Phantom Prey

of the patrolmen. “If one of you guys can haul his butt down to Ramsey, maybe the other guy could help us pull the car apart.”
    “Pull my car . . . wait a minute.”
    “Why’d you decide to run?” Lucas asked. “Somebody tell you about us?”
    Willett’s eyes strayed away, then came back and he shrugged. “Well—yeah. But I don’t know who it was. Some chick. A client, I guess. She heard a rumor about the dope thing, said she’d hate to see me in trouble. Called me on my cell.”
    “How many people have your cell phone number?”
    “About a million,” he said. “All my clients. You know, Frances—I didn’t have anything to do with Frances, but I think I better have a lawyer. I’m gonna need one, aren’t I?”
    “You got any money?” Lucas asked.
    “A thousand, maybe.”
    “We’ll get you one,” Lucas said.
    The truck had nothing but clothing and outdoor gear. The highway patrolman would arrange for a tow, and Lucas thanked Weiner and said goodbye, and called Carol. “We need to get a search warrant for Willett’s place and a couple crime-scene guys to go through it.”
    “Probably be a few hours,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow?”
    “That’s okay; I’m going back down to talk to Austin again,” he said.
    Another dead half hour, going back across town. Austin came to the door, a small frown on her face. “Something more?”
    “Who did you tell about us watching Frank Willett?”
    She posed for a moment, then said, “Gina Nassif in Human Resources. Oh, shit. What happened?”
    “Somebody called Willett and he made a run for it,” Lucas said.
    “That should tell you something,” she said.
    "Maybe he didn’t want to go back to California,” Lucas said. “Anyway, I asked you—”
    “I had to talk to Gina. If we have an employee handing out drugs, I could lose my shirt. I asked her to be discreet, but . . .”
    “What?”
    “She tends to gossip a little bit,” Austin said.
    “Ahhh . . . You couldn’t wait for a couple of days?”
    She pushed a lip out. “I’m sorry if it messed something up.”
    Didn’t sound sorry, Lucas thought.
    Late afternoon, traffic building: Lucas decided to stop at the drugstore apartment and watch Heather Toms for a while, then head home for dinner. Let Willett stew overnight, search his place first thing in the morning.
    The apartment was empty when he got there: Del had been around, leaving behind a foam coffee cup, empty except for a wad of paper. Lucas turned on the boom box, dropped in a Norah Jones disk from a stack of disks on the floor, kicked back in the desk chair and picked up the glasses. Nobody visible in the apartment across the street, but he could see the light of the television flickering on the wall.
    He called Weather and she said they’d have center-cut pork chops, sweet potatoes, and corn bread. He said he’d be home at six.
    He sat and thought about Willett, and Alyssa Austin, and the others in the Austin case: he’d missed something that day, something about Austin, maybe, and it was right there, almost close enough to touch.
    Thought about it, went to the refrigerator, found that somebody had drunk three of the six diet Cokes he’d put inside, took one, twisted off the top, then did a half-dozen toe touches, stretching his bad leg. Damn thing still hurt, but more of an ache, now, than the rippling hot pain that he’d had earlier.
    As he did one of the stretches, Heather Toms stood up, just visible at the edge of one of the window frames, pointed a remote at an out-of -sight TV, clicked the TV off. A couple of minutes later, she went to the door, and her mother wheeled in.
    Heather was looking pretty good, Lucas thought. She went into the bedroom and dug through her closet, tried on a couple pairs of shoes, and then walked back to the living room, disappeared, reappeared in a dark raincoat, said something to her mother, and headed for the door. Going out. Someplace where she’d wear heels.
    Lucas looked at his watch: five o’clock. He had a little time.
    Whistling as he went, he locked the apartment and hurried down the stairs, to the end of the block, and slipped into the Porsche. Heather appeared a moment later, up from the underground parking ramp, in her red Lexus SC 430. Not a hard car to follow, and he stayed back as she turned north on Snelling Avenue, then east on Randolph, and south on I-35. They tracked south and then west of I-494 to the Mall of America. She parked in a ramp at the west end of the