Phantom Prey

got it,” he said with a grin, over breakfast. “Nobody knows where it came from. If I gotta use it, I can ditch it and be clear.”
    She’d said, “For Christ sakes, Hunter, you’re a mechanical engineer, you don’t shoot people. Leave the gun at home—it doesn’t make you look like a gunman, it makes you look like an idiot.”
    That had annoyed him, and he hadn’t spoken to her for a day or two; and he’d taken the gun.
    She lifted the gun out of the drawer, hefted it, put the muzzle to her temple, closed her eyes, started to squeeze, and Loren said, “Don’t do that. Alyssa, please. The gun could go off, you might not even kill yourself, you could leave yourself with half a brain. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
    “Don’t hurt me,” Fairy pleaded.
    Alyssa chuckled, and took the gun down, and now put the muzzle in her mouth—but it tasted bad, and she took it back out.
    “I’ve got to think about this,” she said.
    “One shot, at night, and the Davenport problem is gone,” Loren said. “We don’t even have to hurry—just watch his place. If everything isn’t perfect, we pass.”
    “Maybe he goes to bed at eight o’clock every night,” Alyssa suggested.
    “I don’t think so—he’s talked about working late. Weather says they’re mismatched that way. She gets up early every morning, he stays up late.”
    Alyssa turned off the stereo, carried the gun back to her bedroom and laid it on the nightstand next to the clock, where the green light of the clock, seen from her pillow, broke over the cylinder. Revolvers, she remembered from her lesson, were the simplest gun to use. No safeties—point and shoot.
    And if they were cocked first, the trigger was a hair-pull. A breath would slam the hammer down, and the bullet would be on its way.
    She lay back on the pillow, thinking.
    Put the gun back in her mouth.
    Or shoot Davenport.
    After a while, they all went to sleep.

26
    Lucas got up early, feeling lethargic, after a bad night’s sleep.
    In looking back over the pattern of killings—not counting the murder of Frances Austin—it still appeared to him that they had to be connected. Had to be connected to the Fairy, whether the Fairy had used the knife, or not.
    He knew the Fairy was small, dark, and apparently in good physical condition. Some of the people who’d seen her had described her as young, but one woman said she wasn’t as young as she looked—while a guy in the same conversation had said something to the effect that whatever her age, she had a young ass.
    If, Lucas thought, you were looking for someone a bit crazy—perhaps even schizophrenic—with a powerful revenge motive, a somewhat older face but younger ass, you had Alyssa Austin.
    But Fairy was dark, while Austin was blond. That would not, Lucas thought, be an insuperable barrier for a woman whose career was built on providing youthful images to other woman, through her spas.
    A wig, some eyebrow pencil, youthful dress, a careful avoidance of prolonged contact with other people—it could be done.
    And, in the murder of Patricia Shockley, there’d been the question of why she would let an unknown woman, who looked like the Fairy, whom she’d been warned against . . . why she would allow her in the apartment?
    What if the unknown woman had shown up as the blond, unthreatening mother of Shockley’s own murdered friend?
    A long train of suppositions; not enough for an arrest. How about the burned car? Might that lead to her? Something that would pin her down? The only living person who’d seen the Fairy for more than a couple of minutes was the Xiong guy, if indeed he’d seen the Fairy at all.
    He was moving by eight, cleaned up, grumbled at the housekeeper and Sam, who’d already had breakfast, skimmed the papers. Neither one had anything on the arrest of Ricky and Helen, because, he knew, neither paper spent much time tracking the cops anymore. If the paper’s main cop guy had gone home for the day, you could murder the queen of England, and the papers wouldn’t know about it for eighteen hours.
    He made it to the office a few minutes after nine o’clock, and immediately went down to see Jackson, the photographer—Jackson wasn’t in, but had been in, was probably wandering around the building someplace, Lucas was told. Lucas grumbled more about that, as he sat and waited, and finally had the bright idea of calling Jackson on his cell phone—and it turned out the photographer was three offices down