Phantom Prey

think he’d ever shot a gun before. He held it low, with his wrist cocked, like that picture of Elvis Presley in the cowboy suit. He had no idea where the bullets were going.”
    Jenkins slapped him on the shoulder. “Well, I gotta say, I’m glad he didn’t kill you. God knows who we would’ve got in your job. Probably some bureaucratic motherfucker.”
    Back in his office, Lucas stared at his computer screen for a while. His leg was itching, a painful itch, like poison ivy, so he took half a pain pill, took a peek at the bandage, didn’t see any leakage.
    And thought about the fifty thousand, It’s not enough for anything.
    Not enough for anything that would be important to her, financially. Even if she bought fifty thousand in dope, wholesale, she wouldn’t make enough back to justify any risk—the profit, even from a dope deal, would have been a drop in the bucket compared to what she already had.
    And after what Austin had said, the prospect of a dope deal seemed thin, although it was one explanation that would put Frances close to somebody who might kill her.
    The key thing was, she took it in cash.
    That meant that she didn’t want it traced—couldn’t be any other reason to take that much out at once. Of course, she could have planned to loan it to someone who didn’t want the IRS to know about it, who didn’t want a paper trail; or, even more unlikely, she might have planned to pass it along to some extremist political group, and she didn’t want the ties to show up.
    But it all seemed like bullshit. The explanation, when it came, would probably be simpler than any of that, Lucas thought. Shit, maybe she bought a Ferrari from somebody who didn’t take checks.
    Then why the secrecy about the withdrawals . . . ?
    He took out his notebook, noted “Mark McGuire, Denise Robinson, ” looked them up in the license bureau’s database, and then the phone companies’.
    Robinson answered the phone. Lucas identified himself and said, “I’d like to run out to see you. About Frances Austin. You and Mr. McGuire.”
    “Mark won’t be here for half an hour or so . . .”
    “Neither will I,” Lucas said. He got his jacket and the cane and said to Carol, “I’m gonna run out.”
    “Where’re you going?”
    “Out to Maplewood. This couple Denise Robinson and Mark McGuire, friends of Frances Austin,” he said.
    “Maybe you ought to take Del with you.”
    “Nah. I’m okay; this is just a check,” Lucas said.
    “What you really ought to do is go home and go to bed,” she said. “You don’t look that good.”
    On the way to Maplewood, Sandy rang on his cell phone: “I’ve got eighteen Lorens for you.”
    “God bless you.”
    “It’s an old-fashioned name: there are more of them in their fifties and sixties than in their twenties and thirties. Anyway, I pulled the .jpgs out of the DMV folder and I’m sending them right . . . now . . . to your office e-mail.”
    “Okay. Run them through the NCIC, will you? Get back to me.”
    “I’ll put the returns in your e-mail. But I’m going out tonight, so this’ll be the last thing I can do today.”
    “Got a date?”
    “Yes, I do,” she said.
    Robinson and mcguire might be characterized as “Not-Goths,” Lucas thought when he saw them. They lived in a nondescript robin’s-egg -blue, fifty-year-old split-level house in a nondescript baby-boomer neighborhood that once probably had about a million kids running around in the streets, and now was full of old people.
    Denise Robinson was just as Alyssa Austin had described her: tall, gawky, short sandy hair, big glasses, about thirty. She met him at the door, invited him in, said, “Pay no attention to the living room; it’s the way we live now.”
    The house smelled of coffee and pizza, and the living room was an office, stuffed full of computer equipment, file cabinets, two desks, and a cat-torn couch pushed against the farthest wall, with a red-striped cat perched on the back. McGuire was sitting at a computer, head bent toward the monitor screen, curly dark hair, shorter than Robinson, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, maybe a year or two older than she was. A pair of dirty white Nikes sat in the foot well.
    Still, when he turned to Lucas, Lucas thought, Huh. Dress him up a bit, and he could have been the shooter. McGuire reluctantly signed off what he was doing and turned toward Lucas without getting up.
    Robinson said, “So what’s going on?”
    Lucas stepped over and scratched the