Phantom Prey

cut, but nobody heard them yell because, probably, by the time they thought of it, they were already going.”
    “Unless the knife went up into the diaphragm,” Del said. “Jesus, though, that’d take some expertise—a doctor or something.”
    “There’s that.”
    “And from what you say, there’s other big differences,” Del said. “When they killed Frances, they went to all the risk of moving the body and getting rid of it. Since it hasn’t popped up yet, they did a pretty good job. But Ford and Carter, they leave out on the street, like calling cards. Right out there in public, like advertisements.”
    “Advertisements for what?”
    “You’re the detective,” Del said.
    Lucas slurped on the coffee, which tasted sort of brown, like a cross between real coffee and the paper sack it came in. “If they’re advertisements, there’ll be more of them. And now that you brought it up, another question about Frances. People were going to miss her pretty quickly, so why bother to move the body at all?”
    Del shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe to shift time, to give themselves an alibi. Maybe to shift the place, so you wouldn’t look at people who had keys to the Austin house. But then, if you’re right, and the cases are connected, why does the fairy let herself be seen now? Doesn’t she care? There are probably what, a half-dozen people who’d recognize her now?”
    “Maybe she just doesn’t give a shit,” Lucas said.
    “You know what it adds up to?” Del said. “Either you’ve got two separate things, or she’s nuts. She lets herself be seen, then she runs and hides. It’s like a game to her.”
    Across the street, Heather got up, stretched, loafed into the kitchen, got something out of a cupboard—black corn chips, Lucas thought, and a bottle of salsa. They watched her carefully fixing the snack. “Is salt okay at this point? In the pregnancy?” Del asked. “Those chips have got a lot of sodium.”
    “Dunno.”
    Lucas said, after another moment, “There’s something else going on, too. Austin—Alyssa—says her husband might have been sleeping with his assistant. Smart, pretty, big boobs; that’s Alyssa’s description. Alyssa said she didn’t care too much.”
    “Bullshit,” Del said.
    “. . . because on other levels, the marriage was still okay. They had a solid partnership.”
    “Wasn’t okay. Another woman gets to her husband in a way she can’t? That’s never okay,” Del said. “If she tells you that, she’s lying.”
    Lucas shrugged. “All I can do is tell you what she said.”
    “Did you check the plane crash?”
    “Not personally. I read some paper on it. Supposedly, he’s at a fly-in fishing place up in Canada. He’d been there before, had gone up by himself, meeting some pals. On the day he’s scheduled to leave, he takes off, had a power problem when he’s a hundred feet up, tries to turn back down the lake, dead stalls, and goes straight into the ground. The Canadian investigators didn’t find anything particularly suspicious. Happens a few times a year up there. This was an old rebuilt plane, a Beaver. And boom. Alyssa was back here; the daughter was back here.”
    “What about the guys up there? His pals? Alyssa didn’t have anything going with any of them?”
    “You’re a suspicious motherfucker,” Lucas said. And, “I’ll check that.”
    “Wup-wup-wup . . .” Del said, pointing across the street.
    Toms was running toward the kitchen and Lucas put the glasses on her. “Phone call,” he said. He looked at his watch and noted the time. She spoke for ten seconds then hung up.
    “Quick call,” Del said. “Setting up a meet?”
    “Dunno.” Toms walked back through the visible rooms, then disappeared down a hall that led only to the door. “Somebody coming up?”
    “Didn’t see anybody going in the front.”
    “I think somebody called her from the door.”
    They sat cocked forward on the folding chairs, tensed up; Toms was gone for another ten seconds, then reappeared, pushing an old woman in a wheelchair. “Ah, shit,” Lucas said. “It’s her mom.”
    “You know anything about Goths?” Lucas asked.
    Del did. He’d even dated a couple of them, twenty years earlier, during their initial efflorescence. Much of the Gothic trip was a deliberate, ironic, self-conscious pose, along with a genuine interest in the subject of decadence and the transcendent. Most of the Goths he knew, Del said, were smart. If they’d had a scientific