Certain Prey (3 page)

Carmel was long, sleek and expensive, like a new Jaguar.

She had a small head, with a tidy nose, thin pale lips, a square chin and a small pointed tongue. She was a Swede, way back, and blond—one of the whippet Swedes with small breasts, narrow hips, and a long waist in between. She had the eyes of a bird of prey, a raptor. Carmel was a defense attorney in Minneapolis, one of the top two or three. Most years, she made comfortably more than a million dollars.

Carmel lived in a fabulously cool high-rise apartment in downtown Minneapolis, all blond-wood floors and white walls with black-and-white photos by Ansel Adams and Diane Arbus and Minor White, but nobody as gauche and come-lately as Robert Mapplethorpe. Amid all the blackand-white, there were perfect touches of bloody-murderred in the furniture and carpets. Even her car, a Jaguar XK8, had a custom bloody-murder-red paint job.

On the second of the three unluckiest days in Barbara Allen’s life, Carmel Loan decided that she was truly, genuinely and forever in love with Hale Allen, Barbara Allen’s husband.

Hale Allen, a property and real estate attorney, was the definitive heartthrob. He had near-black hair that fell naturally
over his forehead in little ringlets, warm brown eyes, a square chin with a dimple, wide shoulders, big hands and narrow hips. He was a perfect size forty-two, a little over six feet tall, with one slightly chipped front tooth. The knot of his tie was always askew, and women were always fixing it. Putting their hands on him. He had an easy jock-way with the women, chatting them up, playing with them.

Hale Allen liked women; and not just for sex. He liked to talk with them, shop with them, drink with them, jog with them—all without losing some essential lupine manliness. He had given Carmel reason to believe that he found her not unattractive. Whenever Carmel saw
him,
something deep inside her got plucked.

Despite his looks and easy manner with women, Hale Allen was not the sharpest knife in the dishwasher. He was content with boilerplate law, the arranging of routine contracts, and made nowhere near as much money as Carmel. That made little difference to a woman who’d found true love. Stupidity could be overlooked, Carmel thought, if a woman felt a genuine physical passion for a man. Besides, Hale would look very good standing next to the stone fireplace at her annual Christmas party, a scotch in hand, and perhaps a cheerful bloody-murder-red bow tie; she’d do the talking.

Unfortunately, Hale appeared to be permanently tied to his wife, Barbara.

By her money, Carmel thought. Barbara had a lot of it, through her family. And though Hale’s cerebral filament might not burn as brightly as others, he knew fifty million bucks when he saw them. He knew where that sixteen-hundred-dollar black cashmere Giorgio Armani sport coat came from.

Allen’s tie to his wife—or to her money, anyway—left few acceptable options for a woman of Carmel’s qualities.

She wouldn’t hang around and yearn, or get weepy and
depressed, or drunk enough to throw herself at him. She’d do something.

Like kill the wife.
F
IVE
YEARS EARLIER,
Carmel had gone to court and had shredded the evidentiary procedures followed by a young St. Paul cop after a routine traffic stop had turned into a major drug bust.

Her client, Rolando (Rolo) D’Aquila, had walked on the drug charge, though the cops had taken ten kilos of cocaine from under the spare tire of his coffee-brown Continental. The cops had wound up keeping the car under the forfeiture law, but Rolo didn’t care about that. What he cared about was that he’d done exactly five hours in jail, which was the time it took for Carmel to organize the one point three million dollars in bail money.

And later, when they walked away from the courthouse after the acquittal, Rolo told her that if she ever needed a really serious favor
—really serious—
to come see him. Because of previous conversations, they both knew what he was talking about. “I owe you,” he said. She didn’t say no, because she never said no.

She said, “See ya.”

On a warm, rainy day in late May, Carmel drove her second car—an anonymous blue-black Volvo station wagon registered in her mother’s second-marriage name—to a ramshackle house in St. Paul’s Frogtown, eased to the curb, and looked out the passenger-side window.

The wooden-frame house was slowly settling into its overgrown lawn. Rainwater seeped over the edges of its leaf-clogged gutters, and peeling green paint showed patches of the previous color, a chalky blue. None of the windows or doors was quite level with the world, square with the house, or aligned with each other. Most of the windows showed glass; a few had black screens.

Carmel got a small travel umbrella from the backseat, pushed the car door open with her feet, popped the umbrella, and hurried up the sidewalk to the house. The inner door was open: she knocked twice on the screen door, which rattled in its frame, and she heard Rolo from the back: “Come on in, Carmel. I’m in the kitchen.”

The interior of the house was a match for the exterior. The carpets were twenty years old, with paths worn through the thin pile. The walls were a dingy yellow, the furniture a crappy collection of plastic-veneered plywood, chipped along the edges of the tabletops and down the legs. There were no pictures on the walls, no decoration of any kind. Nailheads poked from picture-hanging spots, where previous tenants had tried a little harder. Everything smelled like nicotine and tar.

The kitchen was improbably bright. There were no shades or curtains on the two windows that flanked the kitchen table, and only two chairs, one tucked tight to the table, another pulled out. Rolo, looking smaller than he had five years before, was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt that said, enigmatically,
Jesus.
He had both hands in the kitchen sink.

“Just cleaning up for the occasion,” he said.

He wasn’t embarrassed at being caught at house-cleaning, and a thought flicked through Carmel’s lawyer-head:
He should be embarrassed.

“Sit down,” he said, nodding at the pulled-out chair. “I got some coffee going.”

“I’m sort of in a rush,” she started.

“You don’t have time for coffee with Rolando?” He was flicking water off his hands, and he ripped a paper towel off a roll that sat on the kitchen counter, wiped his hands dry, and tossed the balled-up towel toward a wastebasket in the corner. It hit the wall and ricocheted into the basket. “Two,” he said.

She glanced at her watch, and reversed herself on the coffee. “Sure, I’ve got a few minutes.”

“I’ve come a long way down, huh?”

She glanced once around the kitchen, shrugged and said, “You’ll be back.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I got my nose pretty deep in the shit.”

“So take a program.”

“Yeah, a program,” he said, and laughed. “Twelve steps to Jesus.” Then, apologetically, “I only got caffeinated.”

“Only kind I drink,” she said. And then, “So you made the call.” Not a question.

Rolo was pouring coffee into two yellow ceramic mugs, the kind Carmel associated with lake resorts in the North Woods. “Yes. And she’s still working, and she’ll take the job.”

“She? It’s a woman?”

“Yeah. I was surprised myself. I never asked, you know, I only knew who to call. But when I asked, my friend said, ‘She.’ ”

“She’s gotta be good,” Carmel said.

“She’s good. She has a reputation. Never misses. Very efficient, very fast. Always from very close range, so there’s no mistake.” Rolo put a mug of coffee in front of her, and she turned it with her fingertips, and picked it up.

“That’s what I need,” she said, and took a sip. Good coffee, very hot.

“You’re sure about this?” Rolo said. He leaned back against the kitchen counter, and gestured with his coffee mug. “Once I tell them ‘Yes,’ it’ll be hard to stop. This woman, the way she moves, nobody knows where she is, or what name she’s using. If you say, ‘Yes,’ she kills Barbara Allen.”

Carmel frowned at the sound of Barbara Allen’s name. She hadn’t really thought of the process as
murder.
She had
considered it more abstractly, as the solution to an otherwise intractable problem. Of course, she had
known
it would be murder, she just hadn’t contemplated the fact. “I’m sure,” she said.

“You’ve got the money?” “At the house. I brought your ten.” She put the mug down, dug in her purse, pulled out a thin deck of currency and laid it on the table. Rolo picked it up, riffled it expertly with a thumb. “I’ll tell you this,” he said. “When they come and ask for it, pay every penny.
Every penny.
Don’t argue, just pay. If you don’t, they won’t try to collect. They’ll make an example out of you.”

“I know how it works,” Carmel said, with an edge of impatience. “They’ll get it. And nobody’ll be able to trace it, because I’ve had it stashed. It’s absolutely clean.”

Rolo shrugged: “Then if you say ‘Yes,’ I’ll call them tonight. And they’ll kill Barbara Allen.”

This time, she didn’t flinch when Rolo spoke the name. Carmel stood up: “Yes,” she said. “Do it.”
R
INKER
CAME
to town three weeks later. She had driven her own car from Wichita, then rented two different-colored, different-make cars from Hertz and Avis, under two different names, using authentic Missouri driver’s licenses and perfectly good, paid-up credit cards.

She stalked Barbara Allen for a week, and finally decided to kill her on the interior steps of a downtown parking garage. In the week that Rinker trailed her, Allen had used the garage four times, and all four times had used the stairs to get to the skyway level. Once in the skyway, she’d gone straight to an office with the name “Star of the North Charities” on the door. When Rinker knew that Allen was
not
at Star of the North, she’d called and asked for her.

“I’m sorry, she’s not here.”

“Do you expect her?”

“She’s usually here for an hour or two in the morning, just before lunch.”

“Thanks, I’ll try again tomorrow.”
B
ARBARA
A
LLEN.

On the last of the three unluckiest days of her life, she got out of bed, showered, and ate a light breakfast of Raisin Bran and strawberries—with Hale for a husband, it paid to watch her figure. As the housekeeper cleared away the breakfast dishes, Allen turned on the television to check the Dow Jones opening numbers, sat at her desk and reviewed proposed charitable allocations from the Star of the North Charities trust, then, at nine-thirty, gathered her papers, pushed them into a tan Coach briefcase, and headed downtown.

Rinker, in a red Jeep Cherokee, followed her until she was sure that Allen was heading downtown, then passed her and hurried ahead. Allen was a slow, careful driver, but traffic and traffic lights were unpredictable, and Rinker wanted to be at least five minutes ahead of her by the time they got downtown.

Rinker had picked out another parking garage, also on the skyway system, a little less than a two-minute fast walk from the killing ground. She wheeled into the garage, parked, walked to her own car, which she’d parked in the garage earlier that morning, and climbed into the backseat. She glanced up and down the ramp, saw one man leaving, heading toward the doors. She reached down, grabbed the carpeting behind the passenger seat and popped open a shallow steel box, which held two Remington .22 semiautomatic pistols, silencers already attached, on a bed of foam peanuts.

Rinker was wearing a loose shift, with a homemade elastic-girdle beneath it. She pushed the .22s into the wide pockets of the shift, through another slit cut through the insides of the pockets, and into the girdle. The .22s were
held tight against her body, but she could get them out in a half-second. With the guns tucked away, Rinker hopped out of the car and headed for the skyway.
B
ARBARA
A
LLEN,
a sturdy, German blonde with short, expensively cut hair, a dab of lipstick, a crisp white cotton blouse, a navy skirt and matching navy low-heels, went into the stairwell of the Sixth Street parking garage at 9:58
A.M.
Halfway down, she met a small woman coming up, a redhead. As she passed her, looking down, the other woman smiled, and Allen, who knew about such things, looked at the top of her head and thought,
Wig.

That was the last thing she thought on the unluckiest day of her life.

R
INKER,
CLIMBING THE STAIRS,
had mistimed it. She knew the lower ramp was clear, and wanted to take Allen low. But Allen came down the narrow steps slowly, and Rinker, now in plain sight, didn’t feel she should stop and wait for her. So she continued climbing. Allen smiled and nodded at her as they passed, and as they passed, Rinker pulled the right-hand .22, pivoted, and fired it into the back of Allen’s head from a range of two inches. Allen’s hair puffed out, as though somebody had blown on it, and she started to fall.

The silencers were good. The loudest noise in the stairwell was the cycling of the pistol’s action. Rinker got off a second shot before Allen fell too far, then stepped down to the sprawled body and fired five more shots into Allen’s temple.