Phantom Prey

fresh hot bread right there, steaming, and she said, “Oh, Lucas,” but he shook his head and said, “Your fault—you got me into it.”
    “What?”
    “It’s Frances.”

12
    At this point in his life, Lucas had no idea how many times he’d done it: stood by the side of a road, cops parked at weird angles and tilts, white faces in passing cars, maybe a Coke or foam cup of convenience-store coffee in his hand, looking at a tarp-covered body in a ditch. He didn’t know how many times, but it was a lot.
    When he got to the scene, driving his truck, he introduced himself to the deputy in charge, who walked him over to the body. Frances was faceup, her face old and wrinkled like a monkey’s, her lips shriveled to show her teeth, but still mostly intact, protected by the frost in the earth, and the slow snowmelt. She wasn’t actually in the bottom of the ditch, through which a trickle of water was now flowing, but partway up the far side.
    The ditch had probably been mowed in August, and the grass had regrown to mid-calf length. The body was curled in a translucent plastic painter’s drip sheet, which had been partly torn away at the hip and around the head. From the roadside, it looked like somebody’s garbage, or flotsam from a passing truck.
    Lucas knelt next to the face and took a photo out of his pocket. He knew already, but he showed it to the cop, and the cop nodded and said, “That’s her.”
    Lucas could see paper towels wrapped inside the plastic, apparently soaked with blood—they must have been used in the cleanup. He pointed them out to the cop and said, “It might be possible that the lab could recover prints or hair or something there. We want to save everything—everything. This is gonna be a big deal, okay? We don’t want to screw anything up.”
    “Should we go ahead and notify?”
    “I’ll do it,” Lucas said. “My wife is a friend of her mother’s—I’ll get her to go along with me.”
    The cop nodded, said, “Good enough,” and he seemed competent enough, so Lucas went on down the road and called Weather. “I don’t know any other of Alyssa’s friends, so it’d be good if you could come along with me,” he said.
    “Yes, sure,” she said. “You want me to meet you there, or . . .”
    They agreed to meet on the edge of Sunfish Lake: that’d save time.
    When he got off the phone with Weather, he called the BCA agent originally assigned to the case, Jim Benson, got him on his cell phone as he was walking out of a Wal-Mart. “Dakota County found Frances Austin.”
    Benson was a little miffed at not being called first, but Lucas was far enough up the hierarchy that he didn’t whine too much; and he was a new guy, so a certain amount of oppression was a way of life. He was happy enough that Lucas would do the notification. “I’ll get down to the scene,” Benson said. “Hope they’re keeping everything together.”
    “Do keep a close eye on that,” Lucas said, giving him something to do. “She’s wrapped in plastic, and we might get something useful out of there.”
    Lucas got to the rendezvous first, went on into Sunfish, saw lights in the Austin house, turned back to the rendezvous, pulled off, wished he had something to drink or read, something to do other than stare into the dark, but he didn’t, so he stared, and saw Frances’s face, not as it had been, but in that gray feral snarl of death.
    Weather arrived five minutes later and he rolled down the driver’s-side window on the truck and said, “Follow me in.”
    She followed him down to the Austin driveway and he parked, with Weather behind him, and saw a shadow on a curtain on the second floor, and he got out and walked to the front door and rang the bell. Weather, before she’d moved down to the Cities to take a microsurgery residency, had been a general surgeon in a small hospital in northern Wisconsin, where she’d occasionally served as a coroner in noncontroversial deaths; she’d done notifications before.
    She came up behind him and took his coat sleeve and said, “I can hear her feet.”
    Austin came to the door, turned on the porch light, peeked out through a glass pane in the wall to the right, opened the door, looked at them for a moment, and then began to back away and said “No no no no no . . .” but smiling as she said it, a kind of placating smile that asked for good news but Lucas stepped inside and he said, “We found her down south of here, the Dakota County deputies . .