Phantom Prey

The fifty-thousand -dollar deposit was withdrawn in cash, starting two weeks after it was deposited. Then nothing more.”
    “Hmm.”
    “That’s what I thought, when I saw it,” the vice president said. “Of course, this is all automated, and it’s not big enough to draw any particular attention. But, look here . . .”
    He reached out for the file, and Lucas let it go, and the vice president put it on the desktop, upside down from himself, so Lucas could read it, and used a pen to point out the individual lines of the withdrawal records.
    “We have five branches: this one, plus one at Maplewood, one at Signal Hills, one in Woodbury, and one down at Midway. The money was taken out twenty-five hundred dollars at a time, in cash. Twenty withdrawals, one a day. Look at this code—this tells you the branch where the withdrawal was made. The first was taken out here, the next in Maplewood, the next at Midway, the next at Signal Hills. And so on. Every week for four weeks.”
    “Why would they do that?”
    “My thought was, she didn’t want to be seen taking out too much money at once,” the vice president said. “I looked in my computer records, and I can tell you that she never saw any teller twice. Since we only have two or three working at a time, that doesn’t work out statistically. ”
    “So she was avoiding the tellers she’d seen before,” Lucas said.
    “That’s my idea,” the vice president said.
    “Thank you,” Lucas said. He started away, then turned back. “The fifty thousand wasn’t the first deposit?”
    “That’s on the paper,” the vice president said. “The account was opened with five hundred dollars. There were two one-hundred-dollar withdrawals on the check card, then nothing for two months, then the big check, then nothing for two weeks, then four weeks of daily withdrawals. ”
    Fifty grand. What had she been buying? Maybe nothing. Maybe she was putting together some case money, a stash. Shit, maybe she was a terrorist. A rich Caucasian Goth terrorist, buying RPGs. Maybe she was going to war against the Republicans. Lucas smiled to himself: maybe not.
    So what had she been buying? Or why would she need case money? He couldn’t remember the names, looked in his notebook: Denise Robinson, Mark McGuire. Hung out with her, might have wanted to start a business. Wanted her for the money? Something to push.
    He went home for dinner, the kitchen warm and smelling good, like potatoes and salmon, Sam making a hash of his hash, Letty working on algebra while she ate (“If a train is going sixty-five miles an hour to the east, and another train is going forty-five miles an hour to the west . . .”), and took time out to grouse about not getting a cell phone, because everybody else had one, and Weather, quiet, amused, and at the same time, tired from a seven-hour-long operation, talking about going to bed early. A happy moment: if he’d ever thought of commissioning a painting of his family, that would be the moment.
    “I’ve got to run out,” Lucas said, when things had settled down to coffee. “Down to the A1, see if I can catch a few of Frances’s friends, people we haven’t touched yet. There’s some weird stuff coming out.”
    “You could have another piece of pie,” Weather said. “A small piece.”
    Felt so good, in a quiet way.
    He left at eight, feeling a tug back toward the brightly lit windows, but going on into the dark, in the Porsche, around the corner, and then up Cretin to I-94.
    He found a place in the street to park the car, under a streetlight.
    The A1 had changed, just as the bartender had said it would. The lights had been turned down, and the crowd was younger and quieter and dressed in black. The bartender was the same guy: Jerry. Lucas nodded at him and asked, “Can you point me at anybody who knew Frances Austin?”
    The bartender asked, “What kind of beer do you drink?”
    “Leinie’s?”
    The bartender nodded and pulled a bottle of Honey Weiss out of a cooler and said, quietly, “Take a drink and then turn and look around, but not like I told you. There’s a guy over there with a black cowboy-like hat. He knew her. But don’t go right over.”
    Lucas took a sip of the beer and nodded, and the bartender went down the bar, to the only other customer sitting on a stool. Lucas took another sip, then turned and looked at the rooms, clusters of black-garbed Goths on their night out, mostly wine with a little beer here and there, quiet enough.