Certain Prey (20 page)

FIFTEEN

Lucas was sitting in his office, pushing deeper into the Equality Report. Reading the perfect, politically correct prose had become a Zen-like exercise. The words flowed softly and without meaning through his brain, an unending stream of nonsense syllables that eventually metamorphosed into a cosmic hum, and allowed other ideas to bubble up.

He was on page ninety-four when Carmel knocked. He thought it was Sloan: “Yeah, for Christ’s sake, come in.”

Carmel opened the door and stuck her head in. Surprised, Lucas stood up. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I thought it was somebody else.”

“A little mistake like that is nothing compared to what you’re
gonna
get into,” Carmel said, stepping into the office, pushing the door closed. She put one fist on her hip and said, “A little birdie told me you stuck my face into a photo spread on that Dinkytown murder. The Blanca chick and the other guy. I want to know why.”

“We were looking for photographs of long-legged blondes, and you were available,” Lucas said, his voice flat.

“Bullshit,” she said. Her mouth was like a short stretch of barbed wire. She dropped into the visitors’ chair opposite him and stretched her legs out, but didn’t really settle in: she was like a spring, all squeezed down and about to explode. “So
why
? You
are
fucking with me, and if I don’t get a good reason, I’ll see you in court and let the judge ask you why.”

Lucas nodded: “It’d be an interesting lawsuit. I don’t know what you could possibly sue us for.”

“Some of the best civil lawyers in the U.S. fuckin’ A. sit down the hall from me, and I don’t doubt that they could find ten reasons that a judge would like,” she said, her voice glassy-edged. “For one thing, I represented Rolando D’Aquila and several of his associates in the past, and now you’re hauling my picture around and showing it to people around this crime. Are you trying to discredit me as an attorney? It might seem so.”

“All right, you’re smarter than I am, Carmel,” Lucas said. “You want the real reason? The reason is that a witness who probably saw the killers described one of the women in a way that you resemble. And you admitted to several people that you knew and represented Rolando D’Aquila, and not only that, that you were representing a man suspected of hiring somebody to kill his wife—a murder committed by the same person or persons who committed the D’Aquila killing. So far, you are the
only
connection we can find between the killing of Barbara Allen and the killing of the other three. And that’s why we took the photos around; and if you don’t like it . . .”

“What?”

“Tough shit.”

They sat staring at each other for a few seconds, then Carmel smiled quickly and said, “All right. I wanted to know.” She stood up to leave. “I didn’t have anything to do with any of these killings. I’ve been trying to work out in
my head how they could have happened, and I can’t come up with anything.”

“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 doorjamb—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.
L
UCAS
LEANED BACK
in his chair, fighting back the little trickle of adrenaline. 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

C l o A N

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. Just like that: C Loan.
“G
ODDAMNIT,
C
ARMEL,
” 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.
”
R
INKER
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 fryer 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.
L
OUISE
M
ARKER
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 Ms. 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?”