Phantom Prey (34 page)

"What?"

"She tends to gossip a little bit," Austin said.

"Ahhh . . . You couldn't wait for a couple of days?"

She pushed a lip out. "I'm sorry if it messed something up."

Didn't sound sorry, Lucas thought.

Late afternoon, traffic building: Lucas decided to stop at the drugstore apartment and watch Heather Toms for a while, then head home for dinner. Let Willett stew overnight, search his place first thing in the morning.

The apartment was empty when he got there: Del had been around, leaving behind a foam coffee cup, empty except for a wad of paper. Lucas turned on the boom box, dropped in a Norah Jones disk from a stack of disks on the floor, kicked back in the desk chair and picked up the glasses. Nobody visible in the apartment across the street, but he could see the light of the television flickering on the wall.

He called Weather and she said they'd have center-cut pork chops, sweet potatoes, and corn bread. He said he'd be home at six.

He sat and thought about Willett, and Alyssa Austin, and the others in the Austin case: he'd missed something that day, something about Austin, maybe, and it was right there, almost close enough to touch.

Thought about it, went to the refrigerator, found that somebody had drunk three of the six diet Cokes he'd put inside, took one, twisted off the top, then did a half-dozen toe touches, stretching his bad leg. Damn thing still hurt, but more of an ache, now, than the rippling hot pain that he'd had earlier.

As he did one of the stretches, Heather Toms stood up, just visible at the edge of one of the window frames, pointed a remote at an out
-
of-sight TV, clicked the TV off. A couple of minutes later, she went to the door, and her mother wheeled in.

Heather was looking pretty good, Lucas thought. She went into the bedroom and dug through her closet, tried on a couple pairs of shoes, and then walked back to the living room, disappeared, reappeared in a dark raincoat, said something to her mother, and headed for the door. Going out. Someplace where she'd wear heels.

Lucas looked at his watch: five o'clock. He had a little time.

Whistling as he
went, he locked the apartment and hurried down the stairs, to the end of the block, and slipped into the Porsche. Heather appeared a moment later, up from the underground parking ramp, in her red Lexus SC 430. Not a hard car to follow, and he stayed back as she turned north on Snelling Avenue, then east on Randolph, and south on I-35. They tracked south and then west of I-494 to the Mall of America. She parked in a ramp at the west end of the complex, looked at her watch, then wandered down into Nordstrom.

Lucas stayed well back; a narrow-eyed saleswoman started tracking him as he cruised the women's clothing, and finally she came over and asked, sharply, as though she were sure she couldn't, "Can I help you find something, sir?"

He took out his ID: "I'm a police officer. I'm working. Go away and don't look at me."

She looked at the ID and then said, "Okay," and walked away.

Heather was looking
at her watch again--it was 5:25 on Lucas's watch--and headed for the store exit that led into the main mall. H
e f
ollowed her, still way back along the north wing of the first floor. At the center exit, she stopped at a bank of telephones and looked at her watch again. Now it was 5:28.

Sonofabitch, Siggy Toms is calling her at 5:30,
Lucas thought.

He got on his cell and called Carol, but Carol was gone. Called the duty guy and told him to set up a phone trace, he'd have the number and the time coming. Then, he thought, a phone rang, because Heather turned and picked it up.

Her face didn't look that happy when she was talking. Not a lover's face, he thought, although given her other love interest, maybe Siggy was a problem, rather than a solution.

At that moment, a tall man, thin as a rail, wearing a battered white cowboy hat, a pearl-button shirt, and jeans worn nearly white with weather, stepped out of a store with a shopping bag, looked down toward Lucas, looked the other way, and wandered off.

Something about him, Lucas thought. Where had he seen the guy? What the hell was it? Was he hooked to Heather Toms somehow? But the man went on past Heather without looking at her, bow-legged and clunky in his boots. . . .

Thirty feet away, Heather was talking, her face and body animated; an argument? After a minute or so, she hung up, smiled, as if she'd accomplished something, and walked back toward Lucas. Lucas stepped inside a junk store--a store full of useless shit--and watched her walk past, and let her go.

The man with the cowboy hat was gone.

Don't know what that was all about, the cowboy,
he thought. Something though.

And Siggy, he thought, as he walked down to check the phone, was coming.

At the dinner table,
over the sweet potatoes and pork chops, he told Weather about it. ". . . calling from a pay phone in Chattanooga. That's a long day's drive out of Miami--I bet he's on the way."

"I'd hate to see the baby at risk," she said. "If Siggy comes, do you have to take him at the apartment? With Heather there?"

"We'll take him when we see him," Lucas said. "He is a
bad
guy."

"I'd like to be there," Letty said. "Be a good story for the station."

"You are
not
going to be there," Weather said.

Letty had a half-assed high-school internship at Channel Three, through one of Lucas's former lovers, the mother of his other daughter. She asked him, "What do you think?"

Lucas said, "Over my dead body."

"Jeez Louise . . ."

"When Siggy comes in, we won't be fooling around," Lucas said. "He's been gone a year and more. He thinks he can sneak in here, and back out--he's probably got some cash stashed here, that he couldn't get at. But when we take him, he's gonna know that he won't get back out a second time. He'll be inside for twenty or thirty, and the feds might tack more onto that. He's not gonna be in a mood for any pissing around."

"Boy," Letty said. "I'd give my left nut to be there."

"Forget it," Lucas said, not rising to the "nut" bait.

"You can let the SWAT guys take him," Weather said to Lucas. "You've been shot enough this year."

"Got that right," Lucas said.

Chapter
20.

Lucas arrived
at Willett's house at nine-fifteen, a little later than he'd intended. The crime-scene crew had already gone in with the search warrant and was doing a preliminary walk-fhrough with a dope-sniffing German shepherd. Lucas waited until they finished with the office nook off the kitchen, then got all the paper he could find, and began looking for Frances's fifty thousand dollars.

He didn't find it--no receipts for large purchases, no bank deposits, no new warranties. On the other hand, if the fifty thousand had gone for dope, there wouldn't be any of that--but there should either be a surge of money from somewhere, or there should be some dope. Willett hadn't been carrying anything in the truck, money or dope, and now the mutt couldn't find anything at the house.

When the dope-sniffing dog was gone, the search began in earnest: it would go on for most of the day, but ten minutes after it started, one of the crime-scene guys whistled: "Got a knife."

Lucas got up to look. The crime-scene guy had taken all the clothes out of the bottom drawer of the unpainted bureau in Willett's bedroom. There, in the back, a butcher knife's handle protruded from a rectangle of cardboard--the knife blade had been slipped into the edge of the cardboard, and pushed deep, with the cardboard acting as a scabbard.

As Lucas watched, they took photos of the room with the burea
u d
rawer open; then a medium shot that included only the bureau, with the knife visible in the bottom of the open drawer; and then a close-up of the knife in place, with a scale next to it. Then they repeated the sequence with a second camera, as a backup.

When they were done, the tech lifted the knife out of the drawer with gloved hands, holding it by the edge of the cardboard, put it three inches under his nose, and said, "Huh. I think we've got some blood."

"Let me see."

"Don't touch," the tech said, as he held the blade three inches below Lucas's nose. "Look right where the blade goes into the handle. See that brown crust?"

There wasn't much, but it was there. "Can't believe it's a pork chop," Lucas said.

"We'll find out," the tech said.

Lucas snagged the supervisor: "I want to get the knife back to the lab right away. I want to know whether it's human, and the blood type, if you've got a big enough sample to do that without fucking up the DNA."

The supervisor squinted at the knife, turned it over, made a supervisory decision and eased the blade out of the cardboard by a half-inch, said, "Got a little more on the back . . . should be enough."

"How long on the DNA?"Lucas asked.

"If we pound it . . . thirty-six hours."

"Pound it. We don't care about budget or overtime. Pound it."

Not much
to do until the preliminary results came back, which would be early afternoon. On the way back to St. Paul, thinking about Willett and the knife, he found the car drifting off I-94 and up the Snelling Avenue exit. He rolled past Heather Toms's apartment and around the block: he'd never watched her at midday. When he pulled up to the drugstore, he saw Del's car, and then Del, coming down the street with a sack from a bagel place and a cup of coffee.

"Thought you were tied up this morning," Del said, when they met at the door into the apartment level.

"So'd I," Lucas said.

He told the story about the knife, and Del said, "That's the stupidest goddamn thing I've ever heard. He's running because he thinks he might get hit by the cops, but he leaves behind a knife he's used to kill four people, with blood on the blade? What the fuck was he smokin'?"

"Well, he might have been smokin' something," Lucas said. "He's been into dope, and he might've had that fifty grand to play with."

The Toms
apartment was empty. Heather had gone someplace and taken the baby. Lucas told Del about the phone call from Chattanooga, and he said, "Wonder if she's running?"

"She'd be leaving a lot behind."

"That's how Siggy punked us the last time," Del said. "Parked his car at Target, walked away from it, never looked back."

"You think Heather would leave the kid's jammies?" He passed the glasses to Del, who took them, did a tour of Heather's apartment as he chewed on one of the bagels, then said, "Probably not."

"She would have taken the jammies," Lucas said. "Unless she's a totally heartless bitch."

"Could be that," Del said. "That guy she was screwing--that was Hilaire Jukos, another Lithuanian, Siggy's f eft-hand man. I looked him up."

"What's this with Heather and Lithuanians?"Lucas asked.

"Well, they got a reputation, you know--Lithuanians tend to be very well hung, the best in Europe. That could turn the head of a former Edina High School cheerleader."

"I thought the Italians . . ."

Del was shaking his head. "That's getting it up--Italians lead the league in getting it up. Lithuanians are purely size."

"Sounds like you've done your research."

Del shrugged: "I'm a professional detective."

At that moment, a man came out of the apartment building, looked both ways down the sidewalk, zipped up his jacket, and walked away from them, wobbling a bit. Lucas put the glasses on him, the way he walked--was that the cowboy from the mall? No. This guy was shorter, with long hair, and seemed to be younger, but still had that wobbling, pointy
-
toed walk.

Lucas took the glasses down. "Sonofabitch."

"What?"

"I just had an epiphany," Lucas said.

"You can get some ointment for that."

"No--I'm serious," Lucas said. "I've been seeing all these guys in cowboy boots, and I remember--I told people this at the time--the guy who shot me seemed to have a limp. He didn't have a limp--he was running in cowboy boots."

"Yeah? Is that a big deal?"

"I don't know," Lucas said. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and punched up Austin's cell.

She came up and said, "Hello, Lucas. Are you still mad at me?"

"Yup--but that's not why I'm calling," he said. "The other day when you were loading those cartons of Frances's clothes into the pickup truck for Goodwill--did you hire that driver? Did you know him?"

"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 . . ."