Phantom Prey

said.
    “Have to think by yourself,” she said. “I’m doing a palate tomorrow and it’s a bad one. I need to be out of here by five, so I’m going to bed.”
    “See you tomorrow then.” He kissed her goodnight, and moved to the den, where he read again through the paper generated by the Minneapolis guys and his own BCA. Lucas had worked for both, and had his prejudices: the BCA guys worked a couple of murders a year, maybe, and they were often hard ones.
    But Minneapolis—a lead Minneapolis investigator might catch as many killings in a couple of years as a BCA agent saw in a career. They were a bunch of flatfeet, but their paper was very good, full of the kind of intuitive detail that caught a guy’s eye after ten years on the street and another ten doing violent crime.
    At eleven o’clock, Lucas stopped. His brain was getting clogged up. He thought about calling Del. No chance he’d be asleep; the guy was like a bat. His old lady was another matter. He worked through the equities for a minute, then dialed.
    Del picked up on the second ring: “What’d ya want?”
    "I don’t want to interrupt anything,” Lucas said. 87
    “I wish you were.”
    “Where’s your old lady?”
    “In bed,” Del said. “She’s been feeling kinda rocky. What’s up?”
    “Meet you at the apartment?”
    “Fifteen minutes.”
    The alley behind the drugstore was dark and cold, and something—a raccoon?—was banging around inside the dumpster. Lucas fumbled for the key to the back door, got inside, turned on the stairway light and went up. The apartment was quiet and cold. He pushed the thermostat higher, in the light coming through the front window, and tuned the boom box to a golden oldies station, playing low; picked up the glasses and looked across the street at Heather Toms’s apartment.
    Toms was in, watching TV in the middle of the three rooms he could see. She was drinking something from a can, a beer or a Pepsi, he thought. Probably a Pepsi, because of the baby. He couldn’t quite pick out the logo in the flickering light of the television.
    Del showed up a couple of minutes later, trudging up the stairs. Lucas heard the key in the lock, and Del stepped inside, bringing along the odor of hot coffee. He handed Lucas a paper cup and Lucas said thanks, and took a sip. The coffee had never seen Seattle, or even heard of it. But it was okay. Free cop coffee.
    Del tipped his head at the boom box: “Clarence Carter—‘Slip Away.’ ” The golden oldie slipped through the room and they sipped along for a moment and then Del took the glasses from Lucas’s hand and looked across the street and said, “She’s got her shirt on.”
    “Yup. Took it off last time, though.”
    “She still looking healthy?”
    “Starting to bulk up with the new baby,” Lucas said.
    “Nipples still point up?”
    “So far.”
    “Wonder if she knows whether it’s a boy or a girl?”
    “You could call and ask . . .”
    Del was wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and a cracked-leather Goodwill jacket with a fake-sheepskin collar. “Who’s dead?” he asked.
    “Guy named Roy Carter,” Lucas said. “Also a guy named Dick Ford and a girl named Frances Austin.”
    “Know about Ford and Austin.” Del handed the glasses back to Lucas. “I didn’t hear about Carter.”
    “He was just a couple of hours ago,” Lucas said. He took two minutes to tell the story, then asked, “What do you think?”
    “Well, there’s a lot of choices. You think the fairy did it?”
    “She knows about it,” Lucas said, looking out into the night.
    “So she’s at least an accomplice.”
    “I think so.”
    “From what you say, Frances sounds like she was playing Goth, but was gonna wind up as an executive somewhere. Not really into the poverty lifestyle. So if you don’t find a fairy, or if she didn’t do it, you’ve really got to think about the possibility that you’ve got two separate things going on here. Austin, and the others.”
    “Be easier if it was all one thing,” Lucas said.
    “The world isn’t easy,” Del said. He finished his coffee and pitched the cup toward an oversized plastic wastebasket, and missed. Clarence Carter went away and Jefferson Airplane came up, “Plastic Fantastic Lover.”
    “It’s not two things,” Lucas said, after a while. “They’re connected. We don’t have Frances’s body, but the lab says there was a lot of blood. Just like Ford and Carter. They could have yelled, their throats weren’t