of pushing her glasses up her nose with her middle finger; Lucas suppressed a smile.

"How serious?" he asked. "Five thousand, ten thousand . . . ?"

"More than that," Coates said. She was talking to Laughlin now: "I saw one of those singleton diamonds, you know, like the Forever diamonds, that must have been six or seven carats." Back to Lucas: "It looked like an acorn. And she had quite a bit of it. She would go on business trips with him, but Hunter always got a suite and she always got the cheapest room available, and she wasn't the kind to stay in a cheap room."

"So they were staying together," Lucas said.

"Of course," Coates said.

"And it was a sexual relationship."

Laughlin nodded. "It was more or less explicit. We had a deal in San Francisco, a contract meeting, and we got together in Austin's suite the morning of the meeting. I happened to glance in the back bathroom and the Viagra was right there--like the quart-jar size."

"Do you think any promises had been made?" Lucas asked. "About a permanent relationship? Marriage?"

"I think she expected it," Laughlin said. She pulled her lips back and showed a well-developed set of eyeteeth. "She behaved that way, as though she were the spouse, an owner. She became quite preemptory."

"Did you see any signs of conflict between Mrs. Trenoff and Mrs. Austin?"

"You wouldn't see them together very often, and when I did, they didn't talk--they didn't really acknowledge each other," Laughlin said.

Coates added, "Mrs. Austin didn't come around much in the last few years. She had her own business interests. We'd see her on business
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social occasions, and then Marty would stay in the background."