Certain Prey (26 page)

“On what?”

“On nothing. On bullshit. On assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, anything. But I want her picked up and identified. Nailed down. I want to know where she comes from. I want mug shots of her, so we can paper the country with them if she gets out and then runs. That means you’re gonna be living outside Carmel’s building. We maybe see if we can find a place, an apartment or an empty office, where you can watch from.”

“I’m out of the investigation?” Sherrill asked.

“A little bit out—but if we nail this woman quick, you’re gonna be the one to do it.”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“First thing, I’m gonna get some guys and I’m gonna knock on every door for two blocks around Davis’s apartment. There are people on the streets there at night.

Somebody must’ve seen this woman, whoever she is.”
L
UCAS
GOT
a half-dozen uniformed cops walking the neighborhood. He hated the job himself, and wasn’t good at it. The good ones had open Irish or Scandinavian faces, young
guys who looked like they might slap you on the back, women who might enjoy the odd bit of gossip. Empathizers.

Lucas and Bretano had brought Davis and her daughter back to the apartment, and waited while they packed. When they left, Davis gave the keys to Lucas. “Use the phone or the toilet, if you have to. I’ll pick them up when we get back.” Having the cops around had restored some confidence—but she still wanted to get out of town, and in a hurry.
L
UCAS
USED
the apartment as a temporary headquarters while the uniformed cops worked the neighborhood, moving back and forth, visiting and revisiting homes, waiting for people to get home from work, sorting bullshit from egg creams. A little after three o’clock, a cop named Lane wandered into the apartment, carrying a Pepsi, and sat down in a kitchen chair. Lucas was at the kitchen table, just getting off the phone.

“What?” he asked.

Lane leaned back, took a hit on the Pepsi. “I’ve been trying to get a break into plainclothes for more’n a fucking year now, and I can’t get it done.”

“I thought I saw you in plainclothes . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, that was just the drug guys looking for a fresh face. After a few weeks, my face wasn’t fresh, and I was back sitting in a squad. What I’m saying is, you gotta help get me outa this fuckin’ uniform.”

Lucas shrugged: “I don’t know you very well, you know? I don’t know what you’d bring to the job especially . . .”

“I was the guy who found that three-eighty in the McDonald case last fall, you remember? I mean, there was luck involved, but I’m a lucky guy. I pushed it, and we rang the bell.”

Lucas nodded. “I remember. And being a lucky guy is pretty critical.”

“I know. But I keep getting this bullshit about being good on the streets, and all that. How they don’t want to lose me off patrol. But I don’t want to
be
on patrol, and they’re gonna lose me anyway, if they don’t move me. I’ll go someplace else.”

“This is the only place to work in the state,” Lucas said. Then he tried to put him off. “Anyway, you know, let me ask around.”

Lane cracked a grin. “I really didn’t come in here to make a speech about getting off patrol, but I thought I’d take the opportunity, especially since I look so good right now.”

Lucas’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. I was down the street, at 1414, there’s a Mrs. Rann, Gloria Rann. She got home at about nine-fifteen last night. She knows because she caught the bus at University and Cretin when she got off work at nine, and it takes ten minutes to get home, and she was hurrying because she had a show she wanted to watch at nine-thirty. She just had time to put the garbage out before the show started. She sees a small athletic woman getting into what she thinks might have been a green car parked on the street, right on the curb at her house. She couldn’t see the woman’s face, but she thought she might be a college kid, because she looked athletic and because the neighborhood has a lot of college kids around. And . . . she had big hair.”

Lucas leaned forward: “That’d be right.”

Lane said, “Yeah. She fits the profile you gave us. Anyway, I ask Mrs. Rann if she’d ever seen the car before, and she said, ‘No, it wasn’t from around here.’ And I say, ‘How do you know that?’ And she says, because when she was walking home from the bus, it was still a little light, and she
looked
at the car because it was parked right in front of her house.”

He paused for dramatic effect, and Lucas said,
“What?”

“It had an Avis sticker on it. It was a rental car.”

“Sonofabitch,” Lucas said.
H
E
TOOK
L
ANE
with him to the airport, tracked down the Avis manager, who was out at the return area, and brought him back to the main office. The manager didn’t need a search warrant. He said, “Let me run a list for you. But I can tell you right now, it’s gonna be eighty to ninety percent guys. Probably won’t be more than ten or fifteen women.”

“Mid-sized green car, athletic-looking woman, small,” Lane said. “Maybe a redhead.”

The manager’s hands were hovering over the computer keyboard, but he stopped, turned to Lane and frowned. “Small and athletic redhead? Nice, uh, figure?”

“That’s what we understand,” Lucas said.

“Could it have been a champagne Dodge? Instead of green? Because I swear to God, a woman who looks like that returned a champagne Dodge up at the check-in, not more than fifteen minutes ago. She’s gotta be in the airport.”

Lucas snapped: “Where do I find the head guy for airport security?”

A
FAT YOUNG MAN
named Herter had handled the return and remembered the woman well; Lucas and Lane spent two hours trolling Herter and the manager through the airport gates, looking for Rinker’s face. Nothing. A lot of small athletic women, a few of them redheads, but no killer.

The check-in record showed the car in, without damage and with a full tank of gas, twenty minutes before Lucas and Lane arrived at the Avis desk. Herter said the woman had headed for the main terminal but had been carrying only a small bag, like an overnight case. There were no security cameras that might have recorded her face, at least not on the immediate route into the terminal.

“She might still be here in town,” Lucas told Lane and Tom Black, who’d come out to the help with the hunt. “The FBI thinks she drives to wherever she’s going. It would make sense for her to drop her car in the airport garage, where there are thousands of cars going in and out all day, and then rent a car to do the hit with. Then, if there’s any problem, she can ditch the car and there won’t be any record attached to it.”

“We should know about the record anytime,” Black said. “The Nebraska cops are running down the address.”

“If it’s her, they’re not gonna find anything,” Lucas said. “But I’ll tell you what: we’ve got to get to the MasterCard acceptance people who clear charges, and they’ve got to tell us instantly if she makes any more charges . . .” He looked at Lane. “You think you could set that up?”

“Yeah.”

“Then go do it; and get out of the uniform before you start talking to people.”

“All right.” He took off, running.

Black said, “The crime-scene guys gotta be done by now.”

“If it’s her, there won’t be anything.”
A
ND
THE CRIME-SCENE
guy said, “I wouldn’t hold my breath on these prints. I mean, we got prints off the passenger side and outa the back seat, but we got nothing from the steering wheel, from the outside door handle, from the inside handle, from the radio knobs, from the seat . . . they’d all been wiped. Wiped clean, by somebody who worked at it.”

“Goddamnit,” Lucas said. Five minutes later, a detective from Lincoln, Nebraska, called and said, “There’s a street like that, and there’s an address like that, and there’s even a woman with that name, but she’s forty-eight years old, she’s got nine ferrets that she never leaves, she’s got black hair and I’d say she goes about two-ten on the bathroom
scales. She says she’s never been to Minneapolis and never rented a car, and she’s got a Visa and a Sears card and a gas card but no MasterCard.”

“The shooter’s outa here,” Lucas said to Black after he got off the line with the Nebraska cop. “She might still be in the Cities, or on her way home, but we’re wasting our time out here.”

“Except we got a decent picture of her,” Black said. “We’ve got two guys who saw her close up, and not all that long ago. We’ll have a composite photo of her in an hour.”

“There’s that,” Lucas said. He held up his thumb and forefinger, a half-inch apart. “But goddamn: we were this close.
This close.
”

“So now what?”

“So now we paper the town with her picture. If she’s still here, maybe we can shake her out.”

TWENTY

Carmel called Rinker at the hotel and said, without preface or identification, “Get out of there now. Your picture’s on TV.”

“What?” Rinker’s heart started thumping, and she looked wildly around the room, looking for clothes, looking for anything with prints, ready to sprint.

“Davenport’s got a composite photograph of you, and it’s on TV. They’re going to show it again on Channel Three in about one minute.”

“Hang on.”

Rinker picked up the TV remote and brought up Channel Three. A talking head, a serious brunette who looked like a former Miss America, was saying, “. . . an Avis rental car at the airport. Two Avis personnel, whose identities are being withheld, provided police with a composite photograph, shown here. If you have seen this woman . . .”

Rinker looked at the picture for a moment, then told Carmel, “That doesn’t look like me.”

“To you it might not look like you, but to me it does—in a general way,” Carmel replied. “And they’ll be taking it
around to hotels and motels and everything else, asking for
anybody
who fits the general description.”

Rinker nodded at the phone. “All right, I’m outa here in fifteen minutes.”

“Go on down to Iowa,” Carmel said. “Des Moines. They don’t get the Cities TV stations there, and you can be back here in three hours, if you need to be. Give me a call on this phone when you get there, give me a number.”

“What’re we going to do?”

“We have to go to Plan B. Somehow, he’s onto us. I don’t know how, but he’s working something.”

“Ah, man, can you handle it?”

“I can handle it,” Carmel said grimly. “Now get out of there.”

“I’m gone.”
T
WO
DETECTIVES,
S
WANSON
and Franklin, responded to a tip from a bellhop at the Regency-White, and took the composite photograph to the manager, who shook his head. “I don’t know the lady, but I only see a fraction of the people who come through.”

“Could we find out how many single women are in the hotel, and go from there?” Franklin suggested. “Then maybe we could talk to the room maids.”

“Most’ve them have gone home already,” the manager said. He had a small mustache but otherwise, Franklin thought, looked a lot like Pee-Wee in
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.
“I can get the room service people, and the bellhops.”

Between the available desk people, they narrowed it to four women: two who more or less fit the composite, and two whom nobody could remember seeing. The bellhop, whom everybody called Louis, didn’t know what room she was in, but swore she fit the picture. “That’s her,” he told Swanson. Swanson called Lucas and told him they had a possible ID.

“Wait for me,” Lucas said.

They waited, working through people on the restaurant staff: two of them had seen the woman, they thought, but then maybe not. The picture wasn’t that good, was it?

Lucas arrived on the run, left the Porsche at the curb and said, “If a cop comes along, tell him it belongs to Chief Davenport,” he told the doorman.

“Right, chief,” the doorman said, and saluted. Just like New York, or something.

Franklin met him in the lobby and said, “We’re ready to go up.”

“Any more IDs on her?” Lucas asked.

“Couple of possibles—but they say they can’t quite tell from the photo.”

“Yeah, but it’s the best we’ve got,” Lucas said. He studied the picture for a few seconds with the same strange feeling of déj‡ vu that he’d experienced when he’d first seen it. He felt that he knew the woman, because, he thought, she was a perfect
type
: a cheerleader. Cute, busty, athletic. He knew a hundred women just like her: hell, there were twenty just like her on the police force. Sherrill was just like her, take away the black hair . . .

“Michelle Jones,” the manager muttered, tapping on a door.

“Just a minute,” a woman’s voice called.

The three cops took a step back, leaving the manager looking quizzically at them. Then he realized that the woman might come out shooting, and started to take a step back. Then the door opened, just two inches, and Michelle Jones looked out: she was black.

“Sorry, wrong room,” Swanson said. “We’re checking a security problem.”

There was no answer at the next room. Lucas nodded at the manager, who used his key and stepped hastily away. Swanson turned the doorknob and they went in.

“Christ, it looks like somebody was beaten to death,” Franklin said. Clothing was strewn around the room and across the bed; two pairs of panty hose, apparently damp, hung from a door, and a wool sweater lay on the rug, drying on top of a bath towel. Two suitcases, both open on the floor, looked like they’d been rifled by a fast-moving thief.

“Nah, it just look like my wife’s been here,” Swanson said. “This is just a fuckin’woman.”

The manager crooked his head out from behind the protective bulk of Franklin: “I think the gentleman is right,” he said. “Single women . . . and you should see what they put in the toilets. Women’ll put anything in a toilet. We once had a woman whose dog died, and she tried to flush it down the toilet.”

“Small dog?” Franklin asked.

“Well, yeah.” The manager’s eyes seemed to cross. “I mean, nobody’d try to flush a German shepherd.”

The third room was also empty: but very empty. No sign of a presence other than the disturbed covers on the bed.

“You’re sure there’s supposed to be somebody in here?” Lucas asked.

“Oh, yeah,” the manager said, looking around in disgust. “She skipped. I know what that feels like. She’s skipped.”

“Then this is her,” Lucas said. “Let’s get the crime-scene guys in here.”

“Four hundred bucks,” the manager said.

“Yeah, well, don’t touch anything,” Franklin growled. Franklin and Swanson went to the last room on the list, while Lucas looked around the empty room, and a moment later, Franklin came back: “Better have a look at this chick.”

This one fit, too: a cheerleader, with the blond hair, blue eyes, good shape, a little busty. And again, Lucas had the sense of déj‡ vu: “Do I know you?” he asked.

“No,” the woman said, a little angry and a little more scared. “Who are you?”

“I’m a deputy chief of police,” Lucas said. “Where are you from?”

“From Seattle.”

Lucas spotted a wedding ring. “And you’re married?”

“Yes, and I’d like to know . . .”

“What are you doing here? Are you in town on business?”

“What’s going on?” she demanded, the fear fading, and the anger growing.

“Just tell me,” Lucas said patiently. “Are you here on business?”

“Yes, I’m here for the perio convention at the Radisson.”

“What’s a perio?” Franklin asked. He was a very large black man in a yellow plaid sport coat, and he loomed in the doorway like a dark moon.

“A periodontist. I’m a dentist,” she said.

“Thanks,” Lucas said. He glanced at Franklin and shook his head and said to the woman, “We’ve got a situation here, which Detective Franklin will explain to you . . .”

Outside in the hall, Swanson said to Lucas, “A gum gardener.”

“A what?”

“A gum gardener. That’s what periodontists are called by other dentists.”

“Yeah? I’ll treasure that piece of information.”
L
UCAS
WENT BACK
to the empty room to wait for the crimescene crew. He wanted only one piece of information: that the china handles on the bathroom fixtures had been wiped. If they’d been wiped, this was the room, and they were too late.

Franklin went off to check on the last room again. Then the two crime-scene guys arrived, and Lucas told them what he wanted to know. One of them stepped into the bathroom, looked at the china handles on the sink, took what looked like a perfume bottle out of his briefcase and
sprayed a steel-colored dust on the handles. Then he stuck his head in the sink so he could get a closer look. When he emerged, he said, “Wiped. Slick as a whistle.”

“Goddamnit, I knew it,” Lucas said.

Franklin returned. “Last lady came in, from that room that was all torn up. She’s fifty, and she’d got a dog. A small one. I offered to flush it for her, but she said no.”

“Okay,” Lucas said. To the crime-scene guys: “She probably wiped the place down, but I want you to dust
everything.
Anything we get . . .”

“Look at this,” the second crime-scene guy said. He was emerging from the shower, and he was holding a small hotel-sized bar of soap.

“What?” Lucas asked.

“I think she forgot to wipe the soap.”

“S
HE
FORGOT
to wipe the what?” Mallard asked.

“The soap,” Lucas said. “A bar of soap.”

“You can’t leave prints on a bar of soap. Wet soap?”

“Well, you can one way,” Lucas said. “If the soap squirts out of your hand and you leave it on the floor, and then get out and dry yourself and remember the soap, and pick it up and put it back in the soap dish, then you can leave prints. At least, that’s what we think—one corner of the soap was squared off and cracked, like it’d been dropped. The hard part was getting the soap back to the office without screwing up the prints. That was a goddamned nightmare.”

“How’re you processing it?”

“We put it in a refrigerator down in Identification.”

“You put it in what?”

Lucas was irritated: “Do we have a bad connection or something? I can hear
you
perfectly.”

“Why’d you put it in the goddamn refrigerator?” Mallard asked. He was getting loud, for a guy who looked like an accountant, even
with
the thick neck.

“We figure if we can harden it up enough, we can dust it and pick up the prints,” Lucas said. “I mean, we can see them, we’re just scared to death of doing anything to them. If you blow on them, they could fade.”

“Ah, Jesus. I’m gonna call the fingerprint guys here and get them in touch with your guys,” Mallard said. “Maybe we can help.”

“Did you get the composite?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah. We’re running it against all former suspects, anybody who’s ever been around one of these cases.”

“Whatever happened to the guy in Wichita? Is he still peddling dope?”

“Little asshole,” Mallard said. “We’ve still got a watch on him, I still got Malone out there with the team, but she’s bitching thirty-six hours a day about getting back. And if you know the suspect was in Minneapolis, and we know Lopez wasn’t, then I’ll call her off.”

“She was here, the shooter was,” Lucas said.

“Then I’ll tell Malone to wrap it up. Still can’t believe it’s a woman. Anyway, I’m gonna drag the files over to witness protection and have a talk with them. We got enough on their boy out there to send him away for three hundred years.”

“Just because Lopez didn’t pan out, doesn’t mean that some kind of Wichita connection isn’t good,” Lucas said.

“I know that; and if you’ve got any suggestions, I’d be happy to have Malone look into them. It’ll take her a couple of days to wrap things up.”

“I’ve got nothing, not at the moment,” Lucas said. “And look, have your guys call our ID guys right now; I’m scared to death about what’s gonna happen when we take that bar of soap out of the crisper.”

“The what?” Mallard asked.

“The crisper, you know, where you keep the lettuce and radishes and . . .”

“Don’t tell me. Please, just don’t tell me.”

• • •

A
GUY NAMED
M
ANUEL found Lucas in the Homicide office talking to Sloan, and said, “We’re gonna try to take the prints.”

“Ah.” Lucas and Sloan both got up and headed down to ID. In the Identification section, they found four people standing around a hippie with shoulder-length hair and a dangly silver earring. He appeared to be about sixteen, and was holding a Nikon F5 camera with a weird lens. The bar of soap sat on a Tupperware lid on the desk.