Phantom Prey

to her?”
    Her voice pitched up and she giggled: “All right, here I am,” Fairy said. “You wanted Fairy. Woman with a knife-edge wit.”
    Loren said, “Quit messing around, Alyssa. I need you back. We’ve got to talk.”
    Alyssa came back, a slack smile playing around her lips: “See, I know what Fairy is. She’s me—another piece of me, and I think we’ll eventually get back together. We’ll heal. Other people have had this disorder—maybe my case is a little different than others, but all cases are a little different than others. Anyway: I understand it. I can look it up on the Internet. I can read stories about people who have gone through it. But you, Loren—the only people who have experiences like you, are total goofs. Crazy people. But you seem so . . . rational. Are you the devil?”
    “There is no devil,” Loren said.
    “Isn’t that what the devil would say? You talked me into all these evil things. . . . I killed three people—or Fairy did—and you were right there, eating it up, pushing me. If you’re not the devil, you’re a pretty good mock-up.”
    Loren looked away: “Well, I’m not the devil. I’m dead and I have a dead person’s psychic ability. I could feel the hands of those people on Frances’s shoulder, and if Frances were here to talk to you, she would tell you the same thing. Killing them was the right thing to do.”
    “And Frances is still dead,” Alyssa said.
    “But she’s not gone,” Loren said. “I can feel her aura. She’s around here, but maybe not for long. She might be getting on the boat, to go over.”
    Alyssa sighed. She had heard it before. “And over . . . is heaven? Or hell? Or purgatory? Or what?”
    “Who’s to know who hasn’t gone?” Loren said. “When I’ve seen the boat, sometimes it’s all lit up and cheerful, like the Delta Queen, with the calliope playing, and sometimes it’s this dark little rotten boat with a red stern wheel. . . . Who knows where it’s going?”
    “Whatever,” she said, waving him off. “There’s nothing to do about it now.”
    “Unless you see Frances, of course,” Loren said. “You have to be prepared.”
    “Oh . . . bullshit. Bullshit.” Now she was angry; wine-angry, more wind than real violence to it. “You are nothing more than an illusion. I wonder what Xanax would do to you, if I got rid of a few anxieties for a while?”
    Didn’t faze him: “You can take what you want, but your problem isn’t going away,” Loren said. “In fact, your problem has gotten worse. When you let Fairy out the other night, you let her out at exactly the wrong time.”
    Alyssa leaned forward, elbows on her thighs, an empty wineglass in her hands. “Lucas Davenport,” she said.
    “Yes.” Loren stood up, thrust his hands in his pants pockets, wandered around the room looking at the paintings, stopped in front of the landscape by Kidd. “You know, this landscape. Those are the bluffs over the Mississippi just downstream from St. Paul—right where the river turns.”
    “That’s right,” Alyssa said.
    “It’s odd—it’s not completely realistic, but it’s completely real. The other odd thing is, that’s where the riverboats leave from. Oh, a little upstream, by the upper landing, but right there in that stretch of river. Weird that you should have this painting, hanging here.”
    “Forget the riverboats!” Alyssa snapped. “We need to focus on Davenport. Something’s going on with Helen. Why’s he looking at Helen? Why’s he looking at Ricky?”
    Loren walked away from the painting, around the table, sat down again, his eyes sliding past hers. “Maybe he found something. Maybe they had something to do with Frances. If they did, this is a serious problem, Alyssa. Right now, he thinks all four killings were done by the same person. If he decides that Helen or Ricky were involved with Frances . . . then why was that knife in Frank Willett’s apartment?”
    “I have to think . . .” she said, dropping her face into her hands.
    “You have to think as Alyssa—not as Fairy,” Loren said. “Fairy is the impetuous one. She’s the one who wanted to do the car and knife in the same night. She almost blew herself up with the car.”
    That made Alyssa smile. It had been one hell of a blast, all right. She’d been both frightened and exhilarated when she got to the top of the hill and ran toward the private plane hangars. “That was pretty amazing.”
    “Amazing,” Loren said. “And she got