Phantom Prey (6 page)

He sat there watching her as she went through a crying jag, pressing her knuckles into her mouth, but unable to stop for a minute or two. When she finally reined herself in, he said, "I'm sorry, if I touched that off."

"Naw, it's not you. I do that every once in a while," she said. "I talked to my shrink, and he said that releasing the emotion would make me feel better. But you know what? It doesn't. It makes me feel worse."

She started again, cried for ten seconds, then cut it off, wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands.

"You're going to have to fix your makeup," Lucas said. "You've got a smear of eyeliner."

"Yes. I've gotten used to that, too."

Austin had made
a list of Frances's friends--she hopped out of her chair, walked over to the ebony Steinway, got a notebook, slipped out a piece of paper and handed it to Lucas: high-school friends, college friends, a couple of Goths, ten names and addresses, neatly computer
-
printed on cream-colored stationery. Lucas asked, "Why would you suspect a Goth? Did any of them ever . . . say anything, or do anything?"

She sat down again. "I hardly knew them. When I came, they left. But I've read about them, they worship darkness, they're fascinated by death, by . . . you know, they're crazy."

"Frances was crazy?"

"No. She was young. She was experimental. Like I was, when I went to school," she said. "Except my experiments weren't like hers. Mine felt outrageous and my parents were outraged, but I wasn't unsafe. I've got a tattoo around my belly button, I smoked some pot, I made out with another woman. I didn't sit around in cemeteries with guys in skirts and white-face, talking about what's on the Other Side. Other Side meaning
death."

Lucas tried to suppress a sigh, but sighed anyway. She heard it: "What?"

"Let me come back to this thing about your marital problems," Lucas said. "You say your husband might have been . . . I think you said 'boinking' his assistant. That means he was sleeping with her?"

"Possibly," Austin said.

"Possibly? Weren't you a little upset by that?"

Her forehead wrinkled, and she thought about it, shook her head and said, "I suppose. But not too much. It wasn't like she was a threat.

If we'd gotten divorced, it'd have been because our partnership wasn't working anymore. But that part--the partnership--was okay. We had the same interests, the same friends, we both got a lot of pleasure out of our work and our home. If he was having an affair, that was just . . . part of this thing he was going through. It was serious, but not critical, if you know what I mean."

"I don't," Lucas said. "If Weather had an affair . . ."

He trailed off, and she jumped in: "You'd what? Shoot her? Beat her up?"

"No . . ."

"Of course not. You're civilized," Austin said. "So you'd shout at her and go storming out of the house. If you were deadly serious, you'd hire some Nazi attorney and pound her in the divorce. But . . . what if you didn't care about sleeping with her anymore, but you still liked her, and you saw it all coming on? Then you might wind up like Hunter and I did. The sex didn't completely stop; it just wasn't central anymore."

"What was his assistant's name?" Lucas asked.

"Martina Trenoff."

"Smart? Pretty?"

"Smart, pretty, big boobs, hustled all the time. Available twenty
-
four/seven. She did a lot of his work for him, I think, toward the end. She was a junior-level exec when he took her as his assistant. MBA from St. Thomas. She knew some stuff. And he groomed her."

"I'm not all that clear on what your husband manufactured," Lucas said.

"High-tech machine parts. Essentially, a tool-and-die place that also made one-off final products. They have a lot of defense work."

"You still own it?"

"We controlled it until we had to liquidate to pay the taxes--w
e o
wned about thirty-two percent of the stock," Austin said. "When he died, five percent went to charity, we got the rest, and when the feds and the state were finished with us, we had lots of money and no stock."

"How about Martina?" Lucas asked. "What happened to her after Austin died?"

"She kept working there, at least for a while. She was there when we cashed out, but I didn't track her," Austin said. "She wasn't too popular, by the time he died. She was telling the other top execs what Austin wanted done, and sometimes, what
she
wanted done. So they may have parted ways."

"Okay. So: the affair wasn't too important," Lucas said.

"Well--important, but not critical."

They sat there for a moment, and he thought,
It'd be critical to me,
and then he slapped his open hands on his knees and said, "I'll talk to some people."

"You'll really make an effort?" She showed her skepticism, as he'd showed the sigh.

"I can't promise unlimited time--and I could get pulled for another job," Lucas said. "We've got the Republican convention coming and I'm on the security committee. But I'll talk to some people."

She snarled at him, "Fuck a bunch of Republicans. Find my daughter."

Chapter
4.

The interview,
he thought as he rolled back out the driveway, hadn't been as bad as he feared. No talk of planets, no cards, no chicken guts. And the problem was interesting. Rich people, infidelity, missing knives. Blood on the wall.

He got back on the highway and headed north through St. Paul, and then west to Minneapolis, splashing through the dwindling puddles, whistling as he went, thinking it over. Tiniest of cracks in the winter gloom, he thought--not in the climate, but in his own.

The Minneapolis City Hall
is not a pretty building. A pile of red granite, a sullen nineteenth-century Romanesque lump, it squats amid the glittering glass-and-steel towers of the loop like a wart poking through a diamond necklace.

Lucas had spent half of his career going in and out of the place. He'd been sworn in as a street cop there, had moved up through the ranks, and wound up as a politically appointed deputy chief; and he still walked through every few weeks, for meetings, to visit with friends, to hang out.

He found a cops-only parking spot at the curb and put the BCA tag under the windshield; but enough cops would recognize the Porsche that he hardly needed the tag. Inside, he walked along to homicide, a
s h
e had five thousand times before, except that nothing smelled like nicotine anymore. A guy coming out let him in: "Hey, dude."

Harold Anson was sitting at his desk, synchronizing an MP3 player with a laptop, deeply involved, unaware that Lucas was coming up behind him.

Lucas said, "I didn't know there were that many polkas."

Anson jumped, turned, clapped his hand to his heart, and said, "Jesus Christ, man, don't sneak up on me."

"You look guilty," Lucas said. "You stealing that stuff?"

"Of course not," Anson said. "I could be investigated by the FBI."

They both laughed, and Lucas asked, "You're working the Ford murder?"

Anson perked up a bit, punched the computer out, swiveled his chair around. "Yeah. What's up?"

"The governor is a friend of Alyssa Austin's," Lucas said. He propped himself on an empty desk. "He's squeezing me to talk to a couple of people. I don't want to step on your toes."

"No skin off my butt," Anson said, yawning and stretching. "You oughta mention it to Whistler."

Whistler was the lieutenant in charge of homicide.

"I called him, he said it's no skin off his butt, but I should run it past you," Lucas said.

Anson shrugged: "So--no butt skin. Welcome to the big time. We copied everything over to Jim Benson."

"I took a look at it," Lucas said. "He's dead in the water, on Austin. He's not even sure the kid is dead."

"She's dead," Anson said flatly. "You only think she's
not
dead if you think about it too much."

Lucas agreed. Frances Austin was dead. "You guys got nothing on Ford?"

"We're not oversupplied with clues," Anson agreed. "We're still talking."

"I'm going to talk behind you," Lucas said, pushing off the desk. "If I get anything, I'll give you a call."

"Do that," Anson said. "Listen, how much do you think Benson makes over there?"

"I don't know. Maybe seventy-five in an average year," Lucas said.

"Yeah? He doesn't seem like the sharpest knife in the dishwasher."

"He's okay," Lucas said.

"So what would a guy have to do . . . ?"

They bullshitted about job openings for a while. Anson was coming up on twenty-two years with Minneapolis and was looking to double
-
dip on a pension. "Unfortunately, my only expertise is in street proctology."

Macy's was a
ten-minute walk from homicide, through the underground tunnel to the government center, up to the Skyways, and through the maze of bridges and hallways to the heart of the shopping district. Lucas stopped and bought an ice-cream cone, stopped again to talk to a couple of uniforms who were frog-marching a shoplifter down to a squad car.

The shoplifter was dressed exactly like a movie shoplifter, in wrinkled gray-cotton slacks and stained parka, set off with a five-day beard and fuzzy, aging Rasta braids. Half-hanging from the arms of the cops, who were wearing yellow rubber gloves, he said, "Hey . . . Davenport."

"That you, Louis?" Louis didn't look so good. His weight was down fifty pounds, and maybe more, since the last time Lucas had seen him.

"It's me," Louis said.

"You look sort of fucked up," Lucas said, licking the cone.

"Got the AIDS, man." His eyes turned up to Lucas, and Lucas could see that the whites were going yellow.

"Ah, Jesus, Louis."

"Gonna get you sooner or later," Louis said. Louis wasn't exactly gay, but he
was
for sale.

"Don't plead out. Take the jail time," Lucas said.

Louis was insulted: "Hey, whacha think I'm doin' getting caught?"

Lucas said, "Don't pass it on, man. You get in there, you sleep on your back."

Louis's eyes turned back to the floor: "What's gonna happen, gonna happen. What it is, is what it is."

"We'll talk to the sheriff's guys," one of the uniforms said.

Lucas nodded and ambled on, looking in store windows, said hello to a salesman at the Hubert White men's store, let himself get pulled inside to look at an Italian summer suit, a steal at $2,495, and then crossed Nicollett Mall on the skyway bridge to Macy's, and found cosmetics. A woman in a white jacket, behind the Dior counter, was staring into space. He walked through the space and she didn't blink. "Charlene Mobry?"

Now she blinked, took him in, sighed, and turned and looked down the counter at another woman in a white jacket, who was rearranging a shelf of eau de cologne bottles. She called, "Charlene? You got a customer."

Charlene Mobry was dishwater-blond, thirty pounds too heavy, puffy lips, green eyes, and small fat hands with tiny polished nails and rings on each thumb. She said, "Help you?"

Lucas took out his ID and unfolded it on the counter. "I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes, about Dick Ford."

"Ohh . . ." Her lower lip trembled and she looked sideways, as though she might run for it. Then she came back to him, with her eyes, and he realized how deeply sad she was. "Did you find . . . who did it?"

"I'm with the state," Lucas said, as he shook his head. "We're doing a parallel investigation: we really want to get this guy. Whoever it is. Don't have him yet."

Mobry nodded and called to the spaced-out woman to whom Lucas had first spoken. "Mary. This guy's a policeman. I've got to go talk to him about Dick."

"Okay," Mary said.

Mobry led the way across the store, behind a counter into a stockroom, steel racks filled with shoe boxes. A couple of plastic chairs were pushed into a corner; the shelf next to the chairs held an old radio, unplugged, and an ashtray with four snubbed-out filter-cigarette butts. They sat down and Lucas took a notebook out of his breast pocket and asked, "You were dating Mr. Ford?"

"We hung out," she said. "Like we'd go to dinner. We weren't a hundred percent a couple, but we sorta were."

"You told the Minneapolis police that you didn't have any ideas at all about who might have done this," Lucas said.

"An asshole," she said.

"Have you heard anything at all, since you talked to Minneapolis? Any thoughts about Mr. Ford? Anything?"

"Just gossip. Everybody says the Goths must've done it, but I know quite a few of them, and most of them are pretty nice. I never met a Goth who'd have done it."

"You're not a Goth?"

"Do I look like one?" she asked.

"Well, after work . . ."

"No, I'm not. It used to make me laugh. It's too dramatic."