Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  'A cultural skill,' Lucas said, lifting up the top of his cheeseburger to inspect the solitary, suspiciously pale pickle. 'Passed on by heroin gurus. Somebody

  oughta look into it. An anthropologist.'

  'Or a proctologist,' Sloan said. 'Say, with that commission meeting tonight, you won't be shooting.'

  'I'm thinking of giving it up, anyway,' Lucas said. 'That goddamn Iowa kid shot my eyes out last time.'

  'He's a freak,' Sloan said. 'He's shooting Olympic, now. He's got a target on his locker, ten bulls, every shot in the X ring. In the middle of the X-ring - you can see black all around the edges.'

  'He's good,' Lucas said. 'At my age, you can't be that good. Can't do it. Your fine muscle control isn't fine enough.'

  'Yeah, yeah. He's sort of a dumb fuck,' Sloan said.

  'I heard he was actually a smart fuck.'

  'Yeah, well - he's a dumb smart fuck.' Sloan looked at his watch. 'I gotta get going. I gotta talk to a guy'

  On the walk back to City Hall, Lucas realized that a mental penny had dropped during the lunch. Something was packed into the back of his head, now, but he didn't know what it was.

  But it was, he thought, something important: he dug at it, and realized it involved the Iowa kid. The kid was still a uniformed cop, but he volunteered for everything hard, and he had a thing about guns. All kinds of guns: he dreamt about them, used them, fixed them, compared them, bought and sold them. A throwback to an old western gunfighter, Lucas thought.

  He tried to think about the coming interview with

  Jan and Heather Davis, the photo-spread that Sherrill was putting together. A photo-spread involved some risks: if the child identified Carmel as one of the killers, and they went to court, then a witness-stand identification could be challenged on grounds that the police had contaminated the witnesses' memory with the photographs... So the whole thing had to be done just right.

  As much as he tried to think about the upcoming interview, the shooter from Iowa always came back. Something that Sloan said about him. Something small. He just couldn't nail it down.

  This, he thought after a while, is what it's like be senile. He had something in his head, but he couldn't get it out. Finally, he walked down to the locker room, wandered through, looking for the Iowa kid's locker: found it, with the target on it, just like Sloan said.

  'Checking out the competition?' a tall blond cop asked. Another shooter, and Lucas nodded at him.

  'I heard about the perfect score,' Lucas said. He leaned forward to look at it: the bullseye on the target was called the ten-ring, but inside the bull was another, much smaller circle: the X-ring, not much bigger around than a.22 slug. There were ten small target faces on the target sheet: and in the middle of each X-ring, a slightly soft-edged hole. Around each of the holes, the full X-ring line could be seen. Lucas whistled.

  'Guy's abnormal,' the cop asked. He was pulling on a bullet-proof vest, slapping the Velcro fastening

  tabs in place. 'My eyes are supposed to be 20-20, but I can't even see the X-ring on them.22 faces. Keeping them inside the ten-ring is one thing; keeping them inside the X, man... that's abnormal.'

  'It's tough,' Lucas agreed. 'I've never done it.' He took a last look, shook his head, and started back to the office. Keeping them inside the ten-ring was one thing, but inside the X...

  He went back to his office, scrolled through the list of phone numbers he'd sent off on the Internet. And there it was, the last one.

  Tennex Messenger Service.

  'Sonofabitch,' he said. That had to be a coincidence.

  He was still thinking about it when Sherrill and Black showed up with a file of full-length color photos of women, silhouetted, wearing head scarves with dark raincoats. A dozen different faces had been grafted into the folds of the scarf, as if the faces had suddenly been hit by light from a doorway.

  'Not bad,' Lucas said, looking through them. 'This one is Carmel?'

  'Yeah - it's weird how context makes a difference; I wouldn't recognize her in a thousand years in that get-up,' Sherrill said.

  Black and Sherrill drove over together, Lucas followed. Davis met them at the door: 'I hope we can do this without a lot of trauma,' she said, her voice tight.

  'There's no reason to be any trauma at all,' Lucas

  said. 'If she can't pick out a photograph, we're done.' 'What if she does? What if this killer hears about it?'

  'The killer won't hear about it from the police,' Lucas said. 'We'd do a videotape deposition, and keep her name confidential until a defense attorney did his discovery motion - by that time we'd have somebody in jail for first-degree murder, and there'd be nobody to come after her.'

  'The whole thing just scares the heck out of me,' Davis said, hugging herself as though she were cold.

  Heather was playing with a fleet of trucks in a back bedroom: 'You know what you need?' Sherrill asked. 'You need a farm tractor. Maybe a cultivator to pull behind it.'

  'I had a tractor, a John Deere, but it got lost,' Heather said. Her eyes narrowed. 'The tractor was good, but you know what I really need?'

  'What?'

  'When we bought the tractor, we bought a combine to go with it, but I didn't have anything to put the corn in. I could use a grain truck.'

  'Yeah... well.' Sherrill was out of her depth. 'Let's look at these pictures, and we'll get you back to the trucks.'

  'Mom said you could probably get me a ride in a police car,' Heather said.

  'Mmm, if you ask Uncle Lucas here, he could probably fix it.'

  'He's not my uncle,' Heather said. 'I can probably fix it anyway,' Lucas said. 'Come on and look at the pictures.'

  She did: she looked at them all, carefully, and when

  she was done she said, 'Nope.' 'Nope?'

  She looked at her mother. 'They don't look right.' 'If they don't look right,' Davis said, 'then, they

  don't look right.'

  'You're sure none of them look right...' Lucas said.

  'Well, they all look sorta right, but not really right.'

  'If that's what you say, that's what you say,' Black said. They all stood up.

  'Can Uncle Lucas still get me a ride in a police car?'

  Out on the sidewalk, Sherrill said, 'Well, gosh-darn.'

  'That's a big gosh-darn from me, too,' Black said. 'Though I don't know if I'd want to put a kid on a witness stand with Carmel Loan ready to cut her up.'

  'I'd take anything right now,' Lucas said moodily. 'I'd take a chimp if it was ready to pick her out.'

  'So what're you going to do?' Sherrill asked.

  'Gonna go home,' Lucas said. 'Have a beer. Think about it. Cry myself to sleep.'

  Chapter Twelve

  Lucas arrived at City Hall at little after ten o'clock in the morning - early for him - closed the door on his office, typed a memo, heading it 'Confidential,' and recorded his interview with Hale Allen. He hand-carried it to Rose Marie Roux, the chief of police.

  'How was your trip?' he asked.

  'A Las Vegas convention in the middle of the summer - it was so hot that I was afraid to go outside.'

  'Dry heat,' Lucas said.

  'So's an oven,' she said. 'I was so bored I almost started smoking again... whatcha got?'

  He handed her the memo and she read it and said, 'Goddamnit, Lucas, this is awful. Why don't you ever come up with easy stuff?'

  'I do,' Lucas said. 'I don't bother you with it. And this, I don't want anybody to see but you and me, Sherrill and Black, and maybe one judge. File it and forget it, until we need it.'

  'Covering your ass,' Roux said.

  'Covering everybody's ass,' Lucas said. 'I need to get her phone records for the last few months, and I need this to back up a subpoena.'

  'Talk to Ross Benton,' Roux said. 'He'll give you

  the subpoena and keep his mouth shut. He'd love to see Carmel get nailed. She makes a game out of fucking with him in court. He had trouble with some decisions in that Prolle case, and she called him Schizo
the Clown and it got in the Star-Tribune.'

  'AH right. I'll carry a copy over to him, get the subpoena.'

  'I hope you know what we're doing,' Roux said. 'I'm too old and tired to get burned at the stake by Carmel Loan.'

  Lucas talked to Benton, the judge, and got his subpoena. 'Let me know how it comes out,' Ross said, a light in his eye.

  'Probably nothing,' Lucas said. 'I'm beggin' you not to leak it.'

  'Don't worry. If it's nothing, and she finds out about this subpoena, I'll stick a gun in my mouth.'

  Lucas walked the subpoena over to the phone company, presented it to the correct vice-president, emphasized the need for confidentiality and the criminal penalties for any breaches of it. The vice-president responded with the correct pieties, and they both walked down to a technical center where the information was printed out. Lucas asked the vice-president to note the date and time on the printout and sign it.

  'Hope this doesn't get me into trouble,' the vice-president said.

  'We're trying to nail a Mafia hit-man,' Lucas said. 'Pretty funny,' the VP said, as he signed.

  Back at City Hall, Lucas thought about the pros and cons of asking a favor from the FBI. His stomach growled once, then again, and he answered: he walked down to the cafeteria and got a sandwich, ate it and read the paper, then walked back to his office and dug Mallard's card out of his desk drawer.

  One problem with the FBI was that once they signed on to a case, its agents tended to get a little over-enthusiastic: laser-sighted submachine guns, helicopters, computerized psychological profiles. A further problem was that they also tended to be under-experienced. A guy who came out of college, went into the FBI, and then spent twenty years working as an agent had about as much experience with actual criminals as a patrol cop a year out of tech-school. So you'd look at a slightly greying forty-five-year-old - somebody about Lucas' age - and you might think, hmm, not too bad. Then you'd find out that in cop years, he was about twenty-five.

  On the other hand, the experience that they had tended to be with heavy hitters...

  After another moment's hesitation, he thought about Mallard's attitude during their meeting: Mallard was one of the brighter ones, Lucas thought.

  Mallard picked up his phone on the first ring. 'Yes.'

  'I have an intuition,' Lucas said, after he identified himself.

  'I'd be inclined to listen to an intuition,' Mallard said. 'Our Minneapolis guys are strangely impressed by you. Or scared, or something.'

  'Thank them for me, the next time you see them.'

  'I didn't say they liked you,' Mallard said. 'They say you refer to us as the Feebs.'

  'Well, that's, uh, the old rivalry.'

  'Sure,' Mallard said. 'So what's your intuition?'

  'We have a possible suspect. Not for the shooter, but for the woman who hired her. To be honest with you, I'm not going to identify her because she's a hot potato, and if I'm wrong, she'd nail me to the wall. I could be looking for a job somewhere way out-state.'

  'So much for the preface,' Mallard said, 'What's the intuition?'

  'We, uh, acquired a number of telephone contacts our suspect made about the time of the killing. One of them was in Washington - right where you are...'

  'Not the state.'

  '... and when I checked it, I gotTennex Messenger Service. Nobody home. It's an answering service. And I was pretty much told that there's never anybody home... And just yesterday I was talking to a friend about target-shooting, and he told me about this young Iowa guy we've got, who just shot a round where he not only kept everything in the ten ring, but also inside the X-ring.'

  'Ten-X Messenger Service,' Mallard said. 'That's a pretty far-out intuition.'

  'That's what I thought.'

  'The odds are about twenty-to-one against it being anything.'

  'I was thinking fifty-to-one,' Lucas said.

  'That's the best odds I've ever had on this woman,' Mallard said. 'I'd jump at a thousand to one.'

  'You gotta go easy with this,' Lucas said. 'None of that laser-sighted submachine gun shit. Or black helicopters.'

  'Nobody'U ever know,' Mallard said, 'Until we want them to. Where can I call you direct?'

  Lucas gave him a number arid Mallard said, 'Call you tomorrow morning.'

  Lucas hung up, leaned back and looked at the phone. Mallard, the dust-dry but thick-necked economics professor, had shown a glimmer of genuine excitement. As though he shared the intuition...

  Sherrill walked in without knocking, sat down without asking, and said, morosely, 'My problem is, I'm a cop.'

  'Good-looking cop,' Lucas said, rolling with it. 'And ya gotta big gun.'

  'I'm not being playful, here,' Sherrill said. 'It's suddenly become a problem.'

  Lucas frowned, recognizing the serious set to her face: 'What happened?'

  'The slug you gave me,' she said. 'It came back from the lab.'

  'Yeah?'

  'Yeah. Lucas, the analysis is identical to the analysis on the D'Aquila and Blanca killings. Not the Allen, though.'

  'Huh,' he said, but he felt a tight kick of pleasure.

  Sherrill continued: 'So me being a cop and all, I gotta ask you - where'd you get it?'

  'I could tell you I found it on the floor at the Blanca killing, and forgot about it,' he said.

  'That'd be utter bullshit,' she said.

  'Such things have happened, even to the best of us,' Lucas said.

  'Not to you. Not to me, either,' she answered.

  'I'll tell you, if you want to know. If you tell anybody else, they might put me in jail. But if you want to know...'

  'You'd tell me?'

  'Yup.'

  She balanced it for ten seconds, then said, 'I gotta know.'

  Lucas nodded. 'I broke into Carmel Loan's apartment, searched it, found the shell in the closet. There was only one. I thought about leaving it, and trying to get a search warrant, then finding it - and if it came back confirmed, we'd have something heavy. But I couldn't think of any way we'd ever get a search warrant. And I could think of about a million ways Carmel or any good defense attorney could impeach that kind of evidence. You know, we just happened to find only one shell, in her closet, and it just happens

  to match, and we are the only people who handled the other slugs... it'd be strong, but it wouldn't be definitive.'

  'So you took it.'

  'That and some other stuff,' Lucas said. 'Computer records, phone records.'

  'Anything she can trace?'

  'No. Don't think so.'

  'Well, goddamnit, Lucas...'

  He leaned across the desk, intent: 'Listen: we know about her now. With this shell. That's the most important thing that could happen in a case like this. We've got a fix on who did it. Now we can start putting things together. We were stuck, now we've got a focus.'

  'I wish you'd told me before you went in there,' Sherrill said.

  'I couldn't. It was really best that you didn't know. It's still best. If anybody asks me, I didn't tell you, even now'

  'I suppose...' She stood up, sighed, and said, 'All right. I just forgot what you said.'

  'Of course you didn't,' Lucas said.

  'Goddamnit, Lucas...' She flared for a minute, then settled back. 'So what next?'

  'I just got a subpoena for Carmel's phone records, and walked over to the phone company and got them,' he said. 'I'd already checked them, from what I got in her apartment, but this gives us some legal support...'

  'Something weird?'

  'Yeah. One odd call. And she made that phone call just before the D'Aquila killings.' He filled her in on theTennex Messenger Service, and his call to the FBI.

  'Tennex - sounds like a rock band,' she said, her voice moody.

  'You're thinking of the Quicksilver Messenger Service.'

  'Never heard of it/ she said. She slumped in the chair, scanning the computer list of phone calls: 'There's nothing before the Allen hit.'

  'No...'

  'You hear what
I just said?' She asked. 'I actually said, hit. Jesus, I'm a TV movie.'

  'You know what I'm wondering?' Lucas asked. 'What if Rolando D'Aquila was her contact with the killer? From what you guys dug up, he had some heavy Mafia connections once, and this shooter -she's supposed to do a lot of Mafia contracts.'