Certain Prey (18 page)

“How does she find out how much she owes?” Lucas asked. “The phone bills are always different.”

Marker shrugged: “We add them up and put a message on the voice mail, on the twenty-ninth of each month. A few days later, the check comes in. End of story.”

“And the voice mail goes through the phone company, so you wouldn’t even handle that call.”

“That’s right.”

“Why would you bother with your service at all? With a receptionist?”

“Well, you gotta have a phone—the phone company won’t let you in on the service if you don’t have a phone,” Marker said. “We’re the phone.”

“That’s nuts,” one of the FBI agents said. “They pay you all this money for a phone?”

“It is
not
nuts,” Marker insisted. “We don’t explore the backgrounds of our clients, because we don’t have the resources, but we know what they are, most of them. They’re mostly trade associations who can’t afford a fulltime
office in Washington, but want people to think they can. People like politicians. So if a politician calls here, a receptionist answers, we tell them that nobody’s in, and switch them to voice mail. Then somebody at the real office out in Walla Walla or wherever calls here a couple of times a day, gets the message and returns the call. And if they have to actually come here, to Washington, we can rent them a suite and all the business machines, the whole works. We’re not the only people who do this, you know; there’re a half-dozen others . . .”

Lucas prowled the office and found an airline magazine, and opened it to the map of the national airline routes. The midwestern and mid-South cities that were the sources of most of the checks—Kansas City, St. Louis and Tulsa—lay in a neat circle with Springfield, Missouri, at its center. On the other hand, if the sender of the checks came from Springfield, or close by, and mailed the checks from neighboring large cities to avoid pinpointing herself, why hadn’t she ever gone to Little Rock? It was hardly farther than the others, at least on the airline map.

And the other checks were so scattered that they probably indicated that the killer either traveled a lot, or arranged for different people to send the checks. Though it was unlikely that she would ask other people—that’d be too much exposure. So she traveled.

“. . . never talked to her,” Marker was saying. “I don’t even know if it’s really a
her.
I always thought it was a
him
.”

“Why’d you think that?” Mallard asked.

“I don’t know. Because he ran a messenger service, I guess. You kind of think that’s like a guy job.”
M
ALLARD
AND HIS
three agents began in-depth interviews with all five women, taking them one at a time. Lucas stood outside of Marker’s office for a while, watching her talk with Mallard; her eyes would flick out to Lucas, then back
to Mallard, and then out through the door to Lucas again. After ten minutes, Lucas stuck his head in the door: “Thanks for letting me ride along. I’ll give you a call this afternoon.”

Mallard said, “Hold on a second.”

Out in the hall, away from the five women, he said, “Not too exciting.”

“I gotta think about it,” Lucas said.

“The problem is, we don’t have an edge, a crack, anything we can get a hold of. We’ll have our local agents run down these checks: maybe somebody’ll remember her.”

“The most checks she got from one bank is six, and those were months apart,” Lucas said. “I’d bet she went to a different teller every time, paid cash.”

“Maybe we can run down the actual paper checks, and get fingerprints. We’re gonna process all the paper we got here. And when the next check comes in . . .”

“Do everything,” Lucas said.

He turned back to look at the building as he walked away, and saw Mallard looking after him. The call-in arrangement was clever: it was also not quite right.
D
ONNAL
O’B
RIEN
WAS
a husky black man with a small brush mustache and four kids at home: his wife had gone out for a loaf of bread one night and never come back, he said. “Just too quiet in that convenience store, I guess, with none of the kids around.”

She was now living in North Miami Beach with a retired D.C. cop named Manners. “The drug guys called him Bad Manners. I think he retired with a little more than the regular pension, seeing as how he didn’t bust anybody for the last three years he was on the force.”

Lucas had met O’Brien at a computer-training conference when Lucas was still hawking his police simulation software. They’d had a few beers, shared information a couple
of times. When O’Brien was still married, he and his wife had once spent a week at Lucas’s Wisconsin cabin.

O’Brien was sitting in a small gray-walled cubicle reading a
People
magazine story about a lesbian golfer when Lucas leaned in the doorway: “Did you know that Kitty Veit is a lesbo?”

“I don’t know who Kitty Veit is.”

“She shot a sixty-three in the final round of the women’s grand-am last weekend, at Merion, and won three hundred and twenty thousand dollars. She’s the only woman who ever shot a sixty-three there.”

“You mean golf?”

O’Brien sighed. “Never mind. Anyway, she’s a lesbo.”

“And that offends your golfer’s sense of propriety?”

“No, it makes me wonder if I got an operation, I could shoot a sixty-three.”

“You’d probably just sit home all day and play with your tits.”

“Mmm. Hadn’t thought of that.”

“How ya been?” Lucas asked.

“Tired. Let’s go get a Coke.”

They found an empty booth at a small, moderately greasy diner with Formica tabletops and cracked red plastic booth seats. The counterman drifted toward them and O’Brien called, “Big Coke and Big Diet Coke.” Lucas told O’Brien that he was thinking of buying a golf course, and O’Brien didn’t believe him. Five minutes later, when he did believe him, O’Brien started fishing for a job as a greenskeeper.

Lucas laughed: “I haven’t bought it, yet.”

“Keep me in mind, I’d be great at it,” O’Brien said. “I’m two years from retirement if some asshole doesn’t shoot me first. Work in Minnesota? Hell, yes.” Then, his voice pitched down, he asked, “What’s going on? You’re working, right?”

“Yeah. We had some people executed in the Cities . . .”
Lucas gave him a quick rundown, leaving Carmel Loan’s name out of it, and concluded with the FBI entry at the answering service.

“Never heard of the place. Louise Marker?”

“Yeah. Just like it sounds, like Magic Marker, M-A-RKE-R.”

“Four dead. Never heard of a pro going in for something like that . . . You might get three or four dead all at once, but not in a series, like they’re hunting them down.”

“There’s something going on,” Lucas said. “It could be something really simple—a money thing. The hit goes sour, somebody gets a name or a connection, and then this killer chick has to come back and clean up.”

“Impossible to prove, though,” O’Brien said. “I get pretty goddamned depressed about it sometimes. Crooks are getting too smart, they move too fast. Hit here, gone tomorrow.”

“Be nice to pull this chick down, though,” Lucas said. “I’d like to see if you’ve got anything local on this Marker, or any of the people who work there. Even word of mouth. The Feebs don’t have anything that’s not on paper . . .”

“I’ll check around,” O’Brien said. “And I’ll tell you what: I know this guy named George Hutton, he works in Fraud . . .”
T
HEY
CAUGHT
H
UTTON
standing at a bus stop where a desk sergeant said he might still be, if they hurried.

“George,” O’Brien called across the street. A bus was rolling down the block. “Wait.”

They crossed at the corner and Hutton looked at his watch and said, “Two minutes and I’m out of here, gone for the week. Then the local Black Irish shows up with some guy in an expensive suit and I get this really bad feeling . . .”

“All we need is a name,” O’Brien said. “Let me tell you a name.”

“One name,” said Hutton. He looked at his watch.

“Louise . . . Marker.” O’Brien had moved to one side of
Hutton so he could speak directly into the other man’s ear. Hutton closed his eyes and tipped his head back, so that he’d have been looking at the sky, except that his eyes were closed. He stood like that for a moment, then opened his eyes and looked at Lucas and spoke to O’Brien.

“Who’s the guy?” “Lucas Davenport, a deputy chief from Minneapolis. Davenport Simulations.”

“I know that,” Hutton said. Then, “Look up Maurice Marker, formerly Marx, of Marker Dry Cleaners, Inc. New Jersey. He had a daughter named Louise. How old is your Louise?”

Lucas said, “I’d say early middle age—forty, maybe. A little chunky.”

Hutton nodded: “That’d be about right. What’s she doing?”

“Running an answering service.”

Hutton nodded. “Yeah. Look up Maurice Marker.” He peered down the street: “That’s my bus.”

Lucas said good-bye to O’Brien, caught a cab to the FBI building and called Mallard, who came down to get him.

“We need to look up a dry cleaner named Maurice Marker or Maurice Marx,” Lucas said.

“Where’d you get the name?”

“From a cop here in D.C.—some kind of savant guy, he knows names.”

“Huh. Well, let’s go punch it in.”
M
AURICE
M
ARKER,
now retired to south Florida, had a short FBI biography. He had once owned a chain of dry cleaners in New Jersey, with a sales staff consisting of a dozen men with severely bent noses. The bent noses were not around much, but they made nice salaries, with excellent benefits, including full dental and medical, as well as life insurance and retirement plans.

“These guys would bring in a chunk of cash from dope or broads or gambling or whatever, give it to Maurice, he’d run it through the cash register, write off their salaries against taxes, take a chunk for himself, and everybody was happy,” Mallard said. “He had thirty-three dry cleaners when he retired. He sold the stores to another guy, who did the same thing until he went away.”

“Where’d he go?”

Mallard peered at the computer: “About four miles east of Atlantic City.”

“Is Louise in there?” Lucas nodded at the computer. Mallard ran his finger down the monitor screen: “Yep. Not necessarily the same one, of course. Just a minute.” He opened a spiral notebook, flipped through to the back, ran his finger down a page of chicken-scratch handwriting, then looked at the screen. “I’ll be damned. Same birthdate. That’s our girl.”

Lucas turned away, paced a few steps, paced back, turned away again. “So. She’s connected. Could be a coincidence, but probably not.”

“Probably not.” Now Mallard got to his feet and started following Lucas in the pacing. “Goddamnit, Davenport, I’m getting a hard-on.”

“You haven’t gotten any more calls since the one from Patricia Case?”

“No.”

“Then it’s possible that was some kind of a warning call. A code . . .”

“It’s possible that Tennex only gets one call a month . . .”

Lucas was shaking his head: “No. You know what it is? The answering service is a blind. Or partially a blind. That’s why it’s not just a phone ringing in an empty apartment somewhere. I mean, why not that? It’d be easier.”

“So what are you saying?” “That one of those women there is a cutout, somebody
the killer can go to for more information. One of the women is really an alarm, and we probably rang it.”

“It’d have to be Marker,” Mallard said. “There are ten different women who work on those switchboards, either full or part time, and they rotate shifts. There wouldn’t be any way to know which operator would be answering which call, so they’d have to have some special instructions from Marker if anything unusual came up on Tennex.”

“So let’s bring her in,” Lucas said.

“On what?”

“Nothing. Scare the shit out of her.”

“That’s, uh, sort of not our operating procedure,” Mallard said.

“Fuck your operating procedure. Bring her in, let me talk to her.”

“Let me make a call,” Mallard said.
M
ARKER
DEMANDED
an attorney, and Mallard was happy to give her all the time she needed.

“If we’re not out of here by seven, I’m gonna miss my plane,” Lucas said.

“I’ll have my secretary see if there’s another flight out,” Mallard said. “Gimme the ticket.”

Marker’s attorney, who showed up two hours after they’d taken her in, was a cheery blond named Cliff Bell. He wanted to know what the hell was going on.

“Your client is a front for a professional killer we’re tracking,” Lucas said.

“I don’t think . . .” Bell started, but Lucas stopped him.

“Wait, wait,” Lucas said. “Let me make my little speech, here. This woman, the killer, has murdered almost thirty people in more than a dozen states. A lot of them are those nasty Southern states with those strange ways of executing people—like Florida, where the guy’s eyeballs went
up in a puff of smoke when they pulled the switch on Ol’ Sparky . . .”