Phantom Prey

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 bureau drawer 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 left-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