Phantom Prey (25 page)

"Did she give you any idea . . ."

"She was going to go to
law school,"
Price wailed. "She was practicing the LSATs. She was going on a
diet.
Jesus Christ, what's wrong with everybody?"

"Why would the person who killed Frances, come and kill Pat?" Lucas asked. "Why? There must be something that ties them together."

"I don't knowww. . . ."

"Frances took fifty thousand dollars in cash out of her bank account. Could she and Patricia have been involved in some kind of business deal? In something, in . . . in . . ."

But he didn't know what, and she looked at him with a stupefied frown, as if he were speaking Norwegian or something, and finally asked, "What? Fifty thousand dollars?"

"Were they involved in . . . What would they do with fifty thousand dollars in cash?"

"I don't know," Price said. "They hardly ever talked to each other. Why would they . . . ? Fifty thousand? What can you do with fifty thousand? You couldn't start a pop stand with fifty thousand dollars. I mean,
I've
got fifty thousand dollars."

"I thought . . . I don't know. Drugs? Gambling? Politics?"

Price's lips trembled again. "You don't know what's going on here--you just don't
know.
Drugs and gambling, that's crazy. There was no fifty thousand dollars. I would have known about that. . . ."

When he had no more questions, Price asked, "Is this fairy coming after me? If I 'd been here, it would have been me that was dead, wouldn't it be? You're looking for a fairy and I would have seen . . . Oh." Her fingers went to her lips.

"Oh, what?"

"She always kept the chain on the door," she said. "Patty. Always. The door wasn't bashed in or anything, was it? I didn't see anything like that."

"I don't think so," Lucas said.

"Then she had to
know
the guy," Price said, eyes wide. "She
never
took the chain off. When I was out late, she'd wait up until I got in, so she could get the chain. If she went to sleep, I'd have to pound on the door until she got up, because the chain was on."

"The chain wasn't on when you got home tonight?"

"No . . . and . . . I mean, she was right there, dead, when I pushed the door open, but I was already worried a little bit when I saw the chain wasn't on, I was about to call her. I knew she was supposed to be there, because I saw her leaving the club."

Back in
Shockley's apartment, Lucas checked the door; the door was fine. Anson came over and asked, "What?" and Lucas told him about the chain.

"Well, that's something," Anson said. "She let her in. If it's a her."

"And Price says she wouldn't have let a stranger in the door. Not even a woman, since this shit started."

"So who is it?"

"Dunno," Lucas said. "But I should." He thought about that for a moment, and then said, "You're tearing the place apart?"

"Naturally."

"I want to know about money. I want to know how much she had, and where it went, and if she got new money, or if she spent a lot recently. That fifty grand plagues me--it's all over my ass."

Chapter
15.

Alyssa Austin
felt not confused, but broken--as though a wire had come loose somewhere in the circuitry of her brain, that her mind was full of static. Felt as though the picture tube was about to blow up, or that a thunderstorm was overhead, ruining reception.

Once in the car, she could feel Loren, there behind her, as surely as if she'd had a pumpkin in the backseat: and at the same time--
at exactly the same time
--she knew that Loren didn't exist, that Loren was a flaw in the wetware. The woman, the nightmare, the horror that Davenport called the Fairy
--she
was the Fairy.

And the Fairy struggled to come back, did come back, fading in and out, as though Alyssa were getting alternating shots of Xanax and cocaine.

She sliced across St. Paul on I-94, headed south across the Lafayette Bridge and down Highway 52, then cut east to the South St. Paul municipal airport; all on remote control, as though she were getting directions from a comic book, frame by frame.

Hunter Austin had a condo-hangar, not yet sold. She used her card
-
key to get through the gate, wound through the clutter of dark hangars, picked up the garage-door opener off the front seat, punched up the hangar door, and when it had opened, pulled the car inside.

Her Benz was crouched there, waiting, and she shifted to the bigger car, hurrying, forgot to get the garage-door opener, and after she'
d b
acked out, had to jump out of the car and go back and get it.
Hope nobody sees me, hope . ..
The hangar area was dark as a coal sack, cold. Not another living thing, only Alyssa, scurrying in and out of her car's headlights, at Hunter Austin's hangar.

From there, it was ten minutes home. Loren's face blinked in the mirrors and the windows and the glass panels around the house, but she ignored him: programming errors, nothing more. Once she thought she heard him cry out to her; thought she felt him plucking at her jacket. She ignored the cry, the touch, hurried up the stairs to her bedroom, to the bathroom, to soak her face in cold water, to take a shower . . .

Flicked on the light, and stopped, staring, agog. She was covered with blood. Her face, her chest . . . she touched her blouse, found it sticky, soaked with still-wet blood. "Oh, God . . ."

She peeled off the clothes, ripping them away from herself, staggered into the shower, turned it on, scrubbed at herself, the stains resisting the body wash, giving way to a loofah. When she got out of the shower, shivering, not with cold, but with fear, and regret, and astonishment . . . she raised a washcloth to her face and saw the black new moons of blood under her fingernails.

She would have pulled the nails with pliers, if she'd had some pliers; frantic, she dug through her travel kit and came up with some blade
-
ended tweezers and used a blade to scrape deep under the nails. "Get it out," she moaned, digging. "Get it out."

Finally clean, she picked up her clothes, and saw blood on the floor. Her clothes were soaked in it. She wrapped them in a towel, used another towel to clean up the blood on the floor, carried the bundle down to the laundry, shoved them into the washer, poured in a cup, then another, of Tide.

Put the bottle down, saw the flecks of blood on her forearms, bega
n t
o weep, backed away from the washer, ran back up the stairs, to the bathroom, watched her frantic, harried eyes in the mirror as she washed off this last insult. Looked in the mirror and then touched her hair, and felt the thickness, and took her fingers down and found more blood. . . .

Weeping, back in the shower, soaking her hair, pouring on the shampoo, scrubbing until she thought her scalp would come loose; and then finally, stepping out, finding a new towel, wrapping herself in it.

My God, the car. Both cars. If anybody looked in the car in the hangar. . . there must be blood everywhere.

Loren flicked in the mirror, his mouth open, but she put out a hand and brushed him away, wiping the slate. Loren wasn't real, she was. And one car was surely soaked in blood, and the other would have at least traces.

With that, something clicked behind her eyes.

She looked at herself again. She was standing there, with a towel on her shoulders. She liked her body, normally, but now it all looked blue and cold and slumped, and her hair hung off her head in tangled wet strands, as though she'd just survived a shipwreck.

Okay. Manage it.
Manage it.

She'd killed a woman. Had she killed anyone else? She must have-- why else would she have that little car?

It was all in there, in her mind, but again, it was like black-and
-
white panels in a newspaper cartoon. She had killed three people. She had killed them under the guidance of Loren Doyle, a man who'd come from nowhere, and convinced her that Frances had been murdered, and that she was the only possible instrument of retribution.

Innocent people. Crazy. Insane. But there it was. She didn't feel crazy now. . . .

She stared at herself:
Manage it.

Had anyone seen her? Davenport was investigating the murders, but had no idea who'd done them.

Frances? Oh, God, no. Had she killed Frances?

She closed her eyes, held on to the bathroom counter, and flipped back through the comic-book images, the last time she'd seen Frances. . . .

Nothing there. She opened her eyes, relieved and puzzled.
She
hadn't killed Frances.

She looked at the towel in her hand, draped it through a rack, wandered to the dressing room. Pulled on clean underpants and a soft bra, a tracksuit, soft woolen socks, and running shoes. Warm and comfortable.

My God, she'd killed three people. With a knife. Where was the knife?
Where was it?
Still in the little car. On the floor, under the front seat. Have to get rid of the car. Clean it up, get rid of it.

She went out into the bedroom, turned off the ceiling lights, lay on the bed in the dim light coming from the bathroom, and thought through it.

She hadn't gone to Shockley's place as Fairy, because Shockley wouldn't have let Fairy in the door, not with Davenport roaming around, asking people about her. And
shit,
she had to get rid of the Fairy stuff.

She started to roll off the bed, but then thought,
Wait, wait, slow down. Think it through. Manage it.

She hadn't gone to Shockley's as Fairy, so if anyone had seen her, they might be able to identify her. If they had, or if they would, she was gone. She hadn't seen anybody, but she hadn't covered her face, and people did watch the street from windows, lonely people, curious people . . .

But it had been dark, and she'd been moving; and nobody inside the house had seen her.

If they suspected, though--and Benson, the first BCA agent, suspected that she had something to do with Frances's death, even though she didn't--if they suspected, they'd go through the house. They'd eventually find the Fairy stuff, and probably blood and hair on that, DNA stuff, and she'd be done.

They'd look at her car, and if there was blood on the car, they'd find it, and they'd match it to Shockley's, and she'd be done.

If they learned about the hangar, they'd search it and find the car, and that surely had blood in it, and she'd be done.

If they looked in Fairy's purse, they'd find the photo that Fairy had used to track Frances's friends, and she'd be done.

Manage it.

Loren called her:
"Alyssa, please, please help me. I'm fading."

"Fuck you," she said.

"Dragging me down, Alyssa. They're dragging me down . . ."

"Fuck you. Go," Alyssa shouted, but his words were as loud as her own.

The first time
she'd seen him, a month after Frances's murder, she'd run into the night, had called the police from a neighbor's house. The police were at her house in a minute, more coming in behind, just as they'd come in the first time, when Frances was killed. Again, they went through the house inch by inch, pistols drawn.

As they hunted for the intruder, it came to Fairy's mind that the intruder wasn't so much
reflected
in the mirror, as he was
inside
the mirror.

The police found no one, but didn't doubt her. Not at first. They were back the next day, in the daylight, to interview her. The intruder, they believed, must know her--must know the house, to get out of sight and out of town so quickly. Or perhaps was a resident. The woods were thick enough that somebody dressed in black, as the intruder had been, could come and go at will, if he was careful and familiar with the terrain.

But he hadn't looked like a neighbor. The neighbors were sometimes eccentric, but the intruder had been theatrical, in the old sense of the word, the Oscar Wilde sense, loose silk shirts and tight butt
-
hugging pants, side-zip boots.

That, the neighbors weren't.

He came back; not all at once, but with hints, a few piano notes here, a figure at the corner of the eye. He frightened her at first, and then not so much. Late one night, he was simply
there,
in her dressing room mirror.

"Who the hell are you?" Fairy asked.

"I'm a ghost," he said.

"A ghost."

"That's right. Not many people can see us, though we can see you. We're dead, and mirrors are our windows into your world."

"Why are you showing up now?"

"I've always been around," he said. "Around somewhere. I drift around the city, watching people. You couldn't see me; but now you can! I'm amazed. Nobody can see me."

"Really . . ."

"Really."