“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’ll ever know,” Mallard said. “Until we want them to. Where can I call you direct?”
Lucas gave him a number and 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 got a 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 the Tennex 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.”
“But you know what?” Sherrill asked, sitting up. “Rolo’s contacts, his drug supply, mostly came out of St. Louis, which was unusual. At the time, most of our traffic came out of L.A.; it was just shifting over to Chicago back then. St. Louis was nothing—never had been, and never was again after Rolo went down.”
“And this shooter . . .”
“Has contacts in the St. Louis mob. That’s what the Feebs say.”
“That’s something,” Lucas said. “Maybe we can work with that.”
CARMEL LOAN was sitting in her office; she could feel Hale Allen’s touch from the night before, the balls of his thumbs on either side of her spine . . . She was trying to read a deposition, but her eyes defocused and she suddenly giggled. The man was unnaturally sexual; a memory popped into her head, she thought it was from a movie, somewhere back in time, a woman telling a man, “Women don’t want sex. Women want love.”
What complete drivel, she thought. Women want sex; they just also want love. And this must be it, she thought, giggling in the middle of the day. She remembered exactly how he’d taken her by the . . .
Her phone rang, a private outside line, and she started, found herself, took a breath and pulled herself back to the day. “Carmel,” she said. Not many people had this number.
“You remember me?” the voice asked.
“Sure.”
“Why don’t you send me a few bucks?”
“Whatever you say, pal. At twenty percent?”
“Carmel Loan-Shark, hey?” He laughed at his own pun. “But I’m selling, not borrowing.”
“I don’t think I’m in the market for anything right now. But whattaya got?”
“First of all, ya gotta agree not to do anything about it for a day or two. Not many people know about this, and if you come charging over here, they could figure me out as your source.”
“Okay. So what is it?”
“Lucas Davenport, Tommy Black and Marcy Sherrill put together a photo spread for some witness to look at, in those killings over in Dinkytown.”
“Okay . . .” She was casual, but she felt a chill.
“Guess whose face was in the spread?”
“Uh, the Virgin Mary’s.”
“Very close, but no cigar. Actually, your face was in the spread.”
“Mine?” She was shocked, and let it show through. The guy on the other end of the line was a cop.
“Yup. I don’t know why. Maybe because they had a picture, because there were a bunch of other faces in there. The weather girl on Channel Three was in there . . . they were looking for tall blondes.”
“Maybe that’s it,” Carmel said. “But it pisses me off.”
“Thought you’d like to know.”
“Watch your mailbox,” she said.
“I will,” he said, with a purr of pleasure.
Some people, Carmel thought when she hung up, get hot at the prospect of cash. Not because of what it can buy, or what it may represent, but just with the pure, smooth, slightly greasy feel of currency. The cop was one of those. She didn’t understand it; bu
t then, she’d never tried very hard. She was grateful the need existed, and that she could fill it. A couple of cops had been useful over the years.
After she thought about it for a while, she took a walk out to a pay phone, punched in Rinker’s number and left a message.
THIRTEEN
Bright and early the next morning—a cool morning that promised heat in the afternoon, with pale blue skies that went on forever—Mallard called Lucas from Washington. The call came in an hour before Lucas had planned to get out of bed; he took it in the kitchen.
“We have some news on the Tennex connection,” he said as Lucas yawned and scratched. “I’ve also got a question. Two questions.”
“What’s the news?”
“There is no Tennex Messenger Service, as far as we can tell, and never has been.”
“That’s nice,” Lucas said.
“That’s what I thought. The phone number goes into a suite of short-term offices. There’re a couple of receptionists out front from eight o’clock in the morning until seven at night. In the back, there’re a couple more women running a high-tech switchboard. The switchboard works around the clock. The offices are rented by the week or the month, mostly by businessmen here to lobby the government. They’re about two-thirds full at any given time. Each of the offices has an individual number, which the switchboard women answer with the name of whoever is renting it at the moment. The answering service calls come in on separate numbers, which the switchboard women answer with a specific name, depending on which number rings. Tennex only has the answering service. No office.”
“So who pays the bills? Where do the checks come from?”
“We don’t know yet. We want to listen on the Tennex line for a couple more days before we talk to the people who run the place. But I’ll tell you what—and this is my question— Did one of your people, a woman, call Tennex from a pay phone yesterday evening?”
“No.”
“Somebody from Minneapolis did,” Mallard said. “The only phone call that came in all day.”
“Huh . . . what time?”
“Around five-thirty, our time.”
“Huh. We took a photo spread over to a little girl who actually saw the shooters . . . you probably read about her, in the files.”
“Yes.”
“We had a photo spread with the face of our suspect inserted in it. We got nothing, but that wouldn’t have been long before your call. And I’ll tell you what: this woman’s got some contacts inside our department. Probably inside yours, as far as that goes.”
“Ours didn’t know about the photo spread.”
“All right—if there was a leak, it was us. If there was a leak . . . but damnit, I would have leaked to her myself, if I’d known she might call. Do you have a recording of the voice?”
There was a brief pause, as if Mallard were contemplating the stupidity of the question. “Of course,” he said.
“I want to hear it,” Lucas said. “I know the suspect personality, I’ve spoken to her in the past week. Maybe I could nail it down.”
“Which leads to my second question,” Mallard said. “What’s her name?”
“Jesus . . .”
“I’ve got to have it. This is turning into something. As long as your case was nothing more than an intuition, it was one thing. Now it’s another.”
“She’s a well-connected defense attorney here in town. A millionaire, probably. And I know she gives money to the politicians—U.S. senators, congressmen, you name it. If you fuck this up, they could find us both buried in the backyard.”
“Three people here will have the name. That’s all. If we’re buried in the backyard, the other two guys’ll be buried under us, I guarantee it.”
Lucas sighed, hesitated, and said, “All right. Her name is Carmel Loan. I can’t tell you how nervous this makes me.”
“Huh. The woman who called yesterday identified herself as Patricia Case.”
“I’ll check around, but I’ve never heard of her,” Lucas said. He picked up the St. Paul phone book, thumbed through it to Case.
“Could be some kind of code,” Mallard said. “Although that’s pretty farfetched.”
“Tennex Messenger Service is farfetched. Did you get a location on the pay phone?”
“Yeah, just a minute. Uh, it’s at 505 Nicollet Mall.”
“Five-oh-five,” Lucas muttered as he ran his finger down the Case listing in the phone book. He said, half to himself, “There aren’t any Patricia Cases listed in the St. Paul phone book. I don’t have the Minneapolis book here at the house.”
“We already checked, and there aren’t any Patricia Cases. We also checked the 505 number, and got some department stores. There’s a Neiman Marcus.”
“That’s an easy two-minute walk from Carmel Loan’s office,” Lucas said. “I can check, but it might be the closest pay phone to Carmel’s office.”
“Interesting,” Mallard said.
“Please don’t let anything out about Carmel,” Lucas said urgently. “Not yet.”
“Nothing will come out of this end. I swear to God.”
“One more thing,” Lucas said. “When are you going to hit this place? The office suite? Go in and talk to the people?”
“We’ll give it another day, anyway.”
“Call me the night before. I’m three hours away. I’d like to be there when you do it.”
“No problem. Anything else?”
“One other thing . . . one of the victims, Rolando D’Aquila, used to be a heavy drug dealer. The word from our drug people is that he bought his coke out of St. Louis, a Mafia connection down there. Not Colombian or Mexican, but old-line Mafia. And this shooter, his woman, she seems to tie in down there.”
“Damn,” Mallard said, “I’m letting something happen here that I’ve never let happen before.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m getting my hopes up.”
THEN, FOR TWO DAYS, nothing happened. Carmel didn’t get a call back. She stayed close to the magic phone, but she never heard from Rinker. Was there a problem with the contact phone? Was it tapped?
The FBI was equally frustrated. There were no more calls to Tennex: nothing. At the end of the second day, Mallard called Lucas back. “We’re going in tomorrow, if nothing happens to slow us down. We want to get in before the end of the week.”
“I’ll get a flight out tonight.”
“We can cover that, if you want,” Mallard offered.
“No, thanks, I’ll do it from here.”
“All right. Anything new?”
“I sent one of my people, Marcy Sherrill, down to St. Louis to schmooze their organized crime people. There’s nothing going on up here.”
“If Sherrill’s the one I remember from the meeting, she oughta schmooze pretty well.”
“One of her many talents,” Lucas said. “See you tomorrow.”
LUCAS CALLED his travel agent, got a business-class ticket on the nine o’clock Northwest flight into Washington and made a reservation at the Hay-Adams. He liked the Hay-Adams because, the half-dozen times he’d stayed there—even the first time—the doorman said, “Nice to see you again, sir.”
Then he called Donnal O’Brien at D.C. Homicide and said, “Hey, Irish.”
“Jesus Christ, the outer precincts are heard from,” O’Brien said. “How’n the hell are you, Lucas?”
“Good. I’m coming to town tonight. I’d like to get together tomorrow, if you’ve got the time.”
“Want me to get you at the airport?”
“I’ll be really late,” Lucas said. O’Brien had four kids to take care of. “I’ll get a cab down to the Hay-Adams. I’ll do my thing with the Feebs tomorrow morning, and make it over to your shop by when? Three o’clock?”
“I’ll plan on three. Maybe go out for a couple beers, huh?”
“See you then,” Lucas said.
THE FLIGHT to Washington was a nightmare: nothing wrong with the plane, the flying conditions were perfect,
and the trip was on schedule, but airplanes—winged planes, not helicopters—were the only real phobia that Lucas was aware that he had. He dreaded getting on one, sat rigidly braced for impact from the time the plane backed away from the departure gate until it nosed into the destination gate and was never really convinced that he’d survived until he was walking through the terminal at the other end.
As they came into Washington, he had a postcard view of the Washington Monument. He ignored it. There was no point in looking at the view when you were only seconds away from flaming death. Somehow, the plane got down, and the stewardesses suppressed their panic well enough to smile at him and thank him for flying Northwest.
The Hay-Adams was excellent, as usual. The White House, framed in the window over the desk, looked like an expensive 3-D photo reproduction, of the kind found in commercial aquariums—until you understood that it was real.
He slept very well, having been properly welcomed back.
MALLARD ARRIVED at ten o’clock in the morning in a blue Chevy, followed by another blue Chevy carrying three more agents. Lucas was waiting just inside the door, and when he saw Mallard step out of the car, pushed through to the sidewalk: “Nice hotel,” Mallard said, looking up at the Hay-Adams façade. “I once got to stay in a Holiday Inn with suites. I didn’t get a suite, but I walked past the door to one.”
“If you guys treat me right, I’ll let you stand in the lobby while I have dinner tonight,” Lucas said.
“You’re all heart,” Mallard said. He was wearing a blue suit with a dark blue necktie with tiny red dots on it. He had a stainless-steel cup full of coffee in the Chevy’s cupholder. He took a sip and said, “If you want some, we can stop at a Starbucks.”
“I’m fine,” Lucas said. “Why all the troops?”
“There are five of them—the two receptionists, the two women on the switchboard, and the manager—so I thought there ought to be five of us.”
“Yeah? Well, if they charge, go for the lead one,” Lucas said as he got comfortable in the lumpy front seat. “If you can turn the lead one, the rest of them usually follow.”
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