Phantom Prey

for a moment, and then let it go. If they nailed down Willett, he thought, the fairy would come clear. She was probably another of his lovers—maybe the one who put Willett up to stealing the fifty thousand.
    "Carol!”
    She popped back in the office: “Dan’s on his way.”
    “We need to get everything on paper that we can about Willett. Run everything you can think of. If we come up with previous addresses, out-of-state, we’re gonna want to get their stuff . . .”
    Jackson, the photographer, came in a moment later, and Carol called, “We’ve only got one Frank Willett locally—it’s Frank, not Francis, on his driver’s license.”
    “Where’s that Willett work? We need an address,” Lucas said.
    “I’ll get into the employment security, hang on . . .”
    Jackson, stepping around Carol, asked, “Another rush job?”
    “I think we’ve got something this time,” Lucas said.
    Carol called, “It’s him, he works for A. Austin LLC in Minnetonka. He lives in St. Louis Park.”
    And she pulled up his driver’s-license photo: Willett had long black hair, carefully arranged on his shoulders, an oval face, square white teeth. He looked good, and he knew it, even in a license photograph.
    “Ooo,” Carol said.
    Lucas squinted at the picture, trying to make him as the man in the alley. Couldn’t do it; the long hair was distracting. The guy in the alley seemed to have short curly hair, he thought. But if Willett had cut it . . . or maybe even if he’d been wearing a ponytail on the night of the shooting . . . it wasn’t impossible, but he couldn’t ID him from the photo.
    Lucas had Carol call Minnetonka and ask for Willett. When the receptionist transferred the call, Carol hung up.
    “I’m going out there,” Lucas said.
    “Want to ride along in the van?” Jackson asked.
    “I’ll meet you over there,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to get stuck if you have to wait awhile; but I’ll come and sit for an hour or two.”
    Minnetonka was on the far western edge of the metro area, and from the BCA office, took a solid forty-five minutes, west on I-94 and I-394, winding around in the maze of streets at the end of it. Lucas had Jackson on the cell phone, and they cruised the spa, Waterwood, from opposite directions, then hooked up at a strip mall and Lucas transferred into the back of the van.
    The GMC had been taken away from a dope dealer. It had nice captain’s chairs in the back, tinted windows, a dresser with a mirror, and, if the chairs were moved, space for a narrow memory-foam mattress, which had been stripped out.
    Jackson took it back to Waterwood, parked across the street, eased into the back of the van and took the other captain’s chair. “Magazines in the chiffonier, diet Coke and raspberry-flavored water in the fridge,” he said. “I got the rest of the subscription to Sirius, long as you don’t play any country and western.”
    Lucas settled for a bottle of water and a classic rock channel, checked the magazines: Blind Spot, PhotoPro, PDN, a couple of Shutterbugs, Men’s Journal, a Playboy, and an aging Esquire with a picture of Charlize Theron on the cover, as the world’s sexiest woman.
    “You think she’s the sexiest woman?” Jackson asked, about Charlize Theron.
    “There is no such thing,” Lucas said. “That’d be like the best baseball game. You can argue about it a long time, but you’ll never agree.”
    “I think she’s the sexiest,” Jackson said.
    “Angelina Jolie?”
    “She’s good, she’s good,” Jackson admitted.
    “Michelle Pfeiffer?”
    “Ah, Jesus, now you’ve got me confused,” Jackson said. “I like the blondies. . . .”
    So they talked about sex and tried not to drink too much water, because they’d have to pee, and Jackson had a sack of black-corn chips and some nacho sauce in a plastic cup, and they ate some of that, but not too much, because then one of them might develop gas, and then they talked about the truck for a while, and whether there was any real difference between a GMC and a Chevrolet, and they watched women coming and going, and Jackson said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing her with her clothes off,” and Lucas asked him if he’d ever shot any nudes. Jackson said he dreamed about it, but his wife would kill him, so he didn’t.
    “You got any nude pictures of your wife?” Lucas asked.
    Jackson bit on the oldest baits in history: “No, uh, you know, I . . .”
    “Want to buy some?”
    They were still laughing about