Phantom Prey

got,” she said. “Are you going to think about it?”
    “Yes. That’s what I’ll do today,” Lucas said. “Think about the money, God help me, and nothing else.”
    That’s what he did.
    His secretary, Carol, came and looked at him, and went away, and then came back and looked at him again, and finally asked, “What are you doing?”
    “Thinking.”
    She looked worried. “Huh. Could you take a look at—”
    He held a hand palm-out to stop her: “No. I won’t look at anything. Go away.”
    She peeked a couple more times. Once she asked, “How’s the leg?”
    “Not good,” Lucas said. “I need to find a teenage girl to suck on it.”
    “I’ll leave you alone,” she said.
    Just before noon, as he was sitting reviewing, in his mind, everything that had happened, the obvious occurred to him. He called Austin on her cell and said, “I need pictures of Frances.”
    “I’m at home, working on the funeral. I’ll get a bunch together. Is this about the money?”
    “Yeah. But I’ll tell you what, this would all be a lot easier if she had a loser boyfriend.”
    He called the vice president at the Riverside State Bank. “Could you get me the name of the banker who opened Frances Austin’s account? ”
    “Sure. Just a minute.” More like two minutes. When he came back, he said, “Emily Wau. She’s now the manager at the Maplewood branch. I checked, and she’s working today.”
    “Give me her number,” Lucas said.
    Lucas ran down to Sunfish Lake, left the car turning over in the driveway. Austin had a dozen photographs: “I’ll get them back to you as soon as I can,” he said. “At the funeral?”
    “That’s okay—she had duplicates of everything.”
    “Well—I’ll get them back.”
    Emily Wau was of Asian descent, a small, smiling, efficient woman in a conservative gray-green dress. “You want me to look at pictures of Frances Austin, to see if I can remember opening her account?”
    “Yes. It would have been only about five months ago. October. You must’ve spent a little time with her.”
    “I looked at the paperwork—she opened it with five hundred dollars, ” Wau said. “So it would not have been a remarkable event.”
    “Still . . . six months. Not very long ago,” Lucas suggested.
    “Let me look at the pictures,” Wau said.
    Lucas passed them over, and she went through them, carefully, one at a time, turning each over, facedown, on her desk as she finished with it. When she was done, she picked them all up, looked at them again, then stared at a monitor camera mounted in one corner of the bank’s ceiling, a thinking-about-it stare, then looked back at Lucas and said, “You know, it was several months ago, and I probably talk to twenty people a day, so I can’t be sure, but . . . I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this woman.”
    Lucas said, “I’m not surprised.”
    And there it was: the case was cracked, though there was some cleaning up to do—like figuring out who the killer was. Lucas left the bank whistling, and on the sidewalk, got on his cell phone and called his secretary: “I need to get Dan Jackson to take some pictures for me.”
    “I’ll see if he’s available.”
    “Do that. I’m going to lunch.”
    He stopped at a McDonalds, had a Quarter Pounder with cheese, fries, and a strawberry shake, thought about the implications, rolled on into the office. Carol saw him coming and said a couple words into a phone, hung up and said, “Dan’ll be up in a minute.”
    “Excellent.”
    Dan jackson was a middle-sized, middle-weight black man with short, neatly trimmed hair and a tightly, neatly trimmed mustache, and black plastic-rimmed glasses. At work, he wore button-up shirts with collars, and sweaters and khaki slacks and Patagonia jackets. He was, he said, invisible, not only to white people, but to black people as well. “I’ve been on elevators alone at night with white women and they never knew I was standing there,” he’d told Lucas. “When I’m in the uniform, I am fully goddamned invisible.”
    Now he showed up carrying a Nikon camera with a lens more than a foot long, and Lucas groaned to himself, but smiled and said, “Dan, sit down.”
    “Got something for me?”
    “I need surveillance shots of five women, plus about five more women at random, for a board,” he said. “Usual range of sizes and shapes on the random shots—give me a couple of each: blond, sandy hair, dark brown. All white. Get some of our people out in the