Phantom Prey

you’re gonna sneak out of town, wouldn’t you pull the blinds?”
    “I would. I don’t think Heather has a modest bone in her body,” Lucas said.
    “It’s not modesty—if she’s gonna run, she’d want to keep it a secret, ” Del said. He fumbled the paperback out of sight, but before it went, Lucas saw the title: Waiting for Godot. “She might be perfectly happy hanging her tits out the window, but packing a bag?”
    Lucas picked up the binoculars and took a look. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s weird.”
    They watched awhile longer, then Del said, “I didn’t think you were coming over. What’s up?”
    “The Austin case may have just solved itself,” Lucas said. He explained about Ricky Davis.
    “. . . so I’m pretty sure he’s the guy who opened the Frances Austin account. There’s the fifty thousand. His girlfriend, Helen, had all the access she needed. She’d have to figure out a password or something, but they could do that, one way or another. Then, all she had to do was call Fidelity with the password, and have a check sent to the address that Fidelity already had. No reason for them to suspect anything was wrong. Helen intercepts the mail—she’s there alone almost every day—and passes it to Ricky, who’d already set up the account.”
    “Why’d they kill Austin?” Del asked.
    “Don’t know that yet—maybe Frances figured it out. You want to hear a scenario?”
    “Go ahead.”
    Lucas pulled up another chair, sat, leaned back with his hands behind his head, feet up on the desk. “Frances is at home and decides to get some money from Fidelity. She sits down and makes the call, paying no attention to Helen, who hears her say the password, or maybe a couple of passwords. There it is—the money’s just sitting there. And—we’ll have to show this—Helen really needs the money. Or Ricky does. For some reason or another. So they come up with this scheme, and it almost works. But Frances, who is no fool, looks at an account statement, maybe a whole month later, if Helen worked it right, and she remembers . . . She remembers Helen being there, when she was on the phone to Fidelity.”
    He continued: “But she’s not sure, so she goes to the house to confront Helen. They argue, it gets physical, there’s a knife, and Helen sticks her. Freak outs, calls Ricky, who comes in his truck, one of his trucks, and they move the body. Helen drives Frances’s car back to her apartment, and then . . . I don’t know. She takes a cab, or Ricky picks her up, they go back and get her car. Or Ricky parks someplace, after dumping the body, and walks in and moves her car. Anyway . . .”
    “They work something out,” Del said. He added, “Works for me, but you ain’t gonna get a jury to buy it. Not on Lucas Davenport’s say-so.”
    “Ah—but there’ll be some hard evidence,” Lucas said. “They bought something with the money. They paid something off. There was some residue on the body, or the sheet—some transmission fluid, and Ricky drove a wrecker. There might be some fingerprints . . . and I just thought of something else. Sonofabitch.”
    “What?”
    “When I found the missing fifty thousand, I was at the Austin house,” Lucas said. “I called up Alyssa and asked her about it, and she didn’t know where it went. When we were talking, Helen was right there. Then I called Anson, and I mentioned that I might go back to the A1 that night. And that night, man, that cowboy cocksucker shot me. Ricky wears cowboy boots.”
    “Bonnie and Clyde,” Del said.
    “Ben and Jerry.”
    “Anthony and Cleopatra.”
    “Heather and Siggy.” Lucas looked across the street: Heather was packing, all right. The boom box came on with Robert Palmer, “Addicted to Love.” Lucas wondered, Is that Heather’s problem?
    “Anyway,” he said to Del, “what else you got going?”
    “Nothing you don’t know about—except, did I tell you I’m trying to find George William Boyd?”
    “George? Why?”
    “He’s been selling Level IV assault vests out his back door, along with Kevlar helmets and the occasional Mini-14 Ranch Rifle.”
    Lucas was annoyed: “What the hell is he doing?”
    “Well, you know George,” Del said.
    “Yeah, but that was just paintball shit,” Lucas said. “What’s he doing now? Starting a war?”
    “That’s the question I plan to ask him,” Del said. “Somebody said . . . hell, that some of the folks on West Seventh were getting antsy about the