Phantom Prey

accounts were in bonds that produced regular income that she apparently used for living expenses—it was deposited in her checking account, which was also at Wells Fargo.
    The totality was confusing. At eleven o’clock, though, his neck and back muscles starting to cramp, he had what could be a breakthrough. In December, Fidelity had issued a check for fifty thousand dollars to Frances. There was no check form where the other check forms were, and there was no record of the fifty thousand going into her checking account.
    Where had the money gone? Had she simply endorsed it to somebody? Had she walked it into a bank and gotten cash—not all that easy to do, in these days of drug awareness and terrorism alerts. What had she spent it on?
    Del had been right, the night before, when he said that people had been killed for a lot less than two million dollars; and a lot less than fifty thousand dollars, too.
    He stood up, stretched, went into the kitchen for another diet Coke, found the housekeeper unstacking the dishwasher. “Do you have a cell phone number for Mrs. Austin?”
    “There’s a list,” she said. She went to a cupboard near the wall phone and opened the door: on the back of it was a list of fifteen or twenty phone numbers: plumber, appliance repairmen, lawn and pool services, Mercedes and Jaguar dealerships, and three different numbers for Alyssa Austin: Office, 1Cell, and 2Cell.
    “Her personal phone is 2Cell; 1Cell is the business cell,” the housekeeper said.
    Lucas called her on the personal phone: she answered on the third ring. “Sorry to bother you,” Lucas said. “I have a question. Frances took fifty thousand dollars out of Fidelity in December, but there’s no record of it going into her checking account. Do you remember anything like that? Did she sign it over to somebody for a car or something, or put a down payment on a condo?”
    There was a long pause, and then Austin said, “Fifty thousand? I don’t know anything about that, at all. I would have known—if she was thinking about spending fifty thousand dollars on something, she would have mentioned it.”
    “She didn’t say anything?”
    “Nothing at all,” Austin said.
    “I’m going to leave some documentation in a folder on your dining table,” Lucas said. “Could you take a look at it, and the other expenses she had at the time? See if anything rings a bell.”
    “I’ll look as soon as I get home—I’ll come back as soon as this meeting is done.”
    “Good. Let me give you my cell number. Call me anytime.”
    When he got off the line, he took out his book and found Anson’s number. “Get anything?” he asked, when Anson came up.
    “I took that photo kit of the fairy woman around to the people who saw her,” Anson said. “And to Frances’s friends. One of her friends said the fairy looked like . . . guess who?”
    “I don’t know. Lana Turner?”
    “Close, but no cigar. They said it looked like Frances Austin.”

8
    A slap in the face.
    "Frances Austin’s dead,” Lucas said.
    “You know that and I know that,” Anson said. “The question is, does Frances Austin know that?”
    “Man . . . the blood at Austin’s. You’ve seen the lab reports?”
    “I’m just telling you what I was told. We really don’t know how much blood there was at Austin’s place, whether it was a little that got smeared around or a lot that got mopped up. But here’s a question for you. What if the fairy is Alyssa Austin? She looks a little like Frances.”
    Lucas had to think it over. Why not? “You’re thinking outside the box,” he said finally.
    “She gets a wig, she gets some black clothes . . .”
    “She’s forty-five, or something like that. Everybody says the fairy is in her early twenties,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, that’s a question,” Anson said. “Still, I wouldn’t mind getting a peek in her wig drawer.”
    Lucas thought, I’m right there. He glanced sideways. The housekeeper was twenty feet away, poking a coat-hanger wire down the drain on the left side of the two-basin kitchen sink, her lips moving, as though she were trying to talk it into the garbage disposal. Paying no attention.
    But how was he going to get into the bedroom? The housekeeper wouldn’t be leaving for hours. And if he found anything, could he tell Anson? It’d be an illegal search and he didn’t know Anson that well. “We’d need something,” he said. “To get a warrant.”
    “Think of something,” Anson said.