Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  'I can't ask you what connection Hale Allen has with D'Aquila, because you're his attorney...'

  'And it would be absolutely unethical for me to tell you, if there were any. I'll tell you this, just between you and me and the door jamb - there isn't any connection. My theory is, Barbara Allen was killed by accident, or mistake, when she got in the way of something else. Something involving drugs and these latinos. Then the cop came along by accident and the whole affair went up in smoke. But my theory is, Barbara Allen had nothing to do with it - and what you really ought to be doing is looking for the other guy who ran from the Barbara Allen scene. The guy that Barbara Allen got killed for seeing, and the cop got there too late to see.'

  Lucas thought about it for a few seconds, then said 'We've gone over all of that.'

  'And?'

  'It worries us.'

  'It should worry you, and you ought to go over it

  some more,' Carmel said. 'And stop showing those fuckin' pictures around.'

  'There was only one witness, Carmel,' Lucas said. 'She gave you a clean slate. She didn't even say, "Maybe."'

  'Good.' And she was gone.

  Lucas leaned back in his chair, fighting back the little trickle of adrenalin. Carmel was a challenge. He picked up the Equality Report, and the zen-hum began again, while his head worked through Carmel's visit. If she hadn't killed anyone, would she have made the visit when she heard about the photo spread? Absolutely. Would she have made it if she was guilty? He thought about it for three seconds. Absolutely, she would have. She had a fine, discriminating taste in the mannerisms of innocence. So he'd learned nothing.

  But the cartridge: the.22 he'd picked up in her apartment was a fact. Couldn't use it in court, couldn't even admit that it existed. But the slug in that.22 said Carmel was guilty. Guilty of something, anyway. Just for argument's sake, say the bullet was usable in court. How would she defend against it? He turned it over in his mind: she'd say the bullet came from D'Aquila. That he'd stored a bag in her closet, or that he'd planted it for some reason...

  D'Aquila. Another image popped into the back of his brain. He leaned forward, let his chin drop on his chest, closed his eyes, concentrated. After a minute,

  he pushed himself out of his chair and half-jogged down the hall to homicide. Neither Sherrill nor Black was in, but the D'Aquila file was in Sherrill's work tray. He flipped through it, and found the coroner's photo of the fingernail gouges that D'Aquila had scratched into the back of his hand before he was executed. Lucas looked at it, turned it over, and thought, if you simply separated out some of the lines... if you realized that D'Aquila, panicked, tortured, facing execution, was not exactly writing in a notebook, and couldn't see what he was doing, then

  might resolve itself out this way: C loan.

  Begin with a C. The next letter was an L, just a straight up-and-down line without the bottom line. The next letter, he thought, was intended to be an O, but was confused by the bar across it. If the bar were moved over one place, it would make an A - leaving the final letter as an N. C Loan.

  'Goddamnit, Carmel,' he said.

  The door opened behind him, and he turned to see Sherrill. 'Looking through my desk?'

  'Looking through the D'Aquila photos,' Lucas said. 'Look at this.'

  Sherrill was looking at him. 'Jeez, you're really pumped. What've you got?'

  He laid it out for her. In ten seconds, Sherrill was convinced. Black, who arrived two minutes after she did, was not.

  'The problem is, you could make anything out of those scratches, once you start disassembling them,' he said. 'I can see five or six different words in there.'

  'Yeah, but none of them are words that are relevant to the investigation, except this one: C Loan,' Lucas said.

  'Maybe that's because we haven't figured out all the possibilities,' Black said.

  Sloan came in during the argument, looked at the photos and shook his head: 'I could take some recreational drugs and maybe believe it, but if you've got an unstoned jury, you got a problem,' he said.

  'Well, it's a piece,' Lucas said finally. 'We get a few pieces and pretty soon we've got a case.'

  Black and Sloan started talking to somebody else, and Sherrill said quietly, 'Is it possible that we can only see it because we already know} Because of the slug?'

  'Nah, it's there,' Lucas said, shuffling through the pictures again. 'Goddamnit, it's there.'

  Rinker flew into Washington on a Saturday afternoon, fifteen hours after Lucas had flown out of the same airport. She stopped at a magazine store and bought the best map she could find, picked up her rental car,

  and checked into the downtown Holiday Inn. From there, she called her bar in Wichita and talked to the assistant manager, a shy cowboy named Art Durrell, and was assured that nothing had burned down, that the customers were happy, that the fat in the deep frier was hot enough, and the refrigerators were cold enough.

  'When that asshole from the health department comes back, we want a hundred-percent clean bill, Art,' Rinker said. 'You can never tell when those reports'll wind up in the local newspapers.'

  'We're the cleanest place in town, Clara, and everybody down at the health department knows it,' Durrell said. 'Stop worrying. Enjoy yourself.'

  At two o'clock, a rat-faced man with too-long, stringy black hair, wearing a denim jacket, jeans and cowboy boots - a man who looked the part of a movie drifter - knocked at her door and, when she answered, handed her a package wrapped in brown paper that had been cut from a grocery sack.

  'From Jim. The phone's probably good until Sunday,' he said, and left. She opened the bag and took out a Colt Woodsman, a silencer, a sealed box of.22 shells and one freshly stolen cellular phone. The package had cost her eleven hundred dollars. She screwed a silencer on the barrel of the pistol, loaded the magazine, opened a window and fired a shot through the curtain. The gun made a loud 'whuff' and the action cycled. She stepped over and looked at the curtain, and after a second found the small hole

  made by the.22 slug as it passed through. Everything worked.

  Louise Marker lived in an apartment complex in Bethesda, an expensive place of three-story yellow-brick buildings arranged around a series of swimming pools set in grassy lawns. If government employees lived there, Rinker thought, they were generals. There were, however, no uniforms in sight. Perhaps a hundred residents, almost all of them young to middle-aged women, lay scattered around the pools in conservative one-piece bathing suits. None of them was Marker. Marker had never seen Rinker, but Rinker had seen Marker, a couple of times. She'd made a point of it, for just this occasion. Wandering casually through the people around the pools, Rinker punched Marker's number into her cell phone and a woman answered on the third ring. 'Hello?'

  And Rinker said, 'Jean?'

  'No... You must have the wrong number.'

  'Ah, sorry.'

  Getting into Marker's building was not a problem: she timed her step to a couple of women in bathing suits who were headed for a side door. She followed them through the outer door, just far enough back that one of them had time to use her key on the inner door. Rinker had her own keys in her hand, jingling, but caught the door, nodded, said thanks and kept going and the other two women thought nothing of it.

  Marker was on two: Rinker took the stairs, did a quick peek at the door to make sure there was nobody in the hallway, then punched Marker's phone number back into the cell phone as she walked down to Marker's door. There was interference, but at least the phone should ring on the other end.

  Again, the woman's voice. 'Hello?' A little asperity this time; expecting another wrong number?

  Rinker said, 'Could I speak to Mrs. Marker?' And at the same moment, she rang the bell at Marker's door.

  Marker said, 'Who is this?'

  'This is Mary downstairs at the office... did I hear your doorbell ring?'

  'Yeah, just a minute.' Rinker heard her put the phone down. The hall was still empty, and she took the pistol out from her shirt just as t
he door popped open. Marker opened her mouth to ask a question and Rinker brought the gun up to her forehead and said, 'Step back.'

  Marker, the good Mafia kid, said, 'Oh, no,' and stepped back. Rinker stepped inside, then whispered, 'I am going to speak very softly: I am going to put my gun in my shirt, and we are going for a walk outside. But first, finish your phone call.'

  'What?'

  'Finish the phone call.'

  Marker nodded, mystified, went back to the phone.

  'Hello?'

  'This is Mary,' Rinker said into the cell phone.

  'You left your car keys down here this morning, they're at the main desk.'

  'Oh, thanks,' Marker said, shakily. 'Uh, I'll be right down.'

  'See you,' Rinker said, and she punched off the phone. Then she pointed her index finger at Marker, crooked it, and stepped back into the hallway. Marker followed like an automaton.

  'You're going to kill me,' Marker said, when they were in the hall, the door closed behind them. 'I should scream.'

  'If you scream, I'll kill you. Otherwise, I've got good reasons not to. But I've got to ask you some questions.'

  'What was that about the telephone?' 'The feds may be listening in.' 'Probably are,' Marker said. Then: 'You're Tennex.' Rinker nodded. "Walk down the hall.' 'I did just like you told me...' Rinker started her rap: 'I don't want to hurt you, because if I do, then they'll know for sure thatTennex is what they're after. Do you understand that? Right now, they don't know for sure.' 'Uh, yes.'

  'But I'll kill you if I have to. If I ever have any hint that you talked to them about this visit, that you're looking at photographs, then I'll come back for you. And if I'm caught, the people who run me will worry that other connections would be made, and they'll come looking for both of us. In other words, if you

  talk to anybody about this visit, you're dead. Do you understand?'

  Marker swallowed hard and nodded.

  'So who came to see you?' Rinker asked.

  Marker told her all of it: starting with the first phone call, the call that seemed uncertain about Tennex - a guy's voice, baritone, educated, cool - to the raid by the FBI.

  'Not a cop? The guy who called?'

  'High-class cop, maybe.' She told Rinker about the FBI, about Mallard, about going down to the FBI building.

  'Was one of the guys named Lucas Davenport?'

  'I don't think so, but they didn't introduce everybody. There was one guy who kept wandering away. Big guy, tough guy. Didn't look FBI, he had this really nice suit. Didn't look government. Looked like, you know, a hoodlum.'

  Rinker dipped in her pocket and came up with the folded page she'd taken from BizWiz, a computer magazine that covered Twin Cities business. 'Is this the guy?'

  Marker took it, looked at it for a half-second and said, 'That's him. Yeah. He looks better in real life, though.'

  'Did you hear his voice? Could he have been the guy who called that first time, the confused call?'

  Marker thought about it for a second. 'Yeah, you know, he could have been,' she said slowly. 'Yeah, you know...'

  After a few more questions, Rinker said, 'I just want to reiterate: I was very careful coming here, very careful about wire taps and even bugs in your apartment. So nobody knows. If anybody ever knows, you're dead.'

  Marker nodded rapidly. 'Okay. Good. That's good.'

  'I learned a trick in a previous business of mine, when I was much younger,' Rinker said. 'And that was, how to forget. You'd just say, "Okay, that never happened. I just dreamed it." And pretty soon, whatever happened becomes like a dream, and you start to forget it.'

  'You're forgot,' Marker said fervently. 'Honest to God, you're forgot.'

  Before she left town, Rinker stopped at a bank and rented a safe-deposit box. She paid a year in advance, wiped the gun, and left it in the box. Next time she was through the area in her car, she'd pick it up.

  From the airport, Rinker dialed Carmel's magic cell phone, and Carmel answered on the second buzz: 'Yes.'

  'You know that guy we saw on TV?' Rinker asked.

  'Yes.'

  'He was here. For sure.'

  'Shit. I wonder how he knew?'

  'Don't know,' Rinker said. 'I'll be back tonight at ten-fifteen on Northwest.'

  'I'll pick you up. I think we're cool for this very moment, but we can talk when you get back.'

  On the plane, eyes covered with a black sleeping mask, Rinker dozed, and between small patches of sleep she thought about Carmel. She could solve quite a few problems by simply killing the other woman. But there were problems with that. Carmel wasn't stupid, and she might already have taken out some kind of insurance: a note written in a check book, or left in a safe deposit box, with what she knew about Rinker. A note that would be found only after she was dead. Another problem: this Davenport guy was as close to Rinker as he was to Carmel. How had he gotten there? Did he know even more? Was he digging around the bar in Wichita? Carmel was a source of information about Davenport, which could be important...

  A final reason not to kill Carmel: Rinker actually liked her. Like some kind of sister, something Rinker had never had. Rinker smiled when she thought of Carmel's invitation to do Mexico. She'd been planning to go, by God, and if they got out of this, she would. Get a couple of thong bikinis and a nice close bikini wax, some of those drinks with little paper umbrellas and lots of pineapple, and maybe do a couple of those Mexican dudes.

  As to Davenport himself, Rinker had read the BizWiz report, and Davenport sounded like a smart guy. And mean: he was a stone killer, no doubt about it. He was like one of those Mafia guys she'd known, a guy running a big coin-op company or garbage-hauler, a businessman who kept a gun in his pocket.

  Of course, she'd killed three or four of those. Not even geniuses were bulletproof.

  In Minneapolis, sitting in front of a muted television, Carmel considered the possibilities. Maybe, if she had a chance, she should kill Pamela, or whatever her name was. It would only make sense, from a criminal-defense point of view. There really was only one perfect witness against Carmel, and if Pamela were gone, then Davenport could go shit in his hat.

  She sighed, got up and wandered into the kitchen, got a glass of orange juice. She'd really hate to kill the other woman: she actually liked her. Pamela could become a friend, for God's sakes, the first real one Carmel would ever have had.

  She sipped the juice and wandered back past all of her perfect black-and-white photos, barely seeing them. If she was thinking about killing Pamela, then it was probable that the other woman was thinking about killing her. And maybe was equally reluctant to do it, for some of the same reasons.

  If things should change, Carmel thought, if it became really necessary to get rid of Pamela, she damn well better move first and fast. She wouldn't have a second chance. She glanced at her watch. Time to go get her at the airport.

  Rinker tossed her light bag in the back seat of the Volvo, and Carmel said, 'I can think of three possibilities.'

  'Which are?'

  'We do nothing. I sat down with a legal pad tonight and tried to work out the worst possible scenario. I can't see how they could ever, ever have come up with enough against us to arrest either one of us. If they did, I don't see how they could convict either one of us, unless you've left fingerprints behind or dropped your billfold or something.

  'Nothing like that,' Rinker said. 'What are the other two possibilities?'

  'Our major problem is Davenport. Forget the FBI, forget these other cops who are digging around. If we get rid of Davenport, they'll never figure out who we are. On the other hand, getting rid of him would be more than risky, it'd be dangerous. He's not only violent, he's lucky. One time he was shot in the throat and would have died, except a surgeon was standing right there with a jackknife and did an emergency tracheotomy and they made it to the hospital...'

  'Are you joking?'

  'No.'

  'Ah, man, that's the most scary thing you've said about him: that he's lucky.'
>
  'The third possibility is that we set up and run a little play - a little pageant - that would somehow make all these killings make sense. The alternative theory: it's one way you can beat what seems like an open-and-shut case against a client. Give the jury something that makes more sense, or seems to... If we created exactly the right pageant, even if

  Davenport knew there was something wrong with it, they couldn't get out of it.'

  'What are you recommending?' Rinker asked.

  'Number one. Do nothing. Sit and wait. I don't think anything more will happen. We know the cops are on the phone in Washington, so we never use it again. I'd love to see their file on the case, but that won't happen unless they make a move on Hale...'