Phantom Prey

with a court date to come. But the prosecutor in the case got killed and the paper got lost, and we can’t prove that he was ever notified of his court date. And his lawyer at that time, a court-appointed guy, moved to New Mexico and is running an ashram or some shit, and . . . you see what I mean? Too much horseshit and not enough money.”
    “Yeah. Doesn’t help me, though,” Lucas said.
    “You know what I’d do?”
    “What?”
    “I’d bust him anyway, if I was ready,” Wane said. “On the California warrant. It’s still good. Then you notify us, and it takes a while for the paper to get through the mill, and then some time to get back to you. . . . You could have him inside for probably ten days or two weeks if you picked your weekends right. Bust him on a Friday, notify on a Monday, takes four or five days out here, we decline to prosecute the following Tuesday or Wednesday . . . and we can probably drag our feet a little.”
    “I might do that,” Lucas said. “We only wanted a shot at squeezing him, anyway.”
    “So if I get some paper from you, I’ll know what you’re doing.”
    “Good enough,” Lucas said. “The prosecutor—he wasn’t stabbed or anything, was he?”
    Wane laughed. “No. We got one of those two-story McDonald’s here, you know? He takes his Big Mac and his fries upstairs to eat and read his newspaper, and when he finishes, he heads for the stairs, still reading the New York Times, trips and falls down the stairs and breaks his neck. He’s dead on the scene.”
    “Jesus,” Lucas said. “Anybody get sued?”
    Wane laughed a little longer, the laughs interspersed with hacks. “He had an estranged wife. She testified that he’d come over twice a week and spend forty-five minutes trying to work through the estrangement. Doggy-style, for the most part, the rumor is. Anyway, she was still his wife, technically, and she sued for loss of companionship and got three-point-four million from McDonald’s. Then she married the guy’s boss. Heh-heh.”
    “If there’s an afterlife, he’s probably got a serious case of the red-ass, ” Lucas said.
    “If there’s an afterlife, he’s got more problems than that,” Wane said. “Nasty little bullet-headed know-it-all fuck.”
    Lucas was back at the office and took a call from Sandy, the researcher: “I’ve got a Loren who might be interesting.” When Lucas didn’t immediately respond, she said, “You know—you had me looking up Lorens?”
    “Oh, yeah. That didn’t come to much,” Lucas said.
    “You still want this guy?” she asked.
    “What’s he look like?”
    “He fits the general description. Dark hair, anyway. The key thing is, he went to the university at the same time as Frances, and it’s likely, but not for sure, until I can check some more, that they were in some of the same classes.”
    “Jeez,” Lucas said. “That might be something. Shoot it over here.”
    The photo popped up a couple minutes later in his e-mail. He looked at it, called Jackson, the photographer, and asked if he could get a print. “Forward it to me,” Jackson said. “By the time you get down here, I’ll have it.”
    Lucas forwarded Sandy’s e-mail, got a diet Coke from the machine, and walked downstairs to Jackson’s cubbyhole. Jackson said, “I’m doing a little work on it.” He had the photo on a computer screen and was touching it up. “A little Photoshop.”
    A minute or so later, he tapped a couple of keys, got up a response box, clicked his mouse, and the printer churned out a glossy print. “Another piece-of-shit photograph—I wonder why nobody makes an effort to get decent ID shots? They should at least look human.”
    “Maybe you should start a campaign,” Lucas said. He looked at the photo. Could it be the man in the alley? Could be.
    He called Austin, who was at home.
    “I’m ten minutes away—I want to run down and show you a photograph, ” he said.
    “Of who?”
    “I’d rather have you respond to it sort of . . . spontaneously.”
    At the austins’, a man in a jean jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots was putting a cardboard carton in the back of a pickup, where a half-dozen more cartons were already stacked. Austin was at the door, and when Lucas came up, she waved at the pickup driver, who was backing the truck out, and said to Lucas, “Finally pulled the trigger on Frances’s clothes. Sent them off to Goodwill.”
    “That’s got to be harsh,” he said.
    “Had to be done. She’s gone,”