Certain Prey (25 page)

“Go, honey.”

“You come, too, Mom,” Heather said, pulling at her mother’s hand.

“I’ve got to talk to this lady,” Davis said, and the fear lay right on the surface of her eyes. Heather saw it as clearly as did Rinker.

“Don’t worry, kid, I’m not going to hurt anybody,” Rinker said. “We’ve just got to have some grown-up talk.”

“I’ve heard grown-up talk before,” the girl said.

Rinker looked down at her. All right; she probably had. She looked back at the mother: “You don’t tell anybody I was here. You could actually provide them with a little more information about me—how tall I am, what my voice sounds like. I couldn’t tolerate that. If you do that, if you tell anyone I was here, I’ll come back and kill you. And if they kill me first, then one of my associates will come here and kill you, because they’ll feel like they’ve got to make the point. And they won’t let you go. They don’t give a
shit
about people like you. Do you understand?”

The vulgarity, the
shit,
hung in the air between them, and lent Rinker’s speech authority—a killer’s authority—and
Mom nodded dumbly. “We’ll never tell. Honest to God, we’ll
never
tell,” Jan Davis said.

“Go sit on the couch,” Rinker said. “Don’t get up for five minutes, no matter how much you want to. I’m going to walk out of the house, and I don’t want you to see my car.”

Mom nodded again, and pulled the child across the living room to the couch, and they sat down.

Rinker stepped back to the door, stopped, brought the pistol up, and fired a single shot. A photograph of Davis, in earlier years, with two other women, fell off the wall, a perfect pencil-thick hole punched through the glass and Davis’s eyeball, in the photo.

“Absolute and complete silence,” Rinker whispered.

And she was gone.

Out the door, down the stoop, up the street, in the car. And she breathed out.

“L
ET’S
GO HOME,”
Black said. “They’re gonna be here all night.”

“Best time to pull something is about five o’clock in the morning,” Sherrill said, but she yawned.

“Yeah, and if we really think that, we should put a twenty-four-hour watch on them. But we can’t do twentyfour hours ourselves. I’m so fuckin’ bored, I can’t think, and the back of my boxer shorts is about five inches up my ass because I’ve been sitting here too long.”

“Take a walk,” Sherrill said.

“I’d get mugged.”

“Not in this neighborhood.”

“By the goddamn security patrol. You see those guys? Would you give those guys a gun?”

“All right.” Sherrill sighed and turned the key, cranked the car. “There’s gotta be something else we can do. I can’t believe we sat in this car for eight hours and never came up with a decent idea.”

“There’s nothing left. If Carmel did it, and I’m not giving you that . . . she’s gonna walk.”
J
AN DAVIS
LAY
in bed, all night, barely closing her eyes. She fought down an impulse to flee to her parents’ home in Missouri—she wouldn’t be completely welcome since the divorce. Her parents had liked Howard better than they liked her, she thought, feeling alone and isolated. Besides, she’d seen the
Godfather
movies, and she knew about these people, the Mafia. Running wouldn’t help: they’d get you anywhere. She decided to stick to routine.

Heather had been going to day school all summer, getting a head start on first grade. Davis had hoped against hope that somehow, in the morning, Heather would have forgotten what happened the night before. But she hadn’t— she looked like she’d gotten as little sleep as her mother.

“Should I go to school?” she asked, first thing.

“Yes. We are going to forget what happened last night. That was a bad dream.” Davis tried to be cheery; but it wasn’t working.

“Is she going to come back and hurt us?”

“No, no, no, nothing is going to happen. Let’s just pretend that nothing happened, nobody came.”

“But the lady came.”

Davis wanted to shake her. Wanted to scream at her, wanted to impress her with the danger, but didn’t know how. “Heather, listen: that was a very bad lady. Very bad. We have to pretend that she wasn’t here. We have to pretend that she was a bad dream. Remember the bad dream you had about Mrs. Gartin chasing you? We have to forget it, just like we forgot the dream about Mrs. Gartin.”

“I didn’t forget that dream,” Heather said solemnly. “I just told you I did.”

“But you don’t have it anymore.”

“No . . .” She ate cornflakes.

And before she could bring the subject back to the lady, Davis said, “I’m supposed to see your father this afternoon.”

Heather looked up from the cornflakes. “Is he going to come to see me?”

“Not this afternoon, I don’t think. This is business. But I’ll tell him you’d like it if he came over.”

“Okay. Do you think he’ll come . . .”

And the talk went that way. All the way to school, Davis looked for trailing cars, looked for short women with red hair, looked for those small competent hands, but she didn’t see anybody exactly like that. And Heather never mentioned the bad lady, not once, all the way to school.

M
RS.
G
ARTIN’S
S
CHOOL
took children from three to six, and taught them letters and numbers and shapes and colors, music, and phonics for the older children. Mrs. Gartin and her two associates tried to keep the little boys from beating each other and victimizing the little girls, and to encourage the little girls to socialize.

At the back of the big kids’ room—Mrs. Gartin never even saw it anymore, just another blob in the background— was Officer Friendly’s full-size, stand-up cutout, sponsored by Logan’s Rendering Co. Officer Friendly’s telephone number was on the front of the poster. Officer Friendly had visited the school, and talked to them about being careful, about bad men and women, and how the police were there to help children. He left behind the cutout.

Heather saw his picture every day, and this day, summoning all her intentness of purpose, she went into Mrs. Roman’s cubbyhole when the rest of the class followed Mrs. Roman out to recess, and called the number. She’d called her mom several times, and knew about dialing nine.

Officer Friendly, whose real name was Dick Ennis, was something of a drunk (“Not an alcoholic,” he said. “ Alcoholics go to meetings”), and was late to work more than
half the time; not that anybody cared. And mostly, when he was sober, he was a pretty good Officer Friendly. For one thing, he liked kids, and had several of his own by two exwives. For another, he’d been a decent street cop. In any case, he’d just arrived at his office, put his sack lunch in his desk drawer, and had turned to go for coffee when the phone rang. He dropped into his chair and picked it up.

Heather said, “Is this Officer Friendly?”

And Ennis said, “Yes, it is. Can I help you?” He thought the little girl on the other end of the line might be five years old.

“Yes. A bad lady came to my house and scared my mom and me.”

“Uh-huh. Who is this? What is your name?”

“This is Heather Davis. My phone number is . . .”

Smart kid, Ennis thought as he scribbled down the number. “Okay, Heather, how did the bad lady scare your mom and you?”

“She had a gun and she had a mask that she pulled down over her face, and she said if we told anybody, she would come and kill us. And she shooted a picture of my mom. And now my mom is scared to tell anybody.”

Ennis sat up, his forehead wrinkled. “When did this happen?”

“Last night when it was dark.”

“Nobody called a policeman?”

“No. Some policemen came to see us, but they went away. Then this lady came and told us not to talk to any more policemen. Ever.”

“Some policemen came to see you? Do you remember who they were?”

“One was a man and one was a woman,” the girl said.

“Do you remember their names? Either one?”

“Yes.”

“Could you tell me what they were?” His own small children had taught him patience.

“One was named Mr. Davenport, and one was named Miss Sherrill.”

“Jesus Christ,” Officer Friendly said.

NINETEEN

Sherrill was still asleep when Lucas called. “We maybe got a break,” he said.

She picked up the intensity in his voice, heard the traffic in the background. He was on a cell phone. She sat up, rubbing sleep from her eyes with the heel of her hand. “What happened?”

“That little kid called in, Heather Davis—she called Officer Friendly, you know the guy, what’s-his-name . . .”

“Ennis.”

“Yeah. She says the shooter was at their apartment last night, and warned her mother not to talk to us. She told them if they did talk to us, she’d come back and kill them both.”

Sherrill hopped out of bed and started for the bathroom, trailed by a twenty-foot coil of white phone wire. “What time was that?”

“Nine, or a little after. Just dark.”

“Then it wasn’t Carmel,” Sherrill said. “We got her coming out of her building around eight-thirty, followed her to the Swan, and watched her dance the night away.”

“You did that? Tracked her?”

“Yeah, me and Tom. You sound surprised.” She lifted the toilet seat and sat down.

“I wasn’t sure you were going to, the way we left it yesterday,” Lucas said. “Seemed like a long shot . . .”

Sherrill lost the rest of what Lucas was saying, suddenly falling off into a mental movie of the previous night. She came back when Lucas asked, “Marcy? Are you still there?”

“Lucas . . . Goddamnit, I think we might have seen the shooter. Last night. Coming out of Carmel’s building.”

“What?” He didn’t believe it.

“Honest to God.” She told him about the redhead who’d left as Hale Allen was going in. In her mind’s eye, she could see the woman brushing past Hale, giving him the onceover, then stepping outside on the walk and looking up and down the street.

“Could you identify her?”

She thought about it for less than a second: “I don’t think so. I wasn’t paying attention to her. I mean, there’s a good chance it’s not even her . . . but still, she was a shorter woman, a small woman, but in pretty good shape, like a gymnast; like Baily said. And she had big red hair.”

“That was her—I’d bet you a hundred bucks it was her,” Lucas said. “We’ve gotta throw a net around the building. And we’ve got to get something on Carmel’s phones. Find somebody who’ll sign a warrant to tap them.”

“Where are you? Are you at Davis’s house?”

“No, I’m in my car, heading for the kid’s school. She’s still there—I’ll be there in five.”

“I’ll get dressed and head out.”
T
HE
INSIDE COP,
the tipster, called Carmel just as Lucas and Sherrill were breaking off their conversation:

“You’re in the clear,” he said. He didn’t bother to identify himself.

“What happened?”

“I’m not sure exactly, but the rumor is, this little kid called in, and said that the shooter was back at her house last night and her mother was afraid to talk about it. And the rumor is, you were being tracked, and they know it can’t be you because you were out dancing at some fancy place. I’ll tell you what, Davenport went running out of here like a fullback. I mean, he was
runnin’.
”

“Jesus: they were following me?” She was shocked. She hadn’t felt it. She’d always thought she’d be able to feel it. Maybe because of Hale, his closeness . . .

“All over you, I guess,” the cop said. “A good thing, because you’re in the clear.”

“Why didn’t you call me before? When you heard they were putting the tail on me?”

After a pause, the cop said, “You know I can’t do that.”

Carmel promised another payment, rang off and dialed Rinker.

“And it was the kid who called the cops,” Carmel said as she finished relating the cop’s tip.

“Jesus, I never thought about that,” Rinker said. “She’s so small.”

“But it works out,” Carmel said, excitedly. “You found out that there really was nothing coming out of them, and even if the cops force the mother to talk this time, what can she give them? And now the cops know I
wasn’t
there. They just stepped all over their own case. All you have to do is disappear, and we’re cool.”

“ ’Bout time,” Rinker said.

“Although,” Carmel said pensively, “we still don’t know why they were messing with me to begin with.”

“Let it go,” Rinker said. “I’m getting out of here. If I move now, I can be through KC before the rush hour.”

“Don’t go yet,” Carmel said. “Hang around for a day or
two. If they’re following me, you can’t come around here, but . . . just hang around.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. Just overnight, to see what happens—to see if we need to settle anything else. See if the kid and her mom keep their mouths shut. See if anything comes of that.”

“All right,” Rinker said reluctantly. Minneapolis seemed more and more like a tar baby. She was anxious to get out. “One more night.”
L
UCAS
ARRIVED
at Mrs. Gartin’s School a little after ten o’clock in the morning. He parked on the street down the block, and walked back under low-hanging maple trees. A light summer breeze had popped up, and a patch of yellow coneflowers bobbed their bright heads and brown eyes at him from the school garden. Behind the garden, and behind a low wooden fence, he could see a playground for small kids, with tractor-tire sandboxes and a gentle tube slide.

Mrs. Gartin was a heavy woman in a print dress, with small jowls and smile lines. She was surprised to see him.

“Heather called you?”

“Yes. It’s important that I talk to her right away.”

“I should call her mother . . .”

“Her mother may be in some danger, which is why I have to talk to her right away.” He let a little cop show through his polite smile. “If you could take me to her?”

“Well, I . . .” She spasmodically shuffled some papers on her desk, cleared her throat and said, “She’s down in Mrs. Roman’s room.”
H
EATHER
SAT
in Mrs. Roman’s office with Lucas, and told the story: Lucas took her over it twice, and when they finished, had no doubt that she was telling precisely the truth.
Sherrill arrived just before they finished with the second run-through, and Davis arrived two minutes later. She was panic-stricken.

“What are you doing?” she screamed. “What are you doing with my daughter? You have no right to talk to my daughter . . .”

“Yes, we do,” Lucas said, as gently as he could. But it didn’t come off well, and Davis grabbed Heather’s arm and would have been out the door if Sherrill hadn’t been blocking it.

“You can’t leave,” Sherrill said.

Heather began to cry, and said, “I only told them . . .”

“I’ll call a lawyer,” Davis shrilled.

“You can call anyone you want to, but life would be simpler for all of us, including you, if we talked about this for a few minutes,” Lucas said.

“She’s going to kill us, she said she would kill us . . .”

“She’s not going to hurt anyone,” Lucas said.

“You weren’t there,” Davis snapped. “She said she was going to kill us, and she meant it. Frankly, I’m not nearly as impressed with you and your cops as I am with her.”

“We will put you where she can’t find you.”

“She’s with the
Mafia,
” Davis screamed. “They can find
anybody
.”

Lucas shook his head and Sherrill said, “Listen, quiet down. Whatever’s happened, has already happened. We need to ask you a few questions, and then we need to arrange things so you’re absolutely safe.”

“That’s impossible now,” Davis said. The anger was still closer to the surface than the fear, but now the fear was bubbling up, too.

“No, it’s not, not at all. We have experts in it,” Sherrill said. “You know why you don’t hear about the Mafia killing cops? Because they’re afraid to. Just think about that.”

• • •

W
HEN
D
AVIS
HAD
calmed down—not before a few nasty moments with Mrs. Gartin, who made an ill-timed appearance with a box of gingersnaps—they took her through Rinker’s assault. Heather sat on her mother’s knee during the talk, and Davis even showed a small tremulous smile when told about how her daughter called Officer Friendly.

One solid piece of information came out: “I could see the ends of her hair, and I’d swear that it was a wig. There was just something unhairlike about it. And I could see her hands, and I saw her face when she first came to the door, and she just wasn’t that real fair complexion that redheads have.”

“But you couldn’t describe her face?”

“No, you know, she had this box, and I looked at the box.”

“Do you still have the box?”

“No, I . . . threw it away,” she said. “It’s in the Dumpster behind the apartment. It’s a FedEx box.”

“Was she wearing gloves?”

“Oh, yeah. I can remember that. They were disposable plastic gloves, like dentists use. Oh, yeah.” The gloves impressed her: a professional killer, after all.

When they were finished, Lucas said, “I can’t see you being called as a witness. Your information helps us a lot, in some ways, but it’s not something that we’d use in court.”

“I won’t testify,” Davis said. “I mean, I
won’t.
”

“So let’s talk about what you want to do now,” Sherrill said.

What Davis wanted to do was to pretend that nothing had happened. “Could she know about this? That we talked to you?”

“Uh, word leaks out of police stations from time to time,” Lucas said carefully, thinking about Carmel’s
sources. “Is there any possibility that you could take off for a couple of weeks, or a month?”

“I’ve got a job I’ve got to go to at the U,” she said. “I gotta eat.”

“I can fix that,” Lucas said. “I can probably fix a paid leave, and if I can’t, we can find some money in city funds to make up what you lose. Do you have some folks . . . ?”

Davis shook her head. “I don’t want to go there. You know what? If you can do it? I’ve got a laptop, I could do a lot of work on my thesis if I could get somewhere quiet, just Heather and me. When I was still with Howard, we stayed at these town houses up on the North Shore, they were really nice . . .”

“We can do that,” said Lucas. He turned to Sherrill: “Call Bretano down in Sex. Get her going on this.” He turned back to Davis. “We’ll hook you up with Alice Bretano. She works with abused mothers and kids and knows about hiding them and getting money and so on . . . she’ll take care of the whole thing.”

“And you’re sure they won’t find us?” Davis asked doubtfully.

“They won’t even bother to look,” Lucas said. “There’s just no percentage in it.”

When she didn’t appear convinced, Lucas said, “Let me tell you about the Mafia. They’re a bunch of guys who are willing to hurt people for money, and they hustle dope and prostitutes and they loan-shark and all of that. But they’re just a bunch of guys. They don’t have any big intelligence service and they don’t back each other up like they say they do . . . they’re just sort of aaa . . .”—his eyes went to Heather, who was looking up at him with big eyes—“. . . jerks. But I won’t lie to you: this one woman, the one you saw last night,
is
somebody to be afraid of. But we’re gonna get her. And we’re not going to give her any reason
to hurt you. If she didn’t hurt you last night, she’s not going to.”
S
HERRILL
CALLED
B
RETANO in Sex, explained the problem, and Bretano said she’d handle the whole thing; she could be at the school in ten minutes.

Outside, while they waited, leaning against Lucas’s Porsche, Sherrill asked, “Now what?”

“We got two things out of that, for sure: we know she’s a redhead, or at least wearing a red wig, and that she’s a small woman in good shape, which means that you probably saw her last night. So now we crank everything up. We put a twenty-four-hour watch on Carmel’s building, and if we get her inside, we take her—this woman.”