John Sandford - Phantom prey

Patricia Shockley.

He spotted the address and found a parking space two blocks away, strolled back. The night was getting cool, and he walked with his head down, hands in his pockets. Up ahead, the pale faces of a young couple bobbing toward him, the woman prodding her escort, and they crossed the street before Lucas got to them. Jesus, he looked like a thug? In the dark, with the jeans and the black leather jacket… Maybe.

Patricia Shockley’s apartment was in another of the converted houses, bigger than the house that Carter lived in, and better kept. The front door was locked, and he pushed a doorbell with a label that said Shockley/Price. A woman’s voice from a door side speaker: “Who is it?”

“Lucas Davenport, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” he said. “I’m a state investigator, looking into the Ford and Austin murders. I need to talk to Patricia Shockley.”

After a moment’s hesitation, “Where did you get my name?”

“Alyssa Austin. It was also in the state file, from an interview with Agent Benson.”

“I’ll buzz you in.” The lock buzzed and slipped, and Lucas pushed through the door into the hallway. A Persian carpet covered the wooden floor inside, and a wide oaken staircase twisted up to the second floor. Like a sorority house, he thought. A woman came to the landing and said, “Up here.”

Patricia Shockley was in full Goth: black leggings, black blouse, black- dyed hair, badly chewed black nails. Late twenties. She led him down the hallway to her apartment. Another Goth woman, this one wearing a sixties- style black sheath over black leggings, perched on a stool at a dinner bar off the kitchen, legs crossed.

Shockley said, “My roommate. Leigh Price.” Price smiled and licked a knife with peanut butter on it. “Cop,” she said. Price was a fairy, if he understood the concept: short, slight, dark, pretty. Maybe thirty. Shockley was thicker, wider; a University of Minnesota basketball player.

“You always work at night?” Shockley asked. “I’m looking for a guy,” Lucas said. “Do either of you know Roy Carter?” The two women glanced at each other, then they both looked back at Lucas and shook their heads. Price said, “Nooo… I don’t think so. Who is he?”

“He works at Mike’s liquors? Hangs out at the A1?” Price shook her head: “Not our scene. Why are you asking?"

"I’m trying to put some of Frances Austin’s friends together,” Lucas said. “I wasn’t one of Frances’s friends,” Price said.“I was, all the way back to school,” Shockley said. “She was really nice, once you got to know her-but Leigh thought she was stuck- up.”

“ Stuck- up rich prig. But I didn’t think that enough to kill her,” Price said. Her dark eyes caught Lucas’s eyes as she dug in a peanut butter jar with the knife. Lucas felt a little thrum , and it didn’t have anything to do with murder.

Lucas said to Price, “Would people call you a fairy?” Her eyebrows went up, and she said, “Maybe."

"Oh, poop,” Shockley said. “You’re a fairy."

"You’re just as much a fairy as I am,” Price said to her roommate. Shockley rolled her eyes. “Right.” To Lucas: “She’s Tinker Bell the Fairy, I’m Clarabelle the Cow."

"Not fair,” Price said; but there was a spark in her eye; she knew it was the truth. Shockley and Frances Austin had gone to Blake Academy from kindergarten through graduation, and then on to separate colleges. “We didn’t date together or anything-we just knew each other for a long time,” Shockley said. “We went to each other’s birthday parties. I didn’t see her much when we were in college, but then… we’d hook up for lunch or go out and have drinks a couple times a year. And we were both interested in the gothic, but from different directions. She came in from women’s studies and I came in from literature.”

“I came in from witchcraft,” Price said. “So you don’t really know who she was hanging out with?” Lucas asked. “She hung out with a lot of students, at night. She was on- again off- again in graduate studies, but there weren’t any jobs in her area and she was thinking about changing direction into something more practical. I’m working, I have to get going early, so I don’t hang out at night.”

“What do you do?"

"Commercial real estate,” Shockley said. “Probably start law school in a year or two. My dad says he’ll supply the bucks.” Price said, “I’m a chemical engineer. I work at 3M in medical products.” Neither of the women had seen Austin in the two weeks before she’d died. Shockley thought she’d seen her on a Monday afternoon or a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks before, but it had been an accidental encounter in a Macy’s store, and they’d gone and gotten cinnamon pretzels and chatted for a while.

“She wasn’t worried about anything, except about what she was going to do,” Shockley said.

“Did she say anything about her mother?” Lucas asked. “She was always talking about her mom. She really admired her-

her mom’s sort of a free spirit, but she also runs a good business, and she’s smart, and she’s on boards and stuff.”

“Her mother thinks that there was a little stress between them, since her father died,” Lucas said.

“She was broken up about her father,” Shockley agreed. “She said a couple of things about her mom being hard on him, but… she wasn’t really mad at her mom. It was just a hard time. She was one of the executors of his estate, and she took it really seriously.”

“Okay.” Lucas looked at his notebook: “Do either of you know a couple, uh, Denise Robinson and Mark McGuire?”

The two women looked at each other and Price said, “Well, sure. Denise and Mark.”

“What do they do?"

"They’re Web people- they’re trying to set up a commercial web-site. Something to do with video advertisements… I’m not too clear about it. Mark has a day job at, uh, some truck thing. Computers and trucks, I don’t know what it is.”

“I’ve been told that they were really tight with Frances before she was killed,” Lucas said.

“I don’t know what that’d be about,” Shockley said, and Price shook her head.

“Okay,” Lucas said. “I need names… I need to run along a rosary of names until I find something.”

Shockley suggested three people that he might contact, and had numbers for two of them, and said each of the two would have a phone number for the third. He took the names down, recognized two of them from Alyssa Austin’s list.

“Are any of the three fairies?” Lucas asked. “You know, we don’t really call ourselves that,” Price said. “I mean, it’s not like people go around pointing them out and saying fairy- fairy fairy.”

“Yes, they do. You even dress like that. The waif look,” Shockley said. She added, “They call them Lolis, too. Loli is short for Lolita.”

“Also lollipop,” Price said. “I’m looking for a woman; and I’ve been told that she is one,” Lucas said. “Like me,” Price said. “That’s what I’ve been told,” Lucas said. Shockley jumped in. “Karen Slade could be. She’s thin enough."

"She’s kind of tall,” Price said. Lucas put a check next to Slade’s name. “Thanks. I’ll call if I think of anything else."

"Do that,” Price said.

Outside, he looked at his watch. It had been a half hour since he’d left Roy Carter’s; might be worth checking back. Or, he could go home.

Got in the car, thought about it; what the hell, he could swing by. Five minutes, found a good parking space, only two houses down from Carter’s place. Up the stairs, knock on the door, still no response. But when he was turning away from the door, another door, sideways down the hall, popped open, and a woman stuck her head out.