Phantom Prey

cat between the ears, and it sniffed his hand and produced a perfunctory purr. Lucas said, “I’ve been compiling all the information I can find on Frances Austin, and I understand you three were close.”
    Robinson opened her mouth to answer but McGuire got there first: “We were friends. We don’t know what happened to her.”
    “Do you think she’s dead?” Lucas asked.
    This time McGuire looked at Robinson, who said, “We think so. Not because we know anything, but just because . . . people usually are, when they’re gone this long. We talked to her the day before she disappeared, and there wasn’t any sign that she was going anywhere, that she had anything planned.”
    “Probably kidnapped—her old lady has all the money in the world,” McGuire said.
    “Were the three of you in business together?”
    A line of wrinkles appeared in McGuire’s forehead: “Where’d you hear that?”
    “Just from . . . friends.”
    “We talked about it,” Robinson said.
    Looking for a little shock: “Did she give you fifty thousand dollars? ”
    Robinson: “ No way .”
    McGuire, almost angry: “She didn’t give us a fuckin’ nickel.”
    Lucas went in again. “She didn’t give you fifty thousand dollars in cash, mostly fifties and hundreds?”
    “No. She didn’t,” McGuire snapped. “What the hell is this?”
    “Trying to find out what happened to the money,” Lucas said. “We heard you were trying to build a website. A website takes money. This”—he gestured around the living room, at the computers and servers and cable lines—“takes a lot of money.”
    “Takes thirty thousand, and we busted our butts getting it,” McGuire said. “If we went national, we’d be looking for more money to set up an office and buy more equipment, and we talked to her about it, but she disappeared before we did anything. And we weren’t asking for fifty thousand. Fifty thousand wasn’t enough—we were looking for a quarter million, and even then, I’d have to keep working.”
    Not enough money , Lucas thought. He asked, “Where do you work?”
    McGuire worked at Inter-Load Systems, a company that tracked mixed heavy freight and matched it with space available on over-the-road trucks. The company was a new start-up, and McGuire worked on the mathematical models that worked out delivery routes and times.
    “Sounds complicated.”
    “It is,” McGuire said. He was surly, and he looked tired; more than tired. Exhausted.
    Lucas asked where he was the night of the shooting. “Working here,” McGuire said.
    “Any witnesses?”
    “Well—Denise. I mean, it was the middle of the night, where’d you expect me to be?”
    “Out clubbing, maybe,” Lucas said.
    McGuire snorted. “I don’t have time to take a leak. The last time I went to a club, the Beastie Boys were big.”
    Lucas peered at him for a moment, then asked, “So what does this new website do? The one you were working on with Frances?”
    “Tries to get people to make free advertisements. Then we test them for online reception, and try to sell them to the companies that they advertise,” McGuire said.
    “What?”
    Robinson stepped up. “Suppose you’re, like, Coca-Cola, and you keep putting out those crappy old Coke ads that no kid would ever watch, because they’re so lame. So we solicit ads from guys with video cameras—high-quality stuff, not your home video—and when they come in, we test them, and then we pitch them to Coke. Coke gets a really out-there ad, something the kids will watch, really cheap—even if they reshoot it—and we get a cut.”
    “Is that going to work?” Lucas asked, genuinely curious.
    “Not unless we can come up with a quarter-million bucks in the next few months. Word’s getting out, and we’re not moving fast enough,” McGuire said. “We get four or five guys doing this, only one’s going to make it. He’ll make a hundred million bucks, everybody else goes broke.”
    “Well, shit,” Lucas said. He scratched his head. “If advertisements are so expensive to make, why would anyone make one for free?”
    “The model’s already there,” McGuire said. “It’s publishing. When Stephen King was starting out, nobody paid him a nickel for all the work he was doing. Eventually, he sells a book, and then the big money arrives. But the publishing companies didn’t put up a penny until he had something good.
    “So you’ve got all these guys with cameras and they’ve been to film school and they know