Phantom Prey

was that Sobotny had killed Frances Austin in an unplanned confrontation in the Austin kitchen.
    She’d then called him, as he was driving the wrecker back from a ditch tow job, and told him what she’d done, and pleaded with him to come over. By the time he got there, she’d cleaned up the kitchen and had wrapped Austin up in her coat. Davis argued that they should call the cops. She told him that they’d go to prison forever, that she loved him, that they could get away with it.
    He’d wound up getting a sheet of plastic out of the back of the wrecker, had wrapped the body in it, to keep any more blood from leaking out, and had taken off with the body. He dropped it in the ditch. Helen, in the meantime, had driven Austin’s car back to Austin’s apartment, and had then taken a cab back to Odd’s towing service, where she’d picked up Davis’s car to drive home.
    Sobotny had heard Lucas talking on the telephone about the fifty thousand, and about going to the A1 that night. Davis had the gun, for home protection. She pressured him into attempting to shoot Lucas outside the bar. “I didn’t want to shoot anybody, but she was all over me,” Davis said. To Lucas: “I didn’t mean to hit you. I was sort of shooting in the dirt.”
    His story wrapped up all the details and most of it was confirmed by the lab reports.
    Sobotny wasn’t talking, but the representations from her lawyer suggested everything was as Davis said, except that Davis had killed Austin with the knife, and that he’d gone after Lucas on his own account, after Sobotny had told him about the phone conversation. She’d begged him, her attorney said, not to do that, but as a small woman alone in a trailer home with a killer, she’d been afraid to say or do anything that might get her own throat cut.
    Her story also wrapped up all the details and was confirmed by the lab reports.
    If one of them could cut a deal with the county attorney, he, or she, might spend as little as six or seven years inside. The other would spend thirty.
    In either case, Del said, by the time somebody got out, the emus would be long gone—or way too fuckin’ tough to eat.
    The problem with the Siggy shooting was that everybody whose name they knew was dead, except Heather, the baby, and her mom. Her mom was out of it. She knew nothin’ about nothin’. Heather also claimed that she didn’t know anything, until it was too late to call anybody. “I had a bunch of goons leaning on me and the baby, for Christ’s sakes. What was I supposed to do, excuse myself while I called nine-one-one?”
    They established that there had been two runners who had gotten away clean. One they’d seen—the man Del had chased until he got in the gunfight. The other, the man who looked like Siggy, they hadn’t seen after the staged scene in the apartment. There’d been St. Paul guys covering the back of the building, and he hadn’t gone that way. They’d checked every apartment in the building, and he wasn’t hiding there.
    One idea was that he’d run through the basement parking ramp to the far end, walked through a garbage pickup area, climbed a concrete-block wall, through some bushes and into a convenience store’s parking lot, and simply walked away from there. There had been other people on the street, and not all had been accounted for.
    When pressed about the phone call at the Mall of America, Heather said she’d simply been shopping, heard the phone ringing, and had picked it up. Somebody with a wrong number, she said. Wouldn’t anybody do that?
    The county attorney eventually decided that they didn’t have anything they could hold her with—she hadn’t actually had time or space to commit any crimes. So she got the baby back from the social services people, and went back to her apartment.
    When the bca people were moving furniture and communications equipment out of the surveillance apartment, Lucas went over to pick up the duffel bag for his armored vest. He noticed that all of Heather’s apartment’s blinds were down.
    Del had a theory.
    “She knew we were there. She was doing a little stage play for us—holding us here. She got rid of Siggy. Siggy was a big liability— violent, on the run, in love with her. He thinks all the hidden money is his. So Heather let us see every damn thing that she did, that might make us think that Siggy was coming back. So we could nail him. Like we did.”
    Lucas and Del took that thought down to the Ramsey County