Phantom Prey

be a benefit. What’d that boy do, anyway?”
    Del asked, “So what’s Jerry’s last name?”
    Lucas washed his hands; and while they waited for the Dakota County crew, they got Linda and Odd around Linda’s desk, and cross-examined them on Ricky Davis. “Used to work on towboats, down on the river, got tired of that, and decided to start a farm. He and his girlfriend are raising emus.”
    “Emus—like the bird.”
    “Yup. Ricky says that they got no cholesterol and no fat, and he’s gonna sell them to high-rent restaurants in the Cities. They got a batch of chicks last fall, and they’re gonna start harvesting them . . .”
    “That means ‘chop their heads off,’” Linda said.
    “. . . around next Christmas.”
    “Where’s the farm?” Lucas asked.
    “Down south of here, somewhere, what’s the town?” Odd scratched his head.
    Linda said, “Wanamingo—it’s by Zumbrota.”
    Lucas got on his phone, called Carol, had her look at a map and figure out what county Wanamingo was in. She came back a minute later and said, “Goodhue. The county seat is at Red Wing.”
    “Get me the number for the county recorder, will you?”
    “Let me get on the Net.” Another minute, and she said, “Here it is . . .” and read out the number.
    As he dialed it, he asked Linda, “Any idea what Ricky’s full legal name is? Is it Richard or Ricky, his middle initial?”
    She poked her computer a couple of times and said, “Richard William Davis, 01-07-75.”
    Lucas got a clerk in the recorder’s office, identified himself, and asked her to check the computer for any deeds, mortgages, or liens listed to Richard William Davis in the past year.
    She was back almost instantly: “We have a deed recorded and a mortgage satisfaction on November twenty-one, forty-two thousand dollars for apparently . . . let me figure this out . . . forty acres out in Cherry Grove township.”
    “Is that near Wanamingo?”
    “It is. Let me see . . . four, five miles?”
    The dakota county crime-scene guys arrived a couple of minutes later, and Lucas and Del and Odd walked them out to Two. “You know what you’re looking for?” Lucas asked.
    “Yes.” The older of the two guys looked into the truck bed. “We’re gonna find it, too—whether or not it’s exactly right, we’ll have to see.”
    “I understand there were some oak leaf bits stuck in the plastic sheet,” Lucas said.
    “That’s right,” the older one said. “We’ll look for them. What we’ll do, we’ll seal up the bed as best we can, then take it back to the garage and sample everything.”
    “How long before you know?”
    “Lot to sample,” he said. “Let’s say . . . a preliminary read by tomorrow, something definitive in a week or so?”
    “I’ll give a preliminary read right now,” the shorter guy said. “Given what we found in the sheet, you couldn’t even think of a better possibility than this truck. We had a mix of engine oil and transmission fluid and brake fluid and . . . shit, we should have thought of wreckers.”
    “Good enough for me,” Lucas said. To Del: “Wanna go talk to Ricky?”
    “What’d that boy do, anyway?” Odd asked.
    They were only fifteen minutes from Lucas’s place, so they went back into town, and Lucas dropped the Porsche and Del left his state Chevy in the street, and they took Lucas’s truck. They got lost cutting across country, and didn’t make the Davis farm until late afternoon.
    The farm was not on what Lucas would have identified as farm-land: it was a forty-acre hump of scraggly, sapling-infested meadow with a big wire cage in the middle of it, backed on one side by the foundation of an old barn. The barn foundation was tented with plastic; the pen itself was full of five- or six-foot-tall birds that Lucas would have called ostriches. A trailer, missing its wheels, sat on blocks to the right of the driveway, opposite the barn and bird pen, and a Dodge pickup was nosed in to the trailer.
    They pulled into the driveway and parked fifty feet down the hump from the trailer; as they did, Ricky Davis stepped out of the trailer and peered at them. Lucas slipped his gun out of its waist holder and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Watch yourself—that’s the mother-fucker who shot me.”
    “You sure?”
    “Ninety-four-point-six percent.”
    Davis was watching them, a frown on his face. When Lucas stepped out, with Del on the other side, his face dropped, and then he looked both ways, up and down