Certain Prey (19 page)

“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 sake . . .”

“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.”
B
ELL
BROUGHT
M
ARKER
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—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 ago, 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.”

“I’m sorry,” Mallard said.

“They said it was all the chemicals from the dry-cleaning,” Marker said. “I’ll probably go that way myself. A lot of us do.”
T
HERE
WAS MORE,
but nothing significant. They released Marker, and Mallard drove Lucas to the Hay-Adams, retrieved his bag from the luggage room and took him to the airport.

“So you think she’s gone,” Mallard said.

“Yeah. And I think I’m the guy who tipped her off by calling into Tennex.”

“Nothing to do about that,” Mallard said. “You were just running checks on a list of phone numbers. It was a long shot.”

“Yeah, but Jesus. That close.”

“We’ve still got a lot to work with—all those checks, all the phone calls. We’ve got something now. I’ll bet we have some kind of description of her in a week. I’ll bet we unravel some kind of connection.”

“How much?”

“What?”

“How much will you bet?”

Mallard sucked on his teeth for a moment, then said, “About a dime, I guess.”

Lucas nodded. “Get me to the plane on time.”
T
HE
PLANE,
as it happened, was going to Minneapolis— with a stop in Detroit.

“Aw, no, I gotta fly direct,” Lucas told the check-in attendant.

“Nothing tonight, except through Detroit,” the clerk
said, punching up her computer. “We could get you on a flight tomorrow morning that goes straight through.”

“Aw, man . . .”

He went through Detroit, miserably suffering through two takeoffs and landings. He was surprised at the safe landing in Detroit, but quickly convinced himself that it would be the second half of the flight, the unnecessary half, that would kill him, so achingly close to home . . .

As miserable as he was, two things occurred to him:

Wichita, Kansas, was a large enough city that it might attract the eye of somebody who traveled out of town to make her calls; but Marker had said the killer was
angry
when she called from Wichita. Was it possible that she lived close to Wichita, and made spur-of-the-moment calls out of anger when something went wrong with the answering service? He got the airline flight magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him, and looked at the flight map again. Wichita, he thought, would be as viable a hometown as Springfield. Something to think about.

The second thing came to him as they were landing in Minneapolis: he was looking down at one of the lakes where he expected the impact to occur—he could see himself struggling to get out of the flooding cabin, but his legs and arms were broken and he couldn’t unfasten the seat belt—and the name
Des Moines
popped into his head.

If the killer came from either Springfield or Wichita or virtually anyplace around those cities, and if she were driving to Minneapolis, she’d go through Des Moines.

If she had done that, he thought, she’d be here now.

He looked down at the broad multicolored grid of lights that made up the Cities and thought,
Somewhere.

FOURTEEN

Carmel didn’t understand the silence: days had passed since she’d left the message for Pamela—if Pamela was her name, which Carmel doubted. Still, she should have gotten back.

Had something happened to her? Had Carmel’s name come up through Pamela—had Pamela been caught? Was she in one of those stainless-steel federal pens somewhere, sweating through the sensory-deprivation stage of a multi-level interrogation? Was the phone connection corrupt, or discontinued, or worse, tapped? What was going on?

She’d worked through her defense two hundred times, and all two hundred times, she’d walked. The cops didn’t have a case, couldn’t have a case. There was nothing to build a case on—unless that little girl had identified her.

Her contact with the cops said that nothing had come of the photo spread, but
Davenport
was running this routine, and he was worse than tricky, he was
bad.
If he was sure that she was involved, he might be sticking together a morality play, to frame her. With nothing more than a sliver of evidence, a woman could go to prison for life, if a jury didn’t approve of her lifestyle.

She shouldn’t have fucked Hale, that was the truth of the matter. Just shouldn’t have. Should have waited. Even if there was no proof, if a jury found out she’d fucked Hale the night before his dead wife’s funeral, she was history. And where in the hell was Pamela?

She was in her apartment, trying to work, when the phone rang. She glanced at her watch: probably Hale, but she said, “Be Pamela.”

And Rinker said, “You got time for a drink?”

Casually: “Sure, where are you? I’d hoped you’d call.”

“Remember that place we went, the bar where we saw the guy with the cowboy scarf? Let’s go there.”

“Oh, sure. An hour from now?”

“Be careful, though; it’s dark around there. You’ll get eaten by a stalker.”

“I’ll bring my switchblade,” Carmel said, laughing. “See you in an hour.”

STALKER? Pamela thought Carmel was being followed? Is that what that meant? And the place where they saw the guy with the red silk cowboy scarf wasn’t a bar, but the lobby of her hotel. Was that where she wanted to meet?

Before she left her apartment, Carmel changed into a loose long-sleeved silk blouse, jet black, with black slacks and a small gold necklace. Ten minutes after she hung up the phone, she was on the street in the Volvo. She took a twisting route out of downtown Minneapolis, eased along a one-way lane on the edge of the Kenwood area, past homes of the rich and the strange, and checked her back trail: nothing.

But if what she’d read about complicated tags was right, the cops might have three or four cars following her, changing off, some in front, some behind. She pulled over to the side of the lane, waited two minutes: nothing went by. What if the car was wired, and they were following her from a distance?

No way she could tell that.

Besides, she was beginning to feel that she might be a little-delusional. She’d read hundreds of criminal files in her lifetime, and the heavy surveillance never started until the case was made. Before that, they were simply too expensive. The cops might go for a phone tap, or loose surveillance, but there wouldn’t be a multicar track across town.

She looked at her watch. She still had a half-hour before she was supposed to meet Pamela. She headed south, on and off I-35, round and round quiet city blocks, looking for anything that might be a follower. At the south end of the loop, a heavy jet roared five hundred feet overhead, and she turned, heading north, moving fast now. She took the Volvo straight into the hotel parking garage, got a ticket, left the car and took the stairs down to the lobby.

Rinker was sitting in a corner. She saw Carmel step out of the stairway, smiled, stood up and walked back to the elevators. She was just getting in the elevator car when Carmel caught up with her.

“Did you understand what I was saying on the phone?” Rinker asked as the elevator car started up.

“I think so. I’m not being followed, unless they’ve done something electronic, and I’d be willing to bet they haven’t—if they really think I’m involved, it’s way too early in the investigation to have twenty-four-hour surveillance. But right now, there’s nobody with me.”

“I sort of bet myself you’d be coming out of that stairwell,” Rinker said. “It’s what I would have done. Zip into the garage, take the stairs, they can’t stick too close behind or you’ll spot them . . . and by the time they sneak in, you’re in one of five hundred rooms.”

“They’ll go through five hundred rooms if they have to, if it gives them a professional killer,” Carmel said.

“Which is why I’m trying not to touch anything hard, except the TV remote control, the on and off faucets in the
bathroom, and a few things like that. I’ll wipe them before I leave.”

“What about the credit card?”

“Good card, fake name,” Rinker said.

“So what’s going on? I was worried when you didn’t call back, I thought they’d picked you up.”

“You tell
me
what’s going on. Why’d you call?” Rinker asked.

“This Davenport guy, the cop. Remember?”

Rinker nodded.

“He took some pictures over to show the little girl who saw us. I was in the photo spread.”

“Ah, jeez. Why?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got a contact in the police department, and nobody knows what’s going on. But apparently, the kid failed to identify me. Nothing came out of it.”

“But why would they take your picture over in the first place?”

“That’s the question,” Carmel said.
R
INKER
HAD
a room on the seventh floor. Inside, Rinker opened the mini-bar, took out two cans of Special Export. “I got glasses,” she said.

“Can’s fine,” Carmel said, popping the top. “I really didn’t expect you to come all the way back from . . . wherever. I just wanted to talk.”

“Yeah, well, I got a little problem of my own,” Rinker said. She sat on the bed and Carmel pulled the chair out from the tiny desk and sat down. “The day before you called me, I got another call, at the answering service. A guy who was supposedly trying to get in touch with Tennex. But when the receptionist asked if he wanted to leave a message, he said no. Then, two days later, the cops showed up. That’s all I know—cops were asking questions. I don’t have any easy way to find out more.”

“Huh.” Carmel thought about it for a minute, then took a cell phone out of her purse, and her address book. She checked a number, as Rinker watched, and punched it in. “Calling my guy,” Carmel said to Rinker. Then, into the phone: “This is Carmel. Anything else happen?” She listened for a moment, then said, “I stopped by to see Davenport a couple of times. He’s never in . . . Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, I’ll probably stop and see him tomorrow, then. Okay. And listen, I’ll send along another envelope. Keep your eyes and ears open; this thing is starting to scare me. I’m afraid they’re setting me up on something. Uh-huh. Well, you know Davenport. Uh-huh. Talk to you tomorrow.”

“What’d he say?” Rinker asked.

“He said Davenport was out of town, and the rumor was, he was at the FBI headquarters. In Washington.”

“Shit.” Rinker said it sharply, expelling breath. “What’s going on? They’re onto you
and
me? How could that happen?”

“I called you once from my apartment,” Carmel said. “This last time, I called from a pay phone, but I did call Tennex that one time, the first time, about Rolo, from my apartment. If they’re looking at my long-distance billing, if they’re checking everything . . .”

“Even if they were, how did they pick out Tennex? It’s a goddamn messenger service.”

“Maybe they picked on it because they couldn’t find anything behind it. Maybe just luck. What does Tennex mean? Would that mean something to somebody?”

“No. When we were setting this up, we were talking in the kitchen of this guy’s restaurant down in St. Louis, and we were wondering what to call the company, and I saw this name on this air filter thing he had there. Tennex. It sounded like something, so I said, ‘How about Tennex?’ ”

“So that’s not it.”

“I don’t see how,” Rinker said.

“All right. So we’ve got to do some prospecting.”

“Very carefully.”

“Very. And there’s something else,” Carmel said. “If it looks like I’m in trouble, why wouldn’t you just shoot me and walk away? I mean, that’s something we ought to talk about.”

“Well, I sorta think of you like . . . well, almost a friend,” Rinker said. “I mean, we’ve done some stuff together, and we get along, and we’re probably going to Mexico together, pick up some guys. So . . . I could ask you the same thing.”

“I don’t know how to find you,” Carmel said. “So I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.”

“If you need some other reason, I can give you one,” Rinker said, swallowing beer. “I gotta find out why I’m in trouble. These guys I work with—if the feds start snooping around, or your pal Davenport, all they’ve got to do is dump me, and
they’re
safe. They have a couple more people like me out there, and I’d walk out the front of my apartment someday and boom, that’d be it. So I gotta find out. If the feds start bugging my guys, I gotta know, and take some precautions.”

“These guys are . . . Mafia?”

Rinker shrugged. She looked like a slightly overaged cheerleader, bouncing softly on the hotel bed. “Yeah, I guess. If you’re gonna put a label on them. I mean, they’re Italian, most of them. Except Freddy, he’s Irish, or his grandfather was. And I guess Dave is like a Polack, they’re always giving him shit about it. They’re sorta the Mafia, but they’re more like a bunch of guys who watch NFL
Monday Night Football
and pick up stuff that falls off trucks. Some of them are pretty mean, though. Like Italian bikers.”

“Huh.” Carmel showed a small grin. “I thought it’d be more dignified than that.”

“Maybe back east. Not in St. Louis,” Rinker said.

“So are you gonna be around?”

“In and out of town, until we figure out what’s going on,” Rinker said. “I’m going to Washington tomorrow. I want to talk to this woman who runs the answering service.”

“What if they’re watching her?”

“Then I won’t talk to her,” Rinker said.

“I’m gonna try to get in touch with Davenport tomorrow, if he’s back. I’ll see what he has to say for himself.”

“Be careful.”

“Always.”

Rinker gave Carmel the name she was using at the hotel, and as Carmel was leaving, said, “Hey—this Davenport. Do you know where I could get a picture of him?”

Carmel shook her head. “No. I mean he’s probably been in the paper any number of times, but I don’t . . . wait a minute. I bet I do know. He also ran a company called Davenport Simulations, computer-simulation things for cops. If you check the library, the business section, the local business magazines, I bet you’d find something.”

“Cut the page out with a razor . . .”

“Don’t get caught,” Carmel said. “The library people can be mean pricks when it comes to people cutting up their magazines.”