Phantom Prey

.”
    Her face spasmed and she began to weep, and wrapped her arms around Lucas’s waist, and Weather wrapped an arm around her shoulders and they stood like that for a moment, then Weather pried her free of Lucas and said, "C’mon, c’mon, let’s go sit down.”
    Austin’s parents lived in Minnetonka, on the far side of the Cities. When she was able, she called them with the news. “They’re coming,” she said. She was drained, perched on the couch with her hands between her knees: demanded the details of the discovery. Lucas made it as simple as he could, obscuring details.
    “There isn’t any doubt, though.”
    “I saw her face . . . the snow . . . you know. She’s still intact. She was wearing a charm bracelet.”
    “The charm said ‘Frances.’” Lucas nodded and she said, “She got it from her father when she was twelve,” and she started crying again.
    Her parents showed up in an hour, gray-haired, shocked, late sixties or seventies in cloth coats, her father clicking his tongue as he tried to comfort his daughter, her mother weeping with her; and after a few minutes, when Austin said they’d be okay, Lucas and Weather left.
    Weather said, on the way to her car, “I never, ever want to go through that. Never ever.” And, “Catch the guys who did it.”
    “Doesn’t really help much,” Lucas said. “Won’t help her.”
    “Maybe not, but it’ll help the rest of us,” she said. “Put those assholes in a cage.”
    On the way home, following Weather, Lucas called Ruffe Ignace, the crime reporter at the Star Tribune, at home. “Has the paper bought out your job, yet?”
    “No. I asked them to, but they said they valued my talents,” Ignace said.
    “Miserable motherfuckers.”
    “No kidding,” Ignace said. “They give me fifty grand, I’d be working in Manhattan tomorrow.”
    “Some kind of cabaret, waiting tables?”
    “Fuck a bunch of cabarets. I’m talking the New York Times. I get up every morning and practice my liberal clichés in the mirror,” Ignace said. “Wanna hear one?”
    “Maybe one,” Lucas said.
    “Income disparity in this country hasn’t been so high since before the Great Depression,” he said.
    “Not bad,” Lucas said.
    “I got a hundred more, and I can say them with a straight face,” Ignace said. “So what’s up?”
    “I owe you one half of a favor, I think, from the other night,” Lucas said. “So—Frances Austin’s body was found a couple of hours ago in a ditch out in Dakota County.”
    Lucas gave him a few details, including the name of the deputy in charge. “You heard nothing from me.”
    “Of course not. Any chance of art?”
    Art was what newspaper reporters called a photograph of a dead body; or anything else, for that matter. “I don’t know, but they’ll be on the scene for a while. If you could jack a guy up and get him out there.”
    “Talk to you later,” Ignace said. “I’ll go do some jacking.”
    The rest of the way home, Lucas thought about the sad scene at the Austins’, the loss of a daughter and a granddaughter, and the effect it’d had on his wife, and the fact that he’d just peddled the information to a newspaper reporter, for some future consideration.
    At a stoplight, he looked out the window and into the car to his right, where a young woman was laughing as she talked to the driver, whom Lucas couldn’t see; and how happy she looked and how miserable Austin and her parents must be. And how he felt bad that he didn’t feel worse about talking to Ignace.
    That night, Weather looked at his leg, shook her head. “The persistence of the bruise bothers me,” she said. “There might still be a little bleeding going on—not serious, but something.”
    “Ah, shit,” he said. “You don’t think they’ll have to go back in?”
    “No, you’d know that, if it happened. You’d have a lump like a golf ball, if there was a big problem. It’s not hard to the touch . . . so . . . it’ll just take a while. The sutures look okay, everything feels fine, smells fine.”
    “There’s some science for you,” he said. “Smells fine.”
    “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that medicine is a science,” she said. “It’s always been an art, and it still is. Look at the training: we’re artists, not scientists.”
    In the morning, he popped a couple of Aleve, and then, working without inspiration, he called Dakota County and talked to an investigator named Pratt, who’d already talked to Jim Benson.