Phantom prey ld-18 Read online

  "I knew she was well- off."

  "Rich,” Ford insisted. “She told me that when her father was killed, she inherited, like, two million. She already had money from trusts her parents set up when she was small. She said they put in, like, ten thousand each, every year; during all those big stock market boom times in the nineties, she had a million of her own, before she inherited. So I know she had that much.”

  “A lot more than I knew,” Fairy said. “We joked about starting a club,” Ford said. His eyes drifted away, seeing another reality. “She’d back it, I’d run it. We’d bring in some dark music; change the scene around here. It would have been a moneymaker.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” Fairy said. A rueful smile: “Yeah: she gets killed, and my life flashes in front of my eyes.” Ford looked at his watch: “Shoot. I gotta go, I’m late for work. Are you going to be around? Mary Janson?”

  “I’ll be around,” Fairy said. He leaned closer again. “You smell wonderful.” She twiddled her fingers at him, and went on her way. “I’ll see you at the A1.”

  Loren had been leaning against an old elm, listening. He caught Fairy down the sidewalk and said, “You smell wonderful.”

  “I do."

  "You heard what he said."

  "Money,” she said. They seemed, now, to pick things out of each other’s minds. “She must’ve talked it around,” Loren said. “You know how she liked to talk-and so, what happened is, she got some of these people all cranked up about starting a club, a new scene, but you know how conservative she really was; so it comes to the moment when she has to produce the cash, and she backs away.”

  Fairy frowned: “How do you know so much about her?"

  "Why, from you,” Loren said. “All you do is talk about her. All day, all the time.”

  Back home, in bed, they made love in his cold, frantic way. Loren’s fingernails were an inch long, left scratches on her rib cage and thighs. And afterward, she said, “Ford knows.”

  “Yes, he does. We should see him again; and some of the others. Patricia…”

  “I don’t think she’d be involved,” Fairy said, tentatively. “She’s involved,” Loren said, sitting up, the sheets falling to his waist, showing off his rib cage. His body was slender as a rake. “I can feel it. She was jealous of Frances. Her parents broke up, they don’t care whether she lives or dies. She’s over there by herself, nothing to do, no place to go. Frances had two parents who loved her, and the money. So the fat girl gets involved in this club thing, she’s going to be cool, she’s going to be a club owner, or operator, hang out with the bands… and Frances finally says she can’t have it. Can’t have any of it. Jealousy and hate.”

  “Maybe."

  "For sure,” Loren said. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s on the list."

  "We have more scouting,” Fairy said. “We have Dick Ford, we have Roy Carter, and Patty…"

  "So we take a week, and think. Then we move again. If we don’t, the energy will fritter away. Just fritter away.”

  She talked to Ford again, for ten minutes, at the A1, passing through. And finally, a third time, just at closing. Went to the bar, drank a beer, and he touched her hand, and touched it again, and the knife was like the Sword of Freya in her belt. When she finished the beer, as Ford was calling to the patrons to “Drink up and go home,” she drifted out the back door and looked back, caught his eyes with hers.

  The alley was paved with red bricks, covered with the grime of a century of wear; she wanted to lean on something while she waited, but everything was dirty, so instead, she wandered in little circles, rocked back and forth, hoping that nobody else would come through the door.

  A thought: I could leave right now. She could leave, and nothing would happen. She could sell the car-or not, who’d care? — and be done with it.

  She toyed with the thought, then let it drift away. Dropped her hand to the knife. She’d spent some time with it, sharpening the edge until it was like a razor. She yawned: nervous.

  Then Ford came through the door. He might have worked on his smile, inside, in the restroom mirror, because it was perfect-an effort to generate a bit of wry charm, in an uncertain situation with a good looking woman. “So, what’s up?”

  He was wearing a leather jacket, unzipped, which was good, and beneath it, a canvas shirt. She got close and let him feel her smallness, her cuddliness, while her right hand slid along the handle of the knife. “I can’t stay away from the Frances Austin thing,” she said. “I thought you… could tell me about it.”

  “Frances Austin?” He frowned: not what he expected. “You’re sort of stuck on that, huh?”

  There was one light in the alley, and they were almost beneath it. She caught a corner of his jacket sleeve, and tugged him closer to the open end of the alley, toward the street, but deeper into the dark. Turned him, set him up against the wall, pressed into him, said, “You were her friend. You must have some ideas about what happened.”

  “No, I really don’t… Not so much.” She whispered, “Don’t give me that bullshit,” and she jammed the knife into his gut, just about at the navel, and then, as she’d imagined it, pulled it up toward his heart, the blade cutting more easily than she’d expected, and she put all her muscle into it, up on her tiptoes, using both hands on the knife handle. Ford swung his arms at her, but they were soft and straight, like zombie arms, uncoordinated, shock with pain, and she moved around them and pulled on the knife, pulled it up to his breastbone, and then out.

  He slumped back against the dirty wall, staring at her, made gargling sounds, his hands stretching down toward the earth, and then he slumped over sideways and fell on his side, and spewed blood.

  She squatted, listened to him die, then wiped the knife on his shirt and spit on him: “That’s for Frances,” she said.

  She walked away, down the empty alley, carrying the knife. Got in the car, drove six blocks in silence, until Loren said, “He’s gone. I felt him go.”

  “Yes."

  "Pull over."

  "Why?” But she pulled over. “Because I’m gonna fuck you,” Loren said. And he did, and when the orgasm washed over her, it smelled purely of fresh blood.

  2

  The day was slipping from gray into dark, the sun going down to the southwest over the Mississippi, and the rain kept coming-a cold, driving torrent that pounded the windows.

  Lucas Davenport sat at a desk, in a dim room, staring at the lap-top screen and listening to Tom Waits, the sound tumbling out of a nineties boom box. Waits was working through “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” and the bluesy piano fit with Lucas’s mood.

  Across the street, a woman tiptoed into her bedroom, stopped to look into a baby bed. Smiled silently; then unbuttoned her blouse, slipped it off her narrow shoulders, hung it on a chair, then reached back between her shoulder blades to pop her brassiere.

  A pair of Canon image- stabilized binoculars sat on the desk next to Lucas’s laptop. Lucas picked them up and watched as she dug through a chest of drawers. Must be cool in the apartment; her nipples were nicely erect. She was a brown- haired girl, of the brown- eyed tribe, with a long supple back that showed every vertebrae down to the notch of her butt. She’d kept herself in shape.

  She came up with a T- shirt and then a heavy blue sweatshirt and pulled them over her head. Her pregnancy was progressing well, Lucas observed. She must be about four months along now, and was faithful about her biweekly visits to the obstetrician.

  Bummer. If she was putting on a sweatshirt, no bra, she wasn’t going out. Heather was intensely fashion- conscious, a woman who wore high heels to Starbucks. Neither was she tarting herself up, so Siggy was not on his way over.

  Sigitas Toms, Siggy to his pals and the cops, had been the Twin Cities’s largest- volume cocaine dealer, pushing the stuff through his contacts in the real estate, stockbroking, and used- car businesses. He’d been netting two million a year, tax free, at the end, with money stashed all over the United States and Europe
.

  When he was busted by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and St. Paul police, he’d told the arresting officers that he wouldn’t be going to prison. They all had a good laugh at that, Siggy included. He was the affable sort, right up to the time he pulled your dick off with a pair of wire cutters.

  Two hours after he bailed out of jail, he vanished. He’d been under a loose two- man surveillance at the time, one BCA guy and one St. Paul detective. From the jail, he’d gone home to a warm front- porch greeting from Heather. An hour later, hair still wet from what the cops assumed was a postcoital shower, he’d emerged from the house, carrying a slip of paper-a shopping list. Pampers, baby powder. He climbed into his Lexus and drove to the Woodbury Target store.

  The watchers weren’t too worried when they lost him in the bed and bath department, pushing his cherry red cart between the high stacks of towels and bath mats and sheets, because there’s only one way out of a Target, the front, and that was covered, right?

  Besides, you’d naturally lose a guy for a minute or two in a Target… but when they couldn’t locate him in a minute or two, they got anxious, and began running up and down, frightening the shoppers- or guests, as Target called them in the letter of complaint that they sent to the director of the BCA and the St. Paul chief of police.

  Turns out, Target does have a back door, but not for customers. Siggy hadn’t had permission to use it, but callously had anyway; a cold blooded criminal, for sure.

  He’d had a car waiting and nobody had ever seen him again. Well. Somebody had seen him, just not the cops.

  His wife, Heather Anderson, pled ignorance of everything. She thought Siggy was a humble car salesman, she said from the steps of their highly leveraged two- point- eight- million- dollar teal- and- coffee- painted McMansion. Doesn’t everybody have a house like this? The house had been part of Siggy’s three- million- dollar bond. When he skipped, the court found out, there was an unremarked second mortgage, and with the slump in housing prices, the two mortgages were underwater. Or, as they say in California, upside down. If the court foreclosed, it’d mostly be foreclosing on air.

  So there was Heather, twisting her hands in regret. There was the Ramsey County attorney, mumbling into his torts. And somewhere, was Siggy-a tear for poor Siggy, growing a beard in Mexico or Paraguay or Belize, drinking salty margaritas and cerveza blanca and watching the tourists walk hand in hand down the beach in flip- flops, pining for the old homestead in Woodbury, with its driveway ring of hosta plants, basketball net to the side, its legal writs.

  Heather was pushed out of the house eight months after Siggy disappeared. A buyer was found, a radiologist, but the radiologist backed out at the last minute, pleading that he’d received a phone call from a man who told him that if his family moved in, his children would be taken from their grade schools, and their eyes would be put out with a red- hot poker.

  So the house sat there, empty, while Heather moved to a second floor apartment on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. Her mother lived in the apartment next door, rolling around on a powered chair with a tank of oxygen. Heather’s mom was dying of congestive heart failure and wouldn’t make it through the year. She might not even make it through the month.

  When the old lady croaked, Lucas suspected, Heather and the child would be off to a warmer climate, like Zihuatanejo, or Monaco, where nobody would care about Siggy and his cocaine business in the Twin Cities.

  The BCA had taken an apartment above a drugstore across the street from Heather’s and, for three months, kept up a regular watch. Then priorities changed, and the watch became sporadic. Lucas and Del took it over, as a hobby. The drugstore apartment was quiet, and Lucas could work there, and the couch was soft, and Del sometimes came by for a nap.

  Lucas’s group had broken the Toms case, and had made the arrests; had argued, through the prosecutor, that no bail should be allowed, that Toms was a flight risk.

  They’d lost the argument, and then Toms had bitch- slapped the BCA and the St. Paul cops at the Target store.

  Then there was Antsy.

  Siggy’s brother, Antanas-Antsy Toms-had been at loose ends since his brother vanished. The cops believed that Siggy had been the brains and the driving force behind the organization. Antsy was… his brother. What could anyone say? Antsy had a tattoo of the Statue of Liberty on one arm, and “US SEAL” on the other, with a dagger with blood dripping off it, though he’d never been in the military. He probably did have a dagger, though, and it probably did have blood dripping off it, from time to time.

  When God was passing out the brains, Siggy had been at the head of the line. Antsy, in the meantime, had been off getting F- U- C- K Y- O U-! tattooed on the knuckles of his hands, upside down and backward from his point of view, but forward and right side up when he was sitting across a table from a cop.

  Antsy had done some enforcement work for Siggy, but hadn’t been arrested because he really, really didn’t know anything. Anything. When Siggy split, Antsy had taken up bouncing as a career, and methamphetamine as a hobby.

  Most recently, he’d drubbed the bejesus out of two St. Paul cops, one of whom was the daughter of a BCA agent stationed upstate in Bemidji. Antsy, like his brother, was still on the run, but the word was, he didn’t have the cash to go far.

  Antsy was still around; and he might also be calling on the beauteous Heather, looking for a little cash money-another reason to keep the surveillance going.

  So, here Lucas was, observing the often- semi- naked or even fully naked Mrs. Toms every day or two, walking around in front of her open windows, one of the least body- conscious women Lucas had ever done surveillance on, waiting for the family to show up.

  He picked up the pregnancy in the third month, the baby bump under her upscale Pea in the Pod maternity clothing.

  Nobody had ever seen a boyfriend-so Siggy had been back, Lucas thought, and they’d missed him.

  In addition to a salesman’s natural affability, and his willingness to use wire cutters on slow- pay retail dealers, Siggy had been a genuine family man. He’d be back again.

  Just not today.

  Lucas looked down at the laptop, where he’d been wrestling with bureaucratic ratshit. He was late with the annual personnel evaluations, and some time- serving wretch, deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy, whose life work involved collecting evaluation forms, was torturing him with e- mails and phone messages.

  And what, really, could he say about Del? Or about Virgil? Or about Jenkins and Shrake?

  The questionnaire asked if Del presented himself in a manner that conformed to standards of good practice as outlined in Minnesota state regulations. In fact, the last time Lucas had seen Del, he’s been unshaven, hungover, three months late for a haircut, and was wearing torn jeans, worn sneaks, and a sweatshirt that said, *underwear not included.

  Virgil, Lucas knew, drove around the state pulling a boat and trailer and almost daily went fishing or hunting on state time, the better to focus investigative vibrations-a technique that seemed to work.

  Jenkins and Shrake carried leather- wrapped saps. Jenkins called his the Hillary- Whacker, in case, he said, he should ever encounter the junior senator from New York.

  Should all of this go into a file?

  Lucas sighed, stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and looked out the window. The last of the snow was being washed out by the rain, and only a few hard lumps of ice remained behind the curbs, where the snowplow piles had been. If the rain continued, the ice would be gone by morning. On the other hand, if the temps had been ten degrees lower, the storm would have produced twenty inches of snow, instead of two inches of rain.

  He didn’t need that. He was done with winter. Until the middle of February, it seemed that the snow would keep coming forever. Not much at one time, but an inch or two, every third day, enough that he had to fire up the snowblower and clear off the driveway before his wife drove on the snow and packed it down.

  In mid- February, it got warm. Two rainy weeks in
the forties and fifties, and the snow was gone. That’s when the end- of- winter blues got him. March was a tough month in the Cities. Dress warm, and the day got warm and you sweated. Dress cool, and the day turned cold, and you froze. Cars were rolling lumps of dirt, impossible to keep clean. Everybody was fat and slow, and crabby.

  Lucas had been playing winter ball in a cops- and- bureaucrats league at the St. Paul YMCA. Some of the bureaucrats were wolverines-hesitate on a shot and they’d have two fingers up your nose and one hand in your shorts. So he was in shape, the theory being that you wouldn’t get the winter blues if you worked out a lot.

  But that was theory, and mostly wrong. He needed the sun, and for more than a week in Cancun.

  Lucas had jet- black hair salted with streaks of gray, and his face was pale with the winter. He had strong shoulders and a hawk’s beak nose, blue eyes, and a couple of notable scars on his face and neck. Traces of the job.

  His paternal ancestors, somewhere back through the centuries, had paddled wild fur out of the North Woods, mink and beaver and otter and martin and fisher, across Superior and the lesser Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence. A bunch of mean Frenchmen; and finally one of them said, “Screw this Canadian bullshit,” and moved to the States.

  When that happened was not exactly clear, but Lucas’s father had suggested that when it did, the immigrant might have had a case of blended whiskey on his shoulder…

  His mother’s side was Irish and Welsh, and a bit of German; but Lucas wasn’t a genealogist and mostly didn’t care who’d done what back when.

  He picked up the glasses and looked through the window across the street at Heather Toms, who was in the kitchen making a smoothie, and doing a little dance step at the same time. She’d done her exercises every day, and while she’d once smoked the occasional cigarette, or maybe a doobie-always on the balcony, so the first baby wouldn’t get secondhand smoke- she’d quit with the pregnancy.