Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  And the other checks were so scattered that they probably indicated that the killer either traveled a lot, or arranged for different people to send the checks. Though it was unlikely that she would ask other people - that'd be too much exposure. So she traveled.

  '... never talked to her,' Marker was saying. 'I don't even know if it's really a her, I always thought it was a him.'

  'Why'd you think that?' Mallard asked.

  'I don't know. Because he ran a messenger service, I guess. You kind of think that's like a guy job.'

  Mallard and his three agents began in-depth interviews with all five women, taking them one at a time.

  Lucas stood outside of Marker's office for a while, watching her talk with Mallard; her eyes would flick out to Lucas, then back to Mallard, and then out through the door to Lucas again. After ten minutes, Lucas stuck his head in the door: 'Thanks for letting me ride along. I'll give you a call this afternoon.'

  Mallard said, 'Hold on a second.'

  Out in the hall, away from the five women, he said, 'Not too exciting.'

  'I gotta think about it,' Lucas said.

  'The problem is, we don't have an edge, a crack, anything we can get a hold of. We'll have our local agents run down these checks: maybe somebody'll remember her.'

  'The most checks she got from one bank is six, and those were months apart,' Lucas said. 'I'd bet she went to a different teller every time, paid cash.'

  'Maybe we can run down the actual paper checks, and get fingerprints. We're gonna process all the paper we got here. And when the next check comes in...'

  'Do everything,' Lucas said.

  He turned back to look at the building as he walked away, and saw Mallard looking after him. The call-in arrangement was clever: it was also not quite right.

  Donnal O'Brien was a husky black man with a small brush mustache and four kids at home: his wife had gone out for a loaf of bread one night, and never came back, he said, 'Just too quiet in that convenience store, I guess, with none of the kids around.'

  She was now living in North Miami Beach with a retired DC cop named Manners: 'The drug guys called him Bad Manners. I think he retired with a little more than the regular pension, seeing as how he didn't bust anybody for the last three years he was on the force.'

  Lucas had met O'Brien at a computer training conference when Lucas was still hawking his police-simulation software. They'd had a few beers, shared information a couple of times. When O'Brien was still married, he and his wife had once spent a week at Lucas's Wisconsin cabin.

  O'Brien was sitting in a small grey-walled cubicle reading a People magazine story about a lesbian golfer when Lucas leaned in the doorway: 'Did you know that Kitty Veit is a lesbo?'

  'I don't know who Kitty Veit is.'

  'She shot a sixty-three in the final round of the women's grand-am last weekend, at Merion, and won three hundred and twenty thousand dollars. She's the only woman who ever shot a sixty-three there.'

  'You mean golf?'

  O'Brien sighed. 'Never mind. Anyway, she's a lesbo.'

  'And that offends your golfer's sense of propriety?'

  'No, it makes me wonder if I got an operation, I could shoot a sixty-three.'

  'You'd probably just sit home all day and play with your tits.'

  'Mmm. Hadn't thought of that.'

  'How ya been?' Lucas asked.

  'Tired. Let's go get a Coke.'

  They found an empty booth at a small, moderately greasy diner with Formica table-tops and cracked red plastic booth seats. The counterman drifted toward them and O'Brien called, 'Big Coke and Big Diet Coke.' Lucas told O'Brien that he was thinking of buying a golf course, and O'Brien didn't believe him. Five minutes later, when he did believe him, O'Brien started fishing for a job as a greens keeper.

  Lucas laughed: 'I haven't bought it, yet.'

  'Keep me in mind, I'd be great at it,' O'Brien said. 'I'm two years from retirement if some asshole doesn't shoot me first. Work in Minnesota? Hell, yes.' Then, his voice pitched down, he asked, 'What's going on. You're working, right?'

  'Yeah. We had some people executed in the Cities...' Lucas gave him a quick rundown, left Carmel Loan's name out of it, and concluded with the FBI entry at the answering service.

  'Never heard of the place. Louise Marker?'

  'Yeah. Just like it sounds, like Magic Marker, M-A-R-K-E-R.'

  'Four dead. Never heard of a pro going in for something like that... You might get three or four dead all at once, but not in a series, like they're hunting them down.'

  'There's something going on,' Lucas said. 'It could be something really simple - a money thing. The hit goes sour, somebody gets a name or a connection,

  and then this killer chick has to come back and clean up.'

  'Impossible to prove, though,' O'Brien said. 'I get pretty goddamned depressed about it sometimes. Crooks are getting too smart, they move too fast. Hit here, gone tomorrow.'

  'Be nice to pull this chick down, though,' Lucas said. 'I'd like to see if you've got anything local on this Marker, or any of the people who work there. Even word-of-mouth. The Feebs don't have anything that's not on paper...'

  'I'll check around,' O'Brien said. 'And I'll tell you what: I know this guy named George Hutton, he works in fraud...'

  They caught Hutton standing at a bus stop where a desk sergeant said he might still be, if they hurried.

  'George,' O'Brien called across the street. A bus was rolling down the block. 'Wait.'

  They crossed at the corner and Hutton looked at his watch and said, 'Two minutes and I'm out of here, gone for the week. Then the local Black Irish shows up with some guy in an expensive suit and I get this really bad feeling...'

  'All we need is a name,' O'Brien said. 'Let me tell you a name.'

  'One name,' said Hutton. He looked at his watch.

  'Louise... Marker.' O'Brien had moved to one side of Hutton so he could speak directly into the other man's ear. Hutton closed his eyes and tipped

  his head back, so that he'd have been looking at the sky, except that his eyes were closed. He stood like that for a moment, then opened his eyes and looked at Lucas and spoke to O'Brien.

  'Who's the guy?'

  'Lucas Davenport, a deputy chief from Minneapolis. Davenport Simulations.'

  'I know that,' Hutton said. Then: 'Look up Maurice Marker, formerly Marx, of Marker Dry Cleaners, Inc. New Jersey. He had a daughter named Louise. How old is your Louise?'

  Lucas said, 'I'd say early middle age - forty, maybe. A little chunky.'

  Hutton nodded: 'That'd be about right. What's she doing?'

  'Running an answering service.'

  Hutton nodded. 'Yeah. Look up Maurice Marker.' He peered down the street: 'That's my bus.'

  Lucas said good-bye to O'Brien, caught a cab to the FBI building and called Mallard, who came down to get him.

  'We need to look up a dry cleaner named Maurice Marker or Maurice Marx,' Lucas said.

  'Where'd you get the name?'

  'From a cop here in DC - some kind of savant guy, he knows names.'

  'Huh. Well, let's go punch it in.'

  Maurice Marker, now retired to south Florida, had a short FBI biography. He had once owned a chain of

  dry cleaners in New Jersey, with a sales staff consisting of a dozen men with severely bent noses. The bent noses were not around much, but they made nice salaries, with excellent benefits, including full dental and medical, as well as life insurance and retirement plans.

  'These guys would bring in a chunk of cash from dope or broads or gambling or whatever, give it to Maurice, he'd run it through the cash register, write off their salaries against taxes, take a chunk for himself, and everybody was happy,' Mallard said. 'He had thirty-three dry cleaners when he retired. He sold the stores to another guy, who did the same thing until he went away.'

  'Where'd he go?'

  Mallard peered at the computer: 'About four miles east of Atlantic City.'

  'Is Louise in there?' Luca
s nodded at the computer.

  Mallard ran his finger down the monitor screen: 'Yep. Not necessarily the same one, of course. Just a minute.' He opened a spiral notebook, flipped through to the back, ran his finger down a page of chicken-scratch handwriting, then looked at the screen. 'I'll be damned. Same birth date. That's our girl.'

  Lucas turned away, paced a few steps, paced back, turned away again. 'So. She's connected. Could be a coincidence, but probably not.'

  'Probably not.' Now Mallard got to his feet, and started following Lucas in the pacing. 'Goddamn

  it, Davenport, I'm getting a hard-on.'

  'You haven't gotten any more calls since the one from Patricia Case?'

  'No...'

  'Then it's possible that was some kind of a warning call. A code...'

  'It's possible that Tennex only gets one call a month...'

  Lucas was shaking his head: 'No. You know what it is? The answering service is a blind. Or partially a blind. That's why it's not just a phone ringing in an empty apartment somewhere. I mean, why not that? It'd be easier.'

  'So what are you saying?'

  'That one of those women there is a cutout, somebody the killer can go to for more information. One of the women is really an alarm, and we probably rang it.'

  'It'd have to be Marker,' Mallard said. 'There are ten different women who work on those switchboards, either full or part time, and they rotate shifts... There wouldn't be any way to know which operator would be answering which call, so they'd have to have some special instructions from Marker if anything unusual came up on Tennex.'

  'So let's bring her in,' Lucas said.

  'On what?'

  'Nothing. Scare the shit out of her.'

  'That's, uh, sort of not our operating procedure,' Mallard said.

  'Fuck your operating procedure. Bring her in, let me talk to her.'

  'Let me make a call,' Mallard said.

  Marker demanded an attorney, and Mallard was happy to give her all the time she needed.

  'If we're not out of here by seven, I'm gonna miss my plane,' Lucas said.

  'I'll have my secretary see if there's another flight out,' Mallard said. 'Gimme the ticket.'

  Marker's attorney, who showed up two hours after they'd taken her in, was a cheery blond named Cliff Bell. He wanted to know what the hell was going on.

  'Your client is a front for a professional killer we're tracking,' Lucas said.

  'I don't think...' Bell started, but Lucas stopped him.

  'Wait, wait,' Lucas said. 'Let me make my little speech, here. This woman, the killer, has murdered almost thirty people in more than a dozen states. A lot of them are those nasty southern states with those strange ways of executing people - like Florida, where the guy's eyeballs went up in a puff of smoke when they pulled the switch on OP Sparky...'

  'That's unnecessary,' Bell said.

  'No, it's not,' Lucas said. He leaned toward Marker. 'That's what we're talking about here, Miss Marker. The electric chair. The gas chamber. Lethal injection. When we nail this woman, we have the complete option of taking you with her. You connected the

  people who were contracting the killings, to the killer - and you knew about it.'

  'I didn't know it was a killer,' Marker sputtered, but Bell snapped, 'Shut up, Louise.'

  Louise didn't: 'I thought it was some kind of political or real-estate scam, for Christ's sakes...'

  'Shut up, Louise,' Bell said. To Lucas: 'What's the deal?'

  'The deal is, we don't have to take her. We can, we don't have to. She can go home right now, if she wants. But we won't make this offer again. Right now, if she tells us everything she knows about Tennex, we're willing to assume the best: that she may have guessed that she was facilitating some kind of criminal enterprise, but thought it was a minor political deal. I can't see her doing any hard time for that. If she doesn't take the deal, right now, while the trail is hot, then tough shit. We'll get this woman some other way, and we'll take Louise with her.'

  'We need some time in private,' Bell said. Mallard found them a private room. When he came back, Lucas noticed that he seemed to be sweating.

  'I'm not used to this kind of stuff. Police stuff. We usually have four specialists and three lawyers doing the talking. Spend a couple of weeks prepping for the thing.'

  'Sometimes, if you keep the momentum going, keep people talking, you get something you'd never get when everything's a formal tit-for-tat,' Lucas said.

  'I know the theory,' Mallard said. 'We usually

  operate on a different one... and I'm just hoping we don't get our tit-for-tat in a wringer.'

  Bell brought Marker back fifteen minutes later: 'We want a letter from Mr. Mallard, outlining the deal as laid out by Agent Davenport. Then we'll give you a statement.'

  The letter took another half-hour: Bell turned a little sour when he learned that Lucas worked for the City of Minneapolis, but Mallard smoothed him over. 'So tell us,' Lucas said. He had his feet up on Mallard's desk, a tape recorder running in the middle of Mallard's blotter-calendar. Marker and Bell sat in wooden visitors' chairs, while Mallard sat back on a couch with his legs crossed, drinking from his endless mug of coffee.

  The connection, Marker said, had been set up by a man named - so he said - Bob Tennex, although he sounded like East Coast Italian. 'Sounded? You didn't see him?' 'No. It was all done by telephone...' 'You set up the account without seeing the guy?' 'That happens, from time to time. If we get a check, and the check is good, we offer that service...'

  Since the connection was set up, Marker said, she'd spoken to a Tennex representative several times, and it was always a woman. Marker had Caller ID on her phones, purely as a matter of course, and had noticed that the calls came in from all over the Midwest, and sometimes from other parts of the country. Kansas

  City was prominent: four or five calls had come from there. Another name that stuck in her head was Wichita, because, while only two calls had come from there, the woman had been angry both times about problems with the phone company's answering service.

  'She wanted us to get on them - they had a couple of breakdowns,' Marker said.

  'But that's not the only thing she asked about, is it?' Lucas asked. 'You had some other agreement with her. About people making inquiries about the messenger service, about the police coming in.'

  'She really just thought it was some kind of minor political hustle - those things go on all the time here,' Bell said.

  'So what was it?' Lucas asked.

  'Uh, well, if somebody came snooping around, I wasn't supposed to do anything, except... wait.'

  'Until what?'

  'Until she called me,' Marker said, her voice barely audible.

  'You're gonna have to speak up,' Mallard said.

  'Until she called me,' Marker said.

  'And then what?'

  'She'd call and ask, 'Is Mr. Warren in?' And if nobody had been around, if I didn't know anything, I'd say, 'You've got the wrong number: this is Marker Answering.' But if somebody had been around, I'd say, 'No, but Mr. White's here. Would you like me to put your call through?" '

  'How many times did you do this?' Mallard asked.

  'Two different times. About three or four years go, something must've happened, and she called me every day for two weeks.' Marker said, her voice dropping again.

  'Ah, shit,' Lucas said. 'Then she called you yesterday or today, didn't she? This afternoon?'

  'She's been calling for a week, every day. And today, about an hour after you left the first time. Before you came and got me again,' Marker said. 'She was calling from Des Moines, a pay phone, I think. I could hear the cars.'

  'And you gave her the Mr. White line.'

  'Yes,' she squeaked.

  'Did you get the job because of your father?'

  'Maybe. Tennex said he knew Dad.'

  'Where's your father living now?' Lucas asked.

  'Well, he's not,' Marker said. 'He died of colon cancer last year.'