Phantom Prey

washed with sorrow for the young woman on the floor. He took in the scene, as much as he could with the administration of murder going on around him, and then he headed down the hall to talk to Price.
    Price was dressed in mourning black, as she’d been the first time he’d seen her, with the little phony Raggedy Ann rips and tatters. Tonight, though, she had dark rings under her eyes, and a trembling disbelief in her lip. An older woman, a dyed-redhead in jeans, was sitting with her when Lucas stepped past a uniformed cop into the living room.
    “Ah, God,” she said, and she stood up and stepped over to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, her head on his chest, and she started weeping. The uniform cop watched with interest, and Lucas let it go for a few seconds then pried her loose and said, “Easy. You better sit down. Really, you better sit down.”
    “She was just . . . she was just trying, trying, to get on with her life,” Price groaned.
    “Did she give you any idea . . .”
    “She was going to go to law school ,” Price wailed. “She was practicing the LSATs. She was going on a diet. Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with everybody?”
    “Why would the person who killed Frances, come and kill Pat?” Lucas asked. “Why? There must be something that ties them together. ”
    “I don’t knowww. . . .”
    “Frances took fifty thousand dollars in cash out of her bank account. Could she and Patricia have been involved in some kind of business deal? In something, in . . . in . . .”
    But he didn’t know what, and she looked at him with a stupefied frown, as if he were speaking Norwegian or something, and finally asked, “What? Fifty thousand dollars?”
    “Were they involved in . . . What would they do with fifty thousand dollars in cash?”
    “I don’t know,” Price said. “They hardly ever talked to each other. Why would they . . . ? Fifty thousand? What can you do with fifty thousand? You couldn’t start a pop stand with fifty thousand dollars. I mean, I’ve got fifty thousand dollars.”
    “I thought . . . I don’t know. Drugs? Gambling? Politics?”
    Price’s lips trembled again. “You don’t know what’s going on here—you just don’t know. Drugs and gambling, that’s crazy. There was no fifty thousand dollars. I would have known about that. . . .”
    When he had no more questions, Price asked, “Is this fairy coming after me? If I’d been here, it would have been me that was dead, wouldn’t it be? You’re looking for a fairy and I would have seen . . . Oh.” Her fingers went to her lips.
    “Oh, what?”
    “She always kept the chain on the door,” she said. “Patty. Always. The door wasn’t bashed in or anything, was it? I didn’t see anything like that.”
    “I don’t think so,” Lucas said.
    “Then she had to know the guy,” Price said, eyes wide. “She never took the chain off. When I was out late, she’d wait up until I got in, so she could get the chain. If she went to sleep, I’d have to pound on the door until she got up, because the chain was on.”
    “The chain wasn’t on when you got home tonight?”
    “No . . . and . . . I mean, she was right there, dead, when I pushed the door open, but I was already worried a little bit when I saw the chain wasn’t on, I was about to call her. I knew she was supposed to be there, because I saw her leaving the club.”
    Back in Shockley’s apartment, Lucas checked the door; the door was fine. Anson came over and asked, “What?” and Lucas told him about the chain.
    “Well, that’s something,” Anson said. “She let her in. If it’s a her.”
    “And Price says she wouldn’t have let a stranger in the door. Not even a woman, since this shit started.”
    “So who is it?”
    “Dunno,” Lucas said. “But I should.” He thought about that for a moment, and then said, “You’re tearing the place apart?”
    “Naturally.”
    “I want to know about money. I want to know how much she had, and where it went, and if she got new money, or if she spent a lot recently. That fifty grand plagues me—it’s all over my ass.”

15
    Alyssa austin felt not confused, but broken—as though a wire had come loose somewhere in the circuitry of her brain, that her mind was full of static. Felt as though the picture tube was about to blow up, or that a thunderstorm was overhead, ruining reception.
    Once in the car, she could feel Loren, there behind her, as surely as if she’d had a pumpkin in the backseat: and