Free Phantom Prey by John Sandford

she pulled a clipboard out from under the counter, looked down a list, and read off the phone number.
    Lucas had his notebook ready and jotted it down. “What’s his last name?”
    “Carter.”
    Lucas wrote it down, said to the cop, “We’re good to go. Madonna here was giving me a raft of shit.”
    They stepped toward the door and she shouted, “Fuck you again.”
    They both flinched and the cop said, “Jesus,” and they were out on the sidewalk.
    “Sorry about this,” Lucas said. “She had me whipped. I was just trying to get a number for a guy whose name I didn’t know.”
    They heard a last “fuck you,” faintly, through the closed door, and the cop said, “She definitely needs to take a couple aspirin,” and, as he walked around the nose of his squad, “Have a nice day.”
    Lucas called Roy Carter from the car, hoping that the number would go to a cell phone; but the phone rang twenty times with no answer. He took fifteen minutes getting across Minneapolis, found Carter’s apartment in a big old house that had been cut into four crappy apartments. He went up the central hall to the second floor, saw light under Carter’s door. He knocked on the door, which rattled in the frame, knocked again, knocked a third time. Felt empty; not even a creaking floorboard.
    Back at the car, he thought about heading home; then took out the list of names that Alyssa Austin had given him and scanned down it. The first time he looked, he’d noticed some addresses in Uptown, and the man mentioned by Mobry, Karl Lageson, also lived around there.
    He glanced at his watch. Still early.
    Lucas got Lageson’s address from the duty guy at the BCA, found it, a redbrick apartment house with a rack of bicycles outside, knocked on the door, was a little surprised when it popped open.
    Lageson was a tall pale man with a black ponytail, probably thirty, and did look a little like a Lurch. He was cooking chunks of white fish in a cast-iron skillet; the fish sizzling in the background when he opened the door. He pulled Lucas inside so he could attend the skillet, and he seemed to know what he was doing, expertly wielding a pair of stainless tongs as he shuffled the fish in and out of the hot oil.
    “I didn’t talk to the police about her—the fairy girl—but I suppose I should have,” he said as he worked, licking hot grease from his thumb. “I mean, Dick was a big guy and this woman was really small. If she’d tried to stab him he would have thrown her in the river . . . but, I should have mentioned it. It just seemed ridiculous. I could get somebody in trouble and she was just such a . . . a harmless thing.”
    “You’d never seen her before?” Lucas asked.
    Lageson stooped to look in his oven window, then stood up and said, “No, I would have paid attention. She looked really nice.”
    “How old?”
    “Early twenties? Looked like a dancer. Moved like a dancer. Dressed like a dancer, when I think about it. All black, but not drab, you know? Likes clothes. Got some money. She was laughing at Dick’s jokes . . . but then, and this is why I never got around to calling your men—she was gone before Dick got off. Like an hour before closing time.”
    “You didn’t talk to her?”
    “No. Didn’t have a chance,” he said.
    “You talk to Dick about her?”
    “No, I had some friends there . . . you know, this whole thing with the fairy, it lasted about ten minutes. That was it. Never saw her before, never saw her again.” He opened the cover again, and the odor of baking bread suffused the room. “You like French bread?”
    “Well, yeah, I do,” Lucas said.
    They ate hot French bread with real butter, and drank fresh-ground coffee, and Lageson ate his fish; the place smelled wonderfully of good food, all over a background of old marijuana smoke. Lageson knew Frances Austin, he said, may have seen her the night before she disappeared. “We tended to go to the same places, you know, and I chatted with her. She seemed