Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  'Well, no, I haven't,' Carmel said. She felt a crawling sensation on the back of her neck: this was it, the beginning of the end game. 'Not since day before yesterday - I had to work last night. I did talk to him last night, though. Sometime about 11 o'clock, I think.'

  'Well, I don't know what to do,' the secretary said. 'He missed a closing this morning, and people are upset. He could miss another one if he's not here in die next twenty minutes. That's not like him.'

  'How about his cell phone? That's permanently attached to him.'

  'It rings, but there's no answer.'

  'Huh. Well, maybe we ought to check with a neighbor or something,' Carmel said. 'I'd go, but I don't have a key, and I do have a court date.'

  'I've got a key,' the secretary said, the concern right on the surface of her voice. 'He keeps an emergency key in his desk drawer. I can go over...'

  'You don't think anything's happened, do you?' Carmel asked. She put concern in her own voice. 'I

  bet he just lost track of time somewhere, he was talking about buying a new sport coat...'

  'He was supposed to be here at nine o'clock.That's a lot of time,' the secretary said.

  'Now you've got me worried,' Carmel said. 'Keep me posted.'

  As the secretary, whose name was Alice Miller, hung up, it occurred to her she'd just had her most congenial conversation with Carmel Loan, who tended to treat secretaries like unavoidable morons. Allen, she thought, was known for a certain mellowing effect he had on women...

  When Allen didn't show up for the next closing, she apologized for him, told the participants that she was very concerned, that he hadn't been heard from; that she was going to his house to check on him. She felt increasing concern as she drove out to Allen's house. And once there, she called back to the firm to make sure he hadn't shown up in the meantime. He hadn't.

  Miller got out of the car and looked up the driveway. Remembered what had happened to Allen's wife; started up the drive. The house felt occupied, but quiet: a bad vibration. She stopped in the driveway and said, 'Oh, God,' and crossed herself.

  The front door was open an inch, and she called, 'Hale? It's Alice. Hale?'

  No answer. She stepped inside, and some atavistic cell deep in Alice Miller's brain, a cell that had never

  before been called upon, triggered, and Alice Miller smelled human blood.

  Knew what it was, somehow, deep in the brain. Clutched her purse to her breasts and took three more steps into the house, leaned sideways, looked into the hall...

  At Hale Allen's shattered skull.

  She may have screamed there, inside the house. Later, she couldn't remember. For sure, she turned and ran toward the front door, still clutching her purse, turned just before she got to the door to look back, to see that Hale Allen's corpse wasn't following her, and ran straight into the door jamb.

  The blow nearly knocked her down. She dropped the purse, dazed, struck out, and pushed her hand through the glass window on the storm door. Now she did scream, a low wavering cry, and clutching her bleeding arm, she managed to get outside, where she ran down the driveway. A man was walking his dog along the curb, and she ran at him, whimpering, bleeding badly from the arm cuts.

  'Help me,' she cried. 'Please please please...'

  The responding cops thought Alice Miller probably had something to do with the shooting, as cut up as she was. But the patrol sergeant who was second at the scene took a moment to walk through the house, to note the drying blood on the floor and the fresh blood on the door. He listened to Alice as she sat on the grass next to the squad car, and finally said, 'Call

  Davenport. And somebody ride this lady into the hospital.'

  Sherrill and Black got to Hale Allen's house five minutes before Lucas. Black looked at Allen's body and said, 'Totally awesome. Somebody shot the shit out of him.'

  'Poor guy,' Sherrill said. Her lip trembled, and Black patted her on the back.

  'How long was Carmel loose last night?' Black asked. 'You didn't go back, did you?'

  'No, but John Hosta did. She came downstairs at one o'clock and went right home.'

  'This is a little different than the other ones,' Black said, looking closer at the gunshot pattern. 'Not a.22 for one thing. Bigger caliber. Still not huge, but bigger. And whoever shot him, really unloaded...'

  'Lover's quarrel,' Sherrill said.

  'Jesus, if we hadn't been watching Carmel, she could be in trouble,' Black said.

  'I don't know,' Sherrill said. 'To tell you the truth, they were still running pretty hot. I don't think they were at the shooting stage.'

  'Maybe he blew her off, maybe...'

  A cop at the door called in to them: 'Davenport's here.'

  'All right,' Sherrill said. 'Let's talk.'

  Lucas was in a cold rage: he should have thought of this. He should have understood that Hale Allen might

  be in trouble. Had Allen discovered something? Had Carmel told him something in pillow talk? Something that led to accusations?

  Sherrill walked him through the house, watching him. 'Take it easy,' she said, once. 'You're gonna have a goddamned heart attack.'

  'I'm not gonna have a goddamned heart attack,' Lucas grated.

  'Your blood pressure is about two hundred over two hundred. I know the signs, remember?'

  'Off my case,' he said. 'And tell me about Carmel.'

  'She was loose for a while last night,' Sherrill said. 'More than an hour.'

  'It'd take a hell of a coincidence,' Lucas said.

  'It'd take more than that,' Sherrill said. 'She would have had to leave the minute we did, get over here, work herself into a rage, shoot him, get away without any neighbors hearing the shots... it's bullshit.'

  'Maybe the other woman did it, the shooter,' Lucas said.

  'Look at the wounds,' she said. 'That looks like somebody who was pissed off, not a cold-blooded professional killer.'

  'But look at the group in the forehead... that looks like a pro.'

  'Yeah, but...'

  'This is ludicrous,' Lucas said. 'I don't even believe it.What happened to the woman who found the body? Alice...'

  'Alice Miller. She's getting her arm sewn up. She

  saw the body and took off and ran right through the door, put her hand through the glass.'

  'She's not...'

  'No. She came here looking for him, because he'd missed a couple of serious appointments, and she couldn't get through to him,' Sherrill said. 'Besides, even if she was a put-up deal, did you ever hear of anybody slicing up their arm for verisimilitude?'

  'Veri what?' Lucas eyes slipped over to her, and she caught the unspoken amusement, out-of-place as it might be.

  'Fuck you,' she said. 'I know some multi-syllabic words.'

  'I've just never heard that spoken before,' Lucas said. His minuscule grin slipped back into the cold stare. 'I need to talk to Carmel.'

  A uniformed cop stuck his head in the door: 'The Miller woman is calling from the hospital. She wants to talk to whoever's in charge.'

  'Probably you,' Lucas said to Sherrill.

  Sherrill nodded and went to take it, and somebody laughed and yelled at somebody outside the door: crime-scene crew was coming in. Lucas met the crew chief at the door and said, 'About a million people have already trampled through, but nobody's been past his feet. I need every goddamned thread and hair and print and stain you can find.'

  'Bad news?'

  'This is very bad news,' Lucas said. 'The newspapers are gonna tear us a new asshole.'

  Sherrill was back, moving fast: 'You remember Allen had a girlfriend, Louise Clark, had an affair with her, before his wife was killed? Before he started seeing Carmel?'

  'Yeah?'

  'Miller was calling to tell us that Louise Clark also didn't make it into work today. And as far as Miller knows, Clark didn't call in to tell people she wouldn't make it. Miller isn't her supervisor or anything, just heard she wasn't around, and didn't really put it together with Allen...'

&nb
sp; 'All right,' Lucas said. 'Let's get her address and get over there. Goddamnit, what is this? What is this?'

  Louise Clark was a fine picture of a murder-suicide, stretched across her bed in her pretty pink negligee, the gun fallen away from her hand on the pillow. The gun had a silencer screwed onto the snout.

  Lucas brought a kitchen chair into the bedroom and reversed it at the end of the bed and sat down, his arms on the back of the chair, his chin on his hands, and stared at her. Another cop came in and looked at him, and then at Sherrill: Sherrill shrugged and the cop made a screw-loose gesture at his temple, and backed out of the room.

  After two minutes of staring at the body, Lucas said, 'It's perfect.'

  'Perfect?'

  'Someplace in this house, we're gonna find either a

  gun, or shells, or something else, that'll tie her to the earlier shootings. The only thing we won't find is, we'll do some swabs and there won't be any semen. Usually, there's semen, and there won't be any, because they couldn't do that. And we'll get the ME to check Allen, and he won't have had sex in the last twenty-four hours, because they couldn't do that, either.'

  'By they, you mean...'

  'Carmel and the shooter-chick.'

  Sherrill looked at him for a moment, wordlessly, then turned and walked back out of the room, only to return three seconds later: 'Lucas, I could make a pretty good case that Louise Clark is the shooter-chick. She was sleeping with Allen; she's a low-level secretary, and if she gets rid of the old lady, and she marries Allen, she goes from being poor and single to rich and married. She's got the motive... she's got the gun.'

  'Where'd a goddamn low-level secretary get a silencer like that?' Lucas snarled. 'You buy a silencer like that on the black market, it'd cost you a grand. And who did the tooling on the muzzle? Did you find a machine-shop in the basement?'

  'No, but Lucas... what if she's the shooter, and she knows Carmel that way? What if Carmel's her lawyer?'

  'And Carmel starts screwing her boyfriend, knowing that the woman she's kicking out of the saddle is a professional killer? Bullshit. Nope: this is a set-up.

  That's why there won't be any semen, and that's why we're gonna find a gun,' Lucas said. 'When you said you could make a pretty good case that Clark is a shooter, you're exactly right. You could. And a pro defense attorney like Carmel could make an even better one. She could make a perfect case. Trying to get anyone else for these murders is pointless: we'll never do it.'

  'What're we gonna do?'

  'I don't know what you're gonna do,' Lucas said, standing up. 'But I'm going up north. You can handle this fuckin' thing.'

  Lucas arrived at his cabin a little after five o'clock, driving back roads most of the way to dodge the Wisconsin state patrol, the most rapacious gang of weasels in the North Woods. As he drove, the image of the dead Louise Clark hung before his eyes.

  Then, just before the turnoff for his cabin, he saw a neighbor, Roland Marks, driving an orange Kubota tractor along the side of the road. The tractor had an oversized loader on one end, and a backhoe on the other. Lucas pulled off and climbed out of the car, and Marks rode the throttle back to idle.

  'What the hell are you doing?' Lucas asked, walking around the tractor. Louise Clark began to fade.

  'Gonna clear me off some snowmobile trails on the back,' Marks said. Marks had forty acres of brush, gullies and swamp across the road. He called it his huntin' property.

  'You don't know how to drive a tractor,' Lucas said. 'You're a goddamn stockbroker.'

  'Yeah? Watch this.' Marks drove the backhoe down a shallow slope into the roadside ditch; did something with the controls, set the brake, turned his seat around backwards, lowered hydraulic support pads on both sides of the tractor, and raised the bucket. With one slow chop, he took a couple of cubic feet of dirt out of the bottom on the ditch.

  'How much did that thing cost?' Lucas asked, impressed despite himself.

  'About seventeen, used,' Marks said, meaning seventeen thousand dollars. 'Got four hundred hours on her.'

  'Jesus, you're starting to talk like a shitkicker.'

  'What're you doing this evening?' Marks asked.

  'Going out in the boat.'

  'Why don't you come over? I'll check you out on this thing.' He carefully dumped the dirt back in the hole where he'd gotten it; only half of it slopped over the edge.

  'Yeah? What time?'

  'Half-hour?'

  'See you in a half-hour.'

  Lucas turned the pump and the water heater on, got a light spinning rod and carried it down the dock and flipped a Moss Boss out into a shallow area spotted with water lilies. The Moss Boss slid and skated frog-like through the lilies and reeds, back up to the dock.

  He threw it out again, then again, and on the third cast, a bass hit. He fought it in, unhooked it, dropped it back in the water. A twelve-incher, and fun; but he didn't eat bass.

  He flipped the Moss Boss around the dock for twenty minutes, taking three small bass, tossing them all back, feeling his shoulders loosen up. Louise Clark was almost gone. After the last cast, he walked back up the sloping lawn to the cabin, got four cold Leinies out of the refrigerator, put them in a grocery sack, and had one foot out the door when the phone rang.

  He stopped, thought about it, shook his head at his own foolishness, and went back.

  'Yeah?'

  'Sherrill. I'm down at the ME's. They're doing the autopsy on Louise Clark.'

  'Anything, yet?'

  'Yeah. She'd had sex shortly before she was killed. The semen hadn't been dissipated yet, and they got a pretty good sample. But to tell you the truth, I figure there's only one place it could have come from.'

  'Man! I don't believe that,' Lucas said. He was shocked. 'What about Allen?'

  'They haven't started on him, but I'll let you know. If you want to know.'

  'Of course, I want to know...'

  'Okay. And there's more stuff. We found the gun, just like you said. It's a Colt.22 with a silencer. Stuffed inside a boot in the closet. And we found a couple hundred bucks worth of cocaine in the bedside table.

  There's the connection to Rolo. Crime scene found some pubic hair in Allen's bed. In fact, they've got three different samples. Most of it comes from Allen, but some of it's blonde, and that'd be Carmel - but there's a third sample that's this mousy-brown color. We don't have the lab work yet, but I know it came from Clark. I know it.'

  'All right. Call me back when they get to Allen. Keep pushing the ME, don't let them put anything off until tomorrow. We need it now...'

  'You going fishing?'

  'Actually, I was on my way out the door. A neighbor's gonna teach me to run a backhoe.'

  'Speaking of backhoes...'

  'What?'

  'You never told me that special agent Malone of the FBI was a woman. And a woman with a sexy voice who wants to dance with you.'

  'Didn't seem relevant,' Lucas grunted. 'Our relationship is purely professional.'

  'She wants you to call her, in Wichita. I've got a number.'

  Malone picked up the phone on the first ring. 'Hello, Lucas Davenport,' she said. 'I'm told you're off rusticating.'

  'Fishing,' Lucas said.

  'I wanted you to know that I'm moving up to Minneapolis with my group, and Mallard is coming in from Washington. We're very interested in this

  Louise Clark. Very interested.'

  'There's something wrong with the whole thing. Did Sherrill tell you about the semen?'

  'No, nothing...'

  Lucas summarized his conversation with Sherrill and Malone said, 'If the semen checks out, if the DNA checks out... that's it.'

  'Makes me feel weird,' Lucas said. 'It's not right. This Clark isn't a pro killer, not unless she was doing it for the fun of it. Because she didn't have any goddamn money.'

  'Could have had it hidden away.'

  'Bullshit,' Lucas said. 'She kills people, but hides it all away? The inside of her house looked like a cut-rate motel. She had a TV set t
hat couldn't have been worth more than a couple hundred bucks, new. Everything in the place said she was a secretary, and struggling to keep her head above water.'

  'All right. Well, I'm coming in tomorrow. Maybe, when you get back, you can take me out for a nice little foxtrot somewhere - some place where you won't spend all of your time dancing with the waitress.'

  Lucas carried the sack of beer next door to the Marks' place. Lucy Marks was snipping the heads off played-out coneflowers as her husband maneuvered the Kubota in and out of a shed. The shed showed splintered wood at the side of one of the doors, evidence of a recent impact.