Phantom Prey (27 page)

"They're not all terrible," Lucas said.

"Yes, they are. Every single one of them," Austin said, a little serious behind the smile. "They take property away from people who work to get it, and give it to people they think will vote to keep them in their jobs. It's that raw."

"Then you should be happy to see the Republicans come to town," Lucas said.

"They're just as bad as the other ones," Austin said. "I am seriously disaffected. I believe what's going on in this country is evil. The president is an evil man, and the people who oppose him are evil people. That's what I think."

Lucas shrugged: "All right."

"You think I'm crazy."

"Well . . ." He spread his arms and gave her his most charming smile, and made her laugh.

She leaned back and said, "I was thinking last night, that of all the issues that have come out of these killings, Frances and all the other people, we know one thing for sure, and we also know that you have developed the only worthwhile clue, and only one of them. I don't feel that you're pushing it in the right way."

Lucas said, "Tell me."

"The thing we know for sure, is that all the killings are linked. They have to be. Same style. One group of people is being attacked. Something is going on that got all these people killed--and it seems like it's still going on, whatever it is. Okay?"

Lucas nodded: "Okay. But knowing that doesn't get us far, if we can't break into what's happening."

She held up a finger. "The second thing that happened was that Frances created a secret bank account that was apparently set up simply to get fifty thousand dollars in cash--in currency, in bills."

"I'm pushing that."

"Not hard enough," Austin said firmly. "And that must lead somewhere. Fifty thousand isn't that much in this day and age, but it's not nothing, either. If she spent fifty thousand dollars in a couple of weeks, it'll have to show up somewhere. And there are other odd things about it . . . like the secrecy. So my opinion is, that whatever's going on--the thing that links the killings--must involve the fifty thousand. Somehow. And maybe the bank itself . . . because the bank involvement is odd, when you think about it."

Lucas leaned forward. "What do you mean?"

"When Hunter was alive, we'd go out to Las Vegas every April for a military procurement convention," she said. "It'd still be cool and wet here, but Vegas would be warm and dry and it made a nice vacation. Hunter would talk to his military people, and Francie and I would hang out. Instead of taking a lot of cash with us, Hunter would set u
p a
n account at the hotel. When Francie or I needed something, we'd charge it. Or, we'd go get some tokens, if we felt like it, and play the slots."

"Yeah?"

She shook a finger at him. "If you needed to get fifty thousand in cash, from money that you had legally, but you didn't want people to know about the cash aspect, that you were putting together this . . . pot . . . how would you do it?"

"Might be a few ways," Lucas ventured.

"Maybe. But one of them, which Frances knew about, would be to send checks totaling fifty thousand dollars to two or three of the big casinos in Vegas, to set up accounts. Once they were cleared, you simply fly out and lose it. But not really. You buy tokens for the slots on the account, and then cash them in for hundred-dollar bills. Do it for a week: party, lie around the pool, pretend to play the slots, cash the tokens. You could easily do six or eight or ten thousand dollars a day, spread between the casinos, and nobody would know and nobody would care and nobody would remember. Except that the hotels would call you up three times a year with offers of a free room."

They thought about it for a minute, then Lucas said, "The point being, there were easier ways to get this money, even in cash, even anonymously, discreetly, than to set up a secret account."

"Not just that: also,
Frances knew about it.
She didn't have to invent some secret bank method. So she must've gone through the bank for a reason. Maybe she
wanted
to leave tracks. Maybe . . . I don't know. But it's something. I thought about it all night."

"So what would you suggest?" Lucas asked.

She shrugged: "I'm not the famous detective. I've got a funeral to work through. I've got . . . things. But. You have to push the money. That's what people always said in the procurement business, when w
e w
ent to Vegas. If something smelled bad, look at the money. Always look at the money. Maybe you could go back to the bank . . . push all of her friends about the money. It befuddles me: what would she use it for? What, that she couldn't simply write a check for? That she couldn't get
me
to write a check for?"

Lucas peered at her for a moment, then asked, "That's what you've got?"

"That's what I've got," she said. "Are you going to think about it?"

"Yes. That's what I'll do today," Lucas said. "Think about the money, God help me, and nothing else."

That's what
he did.

His secretary, Carol, came and looked at him, and went away, and then came back and looked at him again, and finally asked, "What are you doing?"

"Thinking."

She looked worried. "Huh. Could you take a look at--"

He held a hand palm-out to stop her: "No. I won't look at anything. Go away."

She peeked a couple more times. Once she asked, "How's the leg?"

"Not good," Lucas said. "I need to find a teenage girl to suck on it."

"I'll leave you alone," she said.

Just before noon, as he was sitting reviewing, in his mind, everything that had happened, the obvious occurred to him. He called Austin on her cell and said, "I need pictures of Frances."

"I'm at home, working on the funeral. I'll get a bunch together. Is this about the money?"

"Yeah. But I'll tell you what, this would all be a lot easier if she had a loser boyfriend."

He called the vice president at the Riverside State Bank. "Could you get me the name of the banker who opened Frances Austin's account?"

"Sure. Just a minute." More like two minutes. When he came back, he said, "Emily Wau. She's now the manager at the Maplewood branch. I checked, and she's working today."

"Give me her number," Lucas said.

Lucas ran
down to Sunfish Lake, left the car turning over in the driveway. Austin had a dozen photographs: "I'll get them back to you as soon as I can," he said. "At the funeral?"

"That's okay--she had duplicates of everything."

"Well--I'll get them back."

Emily Wau was of Asian descent, a small, smiling, efficient woman in a conservative gray-green dress. "You want me to look at pictures of Frances Austin, to see if I can remember opening her account?"

"Yes. It would have been only about five months ago. October. You must've spent a little time with her."

"I looked at the paperwork--she opened it with five hundred dollars," Wau said. "So it would not have been a remarkable event."

"Still . . . six months. Not very long ago," Lucas suggested.

"Let me look at the pictures," Wau said.

Lucas passed them over, and she went through them, carefully, one at a time, turning each over, facedown, on her desk as she finished with it. When she was done, she picked them all up, looked at them again, then stared at a monitor camera mounted in one corner of the bank's ceiling, a thinking-about-it stare, then looked back at Lucas and said, "You know, it was several months ago, and I probably talk to twenty people a day, so I can't be sure, but . . . I don't believe I've ever seen this woman."

Lucas said, "I'm not surprised."

And there
it was: the case was cracked, though there was some cleaning up to do--like figuring out who the killer was. Lucas left the bank whistling, and on the sidewalk, got on his cell phone and called his secretary: "I need to get Dan Jackson to take some pictures for me."

"I'll see if he's available."

"Do that. I'm going to lunch."

He stopped at a McDonalds, had a Quarter Pounder with cheese, fries, and a strawberry shake, thought about the implications, rolled on into the office. Carol saw him coming and said a couple words into a phone, hung up and said, "Dan'll be up in a minute."

"Excellent."

Dan Jackson
was a middle-sized, middle-weight black man with short, neatly trimmed hair and a tightly, neatly trimmed mustache, and black plastic-rimmed glasses. At work, he wore button-up shirts with collars, and sweaters and khaki slacks and Patagonia jackets. He was, he said, invisible, not only to white people, but to black people as well. "I've been on elevators alone at night with white women and they never knew I was standing there," he'd told Lucas. "When I'm in the uniform, I am fully goddamned invisible."

Now he showed up carrying a Nikon camera with a lens more tha
n a
foot long, and Lucas groaned to himself, but smiled and said, "Dan, sit down."

"Got something for me?"

"I need surveillance shots of five women, plus about five more women at random, for a board," he said. "Usual range of sizes and shapes on the random shots--give me a couple of each: blond, sandy hair, dark brown. All white. Get some of our people out in the parking lot if you want, for the dummies, but don't make it obvious--get a bunch of different backgrounds."

"I'm ready to go," Jackson said. He patted the camera. "I got the new D3 with the 200-400 f.4 VR AF-S. Good ISO up to 6400, I can go to 12800 if I have to, but there'll be some noise. Twelve megapixels so we get plenty of resolution. With this baby, you can really reach out and touch somebody. Brady squealed like a stuck pig when I put in for it--with the police discount, the lens is still better than four grand, and the body's five. . . ."

"That's great," Lucas said.

". . . And I've been out shooting a little wildlife, to familiarize myself with the whole system. The white balance and auto-focus is as good as I've seen. I tested it against a IDsIII, and the D3 is better. The IDs'll give you more resolution, but I'd defy anyone to say which is which when you look at it on a computer monitor, or a sixteen-by
-
twenty print, for that matter."

"Terrific."

"That fuckin' Flowers is already sniffing around, trying to borrow it," Jackson said. "He's still shooting a D2xs and I told him, 'You'll have to pry it from my cold stiff fingers.' "

Lucas's head was bobbing: "That's just what we're looking for, and fuck Virgil. Anyway, I got a short list." He pushed it across the desk.

Jackson fondled the Nikon and leaned forward to look at the list. "Who are these people?"

"Suspects in a series of murders, so you've gotta be discreet," Lucas said. "Alyssa Austin; her housekeeper, a woman named Helen Sobotny; Leigh Price--that's L-e-i-g-h--who works up at 3M; Martina Trenoff, works at General Mills; Denise Robinson . . ." He pushed another sheet of paper across the desk. "Here's their home addresses. I need them as quick as I can get them. If you need some cover from somebody, refer them to me. Overtime's not a problem." He filled in the detail, and pulled up Austin's spa website, showed Jackson a photograph of her, and driver's-license photos on Sobotny, Price, and Robinson.

"Nasty pictures--nasty," Jackson said, looking them over.

"Not good enough to be used on a board," Lucas agreed. "We need civilian clothes, no particular background. If you have to shoot Austin coming out of one of her spas, then you'll have to do something to alter the background. Full-face, side views. Full body."

"I could Photoshop them if I had to."

"The problem is, Austin lives in Sunfish Lake and your cloak of invisibility won't work there."

They hashed it out for a few more minutes. "I'll do what I can," Jackson said. "Talk to you tomorrow."

Then Lucas
was stuck: the next move was to try to identify the person who'd opened the account, without giving anything away. He signed papers for Carol, cleaned up a few more bureaucratic items, then headed for the apartment.

Halfway up the stairs, he could hear the head-banging rock. He opened the door and found Del, with his feet up, watching Toms'
s a
partment with the binoculars, listening to AC/DC's "All Night Long." Del looked back at him and said, "She's running around."

"Like how, running around?"

"Like she's cleaning the place up, and singing a happy tune while she's doing it."

"Gonna be kind of a downer when we bust her old man," Lucas said. Lucas turned the radio off and dragged up a chair and said, "I caught a break on Austin."

"Yeah?"

Lucas told him about it, and then said, "So here's what I'm thinking. Nobody can figure out why Frances needed fifty thousand in cash, or why she took it the way she did. The answer was, she didn't. She didn't take the money, somebody else did. Somebody opened a bank account in her name and got Fidelity to transfer money to it."

"They'd need an ID to open the account. A valid driver's license. Maybe a second form of ID."