Phantom Prey

Richard, not Dick or Rich. And this guy . . .” She closed one eye, thinking, then said, “Brad. Brad something, I don’t know his last name, but Judy would, they went out.” She touched the unknown woman. “This is Judy McBride.”
    She knew Frances, but not Roy Carter or Dick Ford. “I do remember that Karen Slade took the photograph, she was having like a brain-fart or something, she couldn’t push the right button, she tried like ten times.” She had Slade’s phone number, but no numbers or addresses for anybody else.
    She told him all this in a blast of words, wide eyes behind the glasses, her body small and close and soft and round, and when she was done, Lucas had decided that, circumstances being different, he would happily have locked the door, pushed the magazines and all the other crap off her desk, and banged her brains loose right there— the other circumstances being that he was happily married and pathetically loyal.
    Instead, he stood up and said, “You’ve got to be careful. Do not go off to dark corners with women you don’t know—or men, for that matter.”
    She stepped close and put a hand on his jacket sleeve. “You really think . . . there could be a problem?”
    Yeah. There could be a problem. You could find your shorts down around your ankles about five seconds from now. “Yes. Obviously.” He stepped away. “You really have to be careful. And while you’re being careful, you’ve got to watch people around you. This fairy woman lures people to places where she can kill them. If you get that vibration from anyone, anyone at all, that they’re trying to pull you off somewhere . . . call me.”
    He took her cell phone and programmed his cell phone number into it, and she walked him out to the door and he rambled through all the warnings again, and she waved goodbye and watched him cross the parking lot to the car, and when he got inside, he twiddled his fingers at her, and realized that for the first time in several days, his leg didn’t hurt.
    Lucas had learned to recognize when criminal cases come to tipping points, when the clues and the facts begin to coalesce, and that was happening. He was getting the breaks, he’d picked up momentum, the case was turning his way.
    He was wrong about that.
    For the next three days, nothing at all happened, except that his leg started hurting again. He tracked down each of the people in the photograph, asked about approaches, quizzed them about their relationship with Frances, or about men named Loren. He got nothing about Loren, but was given more names, more possibilities, and spent his days driving around the metro area, finding people, looking in their eyes, running their names and DOBs through the NCIC.
    One of the men, Brad Francetta, knew Roy Carter and said, “Roy knew who the Austin chick was, he’d talked to her, but he didn’t know her that well. I mean, I knew Roy pretty well, and he’d get excited about . . . possibilities with women, and if he’d done anything with Austin, he would have told me. Are you sure you’ve got this right? With the photo? Maybe they were just in it by accident.”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “But two people in the photo are dead for sure, and another almost for sure. I’m telling you to be careful. Don’t get in a dark corner with some new fairy chick that you haven’t seen before. Especially if she’s coming on to you hard, wants to take you for a ride.”
    “I can handle myself,” Francetta said.
    Lucas nodded: “I don’t doubt it. But the rule with cops is, if a guy with a knife gets within ten feet of you, you’re gonna get stuck. Doesn’t make any difference if you have a gun, or even if you shoot him— you’re gonna get stuck. So you think you can handle yourself, what’re you gonna do, beat her up first and then check her for a knife? Or are you gonna let her get inside ten feet? Don’t mess around, man: the dead people’d tell you it’s not a joke.”
    “But it can’t be just the photo,” Francetta said, looking at it. “It’s just a bunch of people doing the chicken dance. Did something else happen that night? Maybe somebody shouldn’t have been there? Or is that too TV?”
    Lucas frowned. “I don’t know. That’s part of what I’m trying to find out.”
    He didn’t find it out.
    “Not a thing,” he told Del. They were listening to Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” on the boom box, watching Heather Toms across the street as Heather watched