Phantom Prey

television. She’d gotten a new wide-screen LCD job, and Lucas suspected she’d gotten an envelope from her old man. “I been running my ass off. I’ve been asking the right questions— Albert Einstein would be proud of me. I got nothing.”
    Del said, “In a harsh sidelight, do you think the lines in my face would make me look old?”
    Lucas thought about the question for a second, parsing out the reasons Del might have asked something that stupid, and then said, “Oh my God. You’re hanging out with O’Keefe.”
    Del curled his hand in front of his face, his voice trembled, and he said, slowly, with a sandy grind in his voice, “Out, out, brief candle. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
    “Ah, fuck me,” Lucas said.
    “The other woman,” Del said, back in his own rat-fucker persona. “Go for the other woman.”
    Lucas went for the other woman.
    AUS/TECH, Hunter Austin’s company, was located in a tech zone northwest of Minneapolis. Lucas got an appointment with a woman named Ann Coates, head of the Human Resources Department, though he was told on the phone that Martina Trenoff, the other woman, no longer worked for the company.
    The AUS/Tech building was a block square, with a narrow strip of grass along the sides, and a Wal-Mart-sized parking lot in the back; and was built of concrete panels, without a single window, except in the front, where a cluster of small fixed glass panels hung like afterthoughts around the steel-and-glass shed of the main entrance, and on the west side, where an identical steel shed marked the employee entrance off the parking lot. Rust-colored steel emergency exit doors were spotted at twenty-yard intervals along the sides, with no sign they’d ever been used.
    There were no visitors’ slots near the building, and Lucas had to park at the back of the lot: two hundred yards, and he was limping again by the time he got there, thought about the cane, which he’d left at the office. Goddamn leg.
    The AUS/Tech entrance area was as spare as the exterior: hard blue carpet, pale walls hung with poster-sized black-and-white photos of unsmiling men standing next to unidentifiable machines, and a steel-and -composite counter. The two older women behind the counter watched him through the door, gave him a name tag, and turned him over to Coates, who walked him back to a conference room.
    Coates was a tall woman with dark hair, closely cut; steel-rimmed eyeglasses; high cheekbones and thin lips; and her navy blue suit appeared to have been chosen for its social invisibility. “One of our vice presidents would like to sit in with us,” Coates said.
    “Just a couple of questions,” Lucas said. “I was hoping to talk to somebody who was friendly with Ms. Trenoff.”
    “Tara and I knew her about as well as anyone,” Coates said. “Tara Laughlin, she’s our vice president for legal affairs.”
    “Ah. A lawyer.”
    The lawyer kept them waiting for about four seconds, and Coates seemed surprised by the delay. When Laughlin arrived, she nodded at Lucas, took a seat at the head of the conference room table, and leaned back in her chair. Like Coates, she was a tall woman with dark hair and glasses, but her suit cost a couple hundred dollars more, and was a slightly more fashionable black-and-white check.
    She put a file folder on the table in front of her and asked, “What exactly is the nature of this inquiry?”
    “I’m investigating the murder of Frances Austin.”
    “I didn’t know that she’d been definitively identified as a murder victim,” Laughlin said.
    “I have done that,” Lucas said. “And I am authorized to do that. So. As part of the investigation, we are looking at people who may have had antagonistic relationships with the Austins, including Ms. Trenoff.”
    “You’re not going to record this?” Laughlin asked.
    “No.” Lucas raised his hands above the table. “Nothing up my sleeves, no secret microphones. I was hoping to have a completely informal, off-the-record conversation about Ms. Trenoff’s relationship with Mr. Austin, before I approach Ms. Trenoff herself.”
    “We are concerned about possible lawsuits involving slander and possible damage to reputation.”
    The bullshit dance continued for a couple minutes, Lucas assuring them that there’d be no record of the conversation,