John Sandford - Phantom prey

"Siggy is gonna kill her."

"Especially if that little knob on her tummy isn’t Siggy’s work,” Del said. Lucas handed him the glasses. “If it’s not Siggy’s, then we’re probably wasting our time sitting here. Siggy’s never coming back. She’s way too smart to do that to him. He’d kill her with a goddamn chain saw.”

“Not a complete waste of time,” Del said. “I’ve never seen anybody get laid on a kitchen table, except in that baseball movie. I don’t think it really happens-but if it does, I’d like to see it.”

“I meant, waste of time in terms of life, liberty, and the Minnesota way,” Lucas said.

“Fuck that,” Del said. Talking to the guy across the street: “Go for it, guy.”

Lucas asked, “How’s your old lady?"

"Better. Must’ve eaten something that made her sick,” Del said. He took the glasses from Lucas and put them up to his eyes. “You can’t guilt- trip me outa watching this. This is purely professional.”

At home that night, Lucas told Weather about the break. “It’ll lead to something, for sure?” she asked. “It feels that way in my gut- it’ll lead to something,” Lucas said. “I need to take a really close look at this housekeeper, and maybe Austin herself, and maybe these two friends of hers, McGuire and Robinson, who wanted to start the Internet site. The guy has contacts in the trucking industry, and that’s one place you can for- sure get good fake driver’s licenses-and he may have had access to her apartment, and to her computer, since he was a computer guy. So… it feels good.”

“How’s Heather?” she asked. “Life with Heather is getting complicated,” Lucas said. He told her about the new man, and she was enthralled. “You think he wanted to do it on the kitchen table…?"

"I don’t know-they didn’t, but they pulled the blinds in the bedroom, which is the first time that’s been done, so something happened in there.”

“Kitchen table would probably hurt your hip bones, your shoulder blades, the back of your head, your elbows…"

"Depends on which way you were facing, I suppose,” Lucas said, and he picked up that morning’s Star Tribune and turned to the comics pages.

She had to think about it and then said, “Lucas! God!” But, like most women, she valued a little vulgarity from time to time.

Dan Jackson showed up with the huge camera and a giant Domke photographer’s satchel at eleven o’clock the next morning, and sat in Lucas’s office until Lucas got back from the convention security coordination committee. Lucas rolled in fifteen minutes later, yanked off his necktie and threw it at a photograph of the BCA Shooters, the Y- League second- place basketball team a year earlier; the tie caught and hung up on the picture frame.

“Should I ask?” Jackson asked. “Fuckin’ morons.” Lucas dropped in his chair, shook a finger at Jackson. “They’re doing estimates on how much damage we might get from protesters at the convention. They chose ‘not much’ because that was what they’re budgeted for. It’s like New Orleans: How big will the hurricane be? Well, not very big, because we can’t afford it.”

“Be some good photography, though,” Jackson ventured. “Yeah? Talk to the newspaper guys about that,” Lucas said. “Most of the trouble takes place at night. Nothing like running around in the nighttime with a goddamn strobe, taking pictures of people committing crimes, with no backup.”

“Hmph. I may have to reconsider,” Jackson said. “Reconsider your ass off.” Lucas stood up, turned in a full circle, dropped back in the chair, exhaled and said, “Screw it. They know what I think.”

“Not necessarily good to be right, when all the big shots are wrong,” Jackson observed.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lucas said. He leaned forward: “So. You get it?” Jackson patted the Nikon. “It was a snap.” He chuckled. “You get it? It was a snap ?"

"Dan… when can I get the snaps?"

"Right here,” Jackson said. He reached into the back flap of the photo bag and pulled out a set of 5x7 color prints. “I got all your women, and five from here in the office. They all look equally candid, I think- shouldn’t be any bias toward our gals. None of our people have accounts at the bank, so they shouldn’t be contaminated that way.”

Lucas thumbed through the prints. Ten women with hair that ranged in color from blond to dark brown, looking generally past the camera, but nearly frontal; and side views as they passed. “These are great. Great. I’ll recommend you for the four- to- midnight shift at the convention.”

“You’re a prince.”

Emily Wau, the banker, was waiting when Lucas came through the door. “More pictures, huh?”

“Yup. A bunch of suspects. Secret camera. Just like on TV. Do you have a conference room?”

They did. Lucas turned on the lights and spread the photos over the conference table, all mixed up. “Just let your eyes roll across them… look at all of them before you focus on one,” Lucas said. “Then… whatever.”

Wau took her time: five minutes to look at ten women, including Alyssa Austin, Helen Sobotny, Denise Robinson, Leigh Price, Martina Trenoff, and the BCA dummies. At the end of the five minutes, she touched her lips with her index finger, like a schoolmarm signaling, “Shhh,” scanned all of them a last time, and said, “Nope.”

“Nope?"

"I don’t remember any of them,” she said. She said it confidently, and Lucas felt his heart sink. “Ah, man."

"Something happened the other day, somewhat related, that made me think of you,” Wau said. “I was standing by the door, and we’ve got this thing we do, whenever somebody comes in. We say, ‘Welcome to Riverside.’ This man came in and he said, ‘I remember you, you opened my account.’ And I remembered him. I didn’t even think- I said, ‘You’re Jim!’ and he said, ‘That’s right. I’m flattered.’ So we were both happy. Later, you know, thinking about you, I looked up when he opened his account. It was the end of December. Right after Christmas.”

“So you do remember the people,” Lucas said. “Well, I remembered him, when I saw him,” she said. “And he was nobody spectacular, just a guy."

"Poop,” Lucas said. “I’m sorry."

"We’re not done, yet,” Lucas said.

They weren’t done yet, but where to go? When he’d walked into the bank, he would have given 3–2 odds that they’d get an ID. A thought popped into his head: What if Wau were involved? What if… horseshit. It ain’t Wau.

He sighed, looked back at the bank, and headed for the car. Had to be somebody close to Frances. Had to be.

Sitting in the apartment, looking across the street at Heather Toms’s place, listening to the Doors doing “Love Me Two Times.” Heather was not in, and Lucas got his feet up, and closed his eyes, and ran back through the faces of the women. Nothing there. Thought about Austin, and what she’d said about insanity, about how it was nothing more than an extreme version of everyday quirks…

Good theory, he thought. Lucas had a theory of his own, sociological, rather than psychological.

Some people, he believed, looked at the world and saw a clockwork: events happened and triggered off other events, people did what they were programmed to do, and the results came out the other end: love, hate, war, murder, children, whatever.

Other people, Lucas among them, looked out the window and saw nothing but chaos: accident, chance, stupidity, intelligence, avarice, idealism, all rubbing against one another in an unpredictable stew.

How could Heather Toms, he thought-as Heather came through the door of her apartment carrying an oversized shopping bag from Neiman Marcus-how could a nice suburban girl like Heather Toms ever expect to wind up as the loving wife of a murderous Lithuanian gangster, mother of his children, secret lover of one of the gangster’s underlings?