Phantom Prey

twanger, and her roommate, Patricia Shockley.
    He looked at the rest of the photos, found two more of the November party, but couldn’t pick Frances out of them—it must have been her camera. She took the shots, except in the single photo. He put it in his pocket, whistling, headed down the stairs to the kitchen, got out his book, found Shockley’s cell number—he hadn’t taken Price’s, but remembered that she worked at 3M, and 3M wasn’t too far away.
    Shockley answered on the second ring, and he identified himself and said, “I need your roommate’s number.”
    “Uh-huh,” she said. A taste of cynicism: “Some marital problems cropping up?”
    He had to think about it for a second, then said, “No, no. I’ve found a photograph. You and she are both in it, along with Frances Austin and the two men who were killed, Ford and Carter. All three murdered people in one shot. She’s close, you’re not. I want to identify all the people in the photo.”
    “Are you serious?” Fascinated, not frightened.
    “Absolutely. Do you have her number?”
    “I’ve got two. Her cell number . . .”
    Lucas jotted them in his book, a cell number and an office phone. “Now listen,” he said. “Do not talk to any fairy women. Do not do that, not when you’re alone. If a fairy tries to get you alone, get into a crowd and call me. Okay?”
    “Oh, God. You think . . . ?” Worried now.
    “I don’t know. But do not get alone with a fairy.”
    “I won’t. Oh . . . Jesus.”
    Lucas tried Price’s cell first, got her on the third ring.
    “Leigh Price.” She sounded busy. Un-Goth-like.
    Lucas said, “This is Davenport, the state cop who talked to you a couple nights ago. I’ve got a photograph that I need you to look at right away. Like now.”
    “At the lab, at 3M. My office.”
    “Tell me where.”
    She was at the main 3M campus, straight up a limited-access highway from Sunfish Lake. There was really no hurry getting there, but it was spring, the roads were dry, he had the Porsche. He clipped a great new red-LED flasher on the roof, a six-hundred-dollar light cheerfully paid for by Minnesota taxpayers, and made his way out to the highway.
    He was careful on the gravel roads—a Porsche paint job was not something you fucked with lightly—but once on Highway 52, he let it about three-quarters of the way out, and blew the shorts off a top-down, cherry-red ’65 Corvette Roadster. In the rearview mirror, it dwindled like a poppy seed that you drop off a bagel.
    When he cut into the 3M parking lot, he thought, he unquestionably held the Sunfish-to-3M land-speed record, and it would probably last forever.
    Price’s office looked like the office of a university professor—book-cases stuffed with publications and stacks of paper held together with clamps or rubber bands, a fake-wood-grained desk, an impressive-looking computer workstation, a half-dozen plants that all seemed to be dying, but not quite dead, lots of xeroxed Far Side cartoons, a rubber chicken hanging by its neck, a steel sheet with dozens of magnetized words, one of those poetry boards; a few of the words had been arranged to say, “The ugly gristle of morning smears a dry bone landscape down the flawless tapestry of night.”
    Price was sitting in an Aeron chair, her feet up on her desk, peering at a scholarly publication through oversized black-rimmed glasses. When Lucas stuck his head in the door, she said, “There you are.” She patted the seat of a visitor’s chair that sat beside her desk.
    Price gave off a certain wavelength of fuck-me vibrations. Many women did that, Lucas believed, but they were only received by men who were tuned to the right wavelength, which was determined by birth or accident, perhaps, but not by choice.
    Weather was one of them, and she broadcast on Lucas’s frequency, and he’d begun picking them up before he could even see her face (she’d been wrapped in a parka when they met). Price broadcast on the same frequency; and she knew that Lucas was a receiver.
    She smiled and said, “So what’s the big deal?”
    He took the picture out of his pocket and passed it to her. “This was taken at a Halloween party at November. I need to know the names of the people in it.”
    She took the photo—looked at his face, as though she hadn’t really believed that there’d be one—and said, “Oh, God. This is the Roy guy, isn’t it”—she touched Roy’s face—“and this guy is named Richard Trane . . .