Phantom prey ld-18, Page 6

  “So she might be new,” Lucas suggested. “The other Goth."

  "Could be,” the bartender said. “Or maybe she’s just a figment of somebody’s imagination."

  "A Fig Newton of the imagination; the little cookie that nobody knew,” the first barfly said. The second barfly burped again, scratched some cash out of his pocket, and said, “Gimme one more. Then cut me off. I gotta drive.” Lucas chatted with the three of them for another five minutes, noted their names, and headed out into the failing daylight, fishing his cell phone from his pocket, calling home. “Go ahead and eat without me,” he told Weather. “I’ll grab a sandwich. I’m doing some running around on Alyssa Austin.”

  “Anything I should know?” Weather asked. “There’s a mystery woman,” Lucas said. “That’s always good,” she said. “I’ll tell you about it tonight.” He stopped at a sandwich shop across the street from the supermarket. He got a free newspaper on the way in; from order to delivery, through eating and reading, a half hour drained away. When he walked across the street to his car, it was fully dark. Mike’s was ten minutes away. He got tangled up around a minor traffic accident, and another ten minutes disappeared.

  Mike’s was a wedge- shaped store stuck into the corner of a 1920s building with fake brown- brick siding made of tar shingles, neon beer signs in the windows, bars under the glass. A young woman was sitting on a stool behind the counter, talking on her cell phone, a pudgy salon- blonde with a thumbprint- sized bruise under one eye, a scattering of acne across her nose. She took the phone away from her face for a moment and asked, “D’you need help?”

  Lucas held up his ID. “Need to talk to you about Roy.” She said into the phone, “I’ve got a cop here. I don’t know, it’s about Roy… I don’t know, hang on.” To Lucas, with the phone on her shoulder: “What about Roy?”

  “Could you get off the phone for a minute?” Lucas asked. To the phone: “He wants me to get off the phone? Yeah, he is.” Lucas thought he’d heard a tinny “asshole” from the phone, and he rubbed his forehead. She picked that up and said, “Call you back.” Hung up and said, “Yeah?”

  “I’m looking for an employee of yours named Roy,” Lucas said. “He went home."

  "You got a phone number for him?” Lucas asked. “I’m not allowed to give that out."

  "I’m a cop. You’re allowed to give it to me,” Lucas said. She rolled her eyes, as though she were being tried by the feeble- minded. “I’m not allowed to give to anybody."

  "You want to stop giving me a hard time here?"

  "Me? You’re the asshole.” Lucas looked at her for a moment; she was enjoying herself, jerking around a cop. He contemplated her for a second, then took out his cell phone, hit a speed- dial number, waited for a second, then said, “This is Lucas Davenport, with the BCA… Yeah, hi, Rog. Look, could you send a squad around to Mike’s Liquor on Fourteenth, over in Dinky-town? I’m working that Ford murder thing, I got a witness giving me a hard time. I’d like to get the name and a number for the owner, I might want to pick him up later. Yeah, thanks. Just probably transport her downtown, give her some time in the tank to think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Talk to you.”

  He hung up the phone and she shouted, “Transport me?” Lucas turned away, walked over to the door and looked out. She shouted, “Wait a minute. Transport me? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Lucas crossed his arms, looked down the street. “Hey, fuckhead. Are you talking about me?” He was getting a headache, but turned toward her. “When did Roy leave?” Her eyes were bulging, her face the color of a Coke can, but she gave it up: “Half an hour ago.” A squad car pulled into the curb and a cop got out. “How do I get in touch with him?"

  "You can’t,” she snarled. “He’s on a date."

  "Where’s he going?"

  "How’n the fuck should I know?” she asked. “I’m not his mother."

  "Where does he live?” She rolled her eyes again and Lucas resisted the impulse to jump over the counter and slap the shit out of her. “I don’t know. In Uptown.”

  “So what’s his phone number?"

  "I’m not allowed to give it out,” she said. The Minneapolis cop came through the door, nodded at Lucas and asked, “What’s up?"

  "Ah, for Christ’s sakes,” the woman said. Lucas held a finger up to the cop, as she pulled a clipboard out from under the counter, looked down a list, and read off the phone number.

  Lucas had his notebook ready and jotted it down. “What’s his last name?”

  “Carter.” Lucas wrote it down, said to the cop, “We’re good to go. Madonna here was giving me a raft of shit.” They stepped toward the door and she shouted, “Fuck you again.” They both flinched and the cop said, “Jesus,” and they were out on the sidewalk. “Sorry about this,” Lucas said. “She had me whipped. I was just trying to get a number for a guy whose name I didn’t know.” They heard a last “fuck you,” faintly, through the closed door, and the cop said, “She definitely needs to take a couple aspirin,” and, as he walked around the nose of his squad, “Have a nice day.”

  Lucas called Roy Carter from the car, hoping that the number would go to a cell phone; but the phone rang twenty times with no answer. He took fifteen minutes getting across Minneapolis, found Carter’s apartment in a big old house that had been cut into four crappy apartments. He went up the central hall to the second floor, saw light under Carter’s door. He knocked on the door, which rattled in the frame, knocked again, knocked a third time. Felt empty; not even a creaking floorboard.

  Back at the car, he thought about heading home; then took out the list of names that Alyssa Austin had given him and scanned down it. The first time he looked, he’d noticed some addresses in Uptown, and the man mentioned by Mobry, Karl Lageson, also lived around there.

  He glanced at his watch. Still early. Lucas got Lageson’s address from the duty guy at the BCA, found it, a redbrick apartment house with a rack of bicycles outside, knocked on the door, was a little surprised when it popped open.

  Lageson was a tall pale man with a black ponytail, probably thirty, and did look a little like a Lurch. He was cooking chunks of white fish in a cast- iron skillet; the fish sizzling in the background when he opened the door. He pulled Lucas inside so he could attend the skillet, and he seemed to know what he was doing, expertly wielding a pair of stainless tongs as he shuffled the fish in and out of the hot oil.

  “I didn’t talk to the police about her-the fairy girl-but I suppose I should have,” he said as he worked, licking hot grease from his thumb. “I mean, Dick was a big guy and this woman was really small. If she’d tried to stab him he would have thrown her in the river… but, I should have mentioned it. It just seemed ridiculous. I could get somebody in trouble and she was just such a… a harmless thing.”

  “You’d never seen her before?” Lucas asked. Lageson stooped to look in his oven window, then stood up and said, “No, I would have paid attention. She looked really nice."

  "How old?"

  "Early twenties? Looked like a dancer. Moved like a dancer. Dressed like a dancer, when I think about it. All black, but not drab, you know? Likes clothes. Got some money. She was laughing at Dick’s jokes… but then, and this is why I never got around to calling your men-she was gone before Dick got off. Like an hour before closing time.”

  “You didn’t talk to her?"

  "No. Didn’t have a chance,” he said. “You talk to Dick about her?"

  "No, I had some friends there… you know, this whole thing with the fairy, it lasted about ten minutes. That was it. Never saw her before, never saw her again.” He opened the cover again, and the odor of baking bread suffused the room. “You like French bread?”

  “Well, yeah, I do,” Lucas said. They ate hot French bread with real butter, and drank fresh- ground coffee, and Lageson ate his fish; the place smelled wonderfully of good food, all over a background of old marijuana smoke. Lageson knew Frances Austin, he said, may have seen her the night before she disappeared. “We tended to g
o to the same places, you know, and I chatted with her. She seemed like a nice person. No electricity, though. Between us, I mean.”

  “Did she have anything going on with anybody?” Lageson hesitated and Lucas saw it. He said, “C’mon. You didn’t tell us about the fairy girl. You owe us."

  "I just don’t like…"

  "Cops?"

  "Not that,” he said. He pushed a saltshaker around with his index finger. “I don’t like to feel like a rat. Get somebody in trouble when I have no idea of whether they deserve it.”

  “We’re trying to catch a cold- blooded killer,” Lucas said, snaffling another piece of bread off the plate between them. “I wouldn’t hang that on anyone who’s not guilty. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want you to throw a red herring out there, either-piss on somebody you don’t like by siccing me on them.”

  Lageson watched Lucas butter the bread, then said, “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Good. So what do you got?” Lucas asked. “You got something."

  "I saw her and Denise Robinson running around a lot together-in a busy way, like they were up to something. Denise’s boyfriend was in there, too. Mark McGuire. I don’t know what they were up to, but they were hanging out."

  "Thank you,” Lucas said. Lageson had given him a red linen napkin, and he dabbed his lips with it, wiping away the butter. “You don’t know what it was?”

  “No idea. Maybe nothing. But they were hanging out."

  "In a busy way.”

  Lageson, Lucas decided, as he was leaving, was a pretty good guy, though he might have smoked too much dope; Lucas met a surprising number of good guys while he was running around chasing crooks. They usually weren’t as interesting as the assholes, he thought.

  Patricia Shockley.

  He spotted the address and found a parking space two blocks away, strolled back. The night was getting cool, and he walked with his head down, hands in his pockets. Up ahead, the pale faces of a young couple bobbing toward him, the woman prodding her escort, and they crossed the street before Lucas got to them. Jesus, he looked like a thug? In the dark, with the jeans and the black leather jacket… Maybe.

  Patricia Shockley’s apartment was in another of the converted houses, bigger than the house that Carter lived in, and better kept. The front door was locked, and he pushed a doorbell with a label that said Shockley/Price. A woman’s voice from a door side speaker: “Who is it?”

  “Lucas Davenport, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” he said. “I’m a state investigator, looking into the Ford and Austin murders. I need to talk to Patricia Shockley.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, “Where did you get my name?”

  “Alyssa Austin. It was also in the state file, from an interview with Agent Benson.”

  “I’ll buzz you in.” The lock buzzed and slipped, and Lucas pushed through the door into the hallway. A Persian carpet covered the wooden floor inside, and a wide oaken staircase twisted up to the second floor. Like a sorority house, he thought. A woman came to the landing and said, “Up here.”

  Patricia Shockley was in full Goth: black leggings, black blouse, black- dyed hair, badly chewed black nails. Late twenties. She led him down the hallway to her apartment. Another Goth woman, this one wearing a sixties- style black sheath over black leggings, perched on a stool at a dinner bar off the kitchen, legs crossed.

  Shockley said, “My roommate. Leigh Price.” Price smiled and licked a knife with peanut butter on it. “Cop,” she said. Price was a fairy, if he understood the concept: short, slight, dark, pretty. Maybe thirty. Shockley was thicker, wider; a University of Minnesota basketball player.

  “You always work at night?” Shockley asked. “I’m looking for a guy,” Lucas said. “Do either of you know Roy Carter?” The two women glanced at each other, then they both looked back at Lucas and shook their heads. Price said, “Nooo… I don’t think so. Who is he?”

  “He works at Mike’s liquors? Hangs out at the A1?” Price shook her head: “Not our scene. Why are you asking?"

  "I’m trying to put some of Frances Austin’s friends together,” Lucas said. “I wasn’t one of Frances’s friends,” Price said.“I was, all the way back to school,” Shockley said. “She was really nice, once you got to know her-but Leigh thought she was stuck- up.”

  “ Stuck- up rich prig. But I didn’t think that enough to kill her,” Price said. Her dark eyes caught Lucas’s eyes as she dug in a peanut butter jar with the knife. Lucas felt a little thrum, and it didn’t have anything to do with murder.

  Lucas said to Price, “Would people call you a fairy?” Her eyebrows went up, and she said, “Maybe."

  "Oh, poop,” Shockley said. “You’re a fairy."

  "You’re just as much a fairy as I am,” Price said to her roommate. Shockley rolled her eyes. “Right.” To Lucas: “She’s Tinker Bell the Fairy, I’m Clarabelle the Cow."

  "Not fair,” Price said; but there was a spark in her eye; she knew it was the truth. Shockley and Frances Austin had gone to Blake Academy from kindergarten through graduation, and then on to separate colleges. “We didn’t date together or anything-we just knew each other for a long time,” Shockley said. “We went to each other’s birthday parties. I didn’t see her much when we were in college, but then… we’d hook up for lunch or go out and have drinks a couple times a year. And we were both interested in the gothic, but from different directions. She came in from women’s studies and I came in from literature.”

  “I came in from witchcraft,” Price said. “So you don’t really know who she was hanging out with?” Lucas asked. “She hung out with a lot of students, at night. She was on- again off- again in graduate studies, but there weren’t any jobs in her area and she was thinking about changing direction into something more practical. I’m working, I have to get going early, so I don’t hang out at night.”

  “What do you do?"

  "Commercial real estate,” Shockley said. “Probably start law school in a year or two. My dad says he’ll supply the bucks.” Price said, “I’m a chemical engineer. I work at 3M in medical products.” Neither of the women had seen Austin in the two weeks before she’d died. Shockley thought she’d seen her on a Monday afternoon or a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks before, but it had been an accidental encounter in a Macy’s store, and they’d gone and gotten cinnamon pretzels and chatted for a while.

  “She wasn’t worried about anything, except about what she was going to do,” Shockley said.

  “Did she say anything about her mother?” Lucas asked. “She was always talking about her mom. She really admired her-

  her mom’s sort of a free spirit, but she also runs a good business, and she’s smart, and she’s on boards and stuff.”

  “Her mother thinks that there was a little stress between them, since her father died,” Lucas said.

  “She was broken up about her father,” Shockley agreed. “She said a couple of things about her mom being hard on him, but… she wasn’t really mad at her mom. It was just a hard time. She was one of the executors of his estate, and she took it really seriously.”

  “Okay.” Lucas looked at his notebook: “Do either of you know a couple, uh, Denise Robinson and Mark McGuire?”

  The two women looked at each other and Price said, “Well, sure. Denise and Mark.”

  “What do they do?"

  "They’re Web people- they’re trying to set up a commercial web-site. Something to do with video advertisements… I’m not too clear about it. Mark has a day job at, uh, some truck thing. Computers and trucks, I don’t know what it is.”

  “I’ve been told that they were really tight with Frances before she was killed,” Lucas said.

  “I don’t know what that’d be about,” Shockley said, and Price shook her head.

  “Okay,” Lucas said. “I need names… I need to run along a rosary of names until I find something.”

  Shockley suggested three people that he might contact, and had numbers for two of them, and said each of the two would
have a phone number for the third. He took the names down, recognized two of them from Alyssa Austin’s list.

  “Are any of the three fairies?” Lucas asked. “You know, we don’t really call ourselves that,” Price said. “I mean, it’s not like people go around pointing them out and saying fairy- fairy fairy.”

  “Yes, they do. You even dress like that. The waif look,” Shockley said. She added, “They call them Lolis, too. Loli is short for Lolita.”

  “Also lollipop,” Price said. “I’m looking for a woman; and I’ve been told that she is one,” Lucas said. “Like me,” Price said. “That’s what I’ve been told,” Lucas said. Shockley jumped in. “Karen Slade could be. She’s thin enough."

  "She’s kind of tall,” Price said. Lucas put a check next to Slade’s name. “Thanks. I’ll call if I think of anything else."

  "Do that,” Price said.

  Outside, he looked at his watch. It had been a half hour since he’d left Roy Carter’s; might be worth checking back. Or, he could go home.

  Got in the car, thought about it; what the hell, he could swing by. Five minutes, found a good parking space, only two houses down from Carter’s place. Up the stairs, knock on the door, still no response. But when he was turning away from the door, another door, sideways down the hall, popped open, and a woman stuck her head out.

  “Looking for Roy?"

  "Yup.” He took her in: a round- faced woman, unnaturally pale, with lipstick that looked almost black in the dim light of the hallway. She was dressed in a loose, black, ankle- length dress. Another one; he’d tapped into Goth Central.

  “He won’t be back until late,” she said. “He’s out."

  "I’m a cop,” Lucas said. “I’m going to stick a card under the door

  If you hear him come in, could you ask him to call me? Whatever time it is?”