Phantom Prey

cuppa tea and tell me about it.”
    If his leg hadn’t hurt, Lucas wouldn’t have done it. He said, half to O’Keefe, and half to Del, “I’ve dinged up my leg. I wouldn’t mind sitting down for a minute.”
    "Oho! Are you that copper that got shot?” O’Keefe was delighted. “Your name rings a bell.”
    Lucas nodded: “That’s me.”
    “You’re chasing a ripper, like good old Jack. Damnit, what good luck. Come in, come in.”
    He’d had a pot of tea going, and had it ready in two minutes, fussing around like an old lady, with a tray and cup, and offered them milk to put in it. They both declined, while he took some; he had them sitting in a conversation group, two easy chairs and a love seat.
    “So it’s this bartender and this liquor store clerk you’re investigating, then,” O’Keefe said. “How did my name come up?”
    Lucas gave him a short version of the investigation, O’Keefe manically stirring his tea as he listened, his bright blue eyes like cornflowers in his pink face. He asked questions, and winkled more out of Lucas than Lucas had intended to give.
    When Lucas finished, O’Keefe took a sip and said, “You shouldn’t be chasing Lorens, then. You should be putting pressure on the Austin woman. You should be . . . reenacting the crime. Right at the scene of the murder.”
    “There’s a surprise,” Del said. “A drama teacher who wants to reenact. ”
    "Ah, but I have a reason,” O’Keefe said. He shook a finger at them, like a professor might. “You have only two things. You have a motive: money. And you have a scene of a crime and it’s the first crime. Would I be wrong in assuming that the first crime of a series is probably the key crime?”
    “Sometimes it is,” Lucas said, mildly amused. “There have been cases where a first murder was done to set up a second one, so that it would look like a series killing.”
    “About as often as you’ve seen a leprechaun, I would expect,” O’Keefe said. He went on without waiting for an answer. “You have a motive and a crime scene. If you go back and reenact the crime as you believe it happened, you will see much more deeply into it, I guarantee it. I’m a playwright, as well as a teacher, and when you’re writing a play, you always go and look at the scene of the crime. Or whatever scene. You go to the actual place. When you’re in the actual place, you can work out possibilities and discard impossibilities. You can see the idiosyncrasies that make a scene come alive. I would urge you to reenact.”
    “Maybe I will,” Lucas said. “Maybe—”
    “And then, of course, there’s the obvious question. Often comes up in drama . . . in fact, it’d be a cliché, I’m sure you’ve already checked it out thoroughly.”
    Lucas spread his hands. “What’s the obvious question?”
    O’Keefe leaned forward, his trigger finger still crooked through the cup handle: “Mistaken identity.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “The daughter comes home, it’s dark, she turns off the security system, and the killer strikes! But, ho! To his or her horror, he finds that he has struck at the wrong person. Hoping to recover, somehow, he bundles up the body and cleans up the crime scene. Since the daughter doesn’t live there, perhaps nobody will tumble to her disappearance for a day or two. Or three or four. Give him a chance to cover his tracks—or to strike again at his real target! The Austin woman!”
    At some point during the recitation, O’Keefe had gone on stage, and Lucas and Del both bought it. When he snapped, “The Austin woman!” they both jerked away.
    O’Keefe smiled: “But you’ve thought of that.”
    They argued about it for a bit, as they finished their tea, and Del told O’Keefe about working undercover, which was something of an acting job.
    “Fascinating! Fascinating!” O’Keefe said. “Have you ever thought about collaborating on a play? I think there could be great potential in a play about an undercover man: it’s so right for the stage; it combines friendship and treachery and a modern existential angst. Should you destroy your friend for the sake of The Man? There are so many ways we could take it. It’s just fantastic material!”
    As they took the elevator down, Del asked, “You gonna reenact?”
    “No,” Lucas said, with a Valley-girl inflection. “Jesus Christ, Del.”
    “The guy might be on to something,” Del said.
    “You gonna collaborate on a fuckin’ play?”
    Del didn’t say