Phantom Prey (21 page)

Laughlin leaned forward, one elbow on the table, and dropped her voice: "I saw her watching Alyssa once. It was like a fox watching a chicken. Alyssa seemed unaware of her, though I'm sure she wasn't."

"Of course she wasn't," Coates agreed.

"Sounds like tt'd be a good mud-wrestling match," Lucas volunteered.

The two women looked at each other, and then at Lucas. Neither smiled.

He said, "So. When did you get rid of her?"

"It wasn't quite like that," Coates said. "When Hunter died, well, she was his private assistant. The job no longer existed. She finished up her work here, transferring files over to the new leadership, and then she . . . moved on."

"To General Mills?"

Coates nodded. "Yes."

"With a good recommendation?"

"The best," Coates said.

"A good severance?"

"Very good," Coates said. Now
she
showed some teeth in a tight smile. They were the wolves, and they'd run the other woman down like a sheep. "We were very generous. Considering."

"Considering what?"

"Considering what a mammoth pain in the ass she'd been," Laughlin said.

"When are you going to interview her?" Coates asked.

"Probably Monday," Lucas said. "I haven't called her yet--I wanted to talk to you guys first."

"Off the record," Laughlin said.

"Yeah, except for the microphone down my pant leg," Lucas said.

"You had me fooled," Laughlin said. Her lips may have twitched, a smile? "I thought it was a Chapstick."

"Hey . . ."

Coates said, "When you see her, say 'Hi,' for us."

Then on Sunday,
as Lucas and Weather and the kids were about to sit down to dinner with his old friend Elle, he took a call from the Dakota County sheriff's office.

"We got your bulletin about Frances Austin. We've got a dead female, appears to have been stabbed, though we haven't moved her yet," the deputy said. He was standing in a ditch, talking on his cell phone. "Body's in a ditch, about ten miles south of Sunfish Lake. She's got a charm bracelet on her wrist and one charm says, 'Frances.'"

"Don't move," Lucas said. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

Weather looked at him in dismay, the roast and the potatoes and the fresh hot bread right there, steaming, and she said, "Oh, Lucas," but he shook his head and said, "Your fault--you got me into it."

"What?"

"It's Frances."

Chapter
12.

At this point
in his life, Lucas had no idea how many times he'd done it: stood by the side of a road, cops parked at weird angles and tilts, white faces in passing cars, maybe a Coke or foam cup of convenience-store coffee in his hand, looking at a tarp-covered body in a ditch. He didn't know how many times, but it was a lot.

When he got to the scene, driving his truck, he introduced himself to the deputy in charge, who walked him over to the body. Frances was faceup, her face old and wrinkled like a monkey's, her lips shriveled to show her teeth, but still mostly intact, protected by the frost in the earth, and the slow snowmelt. She wasn't actually in the bottom of the ditch, through which a trickle of water was now flowing, but partway up the far side.

The ditch had probably been mowed in August, and the grass had regrown to mid-calf length. The body was curled in a translucent plastic painter's drip sheet, which had been partly torn away at the hip and around the head. From the roadside, it looked like somebody's garbage, or flotsam from a passing truck.

Lucas knelt next to the face and took a photo out of his pocket. He knew already, but he showed it to the cop, and the cop nodded and said, "That's her."

Lucas could see paper towels wrapped inside the plastic, apparently soaked with blood--they must have been used in the cleanup. H
e p
ointed them out to the cop and said, "It might be possible that the lab could recover prints or hair or something there. We want to save everything--everything. This is gonna be a big deal, okay? We don't want to screw anything up."

"Should we go ahead and notify?"

"I'll do it," Lucas said. "My wife is a friend of her mother's--I'll get her to go along with me."

The cop nodded, said, "Good enough," and he seemed competent enough, so Lucas went on down the road and called Weather. "I don't know any other of Alyssa's friends, so it'd be good if you could come along with me," he said.

"Yes, sure," she said. "You want me to meet you there, or . . ."

They agreed to meet on the edge of Sunfish Lake: that'd save time.

When he got off the phone with Weather, he called the BCA agent originally assigned to the case, Jim Benson, got him on his cell phone as he was walking out of a Wal-Mart. "Dakota County found Frances Austin."

Benson was a little miffed at not being called first, but Lucas was far enough up the hierarchy that he didn't whine too much; and he was a new guy, so a certain amount of oppression was a way of life. He was happy enough that Lucas would do the notification. "I'll get down to the scene," Benson said. "Hope they're keeping everything together."

"Do keep a close eye on that," Lucas said, giving him something to do. "She's wrapped in plastic, and we might get something useful out of there."

Lucas got to
the rendezvous first, went on into Sunfish, saw lights in the Austin house, turned back to the rendezvous, pulled off, wishe
d h
e had something to drink or read, something to do other than stare into the dark, but he didn't, so he stared, and saw Frances's face, not as it had been, but in that gray feral snarl of death.

Weather arrived five minutes later and he rolled down the driver's
-
side window on the truck and said, "Follow me in."

She followed him down to the Austin driveway and he parked, with Weather behind him, and saw a shadow on a curtain on the second floor, and he got out and walked to the front door and rang the bell. Weather, before she'd moved down to the Cities to take a microsurgery residency, had been a general surgeon in a small hospital in northern Wisconsin, where she'd occasionally served as a coroner in noncontroversial deaths; she'd done notifications before.

She came up behind him and took his coat sleeve and said, "I can hear her feet."

Austin came to the door, turned on the porch light, peeked out through a glass pane in the wall to the right, opened the door, looked at them for a moment, and then began to back away and said "No no no no no . . ." but smiling as she said it, a kind of placating smile that asked for good news but Lucas stepped inside and he said, "We found her down south of here, the Dakota County deputies . . ."

Her face spasmed and she began to weep, and wrapped her arms around Lucas's waist, and Weather wrapped an arm around her shoulders and they stood like that for a moment, then Weather pried her free of Lucas and said, "C'mon, c'mon, let's go sit down."

Austin's parents lived
in Minnetonka, on the far side of the Cities. When she was able, she called them with the news. "They're coming," she said. She was drained, perched on the couch with her hands between her knees: demanded the details of the discovery. Lucas made it as simple as he could, obscuring details.

"There isn't any doubt, though."

"I saw her face . . . the snow . . . you know. She's still intact. She was wearing a charm bracelet."

"The charm said 'Frances.'" Lucas nodded and she said, "She got it from her father when she was twelve," and she started crying again.

Her parents showed up in an hour, gray-haired, shocked, late sixties or seventies in cloth coats, her father clicking his tongue as he tried to comfort his daughter, her mother weeping with her; and after a few minutes, when Austin said they'd be okay, Lucas and Weather left.

Weather said, on the way to her car, "I never, ever want to go through that. Never ever." And, "Catch the guys who did it."

"Doesn't really help much," Lucas said. "Won't help her."

"Maybe not, but it'll help the rest of us," she said. "Put those assholes in a cage."

On the way home,
following Weather, Lucas called Ruffe Ignace, the crime reporter at the
Star Tribune,
at home. "Has the paper bought out your job, yet?"

"No. I asked them to, but they said they valued my talents," Ignace said.

"Miserable motherfuckers."

"No kidding," Ignace said. "They give me fifty grand, I'd be working in Manhattan tomorrow."

"Some kind of cabaret, waiting tables?"

"Fuck a bunch of cabarets. I'm talking the
New York Times.
I get u
p e
very morning and practice my liberal cliches in the mirror," Ignace said. "Wanna hear one?"

"Maybe one," Lucas said.

"Income disparity in this country hasn't been so high since before the Great Depression," he said.

"Not bad," Lucas said.

"I got a hundred more, and I can say them with a straight face," Ignace said. "So what's up?"

"I owe you one half of a favor, I think, from the other night," Lucas said. "So--Frances Austin's body was found a couple of hours ago in a ditch out in Dakota County."

Lucas gave him a few details, including the name of the deputy in charge. "You heard nothing from me."

"Of course not. Any chance of art?"

Art was what newspaper reporters called a photograph of a dead body; or anything else, for that matter. "I don't know, but they'll be on the scene for a while. If you could jack a guy up and get him out there."

"Talk to you later," Ignace said. "I'll go do some jacking."

The rest of the way home, Lucas thought about the sad scene at the Austins', the loss of a daughter and a granddaughter, and the effect it'd had on his wife, and the fact that he'd just peddled the information to a newspaper reporter, for some future consideration.

At a stoplight, he looked out the window and into the car to his right, where a young woman was laughing as she talked to the driver, whom Lucas couldn't see; and how happy she looked and how miserable Austin and her parents must be. And how he felt bad that he didn't feel worse about talking to Ignace.

That night, Weather looked at his leg, shook her head. "The persistence of the bruise bothers me," she said. "There might still be a little bleeding going on--not serious, but something."

"Ah, shit," he said. "You don't think they'll have to go back in?"

"No, you'd know that, if it happened. You'd have a lump like a golf ball, if there was a big problem. It's not hard to the touch . . . so . . . it'll just take a while. The sutures look okay, everything feels fine, smells fine."

"There's some science for you," he said. "Smells fine."

"Don't ever let anyone tell you that medicine is a science," she said. "It's always been an art, and it still is. Look at the training: we're artists, not scientists."

In the morning,
he popped a couple of Aleve, and then, working without inspiration, he called Dakota County and talked to an investigator named Pratt, who'd already talked to Jim Benson. "Jim and I are sort of running in parallel," Lucas said.

"Okay--well, I can tell you she was stabbed eight times in the stomach and chest."

"Ripped open? Or stuck?"

"Stuck," Pratt said. "In and out. Short weapon, thin blade. A little tearing, but not like a positive effort to rip. More like the victim was twisting away from the knife. Benson told me that you guys were thinking about a paring knife. The wounds are consistent with that."

"But no knife."

"No. We walked the ditches with metal detectors, but everything seems to be contained within the plastic sheet. The killer drove along until there were no cars coming, threw her body in the ditch, and drove away. The plastic sheet is the stuff you can get at Lowe's or
Home Depot or anyplace else. And, this could be important, there was some oil in there, that we think came with plastic. It's not regular oil, it's transmission fluid."

"You got that back from the lab?"

"No--one of our guys looked at it and sniffed it, but I believe him," Pratt said. "What I'm thinking is, maybe she was transported, wrapped in the plastic, in a work truck or a pickup, where you might have some tools or other gear. Engine parts. From talking to Benson, I got the impression that the killers were in a hurry to get out of the house. And he checked with Mrs. Austin, and she said they hadn't had any painting done recently. So I'm thinking that the killers had the plastic with them. So maybe a painter's truck? Or somebody else who'd have a plastic sheet in their truck. Anyway, if we can find the truck, we might be able to match the transmission fluid. That stuff is sticky, and it's hard to clean up."

"That's something," Lucas said, and it was. "Any other debris with it? Leaves, or anything organic, or paint? Carpet fibers? Something we could put with the transmission fluid to triangulate on the truck, when we find it?"

"Don't know yet," Pratt said. "The lab stuff won't be back for a while--we're pushing it, but you know: it takes time. We're going over the plastic sheet with a microscope. I'll tell you, the transmission fluid was sticky as hell, so if anything else was floating around in the truck, it probably picked it up."