Phantom Prey

‘Welcome to Riverside.’ This man came in and he said, ‘I remember you, you opened my account.’ And I remembered him. I didn’t even think— I said, ‘You’re Jim!’ and he said, ‘That’s right. I’m flattered.’ So we were both happy. Later, you know, thinking about you, I looked up when he opened his account. It was the end of December. Right after Christmas.”
    “So you do remember the people,” Lucas said.
    “Well, I remembered him, when I saw him,” she said. “And he was nobody spectacular, just a guy.”
    “Poop,” Lucas said.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “We’re not done, yet,” Lucas said.
    They weren’t done yet, but where to go? When he’d walked into the bank, he would have given 3-2 odds that they’d get an ID. A thought popped into his head: What if Wau were involved? What if . . . horseshit. It ain’t Wau.
    He sighed, looked back at the bank, and headed for the car.
    Had to be somebody close to Frances. Had to be.
    Sitting in the apartment, looking across the street at Heather Toms’s place, listening to the Doors doing “Love Me Two Times.” Heather was not in, and Lucas got his feet up, and closed his eyes, and ran back through the faces of the women. Nothing there. Thought about Austin, and what she’d said about insanity, about how it was nothing more than an extreme version of everyday quirks. . . .
    Good theory, he thought. Lucas had a theory of his own, sociological, rather than psychological.
    Some people, he believed, looked at the world and saw a clockwork: events happened and triggered off other events, people did what they were programmed to do, and the results came out the other end: love, hate, war, murder, children, whatever.
    Other people, Lucas among them, looked out the window and saw nothing but chaos: accident, chance, stupidity, intelligence, avarice, idealism, all rubbing against one another in an unpredictable stew.
    How could Heather Toms, he thought—as Heather came through the door of her apartment carrying an oversized shopping bag from Neiman Marcus—how could a nice suburban girl like Heather Toms ever expect to wind up as the loving wife of a murderous Lithuanian gangster, mother of his children, secret lover of one of the gangster’s underlings?
    For Christ’s sakes, she’d been a cheerleader at Edina, one of the toniest high schools in the metro area. How could she . . .
    The answer, of course, was that she couldn’t have predicted any of it. If she’d stopped somewhere for a cappuccino, she might not ever have met Siggy. Now she’d be married to an insurance agent or a cop or a finance guy . . .
    The problem with this view of life, this philosophy, was that it suggested that what happened to Frances Austin, and what happened to the other murder victims, was not the result of a cold calculated plan by anybody at all. The whole thing could have been set off by accident, by a bump in the dark, by a burglar . . .
    But then . . . three killings?
    Nope. It might be chaotic, but there were threads in the chaos. He was just pulling the wrong one.
    Across the street, Heather was looking at herself in the mirror, holding up an outfit. Then she turned her head, walked to the door. Her mother was there, said something, and Heather disappeared down the hall, leaving the door open, and was back a moment later with the toddler.
    She put him on the floor and went back to posing.
    Lucas watched in the binoculars and thought, Huh. She supposedly had no money. Her mother supposedly paid half her rent, out of her Social Security and pension.
    And that maternity stuff she’s looking at cost at least a grand.
    A light went on: the guy she’d met at the door, the underling, had delivered more than a good time: he’d brought money from Siggy. Dollars to doughnuts; and Heather was flush again.
    There was contact.
    She wants to look nice.
    Bet Siggy is coming . . .

17
    The next morning, instead of pushing the Austin file, Lucas sat in Rose Marie Roux’s office in the Public Safety building and they shouted at each other about the Republican convention. Roux was working on a matrix of all possible outcomes of the street demonstrations, from minor disturbances to full-blown call-out-the-National-Guard riots— not to determine staffing levels, but to propose differing political postures for the governor and his pals, depending on what happened.
    “If we really had a disaster, there’d be some fallout for us, too,” she said, solemn as a priest.