John Sandford - Phantom prey

Weather was not going to see this on TV.

After he shot Austin, and the bureaucratic stuff began, he’d neglected to call home. Weather had called him, wondering why he was so late.

He lied: told her he’d run into a problem, he’d be a while. When she pressed, he snapped at her, said he’d call.

He talked to St. Paul, then pulled rank.

Weather was in the kitchen when he got home, wearing her ankle length flannel nightshirt, one hand on her hip, irritated until she saw his eyes. Then her hands went to her face: “Ohmigod, what happened now?”

He gave it to her straight, as though he were reading a newspaper report, in declarative sentences and short paragraphs, from the time he pulled into the SA store until the shoot- out on the bridge.

She was reeling when he finished: “The whole family is gone. The whole family is dead,” she said. “How could this happen? How could this happen?”

And the next stage: “What if I hadn’t asked you to talk to Alyssa? I saw her that one day, after my workout, bumped into her, if I hadn’t seen her, she’d be alive.”

“More people might be dead,” Lucas said. “She killed at least three. Who knows how many were on her list?”

“She tried to kill you,” Weather said. “She could have killed you. She didn’t kill you because…”

“I got lucky. I got so fuckin’ lucky."

"Can’t just be luck, Lucas…” That would go on for a while; for two weeks.

His ward, Letty, when Weather wasn’t around, wanted the details. He gave them to her while she was eating a handful of carrot sticks, and when he finished, she gave him a couple of sticks and said, “That was good shooting. I think maybe…"

"What?” Her eyes were cold as a teenager’s could get: “I might have given her a double- tap. You’re lucky she didn’t get off another shot."

"You weren’t there, you didn’t see it,” Lucas said. “That’s true,” Letty said. She crunched on the last stick. “You done good.”

Shrake and Jenkins were freaked out, came and stood in his office door and peered at him the next morning. Jenkins asked, “You’re not thinkin’ too much, are you?”

“Nope. Don’t believe so,” Lucas said. “Man, I looked at the paper,” Jenkins said. “That was as good a shooting as I’ve ever heard of. You had-no-fuckin’-choice.” Lucas nodded. “I know. It was a good shooting.” Shrake said, “You’re a brooder, though.” Lucas asked him, “Did you sleep last night?"

"Like a baby,” Shrake said. Jenkins snorted. “Your goddamn eyes looked like coal pits this morning. If you got ten minutes, I’ll kiss your ass in Macy’s front window.”

“So we all gotta sit down and take it easy for a few days,” Lucas said.

Shrake nodded. “Take it easy. Hard to stop thinking about it, though.”

Over the next week, the Ricky Davis-Helen Sobotny problem became more complicated. Davis had completely and comprehensively spilled his guts. Wouldn’t stop talking. Wanted to get it off his chest. His story was that Sobotny had killed Frances Austin in an unplanned confrontation in the Austin kitchen.

She’d then called him, as he was driving the wrecker back from a ditch tow job, and told him what she’d done, and pleaded with him to come over. By the time he got there, she’d cleaned up the kitchen and had wrapped Austin up in her coat. Davis argued that they should call the cops. She told him that they’d go to prison forever, that she loved him, that they could get away with it.

He’d wound up getting a sheet of plastic out of the back of the wrecker, had wrapped the body in it, to keep any more blood from leaking out, and had taken off with the body. He dropped it in the ditch. Helen, in the meantime, had driven Austin’s car back to Austin’s apartment, and had then taken a cab back to Odd’s towing service, where she’d picked up Davis’s car to drive home.

Sobotny had heard Lucas talking on the telephone about the fifty thousand, and about going to the A1 that night. Davis had the gun, for home protection. She pressured him into attempting to shoot Lucas outside the bar. “I didn’t want to shoot anybody, but she was all over me,” Davis said. To Lucas: “I didn’t mean to hit you. I was sort of shooting in the dirt.”

His story wrapped up all the details and most of it was confirmed by the lab reports.

Sobotny wasn’t talking, but the representations from her lawyer suggested everything was as Davis said, except that Davis had killed Austin with the knife, and that he’d gone after Lucas on his own account, after Sobotny had told him about the phone conversation. She’d begged him, her attorney said, not to do that, but as a small woman alone in a trailer home with a killer, she’d been afraid to say or do anything that might get her own throat cut.

Her story also wrapped up all the details and was confirmed by the lab reports.

If one of them could cut a deal with the county attorney, he, or she, might spend as little as six or seven years inside. The other would spend thirty.

In either case, Del said, by the time somebody got out, the emus would be long gone-or way too fuckin’ tough to eat.

The problem with the Siggy shooting was that everybody whose name they knew was dead, except Heather, the baby, and her mom. Her mom was out of it. She knew nothin’ about nothin’. Heather also claimed that she didn’t know anything, until it was too late to call anybody. “I had a bunch of goons leaning on me and the baby, for Christ’s sakes. What was I supposed to do, excuse myself while I called nine- one- one?”

They established that there had been two runners who had gotten away clean. One they’d seen-the man Del had chased until he got in the gunfight. The other, the man who looked like Siggy, they hadn’t seen after the staged scene in the apartment. There’d been St. Paul guys covering the back of the building, and he hadn’t gone that way. They’d checked every apartment in the building, and he wasn’t hiding there.

One idea was that he’d run through the basement parking ramp to the far end, walked through a garbage pickup area, climbed a concrete- block wall, through some bushes and into a convenience store’s parking lot, and simply walked away from there. There had been other people on the street, and not all had been accounted for.

When pressed about the phone call at the Mall of America, Heather said she’d simply been shopping, heard the phone ringing, and had picked it up. Somebody with a wrong number, she said. Wouldn’t anybody do that?

The county attorney eventually decided that they didn’t have anything they could hold her with-she hadn’t actually had time or space to commit any crimes. So she got the baby back from the social services people, and went back to her apartment.

When the BCA people were moving furniture and communications equipment out of the surveillance apartment, Lucas went over to pick up the duffel bag for his armored vest. He noticed that all of Heather’s apartment’s blinds were down.

Del had a theory. “She knew we were there. She was doing a little stage play for us-holding us here. She got rid of Siggy. Siggy was a big liability- violent, on the run, in love with her. He thinks all the hidden money is his. So Heather let us see every damn thing that she did, that might make us think that Siggy was coming back. So we could nail him. Like we did.”

Lucas and Del took that thought down to the Ramsey County lockup, and talked to Antsy, who had mostly recovered from resisting arrest.“

"I ain’t giving you shit,” Antsy said, when they walked into the interview room.

“We don’t need you to give us shit,” Lucas said, pulling up a chair. “You’re going to Stillwater. For a long time. That deal is done. We just want to chat about your sister- in- law. There’s no criminal aspect to it. We just want to chat.”