Phantom Prey

anything for a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe.”
    Limping across the parking lot, Lucas asked, “Mistaken identity?”
    “Never occurred to me,” Del said. “It’s got a funky logic to it.”
    “Funky being the key word.” Lucas nibbled on the corner of his lower lip, then laughed and said, “Reenact. Reenact, my big white ass.”
    “Like we were talking about what-if the other night, at the diner,” Del said. “What if Alyssa Austin was screwing somebody, like her husband was. What if this guy knocks off her husband to get at her? He thinks he might marry somebody with a billion bucks, or whatever she’s got. What if she begins to suspect? What if he decided he had to get rid of her and her suspicions, and he goes after her. But instead of getting Alyssa Austin, he gets the daughter. Female, looks about the same, she shows up in the dark and knows the security system . . .”
    “I’ll think about it, but it sounds overcooked,” Lucas said.
    “A little overcooked,” Del agreed.
    Back at home, Lucas walked around the house for a bit, working the leg, kneading it, took another pain pill, found his thinking was a little fuzzy, and went to take a nap.
    Weather woke him at dinnertime: “Leg hurts?”
    “It has been.” He rolled a bit, flexed it, tried it out: better. “Not so bad, now.”
    Weather knelt next to the bed, pulled the bedside lamp over. “Let me see it.” She pulled the tape and the dressing, her fingers stroking the bruises. “No new bleeding—but you’re pushing too hard. I want you immobile for the rest of the evening. And tomorrow, take it easy.”
    “All right.”
    She sat back on her heels. “You agreed too fast. It must hurt more than you’re telling me.”
    Lucas said, “It’s not that—it’s fucked me up this time. Getting shot at. I’ve been thinking about it, all those shots. Could have hit me in the heart as well as the leg—and no more you, no more Sam, no more Letty.”
    She’d gotten the gauze and tape and a tube of disinfectant ointment out of the bedstand, and folded the gauze and laid it over the wound, and said, “Last time you got shot at, you were on your own. No responsibilities. ”
    “It’s not responsibilities,” he said. “You guys would get along without me. It’s me. I wouldn’t get to see the kids grow up, I wouldn’t get to jump your bones. . . . I’d miss too much.”
    “Talk to the governor,” she said. “Get an office job.”
    “Be nice if it were that easy,” he said. “Just make one change, and life becomes simple.”
    She finished taping him up, put the medical kit back in the bedstand drawer, touched his cheek. “I’ve got no advice. Except, c’mon and eat.”
    He sighed and sat up. “Gotta call Alyssa.”
    “You’re not quitting?”
    “No. I need to go back over to her house,” he said. “Get in there alone.”
    “You’re gonna sneak something?”
    “No. I’m gonna reenact the crime,” Lucas said.
    “Attaboy,” she said.

11
    Austin met him at the door, the bright sunlight breaking around her, barefoot, in a woolen top and straight long skirt. She smiled and at the same time looked sad, too sad. “You’re going to reenact?”
    “Yeah. I got some advice that I might as well take,” Lucas said. “Also: when I was reading the case file, there was an inventory of Frances’s apartment, and a note that you were going to move her things and close the apartment. Did you do that?”
    “Yes. Everything was brought back here. It’s all up in her room,” she said.
    “I would like to take a look,” Lucas said. “When you’re gone.”
    “Absolutely. C’mon, I’ll show you where.” He followed her up a curving stairs, all polished maple, down a long hall that, at the very end, appeared, through a half-closed door, to open into a bedroom the size of a basketball court. She stopped short of that room, opened a different door, flipped a light.
    Frances’s room was full of cardboard boxes. “I never unpacked. I haven’t been able to look at her stuff, yet,” she said. She touched one of the boxes. “The big ones are clothes. The small ones are personal effects. Books and jewelry and letters and notes and all that.”
    “I’ll start with the acting,” he said. “It’d be better if I were alone.”
    “And I’ve got work to do,” she said. “I’ve got so many meetings I might as well be a politician.”
    “Before you go,” he said as they went down the stairs, “I was kicking this whole