Phantom Prey

it was. We didn’t want to hurt anybody—we certainly didn’t kill anybody else.”
    Lucas looked at Del and said, “Ah, boy. I thought we had it wrapped.”
    And to Sobotny: “You have the right to remain silent . . .”

24
    They processed Davis and Sobotny in St. Paul.
    Sobotny asked for an attorney; Davis, miserable, declined an attorney, and made a statement, admitting that he’d moved the body and destroyed evidence: the knife used in the killing was in the woods, somewhere between the Austin house and the spot where the body was found, and he had no exact idea where.
    He said that he moved the body in the wrecker, which made good the evidence taken off the plastic sheet, and out of the wrecker bed.
    Sobotny actually hadn’t driven to the Austin house that morning, because her car’s water pump was out, and Davis had driven her to the Austins’. After the killing, they’d hastily cleaned up with paper towels and some “cleaning stuff” taken from the broom closet, which made good the crime-scene lab reports on the floor. Then they’d loaded the body into the wrecker, and Davis had taken it out a few miles and pitched it in a ditch. Sobotny had driven Frances’s car back to Frances’s neighborhood, and parked it, in an effort to conceal the fact that Frances had been at the house that afternoon.
    “Honest to God, I was so freaked out that I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “She was telling me what to do, pushing me around, and by the time I got to thinking about it, it was all done and I was in the shit. I knew it wasn’t gonna work. My dad said, ‘If you ever do anything crooked, the ’thorities will get you.’ He said that all the time, and we kids all believed it, and here it is, the proof.”
    “If you didn’t plan to do anything bad, what about the money?” Lucas asked. “You had to plan the fifty thousand dollars.”
    Davis’s tongue flicked out. “Yeah. I guess. I just kept thinking about them birds. No cholesterol, no fat. Them birds were gonna be my career.”
    He said he was sorry, that he would never do anything like that again, and asked who would feed his birds. They had to be fed that evening and again the next morning. Del called the Goodhue County Humane Society, and the woman who answered the phone said that one way or another, they’d take care of it.
    The statement was recorded.
    Lucas, Del, and the Goodhue cop made statements about the arrest procedure, the reading of the Miranda warning, which was critical, because Davis had simply blurted out the confession.
    And when they were done, Del said, “I think we’re good.”
    The Goodhue deputy, a cheerful farm boy with a blond flattop, slapped Del on the back, hitched up his gun belt, and said, “Man, I was in on a murder arrest. First time for that, eh? You’re looking at the deputy of the month.”
    By the time they got out, it was nine o’clock, a small, cold-looking moon coming up in the east, with clouds ripping across it, almost like at Halloween.
    They stood together in the parking lot while Lucas talked to Jenkins, who’d relieved Shrake at the drugstore apartment, watching Heather.
    “She took a long hot bath tonight,” Jenkins said. “Now I gotta find another woman.”
    “What happened to the last one?”
    “Wore me out,” Jenkins said. “And she always listening to that fuckin’ piano music, that Well-Tempered Clavier shit. Enough to drive a saint to drink.”
    “But nothing going on.”
    “Well, I’d call that bath something, but in your cop frame of reference, no. No sign of anybody,” Jenkins said. “But you know, I got the feeling that she’s doing this on purpose: she’s holding us here.”
    “She’s a performer,” Lucas said.
    “She’s a goddamn snake,” Jenkins said. “Though I gotta say, that’s the kind I like.”
    Lucas had called Weather to tell her about the arrests, and she was waiting to hear more when he got home. “I couldn’t believe it—the case was like an egg that got broken. All of a sudden, crack,” she said. “What did Alyssa say?”
    “I haven’t told her,” Lucas said. “I’m going to call her now, I’m going over there. I’d like you to come along.”
    “Me?”
    “Won’t take long,” Lucas said. “You’re cutting tomorrow morning? ”
    “Yes, but nothing big. I’ve got to graft some skin on a tumor site. I could do it in my sleep.”
    “So come on with me to Alyssa’s,” Lucas said.
    Lucas called ahead, and told Austin