John Sandford - Phantom prey

“That was Ricky Davis, Helen’s boyfriend. Why?"

"What’s he do?"

"I think, uh, he works nights for a wrecker service in South St. Paul

Then he’s got a plow blade for his pickup and he plows snow in the winter. He sells firewood… that kind of thing.”

“Okay,” he said. “So tell me…"

"Nope. Last time I told you, you blabbed. I don’t think this is anything, anyway, just that the guy was wearing cowboy boots, and I find that interesting,” Lucas said. “But, let me ask you a favor. I don’t know how to put this, delicately…”

“You don’t have to be delicate,” Austin said. “Okay. Could you please keep your fuckin’ mouth shut about this? That I asked about Helen’s boyfriend? Just keep it shut."

"I swear to God, I will,” she said. “Besides, with Frank, I didn’t exactly blab-it was business."

"And don’t start looking sideways at Helen,” Lucas said. “I promise… I sometimes go days without even seeing her. I’ll just stay away for a while."

"Do that,” Lucas said. “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow or the next day.” Del was curious. When Lucas got off the phone, he asked, “Break the case?"

"I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Something might have happened.” He dialed Carol. When she came up, he said, “Hey- we’ve got another job for Jackson and his camera.”

Heather came into her apartment carrying grocery sacks, as Lucas was on the phone, and then went back out, and came back a minute later with more sacks as Lucas got off, and Del said, “That’s a lotta food for Momma and baby.”

“I’m telling you, Siggy is coming,” Lucas said. “If he was in Chattanooga last night, he’ll be in northern Illinois tonight, and up here tomorrow afternoon or evening, depending on how hard he’s pushing it. Not too hard, I think, because he wouldn’t want to get stopped for speeding.”

“He wouldn’t be driving under his own ID,” Del said. “Still, he wouldn’t speed. He didn’t last as long as he did, dealing big- time dope, being careless.” Del, with the glasses, said, “Uh- oh."

"What?"

"She just unloaded a six- pack of Heineken.” Lucas could see the green bottles with his naked eye. “There you go,” he said. “She hasn’t had a drink since the bump showed up."

"Whoops… looks like a bottle of Stoli.” Lucas said, “ Siggy- Siggy- Siggy… come to Mama.”

The lab tech called a little after noon, about the blood on the blade. “It’s human and it’s A- positive. No prints on the knife. I’ve started the DNA, we got a good sample, we’ll crush it, but it’ll be a couple of days.”

“Thirty-six hours, I was told,” Lucas said. “That’s two days, unless you want the results at midnight,” the tech said. Lucas called Harry Anson, the Minneapolis homicide cop: “We’re looking at a guy who was an employee of Alyssa Austin’s. Hit his house this morning.”

“I heard.”

“Yeah, sorry about that, but things were moving. Anyway, we got human blood on the knife, no prints. The blood is A- positive. I don’t have the paper right here on the three who were killed in Minneapolis.”

“It’s Patricia Shockley. A- pos,” Anson said. “Sonofabitch. You started the DNA?”

“Thirty-six hours. We got the guy locked up in Ramsey on a California warrant, it’s probably good for two weeks.”

He explained the California problem and Anson said, “If we can’t nail it down in two weeks, we won’t get it. Hell, the knife is probably enough. The circumstances, if he was nailing Frances and her mother… there’s plenty of motive in that, somewhere. Get a shrink on the stand…”

“We could do that."

"Lucas, I knew there was some reason I liked you,” Anson said. “I just couldn’t put my finger on it."

"Yeah, well, I’m heading over to Ramsey to squeeze Willett’s pointy little head,” Lucas said. “You better be there."

"Gimme a time.”

Willett had a public defender named Tony Mose, rhymed with Rose, who met Lucas in the lobby of the Ramsey jail and trailed him back to the interview room, where Willett was already waiting with a deputy. Mose was dressed in a somber black suit and white tie, like a guy going to a funeral. He was not, Lucas thought, a bad attorney.

“You get a chance to talk to him?” Lucas asked Mose on the way back.

“I did. I’ll tell you what-this time, for once, I might actually have an innocent guy."

"Nah.” Lucas shook his head. “I’m serious, Lucas, the guy’s got that thing about him-he didn’t know what in the hell I was talking about when I asked him about the knife,” Mose said. “He said you must’ve put it there.”

“You hardly ever hear that,” Lucas said. “The cops must’ve did it."

"The difference is, I think he meant it,” Mose said. Willett had had a bad night, as Lucas had hoped-his eyes were puffed with fatigue, and when they came in the room, he looked up and said, “Now what?”

Mose laid it out: Lucas had some questions. Mose would stop any questions that were improper, and any questions that Willett didn’t feel like answering, he didn’t have to answer.

“I didn’t do a thing,” Willett said. “Wait, I did, you know? I had some bud back in San Francisco, but it was all for personal use. I wasn’t dealing or anything. This Frances thing, this is crazy. I had nothing to do with Frannie getting killed.”

“Did Frances know that you’d been sleeping with her mother before she was sleeping with you?” Lucas asked.

Mose said, “Keep in mind, you don’t have to answer."

"But also keep in mind that sleeping with both of them isn’t a crime and we can prove that you were anyway-we’ll be giving Mr. Mose a copy of a note we took out of Frances’s purse, addressed to you,” Lucas said to Willett.

Anson came through the door: “Did I miss anything?"

"Just started,” Lucas said. He turned to Willett. “You’re in a lot of trouble, Frank. We need to talk about the knife, but we need to talk about this other stuff, too. If you did it, we’re going to put your ass in prison. If you didn’t, we’re your best chance of staying out. Now-did Frances know?”

Willett bobbed his head a couple of times and then said, “I think she found out. I don’t know when. But things were going sour at the end. I hadn’t even talked to her for a week before she disappeared.”

“You didn’t exactly hurry up to give the cops whatever information you had, after she disappeared,” Anson said.

“What would you have done?” Willett asked. “I didn’t know where she went, or why she went. But if a rich girl disappears, and the poor guy she’s been hanging out with, it turns out they were breaking up, and if that guy’s got a dope thing hanging over his head… well, what are the cops going to think?”

He was right about that, Lucas thought: that was what he did think.

His relationship with Frances peaked in the summer, Willett said, then cooled off in the fall, and by December, they’d stopped sleeping together. “I told her right from the start that she couldn’t let her mother know. I mean, I knew what would happen if she did-Alyssa would be all over the place. I’d lose my job, Frances would be gone, I’d be back at Snowbird flippin’ burgers. When we started breaking it off, I said, ‘Please, please, don’t tell your mom. She’ll fire me.’ And Frannie said she wouldn’t tell. We didn’t hate each other, but she was getting all corporate, and I am… what I am. We could see that we weren’t going to make it.”

“How often were you over at the Austin house?” Lucas asked. “When I was going with Alyssa, you know, a couple times a week,” Willett said. “I never went there with Frannie. I mean, we were afraid that Helen would tell Alyssa, and that’d be it. There wasn’t any reason for us to go there. We went to Frannie’s place, or mine.”They pushed and pried, with Mose as an umpire, but couldn’t get Willett to admit any animus toward either of the Austins. “You know, I think sex is a perfectly natural process, and I’ve had relationships with quite a few very nice women and I valued all of them and I’m still friends with most of them and some of them still sleep with me sometimes, and that’s all cool,” Willett said. “It’s not like I’m some crazy geek, and when a woman goes away, that’s it, my world is over. There are women all over the place, and lots of them are pretty good.”