Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  'Uh-huh, I know the feeling,' Carmel said.

  The room was closing around them, getting tighter, the walls moving in, until there was nothing in the house but the two of them. He talked about Barbara, about Louise; laughed a little about some of Louise's excesses; cried a little about Barbara's idiosyncracies. Carmel patted him on the shoulder blades, then rubbed his back a little. He held one of her hands, turned it over, fondled it.

  The room closed in and Carmel tipped back and there he was: a perfect little spread of hair on his chest; a tidy circumcision.

  Unfortunately, she thought afterward, he didn't have the best of bathroom habits.

  She sighed. So much to do.

  Chapter Ten

  Sloan was wearing khaki shorts, a black faux-leather fanny pack pulled around to his stomach, and a pink golf shirt. His legs were the color of skim milk, and so bony they might have been attached to a short ostrich. 'My wife made me wear them,' he said, looking down at the shorts. 'She said I was gonna get heat stroke, and there's no point in getting heat stroke on a vacation day.'

  Lucas was peering over the top of his desk. 'You got your gun in the fanny pack?'

  'Yeah. I got the pack from Brinkhoff. It's allVelcro, it's not really zipped up. See?' He stood up, pulled on the front of the fanny pack, and the entire cover came away. The revolver inside was attached by a single tab over the barrel, which tore away when Sloan pulled the gun out.

  'Pretty slick,' Lucas said. He settled back. 'But it looks stupid.'

  'My wife says...'

  'Your wife has the fashion sense of a cockroach.'

  'I'll tell her you said so.'

  'If you do, I'll have to kill you.'

  There was a tentative knock at the door. Lucas

  called, 'Come in.'

  The door opened and Hale Allen stepped halfway inside, stopping when he saw Sloan with his khaki shorts, pink shirt and the pistol in his hand. 'You need to talk to Lucas?' Sloan asked.

  'If he's not busy,' Allen said.

  'I was just about to shoot him,' Sloan said. 'Could it wait until after that?'

  'Well... Do you think he'd be better by lunchtime?'

  'Go away,' Lucas told Sloan. To Allen, politely, with curiosity, 'Come in, sit down.'

  'Is there anything new with the case?' Allen asked. He looked uneasily around the office as he asked the question; crossed and recrossed his legs.

  'We're still working on it, but we're kind of stuck,' Lucas said.

  A week had gone by since Lucas had spoken to Carmel Loan. All the crime-scene evidence had been exhaustively reviewed, but nothing was coming out. In the meantime, a Ferris wheel at a neighborhood carnival had collapsed, two children had been killed and seven more badly hurt. The execution killings had disappeared from the media, as reporters and state safety inspectors chased down every carnival in the state. The lack of both progress and outside attention had taken pressure off the investigation. Lucas had the feeling that the whole thing was headed for the dead-letter file.

  'You heard about Barbara's parents?' Allen asked. 'Just rumors...'

  'They were going to sue me - for wrongful death, claiming I was involved in killing Barbara, like that O.J. lawsuit,' Allen said indignantly. 'They were gonna try to keep me from inheriting, so they'd get her money. Then it turned out that ninety percent of the money goes to the foundation, not to me. If they sued me, and won, a hundred percent would go to the foundation. They wouldn't get a dime.' 'Ho,' Lucas said.

  'Yeah.They said screw that, we aren't suing if there isn't any payoff. They dropped the whole thing.' 'Hum,' said Lucas. 'Exactly...'

  Allen was indignant, but his eyes kept wandering away from Lucas. Lucas had seen it before in somebody who felt guilty about something, and was about to confess. Allen, Lucas thought, wasn't here to talk about his in-laws.

  'So what else is going on?' Lucas asked, leaning back, trying to sound kindly. He wished Sloan were back. Sloan was a master at this. 'How are you doing? Are you okay? We were pretty rough on you for a while.'

  'Well...' Allen smiled, and Lucas thought, here it comes. 'I came to see you because you know about the case, and you seemed like a pretty good guy, and everybody says you're pretty smart and you've been around...'

  'Okay...' Keep him rolling.

  'I've been feeling kind of weird about something. About the case.'

  'You mean, psychologically troubled? I..."

  'Not exactly/ Allen said. He leaned forward, intent now. 'You know, I really did love Barbara. She was fun, in a quiet way. But we were different, and this affair - you know that I had an affair?'

  'Yes,' Lucas said. He gestured with one hand, as to say, So what? Haven't we all?

  The tentative smile flickered over Allen's face again. 'When Barbara got killed, I felt terrible about it. Your guys found out about the affair, and I hadn't told Carmel. When she found out, she hit the roof. She went and talked to Louise, and now everybody's in an uproar...'

  Lucas nodded: 'I can see why Carmel would be unhappy. Facing the possibility of defending you in court.'

  'Yeah, yeah,' Allen said, brushing the comment away. So that wasn't where he was going, Lucas thought. 'The day you told her that you weren't so interested in me any more...'

  Lucas glanced at a wall calendar, 'A week ago today..."

  'Exactly a week ago,' Allen said, 'Carmel came over to my house to give me the news. And we had a drink, yadayadayada, and then she comes on to me.'

  'Yeah?' Lucas' eyebrows went up.

  'Yeah. Really hard. Really hard. And you know

  Carmel. She gets what she wants.'

  Lucas allowed a faint man-to-man smile to slip onto his face: 'The next thing you knew, you were working closely with your attorney.'

  'What she did was fuck my brains loose. And she's been back three more times since then. Does that sound bad? Does that sound crazy? I can't sleep thinking about it, but I really can't talk to any of my friends, either. They'd go batshit if I told them. Most of them are Barbara's friends, too, out at the club.'

  Lucas shook his head: 'I wouldn't worry about it too much. I've seen all kinds of reactions to spousal deaths, and believe me, you're not the first guy to fall in bed with another woman after his wife's been killed. Maybe there's a drive for intimacy.'

  'You think so?' Allen said. He seemed to brighten, momentarily. Relief? Lucas wasn't sure.

  'It's something like that,' Lucas said. 'Listen, as long as you've told me all this... why Carmel? She doesn't seem like your type. Detective Sherrill told me that you were a pretty relaxed guy. Carmel, on the other hand..."

  'Detective Sherrill, she's the one...' He made a figure with his hands.

  'Yeah.'

  'She seemed nice.' His eyes wandered away again, and he hunched forward in his chair: 'Carmel... pillow talks. She told me that she's been in love with me for two years, and hid it, because she thought it was hopeless, because I was married to a rich woman.

  She told me that Louise - that's the woman I was having an affair with - was a miserable gold-digger and a loser. She gets really violent about it.'

  'Really?' Keep him rolling.

  'I'm serious, once she grabbed me by the dick and said she'd cut it off if I ever put it back in Louise.'

  'Whoa... And she said she was in love with you for two years?'

  'Yeah, ever since a little thing in a restaurant. I couldn't even remember it.'

  'Do you believe her? That she's been in love?'

  'I know it sounds vain, but I do. You'd have to hear her talk. She remembered me saying things, doing things, places she'd bumped into me, times we'd just had a word or two.'

  Lucas thought for a moment, and then said, 'Are you seeing her tonight?'

  'Of course. Every night. She says we're gonna get married in a couple of years...'

  'Huh.' Lucas turned in his chair to face his window, his fingers steepled at his mouth, and looked out at the street. He hoped he looked like Sherlock Holmes. Then he swivelled back to f
ace Allen. 'Do you think if you suggested that you go out to Penelope's, that she'd go?'

  'Penelope's? Oh, heck yes, she loves that kind of scene, Minnetonka, the lake, all that. Trendy, expensive...'

  'Call her. She lives downtown, right? She's got some kind of fabulous apartment that was in the Star-

  Tribune?' Lucas knew exactly where she lived. He'd joked about it with a banker friend who lived in the same building.

  'Right. And it is fabulous,' Allen said. 'Call her, suggest Penelope's, and when she gets to your place, suggest that she drive. Make up some kind of excuse. Sprained your gas pedal ankle or something. Nothing serious, so you have to limp. Just get her to drive.'

  'She drives most of the time anyway,' Allen said. 'She doesn't like my car. I gotta brown-and-creme Lexus, she calls it a Jap car. She's got this red Jag.'

  'Good. Don't tell her any of this, by the way,' Lucas said. 'Don't tell her you talked to me. Just get her out there and have a nice long meal.' 'I will. What are you going to do?' 'Observe,' Lucas said. 'Not me, another guy.' 'Observe what?' Allen asked. 'This whole thing sounds a little bit off to me. Remember, whether you think like this or not: you are a rich guy. And you're good-looking. Women are going to come after you, and it's hard to tell who's sincere and who isn't. So I got a guy on the staff who specializes in... mmm... what would you call it? Emotional readings, I guess. I'll have him take a look at the two of you, and tell me what he thinks. He'll look at her body language, stuff like that. I'll pass it along to you.'

  'He's gonna eat with us?' Allen asked dimly. 'No, no. He'll just be there,' Lucas said. 'Don't go

  looking around for him or anything - just enjoy yourself and make sure that you stay long enough that my guy can get a reading.'

  'An emotional reading?'

  Lucas spread his hands: 'Hey, it's what I got.'

  When Allen had gone, Lucas leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a few moments, thinking about Carmel Loan. He ran through everything she'd said to him since the Allen killing, and in running through the various conversations they'd had, he stumbled over one small gemstone.

  When he'd last talked to her, she'd made a deliberately crude comment about three dead spies and an upper class woman. Anyway, he remembered it that way; and he remembered that they'd had difficulty finding anyone to claim the bodies, or anyone who would even admit to knowing who they were.

  Had they released the names by the time he'd seen Carmel? He didn't think so. But who knows, maybe the television people had talked to the cops outside the house, and somebody made a comment. Or maybe a reporter had talked to a neighbor, and the names had gotten out. Maybe. That could explain how she knew the two Dinkytown dead were Latinos...

  Carmel Loan. He scribbled her name on a legal pad, looked at it, then drew an arrow and scribbled another name: Rolando D'Aquila. Another arrow, at ninety degrees from the first, from Carmel to the next name, Hale Allen. He looked at that for a moment, drew another arrow from Carmel to Barbara

  Allen; and another from Carmel to Dead Spies. Of course, her connection to Marta Blanca and her dead boyfriend was purely part of his memory, nothing that could be proven...

  A cold wind was already blowing through Lucas' chest. He knew what he was going to do - he even knew how he was going to do it, to the smallest detail - but the idea chilled him. He felt like a wealthy man about to shoplift something expensive. And fooling with Carmel Loan was not like messing with a doper or a player or a stick-up guy. If he screwed up, he could go to jail.

  After a few minutes, he roused himself from the chair and walked down the hall to the Homicide office. Sloan was just leaving: 'The goddamned air conditioning is giving me goose bumps.' 'What are you doing tonight?' Lucas asked. 'Maybe taking the old lady out for a movie.' 'If you take her to Penelope's, on Lake Minnetonka, I'll pay for the meal and sign off on the overtime.'

  'Ya got me,' Sloan said quickly. 'For one thing, if I said no, the old lady'd murder me.' Sloan had a daughter in college and tuition to pay, and luxury was hard to come by. 'What do I have to do?'

  When Sloan had gone, Lucas called Jim Bone, president of Polaris bank: 'Jim, are you gonna be home between eight and nine tonight?'

  'Yeah; you need something?'

  'I need to talk. Ten minutes, maybe. I've been

  running around like a mad dog, and I can't spring any time, during the day, and besides, you're busy...'

  'Come on over. Kerin would love to see you.'

  'How's she doing?' Bone's wife was pregnant.

  'Just starting to show...'

  'You guys didn't waste any time.'

  'Yeah, well, we're old people.'

  Myron Bunnson told everybody that his mother was a stone freak hippie and that his real given name was Bullet Blue, and that his father had been an Oakland Hell's Angel, before the Angels got old. None of that was true. His parents were really named Myron (Senior) and Adele Bunnson, and they ran a dairy farm near Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

  Bullet was working one of the three valet slots at Penelope's. He saw the red Jag swing into the lot and said to the other two, 'This is it. This is mine.'

  'Three-way split, man,' said his friend, Richard Schmid, who was trying to convince his friends to call him Crank. The third valet nodded: 'Three ways.'

  'No problem,' Bullet Blue said. 'I'm just workin'

  the chick.'

  'Right.' Crank recognized the Jag. Bullet's chances of nailing this particular chick, especially dressed as he was, like an organ-grinder monkey, were slim and none, and slim was outa town. Still, Bullet Blue wanted the car, and they all had their favorites...

  Blue took the Jag and ten bucks from Carmel, who flashed a smile at him. 'Thank you, ma'am,' Blue said,

  giving her his best look. The look apparently missed over her bare shoulder, and she was into the restaurant with her friend, a guy who Blue thought looked way too straight. Whatever. He hopped into the Jag, and rolled it into the valet parking area on the side of the restaurant. Lucas was leaning against a Chevy van, talking to the man who sat in the driver's seat.

  'You got the money?' he asked Lucas. 'Keys?'

  Bullet dropped the keys into Lucas' hand. Lucas passed them through the window to the man in the driver's seat, who took them and clambered into the back. Lucas handed Bullet Blue a small fold of currency. 'I'll talk to McKinley.'

  'If we could just get her off this one time...' Bullet slipped the bills into his pants pocket. The three-way split only involved the ten bucks from Carmel.

  'I didn't say I could do that,' Lucas said bluntly. From the van, they could hear the grinding buzz of the key-cutter. 'The best we could do is maybe drop the charge to something less heavy. But she's gonna do some time.'

  'She's already done time,' Blue protested. He was talking about his sister, who came off the farm two years after Bullet, and started calling herself Baby Blue. 'She's been sittin' in jail for a month, waiting for the trial. Can't we get her time served?'

  'Not with this one,' Lucas said. 'If she hadn't had the gun...'

  'It wasn't her gun; it was Eddie's,' Bullet said heatedly.

  'But she had it. I'll see if McKinley and the guys'll go for two or three months. As it is, she's looking at a year, and maybe more.'

  'Anything you can do, man.'

  'And you stay the fuck outa trouble, dickweed,' Lucas said. 'Go back home if you gotta.'

  'Right. Spend my life pulling cow tits.'

  'Then get your ass back in Dunwoody - how much time you got to go there?' Lucas asked.

  'One semester.'

  'One semester.You get out, you start making some good money, and you make it wherever you go.'

  'Yeah, yeah,' Bullet said.

  You don't want to hear my Dunwoody speech?'

  'I just ain't made to fix cars, no more'n I'm made to pull cow tits; I'm made to rock n' roll.'

  'You're made to...'

  The man in the van spoke over Lucas shoulder: 'All done.' He handed Carmel's key ring to
Lucas, and Lucas handed it to Blue.

  'Dunwoody,' Lucas said.

  'Rock n' roll,' said Blue, as he walked away.

  Lucas, wearing his dark blue lawyer suit and carrying a black-leather briefcase, said, 'Jim Bone,' to the doorman at the desk, who looked at a list and said, 'And your name, sir?' 'Lucas Davenport.'

  'Go right on up, Mr. Davenport,' the doorman said, making a tick next to Lucas' name.

  Lucas had made a medium-sized fortune when he sold his simulations company; Bone's bank managed it. '... really risky,' Bone said. 'The economy could drop like a rock and who's going to pay a hundred dollars a round after that?'