Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas nodded: 'Yeah, but I wouldn't have to make a hundred dollars a round - I could break even at sixty.'

  'You don't know anything about running a golf course,' Bone said.

  'Of course not; I wouldn't even try to. I don't even like golf. That's why they're talking about professional management.'

  'It's not completely crazy,' Bone admitted finally.

  'The whole point,' Lucas said, 'is that I could give my daughter that big chunk right now, take a mortgage on the rest, put all the excess into course maintenance, building value. By the time she's twenty-five or thirty, she owns the whole limited-partnership share, ninety-nine percent, while I own the general-partner's share, one percent, and we sell it and she's fixed. She picks up four or five million, minimum, and who knows? Maybe five or ten.'

  'The concept's okay, but to tell you the truth, you might do better in the long run just to pay the government's bite...'

  When they were done, Lucas said good-bye to Kerin, who seemed much softer than when he'd first

  met her; slower, happier, pleased with herself. Bone, at the door, said, 'I'll have the guys work it up for you. We'll have something in a week.' 'Thanks, Jim.'

  There were five doors on Bone's floor. Three apartments in addition to Bone's, and the fire-stair door. No security camera. Lucas let the elevator doors close behind him, and pushed twenty-seven. As the elevator started up, he took a nylon sock out of his pants pocket, spread it apart, and slipped it over the top of his head, like a watch cap. If there were somebody in the hallway, he could slip it back off - maybe without it being seen.

  But the hallway of the twenty-seventh floor was dead quiet. Still in the elevator, blocking the door with his foot, he pulled the nylon down over his face, turned up his coat collar, so it looked almost clerical, and did a quick peek out in the hall. No video cameras. He walked quickly down to Carmel's apartment, slipped the first key in. The key turned - the other, he thought, must be for her office.

  There was one light on, somewhere at the back of the apartment.

  'Hello?' he called. No answer. 'Hello?'

  He did a quick tour, checking, his nerves starting to jangle. He'd done this before, but he'd make a poor burglar, he thought.

  He started with her home Rolodex. There were dozens of names, most attached to the name of a law

  firm or a corporation - business acquaintances. There were a few names with a first and last, followed by a number, but usually, by two numbers. An office and a home phone, Lucas thought. Probably not a killer's number. There were ten numbers that involved simply a name and a number, and he copied those into a notebook.

  Then, in the kitchen, he found another address book, this one, apparently, purely personal. He took a small Nikon camera from his briefcase, made sixteen shots, stopped to reload the camera, made eight more, and dropped it back in his briefcase. Then he started through the apartment: He found a Dell computer in her study, with a built-in Zip drive. He'd brought Zip, Jaz and Super-disks; he brought the computer up, clicked on the Computer icon, and dragged all of her documents to the Zip icon. As the computer began dumping to the Zip drive, he began looking through the array of filing cabinets on the other side of the room. He pulled the drawers one at a time, and in the last drawer, found a mass of paid bills - nothing big, just the usual once-a-month routine. He riffled through them quickly, separated out the phone bills for the last four months, and used the camera again. But the last phone bill was almost exactly a month old...

  He went into the kitchen, where he'd seen a neat stack of envelopes, flipped through them, found the US West bill. With another little jangle of nerves, he picked up a teakettle on the stove, tipped it to make

  sure there was enough water, and turned it on.

  He looked in the bedroom while he waited for the teakettle to heat. Nothing obvious. He very carefully went through her drawers, afraid that he would disturb them in a way she could detect. He found nothing. He checked the closets quickly, and was closing the door when a brassy sparkle on the floor caught his eye. The sparkle had a certain quality that he unconsciously recognized. He stooped, scraped his hand along the rug, felt it, picked it: an unfired.22 shell. He took a penlight out of his pocket, searched the closet floor, but found only the one cartridge.

  He thought about it for a second, then put it in his pocket. He was closing the closet door when the teakettle began to hum. He hurried back to the kitchen, let the raw steam play down the back of the envelope, pried up the seal, took out the bill, shot a quick photo of the long-distance calls, and resealed the envelope before the adhesive could dry. He put the kettle back and sniffed: the smell of the adhesive hung in the air, only faintly, but it was there, he thought. He hoped Carmel would take her time.

  In the office, the computer was sitting quietly; he paged quickly through a few other folders, dragged a couple of them to the Zip icon, waited a few seconds until the files had been dumped, then shut the computer down.

  All right. What else? He was ready to leave; before he went, he took a last look around.

  The apartment was fabulous. But aside from the stuff in the filing cabinets, and stuck away in drawers, it hardly seemed to have been lived in: obsessively neat, everything in its place, like a stage set.

  The phone in his pocket rang: Sloan.

  'They're leaving,' he said. 'I just got my shrimp cocktail. I hope I'm not supposed to follow them.'

  'Nah, let them go. But what do you think?'

  'They're tight, all right. It was kissy-smoochy all night. But I think the guy was expecting somebody else to show. He kept cruising the place, looking around.'

  'Huh. Wonder what that's about?' Lucas asked, feeling just slightly guilty. Then: 'How come you're eating a shrimp cocktail and they're already leaving? You having it for dessert?'

  'Well... yeah,' Sloan said. His voice went a little hoarse: 'I love these things.'

  When Carmel got home, a little after eleven - she had to work the next day - she stopped at the threshold of the apartment and wrinkled her nose. Something, she thought, was not quite right. She couldn't put her finger on it: the air was wrong, or something. The apartment's chemicals had been disturbed. She walked through, leaving the hallway door open, so she'd have a place to run if she needed it, but found nothing at all.

  'Huh,' she said, as she closed the hallway door.

  By the next morning, she'd forgotten it.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Lucas got home, he took the CompactFlash card out of his pocket, dropped another one out of the Nikon, and read them into his home computer. After transferring the files to Photoshop, he sharpened the photos as much as he could and dumped them to his photo printer. That done, he called Davenport Simulations and let the phone ring until a man answered, his voice grumpy at the interruption.

  'Steve? Lucas Davenport.'

  'Hey, Lucas! Where've you been, man?' Steve smoked a little weed, from time to time; dropped a little acid on weekends, and let his beard grow. When the acid was on him, he could program in three dimensions. '"You don't come around any more.'

  'I'd be like the ghost of bad news, the former owner hanging around,' Lucas said. 'But I needed somebody who could help me out with a computer problem. I thought about you... from your phreaking days.'

  'I don't do that shit anymore, hardly ever,' Steve said. 'Uh, what do you need?'

  'Is there anyone on the Net who could track down anonymous telephone numbers?' Lucas asked. 'If

  there is, do you know how you could get in touch with him?'

  Steve dropped his voice, though he probably was alone: 'Depends on what the numbers are and how much trouble you want to go to. And whether you want to pay for it.'

  'How much would it cost?'

  'If you want all the numbers and don't ask any questions... I know a guy who does that kind of work. He could e-mail them to you for a couple of bucks a name. How many do you have?'

  'Maybe fifty,' Lucas said.

  'Oh, Jesus, I thought you
were talking about hundreds. Or thousands. I don't know if he'd be interested in a little job like that.'

  'I'd pay him more,' Lucas said.

  'I can ask,' Steve said. 'Say five hundred bucks?'

  'That's good,' Lucas said.

  'I'm putting my name behind this, man. I'll be stuck for the five hundred if you don't come through.'

  'Steve...'

  'All right, all right.'

  'I could use any other information they can find on the people who belong to the phone numbers - I mean, if they can do that.'

  'That'd cost you more.'

  'Go up to a thousand.'

  'You got it: send me an e-mail with the numbers. I'll pass it on. You'll get it back by e-mail.'

  jricy

  Lucas copied odd, unusual or unidentified numbers from the photos and asked for names and addresses. He dumped the e-mail to Steve, then checked his own e-mail account, and found two letters, one advertising pornographic photographs of pre-teens, which he deleted, and another from his daughter.

  Sarah was in the first grade, starting to read and write: but her mother, a TV-news producer, had shown her how to use a voice-writing software program. Using the voice-writer, Sarah now wrote Lucas a couple of times a week.

  Lucas took fifteen minutes to interpret the voice-written text, and he wrote back, struggling to use words that Sarah could sound out, while at the same time trying to avoid the Dick-and-Jane syndrome. He was just finishing when a perky little female voice from the computer said, 'You have mail.'

  He sent the e-mail note to Sarah, then clicked on his in-box. The sole piece of mail was a list of names and addresses attached to the phone numbers he'd sent out. All but two of the names had personal information attached. Lucas scanned it: the information appeared to come from credit bureaus, although some might have come from state motor-vehicle departments. At the end of it all was a price tag: 'Send $1000.'

  'Quick,' he muttered. He looked at his watch. Just under half an hour.

  He printed the numbers out, and turned to the documents he'd pulled from Carmel's computer.

  Though he spent less than five seconds with most of them - virtually all were work-related - it was after three in the morning before he wiped the disk, shut down the computer and went to bed.

  The next day, he chopped the disk to pieces with a butcher knife, and dropped the pieces in two separate trash cans in the Skyway: he had an almost superstitious dread of computer files turning up when they weren't supposed to.

  Then, while he was still in the Skyway, between the Pillsbury building and the government center, he noticed a woman in a shapeless black dress, wearing a white scarf on her head, babushka-style. He turned to watch her walking away; some religious or ethnic group, he thought, but he didn't know which. He went on to police headquarters, whistling, where he called Sherrill.

  'Can either you or Black come by for a minute?'

  'Which would you prefer? Me or Tom?'

  'Stop,' he said. 'I just want to hear about the Allen case. And mention a couple of things to you.'

  Sherrill came down a few minutes later and dropped into his visitor's chair. 'We're running out of stuff to look at,' she said.

  'Let me tell you what Hale Allen told me yesterday,' Lucas said. He laid it out quickly, then told her about the ethnic woman in the Skyway. 'She looked like the aliens the kid described, when she was putting together that composite photo. So we need to get a low-angle photograph of somebody in a dark dress,

  wearing a scarf over her head; then we need to plug in a bunch of faces, including Carmel's.'

  'Carmel Loan,' Sherrill said. 'That could get rough, if we went public and didn't have the goods.'

  'Which is why I don't want her to know that we're looking at her. Not unless we get something solid.'

  'All right,' Sherrill said. She pushed herself up. 'I can probably get a picture of Carmel from your lady at the Star-Tribune library, if she still works there.'

  'She does,' Lucas said.

  'And I'll have the ID guys put together a photo spread. We can base it on the composite the kid gave us. When do you want to talk to the kid?'

  'The sooner the better,' Lucas said. 'I don't know how long memories last with little kids.'

  'I'll try to set it up this afternoon.'

  'Something else,' Lucas said. He dug in his pocket. 'Could you have the lab do an analysis on the slug?' He tossed the.22 shell to her. She caught it one-handed, looked at it, and then asked, 'What's going on, Lucas?'

  'Nothing; it's one of my.22s. I just want to look at the difference between a random analysis and what we're getting from the slugs we took out of the dead guys. Do we really have a case based on a metals analysis?'

  She looked at him, suspicious, turned the cartridge in her hand. 'Then, if I lost this particular shell,' she said, 'You wouldn't mind if I just sent in one of my own.'

  Lucas said, 'Send that one in, huh? Just send it in.' 'This one.' 'That one.' 'Lucas...'

  'Off my case, Marcy,' he said. She grinned at him and said, 'Marcy, my ass. We're operating, aren't we?'

  'Send the fuckin' thing in,' he said.

  Lucas spent the morning running through the numbers he'd taken from Carmel's address books and phone bills: he'd marked fifty-five of them to be checked. In three hours, he'd half-filled a yellow legal pad with notes, but nothing promising.

  A few minutes before noon, he got to the final long-distance call on the last of the long-distance bills: a call made two weeks earlier, he noticed, a couple of days after Barbara Allen's death. The note from the hacker said only, 'Small business phone listed to Tennex Messenger Service.' Lucas dialed the number and a woman answered on the first ring: 'Tennex Messenger Service.'

  'Yes, could I speak to the Tennex manager? Or whoever runs the place?'

  'I'm sorry, sir, Mr. Wilson is out. I can give you his voice-mail.'

  'Well, I was just wondering how I could set up an account with Tennex.'

  'I'm sorry, sir; we're answering service. All I can do is give you his voice-mail.'

  'Okay, thanks, if you could do that...'

  He was switched, and got a voice-mail introduction, a slightly vague voice that might have come from a drugged-out teenager: 'You have reached Tennex Messenger Service, your, uh, fastest messenger service in the DeeCee area. We are either, uh, on the phone or out on a call. We check back for messages, so, like, leave your name and, uh, phone number. Thanks.'

  Not interested in talking to a strung-out bicycle-messenger, Lucas hung up, yawned, stood up and stretched, and walked down to Homicide. Black was at his desk, shuffling through papers; Sloan had his feet up, reading a Pioneer Press.

  'Lunch?' Lucas asked.

  'Yeah, I could see my way clear to a lunch,' Sloan said.

  Sherrill pushed through the office door, spotted Lucas and said, 'I sent that slug in, and we're all set for four o'clock this afternoon.'

  Sloan's eyebrows went up. 'Really? Where at?' he asked.

  Sherrill correctly interpreted his tone and implication: 'Shut up,' she said.To Lucas: 'Mama is not happy with the fact that we're coming back to see the kid. There was all the loose talk in the newspapers about hit men.'

  'So I'll let you warm her up when we get there,' Lucas said. 'Woman talk, bonding, chit-chat, that kind of shit.'

  'Sexism,' Sloan said, shaking his head sadly. 'And from a member of the Difference Commission.'

  Lucas's hand went to his forehead: 'Ah, Jesus, I forgot. There's a meeting tonight.'

  They looked at him with sympathy, and Sherrill patted his shoulder. 'It could be worse.'

  'How?'

  'I don't know. You could be shot.'

  'He's been shot,' Sloan said. 'It'd have to be a lot worse than that.'

  Lunch with Sloan was a long hour of gossip, with brief side-trips into current styles of crime. Murder was down, even with Allen and the two dead in Dinkytown - the fourth, Rolo, was on the St. Paul books. Rape was down, ag assault was down, coke was down,
speed was up and so was heroin. 'Guiterrez told me that the day heroin started coming back, was a happy day in his life,' Sloan said, speaking of one of the dope detectives. 'He says Target's gonna get ripped off, and K-Mart and Wal-Mart, but at least they're not gonna have a bunch of robot-crazy coke freaks running around with guns, thinkin' that nothing can hurt them.'

  Lucas nodded: 'Give a guy a little heroin, he goes to sleep. Give him a little more, he dies. No problem.'

  'Shoplift like crazy, though,' Sloan said.