Phantom Prey
models and young actresses—they can put out a video for a few hundred bucks. Get some experience, get some attention, and maybe, if they’re lucky, they get a whole bunch of money. It’s like publishing, and we’re like the agents.”
“Huh,” Lucas said. “That could work.”
“I sure as shit hope so,” McGuire said.
“So you see why we’re missing Frances,” Robinson said. “There was a possibility that she could round up some money. Her, her friends, maybe her mom and her mom’s friends.”
“Some of those people could drop a quarter-million dollars on the ground and not miss it,” McGuire said. “Frances’s dad joined a golf club out in Palm Springs a few years ago, and the admission fee was a quarter-million dollars. For a golf club . And here we’ve got this idea, and we . . . just . . . can’t . . . get it done.”
Showing anger again. Frustration. Interesting.
Lucas asked more questions about Frances: was she angry, lonely, addicted, scared, vague? No, they said, she wasn’t any of those things. Robinson said at the end, “It was like one of those things where somebody’s killed in a car wreck after the senior prom. Everybody’s happy and then bam! Everybody’s dead. I didn’t see anything in Frances that I didn’t see every day—she expected to see us, to call us, and maybe to get in the business someday.”
“It wouldn’t have pissed you off if she’d said ‘no’? Sounds like she sort of led you on,” Lucas said.
“Would have pissed me off—but I think she was sold on the idea,” McGuire said. “I really thought she was going with us. When she disappeared, I thought I was going crazy. I kept trying to find out what happened, and nobody had anything to say.”
“You talk to her mother?” Lucas asked.
“I did once . . . right after Frances disappeared,” Robinson said. “Just seeing if anybody knew where she was. Mrs. Austin seemed really confused. Out of it. Like she was losing her grip. I felt so sorry for her.”
“Do you have any idea why she might have disappeared?”
McGuire said, “Well, you’ve been all over it: money. She was smart, but not brilliant or anything. She looked okay, but she wasn’t super pretty, like she might have a stalker or something. She was . . . nice. And she had money.”
There wasn’t much more. McGuire stood up when he left, and Lucas looked at him, standing, tried to imagine him with a gun in his hand. Still possible, he thought.
At the door, McGuire asked, “You don’t have anything to do with Davenport Simulations, do you? There was a cop involved in that.”
Lucas turned. “I started it, with a friend. He bought me out, when it got over my head. I’m out of it now.”
McGuire’s head bobbed: “I’m officially impressed. You probably know what I’m going through right now.”
“Fun at the time,” Lucas said.
“That’s because you made it,” McGuire said. “If you’d been wiped out by a competitor, it might not have been so much fun.”
“There were no competitors,” Lucas said.
“The olden days, when the world was new,” McGuire said.
“I’m not that ancient,” Lucas said.
“About six generations down the road, computer time,” McGuire said. “I mean, you probably once used cameras with film .”
McGuire stayed in the doorway, and as Lucas got to his car, he called, “If you want to make another butt-load of money, all we need is a quarter million.”
Lucas paused with one hand on the car-door handle: “Gimme a week to think about it and talk to some friends. Maybe . . .”
“I’ll call you,” McGuire said. “I’ll call you.”
Back at the office, Lucas pulled up e-mail from Sandy. One had NCIC data on the Lorens, the other had photos. He looked at the pictures—and ran into the eyewitness problem: the eighteen were all between twenty-two and thirty-five, with dark hair, and most of them could have been the guy who shot at him. Most of them, in fact, could have been McGuire, but weren’t. He couldn’t pick one out.
He got on the phone and called Alyssa Austin on her cell. “Where are you?”
“At our Edina site,” she said.
“Do you have access to a computer, where you could get e-mail?”
“Of course. Right here in the office—I can access my account.”
“I’m forwarding eighteen digital photos to you. All Lorens. Stay on the phone, take a look at them.”
“Hang on.”
Lucas hung on for a minute, two minutes, then heard her pick up the phone and
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