Phantom Prey

A-R-M or something. Couldn’t make payments. We just got the birds, we were desperate.”
    “Who killed Frances?”
    “She did,” he said bitterly.
    “Helen,” Lucas said.
    “Called me up at work and said there’d been a terrible accident and I had to get down there. Accident, my ass, she stabbed her about a hundred times. Big puddle of blood all over the place. I never knew she hated the Austins that much.”
    Del: “Hated them?”
    “Hated them. They treated her like dirt. Paid her shit, and she was like, invisible. If I’d known all that shit . . . I don’t know.”
    “So you didn’t plan it out?”
    “Hell no. I wouldn’t have done anything to Frances Austin,” Davis said. “I mean, we stole the money. She had so much, we didn’t think she’d notice right away, or that she could figure out what happened. But she figured it out: came right out and told Helen that she was gonna be locked up for a hundred years, because that’s what happened when somebody stole from the Austins. They started screaming at each other, and finally, Helen . . . stabbed her.”
    “And you came down and picked up the body with your wrecker, and put her in the ditch.”
    “I guess,” he said.
    “That’s the goddamnedest thing,” the Goodhue deputy said. “You should have gone right straight to the police.”
    “You weren’t there,” Davis moaned. “You weren’t there.”
    “And you loved her?” Lucas asked.
    “I did then, but that’s gone away,” Davis said. “That crazy bitch. I see her looking at me . . . she was scaring me. I think, I don’t know. I didn’t want to be around when she had a knife in her hand.”
    “When she killed the other ones, were you around for that?” Lucas asked.
    “What?”
    “When she killed—”
    “She didn’t kill anybody else,” Davis said. “I mean, I know that. We were together when those other people were killed, and we weren’t anywhere around there.”
    “What about Frank?” Del asked.
    “Frank who?”
    “Frank Willett?”
    “I don’t know any Frank Willett. Who’s he?”
    Goodhue county was part of a sheriff’s co-op and the deputy called in the crime-scene team, and they all trucked back to the trailer. Davis told them where the pistol was, the one he’d used to shoot at Lucas, and they marked it. And they dug out the folder from the Riverside bank, the one that would have Emily Wau’s fingerprints on it.
    “Whose idea was the Francis thing—calling you Frank, so the ID would be good?” Lucas asked.
    “Helen figured that out,” Davis said.
    “Where’d you get the ID?”
    He shrugged: “Trucker. Them things float around, you can get any name you want.”
    “Did you have one of Frances’s credit cards or something? I understand you had to have two forms of ID.”
    Davis’s head bobbed. “Yeah . . . Helen got one of those offers in the mail, for a credit card, already approved. She mailed it back, and the card came. That’s what started the whole thing. That right there.”
    They were outside, in the dark, about to put Davis in the deputy’s car, when another car topped the hill by the neighbor’s farmhouse, and Davis said, “That’s Helen, coming home from work.”
    Sobotny’s car slowed at the turnoff, as Lucas hustled back to the truck, and then straightened and continued down the road. Del piled into the passenger seat, and they went after her, caught her a mile away, flashers going, and she finally pulled over by a stop sign.
    They came up behind her, slowly, carefully, and found her with her head resting on the center pad of the steering wheel.
    Lucas said, “Come out of there.”
    She sat up for a moment, staring straight ahead, like she was considering other possibilities, then turned the key and shut down the car, and got out.
    “Agent Davenport,” she said.
    “Helen.”
    “What’s happened?”
    “Ricky rolled the truck. You might have seen it back there in the ditch,” he said.
    “I thought . . .” she began. Then: “Never mind.”
    Del said, “Tell you what, ma’am. Ricky sort of spilled his guts.”
    “Yes, that’s what he’d do,” she said. She looked at Del and sighed. “We weren’t smart enough to get away with this. We just weren’t smart enough. Maybe I was, but Ricky . . . Ricky’s a lunkhead.”
    “Why’d you kill the other three?” Lucas asked.
    She frowned. “The other three? You mean . . . We didn’t kill those people. We’re not crazy. This has all been a mistake, that’s what