John Sandford - Phantom prey

“I’m looking for an employee of yours named Roy,” Lucas said. “He went home."

"You got a phone number for him?” Lucas asked. “I’m not allowed to give that out."

"I’m a cop. You’re allowed to give it to me,” Lucas said. She rolled her eyes, as though she were being tried by the feeble- minded. “I’m not allowed to give to anybody ."

"You want to stop giving me a hard time here?"

"Me? You’re the asshole.” Lucas looked at her for a moment; she was enjoying herself, jerking around a cop. He contemplated her for a second, then took out his cell phone, hit a speed- dial number, waited for a second, then said, “This is Lucas Davenport, with the BCA… Yeah, hi, Rog. Look, could you send a squad around to Mike’s Liquor on Fourteenth, over in Dinky-town? I’m working that Ford murder thing, I got a witness giving me a hard time. I’d like to get the name and a number for the owner, I might want to pick him up later. Yeah, thanks. Just probably transport her downtown, give her some time in the tank to think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Talk to you.”

He hung up the phone and she shouted, “Transport me ?” Lucas turned away, walked over to the door and looked out. She shouted, “Wait a minute. Transport me? What the fuck are you talking about?”

Lucas crossed his arms, looked down the street. “Hey, fuckhead. Are you talking about me?” He was getting a headache, but turned toward her. “When did Roy leave?” Her eyes were bulging, her face the color of a Coke can, but she gave it up: “Half an hour ago.” A squad car pulled into the curb and a cop got out. “How do I get in touch with him?"

"You can’t,” she snarled. “He’s on a date."

"Where’s he going?"

"How’n the fuck should I know?” she asked. “I’m not his mother."

"Where does he live?” She rolled her eyes again and Lucas resisted the impulse to jump over the counter and slap the shit out of her. “I don’t know. In Uptown.”

“So what’s his phone number?"

"I’m not allowed to give it out,” she said. The Minneapolis cop came through the door, nodded at Lucas and asked, “What’s up?"

"Ah, for Christ’s sakes,” the woman said. Lucas held a finger up to the cop, as she pulled a clipboard out from under the counter, looked down a list, and read off the phone number.

Lucas had his notebook ready and jotted it down. “What’s his last name?”

“Carter.” Lucas wrote it down, said to the cop, “We’re good to go. Madonna here was giving me a raft of shit.” They stepped toward the door and she shouted, “Fuck you again.” They both flinched and the cop said, “Jesus,” and they were out on the sidewalk. “Sorry about this,” Lucas said. “She had me whipped. I was just trying to get a number for a guy whose name I didn’t know.” They heard a last “fuck you,” faintly, through the closed door, and the cop said, “She definitely needs to take a couple aspirin,” and, as he walked around the nose of his squad, “Have a nice day.”

Lucas called Roy Carter from the car, hoping that the number would go to a cell phone; but the phone rang twenty times with no answer. He took fifteen minutes getting across Minneapolis, found Carter’s apartment in a big old house that had been cut into four crappy apartments. He went up the central hall to the second floor, saw light under Carter’s door. He knocked on the door, which rattled in the frame, knocked again, knocked a third time. Felt empty; not even a creaking floorboard.

Back at the car, he thought about heading home; then took out the list of names that Alyssa Austin had given him and scanned down it. The first time he looked, he’d noticed some addresses in Uptown, and the man mentioned by Mobry, Karl Lageson, also lived around there.

He glanced at his watch. Still early. Lucas got Lageson’s address from the duty guy at the BCA, found it, a redbrick apartment house with a rack of bicycles outside, knocked on the door, was a little surprised when it popped open.

Lageson was a tall pale man with a black ponytail, probably thirty, and did look a little like a Lurch. He was cooking chunks of white fish in a cast- iron skillet; the fish sizzling in the background when he opened the door. He pulled Lucas inside so he could attend the skillet, and he seemed to know what he was doing, expertly wielding a pair of stainless tongs as he shuffled the fish in and out of the hot oil.

“I didn’t talk to the police about her-the fairy girl-but I suppose I should have,” he said as he worked, licking hot grease from his thumb. “I mean, Dick was a big guy and this woman was really small. If she’d tried to stab him he would have thrown her in the river… but, I should have mentioned it. It just seemed ridiculous. I could get somebody in trouble and she was just such a… a harmless thing.”

“You’d never seen her before?” Lucas asked. Lageson stooped to look in his oven window, then stood up and said, “No, I would have paid attention. She looked really nice."

"How old?"

"Early twenties? Looked like a dancer. Moved like a dancer. Dressed like a dancer, when I think about it. All black, but not drab, you know? Likes clothes. Got some money. She was laughing at Dick’s jokes… but then, and this is why I never got around to calling your men-she was gone before Dick got off. Like an hour before closing time.”

“You didn’t talk to her?"

"No. Didn’t have a chance,” he said. “You talk to Dick about her?"

"No, I had some friends there… you know, this whole thing with the fairy, it lasted about ten minutes. That was it. Never saw her before, never saw her again.” He opened the cover again, and the odor of baking bread suffused the room. “You like French bread?”

“Well, yeah, I do,” Lucas said. They ate hot French bread with real butter, and drank fresh- ground coffee, and Lageson ate his fish; the place smelled wonderfully of good food, all over a background of old marijuana smoke. Lageson knew Frances Austin, he said, may have seen her the night before she disappeared. “We tended to go to the same places, you know, and I chatted with her. She seemed like a nice person. No electricity, though. Between us, I mean.”

“Did she have anything going on with anybody ?” Lageson hesitated and Lucas saw it. He said, “C’mon. You didn’t tell us about the fairy girl. You owe us."

"I just don’t like…"

"Cops?"

"Not that,” he said. He pushed a saltshaker around with his index finger. “I don’t like to feel like a rat. Get somebody in trouble when I have no idea of whether they deserve it.”

“We’re trying to catch a cold- blooded killer,” Lucas said, snaffling another piece of bread off the plate between them. “I wouldn’t hang that on anyone who’s not guilty. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want you to throw a red herring out there, either-piss on somebody you don’t like by siccing me on them.”

Lageson watched Lucas butter the bread, then said, “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Good. So what do you got?” Lucas asked. “You got something."

"I saw her and Denise Robinson running around a lot together-in a busy way, like they were up to something. Denise’s boyfriend was in there, too. Mark McGuire. I don’t know what they were up to, but they were hanging out."

"Thank you,” Lucas said. Lageson had given him a red linen napkin, and he dabbed his lips with it, wiping away the butter. “You don’t know what it was?”

“No idea. Maybe nothing. But they were hanging out."

"In a busy way.”

Lageson, Lucas decided, as he was leaving, was a pretty good guy, though he might have smoked too much dope; Lucas met a surprising number of good guys while he was running around chasing crooks. They usually weren’t as interesting as the assholes, he thought.