Free Phantom Prey by John Sandford

weren't as interesting as the assholes, he thought.
    Patricia Shockley.
    He spotted the address and found a parking space two blocks away, strolled back. The night was getting cool, and he walked with his head down, hands in his pockets. Up ahead, the pale faces of a young couple bobbing toward him, the woman prodding her escort, and they crossed the street before Lucas got to them. Jesus, he looked like a thug? In the dark, with the jeans and the black leather jacket . . . Maybe.
    Patricia Shockley's apartment was in another of the converted houses, bigger than the house that Carter lived in, and better kept. The front door was locked, and he pushed a doorbell with a label that said Shockley/Price. A woman's voice from a doorside speaker: "Who is it?"
    "Lucas Davenport, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension," he said. "I'm a state investigator, looking into the Ford and Austin murders. I need to talk to Patricia Shockley."
    After a moment's hesitation, "Where did you get my name?"
    "Alyssa Austin. It was also in the state file, from an interview with Agent Benson."
    "I'll buzz you in."
    The lock buzzed and slipped, and Lucas pushed through the door into the hallway. A Persian carpet covered the wooden floor inside, and a wide oaken staircase twisted up to the second floor. Like a sorority house, he thought. A woman came to the landing and said, "Up here."
    Patricia Shockley was in full Goth: black leggings, black blouse, black-dyed hair, badly chewed black nails. Late twenties. She led him down the hallway to her apartment. Another Goth woman, this one wearing a sixties-style black sheath over black leggings, perched on a stool at a dinner bar off the kitchen, legs crossed.
    Shockley said, "My roommate. Leigh Price."
    Price smiled and licked a knife with peanut butter on it. "Cop," she said. Price was a fairy, if he understood the concept: short, slight, dark, pretty. Maybe thirty. Shockley was thicker, wider; a University of Minnesota basketball player.
    "You always work at night?" Shockley asked.
    "I'm looking for a guy," Lucas said. "Do either of you know Roy Carter?"
    The two women glanced at each other, then they both looked back at Lucas and shook their heads. Price said, "Nooo . . . I don't think so. Who is he?"
    "He works at Mike's liquors? Hangs out at the A1?"
    Price shook her head: "Not our scene. Why are you asking?"
    "I'm trying to put some of Frances Austin's friends together," Lucas said.
    "I wasn't one of Frances's friends," Price said.
    "I was, all the way back to school," Shockley said. "She was really nice, once you got to know her--but Leigh thought she was stuck-up."
    "Stuck-up rich prig. But I didn't think that enough to kill her," Price said. Her dark eyes caught Lucas's eyes as she dug in a peanut butter jar with the knife. Lucas felt a little thrum, and it didn't have anything to do with murder.
    Lucas said to Price, "Would people call you a fairy?"
    Her eyebrows went up, and she said, "Maybe."
    "Oh, poop," Shockley said. "You're a fairy."
    "You're just as much a fairy as I am," Price said to her roommate.
    Shockley rolled her eyes. "Right." To Lucas: "She's Tinker Bell the Fairy, I'm Clarabelle the Cow."
    "Not fair," Price said; but there was a spark in her eye; she knew it was the truth.
    Shockley and Frances Austin had gone to Blake Academy from kindergarten through graduation, and then on to separate colleges.
    "We didn't date together or anything--we just knew each other for a long time," Shockley said. "We went to each other's birthday parties. I didn't see her much when we were in college, but then . . . we'd hook up for lunch or go out and have drinks a couple times a year. And we were both interested in the gothic, but from different directions. She came in from women's studies and I came in from literature."
    "I came in from witchcraft," Price said.
    "So you don't really know who she was hanging out with?" Lucas asked.
    "She hung out with a lot of students, at night. She was on-again off-again in