Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  'Who's working it?'

  'Sherrill and Black. I heard about it, first call, and ran over, took a quick look at the dead woman and then came over here with Baily and the paramedics.'

  'So the dead woman's still over there.'

  Swanson nodded. 'Yeah. She was way-dead. We didn't even think about bringing her in.'

  'Okay... you say the doc's scrubbing?'

  'Dan Wong, right down the hall. By the way, Baily says he was only shot once, but the docs say he's got two slugs in him.'

  'So much for eyewitnesses,' Lucas said.

  'Yeah. But it means that this chick is fast and accurate. The holes are a half-inch apart. Of course, she missed his heart.'

  'If she was shooting for it. If it was a.22....'

  '... that's what it looked like...'

  '... then she might have been worried about punching through his breastbone.'

  Swanson shook his head. 'Nobody's that good.'

  'I hope not,' Lucas said.

  Lucas brushed past a nurse who made a desultory effort to slow him down, and found Wong up to his elbows in green soap. Wong turned and said, 'Uh-oh, the cops.'

  'How bad is it?' Lucas asked.

  'Not too bad,' Wong said, going to work on his fingernails. 'He's gonna hurt for a while, but I've seen a hell of a lot worse. Two slugs - in the pictures, they look pretty deformed, so they were probably hollow-points. They went in at his right nipple, lodged under the right scapula. Two little holes, he hardly bled at all, though his body fat makes it a little hard to tell what's going on. His blood pressure's good. Looks

  like some goddamn gang-banger with a piece-of-crap.22.'

  'So he's gonna be okay?' Lucas could feel the tension backing off.

  'Unless he has a heart attack or a stroke,' Wong said. 'He's way too fat and he was panicking when they brought him in. The surgery, I could do with my toes.'

  'So what'U I tell the press? Wong is doing surgery with his toes?'

  Wong shrugged as he rinsed: 'He's in surgery now, listed in guarded condition but he's expected to recover, barring complications.'

  'You gonna talk to them afterwards?'

  'I got a two o'clock tee-time at Wayzata,' Wong said. He flicked water off his hands and stepped away from the sink.

  'You might have to skip it,' Lucas said.

  'Bullshit. I don't get invited all that often.'

  'Danny..'

  'I'll give them a few minutes,' Wong said. 'Now, if you'll get your germ-infested ass out of here, I'll go to work.'

  Randall Thorn, the newly-promoted deputy chief for patrol, showed up ten minutes later. Fifteen cops stood around the emergency area now. The crowd was beginning to gather. 'I was all the way down by the goddamn airport,' he told Lucas. His uniform showed sweat rings under his armpits. 'How is he?'

  Lucas briefed him quickly, then Sloan came over and said 'The chaplain's on his way to Baily's house. He oughta notify the old lady in the next five minutes or so.'

  Lucas nodded and looked back at Thorn: 'Can you hold the fort here? I ran over because Rose Marie is gone and I knew you and Lester were out of the house. But he's sort of your guy.'

  Thorn nodded: 'I'll take it. You going over to the scene?'

  'For a minute or two,' Lucas said. 'I want to get a picture in my head.'

  Thorn nodded and said, 'You know what picture I can't get in my head? Baily Dobbs getting shot. Last goddamn...'

  'Guy in the world,' Lucas finished for him.

  If the emergency room had seemed unnaturally calm, the Sixth Street parking ramp looked like a law-enforcement convention: a dozen homicide and uniform cops, medical examiner's personnel, a deputy mayor, the parking-garage manager and two possible witnesses were standing in the skyway-level elevator lobby and the stairwell above it.

  Lucas nodded at one of the uniform cops controlling the traffic and he and Sloan poked their heads into the stairwell. Marcy Sherrill and Tom Black were going through the victim's purse. The victim herself was lying on the stairs, at their feet. Her skirt was pulled up over her ample thighs, showing nude panty

  hose. One hand bent awkwardly away from her face -she might have broken her arm when she landed, Lucas thought - and her eyes were frozen half-open. A pool of blood coagulated under her still-perfect hair-do. Her face was vaguely familiar; she looked like she might have been a nice lady.

  Sherrill turned and saw Lucas and said, shyly, 'Hi.'

  'Hey,' Lucas said, nodding. He and Sherrill had ended a six-week romance: or as Sherrill put it, Forty Days and Forty Nights of Sex & Disputation. They were now in the awkward phase of no longer seeing each other while they were still working together. 'Looks nasty,' he added. The stairwell smelled of damp concrete overlaid with the coppery odor of blood and human intestinal gas, which was leaking out of the body.

  Sherrill glanced down at the body and said, 'Gonna be a strange one.'

  'Swanson said she was executed,' Sloan said.

  'She was, big-time,' said Black. They all looked down at the body, arranged around their feet like a puddle. 'I can see seven entry wounds, but no exits. You don't need to be no forensic scientist to see that the gun was close - maybe an inch away.'

  'Who is she?' Lucas said.

  'Barbara Paine Allen. She's got a notify card in her purse, looks like her husband's a lawyer.'

  'I know her face from somewhere, and the name rings a bell,' Lucas said. 'I think she might be somebody'

  Sherrill and Black both nodded and Sherrill muttered, 'Great.'

  Lucas squatted next to the dead woman for a moment, looking at her head. The bullet wounds were small and tidy, as though she'd been repeatedly stabbed with a pencil. There were two wounds high on the back of her head, and a cluster of five in her temple. Her heart had kept pumping for a while after she landed; a thin stream of drying blood ran down from each of the holes. The seven thin streams were neatly defined, which meant that she hadn't moved after she hit the stairs. Professional, and very tidy, Lucas thought. He stood up and asked the other two, 'You got witnesses? Besides Baily?'

  'Baily said the shooter was a red-headed woman, and we've got two people who say they saw a redheaded woman walking away from the scene close to the time of the shooting. No good description. She was wearing sunglasses, they said. Both of them said she was wiping her nose or sneezing into a handkerchief.'

  'Covering her face,' Lucas said.

  'I don't believe this shit,' Sloan said, looking down at Barbara Allen. 'People don't get hit.'

  'Not in Minneapolis,' Sherrill said.

  'Not by a pro,' said Black.

  Lucas scratched his chin and said, 'But she did. I wonder why?'

  'Are you buyin' in?' Sherrill asked. 'Could be an interesting trip.'

  'Don't have the time,' Lucas said. 'I have the Otherness Commission.'

  'Maybe if we find the shooter, we could get her to kill the commission.'

  'They're not killable,' Lucas said gloomily. 'They come straight from hell.'

  'We'll keep you updated,' Sherrill said.

  'Do that.' Lucas shook his head, and looked back down at the cooling body. And he said, aloud, again, 'I wonder why?'

  Chapter Three

  Barbara Allen was killed a month to the day after Carmel Loan took out the contract on her. When word of the murder swept through the firm, Carmel immediately told herself that she had nothing to do with it. She'd made the arrangement so long ago that it hardly counted.

  Carmel learned of the killing as she sat reading the deposition of a late-night dog-walker who claimed that he saw Rockwell Miller - her client - go into the back of his failing steak house with a five-gallon can of gasoline. The prosecution would argue that it was the same gas can found by the arson squad in the shambles of the restaurant's basement. The fire had been so hot that it had melted the fire extinguishers in the kitchen.

  Carmel was looking for what she called a peel. If she could get her fingernails under some aspect of a story, or some aspect of a witnes
s, she could peel the testimony back, and damage the witnesses' credibility. She'd begun to think that she could peel the dog-walker. He was divorced, and carried two convictions for domestic assault, which hurt any witness if there were enough women on the jury. She could get the

  women, all right. The problem was getting the assault conviction before the jury, since the average judge might mistakenly consider it irrelevant.

  The dog-walker lived near the restaurant and knew the restaurant owner by sight. Had the dog-walker and his ex-wife ever eaten at the restaurant? Had they ever had an argument in the restaurant, when they were breaking up? Might the dog-walker have bad feelings about the restaurant, or its owner, even if they were unconscious?

  It was all bullshit, but if she could implicitly ask, 'Can you believe the testimony of an admitted brutal wife-beater?' of twelve women good and true...That would be a definite peel.

  She was dialing her client when her secretary stuck her head into Carmel's office, unannounced, and asked, 'Did you hear about Hale Allen's wife?'

  Carmel's heart jumped into her throat, and she dropped the phone back on its base. 'No, what?' she asked. She was one of the top-three defense attorneys in the Twin Cities, and her face showed all the emotion of a woman who has been asked the outside temperature.

  'She's been killed. Murdered.' The secretary couldn't quite keep the relish out of her voice. 'In a downtown parking garage. The police are saying it was a professional assassination. Like a mob hit.'

  Carmel hushed her voice, while letting the natural interest show through. 'Barbara Allen?'

  The secretary stepped in and let the door close

  behind her. 'Jane Roberts said the cops came and got Hale, and they rushed to the hospital, but it was too late. She was already dead.'

  'Oh my God, the poor woman.' Carmel's hand went to her throat. And she thought: / didn't do this. And she also thought: / was sitting right here, where everybody could see me.

  'We're thinking we should get some money together and send some flowers,' the secretary said.

  'Do that. That's a good idea,' Carmel said. She found her purse beside her desk, and dug inside. 'I'll start it with a hundred.' She rolled the cash out on the desk. 'Is that enough?'

  Late that afternoon, on the open-air balcony of her fabulous apartment, a gin-and-tonic in her hand, Carmel worried: gnawed a thumbnail, a bad habit she'd carried with her since grade school, chewing the nail down to the quick. For the first time since the infatuation with Hale Allen had begun, she stepped outside of herself, and looked back.

  She'd often told her clients, those who were more-or-less professional criminals, that they could never think of all the possible ways to screw up a crime. However many ways you cover yourself, there's always some way that you are not covered.

  Carmel had considered the possibility of killing Barbara Allen herself. She'd never killed anything before, but the thought didn't particularly bother her. She could pull the trigger, all right. But the devil was

  in the details, and there were too many details. How would she get a gun? If she bought one, there'd be a record of the purchase. She could use it and throw it away, but if the cops came asking for it, 'The dog ate it,' would be insufficient.

  She could steal one, but she could get caught stealing it. And she'd have to steal it from one of two or three people she knew who had guns, and that might point a finger at her. She could try to come up with a fake ID - a crime in itself - but she was memorable enough that a gun-store clerk, asked later about the purchaser, might well remember her, especially if prompted by a photo.

  Then there was the killing itself. She could do it. She could do anything she put her mind to. But, as she'd warned her clients, mistakes, accidents, or even random chance could ruin even the best-planned crime. With murder, in the state of Minnesota, a mistake, accident or random error meant spending thirty years in a non-fabulous room the size of a bathtub.

  In the end, she'd decided the least risky way was to go with a pro. She had plenty of untraceable cash stashed in her bank deposit box, and she had Rolando D'Aquila, the connection. She also had a safety margin. Neither her connection nor the shooter could tell the cops about their involvement, because that would make them as guilty of first-degree murder as Carmel herself was. The shooter, even if she were eventually run down, would be eminently defensible in court: as a competent professional, she was unlikely to leave obvious clues, and would have no apparent previous connection with the victim.

  So Carmel was probably safe; but after a few moments of reflection, drink in hand, she decided to stay away from Hale Allen for a while. Let him recover from the murder; let the cops talk to him - they would, of course. Since she'd never demonstrated her infatuation to Hale, there was no reason to think she'd become involved from that direction.

  She was working out the various possibilities, her thumbnails red with blood, and raw, when Rinker called.

  The line was Carmel's unlisted home-business number, and nobody called who didn't already know her. 'Yes?' she said, picking up the receiver.

  'I need to get some money from you.' The woman on the other end had a dry, mid-south or Texas accent, the corners of words bitten off. But there was also an undertone of good humor.

  'Are you okay?' Carmel asked.

  'I'm just fine.'

  'You make me a little nervous,' Carmel said. 'I'd prefer to see you in a public place.'

  The woman chuckled, a pleasant, homey sound rattling down the phone line, and she said, 'You lawyers worry too much - and you ain't gonna see me, honey.'

  'Maybe,' Carmel said. 'So how will we do it?'

  'You have the money with you?'

  'Yes, that's what Rolo said.'

  'Good. Get in your Volvo, drive down to the University of Minnesota parking lot at Huron and Fourth Street. That's a big open lot, lots of students coming and going. There's a ticket-dispensing machine at the entrance. Park as far as you can from the pay booth, but park in a spot where there are other cars around you. Don't lock the driver's side door. Leave the money in a sack - one of those brown grocery sacks would be best - on the floor on the driver's side. Walk over to Washington Avenue... Do you know your way around over there?'

  'Yes. I went to school there.' She'd spent seven years at the university.

  'Good. Walk over to Washington, then walk down to the river. After you get to the River, it's up to you. Whenever you want, walk back to the car. I'll lock it when I leave it. And all the time, you'll be out in the open, in public. Safe.'

  'What if somebody takes the money before you get there?'

  Again, the pleasant chuckle: 'Nobody will take the money, Carmel.' The woman said 'CAR-mul,' while Carmel always pronounced it 'car-MEL.'

  'When?'

  'Right now.'

  'How'd you know I have a Volvo?'

  'I've been watching you off-and-on for a week or

  so. You drove it down to that Rainbow store the day before yesterday. I wouldn't have bought that sweet corn, myself; it looked a couple of days too old.'

  'It was,' Carmel said. 'I'll be there in fifteen minutes.'

  Carmel did exactly as Rinker asked, taking an extra few minutes in her walk along the Mississippi. When she got back to the car, the door was locked and the money was gone. She drove straight back to her apartment, and when she walked in, the phone was ringing.

  'This is me,' the dry voice said.

  'I hope everything went all right,' Carmel said.

  'Went fine. I'm leaving town, but I wanted you to know that your credit is good. Do you have a pencil?'

  'Yes.'

  'If you ever need me again, call this number' - the woman recited a phone number with a 212 area code that Carmel recognized as downtown Washington, D.C. - 'and leave a message on the voice mail that says, "Call Patricia Case." '

  'Patricia Case.'

  'Then I'll call you back within a day.'

  'I don't think I'll ever need this.'

  'Don't count on it; you la
wyers have strange ways...'

  'Okay. And thanks.'

  'Thank you.' Click - and the dry voice was gone.